The Genius of Stanley Kubrick

 

1952, a year in time marked by black-and-white television and high-class movie romances, introduced one of the most enigmatic and anomalous directors to ever grace Hollywood cinema: Stanley Kubrick. A New York native, Kubrick released his first feature film, Fear & Desire (1952), to the silver screen, sparking a future that contained over ten critically acclaimed masterpieces. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), just to name a few. Kubrick’s brilliance for creating film masterpieces helped define cinema, allowing moviegoers to differentiate between the true essence of a “movie” and a “film.” Today, over two decades after the director’s mysterious death, we are still analyzing the psychological motives and nuance behind Kubrick’s films. Whether critiquing human evolution and our place in the universe in 2001: A Space Odyssey or satirizing the Cold War arms race and the debauchery of the politicians in control of weapons of mass destruction in Dr. Strangelove (1964), Kubrick was a master of using slow-paced visuals and altered motifs to inject suspense and underlying meaning within his work. Kubrick’s films are renowned for taking audiences into an altered and subconscious realm of color and symbolism.

Stanley Kubrick’s rise to Hollywood fame began when he was contracted to finish the production of Spartacus (1960), replacing fired director Anthony Mann and assuming leadership of the project alongside the movie’s star Kirk Douglas. Kubrick had already made a series of black and white noir/war films, but none were as successful as Spartacus. After Spartacus, came Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964), but it wasn’t until 1968 that his first masterpiece was released: 2001: A Space Odyssey. With the oft-referenced Tycho Monolith contained in 2001, Kubrick began encoding subconscious visual messages within his films that urged viewers to ignore the spoon-fed basic narrative of a movie, and instead, think outside the box– or in his case, the screen. The cinematic technique would come to epitomize Kubrick’s films. In The Shining, a masterclass of psychological horror, viewers are hypnotically entranced while unknowingly being shown horrific, dark secrets at every turn in the Overlook Hotel. In the Vietnam War epic Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick includes an inordinate amount of Mickey Mouse references – too many for a Vietnam War film – contrasting childhood innocence and the brutality of war. The final stargate sequence at the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey would become an iconic testament for 1960s and 1970s counterculture and a rite of passage that resonated deeply with users of LSD. They in effect, were put in Kubrick’s trance.

Kubrick’s directing style was not without costs. Many actors like Shelley Duvall (The Shining), Scatman Crothers (The Shining), and Kirk Douglas (Paths of Glory, Spartacus) can attest to Kubrick’s overbearing meticulous nature. The man controlled every aspect of his movies from clothing, to set design, to lighting, props, and more. His control angered studios as he commonly ran weeks over schedule on blockbuster films, prolonging production and regularly going over budget. Kubrick can be seen laughing in a famous photograph as he stands in front of the burned-down set of The Shining, which cost around $2.5 million to rebuild. The man was unconcerned with scheduling and money. Kubrick was all about the finished product, willing to take as long as possible and spend as much as necessary to ensure that his films were perfect.

Kubrick like his films was an enigma. Though little is known about his personal beliefs, we do know he was a fan of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Kubrick mentions Jung’s theory on “the duality of man” explicitly in Full Metal Jacket, and film analysts have noticed many parallels with Jungian psychology in several of his projects. Many of Kubrick’s films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey & Full Metal Jacket, contain a recurring visual motif of seven diamonds that some have suggested represents transformation and destruction of the ego. Though, the true meaning of the seven diamonds and other visual motifs in many of Kubrick’s movies remain as mysterious as the man himself.

Kubrick’s own words provide us with little answers as to the meaning and symbolism in his films. The man rarely did any interviews, and if he did, they were almost always over the phone behind closed doors. He made few public appearances, not even stepping on stage to receive his 1998 D.W. Griffith Award at the Director’s Guild of America. And as for the archives that are left of his life? They are scattered amongst thousands of boxes in his estate in Hertfordshire, England nearly impossible to sift through in total. It appears Kubrick did not want to tell his audience anything. Instead, he wanted to show them everything through color, symbols, shapes, and perspective.

The amount of detail and precision that goes into a Kubrick film is uncanny. Kubrick timed the length of The Shining precisely to where you could watch the movie in reverse over the film being played forward and see multiple scenes line up to reveal different themes that he didn’t want to state explicitly. The sexual bear scene, when played backwards on top of the original footage, aligns perfectly with Danny’s seizure scene in the bathroom at the beginning of the movie. Both scenes were shot from outside a doorway with both characters doing something pertaining to their mouths. Film analysts, like Kubrick enthusiast Rob Ager, have noted how most of Kubrick’s blockbuster works are connected– not universally, but thematically. The famous man-ape scene, where Moon Watcher and his primitive gang of apes gather around the Tycho Monolith at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, is mirrored in the second half of Full Metal Jacket, where Private Joker and his regiment can be seen gathered around a monolith-shaped building on fire in the same posture as the man-apes. Kubrick’s films were also iconic for use of the “Kubrick stare,” a pose in which a Kubrick-created character tilts his head downward with his eyes up, staring obliquely into the camera. The Kubrick stare can be seen in many of his works from A Clockwork Orange to Eyes Wide Shut. Some speculate that Kubrick took inspiration from Anthony Perkin’s portrayal of Norman Bakes in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) to come up with the iconic pose.

In an era where it seems like every classic film from the twentieth century is being remade in modern fashion, none of the thirteen films that Kubrick directed from 1953 to 1999 have yet to be redone. Why? Kubrick’s films are too “Kubrickian.” That is, Stanley Kubrick’s style, themes, and subject matters are so peculiar to his perspective alone that any remakes would almost certainly fail. Furthermore, the direction and amount of control that Kubrick exercised on his films would never slide in today’s movie industry. In an industry run by studios themselves, rather than the individual creators, it would be a Sisyphean task for any director to try to recreate Kubrick’s legacy and style.

While we will likely never see a remake to any of the iconic 13 movies that Kubrick directed, Hollywood continues to reference and pay homage to his masterpieces. Horror directors for movies like It (2017) and Midsommar (2019) have admitted to taking inspiration from The Shining. Director Greta Gerwig opened Barbie (2023) mirroring the legendary “Dawn of Man” scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Zootopia 2 (2025) pays homage to the scene in The Shining when Jack Torrance chases his son through a haunted maze. There is even a SpongeBob episode from 2002 that parodies the falsetto choir heard when the Tycho Monolith is introduced in 2001. If you haven’t yet seen a Kubrick film, chances are that another movie you watched referenced one of Kubrick’s. The legend of Stanley Kubrick remains. And though the man, like his films, was mysterious, perhaps that’s why so many of his films continue to stand iconic in Hollywood lore. Fore, Kubrick’s inscrutability instilled his art with multifaceted meaning and symbolism that can hypnotize audiences anywhere, regardless of time and place.