and Nathan Abrams
Kubrick consumes us. Like no other filmmaker, he exerts a hypnotic hold from beyond the grave. Fans trade making-of trivia about his landmark films and lives-of-the-saints tidbits about his habits. There’s no escaping the labyrinth of Kubrickana once you enter: hundreds of books, a touring exhibition, a $2,500 Taschen volume just on The Shining, and even—quick, go look—Kubrick’s eldest daughter answering questions on Reddit about her father’s fur-trim parka.
Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams apparently couldn’t get enough, either, and their Kubrick: An Odyssey is the latest compendium about this son of a Bronx doctor who fatefully got a camera for his 13th birthday (chosen over a Bar Mitzvah). Fate speaks clearly: the teenage wunderkind soon became a professional photographer, publishing in Look magazine, snapping 1940s New York dramas (sometimes staged) and everyone from Sinatra to Leonard Bernstein, to Eisenhower, to Rocky Graziano.
That’s decades before the birth of the popular image of Kubrick as a reclusive genius in his British manor, and in terms of lore, the book’s contribution might be more in the how than in the what. For all the genius, Kolker and Abrams keep returning to mundane, grounding minutiae, and likewise the book’s workman-like granularity makes the director’s obsessiveness feel ordinary, too, even logical. If you’re going to put something on film forever, why not read every single book ever written about nuclear war, or Napoleon?
Kubrick’s methodical nature was a path to making the world look different from how he left it, and that’s apparent early, even when he’s churning out a crime film such as 1955’s Killer’s Kiss. There’s no shortage of desperate New York noirs, but Kubrick’s vanishing-point vistas down empty streets stop you in your tracks: it looks like a bomb dropped earlier and nobody told this hapless boxer.
If you’re going to put something on film forever, why not read every single book ever written about nuclear war, or Napoleon?
City kid Kubrick—or Young Man with Ideas and a Camera, per a 1951 New York Times feature headline—was at this point hanging out in the Village with his Viennese-born second wife, the dancer Ruth Sobotka, and playing chess for cash. But it took The Killing (1956), with Sterling Hayden, for Kubrick’s profile to rise just enough more.
The spine of Kubrick: An Odyssey is his journey from oddball independent, funded by a pharmacist uncle, to oddball studio maverick with “complete total final annihilating artistic control” (his words). Hoovering up story ideas, Kubrick and producing partner James B. Harris hit gold with Paths of Glory (1957) but, to get it made, became entangled with Kirk Douglas’s production company. But the crushing World War I mutiny drama garnered fans such as François Truffaut (pre–400 Blows), who declared it “an important film that establishes the talent and energy of a new American director.”
Kubrick would marry a German actress in the cast, Susanne Christian (born Christiane Harlan), and stay with her for the rest of his days. The daughter of two opera singers, and niece of notorious director of Nazi propaganda Veit Harlan, she made Kubrick feel like “Woody Allen looking like ten Jews.” By all accounts, theirs was domestic bliss, with three daughters and an increasing number of cats and dogs whom Kubrick would later give their own room.
Spartacus (1960), a blacklist-coded drama of slave rebellion starring Douglas, helped shift Kubrick into another realm, though not without considerable struggles with Universal and even his British cast. But Kubrick always had his devotees—Tony Curtis called him “my favourite director.”
Commanding Spartacus, Kubrick showed no shortage of self-confidence; he’d go on to wrangle Nabokov to write the screenplay to Lolita, only to largely abandon the master novelist’s script for his 1962 movie. Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle might have been next, but, Christian begged him, not yet; its anatomy of desire and jealousy would become Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
Instead came the film that in some ways feels like the first true total-control Kubrick we know and love: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). As ever, he zigged where others zagged: instead of the straight drama of On the Beach or Fail-Safe (which he pushed to have released after his own film), here was a black comedy of helpless, throw-up-your-hands laughter.
Rows of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists lined Kubrick’s office (rather than, say, Life magazine) as he prepared his adaptation of Red Alert, by R.A.F. officer Peter George. Kubrick at first imagined a “nuclear wiseman” who was a “crackpot realist,” “horny and relatively celibate,” though eventually we got Strangelove, one of multiple roles played by Peter Sellers at the request of the studio.
Kolker and Abrams dutifully compile these details and more: that Kubrick once intended the film to start from the viewpoint of aliens, that its press screening was scheduled the day of J.F.K.’s assassination (when Warren Beatty was visiting the Kubricks on Central Park West to pitch), and that Kubrick saw a nuclear holocaust as so likely that he planned to move to Australia to survive (which became a family joke).
His next, mind-altering milestone, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), took us from a “technocrat” space mission to transcendence, exhausting his collaborators. Kubrick won admirers but also displayed an almost vampiric extractive tendency, with crew and writers alike.
In 1964 came the film that in some ways feels like the first true total-control Kubrick we know and love: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a black comedy of helpless, throw-up-your-hands laughter.
Kubrick is a quintessential 20th-century modernist in the grand reach of his themes—free will comes in for a hard (and dazzling) look in A Clockwork Orange (1971), though it’s also fun to see it as a Kubrick youth movie. But Kolker and Abrams make no real effort to take him into the 21st century, even for comparative studies in civilization collapse.
So while it’s fascinating to hear of Kubrick’s fleeing potential I.R.A. assassination while filming Barry Lyndon in Ireland, I tended to cling to the kitchen-counter Kubrick: leaving his daughter Vivian a note to be careful when hosting parties because his cat Penny gets locked in the office, crushing hard on Barbra Streisand (“Indescribable!”), or being Steven Spielberg’s bizarre fax pal (and giving up on his own Holocaust movie after seeing his friend’s).
The book dies when Kubrick does, lasting only a scant few pages past the digital bowdlerizing of Eyes Wide Shut after the filmmaker’s death. But all the annotation in the world can’t compare with the simple surrender of watching. Eyes Wide Shut is now, somewhat hilariously, a Christmas-movie staple at the Metrograph cinema, in New York City, and when I went last month, the room was silent, rapt. Stanley lives on, his dreamlike hold unbroken.
Nicolas Rapold is a New York–based writer and the former editor of Film Comment magazine
