222 ON KUBRICK funny and, to some degree, admirably self-disciplined; his attractiveness, if one can call it that, may have prompted Kubrick to balance the dramatic scales by making Joker less active or heroic. As a result, Hartman is too fascinating to be truly hated and Joker too ineffectual to be fully sympathetic. It would be difficult to conclude from all this that Kubrick approved of US policy in Vietnam or wanted to make the conflict seem tragic rather than criminally foolish. Kubrick's vision of military indoctrination and combat is distinctly unsentimental and unmelodra-matic, especially compared with the patriotic distortions of The Deer Hunter, the operatic pretensions of Apocalypse Now and the emotional manipulations of Platoon. The action in the second half of the film is noticeably unspectacular, lacking the suspense we normally expect of the genre. Kubrick's refusal to pull heart-strings or arouse vengeful emotions is particularly evident in the way he stages a scene we've seen many times before in Hollywood war movies: the death of the hero's friend. In Hasford's novel, Joker kills the stranded Cowboy in order to stop the platoon from making suicidal attempts to save him. Kubrick is much less dramatic: Cowboy dies in Joker's arms and Joker bends his head to weep - but the camera is set at a distance and Joker is surrounded by so many figures that we hardly see him. . The most unusual aspect of the film is that it uses many familiar generic ingredients and yet never generates a lucid, conventionally unified plot with a forceful protagonist. The first part is a closet drama dealing with a failed ideological indoctrination and the second part a relatively aimless and sometimes emotionally flat series of episodes in ravaged Vietnam. Kubrick keeps the war-loving viewer off balance, waiting for a thrill that never comes. He does, however, offer the convulsive violence of two closures, the first staged in the blue latrine and the second in the flame-red factory. The emphasis in both cases is not on the heroic or pathetic sacrifices of US soldiers, but on the last, barely articulated expressions of two outsiders - an unmanly Marine and a teenage girl who use weapons of steel and wood, and whose deaths rebuke the warrior-male ethos. II. Lovers Twelve years went by before Kubrick's next and final film, a period when he worked with writers and designers on the development of two projects, The Aryan Papers and A. I Artificial Intelligence, which, for reasons having to do with Warner's assessment of the market and Kubrick's own doubts about the scripts, were never brought to completion. In the end, he secured approval from Warner for Eyes Wide Shut, a modernised retelling of an erotic Arthur Schnitzler novella of 1925, scripted in collaboration with Frederic Raphael and starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who were the most famous married couple in America. Kubrick died shortly after completing the lengthy production of the film; he probably didn't supervise the final sound mixing, and he had no opportunity to fine-tune the editing after the initial release. But Eyes Wide Shut is substantially what he aimed to accomplish and is a remarkable last testament. PART FIVE: LATE KUBRICK 223 Kubrick had been fascinated with the Schnitzler novella since at least 1968, when he asked his wife to read it. At about the same time, he briefly discussed with Terry Southern the possibility of making a sleek pornographic movie featuring major stars (Southern wrote Blue Movie, a novel about a Kubrick-like director who tries to make such a picture), and he told the potential backers of his Napoleon film that the central character would have a 'sex life worthy of Arthur Schnitzleť (quoted in LoBrutto, p. 3 2 2). Christiane Kubrick could easily have read the novella in its original German version, entitled Traumnovella ('Dream Story'), although Kubrick probably showed her the 19 26 English translation by J. M. Q. Davies, entitled Rhapsody. The fact that he knew the text at all is an indication of his wide-ranging interests. By the middle of the twentieth century, Schnitzler, whose career began in the 1870s and lasted until 1931, seemed a bit dated as a writer, probably because most of his work was set in Jin de siědeVienm and involved characters who fought duels and spoke in formal language. Even in Traumnovella, in which the characters use telephones, the atmosphere is reminiscent of an earlier era. During the period between the r890S and thei92os, however, Schnitzler had been at the forefront of European literature. He was among the first novelists to employ internal monologue (in the third-person, free-indirect form known in Germany as erlebte Rede), and his writings were almost as sexually scandalous to their original audience as those of James Joyce or D. H. Lawrence. Schnitzler's insights into bourgeois sexual psychology, most of which resulted from his personal experience a§ a medical student and self-confessed womaniser, attracted the interest of no less a contemporary than Sigmund Freud, who described Schnitzler as his 'double'. Schnitzler never returned the compliment, but he became part of an Austro-Hungarian cultural revolution that produced, in addition to Freud, Hugo Hofmannsthal, Gustav Klimt, Gustav Mahler, Karl Kraus and Arnold Schoenberg. The vibrant art world of 'Young Vienna' also influenced a later generation of film directors, including Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder. In fact, Schnitzler himself was a lover of movies. His diary, in addition to describing roughly 600 of his dreams, indicates that he saw at least three films a week in the late r92os. His work was adapted by several film directors, including Cecil B. DeMille (The Affairs ofAnatol [1921]), Paul Czinner (Fraulein Else [1929]) and Max Ophuls (Liebeli [1932] and La Ronde [1950]). G. W. Pabst was at one point interested in making a film based on Traumnovella, for which Schnitzler prepared an incomplete screenplay. (He believed the novella would make an interesting sound film without dialogue.) Finally, in 1969, Traumnovella was adapted for Austrian TV, directed by Wolfgang Glück. Traumnovella differs from most European fiction of the previous two centuries in that it concerns fidelity rather than adultery. Its chief characters are Fredolin, a successful Jewish medical doctor in Vienna, and his decorative wife, Albertině. The couple has a 'flaxen-haired' little daughter and lives in bourgeois luxury, assisted by a maidservant. One evening at a fashionable masked ball, Fredolin is greeted warmly by two amorous young women while, at another place in the room, Albertině is almost seduced by a stranger 'whose blase 224 ON KUBRICK melancholy air and foreign-sounding - evidently Folish - accent had at first intrigued her'.14 At home later that evening, the husband and wife fall into one another's arms 'with an ardor they had not experienced for quite some time' (p. 176). On the next evening, however, the memory of their 'missed opportunities' causes them to feel a 'need for mild revenge'; in the bedroom, they begin to confess 'scarcely admitted desires', exploring 'secret regions ... towards which the irrational winds of fate might one day drive them, if only in their dreams' (p. 177). Albertině tells of an incident that occurred during their previous summer's vacation in Denmark, when she was so attracted to a passing naval officer that she would have been willing, had he asked, to run away with him. Fredolin recalls that on the last day ofthat same vacation, as he was walking near the sea-shore, he saw a naked girl of no more than fifteen with 'loose, flaxen hair', who looked at him with 'joy and abandon', leaving him on the point of swooning (p. 181). On the heels of these troubling confessions, Fredolin is called away to meet with the family of a patient who has just died. For the rest of the evening he wanders the city, encountering sexual opportunities that he either rejects or is unable to seize: he hears a bizarre declaration of love from the dead patient's daughter; he is approached by a seventeen-year-old prostitute; he has a chance meeting with an old acquaintance who tells a fantastic story about playing piano blindfolded for a masked orgy; he makes a hasty visit to a costume shop where the proprietor acts as a pimp for his underage daughter; he travels by night to a mysterious estate where a secret password ('Denmark') gains him admission to the orgy; his masquerade is discovered and he is on the verge of being punished when a beautiful masked woman announces to the gathering that she will 'redeem' him; and he returns home to his marriage bed, where Albertině laughs in her sleep and, upon waking, explains that she has been dreaming of having sex with the Danish naval officer and a crowd of others while Fredolin was being crucified. On the next day, Fredolin retraces his path through the city and tries to discover the identity of the beautiful woman who was ready to sacrifice herself for him. In a newspaper, he reads about the apparent suicide of 'Baroness D.\ a lady of 'remarkable beauty' (p. 267) and fears this might be the woman at the orgy; he visits a mortuary to view her body but, when he sees the naked corpse, he realises that he can never know for certain who she is and perhaps doesn't want to know. Returning home in the evening, he finds Albertině asleep beside the mask he had worn to the orgy. When she wakes, he tearfully admits everything that has happened and asks what they should do. Albertině says they should both be grateful that 'we have safely emerged from these adventures - both from the real ones and from those we dreamed about' (p. 281). Before Fredolin can promise to be true forever, she places a finger over his lips and whispers, 'Never enquire into the future/ The story ends as the new day dawns and the couple's child is heard from a nearby room. Although Traumnovella is a product of the fin de siéclčs 'dreamy' aestheticism, it also has certain affinities with well-known examples of high-modernist fiction. It occasionally resembles Kafka, partly because it introduces a note of perverse, unhealthy sexuality into PART FIVE: LATE KUBRICK 225 an otherwise straightforward and rather polite narrative and partly because it blurs the boundaries between dreams, fantasies and reality. It also has a few things in common with James Joyce's most celebrated short story, "The Dead' (1914). which, like Traumnovella, is told mostly from the point of view of a husband who learns that his beautiful wife once felt passionate desire for another man. Like Joyce, Schnitzler employs a free-associative 'inner speech' to reveal hidden aspects of the husband's character. In both stories the husbands are cautious men, clinging to respectability in a decadent or moribund society, who come to realise, in Schnitzler's words, that 'all this order, balance and security' are really 'an illusion and a lie' (p. 259). The two husbands are also subtly attracted to death. When Fredolin leaves his dead patient, he feels as if he has 'escaped, not so much from an experience as from some melancholy enchantment that must not gain power over him' (p. 193). When he visits the mortuary to view the naked body of the 'Baroness', he imagines that the corpse is trying to move and touch him and, as if 'drawn on by some enchantment', he bends down and almost kisses the dead woman on the lips (p. 276). The pull towards dissolution has something to do with Thanatos, but is also related to a more general insecurity and lack of moral courage in the face of social life. For example, when Fredolin first sets out to wander the nocturnal streets, he sees a homeless man sleeping on a park bench and struggles to avoid identification with him: What if I were to wake him, thought Fredolin, and giire him money for a night's lodging? But what good would that do, he went on to reflect, I'd then have to provide for him tomorrow too, otherwise there would be no point and perhaps I would be suspected of some criminal association with him__Why him, specifically? He asked himself, in Vienna alone there are thousands of such miserable souls. Supposing one were to start worrying about all of them - about the fates of all those unknown people! The dead man he had just left came into his mind, and with a shudder of revulsion he reflected how, in compliance with eternal laws, corruption and decay had already set to work in that emaciated body.... He was glad that he was still alive, that for him such ugly matters were still probably a long way off; glad that he was in his prime, that a charming and lovable woman was there at his disposal, and that he could have another one, many others, if he so desired. Such things might admittedly require more courage than he could muster; and he reflected that by eight o'clock tomorrow he would have to be back at the clinic, (pp. 193-4) Whether or not Stanley Kubrick was aware of the similarities between Schnitzler and Joyce, he at one point considered setting his adaptation of Traumnovella in Dublin. Before that, he contemplated a black-comic version starring Steve Martin. Eventually he recognised the voyeuristic and commercial possibilities of giving the leading roles to major film stars who were married in real life. The participation of Cruise and Kidman also helped to confirm another of his ideas: the story could be moved to contemporary Manhattan. Kubrick strongly believed that Schnitzler's characters and themes would make sense in 226 ON KUBRICK a late twentieth-century context. He was not alone in this conviction. At almost the same moment as the release of Eyes Wide Shut, and purely by coincidence, British playwright David Hare transformed Schnitzleťs Reigen (r 897) into a modern-day drama entitled The Blue Room; the London production starred Nicole Kidman, who, as in Kubrick's movie, appeared nude in some of her scenes. By casting Cruise and Kidman, Kubrick invited the audience to speculate about their real-life relationship (their divorce not long after the release of the film fuelled even more speculation), but Epes Wide Shut is also filled with 'inside' references to the director and several of the people close to him. The Manhattan apartment where the fictional married couple lives is loosely based on an apartment where Kubrick and his wife lived in the late 1960s. The paintings on the walls of theapartment are by Christiane Kubrick and Katharina Kubrick Hobbs, both of whom make cameo appearances as extras later in the film. The granny glasses and upswept hair Nicole Kidman wears in her domestic scenes bear a strong resemblance to the glasses and hair of Christiane Kubrick in photographs taken at the time when the film was made. The husband in the film watches pro football on TV, as Kubrick was fond of doing. When the wife watches TV, she sees Blume in £01^(1973), a movie about the break-up of a marriage, directed by Paul Mazursky, who was an actor in Kubrick's Fear dnd Desire. When she wraps Christmas presents, we see her wrapping a boxed edition of Van Gogh's paintings much like the one Kubrick gave as a Christmas present to screenwriter Frederic Raphael during the making of the film. When the husband wanders the New York streets, he passes a storefront called Vitali's' - a reference to Leon Vítali, Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, who plays a small role in this film and who worked as Kubrick's assistant on this and other pictures. There are also links to Kubrick's family history: his father, like the husband in the film, was a doctor, and his ancestors emigrated to America from Austria at about the time when Arthur Schnitzler was at the height of his fame. All these connections may not constitute a ŕull-fledged_/i/m-ä-de/; but they provide a good deal of evidence to suggest that Eyes WideShutis Kubrick's most personal project. The result, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has observed, is 'personal filmmaking as well as dream poetry of the kind most movie commerce has ground underfoot'.15 Where the development of the screenplay was concerned, Kubrick's relationship with his co-writer appears to have been different from his previous collaborations -more distant and impersonal, at least if one can judge from Frederic Raphael's Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick (1999). A prolific author with a scholarly background, Raphael was no doubt hired for the job because he had written the screenplay for Stanley Donen's Two for the Road (1967), a realistic film about modern marriage. He made a few lunch-time visits to Kubrick's home but conducted most of the script conferences over the