You Just Can’t Win with Stanley Kubrick

(or: Trying to Do the Right Thing in the Wrong World)

In most accounts of Stanley Kubrick’s upbringing, the biographer notes that, at the age of twelve, Kubrick’s father taught him how to play chess, and that when Kubrick was thirteen, his father gave him a camera. The importance of that first camera in the life of a D.W. Griffith Award winner might be more obvious than that of chess instruction, but the lessons stuck with him, and the techniques of the game seem to have shaped his understanding of the world in interesting ways. In the documentary Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Lee Minoff, the executive producer of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), told a story about how the director tamed the fiery George C. Scott, who played General “Buck” Turgidson for the film, by repeatedly trouncing him at chess, a game at which Scott fancied himself quite the rare talent. Minoff went on to say that Kubrick “was a master chess player, [and] viewed life as chess.” Perhaps Kubrick’s ability to set up an un-winnable game for an opponent on the black and white board led him to a fascination with depicting situations on film which he saw as real-world mirrors of such conditions, exploded to their logical extreme. Kubrick seemed to love putting his characters in predicaments wherein it would be impossible for a character to do the “right” thing, often because it would be impossible for him or her to know what doing the right thing would entail. A viewer can see instances of this phenomenon in a span of Kubrick’s films, ranging from the clean, almost chess-like definition of the “Plan R” situation in Dr. Strangelove to the amazing moral ambiguity of the world depicted in his last completed film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick’s telling of Peter George’s deadly-serious *Cold War novel Red Alert, takes the form of a “nightmare comedy.” The film is structured into three primary parts, which correspond with three locations, each with its own set of characters functioning entirely at cross-purposes and constantly undermining their supposed cohorts. Each of these locations is revisited a number of times over the course of the action, and with each visit, new and devastating twists are revealed. There is the office of General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) at the Burpelson Air Force Base, a quickly moving B-52 bomber, and the fictitious War Room at the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

A fantastic example of Kubrick’s masterly manipulation of his characters, as well as of his audience, takes place over a series of scenes at Burpelson, culminating at Ripper’s office. As the sequence marches relentlessly toward its horrible conclusion, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) goes through the proverbial *Seven Stages of Grief as he gradually realizes that Ripper has come totally unhinged. The General tells Mandrake that he has launched an emergency nuclear attack plan on Russia, and, as it becomes clear to the latter that this is not a readiness exercise, he becomes suitably alarmed. But when it becomes clear that this is also not, as per the provisions of the attack plan, a retaliatory strike, he begins to fear that there has been a terrible mistake. However, Mandrake’s fears of such a mistake, as he is shortly informed by Ripper, are not justified. Oh, no; there has been no mistake on Ripper’s part. Things are much worse than that. Ripper tells Mandrake, then, that he has acted of his own volition, based on his own best judgment, which was based, in turn, on his unique understanding of communist behavior. His starkly lit, commanding visage emerging from the blackness behind him, the camera shooting from slightly below, Ripper gives a speech to this effect as he pulls at a considerable cigar, ending by saying, “I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” The string of expletives a viewer imagines running through Mandrake’s shocked noggin is loud enough that nothing more needs to be said, and the camera cuts from Ripper’s daunting countenance directly to an aerial view of the Pentagon, a jet engine roars in the background, and the viewer is given a moment to contemplate the next move.

