The “Cult” of Kubrick *
Date : *31 May 2006
Author(s) :* David Church
Blurb:* Using the critical status of Stanley Kubrick, David Church analyzes how the films of a revered art film auteur can also be held up examples of cult cinema.
When director Stanley Kubrick died in March 1999, there was much eulogizing from all corners of the film world. Many critics referred to the deceased by first name, as though “Stanley,” that legendarily reclusive filmmaker, were as familiar and known to them as a kindly old man they might happen to bump into now and then at the corner store. Perhaps it was Kubrick’s long and storied career, a livelihood producing great movies poured over by consecutive generations of filmgoers, which occasioned such informality. After all, here was a self-taught kid from the Bronx who broke into the pictures and, through sheer ingenuity and vision, changed the way the world saw film. In any case, Kubrick’s legacy is undeniable and he has clearly become part of the film canon. The most recent installment of /Sight and Sound/’s famous Top 10 poll (taken in 2002) ranked Kubrick as the #6 top director of all time as chosen by critics, and the #5 top director as chosen by other directors.
Likewise, his films 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) ranked highly on the polls of Top 10 films of all time, as chosen by critics and directors respectively. In these polls, Kubrick shares a lofty place in the pantheon with such fellow auteurs as Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles—but unlike most of those other directors (excluding Hitchcock), Kubrick remains more of a household
name. Even in death, he still carries more cultural currency than many of his contemporaries, not only a reputation in the academy and the industry but also in the general public.
Kubrick has become a fast favorite of budding film buffs and aspiring art house patrons. Ask a young (often male) or otherwise somewhat inexperienced film buff for his/her favorite directors and Kubrick is almost assured to make the list at some stage in his/her cinematic education. As a young film buff’s knowledge of cinema gradually widens, auteurism proves a seductive line of thought that enables one to organize one’s developing cinematic tastes around whole bodies of work made by individual filmmakers, instead of simply individual favorite films. With auteur theory’s privileging of the director generally incorporated into popular mainstream thought as a means of reading films
as texts (perhaps the first “academic” reading strategy acquired by young film buffs), “Kubrick” as both preeminent auteur and canonical body of work provides a site of ready access for students and film buffs aspiring to upward cultural and academic mobility. Despite its inherent shortcomings and the challenges to it by feminism and poststructuralism, auteurism remains a strong structuring force in film studies, providing varying degrees of readability for “high” art texts; for example, some
auteurs’ bodies of work are less readable than others, often by virtue of their “foreignness” or lesser availability to “the masses,” thus helping to establish a cultural hierarchy in which high-brow cineastes foster elitism over cinephiles with supposedly less refined tastes.
Meanwhile, cult movie criticism has emerged in recent years as almost a form of “reverse elitism” celebrating modes and genres of films typically considered untouchable by either a) “the mainstream” or b) “cultural elites”: two hazily defined conceptualizations to which the figure of the cultist is often posited and constructed in an oppositional, subcultural stance. [1] <#fn1> It is in this light that I
wish to look at Stanley Kubrick as an example of a filmmaker in whom auteurism and cultism are interrelated. I am not trying to claim him as a “cult auteur” in any sense, for it is certainly difficult to imagine Kubrick’s art film reputation mingling with the likes of John Waters, Jess Franco, or Ed Wood. Indeed, with the notable exception (and counterexample) of A Clockwork Orange (1971), none of his films are widely regarded as “cult” objects. Rather, Kubrick interests me precisely because, like Hitchcock, he is such a canonical director in the “high” auteur tradition, greatly regarded by cultural elites and casual (even “mainstream”) film buffs alike. However, in Kubrick there are clearer parallels between the phenomenon of cult movie celebrationand the “cult” of personality surrounding his role as auteur.
Auteur criticism seems to be the legitimate, academic side of the “cult” appreciation of a given director, taking artfulness for granted in thevery term “auteur” (as opposed to the much more recent concept of a “cult auteur,” such as Ed Wood, who might create rather artless exploitation films that still bear a distinct authorial stamp). Cult film scholars have alluded to the connections between cultism and auteurism as different but related reading strategies for films. Sconce (1995) compares the cultist’s film consumption to the cineaste’s film consumption, both sharing a perceived opposition to mainstream Hollywood productions (p. 381); likewise, the cultist uses sophisticated reading
strategies similar to the cineaste’s interpretation of an auteur’s stylistic innovations (p. 386). More recently, Sconce (2003) notes that “What is often dismissed in [cult film’s white, middle-class, male]
audience as pointless obsession, however, is a close analogue to the work of legitimate film scholars…. […] If ‘cult’ audiences mimic film scholars, film scholarship is not unlike a cult” (p. 31). [2] <#fn2> Indeed, Hawkins (2000) notes how auteur theory grew out of the cultish celebration by white, middle-class, male critics at /Cahiers du cinéma/ (several of whom famously became the vanguard of the “high art” French New Wave) of various B-movie and genre directors like Samuel Fuller, Howard Hawks, and Nicolas Ray (directors who represented an alternative to commercialized Hollywood productions). She describes how “MacMahonism” informed the /Cahiers/ auteurist debates with “a macho, heroic film aesthetic that drew equally from high and low culture” (p.
18). Auteur theory of the 1950’s and 1960’s was in many ways a sort of fan-boy’s club,” a school of thought at odds with the feminizing effects of “mainstream” Hollywood culture, yet leveling certain high and low films as equals within the same critical plane in the process of cultish adulation. Auteurist and cultist reading strategies both share the same insistence on reading films for special aspects perhaps not noticeable by the uninitiated (no matter whether that “uninitiated” be
construed as mainstream commercial moviegoers or viewers on either side of the supposed “high/low” cultural divide)—and of course, thecontinuing influence of auteurism has informed the criticism of both artcinema and cult cinema.