telephone, reluctantly sending Kubrick pages of work in progress via fax from various places in Europe. Kubrick made revisions to the first draft of the script, Raphael polished Kubrick's work and other changes were probably made by Kubrick during production. Although Raphael has described Kubrick as a 'genius', he seems to have felt a good deal PART FIVE: LATE KUBRICK 227 of suspicion, resentment and intellectual defensiveness towards his employer, as if he and Kubrick were combatants in a chess match: 'If we sometimes acted like buddies,' he writes, 'there was between us an intimacy without commitment and, at times, heat without warmth.'16 Despite its subtitle, Raphael's memoir is chiefly about himself and needs to be used with caution, especially when it gives us lengthy, verbatim reports of his conversations with Kubrick in the form of a mock screenplay. Nevertheless, it contains some useful information. Raphael disliked the title Eyes Wide Shut, which was Kubrick's idea, and thought Schnitzleťs treatment of sex would look dated if it were transposed without much change into the present day. He also thought - correctly - that an important issue in the novella was the married couple's Jewishness, a feature Schnitzler establishes early in the story, when several young men from a Viennese fencing fraternity deliberately bump against Fredolin in the street and make anti-Semitic remarks.17 Kubrick insisted that the husband and wife should be a WASP couple, probably because he wanted to cast Cruise and Kidman. In the film they become Bill and Alice Harford, a surname created from the first and last names of Harrison Ford, a thoroughly middle-American star. Bill is abused in the street by American fraternity boys who call him a queer, and in a later scene a gay hotel clerk tries to flirt with him. As if to make things look even more Gentile, everybody in the film celebrates Christmas. I'm not sure what to make of the irony that the character who is coded as Jewish - Victor Ziegler (Sydney-Pollack), Bill's super-wealthy patient - is also the most morally corrupt character. Raphael initially tried to give Bill Harford a back-story, writing scenes in which we would see him in his student days and learn something about his relationship to his father. Later in the process Kubrick rejected these scenes and repeatedly asked Raphael to follow Schnitzleťs 'beats', deviating as little as possible from the events in the original story. Most of the changes in the plot are relatively minor: for example, the party attended by the married couple is shown rather than reported upon; the husband's story about an encounter with a teenaged girl on the beach is eliminated; the husband doesn't pass a homeless man in the street; and the wife's passionate desire for the Danish officer seems to obsess the husband in the film a bit more than it obsesses Fredolin in the novella. The most significant change is the addition of an entirely new character - Victor Ziegler, an invention of Raphael's, who appears at the beginning and end, creating a slightly noirish aura and acting as a sinister deus ex machina. Although the transformation of Schnitzleťs characters into contemporary Manhattanites is cleverly achieved, the completed film often alludes to the Viennese origins of the story. The eclectic musical soundtrack includes 'Wein, Du Stadt meiner Träum? by Rudolf Sieczynski. 'Sharkey's', the coffee shop where Bill Harford reads a newspaper with a minatory headline ('Lucky to Be Alive'), has frosted windowpanes, dark wooden furnishings andern de siede artwork reminiscent of the cafes in Schnitzler's world. The Beethoven opera Fidelio, which serves as a password to the masked orgy, had its premiere in Vienna in the 228 ON KUBRICK nineteenth century. A more prominent allusion can be seen in the dazzling curtain of gold lights decorating the ballroom at Ziegler's Christmas party - a reference to Gustav Klimt, a Viennese contemporary of Freud and Schnitzler, who began as a painter of bourgeois theatrical scenes but soon became what Carl Schorske describes as a 'psychological painter of women'.18 A controversial figure in his lifetime, Klimt suffered a loss of patronage from official museum culture and evolved into a proto-modernist whose erotic images were characterised by a flat, golden luminescence and, in Schorske's words, a 'crystalline oma-mentalism' (p. 264). Notice also that Eyes Wide Shut opens with 'Waltz # 2' from Dmitri Shostakovich's Jazz Suite, which, although written in the 1930s, evokes the sexy glamour of Viennese culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Claudia Gorbman has observed, the timbre of the saxophone passage conveys 'nostalgia or even melancholy', creating a slightly decadent, Old-World sense 'of texture, of history, of knowing' that seems at odds with the married couple we see in the film. (Because of its fullness and presence, we initially assume the Shostakovich music is non-diegetic, like The Blue Danube in 2001; but Bill abruptly stops it by turning off a stereo.) Besides all this, Kubrick gives us a number of gracefully executed Steadicam shots of characters walking through rooms or dancing around ballrooms reminiscent of the films of Max Ophuls - a director who was born in Saarbrücken but who is usually regarded as quintessentially Viennese. PART FIVE: LATE KUBRICK 229 Like the novella, the film has an oneiric quality. Apart from a few stock shots of traffic on Manhattan streets, the city is vaguely like a stage setting, with street names that don't exist and a jazz club that looks like a nostalgic recreation of places Kubrick might have habituated in his youth. (Kubrick went to considerable lengths to achieve an accurate representation of New York, even hiring photographers to secretly snap pictures of people on Manhattan streets so that extras in the film could be garbed appropriately; but the subtle, deliberate unreality of the sets confused some of the film's original reviewers, who thought the director had been living abroad so long that he had forgotten what the city looked like.) Night-time scenes in the Harford apartment are designed and lit in a colour-coded, stylised manner: the golden bedroom is decorated with flaming-red drapes, and through an open doorway the adjacent rooms look mysteriously blue. The bedroom of the luxurious Park Avenue apartment where Bill goes to pay his respects to a dead man has a sickly, somewhat greenish quality; the secret orgy looks like a mixture of ancient ritual, Venetian carnival and perverse fairy tale; and the climactic conversation with Ziegler takes place around a strangely expressive, blood-red billiard table. Masks can be seen in several rooms, and the ubiquitous Christmas decorations take on a magical aura. What gives the film an especially strange feeling, however, is the weird comedy of a few of the scenes, such as the ones involving the costumer and his daughter (Leelee Sobieski), plus 230 ON KUBRICK the associational or 'rhyming' relationship between certain events. Two beautiful models at Ziegler's party invite Bill to follow them to 'Jwjhere the rainbow ends', and later Bill visits a shop named 'Rainbow Fashions' with a basement called 'Under the Rainbow'. During the party, a vaguely dangerous-looking associate of Ziegler calls Bill away from the two models and, during the Somerton orgy, an ominous man calls Bill away from a sexy masked woman. When Bill returns home from the orgy, where he was simply an observer of the action, Alice tells of a dream she's had in which she takes part in an orgy while he stands by and watches. Mandy, the naked call-girl who is saved by Bill early in the film, may or may not be the naked masked woman who saves Bill at the orgy and the naked woman whose body Bill later views at the morgue. (For the record, Mandy, the masked woman, and the woman in the morgue are played by two different actors - Abigail Good is the mysterious masked woman and Julienne Davis is Mandy and the woman in the morgue.) These repetitions and transformations create a problem of interpretation similar to the one we've seen in The Shining. In the earlier film, we're constantly invited to ask: is this real or is he crazy? In Eyes Wide Shut, the question is only slightly different: is he awake or is he dreaming? Once again, we've entered the narrative mode of the uncanny as it verges on the fantastic. As previously, the story concerns a nuclear family and produces the spooky oreerie effects that Freud attributed to the intimate appeal of 'what is familiar and PART FIVE: LATE KUBRICK 231 agreeable' mixed with anxiety over 'what is concealed and kept out of sight' (pp. 224-5). Freud's essay on the uncanny was in fact written only a few years before Schnitzler's Traumnovella,19 and Kubrick's film seems to emphasise the deep connection between the two texts, almost systematically touching upon the events and situations Freud had described as giving rise to uncanny feelings. Among these are the fear that a puppet, doll or lifeless body might become animate (as in the scenes involving the dead patient, the body in the morgue and the mannequins in Milich's shop); the fear of a mirror-image or doppelgänger{&$ in the two models at the party, the two prostitutes, the two dead bodies and the peculiar doubling effect that Michel Chion has noted in the scene of the grieving and neurotically love-struck daughter, in which the arrival of the daughter's fiance is represented with exactly the same sequence of shots and movements that were used for the arrival of Bill Harford); and the fear of having one's eyes put out (in this case the purely metaphorical fear of having one's eyes wide shut - in Freudian terms, being symbolically castrated by a father-figure like Zeigler or a woman like Alice). Freud also puts great stress on the uncanny effect of mysteriously recurring events, which he attributes to a neurotic 'repetition compulsion' and later analyses at length in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (19 20). In the essay on the uncanny, he compares these recurrences with the 'helplessness experienced in some dream-states', and he gives an example from his personal experience: As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy, which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen in the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street... I hurried away once more, only to arrive by a detour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery, (p. 237) Freud's 'voyages of discovery* have something in common with Bill Harford's wanderings through New York, all of which return him uncannily to the same places, including the apartment of a prostitute. In one sense, Bill is an ironic version of Odysseus, experiencing dangerous adventures while Penelope remains at home; but he's also a Freudian everyman, led along by unrecognised wishes, confounded by the interpenetration of dreams and everyday life, neurotically repeating himself. Diane Johnson has described this psychological atmosphere perfectly: 'As in a dream, a texture of fears and wishes unfold - a lover waltzes away with one's wife, a patient's pretty daughter confesses her passion, a prostitute both beckons and threatens death, the erotic fantasies of men about little girls are made frighten-ingly specific. The wallet always has money in it....' The result, she concludes, is 'a ground 232 ON KUBRICK plan of the male psyche, mapping the fear, desire, omnipresence of sex, preoccupation with death, the connection of death and Eros, the anxiety in men generated by female sexuality' (Cocks eta/., p. 61). The feeling of eerie repetition also insinuates itself into the film's dialogue. During the development of the screenplay Kubrick emphasised to Raphael that the language should be plain to the point of minimalism. (Schnitzler's novella tends to report speech rather than giving it directly.) He particularly wanted to avoid the witty give-and-take associated with theatrical or cinematic depictions of middle-class sex - Neil Simon's Plaza Suite(ig7i), for example, and even Raphael's Two for the Road. As a result, most of the language in Eyes Wide Shutis utterly banal - a significant phenomenon given Kubrick's high regard for verbal stylists like Nabokov and Burgess and the obvious pleasure he takes in the elaborate formal locutions of Barry Lyndon or the flamboyant vulgarity of Ml Metal Jacket. Even in 2001, in which all the human characters speak in banalities or technocratic jargon, the HAL computer sounds almost eloquent. In Eyes Wide Shut, however, the speeches are usually so monosyllabic and quotidian that they constitute an anti-style. The qualified exceptions are the epigram that Alice's potential seducer borrows from Oscar Wilde ('Don't you think one of the charms of marriage is that it makes deception necessary for both parties?') and some of the longer speeches, such as Alice's story about the naval officer, her tearful recounting of her dream, and Ziegler's disquisition near the end of the film. But even these monologues are marked by hesitations and repeated words. The only artful touch, though at first it doesn't seem to be, is the extremely large number of what Michel Chion calls 'parroted' lines - instances when a character repeats what another character has just said.20 In one crucial place, as Chion points out, a delayed parroting has an ironic effect: near the beginning of the film, Bill tells Mandy, the young woman who has nearly died of a drug overdose in Ziegler's bathroom, 'You're going to need some rehab. You know that, don't you?' And near the end, Ziegler tells Bill, 'Life goes on. It always does until it doesn't. But you know that, don't you?' The other repetitions are less weighty. A few of Chion's examples will suffice to reveal the pattern they create: bill: What did he want? Alice: What did he want? Oh... what did he want? domino: Come inside with me? bill: Come inside with you? mílích: He moved to Chicago. bill: He moved to Chicago? sally: HIV positive. bill: HIV positive? PART FIVE: LATE KUBRICK 233 ziegler: I had you followed. bill: You had me followed? bill: What do you think we should do? Alice: What do I think we should do? bill: Forever? Alice: Forever? bill: Forever. One might think that the actors would dislike this sort ofthing, but I suspect they enjoyed it. In the jargon of professional linguistics, it enables them to demonstrate the 'performance' functions of language; they often convert simple declarative statements into questions, thus performing what the linguists describe as an 'illocutionary act', or they change a statement's inflection, performing a 'perlocutionary act'. (One of the most obvious instances of the latter technique is Alice's 'What did he want? Oh... what did he want?) Sometimes the repetitions achieve a kind of wit, as in the conversation between the slightly tipsy Alice and Sandor Szavost (Sky Dumont), who is one of the cinema's most aggressively seductive lounge lizards: 'My name is Sandor Szavost. I'm Hungarian.' 'My name is Alice Harford. I'm American.' The repetitiousness induces a 'subtextuaľ style of acting, a tendency to communicate meanings chiefly through inflections, tones of voice, facial expressions or small gestures. Kubrick enhances this quality by giving the actors very little business to perform and seldom allowing them to walk around a room or execute complicated movements in relation to the camera. He paces everything in characteristically slow fashion and sometimes photographs simple actions (walking down a hall, crossing from A to B) in wide shots that create empty space and dead time. The effect is almost Antonioni-like, except that the framing is extremely precise and relatively little use is made of off-screen areas. With the notable exception of the Steadicam shots in the opening sequences and at the masked orgy, most scenes involve actors who face one another across a table, a desk or a small room. A good example is Bill's conversation with a hotel desk clerk (Alan Cumming) who smiles, looks Bill up and down, rolls his eyes, flutters his hands and turns every line into a coy insinuation. A less comically ostentatious example is Bill's second visit to Domino's apartment, where he encounters Sally, Domino's attractive roommate (Fay Masterson). The conversation is filled with echoed lines and suggestive glances: 'So, do you have any idea when you expect Domino back?' 'No, I have no idea.' 'You have no idea?' 'Well, to be perfectly honest, she... she may not even be coming back.' 'She may not even be coming back?' At the beginning of this exchange, the two actors stand close together in the tiny room; an erotic charge passes between them and they smile or laugh each time they speak. By the time we reach 'She may not even be coming back', Bill is fondling Sally's breast. 