The camera is then inside of the massive War Room, with its imposing, dimly glowing wall maps above, and vast, round, austerely illuminated table below. The President (again Peter Sellers), amongst a seeming legion of suited men sitting elbow-to-elbow around the table before their binders and embedded telephones, is being briefed on the locations of absent cabinet members. A viewer’s first impression of the scene might be that these are the men who will save America from the “bodily fluids” maniac, but that turns out to be far from the truth. President Muffley tucks his hanky into his sleeve and tensely directs the uneasy looking General Turgidson to tell him “what’s going on here.” The camera cuts to Turgidson who is seated in front of a pile of binders, the topmost of which, entitled “World Targets In Megadeaths,” hints at some of his more morbid fascinations. Turgidson clears his throat and begins his account; “Mr. President, about, ah, thirty-five minutes ago, General Jack Ripper ... issued an order to the thirty-four B-52s of his wing, which were airborne at the time .... Now it appears that the order called for the planes to, ah, attack their targets inside Russia.” At this point a general and undisguised murmur goes up amongst those present as the camera cuts to a medium shot of President Muffley’s expression of gape-eyed consternation. General Turgidson is undeterred from his telling, and his attitude of stubborn calm gives the impression of a person who, though dimly aware of the massive ramifications of what he is saying, feels that if he continues to fall back on the solid details of the situation in a matter-of-fact tone, somehow, all might not be lost. He goes on to elucidate these details, using a glowing wall-map to which he has a childish attachment, and finishes his account by saying that “the aircraft will begin penetrating Russian radar cover within twenty-five minutes.”

President Muffley and General Turgidson then have an exchange wherein, pawn by rook, everything seems to fall neatly into place to crush any hopes of recalling the Air Force wing. The President had been “under the impression that [he] was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.” As he pops another stick of gum into his chaw, Turgidson agrees that the President is “the only person authorized to do so.” “And, although I hate to judge before all the facts are in,” he continues, in what will become something of a “don’t blame me!” mantra for the character, “it’s beginning to look like General Ripper exceeded his authority.” The President curtly agrees with that assessment, and adds that Ripper’s excess had gone “far beyond the point [he] would have imagined possible.” “Well, perhaps,” Turgidson replies, “you’re forgetting the provisions of Plan R, sir.”

Plan R, Turgidson reminds the President, was developed to be used as an emergency response to a “sneak attack” that “disrupted the usual chain of command,” and would allow a “lower echelon commander to order nuclear retaliation.” (“You approved it, sir; you must remember.”) The plan was cleverly structured in such a way as to “prevent the enemy from issuing fake or confusing orders,” this by virtually eliminating the possibility for a call back of the planes, except by the initiating officer. In this case however, the initiating officer was a man bent on sending America to war with Russia in order to preserve the sanctity of our vital juices. The effect that this self-engineered “checkmate” has on the President and his cabinet, who are still very much alive thanks to a distinct absence of sneak attack, is fairly devastating.

But the biggest bomb has yet to drop. Though President Muffley and his men do eventually succeed in issuing a recall, there is one plane with a damaged communication system which cannot receive the message. In the interim, Muffley and company learn that the Russians have activated a Doomsday Device, and that they are all one giant leap closer to a much larger disaster for mankind than they had ever imagined. This Doomsday Device is a computer controlled, non-disarmable machine, which, when triggered by nuclear attack, will release a globe-blanketing cloud of fallout wiping out all life on Earth in ten months. The machine was intended to be a deterrent to attack based on fear of mutual annihilation; however, in another stroke of self-defeating genius which renders the machine useless in all preventative regards while leaving the destructive capabilities unimpeded, the Russians have not yet announced its activation.

Inter-cut with the War Room situation, and scenes of the mêlée at Burpelson Air Force Base as the U.S. Army attempts to put their hands on General Ripper and his recall code, is footage of Major T.J. “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) and his crew, nobly pursuing their targets despite the failing condition of their B-52. In another movie, with another story to tell, the audience might be rooting for the boys in the plane to succeed. They really give it their all, and overcome great adversity in order to do their duty. But Kubrick is not averse to pitting the audience against its expectations for itself. In this sequence’s reversal of standard cinematic allegiances, the viewer quails and cringes at each success, while their heart leaps with hope and joy at each mechanical failure or increase in rate of fuel loss. But Major Kong and the good men on his bomber do prevail, and Kong himself rides the bomb he has worked so hard to drop to the great V.F.W. hall in the sky, and total, global annihilation. This humble servant of the great nation we call America thus serves to crown a series of persistently progressing disasters with the disaster he sought to prevent.