Beneath the glossy veneer of artiness (which critics usually emphasize to help elevate, and thus distance, an auteur’s films from that of “common” genre directors), Kubrick’s films generally fall into the classifications of popular genre, especially genres that have traditionally been associated with male-oriented, “low,” or B-movie productions. For future reference, a listing of his 13 films, accompanied by my genre classifications for each, should make this more readily viewable:
Fear and Desire (1953): war
Killer’s Kiss (1955): film noir
The Killing (1956): film noir
Paths of Glory (1957): war
Spartacus (1960): sword & sandal epic, war
Lolita (1962): black comedy, romantic melodrama
Dr. Strangelove (1964): black comedy, war
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): science-fiction
A Clockwork Orange (1971): science-fiction, black comedy
Barry Lyndon (1975): costume drama
The Shining (1980): horror
Full Metal Jacket (1987): war
Eyes Wide Shut (1999): psychosexual melodrama
The obvious artistry of Kubrick’s films tends to raise their cultural
status from being mere genre pictures to being the artful products of an
auteur, especially after the time of Kubrick’s formulation as an auteur
in the early 1960’s (as I shall elaborate upon shortly). Auteur status
automatically confers a certain artistry upon a director, especially one
able to raise “low” genres and make them palatable to those with higher
cultural tastes. Of course, this is not to say that all of Kubrick’s
films were received favorably by either mainstream moviegoers,
academics, or elite cineastes; many of his films garnered mixed reviews
from both “low” and “high” audiences. However, Kubrick’s films mixed
low/mass and high/art in ways that made his films relatively popular to
most viewers. Like many art film auteurs, Kubrick’s films were produced
outside of the Hollywood system (not to mention, geographically in
England since 1962’s Lolita) and exhibit various artistic traits
alternately familiar and challenging to mainstream American audiences
accustomed to Hollywood products; however, unlike most art film auteurs
(even other American ones like David Lynch), most of Kubrick’s films
were financed and widely distributed by major Hollywood studios, as
likely to be shown in mainstream cinemas as to be shown in art houses.
Kubrick’s crossover success between both mainstream audiences and art
house elites speaks to the fact that many of his films were both strong
artistic and financial achievements upon their release, no doubt
inspired by Kubrick’s choice of subject matter that roughly falls into
popular, traditionally profitable genres. [3] <#fn3> While some subject
matter came from popular fiction (e.g., Stephen King, Peter George),
some of Kubrick’s source material descended from “high” literary canons
(e.g., Vladimir Nabokov, Anthony Burgess, William Makepeace Thackeray),
thus adding a further degree of artistic repute to the resulting filmic
adaptations—though the case of A Clockwork Orange shows that material of
a “high” literary pedigree can still result in a definitive “cult” work.
Of considerable interest in auteur criticism is the personal life of the
director authoring the text, a life informing films with his/her unique
sensibility, and Kubrick’s legacy /as it exists today/ provides a
notable example. The “cult of personality” formed by auteurism builds
legends around filmmakers, especially those whose living and working
methods are marked by eccentricity, such as Lars Von Trier, Werner
Herzog, and David Lynch. Legends about Kubrick’s meticulous and
pain-staking preproduction research, his penchant for repeated takes and
sheer perfectionism while filming and editing, and various obsessive
aspects of his personal life (e.g., fear of flying, permanent residency
in England, etc.) have sprung up around the man and his work, creating
him into a sort of mythic figure. A connection can be drawn here between
auteur theory and cultism, for both highly value trivia as a means of
providing “a sense of inclusion through shared knowledge” that is also
used “to exclude outsiders” (Hunt, 2003, p. 187). Just as cultists use
trivia to inform reading strategies and exert a purported sense of
ownership over the revered material, the auteurist critic uses intimate
and highly detailed knowledge of the director’s personal life and prior
work in order to inform auteurist reading strategies and to assert a
film’s academic or high cultural value as an artistic text that rises
above “mainstream” tastes or fosters such reading strategies. Likewise,
both cultists and auteurist critics use “critical distance” to
distinguish themselves as more discerning than mass market viewers, thus
privileging some reading strategies over others (Hunt, 2003, p. 197),
especially when the cult/auteur object is also widely popular within
“mainstream” consumption (as in Kubrick’s films, for example).
In the case of Kubrick specifically, the figure of him as a hermetic,
idiosyncratic auteur bodes well for a sort of cultist/auteurist
conflation. By remaining intensely private and secretive on the fringes
of an industry built upon public exposure, the notion of
Kubrick-as-auteur fostered a “cult of personality” by his very refusal
to exploit the limelight occupied more comfortably by other prominent
directors (e.g., compare Kubrick to Hitchcock’s rampant showmanship and
self-aggrandizement). This hermeticism encourages auteurist readings
that border especially strongly on cult because the auteurist critic
must “gain access” to the filmmaker’s private world—a world not unlike
the hermetic, border-policed world of the cultist—using the sort of
detailed cross-textual knowledge (and/or trivia) of Kubrick’s work
necessary for an auteurist reading. Likewise, the infrequency with which
Kubrick produced films—only 13 in almost 50 years of filmmaking, with
lengthening intervals between films in his late career (e.g., 12 years
between 1987’s Full Metal Jacket and 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut)—adds to an
almost cultish critical overinvestment in each release. [4] <#fn4> In a
broader sense, this sort of critical (over)investment also leads to
repeat consumption of an auteur’s films under the lofty stance of
“artworthiness,” a reading/consumption strategy resembling the repeat
consumption of cult films by fans similarly attuned to the
textual/profilmic practices and eccentricities of their less reputable
object choices.
A brief glance at each of Kubrick’s films should hopefully help to draw
some parallels between cultist and auteurist object choices. Fear and
Desire (1953), Kubrick’s low-budget independently produced first
feature, tells an existential tale about soldiers fighting behind enemy
lines in an unnamed war that causes them to lose their sanity and
humanity. Along with Spartacus (1960), this was Kubrick’s only film on
which he received no screenwriting credit, yet for all of its weaknesses
as a rather amateur debut film, it shares thematic resonances with many
of his later films—most notably in its evocation of the dehumanizing
effects of violence and war. According to biographer Vincent LoBrutto
(1999), the film played the art house circuit to mixed reviews before,
notably enough, being billed “as a sexploitation picture.” Kubrick soon
withdrew all prints of it from public exhibition and it was very rarely
seen for decades. As LoBrutto says, “Cultists and Kubrick fanatics saw
it as a cinematic equivalent of the Rosetta Stone or the Shroud of
Turin,” due to its utter unavailability (p. 90). Although extremely
difficult to find, there are very poor quality bootlegs of the film
circulating within the same paracinematic video trade/sales circles that
many hard-to-find, semi-legal cult films call home. In this sense, Fear
and Desire exists today as a sort of “lost object” invested with great
desire by Kubrick cultists, a prize obtainable by only the hardcore few
who use the same illicit, underground sources utilized by other cult
consumers.