234 ON KUBRICK 'Well, umm... I, erh,' she murmurs, and Bill responds, 'You, erh.' Awkwardly, Sally finds her voice: 'I think some... something that I should tell you.' 'Really,?' 'Yeah... but I don't know' 'You don't know? What is it?' Forcing herself to break free, Sally asks Bill to sit down. A brief silence falls. Bill laughs softly. Sally's discomfort begins to show: 'Oh... I don't quite know how to say this.' Bill is still amused: 'You don't quite know how?' Sally grows serious, creating a beat-change in the emotional tenor of the conversation: 'I think it would be only fair to you, to let you know that, umm... pomino] got the results of a blood test this morning and, erh ... it was HIV positive.' Bill reacts quietly: 'HIV positive?' A longer silence descends. 'Well,' Bill says, and adopts his best bedside manner. 'I am very... very sorry to hear that.' Within the film's deliberately narrow stylistic constraints, both Cruise and Kidman give impressive performances; but, even though the action is presented chiefly from Cruise's point of view and is almost entirely about masculine fantasy, Kidman makes the stronger immediate impression, contributing to the most complex female characterisation in Kubrick's career. (Not that it has much competition.) This is true despite the fact that, in traditional movie fashion, Kidman is offered up for the visual pleasure of the male audience. From the very beginning, in a temporally ambiguous shot, she sheds her party dress, revealing her coltish legs and beautifully shaped derriěre for the eye of the camera. An PART FIVE: LATE KUBRICK 235 obvious signifier of what Laura Mulvey has described as 'to-be-looked-at-ness', she overshadows a gallery of young women with more voluptuous figures but less interesting or entirely masked features. Her porcelain skin and delicate lips connote propriety, and she plays the maternal scenes with convincing sweetness; but her red hair and vixen eyes connote sexual passion. She's a fantasy figure - the mother and the whore, a baby who, in the words of the Chris Isaak song, might 'do a bad, bad thing'. But she's also much more modem, independent and sympathetic than the equivalent character in Schnitzleťs novella - a woman who might feel trapped and resentful in her marriage. During the course of the film, Bill performs no household duties and Alice has no apparent purpose except to be decorative, wrap Christmas presents and help her daughter with schoolwork or the arts of beauty. (One of the toys her daughter wants to buy in the closing scene is a fairy-tale Barbie doll.) Everyone Alice meets, from her baby-sitter to Zeigler, compliments her on her beauty and says nothing else. When she explains to Sandor Szavost that the gallery where she once worked went broke and she's still looking for a job, Szavost is amused. 'Oh, what a shame!' he says, looking deep into her eyes. 'I have some friends in the art game. Perhaps they can be of help?' Then he tries to lure her upstairs, ostensibly to view Renaissance bronzes in Ziegler's private gallery. On the next day she reads newspaper ads, puts on a bra, combs her daughter's hair and prepares to go out (Job hunting? Shopping?). Kubrick cross-cuts between these scenes and Bill at his office, where, assisted by his female secretary and nurses, he examines a series of patients, including a bosomy young woman clad in bikini pants. The film very swiftly establishes that Bill and Alice have been married for some time and that Bill takes her for granted. As they prepare to leave for the Christmas party, she sits on a toilet in their bathroom and urinates while he studies himself in a mirror. 'How do I look?' she asks. 'Perfect,' he replies, without glancing at her. Eyes wide shut, he leaves his ravishing wife alone at the party, never doubting her fidelity. Having no one to talk with, Alice drinks too much champagne and is pleased and amused by the flirtation that develops with Szavost. At home afterward she stands naked in front a mirror, wearing glasses and admiring her body as she moves seductively to music. Kidman expertly conveys the character's momentary pleasure in the power of her sexuality. As her husband embraces her, she looks away from him, into the mirror and almost into the camera, as if she were indulging her narcissism and at the same time offering herself to male viewers. Kidman has nearly all the scenes in the film that showcase acting ability. She feigns two kinds of intoxication (champagne and marijuana) and delivers two monologues in different emotional registers (a vengeful confession of desire for another man and a tearful account of a sexual dream). Her most important scene is the one in which she tells Bill about the naval officer. First we see Alice studying herself wearily in the bathroom mirror, taking out a stash of marijuana and beginning to roll a joint. Cut to the bedroom, which is bathed in a golden light, again evoking Gustav Klimt. The camera zooms out from Alice, who reclines on the bed in sexy, pale lingerie, drawing deeply on the joint while Bill, in 236 ON KUBRICK black boxer shorts, leans over her. Both characters are stoned, and Alice's resentments surface immediately. She asks if Bill happened to 'fuck' the two women she saw him with at the party. As an argument develops, Kubrick cuts to medium close-ups on every line of dialogue, then to a wide shot as Bill engages Alice in sex play and teases her about Szavost When Bill says it's 'understandable' that another man would want to have sex with her, she becomes angry and moves to the other side of the room. In a series of shot-reverse shots we see Alice at full length and Bill seated on the bed. Alice's initial outburst seems almost comically excessive; she stands unsteadily, framed in a blue doorway in semi-transparent underclothes, her entire body on view. 'So,' she asks loudly, "because I'm a beautiful woman, the only reason a man wants to talk to me is he wants to fuck me?' Faced with this evidence, it's difficult not to sympathise with Bill, whose woozy attempt to avoid a quarrel pushes him deeper into a hole: 'Well, I don't think it's quite that black and white,' he says lamely, 'but I think we both know what men are like.' Seizing on the point as if she were a lawyer, Alice reminds Bill that he chatted with two beautiful models at the party and that he examines beautiful women in his office every day. 'This pot is making you aggressive,' he says. Tm not ar-gu-ing,' she cries as she plops down drunkenly on a dressing-table stool, 'I'm just trying to find out where you're coming from!' The sources of Alice's resentment have less to do with Bill's flirtations or her own missed sexual opportunities than with an understandable feeling of inequality in the relationship. She stands and begins pacing back and forth, the red drapes on the bedroom window subtly suggesting her passion and anger. After millions of years of evolution, she says, men 'stick it in every place they can', while for women marriage is supposed to be about 'security and commitment'. 'If you men only knew,' she taunts. When Bill tells her that he's sure of her faithfulness, she laughs uncontrollably and falls to her knees. The critic Christian Appelt has pointed out that, until this point, Kubrick's framing and staging has been meticulous but unobtrusive, but when Alice doubles up laughing we have the only visibly hand-held shot in the film: the camera quivers slightly, 'evoking the feeling that the foundations of the marriage have been shaken'.21 Recovering her composure, Alice sits on the floor with her back to a radiator and begins telling him about the last summer in Cape Cod. A close-up frames her face in three-quarters profile and her expression takes on a sadistic quality as she slowly describes the moment when the naval officer glanced at her. 'I could hardly move,' she says quietly, giving stress to every syllable. Then she confesses that throughout the rest of that day, even while making love with Bill, the officer was never out of her mind. With almost ruthless conviction she says she 'was ready to give up everything', but then in a dreamy voice admits that her love for Bill also made her feel 'tender and sad'. When she discovered on the next day that the officer was gone, she found herself 'relieved'. Four times during Alice's long speech, Kubrick cuts to large close-ups of Bill, who sits completely still. Despite everything that has been said about the Kuleshov effect and its ability to create meaning, Cruise's performance in these tightly framed shots is important. Motionless, gesture-less, he nevertheless conveys subtle gradations of emotion that Kubrick PART FIVE: LATE KUBRICK 237 can use to chart the progress of Bill's feelings: a stunned, wounded look mixed with a slight frown of anger; a determined, stoic resistance to pain; a defeated glance downward, as if his bearings were gone; and, finally, as Alice mentions feeling 'tender and sad', a suggestion of tears. When Alice comes to the end of the story, Kubrick cuts to a more distant close-up that makes Bill seem isolated on the edge of the bed. Silence descends and the expression on Bill's face seems both hurt and resentfully angry. Suddenly, in time-honoured dramatic fashion, the telephone rings. Without changing the look on his face, Bill waits for three rings before he answers it. Cruise's work in the film is consistently excellent but, as in this scene, relatively thankless. Most of the time he simply reacts quietly to what other people say and do. At Zeigler's Christmas party, where Bill tries to play the role of the successful young doctor, we glimpse the trademark energy and vitality of the Cruise persona - the action-hero intensity, the 1,000 kilowatt grin, the hearty back-slapping and hugs, and the sexual charisma. After Alice tells the story about the naval officer, however, Bill becomes a kind of sleepwalker, who seems to drift into a series of sexual encounters and near-comic sexual frustrations. Except for the blue movie running through his head at several points (literally blue: it consists of black-and-white, blue-tinted views of the naked Alice making love with a uniformed naval officer) and a point-of-view shot in which Alice smiles at him while he mentally 'hears' her voice from an earlier scene, we seldom know exactly what Bill is thinking. Or is most of what we see intended to suggest his dream thoughts? if so, exactly when does his dream begin and end? These questions are unanswerable and perhaps unimportant because, unlike the Schnitzler novella, which consists mostly of the central character's internal monologue, the film gives the story an entirely ambiguous ontological status. Kubrick decided to cut Bill's extensive voice-over from an early draft of the script; instead he shows the character almost completely from the outside, relying on the mise en scene and Cruise's understated reactions to create psychological effects. This technique contributes to the feeling that Bill is being carried along impassively, rather like someone in a dream. In effect, his aimless journey is both a fantasy of sexual revenge and a guilty response to his own sexuality. Nearly everyone he meets comes on to him sexually, but his chief response is attempted dignity in the face of all kinds of fears, including infidelity, homosexuality, HIV-AIDS, incest/paedophilia and punishment from a father-figure such as Ziegler. At the orgy, where we might expect him to display at least a few excited reactions, his face is covered by an ornate but inexpressive mask that barely shows his eyes; he's a nearly ridiculous little man who wanders blankly through a strange sexual fun-house and then (as in a typical anxiety dream) suffers the embarrassment of having to remove his mask in front of the entire crowd. The orgy was a major concern for Kubrick throughout his preparation for the film. Despite the anything-goes, pornography-on-demand environment of late twentieth-century media, some viewers expected a kinky sexual shock they had never seen. The Wamer publicity campaign for Eyes Wide Shu t and Kubrick's reputation as the director of ON KUBRICK A Clockwork Orange obviously contributed to this expectation and may have led to disappointment in certain quarters. In fact, Bill's masked walk through the Somerton mansion was designed to show glimpses of fucking and sucking but, in order to obtain an R rating in the US, Kubrick placed computer-generated figures in the mise en scene for the North American market, blocking out the more explicit sexual details (his first use of CGI, which would figure more importantly in his plans for A. I. Artificial Intelligence). His concession to censorship, however, doesn't have a significant effect. Even without the computerised fig leaves, the orgy is coldly detached, involving none of the techniques - pulsing music, close-ups of genitalia, lingering views of lithe and sweaty bodies, moans and cries of satisfaction - that are the sine qua non of movie pornography. In a series of travelling shots from Bill's point of view, we see all sorts of sexual positions and a variety of heterosexual and homosexual activities, but the action is viewed from a relatively discreet distance and has a ritualistic quality that makes both participants and voyeurs seem bored. The entire panorama is intended as an allusion to fashion photographer Helmut Newton's fetishis-tic, semi-pornographic images in Vogue and other magazines during the r98os. Newton's mostly black-and-white photographs featured half-naked, glamorous models standing or lying beside other, fully clothed models in extravagantly luxurious or formal settings, in poses suggestive of sadomasochism, zoophilia and other kinds of forbidden sexuality; one PART FIVE: LATE KUBRICK 239 of their most distinctive traits, a sign either of Newton's decadence or of his subtly satiric attitude towards the fashion world, was the jaded, blase or drugged look of the models, who vaguely resembled the stone-faced socialites in Last Year at Marienbad. Kubrick pays as much attention to the eclectic design and decor of Somerton as to the orgy itself, viewing the sexual activity in the context of ornate, rather Moorish architectural designs, marbled and carpeted floors and a richly furnished library. Everything has the feeling of a confused dream about ancient and modem cultures: the interiors look like a cross between Xanadu and the Playboy mansion; the invited guests resemble Catholic monks dressed as Venetian revellers; and the music, written and conducted by the British avant-garde composer Jocelyn Pook, sounds like a religious ritual filtered through postmodern performance art. One of Pook's compositions, 'Backward Priest', was created by recording the voice of a Romanian priest, running it backward and adding a repetitive, percussive musical chord that supposedly comes from Nick Nightingale's piano; another, 'Migrations', sounds vaguely Arabic or North African in origin. To this melange Kubrick adds a kitschy dance tune, 'Strangers in the Night*. He also intended to incorporate chanted verses from the Bhagavad-Gita, but removed them when Hindu fundamentalists threatened to protest against the film.22 In The Da Vinci Code, author Dan Brown absurdly opines that Kubrick was trying to send hidden messages about a grail society but got the details wrong. Actually, the point of all the wildly clashing cultural references isn't to create puzzles or secret symbols, but to lend an aura of all-purpose demonic ritual to a slightly weird erotic pageant. Like some types of dream, the orgy is both sinister and silly. Filled with details that would presumably make Jung and Freud jump for jóy, it often looks like what Ziegler later claims it to be - an event staged to frighten Bill. Kubrick's alienating treatment of the Somerton orgy points up the fact that Eyes Wide Shut is as much about money as about sex. As Tim Kreider has observed, the first words in the film are 'Honey, have you seen my wallet?' and the last scene is a shopping trip to FAO Schwartz; in between, we meet several prostitutes - one of whom is a girl working her way through college who owns a textbook entitled Introducing Sociology - and we're constantly reminded that Bill Harford is a prosperous doctor who serves extremely wealthy patients.23 The importance of money is somewhat less evident in Traumnovella, which has no character like Zeigler, and this may be one reason why Jonathan Rosenbaum feels that Kubrick is more of a 'moralist' than Schnitzler (p. 265). In various ways the film suggests that Bill's guilt and shame when he returns home isn't simply the result of his potential unfaithfulness. In fact, for whatever fearful or accidental reasons, Bill hasn't committed adultery; his greater failing has to do with a tacit acceptance or complicity in Victor Ziegler's behaviour. At the big Christmas party, he jokingly tells Alice that they've been invited because of his willingness to make 'house calls'. Not long afterward Ziegler summons him upstairs to the fancy bathroom to help with a prostitute who, while having sex with Ziegler, has nearly died from a drug overdose. When Bill revives the woman, Ziegler tells him, 'You saved my ass', making it clear that the fate of the woman isn't the real concern. Bill replies 240 ON KUBRICK ambiguously, 'I'm glad I was here.' Ziegler pointedly asks Bill to keep quiet about the incident. 