Full Metal Jacket

by Bill Krohn

Excerpt taken from the book: Zone 6: Incorporations, edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, New York: Urzone inc, 1992, pp. 428–435. All Rights Reserved

First movement: At a Marine boot camp on Parris Island, a squad of young recruits are brutalized by Sergeant Hartman, a horrifyingly funny drill instructor whose face and voice so dominate the film’s first section that only two other characters are permitted to develop a semblance of psychological individuality: a wiseass named Joker and a dumb farmboy named Pyle, whose propensity for screwing up makes him the main target for Hartman’s brutality, and that of his own comrades, until he goes mad and shoots his persecutor in the latrine.

Second movement: Cut to Da Nang, where Joker and a gung ho newcomer named Rafter Man have drawn easy duty as correspondents for the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, and suddenly the tension of the first part dissipates, the structure of the film loosens to the point of entropy and the narrative is set adrift, as if we were watching outtakes from a film whose story we haven’t completely under stood. We follow Joker and Rafter Man from the placid corruption of Da Nang, broken only by a curiously anemic sequence showing the let Offensive, to the countryside around Hue, where they join a seasoned combat unit called the "Lusthogs" for an assault on Hue, overrun by the Vietcong. The drifting, fragmentary, anti-dramatic feeling of these sequences is heightened in the aftermath of the assault, when a television crew films the characters speaking in choreographed succession like actors in a bad Broadway play about Vietnam, then addressing the camera directly in inter views that recall a famous episode of TV’s M*A*S*H.

It is only during the last minutes of the film that a sense of narrative progression returns: as the Lusthogs patrol the streets of Hue, they find themselves pinned down by an invisible sniper who turns out, when Joker penetrates her stronghold, to be a teenage girl. Cut down by Rafter Man’s bullets, the sniper is slow to die, and only Joker is willing to put her out of her misery with a bullet through the head. Afterward, we see American soldiers marching at night silhouetted against a fiery landscape, singing the "Mickey Mouse Club" theme song, while Joker, barely distinguished from the horde by the last of a sparse series of laconic voiceovers, informs us that he is no longer afraid.

Is Full Metal Jacket an antiwar film, as the critics have assumed, or is it, in the words of an indignant Samuel Fuller, "a recruiting film"? Fuller’s reaction did more to point up the slippery quality of Full Metal Jacket for me than all the raves predicated on the notion that Stanley Kubrick had made another Paths of Glory (1957). Since that film and Spartacus (1960), Kubrick has rejected messages in order to purify his art, and Full Metal Jacket (1987), which returns thirty years later to the booby-trapped terrain of the war film, is part of that ongoing process, as we can see by comparing the director’s shooting script with the film he finally made. Two scenes were eliminated which would have made the drill instructor a monster: one where he nearly drowns Pyle in a bowl of urine, and one where he orders a recruit who has cut his wrists to clean up the mess he’s made before reporting to the doctor. Instead, due in no small part to Lee Ermey’s mesmerizing performance, the character remains human-size, believable, by turns outrageous and sympathetic, and seductive.

So it’s not difficult to understand Fuller’s rage at the way Hartman is portrayed, or his distrust of any film that includes a scene like the one where the recruits, transformed by many sufferings into proud members of the Corps, parade to the strains of the "Marine Corps Hymn," while Hartman’s voice tells them they are now part of an indestructible brotherhood, It was just such a scene that the producer of Merrill’s Marauders (1962) tacked onto Fuller’s film to turn it into the kind of war film described by Roland Barthes in a famous essay In Mythologies:

Take the Army; show without disguise its chiefs as martinets, its discipline as narrow-minded and unfair, and into this stupid tyranny immerse an average human being, fallible but likeable, the archetype of the spectator. And then, at the last moment, turn over the magical hat, and pull out of it the image of an army, flags flying, triumphant, bewitching, to which, like Sganarelle’s wife, one cannot but be faithful although beaten.

In fact, that is a perfect description of what happens in Full Metal Jacket until Pyle shoots Hartman. Then another kind of film begins, and by the time the image of the triumphant army returns at the end, the conventions of the (anti)war film have been transformed into something else altogether.

The best answer I have seen to the perennial critical quarrel about whether Kubrick is a humanist is Gilles Deleuze’s observation that all of Kubrick’s films portray the world as a brain, one fated to malfunction from both internal and external causes. This surprising insight will at least permit us to do justice to the strangeness of Full Metal Jacket, where the little world of the training camp on Parris Island is portrayed as a brain made up of human cells thinking and feeling as one, until its functioning is wrecked first from within, when a single cell, Pyle, begins ruthlessly carrying out the directives of the death instinct that programs the organ as a whole, and then from without by the Tet Offensive, the external representation of the same force. A double movement is described by the rigorously plotted movements of Kubrick’s camera: in the first section, as the camera follows the constant parading of the recruits and their instructor, and movement is almost exclusively from the interior of the screen out, while in the second section, beginning with the striking dolly forward on the miniskirted ass of a Da Nang whore, camera movements into the screen, toward the vanishing point, predominate; but the film’s two parts describe a single movement with a single endpoint–the encounter with a fellow human being whose face, in Hartman’s memorable phrase, has become a "war face," the face of death.