There are many great ironies in Dr. Strangelove, not the least of which being that a man so deeply obsessed with the purity of his bodily fluids would launch a nuclear attack, but perhaps the greatest is in how the foremost of humanity and the apogee of technology are ultimately the forces that collude to destroy the world. Sometimes you just can’t win.

As Dr. Strangelove examines the sometimes self-encumbering motivations behind global politics, Eyes Wide Shut addresses the surprisingly ambiguous terms of marital fidelity. The relationship which the film examines is that of Dr. Bill and Mrs. Alice Harford (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman). Bill and Alice never actually have extramarital sex. However, over the course of the film, the viewer is made to feel more and more uncomfortable with the decisions the two characters make regarding their commitment to each other, and ultimately, with the way in which they handle the fallout resultant from these decisions. Using this scenario, Kubrick again demonstrates how, even when we play by the rules, we sometimes break the rules, and, even when we break the rules, we sometimes still can’t win.

Eyes Wide Shut was based on a novella by Arthur Schnitzler entitled Traumnovelle, the title of which, according to wikipedia.org, translates as “dream story.” Dreams have an important place in this film, and there is an underlying quality of unreality throughout much of it, sometimes manifesting as a sort of abstract surreal feeling, sometimes as a dreamlike lack of agency on the part of the main characters. The film captures this borderline-nightmarish “can’t win,” can’t-even-quite-focus, quality subtly and precisely, and uses certain key scenes to channel the mood. Two notable instances of such scenes occur on the first and second nights of the movie’s timeline, and establish much of the plot trajectory as well as the elusively illusory atmosphere.

The first of these takes place at a party at the lavish home of Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), an extremely wealthy patient of Bill’s. It is a regular enough scene in terms of storyline, but it acquires a bizarre patina because of Alice’s labored affect. Alice has had too much champagne, and is propositioned by the brazen Hungarian Sandor Szavost (Sky Dumont): “Are you here with anyone tonight, Alice?” “With my husband,” she replies seductively, after a suggestively prolonged look at Szavost’s mouth. “Oh, how sad,” Szavost continues, with the sincerity of a paid lobbyist, “but then I’m sure he’s the sort of man who wouldn’t mind if we... danced?” Past a dizzy dissolve, we find the two swaying in the ballroom, and Szavost delivering a series of pithy come-ons. But rather than turning to putty in his hands, Alice seems almost as if she is speaking through putty in her emotionally mixed responses. The pair talk of this and that as Alice floats flaccidly in Szavost’s capable arms. Then, in a shot from Alice’s point of view, we see Bill, in the next room, laughing with two conspicuously attractive young models. The mildly vertiginous dancing continues, Alice barely repelling Szavost’s advances; at the same time, we continue to follow Bill’s situation with the models, which is advancing similarly. Just as the two young women are offering to take Bill “where the rainbow ends,” Ziegler’s personal gentlemen interrupts, requests Bill’s presence upstairs, and we are left to wonder how the good Dr. Harford would have handled himself without the well timed intervention. Alice, however, is left to fend entirely for herself on the dance floor, with only her wedding band as a weapon; but, in the end, the ring’s sparkle catches her eye through the champagne-haze, and she tells Szavost that she cannot see him again.

As it turns out, the situation Bill was called away to manage involved ministering to the sometime mistress of Mr. Ziegler who had overdosed in the bathroom, all of which Ziegler tells Bill to be discreet about. Aside from that episode, however, neither Bill nor Alice did anything at the party that wasn’t by-the-book; but, again aside from that episode, just about everything Bill and Alice did there felt terribly underhanded and risky.