'Of course,' Bill says, in a man-to-man tone. The lengthy conversation in Ziegler's library/billiard room near the end of the film brings these moral issues to roost - although, as Rosenbaum has pointed out, Ziegler seems like such a nice fellow that audiences might not fully grasp the situation. Kubrick originally intended to cast Harvey Keitel in the role, probably because Keitel often plays gangster or low-life characters and is roughly the same size and body configuration as Cruise. Sydney Pollack is a completely different type; tall and burly-chested, he's best known as an actor for playing a small role in Tootsie (1982), a film he directed. He gives the impression of an intelligent, kindly and rather earthy father-figure, and his performance creates a disjunction between the character's outward charm and actual corruption. In this regard and others, the scene between Pollack and Cruise makes a nice contrast with the one between Kirk Douglas and Adolphe Menjou near the end of Paths of Glory. In both cases a monstrous but almost likeable representative of prestige and power has a private conversation with a younger man who is concerned about injustice, and in both cases the characters are surrounded by leather-bound books and emblems of 'culture'. In Eyes Wide Shut, however, the scene is less dynamically blocked and the star can't give vent to moral outrage. Here as elsewhere in the film, Bill Harford is a relatively passive figure. Immediately after viewing the body in the morgue, he's called to Ziegler's mansion, where, escorted to the library by a tall, strong-looking male 'secretary', he arrives in a state of exhaustion and guilt Ziegler pours him a glass of twenty-five-year-old Scotch, pleads unsuccessfully with him to accept a full case of the whisky as a gift and toys uneasily with an ivory ball on the red surface of the billiard table (the only instance in the lengthy scene when an actor is given the opportunity to convey emotion by manipulating a prop). The Steadicam follows Ziegler as he paces around the table and struggles for words. T... I was just, erh — Listen, Bill, the reason I asked you to come over, I, I... I need to talk to you about something.' At first, the older man is deferential, suggesting that Bill 'might have the wrong idea about one or two things' but, as the conversation develops, he makes veiled threats. Explaining that he was one of the people at the orgy, he denounces 'Nick what-ever-the-fuck his name was* and reveals that Bill has been followed all day. Bill says little and hardly moves; in close-ups, he reacts to Ziegler's long speech with puzzlement, surprise and muted anger, finally putting his hands on the edge of the billiard table and slumping over in embarrassment. 'Victor, what can I say?' he asks. 'I had absolutely no idea you were involved in any way.' Ziegler crosses to the drinks table, pours more Scotch, says that if Bill knew the names of the people at the orgy he wouldn't 'sleep well', and walks to the other side of the room to sit in a chair. In an extreme deep-focus shot Bill turns his back on Ziegler, folds his arms and walks a couple of paces into the foreground. 'There was a woman there,' he says, 'who tried to warn me.' Zeigler gets up and walks forward, describing the woman as a 'hookeť and claiming that everything at the party was a 'charade'. Bill slumps into a chair, briefly holds his forehead in his hand, PART FIVE: LATE KUBRICK 241 clutches both hands together almost prayerfully and then asks Ziegler if the hooker is the dead woman described in today's newspaper. When Ziegler says yes, Bill shows his only flash of anger: standing, he turns and asks, 'Do you mind telling me what kind of fucking charade ends up with somebody turning up dead?' Ziegler's genial mask almost drops away: 'Let's cut the bullshit, alright? You've been way out of your depth for the last twenty-four hours .... She got her brains fucked out, period.... She OD'd. There was nothing suspicious. Her door was locked from the inside. The police are happy. End of story.' Then he becomes paternal, telling Bill that it was only 'a matter of time' before this particular woman died from drugs. 'Remember, you told her so yourself? Remember the one with the great tits who OD'd in my bathroom?' Kubrick photographs the last shot of this sequence expressionistically. As Bill hangs his head and Ziegler steps up behind him to put reassuring hands on his shoulders, an unmotivated blue Hght falls mysteriously across the left side of both men's faces. 'Life goes on/ Ziegler says. 'It always does until it doesn't. But you know that, don't you?' Cut to Bill and Alice's bedroom, which is bathed in the same blue light, ostensibly from the moon. Alice lies sleeping, with Bill's mask from the orgy resting on the pillow next to her. (In the Schnitzler novella the husband's failure to return the mask is inadvertent, rather like a Freudian slip; in the film, the presence of the mask is unexplained.) When Bill sees the 242 ON KUBRICK mask he puts his hand to his heart, and on the soundtrack we hear the piercing piano notes of Ligeti's 'Muska Ricercata IF. Bill breaks into tears, curls up in a foetal position on the bed next to Alice and promises to tell her 'everything'. Cut to a close-up of Alice on the next morning; her eyes red from tears, she smokes a cigarette while Bill looks remorseful. She remembers the shopping trip they've promised their daughter and we cut to the toy store, which again has no equivalent in Schnitzler. Bill, Alice and Helena walk in a circle, the Steadicam retreating in front of them as numerous extras walk past like figures in a play or a dream. Bill has a hangdog look and asks Alice what they should do. As in the Schnitzler novella, she tells him to be grateful that their marriage has survived its 'adventures', whether they were 'real or only a dream*. Bill remarks that 'no dream is ever just a dream', and wants to be awake 'forever1. Alice rejects this idea and responds in existential terms: she loves Bill now and thinks that as soon as possible they should 'fuck'. This last word, which we've heard at several other junctures in Kubrick's last film, is significantly given to a woman. A grotesque term for what is sometimes an act of love, 'fuck' has a sucking, lower-body sound and derives from an Anglo-Saxon word that connotes violence or repeated blows, as when Ziegler says 'she got her brains fucked out'. Kidman delivers it in a soft, wryly amused voice that conveys both tenderness and a tough awareness of how much the unsteady edifice of everyday, companionate marriage is built on primal urges. One could argue that, by ending the film in this way, Kubrick shows himself to be a sexual conservative, since he confirms the importance of monogamous married relations and the heterosexual, nuclear family. One could also argue by the same logic that Eyes Wide Shut has a 'happy' ending, which would mean that it differs from any Kubrick movie, with the possible exception of Killer's Kiss. Without doubt the film honours Kubrick's third marriage, which was long and apparently happy. But his implicit view of sexuality is by no means simple or complacent. The Spanish critic Celestino Deleyto offers what seems to me an accurate summation of the film's sexual themes: it explores in complex and convincing ways the links between love and sex, between affective relationships and sexual fantasy, between sex as a male construct signifying anxiety, guilt and death and sex as a crucial ingredient in a healthy relationship, between sex as commodity and sex as emotion.24 As Rosenbaum has argued, Eyes Wide Shut also shows the tenuous, conflicted and always complicated links between dreams and responsibilities. Whatever optimism there might be in the last scene is extremely hard won, and the film has the courage to leave its characters relatively unchanged: Bill remains the successful, compromised doctor and Alice the beautiful, jobless wife, and their lives still involve guilt and resentment. Tomorrow and the next day they will have similar adventures, which they may or may not survive. PART FIVE: LATE KUBRICK 243 Notes i. Michael Herr, 'Foreword', in Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford, Ml Metal Jacket The Screenplay (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). P- vi. 2. Thomas Doherty, 'Full Metal Genre: Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam Combat Movie', in Mario Falsetto (ed.), Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), p. 315. All further references are to this edition, and page numbers are indicated in the text. 3. Brad Stevens, '"Is That You, John Wayne? Is This Me?" Problems of Identity in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, Senses o/Cincm« 2 3. Tim Kreider, 'Introducing Sociology: A Review of Eyes Wide Shut, in Cocks et al, Depth of Field, pp. 280-97. 24. Celestino Deleyto, '1999, A Closet Odyssey: Sexual Discourses in Eyes Wide Shut', Part Six EPILOGUE I. Afterthoughts In the absence of a grand synthesis or a key to Kubrick's work, which I believe would be impossible, it may be useful to offer some remarks on the themes that have emerged from this study. From the beginning I've emphasised that Kubrick's position as an author is paradoxical and almost unique. For most of his career he seemed both inside and outside the American film industry. In some ways he might be compared to Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen, who made their home in New York rather than Hollywood; but Kubrick, after shooting three early pictures in California, moved much further than Scorsese and Allen from the centres of US entertainment and managed to keep a greater control as producer. Even though his career was enabled by historical conditions - the breakdown of the classic studio system, the advent of 'art' cinema, the rise in foreign productions of American movies and so forth - his position in history is unusual. He can't be placed among the classic auteurs, or among the New York television directors who entered movies in the 1950s and 1960s or among the directors of the 'New Hollywood'. Part of the aura surrounding his name and much of the argument I've made for his late-modemist attributes derives from his special status and apparently aloof individuality, coupled with the sense that nothing in his films (with the exception of Spartacus) happened unless he allowed it to happen. Unlike many directors, Kubrick never suffered the experience of having his projects re-cut, re-shot, or abandoned by the organisations that financed and distributed them. Dr. Strangebve, 2001 and The Shining were slightly revised after their premieres, but Kubrick did the revisions. He left no 'director's cuts' or alternative versions to signify a conflict between the artist and the money men. By the end of his career, the US movie industry was moving into the digital era and being absorbed into home entertainment, but Kubrick 246 ON KUBRICK continued to make personal films in his own style, eschewing the tight framing and skittish editing typical of movies in the age of Avid technology. Although his films were sometimes strikingly different from one another and derived from a variety of literary sources, his career as a whole was unified by his stylistic, emotional and intellectual concerns, and in qualitative terms the level of his achievement was remarkably consistent -more like a writer or painter than a movie director. Almost from the beginning, Kubrick was a total film-maker who combined the sensibility of a literary intellectual with the technical expertise of a photographer/editor and the instincts of a showman. The strength of his work came from his ability to link together these and other apparently irreconcilable oppositions. He had a sensitive understanding that movies are a medium of light and sound, but at the same time, his films were characterised by novelistic or theatrical word-play. He disavowed the old Hollywood codes of lighting to such a degree that even 2001 and Barry Lyndon owe something to his early experience as a street photographer; and yet his visual 'realism1 was counterbalanced by his interest in myth, fairy tales and the Freudian unconscious. A dialectic or tension between the rational and irrational can be seen everywhere in his work, so that he usually leaves the impression of a fastidious, highly controlled or 'cool' technician dealing with absurd, violent or .sexually 'hot* material. As one instance, consider the characteristic 'tunnel' shots that I and other critics have noticed in his films, some of which are vividly spectacular (Davy's nightmare in Killers Kiss Colonel Dax's walk down the trench in Paths of Glory, the B-52 hurtling between mountains in Dr. Strangelove, Bowman's journey through the star gate in 2001; Danny Torrance's exploration of the hotel hallways in The Shining); and others fairly simple or ordinary (a car moving down a foggy road at the beginning of Lolita; a nurse rolling dinner down a hospital corridor in A Clockwork Orange, Lord Bullingdon advancing uneasily along the entrance to a men's drinking and gambling room in Barry Lyndon, Sergeant Hartman reviewing a line of recruits in Full Metal Jacket, Bill and Alice Harford hurriedly walking along their apartment hallway as they prepare to leave for a party in Eyes Wide Shut). Most of these shots involve a camera with a wide-angle lens moving forward or backward along a corridor of some kind; but Kubrick seems less interested in the specific technique than in the quality of the image itself, which can be achieved by various means. He creates the sensation of a series of lines sharply converging towards a distant horizon and of a steady, smooth, fairly rapid movement towards or away from a vanishing point, which is sometimes obscured by fog, smoke or a turning hallway. The image is orderly in its composition, pleasurably dynamic in its streamlined movement and almost phallic in its energy; but at the same time, either overtly or very subtly, it generates a feeling of anxiety, as if we were moving forward or backward through a demonic space that might burst open into something threatening or unknown. This orderly presentation of a strange, unnerving energy is typical of Kubrick's work, but in intellectual terms his career involves not so much a coherent world view as a trajectory, an interaction of his social, technological and aesthetic interests with historical forces. At PART SIX: EPILOGUE 247 the deepest level, one key to his art can be found in the emotional qualities of his films, which I've argued are strongly marked with grotesque effects. He makes toilet jokes; he uses actors who have eccentric faces and performing styles; he puts masks on the players or encourages them to behave like caricatures; and he repeatedly blurs the distinction between the animate and inanimate by showing us mannequins, dolls, figures in wheelchairs or computers that seem alive. Running beneath all these things is an anxiety about the body - its secretions, its orifices, its inevitable decay and death - mingled with a derisive sense of humour, so that the audience is caught somewhere between shock and laughter. Beginning with Lolita, the films also tend to swerve unpredictably between different modes or tonal qualities, creating a grotesque clash between acting styles or between realism and black comedy. Kubrick is essentially a satirist whose subject is human folly or barbarism; in the interest of satire, he's drawn to a family of 'estranging' effects - the grotesquely misshapen, the uncanny, the fantastic, the Kafkaesque - and he repeatedly conjoins methodical orderliness and horrific absurdity. Kubrick's treatment of male sexuality, one of his leading subjects, is nearly always inflected with darkly psychoanalytic themes, but like Freud he was capable of