Killer’s Kiss (1955) was Kubrick’s second low-budget independent
feature, and his first foray into the film noir style/genre still in its
heyday at the time, despite being a “low” B-movie genre. This time out,
Kubrick wrote the film, in addition to photographing, editing, and
directing it. The story of a boxer dragged into violence as he attempts
to protect a dancer from a vengeful nightclub owner, Killer’s Kiss was
inspired by Kubrick’s first short documentary film, Day of the Fight
(1951). Kubrick’s next project was his first Hollywood studio feature,
The Killing (1956), another film noir that is often considered his first
“professional” picture. It helped pioneer a radically nonlinear
narrative structure by using intersecting flashbacks to show the details
of a racetrack robbery gone wrong and a getaway thwarted by cruel
chance. According to LoBrutto (1999), this nonlinear structure was
rather confusing to audiences at the time and the film was neither a
critical nor financial success; instead of showing in art houses (as
Kubrick intended), it played as part of a double feature like many other
films noirs and B-movies (p. 123-26). Although this type of nonlinear
structure would eventually become a trademark of art cinema, it was
apparently not enough to raise a film noir like The Killing to “high”
enough cultural status for it to play in the art houses. Nevertheless,
Kubrick’s “auteur” methods (e.g., commandeering the film’s
cinematography from veteran studio cinematographer Lucien Ballard) and
critical status (e.g., press comparisons to Orson Welles) were beginning
to mount; from this point on, Kubrick’s control over his films
(Spartacus excepted) from the writing stage to the directing was more
pronounced, although he was not yet also in charge of the distribution
and theatre booking of his films, as he would be in his later career.
Kubrick’s reputation as a skillful perfectionist and talented
up-and-coming auteur grew with his next film, Paths of Glory (1957). His
first studio film with a major star, it featured Kirk Douglas as a
French general who tries unsuccessfully to save three men from execution
for cowardice following a blundered attack in the trenches of World War
I. Another film about the dehumanizing effects of war, not to mention a
harsh condemnation of military corruption and wrongdoing—themes to which
he would return in Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket—it was a
critical success. It was also Kubrick’s first film to be shot outside of
the United States (in Germany). Douglas then brought in Kubrick as a
last-minute replacement for director Anthony Mann on his sprawling
big-budget sword & sandal epic Spartacus several years later. Centering
on the failed slave rebellion led by the titular gladiator, the
resulting film was a lackluster example of a cycle that was nearing the
end of its course in Hollywood. [5] <#fn5> Although it earned several
awards and a respectable box-office return (despite controversy about
the source novel and screenplay being written by two blacklisted
writers), Kubrick was not pleased with the production process as
essentially a director-for-hire and in later years semi-disowned the
film. As LoBrutto (1999) states, “The supreme lesson that Stanley
Kubrick learned on Spartacus was that he had to have autonomy on the
films he directed,” and Kubrick later noted that Spartacus was the only
film on which he did not have “absolute control” (p. 193). It seems that
this unpleasant transitional experience merely strengthened Kubrick’s
resolve to take the next step into auteurdom.
Lolita (1962) was Kubrick’s first production to be surrounded by
widespread controversy, due to Nabokov’s notorious seriocomic story of a
middle-aged professor who becomes tragically infatuated with a pre-teen
“nymphet.” With the announced production mired in scandal from the
get-go, Kubrick decided to move shooting to England to help avoid high
production costs and censorship restrictions, and he would subsequently
shoot the rest of his films in England as well. Many compromises with
various censorship boards were necessary to secure the film a seal of
approval for distribution, but Lolita was finally okayed, opening to
positive reviews and solid box-office returns. Although Lolita is not
generally considered a cult movie in any respect (possibly in part
because its risqué subject matter always remains at the level of
innuendo and mild suggestion, never explicitly employing “low” or
exploitative appeals to the viewer’s body), the very controversy itself
shares parallels between cultism and auteurism. In his discussion of
David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), Mathijs (2003) notes how “topicality
and controversy are crucial mechanisms in the creation of cult in
critical reception” (p. 122), serving to help form or bolster a
director’s auteur status. Controversy and topicality—which often go
hand-in-hand when a film calls into question the changing nature of
cultural values (e.g., the relaxing of limits as to “permissible” film
content)—raise critical discussion about the extra-textual “worth” of a
disputed cultural artifact. As some critics attempt to reappraise a
scandalous film in this context, auteurist readings may result through
the linking of the film’s controversial aspects to the question of
directorial intent, thus helping to critically reinterpret the film as
more “worthy” than it might not otherwise seem at first glance (p.
115-16, 122). While there appears to be a world of difference between
Kubrick’s “high” literary adaptation (pre-privileged for serious
critical consideration) and Cronenberg’s “low” body horror debut
(pre-prejudiced for serious critical dismissal), the reception of each
film respectively shares a critical tendency toward auteurist readings
that help to dispel the threat of potentially “pornographic,”
exploitative subject matter in each. Just as Cronenberg’s reputation as
a budding auteur sprang from the controversy of his first feature film,
I believe that Kubrick’s growing reputation as an auteur was much aided
by his willingness to engage in controversial subject matter (e.g., as
in his later films like A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut). After
Lolita, Kubrick’s renown as an auteur seemed to be firmly established:
virtually all of his subsequent films were advertised under the banner
of his own name, the title of each film often preceded by the “Stanley
Kubrick’s” ownership tag (e.g., “Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange”
or “Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove”), as if actively using his
“absolute control” as auteur as a marketing strategy unto itself.
Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(1964) marked another Kubrick incursion into comedic territory, again
using a fairly serious novel (Peter George’s /Red Alert/) as inspiration
for a satire. The result was one of his most popularly enduring films, a
perversely razor-edged black comedy about the very real threat of global
nuclear annihilation; in more recent years, Kubrick’s vision of
power-mad politicians and military men has been validated as being much
closer to the truth than even the filmmakers themselves knew at the
time. As Eco (1986) notes, a cult movie must “provide a completely
furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes”
(qtd. in Mathijs, 2003, p. 109), and Dr. Strangelove seems to fall into
this category. It is Kubrick’s first immensely quotable film and its
shadowy netherworld of government war rooms, hovering bombers, and
besieged military bases denotes a sort of eerily familiar, yet
satirically sent-up Cold Warring world. Were the film not so highly
celebrated by both cineastes and moviegoers (both at the time of its
release and today), its subversively sardonic take on the global nuclear
politics of its day would no doubt heighten its status as a cult object
due to the sheer perversity of its subject matter. A film’s inclusion in
the canons of “high art” often seems to preclude its being taken as a
cult object, and vice-versa; “cult” is automatically associated with
“low” objects, even if cult is just as select a culturally imposed
categorization as the “high” art revered by cineastes. Dr. Strangelove,
like Eco’s example of the highly regarded Casablanca (Michael Curtiz,
1943), provides a case in which low/cult and high/art appreciations of
the same film are not mutually exclusive, even if each categorization is
often used in opposition to the other. In this way, auteurism and
cultism can share similar cultural self-exclusionary tactics, even if
their reading strategies are remarkably alike, finding value in the very
same aspects of a given film (even when those aspects are not
necessarily read ironically or subversively, as in cult
consumption)—perhaps even more alike than some cult film theorists are
willing to admit.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was Kubrick’s first science-fiction film,
and is generally considered a very influential benchmark effort, not
only of the genre but of cinema in general. Adapted from a short story
by Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most highly esteemed science-fiction
writers, the film traced the simian ancestry of man back to the
existence of extraterrestrial intelligence during prehistory—then leapt
forward in time to the titular year as man-made computer technology
takes over a spaceship amid an exploratory expedition to Jupiter. The
film ends with the sole surviving astronaut fleeing the ship in an
escape pod, being sucked through a Star Gate, and emerging in an alien
environment where he ages rapidly before apparently being reborn as an
evolutionarily advanced Starchild orbiting Earth. The open-ended, highly
symbolic narrative of the film has much in common with other radical
narratological developments in 1960’s art cinema (e.g., Alain Renais’
1961 Last Year at Marienbad), and despite some understandable public
confusion and discussion over what the film ultimately meant, it became
regarded as the first “serious” science-fiction picture; its most direct
cinematic descendant in narrative form and genre is Solaris (Andrei
Tarkovsky, 1972). Hailed as an artistic and technological triumph, 2001:
A Space Odyssey helped bring an air of respectability to the genre.
According to LoBrutto (1999), Kubrick had prepared for the production by
viewing any and all science-fiction films he could acquire, even ones of
the lowest quality, in his search for new ideas (p. 270)—though he would
not do likewise in his preparation to enter the horror genre with The
Shining (1980). Kubrick himself helped to distinguish his film from the
“low” associations that science-fiction films had garnered since the
youth craze of the 1950’s: “I don’t regard 2001 simply as science
fiction,” he told /Newsweek/. “Science fiction is a legitimate field, of
course. But there has been bad execution of the visual effects and too
much emphasis on monsters. 2001 is not fantasy, though a portion of it
is speculative” (qtd. in LoBrutto, 1999, p. 311). Although Kubrick (and
critics supporting the film) seemed all too ready to distance 2001: A
Space Odyssey from the fantasy, monsters, and bad visual effects found
in the less reputable science-fiction films of the 1950’s and 1960’s
which are now consumed primarily by a cult audience, his own film drew a
strong cult audience of its own. Billed as “the ultimate trip,” 2001: A
Space Odyssey was very popular with the 1960’s youth generation,
frequented by hippies and other counterculture members eager to enhance
their drug trips with the hallucinatory trip through the Star Gate
depicted in the film. In his pioneering survey of “subversive” films,
Vogel (1974) describes 2001 as a “Cult film of the young, this is a
manifesto of the new sensibility; a nostalgic elegy to innocence lost to
technology, a vision of truths beyond understanding. It ends with
unforgettable images of the new star child in space, facing the earth he
must transform to make it human again” (p. 322, caption). Though Kubrick
had not made the film specifically for the counterculture, nor intended
it to portray or enhance a drug trip (as in a “head film”), it was
nevertheless appropriated by a strong countercultural cult audience, the
same demographic that helped bridge the “high” art cinema of the 1960’s
and the “low” midnight (cult) movie sensation of the 1970’s.
Part science-fiction, part black comedy, A Clockwork Orange (1971) is
the only Kubrick film to be widely regarded not only as an important art
film, but also as a prime example of a cult film. With its dark humor,
disturbingly graphic imagery, “retro-futuristic” visual style,
synth-classical score, and the inventive “nadsat” slang taken from
Anthony Burgess’s novel, there is much to suggest the film as a cult
object, a special sort of (in Eco’s words) “completely furnished world”
unto itself enabling the quotation of dialogue and situations. The
near-futuristic story of a vicious teenage gang leader whose violent
free will is stripped from him by an authoritarian society attempting
his rehabilitation, A Clockwork Orange proved very popular with young
audiences and much of its cult reputation springs from the notorious
depictions of sex and violence that allegedly inspired “copycat” crimes
(a controversy much like the one later surrounding Walter Hill’s 1979
cult movie The Warriors). As had been the case with Lolita, the gradual
easing of censorship restrictions meant that Kubrick could take on more
potentially objectionable subject matter; inaugurated in 1968, the
Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings system opened
possibilities for new sexual and violent material to appear on screen,
and A Clockwork Orange (rated “X” upon its initial release) was one of
the most notorious of these transgressive new films to appear. The
elimination of formal censorship restrictions meant that Kubrick could
finally have “final cut” on A Clockwork Orange and his subsequent films,
a rare privilege stipulated in his contracts with various studios
(though some rare cuts had to be made to avoid an “X” or “NC-17” rating
for better distribution and marketing purposes, and A Clockwork Orange
was eventually re-rated “R” after several cuts). Ironically, the
conservative backlash over the film’s purported ability to incite
copycat crimes echoed the film’s own depiction of filmic images being
used to forcibly alter human behavior; after receiving death threats
over the film, Kubrick pulled it from theatrical release for many years.
Regardless, “cult” behavior associated with the film was especially
marked in Britain (the film’s setting), where actual teenage gangs
emulated the distinctive dress and talk of the film’s dangerous young
“droogs,” this being one of several trends in British youth
counterculture (along with teddy boys, skinheads, mods & rockers, etc.)
that would eventually culminate in the punk movement of the late-1970’s.
When Quentin Tarantino recently quipped that Kubrick made A Clockwork
Orange merely for the masturbatory fantasy afforded by the graphic
opening scenes of the picture [6] <#fn6>, there is no doubt a grain of
truth in his statement, since Hawkins (2000) points out that, according
to cineastes and other elites, “high” cultural objects /supposedly/ (but
clearly do not) evoke different pleasures than “low” or exploitative
cultural objects, even when both high and low objects engage the
viewer’s body in the very same way (p. 6). As Clover (1992) says in her
analysis of rape-revenge horror films, “were they less well and
expensively made by less famous men,” both Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah,
1971) and A Clockwork Orange “would surely classify as sensationalist
exploitation” like Meir Zarchi’s infamous 1977 cult film I Spit on Your
Grave (p. 116). Just as Watson (1997) notes that censorship regulations
actively created the illicit subjects taken up by classical exploitation
cinema (p. 79), the final lifting of these regulations in the 1960’s
meant that these illicit subjects could be taken up by dominant culture,
with art cinema often leading the way that more mainstream films would
soon follow. Indeed, as Hawkins (2000) notes, A Clockwork Orange is one
of a group of films that is difficult to categorize because it draws
upon both “high” and “low” art traditions, mixing avant-garde
stylization, high production values, and European art film cachet with
plenty of sex and violence that engage the viewer’s body (p. 22-23).