What is new in Full Metal Jacket is that, for the first time in Kubrick’s cinema (although A Clockwork Orange [1971] attempts some thing similar with its self-effacing boustrophedon structure), the narrative itself begins to malfunction, after Pyle has turned his rifle on Hartman and then on himself, as if eliminating the antagonists whose repeated confrontations made a story possible has condemned the film to wander into regions bordering dangerously on nonsense, until a new antagonist erupts in the encounter with the sniper, which permits the filmmaker to start turning the screw of suspense again, imparting a linear and dramatic coherence in time to arrest the fatal drift.

Kubrick told Newsweek that he wants to "explode the narrative structure of film," and in Full Metal Jacket the first casualty of the explosion is the conventional notion of character. For Full Metal Jacket is a film without a hero; its sole protagonist is a group-mind whose formation is shown in the boot camp scenes, most of which portray the process of indoctrination, with little reference to combat training per se. Then, in the second section, we follow scattered pieces of the group-mind as they are set adrift in a world where scene follows scene with no apparent dramatic or thematic necessity, so that even Joker, the protagonist whose acts and motives were starkly delineated by the constricting circumstances of boot camp, seems to withdraw from us, be coming a cipher as the film unfolds – mainly thanks to the unsparing labor of purification, by which Kubrick during the year-long shoot stripped away the elements in his own script that made Joker someone with whom the audience could identify: his voiceovers reduced finally to four or five; the instinctive revulsion that impels him, in a scene that was either cut or never filmed, to kill an Arvin colonel who is murdering prisoners during the helicopter ride from Da Nang to Hue; and his death and burial, which would have concluded the film on an elegiac note – replaced here by the group-shot of soldiers singing the Mousketeer anthem that was originally planned for an earlier scene, after the assault on Hue.

The effect is subtle and at times paradoxical: for example, the mute, expressionless faces in the film’s opening sequence, a montage of close-ups of recruits getting their first Marine Corps haircut, seem emotionally much closer to us than the faces in the montage of TV interviews, which distance the characters at the very moment they are being permitted, for the first time, to "express" themselves – with all the method acting, mock hesitations and other signals of sincerity on the part of the actors that "expression" implies. In the second section of Full Metal Jacket, we meet a whole new cast of highly individualistic characters who are imbued with the full range of human emotions, but cut loose from their narrative moorings they appear as opaque fragments of a larger whole, their acts legible only as behaviors (to borrow a term from the science of operant conditioning) in which are embedded, in a kind of horrible monotony, the traits – racism, misogyny, machismo, homicidal mania – that govern the group-mind, even in its malfunctioning; although this does not prevent us from feeling momentary sympathy for each of the characters. Sympathy, in fact, is necessary if we are to read the subtle, often nearly imperceptible gestures and expressions in which the drama of the group is played out.

One striking effect of Kubrick’s narrative experiments in Full Metal Jacket was to force many critics to reconsider their adulation of Platoon [1987], because Kubrick has eliminated every scene or action that might have served as a handhold for the spectator in search of easy edification, choosing instead to construct his film as a parody of all edifying and unifying fictions. It’s impossible to watch the last scene, where Joker, made fearless, is swallowed up by the marching throng, without thinking of Stone’s proclaimed intention of bringing Americans together and healing the nation’s wounds, to which the only proper reply is Alex’s last line in A Clockwork Orange: "I was cured, all right!"

I would also argue that the alienation effects that Kubrick uses in the Vietnam section of his film are a superior form of realism to Platoon’s scorched-earth naturalism, which is largely based on effects of déjà vu: Stone, who was there, has portrayed it in images copied from TV coverage of the war and myriad other war films, so that the shock of discovering a new reality Is mediated by images that are believable because they are already familiar– as in Salvador [1986], where the photojournalist played by John Savage says not that he wants to take a picture that shows the reality of war, but that he wants to "take one like Capa." Kubrick’s formal strategy in Full Metal Jacket– which encompasses every element of his film, and not just the narrative choices I’ve focused on in this brief description – is to create moments of utter strangeness that have the shock of fresh perception. His motto could be that of the seventeenth-century haiku poet Basho: "I do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old. I seek the thing they sought."

Deleuze discusses Kubrick in the second volume of Cinema, his comprehensive classification of film images and signs, initially as signing him to one of the two stylistic camps into which he divides modern cinema, the cinema of the body (for example, Godard, Cassavetes) and the cinema of the brain (for example, Resnals, Kubrick). Deleuze’s description of what is specifically modern in Resnais and Kubrick – as opposed to Eisenstein, who uses a classical model of the brain structured by processes of integration and differentiation – is based on philosopher of Science Gilbert Simondon’s speculation that "the properties of living matter are manifested as the maintenance ...of certain topological properties, much more than of pure energetic or structural properties," which leads Simondon to propose a non-Euclidian model of living organisms where "the functions of integration and differentiation are a function of a meta-stable asymmetry between an absolute interlority and exteriorlty’

Delouse makes a few adjustments to this speculative model –which seems to be equally applicable to organisms and their parts – when he proposes his own post-classical model of the brain. For example, by "absolute interiority and exteriority" Simondon means simply the organism and its environment, in contrast to the relative relationships of interiority and exteriority which hold between systems of the organism, where the bloodstream may be exterior with respect to a gland that emits secretions into it, and interior with respect to the intestinal walls. Reinterpreted by Delouse, these topological absolutes become "an inside more profound than any interior milieu, and an outside more distant than any exterior milieu," both of which are Identified with death in the section on Resnais and Kubrick and, in the conclusion to the volume, with "the unevocable in Welles, the undecidable in Resnais, the inexplicable in Robbe-Grillet, the incommensurable in Godard, the unreconcilable in the Straubs, the impossible in Marguerite Duras, the irrational in Syberberg."