hard-won respect for marriage. His attitude towards science and machines is equally complex, and it interacts in interesting ways with the social and sexual implications of his films. One of the cinema's foremost technicians and engineers, Kubrick was well grounded in physics and mathematics and obviously attracted to a kind of speculative, scientific futurism. In 2001, he suggests that humanity may be evolving towards pure machine intelligence, leaving behind its grotesque organic shell and finding a kind of immortality; but in A Clockwork Orange he offers a nightmare view of a 'mechanical', reified society in which sexuality becomes a reflex and art a commodified stimulus. As his career progresses, his romantic identification with the criminal as a kind of artist or elite outsider (as evidenced in The Killing, Lolita and A Clockwork Orange) is increasingly shadowed by his social pessimism, and partly for this reason it's difficult to say exactly what political position his films occupy. His career began with a photograph of a news vendor mourning the death of F. D. R., a hero to his family and to most New Yorkers in the r 940s, but the image was despairing, marking the end of an era and the beginning of what would become a Cold War. Kubrick's subsequent films, made in the period of the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War and the increasingly reactionary drift in US politics, convey liberal, libertarian, anarchic and, in some respects, conservative attitudes; the conservative impulses, however, might be said to dominate in the sense that there is very little room in his work for Utopian idealism. The exception to the rule might be in certain of his uses of myth or fairy tale, as in 2001 or in the boy's victory over a menacing adult in The Shining, but I would hesitate to call either film optimistic. All these issues seem to me to coalesce in one of Kubrick's most ambitious projects, A. I. Artificial Intelligence, which was brought to the screen by Steven Spielberg a couple of years after Kubrick's death. In lieu of any further summary and as a way of achieving some 248 ON KUBRICK sort of closure, I now want to offer a fairly wide-ranging meditation on that film, in the process moving beyond the subject of Kubrick as auteur. My discussion takes a different form than previous chapters on individual pictures, but it engages with some of the same topics. Like the book as a whole, it begins by emphasising the theme of death - the death of both an individual and a period in film history - as well as the problem of emotional affect. II. Love and Death in A. I. Artificial Intelligence At the end of the Steven Spielberg/Stanley Kubrick production of A. L Artificial Intelligence (2oor), a blond, innocent-looking boy, played by the remarkable child actor Haley Joel Osment, goes to bed with his beautiful, dark-haired mother, played by the equally remarkable Frances O'Connor. The two are alone in what looks like a California-modern house located somewhere beyond the city. Significantly absent are the boy's father and brother, who, much earlier in the film, caused the boy to be sent away from home. The day is fading, suffusing the room with earthen colours. 'I really ought to be tucking you in,' the mother says as her son covers her with a bedspread. 'How strange, I can hardly keep my eyes open ... Such a beautiful day!' In close-up, she gazes adoringly at the boy. 'I love you, David,' she says. 'I do love you. I have always loved you.' A reverse-angle shows the boy smiling through tears and embracing her. On the soundtrack, a voice-of-god narrator tells us that this 'was the everlasting moment [David] had been waiting for, and the moment had passed, for Monica was sleeping'. Dissolve to an overhead shot of the boy crawling into bed, where he lies on his back next to his mother, who is posed almost like a stone figure atop a catafalque. The boy blissfully closes his eyes, the room grows dark, a John Williams piano score reminiscent of Schubert rises on the soundtrack and the camera begins craning back and away. The narrator speaks again, as if reading the last lines from a child'sl>edtime story: 'So David went to sleep. And for the first time in his life, he went to that place where dreams are born.' The camera continues craning back, moving out of the bedroom window, and we see that the sleeping couple is being watched over by a robotic teddy bear at the foot of the bed, who moves his furry arms and head in benediction. Outside, blue night has fallen and, as the camera cranes up and away, the lights in the house go out one by one. Several intelligent critics and not a few friends whose opinions I value have said that they dislike this scene and the movie as a whole, finding in it a sentimentality they associate with Spielberg and a pseudo-profundity they associate with Kubrick.1 Even when they express admiration for one or both directors, they complain that the teddy bear is no E. T. and the bedtime-story narration no substitute for the cinematic razzle-dazzle of 2001. I've heard reports of audiences laughing at the end of A. L, and I once encountered a couple on an elevator who had just returned from the film and were grumbling about the time they had wasted. As for me, I've watched it five times, and on each occasion I've been moved to copious tears. I should perhaps note that as I grow older I seem to shed tears more easily in the movies, even when I know my emotional buttons are being pushed; then, too, the last scene in A I. probably has a personal resonance for me, because my mother PART SIX: EPILOGUE 249 died when I was about the age that the boy appears to be in the story. At any rate, David's cry of 'Mommy! Where are you?' at a point near the end, when he returns home after a millennium of longing, is voiced in a tone of such desperate excitement and anxiety that it wrenches my heart. In the concluding shot-reverse shot, when he hears his mother's declaration of love and embraces her, I weep - and I feel in tune with the film, because tears are one of its most important motifs. To those who are unmoved, I can only say, in the words of William Butler Yeats, who is quoted twice in A. L, 'the world's more full of weeping than you can understand'. But would laughter or at least a wry smile be totally inappropriate? Despite all the fairytale sweetness, David is experiencing a kind of Freudian wet dream. The film is fully aware of this implication; it tells a straightforward Oedipal story containing several overt references to Freud - as in an earlier scene when David surprises his mother in the bathroom, where she is sitting on a toilet reading a book entitled Freud and Women (a volume Frances O'Connor chose for the shot). Throughout, the Disneyish atmosphere is inflected by an art-cinema irony. As in Kubrick's The Shining, we get Freud with revisionist vengeance: Father isn't simply an imaginary danger but a real one - a deadly threat who needs to be expunged so that the son can fulfil his romance with Mother. The closing moments of the film also seem to confirm Freuďs ideas about Thanatos, neatly linking the fairy tale's drive 250 ON KUBRICK towards closure with the human death drive, or with what Freud called the 'conservative' instincts, through which we strive to return to 'an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has departed and to which it is striving to return'.2 To make things more complicated, another irony runs deeper, threatening to undercut even Freud. As everyone who is familiar with A. I. knows, the story takes place in the far distant future, thus producing the sense of 'cognitive estrangement' that Darko Suvin and other theorists have equated with literary science fiction.3 David isn't a 'real' boy but a 'mecha' - a computerised replicant, operating with relative autonomy, who is programmed by a scientist and an army of corporate technicians to feel love for his organic 'mother1 and to want, like some futuristic Pinocchio, to become truly human. Hard-wired to experience Oedipal desire, he can weep and feel joy or fear, but he can't pee and can't eat spinach or any other kind of food. He has lived on the earth for thousands of years and will never grow older. He can dream, but in one sense he dreams of electric sheep. As for the mother he loves with single-minded obsession, she herself in the final scene is a kind of simulacrum or reconstruction with a limited memory, brought to life for a single day and awakened like Sleeping Beauty by virtue of a preserved lock of her hair, which was frozen for centuries at the bottom of the sea. Even the house is a simulacrum, fashioned by other robots on the - basis of David's memory bank. Perhaps the ultimate irony is that, while the scene concludes a film that poses the question of what it means to be human, while it effectively dramatises childhood trauma and loss, and while it stirs me profoundly, it also makes its own status as artifice quite evident. What am I crying about, except a fantasy staged by robots for the benefit of an artificial boy who was invented by a corporation; and what am I watching, except a movie manufactured by a horde of Hollywood technicians from another corporation? The credits at the end of A I. list scores of technical specialists, headed by robot designer Stan Winston, effects supervisors Michael Lantieri, Dennis Muren and Scott Farrar, and digital experts from Industrial Light and Magic and Pacific Data Images. Because of these contributors, I sometimes find it difficult to trust the evidence I see on the screen. For example, the teddy bear gently moving his arms and head in the closing scene is not just a robotic 'super-toy', as the story would have it, but also a 'special effect' - a doll animated partly by robotics and partly by computer-generated imagery (CGI). It was never fully there in front of the camera, occupying what is sometimes called the 'pro-cinematic' space, even though it forms part of the mise en scene in such realistic fashion that it's almost indistinguishable from the real players. A. I. was released in a year when Stephen Hawking told his fellow scientists that they should begin developing advanced forms of genetic engineering to compensate for 'Moore's Law', or the theory that computers will soon surpass human intelligence. That same year, children could purchase an electronic toy resembling a live insect; Sony Corporation announced SDE.-4X, a humanoid robot with an extensive vocabulary who is designed to live with people in their homes; and a war in Afghanistan was fought with the assistance PART SIX: EPILOGUE 251 of robotic aircraft called 'drones'. Meanwhile, Hollywood created a new category for the Academy Awards to honour feature-length animated films that use CGI, and digital animators around the world spoke repeatedly of their desire to achieve the 'holy graiľ óf computer-generated 'synthespians' who seamlessly interact with live players on the screen. No doubt A Í. is symptomatic of all these events, but it has a special relationship to computerised imagery, which is the most spectacular of a series of digital technologies that have changed the manufacture and look of contemporary movies. A non-photographic or semi-photographic special effect, CGI brings into question the status of visual evidence, apparently lending credence to Jean Baudrillard's theory of the simulacrum, and reinforcing fears, such as the ones expressed in a recent book by Paul Virillo, that under postmodernity the individual's relation to reality is collapsing.4 One of the most intelligent writers on the subject, Sean Cubitt, doubts that CGI actually functions in this way, and I would agree;5 nevertheless, as Cubitt notes, the digital has been charged in some quarters with being guilty of 'the murder of reality and of the human' (Cubitt, p. 12 5). How logical, then, that A I. should make extensive use of CGI. The film is about the robotic post-human, and it uses a technique that's occasionally described as 'post-cinematic'. Am I weeping for the death of David's mother, for the death of humans, for the death of photography, or for the death of movies? AI and CGI To answer the question above, which by no means exhausts my interest in A. I, it may help to briefly consider another emotionally powerful and equally maternal scene from an older and ostensibly quite different Hollywood film. Three-quarters of the way through the Samuel Goldwyn/William Wyler production of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), a World War II veteran named Homer prepares for bed, and in the process exposes his war wounds to the camera. Homer is a former enlisted man who has lost both of his hands and who skilfully manipulates a pair of mechanical hooks attached to his wrists. By day he's self-sufficient, lighting his own cigarettes, eating with a knife and fork and playing chopsticks on the piano. In the evening before going to bed, however, he needs his loving but inarticulate father to help him remove the hooks, and he feels helpless and unmanned. At one point, he invites his former high-school sweetheart, who still loves him, to visit his bedroom and see his condition. For me personally, this is one of the most poignant moments in the history of Hollywood, in part because of my knowledge that the sailor is played by Harold Russell, an amateur actor who had lost his hands in a training accident during the war. This fact was well known to the film's original audience. Best Years was a highly publicised feature, second only to Gone with the Wind (1939) in its initial box-office profits, and it won seven Academy Awards, two of which went to Russell. But the emotional efficacy of the scene also derives from the dignity and discretion with which it is staged by Wyler and photographed by Gregg Toland. The camera stands completely still, at a respectful middle distance, viewing the two actors on the same plane, without the elaborate deep-focus 252 ON KUBRICK perspective that was the hallmark of Toland's style. When Russell removes his hooks and puts on his pyjama top, Wyler doesn't try to analyse the action with shot-reverse shots or close-ups. Non-diegetic music can be heard throughout, but there is no dramatic lighting and no tricks of costume or special effects. In other words, although the film is obviously fictional, it wants the camera to bear witness to history. Nearly everything conspires to show us that the sailor has no hands. I've often shown this scene in the classroom in conjunction with André Bazin's famous essay on the ontology of the photographic image, in which Bazin argues that photography has an 'objective' quality (today's film theorists tend to say 'indexicaľ), since 'between the originating subject and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent'. For the first time in history, Bazin tells us, 'an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man [sic]'. The paradox of the situation, at least insofar as Bazin is concerned, is that the purely mechanical becomes the servant of the organic. Photography, he says, has the power to affect us 'like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty'.6 Bazin was a great admirer of The Best Years of Our Lives, which he praised in another essay for its self-effacing 'neutrality and transparency of style'.7 From our current perspective it's possible to see both his arguments and Wyler's film as symptoms of an international movement towards humanist realism in the decade after the war- a phenomenon determined by the political and social temper of the times, and made possible by new forms of recording technology. But in a still larger context, as R. L. Rutsky has shown, theories about photography have long involved a distinction between the organic and the mechanical that has contradictory implications, sometimes reinforcing humanism and sometimes threatening it. Behind the invention of cinema, Rutsky notes, there is both a 'Mummy myth' of the kind postulated by Bazin, who sometimes speaks of photography as if it were a means of embalming time and forestalling death, and a 'Frankenstein myth' of the kind suggested by Lev Kuleshov, whose experiments with montage involved a sort of cutting and reassembling of the human body.8 Thus, Susan Sontag can argue that photography is 'treacherous' because photographic images 'do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it'.9 Even when bodily anxiety or a fear of violence against nature isn't present in theoretical writings, the photographic machine is often placed in contested relation to the human sen-sorium - in Dziga Vertov's manifestoes, for example, where we repeatedly encounter contrasts between the camera and the human