Financed and distributed by a major American studio, it emerged at a
time in which Hollywood was competing for art film audiences as art
films, pornography, and countercultural films all crossed over into
increased mainstream popularity (p. 22, 189). Even today, A Clockwork
Orange remains a controversial and notorious work, retaining its cult
status among young (predominantly male) viewers; venerated by cultists
but still regarded by cineastes as one of Kubrick’s finest films, it
demonstrates perhaps the strongest meshing of “high” and “low” elements
in the director’s oeuvre.
For his next project, Kubrick would dive into a very different sort of
“completely furnished world,” an 18th-Century costume drama based on a
fictional memoir written by William Makepeace Thackeray about a young
Irish rogue who flees his homeland after a duel, gradually rises to
great wealth and social status (after being a soldier, spy, and card
shark), only to be reduced back to destitution after a series of social
mishaps. Barry Lyndon (1975) is an opulent, exactingly detailed vision
of a time period long gone, recreated using very modern technology
(e.g., special lenses adapted to shoot by candlelight). Although it was
an impressively executed film that was celebrated by critics worldwide
and drew large audiences in Europe, it did not attract large numbers in
the United States (unlike most of Kubrick’s other films). Despite its
obvious artistry and technical achievement, today Barry Lyndon seems to
be one of Kubrick’s least culturally enduring works, perhaps because it
is one of the least likely to potentially foster a cult reading; indeed,
beyond Kubrick’s “cultish” auteur status and his previous film record,
there is remarkably little textual material in Barry Lyndon to encourage
a crossover cult acceptance of it. Another factor in this (as I hinted
in note 3) may well be the “feminine” quality attributed to the costume
drama. Although Barry Lyndon the protagonist is a fighter in duels and
wars, a womanizer, and a rather likable masculine fellow, the costume
drama is commonly associated with the feminine, especially when
melodramatic elements are involved. While most of Kubrick’s other films
are in typically “masculine” genres (e.g., war, science-fiction,
horror), several of his least currently popular works (e.g., Barry
Lyndon, Lolita, Eyes Wide Shut) all contain more melodramatic or
expressly romantic material than the others. Though melodrama (a
traditionally “low” genre) certainly does not preclude auteurist
consideration, as the reputations of Douglas Sirk and Max Ophuls
testify, cult consideration is more likely to reject more manipulative
“feminine” melodramatic elements and lean toward masculine appreciation
of films. Indeed, Hollows (2003) and Read (2003) both show how “cult” is
often strongly associated with masculinity (albeit a masculinity under
threat from the stereotype of the cultist as a “desexualized” fan-boy in
whom femininity and consumerism are conflated). Hollows (2003) in
particular notes how a film like Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) may be a
“cult” film to a certain select (largely feminine) audience, but its
associations with both a mass audience and the feminine qualities of
melodrama ensure that it is unlikely to be accepted by either academic
or popular (male-dominated) cult canons (p. 38). Such may be a similar
case with Barry Lyndon merely due to its high production values and
(feminine) genre status, thus repelling possible “cult” readings while
preserving all of the “high” art distinction of auteurism. With the
counter-cinematic (i.e., low-budget, marginalized, or subversive) stress
placed on so much cult film, perhaps it comes as no surprise that
costume dramas in general—a genre typified by lavish historical
depictions of the aristocratic and bourgeois ruling classes—do not often
have a cult reputation, unless there are some outstanding textual
elements that help to actively encourage a cult reading (e.g., the
eccentric and horror-based imagery of Ken Russell’s 1986 Gothic).
The Shining (1980) was Kubrick’s only real foray into the horror film,
but it remains a rather notable and well-known release within that
genre. Jack Nicholson delivers one of his most campily excessive
performances as a struggling writer who moves his family to a snowbound
hotel where he has been hired as a winter caretaker, only to be driven
murderously insane by ghostly influences. Though most critics panned the
film (perhaps in part due to its status as a horror film), it was still
a box-office success. Although Kubrick’s “high” auteur status somewhat
sets him apart from “low” horror auteurs who are more likely to have a
cult following, the use of the horror genre itself is in some sense
enough to draw some kind of cult audience; for example, even a glossy
“mainstream” horror film like The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) or
The Shining remains celebrated by many cult horror audiences, while
those same cult audiences may denounce other more explicitly commercial,
derivative Hollywood horror output. There are many different “cult”
audiences, “mainstream” audiences, and “high art” audiences—none of them
are a cohesive group with entirely shared tastes—but The Shining tends
to find some acceptance in each rough category of spectatorship, whether
by virtue of its status as a horror film, its status as a Kubrick film,
or its actual artistic merit. More recent critical reappraisals of the
film (see Cramer, 1997) have located it in the domain of postmodernity
(and thus a level of artworthiness supposedly transcending traditional
horror film conventions), seeing Kubrick as knowingly playing with
tropes of the Gothic novel, the haunted house subgenre, and the slasher
subgenre, creating something distinctly different from Stephen King’s
source novel. Another critic even relates the emergent paternal violence
in The Shining back to the Starchild from 2001: A Space Odyssey, as the
father symbolically seeks revenge and the reappropriation of patriarchal
power that he ceded in the face of a new type of bourgeois family reborn
during the turmoil of the 1960’s (see Sobchack, 1996). In any case, the
development of serious scholarly work on the horror film (which has also
partially yielded recent work on cult films) has helped The Shining to
gain some “high” cultural currency with cineastes, not just as the work
of a well-known auteur but also as a major work in the “horror canon” (a
canon that has traditionally been a favorite for cultists, even if
cultists and cineastes would not necessarily include the same films in
their own definition of the that canon). In the realm of “art-horror”
films like The Shining, a crossover between auteurists and cultists
seems quite inevitable.