Deleuze’s poetic rewriting of Simondon turns out to have many applications: in fact, as that diversified roster of modern filmmakers suggests, Deleuze Intends it to be more widely applicable than he first indicates: by the end of the book he is proposing his new model of the brain, which also includes "the irrational cut" and "the black screen," as a model for alt the global structures – mainly variations on the series – used in modern films. The new brain model is the "noosign" of modern cinema, just as the spiral was the noosign of classical cinema, based on the classical model of the brain structured by processes of integration and differentiation. Deleuze even says in an interview about the book that the biology of the brain, and not linguistics or psycho analysis, will furnish the criteria for a new film aesthetics: "The value of all cinema depends on the cerebral circuits It establishes...the richness, complexity and general tenor of its arrangements, of its connections, conjunctions, circuits and short-circuits."

So the cinema of the brain is not just one type of film in Deleuze’s taxonomy of modern cinema – it represents the whole terrain to be mapped. This means that the films of Resnais and Kubrick, which take this new organic model as their subject, are exemplary. By dispersing its narrative and making classical narrative one element in a structure that implements another logic, Full Metal Jacket, like any modern film, is exploring the cerebral processes that found the new aesthetic of l’image-temps; but by portraying as parts of a brain the stock characters of a genre that could stand for all of classical cinema ("A film is like a battlefield" – Samuel Fuller, 1965), and having them act out the breakdown of semimotor connections that give rise to "pure optical and aural situations," Kubrick is staging, in a peculiarly literal way, an allegory of modern cinema.

I don’t want to leave the impression, in concluding, that Kubrick is without masters. He had one, Max Ophuls, who is as present in Full Metal Jacket as he is in an obvious pastiche like Lolita. Hartman’s first appearance, for example, visually duplicates the opening sequence of Lola Montes [1955], with Peter Ustinov’s ringmaster spieling to the backward-tracking camera as he advances past a line of acrobats standing at attention. William Karl Guerin, In a book on Ophuls, has taught us to be suspicious of this Mephistophellan figure and his twin, the Master of Ceremonies In La Ronde [1950], who subject the other characters and the spectator alike to the seductive rigors of a mise-en-scene designed to illustrate "a sinister conception of man." Traditionally, critics have tended to identify these director surrogates with Ophuls, and Kubrick, who revises his predecessor by killing off Hartman in the middle of the film, might agree with them, but all the ambiguities of Full Metal Jacket are already deployed in Ophuls’ late films, where, as Guerin has shown, a single close-up (Simone Signoret in La Ronde, Martins Carol faint and perspiring before her final leap in Lola Montes) is sufficient to derail the Master of Ceremonies’ infernal machine. In Full Metal Jacket the close-up of Pyle, insane, signals the imminent death of Kubrick’s Master of Ceremonies, which liberates images and characters from the machine of the narrative; and when the narrative begins to function again during the assault on Hue, the close-up of the young sniper shatters the spell, leaving us with those concluding images of the marauding horde, which recalls the Dionysian mobs at of Le Masque and the end of La Maison Tellier episode in Le Plaisir (1951): images of a world without a master of ceremonies.

References

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavera. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972, p. 41.

Gilles Deleuze. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 205–206.

Gilbert Simondon, L’ lndividu et sa genese physico-biologique, Paris: P.U.F., 1964, p. 261.

Deleuze, Pourparlers: 1972–1990, ParIs: Minuit, 1990, pp. 85–86.

William Karl Guerin, Max Ophuls, Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 1988

The on-again, off-again story of Stanley Kubrick's new vision of thinking machines.

Some are born to greatness, others have it thrust upon them, and still others have it programmed into their operating systems. Such was the case with HAL, the iconoclastic digital antagonist of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Debuting in a science fiction cinema whose conception of artificial intelligence amounted to clunky chunks of rolling metal like Robby and Gort, the sophisticated, subtly neurotic HAL redefined Hollywood's portrayal of thinking machines. It should surprise no one that Kubrick - who has applied his skills to a variety of material, from pulp to period drama - now appears ready to turn his attention back to the themes of man and automation. True, he's currently directing the conventionally fabulous Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut, but it's another, more enigmatic project that has his fans on the Net checking in regularly to alt.movies.kubrick.

For almost a decade, Kubrick has been developing a film project known as AI (as in artificial intelligence), which promises to graduate from computers to an android who thinks, is self-aware, and ages. Inspired by "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long," the short story by British author Brian Aldiss (see page 134), AI is set in a future when scientists have, as Aldiss writes, "at last found a way to link computer circuitry with synthetic flesh."

