(SK) Admiring the Unpredictable Mr Kubrick | June 21, 1987 | New York Times | David Rabe

ADMIRING THE UNPREDICTABLE MR. KUBRICK By DAVID RABE; David Rabe's plays include ''Hurlyburly'' and a quartet of Vietnam works - ''The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,'' ''Sticks and Bones,'' ''The Orphan'' and ''Streamers.'' He has just completed a novel, ''The Recital of the Dog.'' Published: June 21, 1987 IT WAS ABOUT EIGHT MONTHS ago when I first heard that Stanley Kubrick was making a film dealing with Vietnam, called ''Full Metal Jacket.'' Holding Mr. Kubrick's work in the high esteem that I do - and having attempted to write about the war in a number of ways and from a number of angles - I was immediately intrigued. The fact that Michael Herr, who had written ''Dispatches,'' an amazing book about the war, was involved only increased my interest. The person to whom I was speaking said the movie was based on a novel, ''The Short-Timers,'' by Gustav Hasford, and that it contained one of the scariest scenes my friend had ever read. It sounded like this material was right up Mr. Kubrick's alley. Certainly he had shaken me up a number of times. Though I cannot, without reference to a film almanac, recollect the date or where I was living at the time, the experience of first seeing Mr. Kubrick's ''Dr. Strangelove'' rushing to its conclusion is fixed in my mind. It was in a state of near hysteria that I watched the great white plumes of flowering nuclear devastation erupting in gyres one upon the other and heard the eerie, innocent music in the background, the tune being sung by innocuous voices in their sweet but dopey harmony: ''We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day.'' With the cataclysms depicted in the rather abstract beauty of their fury, the image that we had emerged from the 50's sharing as our communal nightmare totem, the mushroom cloud, appeared again and again, a kind of exploding cross when you really looked at it, the plume intersected by the light rushing out in either direction; and with the sappy, nostalgic music beneath it, a kind of cozy and ostensibly sweet, yet somehow lifeless, invitation to a universal and final rendezvous, it seemed to me some dark yet cherished longing of our hearts had been unmistakably depicted. It's from that moment that I date my awareness of Mr. Kubrick. There was a spirit at work, as distinct as the most developed novelistic voice. He seemed a man thinking rigorously and originally about the most crucial issues. What was more, he had control of a film technique flexible enough to render this theme with wit, intelligence and passion. The year, according to the film almanac, was 1964. With the use of that date I can establish my occupation and whereabouts. Having dropped out of school, I was working either as a parking lot attendant at one Philadelphia hotel or a bellhop at another. Prompted by these facts, the street onto which I strode in the aftermath of that experience emerges. It was late afternoon, the theater was in Bryn Mawr, Pa., and I could not shut up. My shock was one of recognition, for nothing I had previously seen had ever portrayed with such precision and accuracy the strange mix of inappropriate emotion, tedium and elaborate rationality that are the ingredients repetitively of our contemporary horrors. In Sterling Hayden, as General Jack Ripper, reason and logic were at a premium as he outlined the cause and effect basis upon which he had set out to start World War III. Mad he might be, but logical he was. In the latter part of the 1950's, films had delivered us a steady parade of bug-eyed, frothing crazies. But this lunatic was professorial and bureaucratic. Every word was measured, the voice confident and calm, however undeterrable. While others might fret, he was serene in the absolute plausibility of his knowledge. Only when he revealed his deepest premises, some construct to do with fluoridation, Commies, precious bodily fluids and sex, could his madness be glimpsed. But even these points he explained patiently as, step by step, he laid out the entire scheme, expecting to be understood, every thought precisely placed before he went into the bathroom and shot himself. In the B-52 headed with the bomb toward Russia, the crew knew nothing of their commanding general's arcane and personal premises. They were lost in a system of technological procedures, cut off from all access in a hermetic world of codes and passwords, like numerological adepts adhering strictly to their doctrines. Shot with a shaking hand-held camera, every angle awkward, the frame crowded, the pans were rushed and sometimes indecisive. The faces of the men inside the belly of this bomber were shot past shoulders, over knees, the angles always clumsy so that the feel was that of a documentary. They spoke almost exclusively in slogans or the jargon by which they fulfilled their functions, and every button, light bulb and switch of their procedures was shown with a mounting sense of onrushing, mechanized doom. I began then to await Mr. Kubrick's movies, looking forward to them with a special anticipation. Memory, operating out of its own prerogatives, suggests that his next film was ''Lolita,'' followed by ''Paths of Glory,'' ''2001,'' ''A Clockwork Orange,'' ''Barry Lyndon'' and ''The Shining.'' The film almanac, however, quickly amends this list with ''Fear and Desire,'' ''Killer's Kiss,'' ''The Killing'' and ''Spartacus.'' It also reorders some of my transposed chronology, informing me that both ''Paths of Glory'' and ''Lolita'' preceded ''Dr. Strangelove.''