Full Metal Jacket (1987) marked Kubrick’s full return to the war film,
and was considered one of the strongest films in a cycle of
Vietnam-related films that appeared during the 1980’s. Opening to strong
reviews and strong box-office, Full Metal Jacket was another bleak look
at the dehumanizing effects of war, first focusing on the
identity-destroying Marine boot camp experience, then on the horrific
violence inflicted and incurred by American troops in Vietnam. The film
also depicts the racism, sexism, and homophobia of the troops in a
negative light, but regardless of these admonitions of insensitive male
bonding behavior, Full Metal Jacket remains a favorite of (male) war
movie enthusiasts, typically for its darkly sadistic sense of humor (as
deftly illustrated in R. Lee Ermey’s much-quoted gunnery sergeant
character). “Serious” war films like Full Metal Jacket, even if
artistically made and offering a critique of military violence,
nevertheless serve a sort of masculine dynamic as shaping a strongly
male-dominated genre. While war films are often created on large
budgets, either as historical recreations or as action vehicles, high
production values (especially in “serious” war films) often translate
into graphically realistic depictions of wartime violence and other
aberrant behavior (e.g., rape, racism, etc.), all in the name of
historical authenticity. Like the extreme (male-oriented) imagery in
horror and other types of cult film, gore and other “authentic”
offensive material in the (male-oriented) war film is often used by
(young) male viewers as a sort of test of “hardness,” as if only the
most hardened sensibilities will be able to withstand the experience of
such imagery (e.g., see Hollows, 2003, p. 45). In this way, war films
and horror/cult films, two traditionally male-dominated varieties of
film, both use extreme imagery as a means of determining a sort of
“masculine” inclusion, almost like a rite of passage. In a time when the
draft has been abolished in America and military service remains merely
optional, the modern war film especially serves this masculine “rite of
passage” by using graphic imagery as an ersatz substitute for actual
lived combat experience (even if this inadvertently celebrates the
sacrificial nature of American troops in unjust wars like Vietnam,
partially undercutting the larger critique of American involvement in
such wars). Also like the horror/cult film, Full Metal Jacket in
particular is infused with a sadistic blend of horror/abuse and gallows
humor, evoking both shock and laughter.
Though he had first become interested in the project in the early
1970’s, Kubrick’s final film would be Eyes Wide Shut (1999), a languid
and dreamlike psychosexual fantasy about a New York doctor who embarks
upon a nighttime journey of gradually increasing deviancy after his wife
reveals her unrequited sexual fantasies for another man. Despite (or
perhaps in part because of) the hype surrounding the film, especially
the infamous orgy scenes and the on-screen sexuality between
then-married stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, most critics dismissed
the film as a relative failure, remarking that the reclusive Kubrick was
out of touch with modern marriage—though the film’s marketing and
notoriety did draw audiences. Controversy surrounded the film on several
issues: first, that Kubrick had not finished editing the film at the
time of his death, for he often made cuts after a film’s premiere,
before sending prints into wider distribution; second, that this film
was proof that Kubrick the mythic auteur was an uncontrollable
megalomaniac (as suggested by Eyes Wide Shut screenwriting collaborator
Frederic Raphael in his memoir Eyes Wide Open); and third, that the
American version of the film would be rated NC-17 by the MPAA unless
computer-generated figures were inserted to obscure several of the more
risqué shots in the orgy sequence, thus violating Kubrick’s final
“vision” for the film. [7] <#fn7> As had been the case with several of
his earlier films, Kubrick’s “high” cultural use of transgressive sexual
content was cause for much auteurist consideration, whereas similar
content in a film by a lesser director would surely be construed as a
typically “low” cultural employment of softcore pornography—despite the
fact that many critics seemed genuinely disappointed by the lack of
actual eroticism in Eyes Wide Shut, which as Siegel (1999) suggests, led
to a critical backlash against the more subtle artistic touches in the
film (p. 76-83). Thus, auteurist critics (e.g., Andrew Sarris) built
their expectations upon the failed promise of “low,” potentially
pornographic content that would then be “redeemed” for cineastes through
Kubrick’s “high” culture reputation and artistry as an auteur—but
instead they turned against the film precisely because the more
auteurist strokes in Kubrick’s film were too subtle to outweigh the
much-hyped sexual content. Kubrick’s touted role as auteur is quite
apparent in the outcry that the mild censorship of the orgy sequence
would infringe upon his apparent “auteur privilege” to include whatever
he wished in his final cut, even if that freedom to do so would not be
shared by “lower” directors. The backlash over the sexual content of the
film—combined with Rafael’s diatribe, which seemed to represent the
flip-side of the idiosyncratic auteurist coin that had benefited Kubrick
for so much of his career—added up to a negative critical response to
Eyes Wide Shut which actually used Kubrick’s own auteurdom against him.
With even auteurist critics sided against the film, celebration of the
film today falls more to the same “cultists and Kubrick fanatics” noted
by LoBrutto (1999, p. 90). Despite its mix of “high” art and “low”
softcore sexuality, Eyes Wide Shut remains one of Kubrick’s most
culturally neglected films, but that very neglect (mixed with the film’s
controversial content) leaves it as fodder for Kubrick fans in whom
cultism and auteurism exist symbiotically. [8] <#fn8>
As I have hopefully shown, cult readings and auteur readings share many
similar strategies and objects, especially in films where “high” and
“low” elements commingle. Kubrick’s films ostensibly belong squarely in
the “high” cultural category of “art,” but they clearly share
crosscurrents with “low,” largely male-oriented cult films, on both the
textual level of diegesis and the extra-textual level of consumption.
Auteurist veneration of such films borders strongly upon (if not
outright overlaps into) a sort of cultist celebration of those works
under the respectable veneer of “artworthiness” and “high” cultural
acceptability (and vice-versa in the case of “cult auteurs”); in this
way, auteurism and cultism can be seen to intersect quite often in the
spectatorship of both art films and cult films in general, for the
reading and consumption practices of each commonly blur together upon
closer inspection, falsely separated only by the associations of
high/elite and low/mass taste that “art” and “trash” respectively garner
in an economically stratified society.