"One of the fascinating questions that arises in envisioning computers more intelligent than men is at what point machine intelligence deserves the same consideration as biological intelligence," Kubrick mused in a 1971 interview for the book Stanley Kubrick Directs.

"Once a computer learns by experience as well as by its original programming, and once it has access to much more information than any number of human geniuses might possess, the first thing that happens is that you don't really understand it anymore, and you don't know what it's doing or thinking about. You could be tempted to ask yourself in what way is machine intelligence any less sacrosanct than biological intelligence, and it might be difficult to arrive at an answer flattering to biological intelligence."

Kubrick followers will recall that for all the imaginative spark of Arthur C. Clarke's The Sentinel - the story that inspired 2001 - it contains no HAL, no Jupiter mission, no enlightened, club-wielding apes. There's no telling how Kubrick's imagination will transform "Super-Toys." Aldiss says that in the early '90s, he and the director made two collaborative attempts to turn his story into a script. "I can't tell you how many directions we went. My favorite was when David and Teddy got exiled to Tin City, a place where the old model robots, like old cars, were living out their days. Stanley definitely had the ambition to make another big science fiction movie, but in the end, we didn't get anywhere. Stanley called in Arthur Clarke and asked him to provide a scenario, but he didn't like that, either."

Kubrick, meanwhile, is as secretive as ever about his plans and insisted that powerful Warner Bros. co-CEO Terry Semel and Kubrick's then-agent, Michael Ovitz, fly to England to read the AI material under his personal supervision. The notion inspired awe and amusement in Hollywood, where the proud tradition of kicking "geniuses" around begins with D. W. Griffith and continues up through von Stroheim and Welles. Kubrick, who was born in the Bronx, has for the last 35 years lived a secluded existence in a palatial British estate in Hertfordshire.

Ovitz says there was a method to the madness. "It's true; he doesn't feel comfortable sending his scripts out, but we also wanted to have everyone in the same room, and you know Stanley doesn't fly. By the next day, Terry and I had a deal for Stanley to make the movie."

Of course, some information always leaks out - in this case, news that Kubrick has set AI in a future in which the polar ice caps have melted, drowning some well-known coastal cities such as New York. After having a special effects epiphany while watching Jurassic Park in the summer of 1993, he contacted the movie's digital effects supervisor, Dennis Muren of Industrial Light & Magic. Kubrick wanted animatics depicting computer-generated fly-throughs of a submerged Manhattan, its skyscrapers rising totemically from the tidal stew. Muren obliged (and flew to England to present the work).

Though it was reportedly well received, Kubrick was keeping his options open. In the summer of 1994, James Cameron flew to England when Kubrick asked the younger filmmaker to show him True Lies. "I was really honored, 'Oooh, Stanley Kubrick wants to see my movie!'" remembers Cameron. "But it turns out that he does this with everybody. He's like a brain vampire. He likes to get people and suck what they're doing out of their heads." The two viewed the film on an editing machine at Kubrick's home and talked about the effects shot by shot.

As for AI, Cameron reports that "Kubrick was interested in Digital Domain, passingly, to do some visual effects, and he showed me some of the artwork for AI. There was a lot of water interaction stuff - very difficult." But beyond that, Cameron is as tight-lipped as Kubrick. "It's his movie," says Cameron. "He can talk about it if he wants to."

But apparently he doesn't. Word began circulating that Kubrick planned to do all the AI effects himself, in his home workshop. The filmmaker has been known to operate his own handheld camera, and his hands-on enthusiasm is legendary. Kubrick will call up a given technology company - the manufacturer of a sound system, a film stock, or a piece of camera equipment - have the thing delivered, test it exhaustively, and notably not pay for it, explained one industry observer. Then Kubrick will send back extensive notes on what the machine can and can't do. Though this R&D ethic causes some grumbles in the industry, it works - companies develop new technology specifically for him.

In this case, Kubrick got the local boys from Quantel to set him up with a demo of the Domino, a computer graphics workstation known for its ease of use and real-time playback. Although the machine was said to have enthralled the filmmaker, his plan to do the special effects himself seems to have been scrapped; Kubrick put in another call to ILM this fall, this time requesting that Muren fly to England to read the script he had written himself. Muren, well under way with Steven Spielberg on The Lost World (aka Jurassic Park part two), declined. "Stanley's been having conversations with Dennis for years," says an ILM staffer. "It's hard to feel like the train's about to leave the station."

Will the 68-year-old Kubrick ever realize this high tech opus? According to some of the more out-there speculation, he's already begun. One rumor - popular on the Net - holds that he's filmed two short segments of AI since the project began almost a decade ago to incorporate the natural aging of his young star, said to be Jurassic Park's Joseph Mazzello. While a spokesperson for Mazzello confirmed that in 1993 there was a deal brokered between the actor and director, she said it was for another stalled Kubrick project, The Aryan Papers, and had nothing to do with AI.

A more plausible scenario, circulating not on the Net but in Hollywood, is that Warner Bros. - gun-shy after lackluster returns on Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket - balked at the big-budget bucks it would take to film AI and convinced Kubrick to first tackle the commercially bankable Eyes Wide Shut. Then they'd set him loose in the toy shop.

