femme fatales x murderous machines = kubrick + failure of men,
calculates markobeney 


‘Cinema divides into two essential eras, before Stanley Kubrick and after Stanley Kubrick’. His use of music, special effects, and sectioned storytelling have indeed become embedded into the Hollywood system. But it is often overlooked how much the thematic motifs in his films have affected contemporary cinema. Coppola, Scorsese, Lynch and Cronenberg, the modern masters of human despair, all owe their freedom to Kubrick's first attempts to explore man's darker side in Paths of Glory and Dr. Strangelove. It was probably Orson Welles who first delved into the darkness with such passion and such studio funding, and even he couldn’t touch A Clockwork Orange for its detached and amoral portrayal of its protagonist.

Kubrick, often referred to as the most objective of filmmakers, in fact accepted the subjectivity of his life when choosing his protagonists. Consider that each of the men in his films, and it was always men who were the centre piece of his narratives, were middle-class or at least affluent working-class, white and clearly existentially weary of their surroundings - in other terms Colin Wilson's The Outsider. Biographically, this is the director placing himself amongst the epic deconstruction of this world. If Kubrick hadn’t been so shy and so opposed to fame, he would have played these parts himself.

Core to the understanding of Kubrick's works is the theme of man’s inadequacy in regard to women and machines.

 Women in Kubrick’s world can never be taken at face value. Their apparent innocence is always torn away furiously at a key scene, as if Kubrick himself had a vendetta against his loves lost through underestimation. Women are never unravelled slowly to us in these films- the shocking truths are revealed as explicitly and untimely to us as to our leading man. In Lolita, the unspoiled pre-pubescent girl becomes the man’s domination by the end of the film. We no longer hate him for wanting to exploit the girl; we hate her for exploiting him. As Brian McKay remarked in his review, ‘She is fully aware of her sexuality and the effect it has on men, and likes to play it up…Is she using it as a weapon?’

A similar predicament appears for Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, this time in the form of a nymphomaniac who again is way too young to be committing the sexual acts with two Japanese businessmen. When Cruise discovers her at the back of a fancy-dress shop, we are left appalled at the businessmen. But then Kubrick’s alternative take on the situation appears as the girl hides behind Cruise, using him as a shield from her enraged father. The look she gives explains fully she knew what she was doing, and still enjoyed it. Moments like these are offered throughout, as male viewers are forced to re-examine our misconceptions that women are our property. Kubrick wants us to realise that female innocence is non-existent, that our misgivings that this is not so is our downfall through manipulation. Men may be standing on the stage, but women control the curtains.

In Kubrick’s films women may controls man’s life, but his death is decided by machines. If male competition is divided between alpha and beta males, the machine in 2001: A Space Odyssey is unquestionably an alpha male. HAL 9000 exhibits the characteristics that would be expected in a masculine man: rationalistic, unemotional, quiet, and ruthlessly intelligent. In the late scene in which the hibernating crew members’ life support systems are shut down by the machine, his actions are committed with such a calm calculation that the men he kills have become no more to him than ants are to us. If this is true masculinity, any man worried over whether he is masculine enough can relax, knowing men need not aim for this. Jason Anderson in his review said of the computer, ‘It’s no accident that the only compelling character in the piece is the HAL 9000, and Kubrick lends its death a gravitas that he deprived of just about every other casualty in his films’. Meanwhile, the male players receive the same treatment of character development as the control panels in Star Wars.

The only other contemplation upon a character’s death appears in Full Metal Jacket, where women and machines are finally combined into a singular character: the young ill-fated female Vietnamese sniper, capable of assassinating the marines with a precise dedication that their inadequacies do not afford them. It starts to make sense why the marines are ordered to
give their rifle a woman's name.