eye: 'I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.' Along similar lines, early photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and E. J. Marey, who were motivated less by the aesthetic desire for representation than by a technological/scientific urge, always treated photography as an extension and improvement of the eye, or as what Rutsky calls 'a kind of prosthesis' (p. 31). The scene from Best Years is about prosthesis, and it uses sophisticated camera technology in an apparently artless way, giving us empirical evidence of a wounded human body. PART SIX: EPILOGUE 253 Whenever I show it to contemporary students, however, they seem sceptical of the idea that photography has an indexical relation to the world, and they tend to doubt that the actor who plays the sailor in the film really has no hands. One reason for their scepticism, I suspect, is that they've never heard of Russell, and they've all seen Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump (1994), which contains several scenes involving a paraplegic Vietnam veteran acted by Gary Sinise, whose legs have been imperceptibly 'erased' by means of CGI. The effect in Gump is at least technically similar to an earlier Zemeckis film, Death Becomes Her (1992), in which digital imaging is used for comic and spectacular ends, enabling Meryl Streep's head to go spinning around on her neck and Goldie Hawn to carry on conversations after a gaping hole has been blown through her stomach. The major difference is that the trick with the wounded veteran in Gump, like the majority of trick shots in narrative movies since the beginning of cinema, is intended to be invisible. To find an example of an invisible trick prior to the digital age, we need only consider another moment in The Best Years of Our Lives. Just prior to the scene in which Homer invites his sweetheart up to his room, he looks at some old high-school photographs of himself, showing him passing a football and dribbling a basketball. If you study the photos, you'll notice that they've been doctored by the film-makers, who have pasted Harold Russell's head onto the bodies of young athletes. Best Years relies upon our willingness to ignore such details in the interest of social realism. By contrast, the computer-enhanced scenes in a movie like Death Becomes Her feel more like a cartoon or a trompe ľoeil; and, as Sean Cubitt remarks, 'despite its name, trompe Voeil wants not to trick, but to be discovered in the act of trickery' (p. 127). We can, in fact, make distinctions among degrees or kinds of disbelief that special effects elicit. Some want to be accepted as 'invisible' even though they look artificial to the knowing eye (matte printing, glass shots and process screens in classic Hollywood); some deliberately call attention to themselves as 'movie magic' (dream sequences, expressionist distortions of the visible world and cataclysms in action-adventure movies); and some are unnoticed or completely undetectable (the arched eyebrow that was 'painted' by computer onto the face of Jodie Foster for a close-up in Zemeckis's Contact [1997])- Given the ubiquity and historical importance of special effects, my own students are inclined to accept Christian Metz's notion that all cinema is essentially a trick, beginning with the phenomenon of persistence of vision upon which the medium is founded.10 They also tend to agree with Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault that cinematic spectatorship was originally founded on a kind of incredulity or sceptical wonder; hence, there was no radical difference between the way early viewers regarded the Lumieres' train arriving at a station and the way they regarded Melies's magic act, since both experiences involved a sense of astonishment in the face of what was known to be a mechanical illusion.1: In my own view, the situation is more complicated. The old theoretical distinction between movies as document and movies as magic makes sense as a description of two filmmaking practices, and the documentary practice isn't threatened by digital technology. In 254 ON KUBRICK fact, digital cameras have opened up vast new possibilities for film-makers who work in the tradition of neo-realism or documentary, and who want to explore the camera's ability to function more or less autonomously, recording accidents or contingency in everyday life. It should nevertheless be noted that, even when we're treated as incredulous spectators who are aware that some kind of visual trick has been projected onto the screen, CGI seems to undermine documentary authority in the entertainment film. It brings movies closer to the spirit of comic books and animation, it makes some tricks less easily detectable and it threatens a certain discourse about realism and humanism in the cinema. Perhaps it's no accident that CGI has often been used to show morphing androids and missing body parts, as if the world were coming apart before our eyes, or as if the mechanical were supplanting and not simply serving the organic. A I. is filled with such moments - for example, in the scene in which David's face melts after he eats spinach, or in the scenes of the 'Flesh Fair*, in which CGI is used to show robots with their humanoid surfaces ripped away and their arms and legs torn asunder. (Spielberg hired actual amputees to perform in several shots at the Fair, but he also used a full range of technical tricks; at one point we see a robot played by an African-American amputee picking up a white mechanical hand from a junk pile of spare parts and inserting it onto the stump of his wrist.) One of the most spectacular of these effects occurs at the very beginning of the film, and is clearly designed to showcase CGI's ability to split actors apart and blur the distinctions between human arid mechanical. Professor Hobby (William Hurt) calls a meeting of his corporation in order to demonstrate the strengths and limitations of their new 'artificial being' - an attractive and compliant robot 'secretary* named 'Sheila'. At the end of the demonstration, Hobby orders Sheila to 'open', whereupon her face slides apart, revealing an inner network of electronic wiring. As viewers of the film, we-recognise that Sheila is played by a flesh-and-blood actor, and that CGI has been used to morph her face into a machine image; the illusion, however, is almost perfect, and is neatly capped when the mechanical face re-closes like a jewel box. Hobby remarks that this new model is only a toy, and goes on to explain his vision of creating 'a mecha of a qualitatively different order*. As he speaks, we see Sheila take out a compact and adjust her make-up. Dissolve to a scene that takes place twenty months later, in which Monica, the flesh-and-blood mother played by Frances O'Connor, takes out a compact and adjusts her own make-up. In one sense the trick shot of Sheila's face isn't unusual, because movies have always enjoyed splitting actors apart. The first special effect is usually said to have been the Edison Company's The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (1895), which employed a 'substitution shot' to show an actor being beheaded. (The camera was stopped, the actor playing Mary was replaced by a dummy and the camera was restarted to show the executioner chopping off the dummy's head.) Digital effects clearly have their own phenomenology and their favoured images, especially in scenes involving impossible 'camera movements,' morphing shapes and crowds of figures running across landscapes; they can also show us purely electronic, non-verisimilar images that are unlike anything we've seen before. In Hollywood, PART SIX: EPILOGUE 255 however, they tend to be used for exactly the same purposes as older technology like matte shots, optical printers and rear or front projection - that is, to achieve magical transformations or to combine verisimilar images in order to produce a kind of invisible collage. In this sense, A. 1. is typical of Hollywood. Even so, because A. I. is explicitly about the distinction between the 'real' and the 'artificial', and because it depicts a future in which humans are replaced by robots, it seems a particularly appropriate use of CGI. Indeed, the film as a whole can be understood as an allegory of cinema, involving a somewhat contradictory attitude towards the future of the medium. Notice, moreover, that even though A. I. envisions the death of the human, it invites us to understand its creation in humanist terms, as a kind of dialogue between two auteurs about the relationship between the organic, the mechanical and the spiritual. In the history of Hollywood there have been several instances when two celebrated directors of different temperaments worked on the same picture - Murnau and Flaherty on Tabu (r93i), Hawks and Wyler on Come and Get /ŕ (1936), Mamoulian and Preminger on Laura (rg44) - but none is more interesting or well publicised than A. L: on the one hand we have Kubrick, a symbol of mid-century cool, a devotee of black humour, a technophile influenced by street photography and Wellesian expressionism and an intellectual whose movie career was partly built on challenges to censorship; on the other hand we have Spielberg, a populist and postmodernist who alternates retro-styled adventure movies with liberal projects about Important Themes. Spielberg may have written and directed A /., but Kubrick conceived the idea and worked on it intermittently for over almost two decades before his death. Kubrick is therefore figured as the ghost in the machine and Spielberg as his eulogist. Some commentary on the two seems inevitable as a way of accounting for A. Us particular way of achieving closure and its unusual commentary on gods, humans and robots. It may also help to answer another of my questions: why am I crying in a movie for which Stanley Kubrick is at least partly responsible? Puppet Masters A I. originated shortly after the release of Kubrick's 2001, a film that suggests that machines might someday achieve an improvement over humankind, and a film that has continuing relevance in a period when computer intelligence and biological engineering have brought us to the point where the definition of the human is no longer clear. Kubrick's outer-space epic had been inspired by a short story and A 7. began in much the same fashion, with Brian Aldiss's 'Super-Toys Last All Summer Long', which appeared in Harper's Bazaar in 1969. The Aldiss story depicts a future when two-thirds of the earth's population is starving, when birth-control laws are enacted to protect resources and when engineers and corporate executives live in luxurious but entirely artificial enclaves fitted with electronic windows that emit hyper-realistic scenes of sunlit gardens. Monica Swinton, the childless wife of the managing director of Synthank Corporation, has been provided with one of the company's most advanced products - a 'synthetic life form' named David, who looks and 256 ON KUBRICK behaves like a real boy, and whose best friend is an electronic teddy bear. Unfortunately, Monica can't develop a truly maternal attitude towards David. Her husband nevertheless announces a programme to market more such products, which he predicts will surpass the company's recent success with a line of miniature dinosaurs. Meanwhile, David uses crayons to compose a series of unfinished messages to Monica ('Dear Mummy, I love you and Daddy and the sun is shining -' 'Dear Mummy, I'm your little boy and not Teddy and I love you but Teddy -'.) At the end of the story, Monica discovers that she has won the parenthood lottery from the Ministry of Population and will be allowed to become pregnant. David, who will probably be abandoned, has a conversation with his teddy bear: 'I suppose Mummy and Daddy are real, aren't they?' 'You ask such silly questions,' the bear replies. 'Nobody knows what real really means.' In the early 1990s, Kubrick collaborated with Aldiss in an attempt to turn this story into a film, and at various points he commissioned other writers, including Arthur Clarke, Ian Watson and Bob Shaw. He was never fully satisfied with the results, but three of his objectives remained constant. First, he wanted the story to be told from the point of view of robots, for whom it would elicit sympathy; as Aldiss remarked, 'Stanley embraces android technology and thinks it might eventually take over - and be an improvement over the human race.'12 Second, he wanted to structure the story along the lines of Carlo Collodi's nineteenth-century fairy tale, Pinocchio (1883), which he would subject to what Roman Jacobson terms a 'metaphoric transformation'. Instead of a hand-carved Italian street urchin with an unusual nose, we would be given an industrially manufactured product resembling an innocent and rather suburban American boy; the boy's adventures, however, would be loosely based on those of Collodi's puppet. (Many of the characters and incidents in the completed film retain this quality: Professor Hobby, the Blue Fairy, Gigolo Joe, the Flesh Fair, the visit to Rouge City, the swarm offish that convey David underwater, etc.) Finally, he wanted to unify Collodi's picaresque tale by treating the boy's adventures in Freudian terms, as an Oedipal quest. Because he loved high-tech, and because he anticipated a lengthy production schedule, Kubrick actually tried to have a special-effects crew build a robot to play the role of David.13 This proved unworkable, but a new idea occurred to him when he saw Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993), in which ground-breaking CGI effects are used to create dinosaurs that move freely through a Bazinian mise en scene, looking rather like the ones made by the fictional Synthank in Aldiss's story. During the same period, computer animators were producing 'synthespians' or 'vactors' to play extras and stunt roles in live-action movies, and videogame developers were experimenting with characters that possessed Artificial Intelligence. The time was ripe for 'virtual humans', and Spielberg's film suggested how they might be created. As it happened, Kubrick and Spielberg had already developed a friendship and were in regular communication. Thus, when Kubrick grew more frustrated and uncertain about A L, he suggested that he might serve as producer and Spielberg as writer/director of the film. (When the film was eventually released, Kubrick was, in fact, PART SIX: EPILOGUE 257 listed as producer. Spielberg wrote the screenplay from a ninety-page treatment prepared for Kubrick by Ian Watson; he also consulted some 600 drawings Kubrick had commissioned from Chris Baker, and he hired Baker to work on the Hollywood production.) Critics tend to describe Kubrick as 'cold' and Spielberg as 'warm', but, as I've already tried to explain in regard to Kubrick, that claim seems oversimplified. It's better to say that Kubrick was a fastidious stylist who favoured slow, measured, sometimes over-the-top performances and crystal-clear imagery, whereas Spielberg is a flashy rhetorician, more inclined to sentiment, who works with dazzling speed and who produces fast-paced narratives with a somewhat garish and smoky look. (The garish atmosphere is exacerbated by his photographer on A. I., Janusz Kaminski, who loves to show beams of light penetrating through studio fog.) In any case, the two figures converge in their love of movie magic, and Spielberg was good 'casting' for this film because he brought to A. I. a vast knowledge of digital technology, a gift for telling stories about suburban families, and a certain affinity with the Disney aspects of the story; indeed 'When You Wish upon a Star', the theme from Disney's Pinocchio (r94o), had figured importantly in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). There is, in fact, a sort of lineal relationship between Collodi, Disney and Spielberg. Although the romantic movement taught us to think of children's stories as simple, unaffected and genuine, Collodi's fascinating, often dark narrative about a puppet who wants to become a boy belongs to a period when the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and Rudyard Kipling were bringing the European fairy and folk tale to the apex of literary respectability. As folklore historian Jack Zipes points put, this was also the time when modern nation-states were 'cultivating particular types of literature as commensurate expressions of national cultures'.14 The nineteenth-century tales were derived from a much earlier oral tradition of Zaubermärchen, but they were addressed to the bourgeoisie and were part of a struggle for ideological hegemony. For similar reasons, the fairy tale figured importantly in