With this in mind, I would like to return to my initial question of the
young (male) film buff’s common investment in Kubrick as both auteur and
cult film director. Roughly comprising the same demographic that
primarily consumes both art and cult cinema, the young film
buff—ascending into the academy’s realm of “higher” knowledge and
cultural worth (not to mention greater capital-earning potential)—is
positioned between different economic and cultural strata that seem to
conflict along class divisions; as Hawkins (2000) notes, when bourgeois
and working-class people have the same amount and type of formal arts
schooling, bourgeois people are more likely to side with higher art
preferences due to class interests alone (p. 30). Although many of his
contemporary “high” auteurs have also made films into the late 1990’s,
Kubrick has retained a greater share of cultural currency in both
high/elite and low/mass audiences than perhaps any other art film
director. With a share in both popular and elite culture, the figure of
Kubrick-as-auteur proves an especially “safe” choice of filmmaker for
young film buffs to idolize in cultish ways, helping to bridge the gap
between those differing economic and cultural strata in the film buff’s
move from low/mass tastes to the high/elite tastes associated with a
higher educational and/or economic level and a wider knowledge of world
film. Aside from (and also in connection with) the major studio
distribution of his films in America, Kubrick’s “Americanness” may play
some role in his crossover cultural currency within both high/elite and
low/mass American audiences, for his films (all in the English language)
tend to lack the stigma of “foreignness” typically associated with art
cinema, for art cinema as a mode is most often associated with European
(non-English language) film productions as distinct from common
Hollywood product. The Kubrick oeuvre also consists of a rather
eclectic, almost “exotic” group of quality films produced over a broad
timeline of film history in varying genres, providing an automatic air
of worldly viewing experience to young film buffs that are Kubrick
aficionados/cultists; in addition, these somewhat disparate films tend
to be seen by young film buffs as sharing a similarly dark and
existential worldview (i.e., the opinion of the auteur), a general tone
for all of his films, rather than a set of specific and complicated
themes that might be more difficult for young film buffs to understand
and articulate. Kubrick’s long career of almost 50 total years allows
his films to be held in high regard by successive generations of critics
and audiences, allowing young film buffs an easy point of access into
the “high” film canon, but Kubrick’s “low/mass” genre crosscurrents
ensure that young film buffs do not seemingly (snobbishly) compromise an
earlier (“lower”) economic/cultural stratum that they might seem to
leave behind when entering the academy or bourgeois society.
One of the effects of cult film criticism has been this sort of repeated
traversing of high/elite and low/mass cultural strata, academically
placing cult film within the context of “high” film canons, whether by
positing cult film in political opposition to elite canons or by
incorporating cult film into aesthetic discussions of film form and
cultural consumption (for further discussion, see Read, 2003). As Read
(2003) points out, the male cult film critic is often caught between the
position of A) the politically enlightened academic and B) the
feminized, desexualized figure of the subcultural “fan-boy” who is at
once opposed to the feminine associations of “mass” culture consumption
and the political correctness (e.g., feminism) that would typically
denounce the disreputable (body-affecting) pleasures of many cult films
(p. 56). The cult film critic, much like the young film buff negotiating
high/low distinctions via the cultish celebration of an auteur like
Kubrick, thus cannot escape a position that is either viewed as
feminized and disempowered or as laddishly opposed to the feminism of
political correctness. Although mass culture consumption is generally
coded as “feminine” in a patriarchal society, less remarked upon by cult
film theorists is the strong reverse element of feminization that is
often associated with “high” art; from the perspective of the lower
classes (i.e., when working-class males are traditionally associated
with an aggressive, over-sexualized masculinity), “high” art is often
seen as rather foreign and bourgeois/elite, typically less visceral and
direct, somewhat unmanly and effete (hence the tellingly derogatory
epithet “art fag” occasionally applied to high art elites). Read (2003)
notes how the male cultist’s identification with the male
director-as-auteur allows him to fight the common connotations of
cultists as “nerdish,” desexualized fan-boys and feminized mass market
consumers; by actively and discriminatingly choosing their cult objects
(as opposed to vainly consuming, as is supposedly the case in feminine
mass market consumption) and exercising a degree of supposed control
over the texts through detailed knowledge/trivia of the auteur, male
cultists make a “masculine” claim over their cultdom (p. 65). In the
case of Kubrick-as-auteur, his use of certain genres and subject matter
(often associated with low, male-oriented, and body-affecting material
that is far from feminism’s various definitions of political
correctness) in combination with the major studio (semi- to
fully-mainstream) distribution of his films, means that his work
straddles mass tastes and elite tastes, its continuing cultural currency
in each category of spectatorship allowing the young (male) film buff to
retain ties to a low/mass audience and yet safely stretch his interests
into high/elite circles (since “art” film credentials supposedly raise a
film above “mainstream” consumption) without the risk of snobbery or the
potential guilt of leaving one’s previous economic/cultural level. The
figure of Kubrick-as-auteur thus allows “cultists and Kubrick fanatics,”
including the young (male) film buff, to indulge in (primarily)
male-oriented art films that draw upon both high and low cultural
elements and remain highly regarded by both low and high audiences,
suspending those cultists in a transitional space where the apparently
feminizing aspects of both low/mass and high/elite cultures comfortably
cancel each other out [9] <#fn9>, leaving Kubrick’s cultish auteurdom as
an ostensibly unproblematic and ultimately accessible site of interest
for the aspiring young (male) film buff or academic-in-training. Of
course, this same sort of argument can be equally extended to other
auteurs (both “high” and “low”) beyond Stanley Kubrick, but I have
hopefully pointed toward a source for increased critical work on the
intersection between cultism and auteurism, two overlapping
reading/consumption strategies that have coexisted uneasily for far too
long.
*End Notes*
^1 <#fn1up> When Kubrick died in March 1999, I was but a young high
school student familiar with only a handful of his films—but by the time
his final film Eyes Wide Shut was released four short months later, my
idolization of all things Kubrick was at a fever-pitch. This idolization
continued through high school and on into my first few years of college,
when my tastes became more eclectic and drifted toward more obscure
filmmakers, partially as a response to my new-found awareness of the
flaws of auteur theory and no doubt inspired in some regard by an
elitist desire to distance myself from the figure of Kubrick as an “easy
favorite” for other aspiring film students. If this personal admission
seems unnecessary, I am merely following a common convention of cult
movie criticism by naming my own investment and origins of interest in
the subject matter, then widening my scope somewhat. As such, my
observations in this article should be taken as rather speculative,
being based largely upon my own experience and my conversations with
fellow film buffs, most of whom have been young white American males.
^2 <#fn2up> Although Sconce’s observations center around what he terms
“paracinema,” which he locates around the mode of exploitation film
(Sconce, 1995, p. 372), cult film actually comprises a larger set of
films, as Jancovich, Reboll, Stringer, and Willis (2003) point out (p.