One hopes, when all is said and done, that Kubrick still has the desire to play. "I have a feeling, having worked with him, that he hasn't got the dashing confidence of youth," says Aldiss. "But of course, with age, you acquire a different sort of confidence." The director's creative vision, meanwhile, is clearer than ever. "Stanley embraces android technology," Aldiss notes, "and thinks it might eventually take over - and be an improvement over the human race."

Eyes Wide Shut

Credits

Director/Producer: Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, based on Clarke's "The Sentinel"
Music: Johann Strauss, Gyorgy Ligeti, Aram Khachaturian, Richard Strauss
Running time: 141 min
Cast: Keir Dullea (David Bowman), Gary Lockwood (Frank Poole), Douglas Rain (voice of HAL), William Sylvester (Heywood Floyd)

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Plot

Four million years ago, at the dawn of man, proto-humans survive in a hostile world. A mysterious alien presence appears on earth, in the shape of a towering, black monolith. After contact with this monolith, a monumental breakthrough occurs: the proto-humans develop conscious thoughts and actions. They begin to use tools, killing both game and rivals. Forward, to the title year. Man has conquered space travel to the point that it is mundane commuting. Dr. Heywood Floyd, a high ranking official in the American space agency, goes to the moon to investigate the discovery of a black monolith buried beneath the lunar surface. As he and other scientists examine the monolith, it emits a pulse of energy. Eighteen months later, Drs. Bowman and Poole are on their way to Jupiter. Three crewmembers are aboard in stasis. The ship, Discovery, is controlled by a supercomputer known as HAL. All has been running smoothly, until HAL malfunctions and kills the crew before Bowman can disconnect him. A pre-recorded message begins playing. Dr. Floyd, talks about the top secret mission Discovery has been on: a four million year old monolith, buried beneath the lunar surface, emitted a burst of energy at Jupiter when excavated. The monolith is the first conclusive evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Once at Jupiter, Bowman leaves Discovery to investigate. Another monolith, huge this time, is in orbit. Bowman and his pod are hurled past the infinite. After this cataclysmic experience, Bowman appears in a stately room. Linear time has been disrupted, and he sees himself at different ages. Finally, a decrepit and dying Bowman receives a visit from the monolith. He is transformed. He becomes a fetus, a newborn of, perhaps, man's next evolutionary step.

In depth summary with quotes

Re-Release Information

 

Commentary

Film review from the Harvard Crimson

Tim Hunter with Stephen Kaplan and Peter Faszi, 1968

As a film about progress—physical, social, and technological—Stanley Kubrick’s huge and provocative 2001: A Space Odyssey remains essentially linear until its extraordinary ending. In the final transfiguration, director Kubrick and co-author Arthur Clarke suggest that evolutionary progress may in fact be cyclical, perhaps in the shape of a helix formation. Man progresses to a certain point in evolution, then begins again from scratch on a higher level. Much of 2001’s conceptual orginality derives from its being both anti-Christian and anti-evolutionary in its theme of man’s progress controlled by an ambiguous extraterrestrial force, possibly both capricious and destructive.

If the above seems a roundabout way to open a discussion of an $11 million Cinerama spectacular, it can only be said that Kubrick’s film is as personal as it is expensive, and as ambitious an attempt at metaphysical philosophy as it is at creating a superb science-fiction genre film. Consequently, 2001 is probable commercial poison. A sure-fire audience baffler guaranteed to empty any theater of 10% of its audience, 2001 is even now being reedited by Kubrick to shorten the 165-minute length by 15-odd minutes.

Although some sequences are gone, most of the cutting consists of shortening lengthy shots that dwelled on the slow and difficult operation of space-age machinery…the trimming of two sequences involving the mechanics of entering and controlling “space pods,” one-man spaceships launched from the larger craft, may emphasize plot action but only at the expense of the eerie and important continuity of technology that dominates most of the film. 2001 is, among other things, a slow-paced intricate stab at creating an aesthetic from natural and material things we have never seen before: the film’s opening, “The Dawn of Man,” takes place 4 million years ago, and a quick cut takes us past the history of man into the future.

Kubrick’s dilemma in terms of satisfying an audience is that his best work in 2001 is plotless slow-paced material, an always successful creation of often ritualistic behavior of apes, men, and machines with whom we are totally unfamiliar. In the longer version, the opening of astronaut Poole’s (Gary Lockwood) pod scene is shot identically to the preceding pod scene with as astronaught Bowman (Keir Dullea), stressing standardized operational method by duplicating camera setups. This laborious preparation may appear initially repetitive until Poole’s computer-controlled pod turns on him and murders him in space, thus justifying the prior duplication by undercutting it with terrifyingly different conclusion. Throughout 2001, Kubrick suggests a constantly shifting balance between man and his tools, a dimension that largely vanishes from this particular scene in cutting the first half and making the murder more abrupt dramatically than any other single action in the film.