early cinema, particularly in Melies's féeries and in Porter's Jack and the Beanstalk. It remained for Disney in the late 1930s and early 1940s to appropriate the genre and turn it into a truly middle-class American form, or into what Zipes describes as a Horatio-Alger myth about patriarchy, perseverance, cleanliness, hard work and the rise to success. Disney's films were made by a Taylorised industry, but they celebrated the individual imagination and appeared to spring from Disney's own brow. The lovely princesses, handsome princes and cutely anthropomorphised animals were treated as Walt's puppets, even when they were drawn by a host of animators and supervised by gifted directors like Ben Sharpsteen, who was in charge of the adaptation of Pinocchio. But to expose Disney's ideological aims and modes of production, as several writers have done, is not to break his spell, for the classic Disney films are superbly crafted narratives, and like their sources they have a genius for tapping into elemental anxieties. The grinning witch addressing the camera in Snow White(ig^7), the death of the mother in Bambi(ig^2), the abandonment of the child in Dumbo (r 940), the transformation of Lampwick in Pinocchio - these 258 ON KUBRICK events are burned into the screen memories of generations of children, and they can never be expunged by happy endings. For his own part, Spielberg has repeatedly drawn upon the Disney films, evoking nostalgia for middle-class Americana and encouraging audiences to regress into childhood; it's as if the pop culture of the r 9 30s, 1940s and 1950s offers him a repository of'authentic' materials, roughly analogous to what gothic architecture offered the English romantics during the industrial revolution. A talented director of stories about monstrous predators, he is also sharply attuned to the anxieties of childhood, which he treats in affecting and ultimately optimistic fashion. Thus, Spielberg's version of A. I. eschews the dark sexuality Kubrick had intended to convey through the Joe Gigolo character, and it frequently alludes in affectionate ways to classic Hollywood, reminding us not only of Sharpsteen's Pinocchio and Dumbo, but also of The Wizard ofOz (1939) and the Astaire/Kelly musicals. Everywhere it shows its indebtedness to comic books and animated films and, in line with contemporary practice for the Disney Company, it uses celebrity actors (Robin Williams, Ben Kingsley, Meryl Streep and Chris Rock) as voices for the CGI figures. One is tempted to speculate about whether Spielberg could have experienced an anxiety of influence during the making of A. I., or whether he and Kubrick, who were -undoubtedly friends, were at any point engaged in a psychic contest with one another. I doubt this was the case and, even if it was, Spielberg seems to me to win the contest. Nevertheless, the last scene of A. I. isn't typical of Spielberg. Its particular mixture of sadness and intellectual irony feels less harmonious than dialectical, rather like a decon-struction of Spielberg's sentiment that somehow leaves all his emotional gestures in force. He, Kubrick, Aldiss and Ian Watson might be its authors, but none of them is its puppet master. To further account for the scene, we need to broaden our perspective, for A. L is a film about the curious affinity between Artificial Intelligence and psychoanalysis, and it involves a good deal of metaphysical speculation about such big concepts as the self and God. The central themes of the film can be traced back to a long tradition of western philosophical idealism - to Plato, for example, who believed that human beings are puppets formed by a demiurge, to Renaissance neo-Platonists like Marsilio Ficino, who argued that the visible world is a kind of machine that mediates between earth and heaven; and to romantic authors like Heinrich von Kleist, who proposed that theatrical marionettes have spirit or soul. This quasi-religious tradition, which provided a basis for most of western high art prior to the age of Enlightenment, is intriguingly discussed in "Victoria Nelson's The Secret Life of Puppets, a book that was published in the same year as A. I's first screenings. Nelson points out that there has been a resurgence of Platonism in our own day, but this time in pop-culture genres like science fiction or fantasy, where it often takes a sublimated or displaced form, allowing 'the benign supernatural' to emerge from the shadows of modernism's fascination with 'the demonic grotesque'.15 As I hope to show, A. I. contributes to exactly this phenomenon, and could be described as one of its most emotionally forceful manifestations. PART SIX: EPILOGUE 259 The Robot's Soul Several viewers of A. I have told me that they think the film should have ended earlier, at the point when David and Teddy travel far beneath the waters of global warming that engulf Manhattan, ultimately arriving at the remains of Coney Island. The old amusement park contains a kitschy theme park based on the characters and events in Pinocchio, and in its midst is a statue of the Blue Fairy. As soon as David arrives, however, a giant Ferris wheel pitches forward and crashes atop his amphibious helicopter, pinning it undersea. Mesmerised by the statue in front of him, David ignores his situation and begins to pray: 'Blue Fairy, please, please make me into a real boy!' As he incessantly repeats his prayer, the camera cranes backward, the image fades and the narrator tells us that David went on praying until the seas froze over. This is certainly a more spectacular ending than the one we have, and more of a downer. For those of us who believe that David isn't really real, it sums up the film's 'Frankenstein' theme, showing how Professor Hobby's arrogance leads to the destruction of civilisation and the death of a pathetically artificial creature. It also seems to echo the closing of the first 'act' in A. L's narrative, when we see David abandoned at the bottom of his family swimming pool. The film might well have stopped at Coney Island, and for a moment it seems to; but then it starts up again, jumping 2,000 years into the future, where its third and final act brings other issues into focus. David has been engaged in an Odyssey, albeit one in which he has never been distracted from a single, urgent goal; it seems appropriate, therefore, that he should be given a nostos in which, however briefly or ironically, he rejoins the woman he loves, banishes her suitors and reclaims his kingdom. The scene in which he and Monica sleep together is suffused with the gauzy, golden light of nostalgia, and is both triumphant and deeply sad. In some respects it may run counter to Stanley Kubrick's original intent, because one of its apparent aims is to suggest nostalgia not simply for childhood, but also for human imagination in a world of purely mechanical intelligence. It never quite achieves that aim, however, and as a result it has fascinating implications about Hollywood, about the machine as a bearer of life, and about the simulacrum as a mediator between matter and spirit. The first of these implications is easy to explain, for what is David if not an emblem of Hollywood? He's an image of white male innocence and resourcefulness who touches my heart even when I know he's artificial; he's frozen in time and will never grow older; he's an illusion created by an actor, a director and a team of technical magicians; he's programmed to enact the Oedipal scenario; and, above all, he's a commodity - in this case a star personality or brand name, cleverly packaged by a corporation that plans to construct many more just like him. As Professor Hobby tells his staff at the beginning of the film, 'Ours will be a perfect child caught in a freeze frame___Our little mecha will not only open up a compelling market, it will fill a great human need.' And as the baffled mother says to her husband when he brings David home as a sort of toy or gift who can function as a substitute child, 'He's so real, but he's not. But outside he just looks so real!' 260 ON KUBRICK Despite the fact that he isn't 'acted' by robotics or CGI, David is also an emblem of advanced technology and of an anxiety over the human body that Scott Bukatman finds at the heart of most science fiction (such an anxiety is clearly present in Kubrick's 2001). The body, Bukatman writes, 'has long been the repressed content of science fiction, as the genre obsessively substitutes the rational for the corporeal, and the technological for the organic'.1 In one sense, Spielberg reverses the process. He chooses not to animate David and thereby completely displace the organic because the illusion of David's human presence needs to be complete if he is to convince either the audience or the live-action characters in the film. Unlike Kubrick, who consistently found ways to alienate the audience, Spielberg wants us to identify strongly with his leading characters, and he knows that computer animation has yet to reach the stage where it can create truly believable human figures in major speaking roles. The most elaborate attempt to do so is Final Fantasy (2001), a feature-length sci-fi adventure modelled on videogames, which was released in the United States at almost the same moment as A. L, and which, for all its use of CGI, looks waxen and stilted, seldom rising even to the level of trompe Voeil More recently, Robert Zemeckis has put Tom Hanks and several other actors into motion-capture suits for the computer-animated Polar Express (2004), in which the figures on the screen look almost dead. Even so, contemporary animators continue to speak of photo-realism as an attainable goal, and they sound as if they were trying to produce exactly the-same psychological effect that young David has on his mother. According to John Lassetér, the director of the Pixar/Walt Disney company's computer-animated Toy Story (1995), 'I'm interested in creating a film with characters that people obviously know don't exist. But then they look at it and say "It seems so real. I know it doesn't -but wait__No, they can't be alive, no. Are they?'"17 The effect Lasseter describes is essentially that of good movie magic since the beginning of the medium, and also the effect of the commodity fetish, whose promise of 'real' gratification is always teasingly deferred. Where A. I is concerned, however, both emotional identification with the leading character and engagement with movie magic are somewhat estranged, because David is explicitly shown as a machine and a commodity. The situation is similar to what we find in at least one version of the many scripts of Blade Runner, except that here the plot is reversed: the leading character is known to be artificial at the beginning and we're asked to accept him as human in the course of the story.18 Haley Joel Osment's performance is especially interesting in this regard because A. I. requires him to start with a slightly digitalised or pantomimic style of acting, very similar to what the Russian futurists called "bio-mechanics', and then to shift, at the moment when David's mother imprints his circuits with Oedipal desire, into an analogue, Stanislavskian style that reveals his 'inner' life. (Even in the final stage of his development, he never blinks his eyes.) The important question posed by the last scene, in which the emotions expressed by Osment are particularly subtle and moving, is whether the film regards David's acquisition of so-called humanity as progress, regression or neither. This question isn't easily PART SIX: EPILOGUE 261 resolved. A. I. often uses the keywords of romantic idealism ('God', 'love', 'spirit', 'dreams' and 'genius'), but it submits these words to a certain amount of irony or scientific scepticism. At the beginning of the film Professor Hobby, who is both a Dr Frankenstein and a surrogate movie director, boasts that he is about to achieve a great leap forward by creating a 'mecha with a mind... who will love its parents'. He wants to produce many copies of this mecha for the marketplace, but he describes them in the rhetoric of pure romanticism: 'Love will be the key by which they acquire a kind of subconscious never before achieved, an inner world of metaphor, of intuition, of self motivation, of dreams.' Hobby descends from a long line of scientist-as-rfemzür^ characters who have populated western culture since the Renaissance (famous examples in the modern period include the puppet masters in E. T. A. Hoffmann's supernatural tales, the fictional Thomas Edison in Villiers de ľlsle-Adam's L'Evefitture and Rotwang in Fritz Lang's Metropolis) and, like most of his ancestors, he is treated unsympathetically. Despite his godlike role ('Didn't God create Adam to love him?'), he fails to see what we eventually learn - that robots, who until now have served purely instrumental needs as secretaries, cooks, nannies, entertainers and sex workers, already have an ability to love and to act in self-motivated ways. When Teddy (who insists he's 'not a toy') is forced by David's 'real-life' brother (who wears a mechanical brace on his legs) to make a choice between David and the brother, he suffers a psychological double bind that almost destroys his circuits; and when Gigolo Joe encounters David at the Flesh Fair, he deliberately chooses to befriend the boy and assist him. With the qualified exception of Monica, who suffers a crisis when she must abandon David, none of the humans in the film is as loving and sympathetic as the robots, and none is more inherently capable of feeling emotion. David may be different from other robots, but what makes him unusual isn't so much his ability to love as his ability to fill a prescribed role in the nuclear family. Unlike his fellow machines, he isn't created as a proletarian or a skilled worker in the service industries. Combining Agape and Eros, he both loves and is in love with Monica, and therefore aspires to become a particular kind of human. At this level he resembles the robot played by Robin Williams in a much less interesting film, Bicentennial Man (1999), who is possessed with a suicidal desire to become human, even to the point of experiencing mortality. We might say that his tragedy is that he wants to be something less than he is. Like many humans, David has a fascination with magic and the supernatural, as when he encounters a kitschy statue of the Virgin Mary in Rouge City and wonders if she is the Blue Fairy. His friend Gigolo Joe explains that the statue is only a symbol of the humans' rather contemptible desire to know who made them. (One could also say that the statue, rather like a robot, is a simulacrum mediating between the divine and the earthly.) This issue never troubles David, who is concerned only with finding his mother and reclaiming her love. 'Mommy doesn't hate me, because I'm special and unique,' he says to Gigolo Joe. But when David travels to Manhattan and confronts his maker, he encounters a nightmarish form of mechanical reproduction in the service of serial commodities. Copies of 262 ON KUBRICK himself are suspended on hooks along the walls of Hobby's corporation. 'I thought I was one of a kind,' David says to Hobby. 'My son was one of a kind,' Hobby replies. 'You are the first of a kind.' Hobby is already packaging scores of boys who resemble his dead son, and he plans to market them under the brand-name of'David'. His workshop also contains packages for a female product named 'Darlene'. We can only guess what her story might be like (the film is far too Freudian to know for sure), but David's seems to end in a murderous assault on his mechanical twin, a revolt against the patriarch, an attempted suicide and a futile prayer to the Blue Fairy. Only after he's discovered under the ice by a future generation of robots does he have a chance to become real. 'These robots were originals,' one of the futuristic mechas says to the others when they remove David from the ice. 