Living in Space

Rating: Null/10 (28 November 2001)

Spoilers herein.
Kubrick is a hard filmmaker to touch. He's obviously competent, even brilliant in some ways. And a few of his films -- `Strangelove' comes to mind -- make enough sense superficially that one is not compelled to go farther. The problem is that Kubrick never gives us much hint that his films are a whole different beast than the others on the shelf at the video store. I think he relished the confusion.
Most films tell a story in the old fashioned way: time moves, things happen, characters act. In these films, the story is largely apart from the storytelling. Because film is different than everything else, the means of storytelling are unique to film. And because film is still new, we have lots of room for discovering how to tell a story.
So we have the vast majority of filmmakers and viewers who think of a film purely in terms of the story. But we have another group of people who watch the storytelling, and perhaps (like myself) don't demand that much from the story itself. That's why we admire empty stylists like De Palma, but of course prefer master visual storytellers like Kurosawa.
The holy grail is when the narrative of the conventional threads and the cinematic ones mesh, or are coordinated in some clever way. By cinematic threads, I mean a narrative invested in the very fabric of the camera, like `Marienbad,' like `Pillow Book,' like Welles' `Othello,' or with the aid of actors like `Sweet and Lowdown,' or `Vanya on 42nd Street.' There's a sublime joy to parallel immersion in both the story and cinematic narratives.
But sometimes along comes a Kubrick to confound us. I spent a lot of time with `Eyes Wide Shut' before understanding it, because I was looking for the tie with the story. But Kubrick has the equation the other way around. The primary narrative anchor is in the cinematic narrative. The story isn't a skeleton around which the filmmaking takes place, rather an annotation or an incomplete dream that results from it. Jarmusch, Malick, and Kar-wai Wong (`In the Mood for Love') have this same attitude, with minor twists.
Freed from limiting expectations, I am now able to enjoy `Barry Lyndon' in more the way I think Kubrick saw it. It is not a story about a Black Irish told through pretty pictures. It is a visual tone poem on the seduction of beauty, with a dissonance between natural beauty and cosmetics. The primary story is visual. It needs space. It needs time. (`2001' has the same cinematic narrative, with the `cosmetics' being logic; the minor twist in `Clockwork' is that the cultural cosmetic is in the future.)
The part of the narrative that O'Neal contributes is a loose stitching of this to plot elements as seasoning to help our digestion: war/ gambling, arbitrary privilege, duals and duels, face and body costumes, superposition of languages.
The ironic point is that Kubrick tricks you into soaking up the lushness, and doesn't punish you at the end. That's why you leave the theater feeling guilty and not knowing why. (He takes away one of our legs -- the story -- and sends us to wander in America, not quite sure what has happened to us.) Can you think of any other artist with that power?