Even compromised in order to placate audiences, Kubrick’s handling of the visual relationship between time and space is more than impressive. He has discovered that slow movement (of spacecraft, for example) is as impressive on a Cinerama screen as fast movement, also that properly timed sequences of slow movement actually appear more real—sometimes even faster—than equally long sequences of fast motion shots. No film in history achieves the degree of three-dimensional depth maintained consistently in 2001 (and climaxed rhapsodically in a shot of a pulsating stellar galaxy); Kubrick frequently focuses our attention to one side of the wide screen, then introduces an element from the opposite corner, forcing a reorientation which heightens our sense of personal observation of spontaneous reality.

His triumph, both in terms of film technique and directorial approach, is in the audience’s almost immediate acceptance of special effects as reality: after we have seen a stewardess walk up a wall and across the ceiling early in the film, we no longer question similar amazements and accept Kubrick’s new world without questions. The credibility of the special effects established, we can suspend disbelief, to use a justifiable cliché, and revel in the beauty and imagination of Kubrick/Clarke’s space. And turn to the challenge substance of the excellent screenplay.

2001 begins with a shot of an eclipse condition: the Earth, Moon, and sun in orbital conjunction, shown on a single vertical plane in center screen. The image is central and becomes one of three prerequisite for each major progression made in the film.

The initial act of progress is evolutionary. A series of brief scenes establishes the life cycle of the australopithecine before its diversion into what became both ape and man—they eat grass, are victimized by carnivores, huddle together defensively. One morning they awake to find in their midst a tall, thin, black rectangular monolith, its based embedded in the ground, towering monumentally above them, plainly not a natural formation. They touch it, and we note at that moment that the Moon and sun are in orbital conjunction.

In the following scene, an australopithecine discovers what we will call the tool, a bone from a skeleton which, when used as an extension of the arm, adds considerably to the creature’s strength. The discovery is executed in brilliant slow-motion montage of the pre-ape destroying the skeleton with the bone, establishing Kubrick and Clarke’s subjective anthropological notion that the discovery of the tool was identical to that of the weapon. The “dawn of man,” then, is represented by a coupling of progress and destruction; a theme of murder runs through 2001 simultaneously with that of progress. Ultimately, Kubrick shows an ambiguous spiritual growth through physical death.

The transition from prehistory to future becomes a simple cut from the bone descending in the air to a rocket preparing to land at a space station midway between Earth and Moon. A classic example of Bazin’s “associative montage,” the cut proves an effective, if simplistic, method of bypassing history and setting up the link between bone and rocket as the spectral tools of man, one primitive and one incredibly sophisticated.

On the Moon, American scientists discover an identical black monolith, apparently buried over 4 million years before, completely inert save for the constant emission of a powerful radio signal directed toward Jupiter. The scientists examine it (touching it tentatively as the ape did) at a moment when the Earth and sun are in conjunctive orbit. They conclude that some form of life on Jupiter may have placed the monolith there ane, 14 months later, an expedition is sent to Jupiter to investigate.

Two major progressions have been made: an evolutionary progression in the discovery of the tool, and a technological progression inherent in the trip to Jupiter. The discovery of the monolith has preceded each advance, and with it the conjunction of the sun and moons of a given planet, as well as the presence of ape or human at a stage of development where they are ready to make the significant progression. The monolith, then, begins to represent something of a deity; for our own purposes, we will assume that, given the three conditions, the inert monolith inspires ape and man to make the crucial advance. Therefore, it becomes a major force in man’s evolution: man is not responsible for his own development, and perhaps the monolith even brings the men to it at the precise moment of the conjunctive orbits.

To Kubrick, this dehumanization is more than the result of the undefined force exerted by the monolith and proves a direct consequence of advanced technology. Kubrick is no stranger to the subject: The Killing and Lolita both involve man’s self-expression through the automobile, Spartacus’ defeat comes because he is not adequately prepared to meet the advanced military technology of the Roman army; Dr. Strangelove, of course, contains the running motif of machines assuming human characteristics (the machine sexuality of its opening titles) while humans become machinelike, a theme carried further in 2001. The central portion of 2001, the trip to Jupiter, can, as an odyssey toward a final progression of man, concern itself largely with Kubrick’s persistent preoccupation of the relationship between man and his tools.

Kubrick prepares us for the ultimate emotional detachment of Bowman and Poole; his characterization of Dr. Floyd, the protagonist of the Moon sequence and the initiator of the Jupiter expedition, stresses his coldness, noticeably in a telephone conversation with his young daughter, a dialogue which suggests a reliance on manipulating her more than it demonstrates any love for her. These men, all professional, are no longer excited by space travel: they sleep during flights and pay no attention to the what-we-consider-extraordinary phenomenon occurring before their eyes (the rapid rotation of the Earth in the background during the telephone scene).

Bowman and Poole are inhuman. Their faces register no emotion and they show no tension; their few decisions are always logical and the two always agree; Poole greets a televised birthday message from his gauche middle-class parents on Earth with complete lack of interest—he is, for practical purposes, no longer their child. With subtle humor, Kubrick separates one from the other only in their choice of food from the dispensing machine: Poole chooses food with clashing colors and Bowman selects a meal composed entirely within the ochre-to-dark-brown range. In a fascinating selection of material, Kubrick omits the actual act of Poole’s murder, cutting to his body in space directly after the mechanical pod-hands sever his air hose, thus taking emphasis off any identification we might suddenly feel and turning murder into cold, further dehumanized abstraction.

