/pdf/dark-side-of-the-dream-the-social-gothic-in-vietnam-era-1zjvzs8hbu.pdf

Dark Side of the Dream: The Social Gothic in Vietnam Era America

In the course of fifty years, director Stanley Kubrick produced some of the most haunting and indelible images on film. His films touch on a wide range of topics rife with questions about human life, behavior, and emotions: love and sex, war, crime, madness, social conditioning, and technology. Within this great variety of subject matter, Kubrick examines different sides of reality and unifies them into a rich philosophical vision that is similar to existentialism. Perhaps more than any other philosophical concept, existentialism-the belief that philosophical truth has meaning only if it is chosen by the individual-has come down from the ivory tower to influence popular culture at large. In virtually all of Kubrick's films, the protagonist finds himself or herself in opposition to a hard and uncaring world, whether the conflict arises in the natural world or in human institutions. Kubrick's war films (Fear and Desire, Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, and Full Metal Jacket) examine how humans deal with their worst fears-especially the fear of death-when facing the absurdity of war. Full Metal Jacket portrays a world of physical and moral change, with an environment in continual flux in which attempting to impose order can be dangerous. The film explores the tragic consequences of an unbending moral code in a constantly changing universe. Essays in the volume examine Kubrick's interest in morality and fate, revealing a Stoic philosophy at the center of many of his films. Several of the contributors find his oeuvre to be characterized by skepticism, irony, and unfettered hedonism. In such films as A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick confronts the notion that we will struggle against our own scientific and technological innovations. Kubrick's films about the future posit that an active form of nihilism will allow humans to accept the emptiness of the world and push beyond it to form a free and creative view of humanity. Taken together, the essays in The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick are an engaging look at the director's stark vision of a constantly changing moral and physical universe. They promise to add depth and complexity to the interpretation of Kubrick's signature films.

The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/culturalcritique.77.2011.0180

Seeing Is Digesting: Labyrinths of Historical Ruin in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining

Horror in the 1980's : a comparative analysis of violent content in independent studio and major studio horror movies /

In the 1970s the large multinational entertainment conglomerates that gained control of both publishing and Hollywood traded the rights to creative works across different media, hoping for a single moneymaking hit. This new emphasis on blockbuster productions led to a “winner-take-all” labor market with a few superstar earners and many struggling unknowns. Both Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick used their respective versions of The Shining to describe the conditions of the 1970s media industries. Each told the story of a would-be middle-class writer grappling with the Overlook Hotel, the larger, phantasmal structure of capital that surrounds him. In King’s version the hotel represents publishing and other aspects of the literary field, whereas Kubrick identifies it more closely with Warner Brothers, which distributed and financed the film. Understanding The Shining as a narrative of artistic production will ultimately help us understand not only the interlocking structure of the publishing and film industries in the late 1970s but also the ways in which the inequality in the media industries during that time prefigured and helped to justify the growing social inequality across society under neoliberalism.

The Shining and the Media Conglomerate; or, How All Work and No Play Made Jack a Creative Artist in the 1970s

Most critics of Stanley Kubrick's latest film, The Shining, seem to feel that he has provided so much psychological motivation for the events in the movie that he has rendered unnecessary the presence of the supernatural and extrasensory perception, thereby draining the horror from what was heralded as "the ultimate horror film." Jack Kroll says that "The sight of Torrance's endlessly repeated sentence chills you with its revelation of a man so clogged and aching with frustrated creativity that his desire to kill doesn't need to be explained by his seizure by sinister and suppurating creatures from a time warp of pure evil."l Pauline Kael asks, "Do the tensions between father, mother, and son create the ghosts, or do the ghosts serve as catalysts to make those tensions erupt? It appears to. be an intertwined process. Kubrick seems to be saying that rage, uncontrollable violence, and ghosts spawn each other-that they are really the same thing." She concludes that while the film's theme is "the timelessness of murder," "the picture seems not to make any sense."2 Both these critics go wrong in focussing on Torrance's transformation from troubled father to axe-murderer. Both Torrance's son and wife who are not characterized by rage or uncontrollable violence also see ghosts- ghosts he never sees. Like Torrance's wife, Wendy, we are torn between two people possessed, a father and a son. Kubrick places us at the very fulcrum of their opposing but related perspectives. The source of this balance can be traced to the two books Kubrick and Diane Johnson reportedly read while writing the script- Freud's essay "The 'Uncanny' " (1919) and Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment (1976). 3 Pauline Kael recognizes that Kubrick may have structured his film in terms of Freud's essay (i.e., the use of doubles, deja vu, a maze),4 but she completely ignores not only Bettelheim's book as an influence but elements in Freud's essay directly related to Bettelheim's topic. If Kubrick's intention was to focus solely on the father, it is understandable why he might read an essay about the nature of an adult's feeling of horror. But why read a book concerning the importance fairy tales have for children if the son's view of the events is not equally important? Understanding the complementary nature of both works clarifies the theme and parallel structure of the film and helps to explain the seeming contradictions even positive reviewers have criticized. Freud's essay and Bettelheim's book are complementary not merely because both explore the mind in terms of psychoanalysis but because both discuss man's relation to an animistic universe- Freud from the perspective of the adult whose beliefs have supposedly "surmounted" it or the madman who has become trapped in it and Bettelheim from the perspective of the child who begins life very much within it. Freud characterizes the animistic universe by the belief that spirits, good and bad, inhabit all things and that thoughts and wishes are all-powerful over physical reality. Primitive man thus "transposed the structural conditions of his own mind into the external world." As Freud emphasizes, each of us has padded through a stage in our development corresponding to this animistic stage in primitive man, but "none of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of manifesting themselves . . . [so] that everything which now strikes us as 'uncanny' fulfills the conditions of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression (XVII, 24041)." But as Freud mentions and as Bettelheim more extensively examines, the child still inhabits an animistic universe, and the fairy tales which reflect that universe may be frightening but are not "uncanny." The themes of the uncanny which Freud lists are all concerned with the "phenomenon of the 'double' " and are all found in The Shining: characters thought to be identical because of their similar appearance, telepathy, identification of one character with another to the extent that he forgets his own nature or substitutes the other self for his own. …

Christopher Hoile

Papers

The Uncanny and the Fairy Tale in Kubrick's the Shining