1). Thus, “cult” films can even include Hollywood or “high art”
productions that are read ironically, subversively, or “for all the
wrong reasons.” Hawkins (2000) and Betz (2003) are among the scholars
who have noted how art cinema’s consumption in America has often
overlapped dramatically, even indistinguishably, with the consumption of
exploitation film. It should also be noted that although the low-budget
nature of many cult films is often a cause for celebration for cultists
viewing such films as being in opposition to big-budget Hollywood
products, budget and production values do not a cult film make: take the
glossy, well-made films of Dario Argento, for example, as Hutchings
(2003) shows (p. 135, 137).
^3 <#fn3up> To an extent, Kubrick’s post-1950’s films (i.e., the ones in
which his auteur identity was fully formed) that seem to be the least
enduring in popular cultural currency today tend toward being those
which fall furthest outside the popular male-oriented genres in which he
traditionally worked. For example, Lolita (black comedy, romantic
melodrama), Barry Lyndon (costume drama), and Eyes Wide Shut
(psychosexual melodrama) all seem somewhat neglected compared to
Kubrick’s other post-1950’s films; while none of them lacks for
artistry, all three share considerable melodramatic elements that might
mark them as more “feminine” than the rest of Kubrick’s output.
^4 <#fn4up> While the number of films produced by a cult director does
not necessarily impact that director’s subcultural “worth,” some cult
critics are prone to celebrating directors who have made hundreds of
films outside the Hollywood system (e.g., Jess Franco), while other
critics focus on directors with a rather scarce output (perhaps scarce
due to the films being lost or censored out of existence) that is
subsequently inflated with worth, most often in retrospect in the
process of “reclaiming” a neglected filmmaker. Though Kubrick was
certainly not a neglected filmmaker, nor primarily a cult director, the
mix of zealously positive and negative critical responses that attended
his films upon their release (often with the same critics, such as
Richard Schickel, coming to similar conclusions from one film to the
next) points toward a more “cultish” response to the figure and critical
reputation of Kubrick-as-auteur than to unbiased opinion. Of course, in
this sense “fandom” and “cultdom” are hard to distinguish from one
another, as the auteurist critic will often overvalue the more positive
or progressive aspects in a lackluster film made by an auteur that
he/she celebrates, in order to help bolster the cultural “worth” of a
film that might not otherwise seem particularly important to members of
their readership (who are commonly academics, art house patrons, and
“high culture” cineastes) who are not “inside” when it comes to
knowledge of a particular auteur.
^5 <#fn5up> It should be noted here that “sword and sandal epics” like
Spartacus are one of the subgenres of “paracinema” mentioned by Sconce
(1995) as recipients of cult attention (p. 372). Although most of these
epics produced by Hollywood during the 1950’s-1960’s were glossy, often
award-winning historical films with big budgets, big stars, and high
production values (unlike, say, the more myth-inspired Italian /peplum/,
a more definitively paracinematic and “exploitation”-based foreign
subgenre), these epics still foster cult reading strategies today
through the use of campily excessive spectacle supposedly justified by
vaguely historical “facts,” not to mention the pervasive homoeroticism
that begs for ironic viewing. Case in point: the long-censored scene
from Spartacus (finally restored to the film 30 years later) featuring
an attempted seduction between characters played by Lawrence Olivier and
Tony Curtis.
^6 <#fn6up> According to Tarantino, interviewed in the October 20, 2003
issue of /The New Yorker/: “I always thought Kubrick was a hypocrite
because his party line was ‘I’m not making a movie about violence, I’m
making a movie against violence.’ And it’s just like, get the fuck off.
I know and you know your dick was hard the entire time you were shooting
those first twenty minutes; you couldn’t keep it in your pants the
entire time you were editing it and scoring it. You did it for those
first twenty minutes. And if you don’t say you did, you’re a fucking liar.”
^7 <#fn7up> Of the controversy over the MPAA’s de facto censorship (to
which most filmmakers bend to ensure a much more marketable “R” rating)
and Warner Brothers’ eventual addition of computer-generated figures to
Kubrick’s orgy scene, it is worth noting briefly that, as Hutchings
(2003) points out, “cult” culture sets up an us/them opposition positing
cultists as “freedom-seekers demanding the right to see forbidden
material” vs. mainstream conformist values or the apparatuses of
censorship (p. 131). As the Eyes Wide Shut controversy shows, this
cultish “desire to look” at that which is forbidden manifests itself in
the consumption of “high” auteurist work as well, since “high” art (a
longtime site of crossover for spectators seeking both “high” and “low”
material, especially in explicit sexual content, as the history of
foreign art cinema has illustrated) has long been similarly positioned
in opposition to both mainstream conformist values (i.e., bland
Hollywood product) and the apparatuses of censorship (e.g., the MPAA’s
censorship restrictions). Although the notorious orgy scene contains no
more sexual content than the sort of softcore simulated sex symptomatic
of the very “low” (sometimes even vaguely cultish but almost certainly
campy) erotic movies shown on late-night premium cable TV, the American
version of Eyes Wide Shut featured the computer- added obscuring figures
as a form of mild censorship, while European cuts of the film did not
(suggesting that European art cinema is still more free and potentially
transgressive than its American cousin, especially when Hollywood
studios like Warner Brothers are helping to fit the latter’s bill).
^8 <#fn8up> The screenplay for Kubrick’s unrealized final project
(another science-fiction film) would be rewritten and directed by Steven
Spielberg as A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). The resulting film
was a messy combination of Kubrick’s dark futuristic vision and
Spielberg’s typically schmaltzy Hollywood product. Because of the
organic way that Kubrick often re-wrote his scripts during filming and
included little specific visual detail in his written screenplays, it is
impossible to extract Kubrick’s ideas from Spielberg’s re-conception of
the film, just as it would make little sense to fully judge the relative
“auteur” status of each director. As such, I am excluding A.I. from my
analysis.
^9 <#fn9up> Although I have followed other cult film critics in their
delineation of masculinity vs. femininity in different types of
consumption practices, it may ultimately be more useful to view the
transition from young film buff to academic/elite as akin to the
transition from child to adult. Mass tastes (including most cult films)
are generally associated more with juvenile tastes, while appreciation
of art cinema would seem to demand a greater degree of adult maturity
and worldly knowledge. Of course, this is not necessarily a reality, for
cult readings are often just as complicated as art film readings, but
associating the young film buff with a child (while closer complying
with the youth demographic comprising both aspiring students and
cultists) still retains the association of cultism with the
desexualization of the aptly named “fan-boy.” Either way of
conceptualizing the anxious transition from mass/low tastes to
high/elite tastes (and certainly the ever-continuing fluctuations and
lapses between the two categories, for it is very rarely a permanent
one-way transition that subsequently eschews all “low” texts) may be
used here.
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