The only human in the film is HAL 9000, the super-computer which runs the ship and exhibits all the emotional traits lacking in Bowman and Poole. The script development is, again, linear: the accepted relationship of man using machine is presented initially, then discarded in favor of an equal balance between the two (HAL, for example, asks Bowman to show him some sketches, then comments on them). This equilibrium where men and machine perversely share characteristics shatters only when HAL mistakenly detects a fault in the communications system. The HAL computers cannot make mistakes and a confirmation of the error would necessitate disconnection. At this point the balance shifts again: Bowman asks HAL to explain his mistake and HAL denies it, attributing it to “human error”; we are reminded of the maxim, “a bad workman blames his tools,” and realize HAL is acting from a distinctly human point of view in trying to cover up his error.

As the only human in the film HAL proves a greater murderer than any of the men. Returning 2001 to the theme of inherent destruction in social and technological progress, Kubrick’s chilling last-shot-before-the-intermission (a shot of HAL’s point-of-view, lip-reading a conversation of Bowman and Poole deciding to dismantle him if the mistake is confirmed) suggests the potential of machine to control man, the ultimate reversal of roles in a situation where man makes machines in his own image. HAL’s success is partial; he murders Poole, and the three doctors on the ship in a state of induced hibernation. The murder of the sleeping doctors is filmed almost entirely as close-ups of electronically controlled charts, a pulsating coordination of respiration regulators, cardiographs, and encephalographs. HAL shuts his power off gradually and we experience the ultimate dehumanization of watching men die not in their bed-coffins but in the diminished activity of the lines on the charts.

In attempting to reenter the ship from the pod he has used to retrieve Poole’s corpse, Bowman must improvise--for the first time—ad lib emergency procedures to break in against HAL’s wishes. His determination is perhaps motivated by the first anger he has shown, and is certainly indicative of a crucial reassertion of man over machine, again shifting the film’s balance concerning the relationship between man and tool. In a brilliant and indescribable sequence, preceded by some stunning low-angle camera gyrations as Bowman makes his way toward HAL’s controls, the man performs a lobotomy on the computer, dismantling all except its mechanical functions. Symbolically, it is the murder of an equal, and HAL’s “death” becomes the only empathy-evoking scene in 2001. Unlike any of the humans, HAL dies a natural human death at Bowman’s hand, slowing down into senility and second childhood, until he remembers only his first programmed memory, the song “Daisy,” which he sings until his final expiration.

Bowman’s complex act parallels that of the australopithecus: his use of the pods ejector to reenter the craft was improvisational, the mechanism undoubtedly designed for a different purpose—this referring to the use of bone as weapon-tool. Finally in committing murder, Bowman has essentially lost his dehumanization and become an archetypal new being: one worthy of the transcendental experience that follows. For the last part of the film, we must assume Bowman an individual by virtue of his improvised triumph over the complex computer.

Left alone in the spaceship, Bowman sees the monolith slab floating in space in Jupiter’s atmosphere and takes off in a pod to follow it; knowing by now the properties of the pod, we can conjure images of the mechanical arms controlled by Bowman reaching to touch the monolith as did the australopithecines and the humans. The nine moons of Jupiter are in orbital conjunction (a near-impossible astronomical occurrence) and the monolith floats into that orbit and disappears. Bowman follows it and enters what Clarke calls the timespace warp, a zone “beyond the infinite” conceived cinematically as a 5 minute three-part light show, and intercut with frozen details of Bowman’s reactions.

If the monolith has previously guided man to major evolutionary and technological progression, it leads Bowman now into a realm of perception man cannot conceive, and experience unbearable for him to endure while simultaneously marking a new level in his progress. The frozen shots intercut with the light sequences show, debatably, Bowman’s horror in terms of perception and physical ordeal, and his physical death: the last of many multicolored solarized close-ups of his eye appears entirely flesh-colored, and, if we are justified in creating a color metaphor, the eye is totally wasted, almost subsumed into a pallid flesh. When man journeys far enough into time and space, Kubrick and Clarke are saying, man will find things he has no right to see.

But this is not, as Clarke suggests in Life, the end of an Ahab-like quest on the part of men driven to seek the outer reaches of the universe. Bowman is led into the time warp by the monolith. The Moon monolith’s radio signals directed toward Jupiter were not indicative of life as we know it on Jupiter, but were a roadmap, in effect, to show Bowman how to find his way to the monolith that guides him toward transcendent experience.