The scene which takes place the second night opens with Alice sucking on a joint, lounging on a warm-looking, red-sheeted bed, bathed in creamy light. The camera pulls back to reveal Bill sitting next to her on the bed, partially framed by the blue, city-at-night light of the bathroom behind him, as she passes him the joint. The camera cuts back down to a tight shot of Alice’s face as she exhales and very laboriously asks Bill whether he didn’t, “by any chancce ... happen tooo ... ffuck ...” the two girls she had seen him “blatantly hitting on” at the Zieglers’ party. Bill laughs (or chokes), and a short, largely good natured back-and-forth between the pair ensues, during which Alice sits up and takes Bill’s place in the blue-light frame of the bathroom door. Bill, caressing Alice, asks her about the man who had been dancing with her, and what he had wanted, and she explains that he had wanted “sex... Upstairs... Then and there...” They laugh, and Bill responds by saying that “that’s understandable ... because you are a very, very beautiful woman.” That, however well intended, was the wrong thing to say. In a slightly longer shot, Alice, having become visibly tense, gets up and backs unsteadily toward the door of the bathroom, asking (tersely now) “Wait! So, because I’m a beautiful woman, the only reason any man ever wants to talk to me ... is because he wants to fuck me?” The cut ends with Alice framed full length in the bathroom doorway, the blue light now dominating the frame and underscoring the sudden chilliness in her mood. Throughout the scene she has been comfortably clothed in only her panties and a diaphanous camisole, but as she delivers this line, her outfit becomes almost an accusation, to Bill, to the audience, and any comfort drains out of the scene for good.

Alice proceeds to deliver a sort of interactive tirade, egging Bill on to give her further ammunition as only people who know each other very well can do, and culminating with an explosion into convulsive laughter at his naïveté in thinking her devotion to him beyond reproach. From her spot on the floor, her laughing fit subsiding, Alice asks Bill if he remembers their trip to Cape Cod the previous summer. The camera cuts to Bill, still sitting on the bed, his head in his hand, who seems to understand that his wife is about to reveal that she cheated on him. The score enters quietly, Bill looks up and replies, “yes.” Alice then asks him if he remembers a young Naval officer who sat at a table near theirs. With the camera still on Alice as she settles in under a window letting in that same blue night, Bill says, “no.” But Alice remembers the scene in vivid detail, and recounts it to him as though it had been a dream, slipping, as she does, back into the slow-motion speech she used on the dance floor. She talks about the afternoon that she and Bill spent together, that day on Cape Cod, making love, making plans for their future, talking about their child, and she tells him about how, during every moment of it, that young Naval officer never left her mind: “If he wanted me, even if it was only for one night, I was ready to give up everything, you, [our daughter] Helena ... my whole fucking future. Everything! And yet, it was weird, ‘cause at the same time, you were dearer to me than ever; and, and at that moment my love for you was both tender and sad.” If Bill had feared that there was a night of passion between Alice and another man, his fears have not been realized, but what she has said to him is almost worse.

Again, we see a situation where Alice did do the right thing insomuch as her duty to her husband was concerned. Nevertheless, Bill is deeply hurt, becomes haunted and obsessed by Alice’s theoretical infidelity, and spends much of the rest of the film trying to avenge himself. As in a dream, though, he is always interrupted, distracted, or somehow diverted before he can consummate his retaliatory betrayal.

Bill’s first attempt at reprisal takes place the same night as Alice’s jarring confession. Before Bill can speak any response to his wife’s account, the phone rings. He answers it to find that an elderly patient he had been caring for had just died, and he feels obliged to “go over there and show [his] face.” Having deflected a tearful advance by the daughter of the deceased, who was grief-stricken and not in love with her fiancé, and having left upon the latter’s arrival, Bill is next seen walking through the lights and shadows of a New York street at night. He passes lovers making out in the doorway of a flower shop, and his mind conjures up images of his wife in bed with her mythologized Naval Officer. He dashes his hands together in frustration, and as he turns the corner, he meets with a rowdy young gang of bar-hoppers who harass him, impugning his sexuality, and shove him into a parked car. He is powerless against their number, and left with yet another emasculating frustration. We next see him come to a street corner, at which he is gently accosted by a gaudily attractive young prostitute who wants to know the time, and if he wants to “have a little fun.” “Doctor Bill,” as she ends up calling him, looks almost unable to believe that he is following the girl into her shabby building as he does so.

