The Crumbling Social Orders of Stanley Kubrick

The films of Stanley Kubrick don’t fit easily into boxes. Shot equally in black and white or color, and ranging in tone from parodic comedy to supernatural horror, it sometimes seems they share nothing in common beyond the mastery of their making. This contradiction, between rigidity of form and suppleness of content, might be what leaves so many cinephiles enraptured by Kubrick’s movies. How did the infamously strict, dictatorial director also manage to produce such creative spontaneity?

If Kubrick’s eclectic filmography circles a single theme, it’s the same ambivalence that defined his character: the antagonism between order and individual will. Across all of his films, stubborn and decisive characters (always men) confront opaque and manipulative systems of power – and, notably, fail to change them. It’s a remarkable throughline in Kubrick’s work that, across genre and style, such would-be revolutionaries succumb to the powers they once rebelled against.

Though several of his films are still too aggressive or challenging for truly popular engagement, nearly every internet user today is familiar with at least some of his work in the form of the “Kubrick stare,” a creepy motif that has since become a meme. Brow lowered, eyes vacant, corners of the mouth turned up in malice. This is the signature gaze that appears on the faces of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Jack Nicholson in The Shining (1980), and Vincent D’Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket (1987). Instantly unsettling, these iconic menaces light up the internet every Halloween (and continue to shape the genre of horror today). In the context of Kubrick’s films, the expression symbolizes corruption, the lobotomized glee of a rebel finally succumbing to the system they once kicked against. In Kubrick’s world, this loss of values is the scariest fate a person can endure. The four films below best illustrate the existential (and often terrifying) drama Kubrick made from lone individuals staring down their troubled fates. 

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Kubrick’s first forays into filmmaking (Fear and Desire, 1952 and Paths of Glory, 1957) took the form of antiwar movies, which questioned the purpose of blindly following orders. Dr. Strangelove presents, with the very blackest humor, the opposite problem: What happens when no one disobeys? Shot in noirish black-and-white and interposed across a variety of stagings (a fighter jet, an Air Force base, a national war room), the director dissects a chain of command riddled with misinformation and sabotage, in which the paranoid delusions of one Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) ricochet through a military so rattled by Cold War brinksmanship that they spring into action, assuming the worst. 

The result is global suicide, an entirely avoidable apocalypse celebrated by the titular Dr. Strangelove (played with outrageous glee by Peter Sellers, and inspired by real-life Nazi-turned-US-military-asset Wernher von Braun). To him, the end of the world is a chance for humanity to wipe the slate clean and restart under far more eugenic auspices. A powerful anti-nuclear polemic when it first came out, Dr. Strangelove also marks the first instance of a conspiratorial vein in Kubrick’s work, in which the ostensibly noble acts of lesser characters play into the hands of an evil they can hardly countenance.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Adapting Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel gave Kubrick the opportunity to explore freedom and oppression in their most extreme form, from the rampaging “ultraviolence” of psychopathic “droogs” to the corrupt state that seeks to destroy them. One of the director’s lesser-seen films given its graphic violence and NC-17 rating (‘No One 17 and Under Admitted’), it nevertheless remains one of Kubrick’s most iconic pictures, full of electric symphonies, indelible costumes and mod-gone-wild decor.

Alex (Malcolm McDowell), an unrepentant sociopath, kicks the film off in a full-blown Kubrick stare and ends it in nearly the same expression, experiencing the full spectrum of morality in the time between. After he is treated to a Pavlovian experiment in criminal reform that leaves him physically ill at the thought of committing further violence, Alex is released by the state, only to reencounter the many victims of his former crime sprees who are nowhere near as forgiving. Nearly beaten to death and driven to suicide by the sound of his favorite symphony, Alex is recaptured and restored to his old amoral self on behalf of a state that would rather release him as a criminal than admit its own mistakes. Kubrick’s depictions of violence are often luridly brutal, no more so than here, but his frequent juxtaposition of criminals and law enforcement throughout Clockwork emphasizes their fundamental sameness, imagining a society without virtue.

The Shining (1980)

Kubrick’s only direct engagement with the horror genre created one of its most indelible masterpieces, a tour de force that frightens as much as it entertains. Adapting Stephen King’s 1977 novel, the director dispensed with overriding logic to focus on the effects of distressing images in their own right. Set in rural Colorado at the fictional Overlook Hotel, frustrated writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) becomes haunted and possessed by the historic building itself, succumbing to its violent history through his encounters with the ghosts that walk its rooms. Meanwhile, his son Danny (Danny Lloyd) begins to experience powers of telepathy that both beckon and counter the hotel’s demons. The resulting film revels in madness without meaning, taking perverse pleasure in the breakdown of reality within its picturesque, contained environment.

As so often occurred in his literary adaptations (including Clockwork), Kubrick did away with the novel’s happy ending to give us the most distressing and least resolved version of events. Forgoing King’s prescriptive logic allowed the director to vividly flirt with surrealism, exploring a struggle with powers that exceed understanding. While not for the faint of heart, it remains one of the most psychotically memorable films of the spooky season. 

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Some consider the final film of Kubrick’s career to be his best. It’s certainly one of his most ambitious stagings of an individual’s struggle against an unseen higher order. The story centers on Bill Harford (Tom Cruise), an ambitious young doctor who attends a Christmas party in a tony New York townhouse with his wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman). From the beginning, every encounter feels orchestrated, as Kubrick lavishly layers symbolism and subtext into the smallest details, creating a film that beckons like a puzzle for viewers to solve. Following a series of increasingly inexplicable and suggesting encounters with women, Dr. Harford soon uncovers a secret society as seemingly all-powerful as it is violently perverse.

In Lolita (1962), Kubrick explored to comic effect the life of an unrepentant sexual deviant struggling to pass in the straitlaced, corn-fed American heartland. Eyes Wide Shut imagines the same scenario as a kind of reverse: The upright young doctor confronts a cabal of depraved elites and struggles with his own desire to attain a status he’s also clearly repulsed by. Finally engaging directly with the gendered aspect of power at the heart of so many of his narratives, Kubrick puts Harford’s own masculinity on the line, teasing out an ambiguous relationship with his wife – one that seems to hinge on a sexual potency he refuses to share with the elites. Today, the film reads like a Rosetta Stone of modern American conspiracies – all the more so because the director died suddenly just after completing a subsequently redacted final cut.

In a time where power, corruption and lies threaten systems of order at the very highest echelons, many of Kubrick’s films now make for an unsettling watch. A dip into one of the director’s crumbling social orders may well leave viewers chilled to the bone long after the elevators of blood have emptied out, reflecting on power structures in their own lives where madness rules the day.