At the end, Bowman, probably dead (if we are to interpret the makeup in conventional terms), finds himself in a room decorated with Louis XVI period furniture with fluorescent-lighted floors. He sees himself at different stages of old age and physical decay. Perhaps he is seeing representative stages of what his life would have been had he not been drawn into the infinite. As bed-ridden dying man, the monolith appears before him and he reaches out to it. He is replaced by a glowing embryo on the bed and, presumably, reborn or transfigured into an embryo-baby enclosed in a sphere in our own solar system, watching Earth. He has plainly become an integral part of the cosmos, perhaps as Life suggests, as a “star-child” or, as Penelope Gilliatt suggests, as the first of a species of mutant that will inhabit the Earth and begin to grow. What seemed a linear progression may ultimately be cyclical, in that the final effect of the monolith on man can be interpreted as a progress ending in the beginning of a new revolutionary cycle on a vastly higher plane. But the intrinsic suggestiveness of the final image is such that any consistent theory about the nature of 2001 can be extended to apply to the last shot: there are no clear answers.

by John Morgan

On viewing any of director Stanley Kubrick's masterpieces, it becomes immediately apparent that extreme care and precision is practiced for each and every frame of his films. This is one of many elements that make Kubrick unique as a director. Many commentators have speculated that this is probably the result of the origins of Kubrick's career: namely, his apprenticeship as a still photographer. Strangely, while this fact is widely known and acknowledged, to my knowledge not a single commentator has ever gone back and blown the dust off of Kubrick's photographic work. This page is an attempt to rectify this situation.

On his thirteenth birthday, Kubrick has told us, his father presented him with his first camera. Kubrick immediately took to photography, and it soon became one of his favorite hobbies. It was while he was still in high school, at age 16, that Kubrick happened to snap a photo of a newsstand owner on the morning following FDR's death. He soon sold the photograph to Look, a well-known news and photo magazine in its day, for $25.

Due to his total lack of interest in public school, Kubrick barely managed to finish, and soon found himself out of school and without any prospects for enrollment at the college level. In a fortuitous move which Kubrick has claimed was more an act of generosity than of appreciation for his skill, Look decided to employ him as an apprentice photographer. Over the next several years, Kubrick worked as a staff photographer, working on both "grunt" assignments and his own inspirations. It is the latter in which his budding talents can most clearly be detected.

The question now arises: is the theory that Kubrick's cinematic style has its origins in his photography borne out by the facts? Judge for yourself. Most of Kubrick's Look work is extremely pedestrian in nature (only to be expected considering the nature of the assignments he was given), but occasionally one of the pieces, particularly his photographic essays, proves interesting. Due to the large volume of work that Kubrick produced for Look, I have only included the pieces I think to be of particular interest here.

The most striking thing about the pieces I've included on this page are their subject matter. As you will see, many of them show signs of the same preoccupations which appear in Kubrick's films. Many of them are also extremely funny in an absurd way, also rather like his films.

Unfortunately, these images are not of very high quality. I rely on my University Library for copies of Look, and unfortunately they have junked the original copies in favor of microfilm, thus precluding a clear transfer from original to screen. If you have copies of Look from the period 1945-early '50s and would be willing to donate or sell any of them, please drop me a note. As I'm currently a poor suffering undergraduate, I'm afraid I can't offer very much in the way of money, but I will consider any offers.

This page is under construction. I have not yet tracked down all of Kubrick's Look work (I'm currently in early 1947), but I will add pieces of interest as I discover them.

This was Kubrick's first piece for Look. It appeared in the June 26, 1945 issue. Below it is Kubrick's name as it appeared in the acknowledgments for the same issue.

This is a transcript of the text that appears at the top of the following image:

To test a girl's reaction to the advances of an amorous stranger, a free-lance photographer and friend recently visited a Bronx movie. They selected a total stranger, and the photographer's friend sat down beside her. She was completely unaware that a photographer was recording the scene a few seats away on infra-red film. See below for what he recorded.

This piece appeared on April 16, 1946, and already Kubrick is in the movie theater. Kubrick's interest in sexual obsession obviously predates Lolita and Eyes Wide Shut! The rather twisted sense of humor that is also a Kubrickian trademark also seems to have had deep roots. Lastly, the use of state-of-the-art camera techniques in Barry Lyndon seems to have been an outgrowth of the same drive that inspired Kubrick to use infra-red in this piece.

This appeared on August 20, 1946. The photo of the monkey is credited to "Ylla-Guillumette," but the entire second page is Kubrick's. All it needs is a monolith. Humanity the "eternal savage," indeed!

Here is the text accompanying the next set of photos. Each line appears beneath the corresponding photo starting in the upper left hand corner, proceeding left to right down each page.

It hurts, and probing finger shows exactly where.

Resigned to his fate, he placidly sweats it out.

That thumping jaw keeps him oblivious of everything.

Okay, so it'll hurt! That tooth's got to come out.

He's enjoying a book, but she frowns unhappily.

He can concentrate on jaw and magazine at same time.

She can't see a thing, but that drill sounds awful.

Her composed face reflects patience and fortitude.

Picking old nail polish keeps her mind off pain.

Nothing he can do but wait, so he settles to read.

She's worried. Outgoing patient didn't look happy.

Dejected, she slumps in her chair. Hope seems gone.

On the alert! He keeps a sharp lookout at the door.

Restless, she broods - wonders whether it will hurt.

Something tells him that no good can come from this.

Well! What's the use of fretting about a tooth.

He seems to think it's all in how you look at it.

DENTIST'S OFFICE: Americans visit the dentist more often than any other people. But in the dentist's waiting room, they always look as if they want to be somewhere else.

All it needs is "We'll Meet Again" in the background... October 1, 1946.