In her small kitchen, Bill and Domino, the prostitute, have a very awkward, though surprisingly warm and unguarded exchange. The camera then cuts to a shot of Alice, bathed in the blue light of a small television, sitting in her kitchen looking bored. The next cut, back to Bill and Domino, is a close shot of the pair’s profiles; they kiss over a backdrop of bluesy piano jazz, Domino asks, “so... shall we?” and, promptly, Bill’s cell phone begins to ring. The camera cuts away from the intimate profile shot as the mood in the room breaks, and Bill, excusing himself, gets up, turns off the stereo (which, as it turns out was the source of the music), and softly motions Domino to keep quiet. He answers the phone, it’s Alice calling, and the camera cuts between them as they have a brief conversation during which he leads her to believe that he is still at the home of his just-deceased patient. Bill then slowly closes his phone, and Domino asks him if it had been “Mrs. Doctor Bill.” When he says that it was, she asks him if he has to go. He mulls this question over for a moment, says that he thinks that he does have to go, and, in response to her further question, says that he is, in fact, sure about that. From Domino’s bedroom the camera cuts out to the street, with Bill walking, again, through the night.

As at the Zieglers’ party, Bill was saved by the bell here. But, though he ended up not, by the letter of the law, having an affair, no one, save perhaps Sandor Szavost, would fault Alice for feeling as though Bill had very deeply violated her trust.

With his professional alibi, Doctor Bill is given a sort of conjugal “get out of jail free” card in the scene with Domino. Unfortunately, he does not end up using this escape to rethink his retaliatory approach towards consoling himself about his wife’s fantasy, and that leads to some very serious emotional consequences. Late one night, after having gotten far over his head into a series of very bizarre and frightening experiences, Bill comes home to realize that his actions have been partially discovered by Alice, and he tearfully, ruefully, says that he will tell her all that has gone on in the few days that had elapsed since her confession. We then see the morose and disheveled couple in their living room, clearly having sat up all night. Alice reminds Bill that their daughter Helena (Madison Eginton) will be awake soon; “she’s expecting us to take her Christmas shopping today.” With that, we are abruptly dropped into the happy din of a toy store days before Christmas. All of the light and color and cheer and noise seem hollow and distant as the couple walks slowly past the piles of merchandise. As Helena runs ahead of her parents, Bill finally breaks the mounting tension, despondently asking, “Alice... What do you think we should do?” After a momentary interruption from their clearly uneasy daughter, Alice offers an olive branch of reconciliation: “maybe I think we should be grateful. Grateful that we’ve managed to survive through all of our... adventures, whether they were real or only a dream.”

Bill seems almost overwhelmed by the clemency of her response. But this scene, the last in the film, is played with a sort of bleary ambivalence that undercuts it as a Happy Ending. When Alice goes on to say that “the important thing is, we’re awake now, and hopefully for a long time to come,” Bill, for whom a long time is not quite solid enough, wants to insist on “forever.” Alice reacts tearfully to Bill’s earnest trepidation, saying, “let’s not use that word. ... It frightens me.”

The words of Alice’s reconciliation are, in fact, true; by the most literal account, Bill and Alice do survive their adventures, and that without actual transgression. When all is said and done, they choose to stay together, but it is clear in the last scene that they have broken their own laws, and, to a degree, broken each other’s hearts.

And so it goes in life. What makes Kubrick’s portrayals of these no-win situations so funny, so heart rending, and, ultimately, so compelling to watch is how true they are to the human experience. We can all relate to being up against an immovable object or an irresistible force, and, not infrequently, one of our own making. The systemic paradoxes we see through Kubrick’s telephoto lens, even those in the comically extreme exaggerations of Dr. Strangelove, have an innate, resonant plausibility; and in the microscope of Eyes Wide Shut, the Harfords’ intimate toiling through their own contradictions and fear become a magnification of our own small struggles. So perhaps, with careful study and close reflection on what these stories have to offer, we can eventually learn to relax, and stop trying to do the right thing in the wrong world.

The End