'They knew living people!' In a final twist, humanism and 'spirit' survive. Like a precious archeological find or a rare zoo animal, the robot boy is given special care by robots of the future, who bring His organic mother to life for a single day and fulfil his greatest wish. The final section of the film was undoubtedly a problem for Spielberg, because it posits a situation beyond human understanding. Kubrick faced similar difficulties in the last segment of 2001, which he wisely chose to keep ambiguous and non-verbal; but A I. is further complicated by the fact that we need to see events from the radically different perspectives of a futuristic intelligence and a human child. Unfortunately, Spielberg chose to represent the technically advanced androids with a rather conventional design that looks a bit like a CGI version of the 'Grey', a pop-culture figure who has influenced the look of space aliens in almost every sci-fi movie after Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It doesn't help that the chief robot speaks to David in the voice of Ben Kingsley, who sounds as if he were narrating Masterpiece Theater. But these faintly risible touches could have been intended as such, because the conversation between David and the robot of the future has been mediated or managed for the benefit of a human boy's comprehension. (A window behind the two when they talk seems almost like an HDTV screen showing an imaginary natural world.) Because David is so thoroughly programmed as a suburban boy, it makes sense that signs of gender, nationality and even Hollywood movies should be used in an attempt to communicate with him. At the end, David becomes a paradoxical representative of humanity, which the film defines in Freudian terms. This move is typical of both Spielberg and Kubrick; of the two, however, Kubrick was the more deliberate and forthright in the way he deployed psychoanalytical themes. As we've seen, when he was working with Diane Johnson on the screenplay of The Shining, he became interested in Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, which is filled with ahistorical, somewhat vulgarly psychoanalytical interpretations of literary fairy tales. Bettelheim was also an influence on the development of A I., and one wonders if either Kubrick or Spielberg read the following passage from another of Bettelheim's books, Freud and Man's Soul (1984), which insists that Freud's use of the term 'psyche' has something in common with the spiritual idea of 'soul' and ought to be translated as such: PART SIX: EPILOGUE 263 Freud's atheism is well known - he went out of his way to assert it. There is nothing supernatural about his idea of the soul, and it has nothing to do with immortality; if anything endures after us, it is other people's memories of us - and what we create__It is intangible, but it nevertheless exercises a powerful influence on our lives. It is what makes us human; it is what is so essentially human about us that no other term could equally convey what Freud had in mind.19 Bettelheim is symptomatic of the way psychoanalysis (like art) became the last refuge of spirituality in an increasingly secularised and scientific age. But if memory is what makes us spiritual and human, how is it that machines can also be given memory, and why have computer engineers turned memory into the basis of what Sherry Turkle describes as the 'emergent' field of Artificial Intelligence? In a 1998 paper on 'Artificial Intelligence and Psychoanalysis', Turkle observes that the two intellectual domains in question would appear to be worlds apart: Psychoanalysis looks for what is most human: the body, sexuality, what follows from being born of woman and raised in a family. Artificial intelligence looks deliberately for what is least specifically human: the foundation of its theoretical vision is the thesis that the essence of mental life is a set of principles that could be shared by people and machines.2? And yet, as Turkle goes on to demonstrate, the culture of psychoanalysis and the culture of computers also have a great deal in common: both make use of a 'biological aesthetic', both involve a fragmented or de-centred conception of the self, both theorise that repression and the unconscious are central to the workings of the mind and both dissolve the line between subjective and objective reflection. Turkle concludes that psychoanalysis and emergent A. I. can provide each other with 'sustaining myths', in the process overthrowing certain paradigms. The mind of the computer unsettles behaviourist psychology in much the same way as it unsettles complacent notions of the ego. 'Artificial intelligence,' Turkle remarks, 'is to be feared as are Freud and Derrida, not as are Skinner and Carnap' (p. 245). In the concluding scenes of A I, the pure machine entities of the future seem to have evolved beyond the biological differences that constitute Freud's theory, and they inhabit a world so rational that it bears no signs of sex, capitalism, and nationality. Even so, they have memory, and an intense historical interest in David, which they express as a kind of nostalgia for humanist idealism. 'You are so important to us,' their representative says, 'you are unique___You are the enduring memory of the human race, the most lasting proof of their genius.' After downloading David's memory cells and viewing his life like a videotape running at fast speed, this same robot confesses, 'I often felt a sort of envy of human beings; ofthat thing they called spirit.' When the robots decide to grant David's wish by reuniting him briefly with his mother, they view the action from the vantage point of a 26A ON KUBRICK table-top TV screen, as if they were archivists looking down at an old movie that offers a key to the human psyche. None of this irony detracts from the emotions represented in the last scene. David has brought his mother back from the dead in order to have a single moment when the two can express their love for one another and when David can reconcile himself with her death. During his adventures he has seen things she can barely understand and for the first time he possesses a knowledge superior to hers. Spielberg focuses our attention on the faces of the two actors, particularly on Haley Joel Osment. As the camera shows in empirical fashion, here is a real-life boy who has only just acquired his mature teeth, but whose weary smile reveals that death is the mother of beauty. What makes the scene distinctive, however, is that every emotion evoked by Osment and O'Connor is bracketed or qualified by the unusual fictional situation. The mother, the child and the house are too perfect, like idealised figures from Hollywood. Something uncanny inflects everything - a feeling of 'un-homeliness', as if we could sense ghostly futuristic robots designed by CGI somewhere off in the distance, looking down upon David and his mother, who are themselves artificial. The effect isn't so shocking as David's uncanny laughter during a family dinner at an earlier point in the film, but it asserts its presence like a chilling afterthought or an overlay to an otherwise touching reunion. Freud's essay on the uncanny is based at least in part on his analysis of the animated dolls in E. T. A. Hoffmann's stories, and on 'the impression made by wax-work figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata'. One of its conclusions, implicitly evident in Kubrick's The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut, is that uncanny feelings are related to the primal fear of castration and death.21 R. L. Rutsky notes that this fear can also be understood through Lacan's rewriting of Freud, as a threat to the 'phallus' or to the idea of Cartesian self-hood; thus, when technology appears animated or strangely 'undead', we tend to lose our faith in the 'authority of a unitary, living soul or spirit over the fragmentation and contingency of the object-world' (p. 3 9). Freud and Lacan seem to hover in the background of the last scene in A L, alongside those CGI robots - especially when the childlike automaton embraces his maternal 'bride' and goes to 'that place where dreams are born'. But they don't rule the story, which can also be viewed as another in the long history of tales about the way statues, dolls and robots fascinate us because they seem to embody spirit. Vast oppositions - grief and irony, sentiment and intellect, nostalgia and strangeness, humanism and anti-humanism, rationalism and idealism - are joined in the concluding scene. David is a child who overcomes the trauma of a dead parent, but at the same time a machine whose deepest 'human' tragedy is that he's created in our image, a projection of us. We witness a fundamental experience of love and death, and at the same time an Oedipal fantasy staged by machines for the benefit of a mechanically reproduced commodity from a dead American culture. After my first viewing of this scene, I recalled a 1976 short story about robots by Peter Wollen, entitled 'Friendship's Death', which Wollen later turned into a movie. The story concerns a space alien named Friendship, who looks like a human being but is in fact a PART SIX: EPILOGUE 265 robot equipped with 'artificial intelligence and a very sophisticated system of plastic surgery and prosthesis'. Friendship is sent by his programmers as an envoy to earth, where he hopes to have a conversation with Noam Chomsky at MIT. Unfortunately, an error in navigation causes him to land in Jordan during the 1970 war between the Jordanians and Palestinians. At the same moment all his communications with his home are cut off, thus giving him complete autonomy. In a conversation with a British journalist who is the only person to leam his true identity, Friendship says that during his short visit he has begun to see how human society is strongly marked by class division and class struggle. Lines of power have been drawn between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, between industrial nations and the Third World, between men and women, and between humans and animals. The most basic division of all is that between the human and the non-human, although the definition of human seems to change over time and certain humanitarian principles have been extended to, the whole of the organic world. The one thing that always seems to be walled off from the human, Friendship observes, is the machine, which is regarded as instrumental and not sentient. This seems unreasonable to Friendship, for have not many of Earth's philosophers likened human beings to machines? (The most important example, as Wollen knows, is Descartes.) Suddenly the reporter who narrates the story feels uneasy, because he begins to see the drift of the conversation: '[Friendship] could not possibly look at machines in the same way. He was one himself. Moreover, he had intelligence, privacy andautonomy; he felt, although he was not a human, he was clearly entitled to the same consideration.' When the reporter last sees Friendship, the robot is on his way to join the Palestinian militia and to die in struggle.22 Like Wollen, but in less political terms, Spielberg and Kubrick indicate that solidarity, love and even sex are grounded less in biology than in intelligence. More importantly, they reveal that the human/not-human distinction lies at the very bedrock of ideology. The last scene of A /., therefore, moves beyond irony to a place where rationality is troubled, where empathy and intelligence reinforce one another and where the 'oceanic' feeling Freud once ascribed to religious experience comes flooding back into force. It allows us to understand David's tragic condition on a level that both transcends and contains oppositions, so that we can share his grief and victory in a 'humane' fashion but in a much larger context than humanism normally allows. I weep for David as a boy and as a machine, even as I watch him living out a fantasy of modernity. In a hyper-modem America where, in the wake of September 11,20or, there was much discussion of family and home, much sober reflection on the excesses of modern entertainment and much nostalgia for an older, supposedly more 'human' national life, such a scene is rare indeed, and affecting in more ways than one. Notes 1. Critical reaction to the film was mixed. One of the most lengthy and discerning reviews was Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Best of Both Worlds', CWcí33t?Jře(3cíer(i3 July 2001), pp. 32-6, reprinted in Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, pp. 271-9. See also Geoffrey J266-....._............-........-........-............................. ON KUBRICK O'Brien, 'Very Special Effects', The New York Review of Books (9 August 2001), and Andrew Sarris, 'A. I.=(200i+E. T.)2\ The New York Observer (23 June 2001), p. 1. 2. Sigmund Freud, 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), vol. 17, p. 38. Fora fascinating discussion of the relation between narrative closure and the death drive in Hitchcock's Psycho, see Laura Mulvey, 'Death Drives', in Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales (eds), Hitchcock Past and Future (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 231-42. 3. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). See also Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999)- 4. Paul Virillo, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose (London: BFI, 1994). 5. Sean Cubitt, 'Introduction: Le reel, c'est ('impossible. The Sublime Time of Special Effects' in Sean Cubitt and John Caughie (eds), Screen: Special Issue on FX, CGI, and the Question of Spectacle vol. 40 no. 2 (Summer 1999), pp. 123-30. Page numbers hereafter noted in the text. See also Sean Cubitt, 'Phalke, Méliěs, and Special Effects Today', Wide Angle vol. 21 no. 1 (January 1999), pp. 115-48. 6. André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 13. 7. Ändré Bazin, 'William Wyler, or the Jansenist of Directing', trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, in Bazin, Bazin at Work, ed. Bert Cardullo (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 12. 8. R. L Rutsky, High TechneiArtand Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 34. Page numbers hereafter noted in the text. 9. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), p. 4. 10. Christian Metz, Trucage and the Film', Critical Inquiry (Summer 1977), pp. 657-75. 11. Tom Gunning, An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Films and the (In)Credulous Spectatoť, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, 5th edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 818-32; André Gaudreault, Theatricality, Narrativity and Trickality": Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Méliěs', Journal of Popular Film and Television vol. 15 no. 3 (Autumn), pp. 110-19. 12. Aldiss is quoted in the introduction to 'Super-Toys Last All Summer Long', which is reprinted in an extremely useful website devoted to Stanley Kubrick: 13. One of Kubrick's ideas was to have experimental director Chris Cunningham create the scenes involving the robot. Tests of these scenes were apparently made, but were judged unsatisfactory. (For an example of Cunningham's sexy and uncanny work with robotic figures, see his video of Bjork's'AlIIsFullofLove'.) 14. Jack Zipes, 'Breaking the Disney Spelľ, in Elizabeth Bell, Linda Haas and Laura Sells (eds), From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Cu/fare(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 25. For a good discussion of the historical and literary context of Collodi's story, see Nicolas J. Perella, 'An Essay on Pinocchio', in Carlo Collodi, The Adventures ofPinocchio, Story of a Puppet, trans. Nicolas J. Perella (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 1-70. PART SIX: EPILOGUE 267 15. Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. xi. Nelson's fascinating book is strikingly relevant to A. I., though she was not able to write about the film. Her thesis, which is elaborated through a rich and diverse exploration of western art and philosophy, is that the 'larger mainstream culture' of the twenty-first century 'subscribes to a non-rational, supernatural, quasi-religious view of the universe', and that our consumption of art forms of the fantastic is 'one way that we as nonbelievers allow ourselves, unconsciously, to believe' (p. vii). 16. Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 19. 17. Lasseter is quoted in a website created by the PBS programme NOVA, which devoted one of its programmes to the history of special effects in Hollywood: 18. For a discussion of the scripts of Blade Runner and the ambiguous effect of the film's ending, see William M. Kolb, 'Script to Screen: Blade Runnerin Perspective', in Judith B. Kerman (ed.), Retrofitting Blade Runner (Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1991). PP-132~53- 19. Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man's So«/(New York: Vintage Books, 1984), p. 77. 20. Sherry Turkle, 'Artificial Intelligence and Psychoanalysis: A New Alliance', Daedalus vol. 117 no. 1 (Winter 1998), p. 241. See also Sherry Turkle, The Second Self Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984). 21. Sigmund Freud, 'The 'Uncanny',' in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. i7,p,226. 2 2. 'Friendship's Death', in Peter Wollen, Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), pp. 140-52.