A Book Review Essay by Jeremy Carr.
A well-researched work of personal scholarship, with an array of sources and citations utilized to substantiate D. Harlan Wilson’s own arguments or to initiate new avenues of thought….”
D. Harlan Wilson wastes little time establishing the importance of the science fiction genre to the work of Stanley Kubrick. “Science fiction enabled Stanley Kubrick to become Kubrickian,” he writes in the first line of his introduction to Strangelove Country: Science Fiction, Filmosophy, and the Kubrickian Consciousness (Stalking Horse Press). From there, he then makes an elaborate and detailed case for his overriding thesis, arguing with considerable justification (in some spots more strained than others) that all of Kubrick’s films “exhibit SF elements, tropes, and critical engagements.” That said, he limits the bulk of his primary focus to the three films that most adhere to the sci-fi formula—Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971), three “touchstones” that “have been referred to as the futurist trilogy and comprise a formidable SF yoke.” But by the end of Strangelove Country, published by Stalking Horse Press, Wilson is also making a case for Barry Lyndon (1975), where the “dueling pistol” and “warring musket” are “extensions of technomasculinity,” and Full Metal Jacket (1987), which, he writes, “is more science-fiction than Dr. Strangelove.” An unusual view to be sure, but Strangelove Country is not the usual film book.
Before getting to the fundamentals of his multifaceted study, with distinct chapters on the three aforementioned titles and a fourth on the Kubrick-conceived and Steven Spielberg-realized A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Wilson, a novelist, scholar, editor, playwright, and college professor, sets the scene by rightly noting how crucial science fiction was to the full formation of Kubrick’s inimitable style. “Prior to Dr. Strangelove,” he writes, “the shape of the Kubrickian was still gestating. Definitive contours started to coalesce and become visible in Lolita (1962). Not until Kubrick’s first SF film did there manifest a discernible, meaningful physique. Thereafter, 2001 and A Clockwork Orange solidified (and solarized) the Kubrickian.” It’s a persuasive take, for aside from Paths of Glory (1957), much of what one envisages when thinking of a “Stanley Kubrick film” indeed derives from his post-1964 output.
But when Wilson later grants that one of the fascinating aspects of Kubrick’s filmography is the way “each new instalment in the Kubrickian consciousness advances a self-reflexive discussion initiated by an antecedent,” he is also reiterating an earlier portion of his text, in which he acknowledges that “traces of what Kubrick would become in his pre-Strangelove harvest” are even apparent in something like Spartacus (1960), which often gets slighted due to Kubrick’s comparable lack of authoritative and creative control. “In fact,” Wilson notes, “Lolita anticipates all of Kubrick’s subsequent films, which are defined by oneiric environments and exchanges, technopathology, masculine anxiety and insecurity, invocations of the sublime, and an idle, revving malevolence that occasionally shifts into high gear.” In other words, while Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange may be the most patently science fiction features he made, there was something analogous forming in Kubrick’s creative prescription well before those three singular features.
And yet, Wilson isn’t as concerned with the traditional take on Kubrick and his filmography, which often revolves around the director himself, linking his biography, his working methods, and his personal peculiarities in a grand summation of defining themes and forms. Instead, Wilson contends that “Strangelove Country siphons vitality from [Daniel] Frampton’s peculiar line of flight, recognizing Kubrick yet foregrounding the Kubrickian.” As such, he primarily refers to either Kubrickian science fiction, what he dubs “KSF,” or the Kubrickian “filmind,” the “KFM.” The distinctive Kubrick style, Wilson maintains, is tailor made for science fiction (and vice versa). It’s a genre that was “so important to Kubrick’s maturity as one of the twentieth century’s foremost big-budget auteurs,” for “no other cinematic genre depends so much on style.”
This futurist trilogy, which, amazingly, as Wilson points out, is comprised of films coming one right after the other in the years 1964 to 1971, represents a Kubrickian approach to science fiction that isn’t about suspending disbelief so much as it is about wanting “immersion, if not absorption, and then sublimation.” (author’s italics) Though each film is granted its own chapter, Wilson frequently recalls others to compare, contrast, and connect these three features, or he unites the trilogy with a routinely clever turn of phrase, writing, for example, that “Dr. Strangelove ends badly on a one-way street […]. 2001 ends ambiguously on a two-way street […]. A Clockwork Orange ends where it began on a no-way street […].” Recognizing how superficially dissimilar these films can be, Wilson nevertheless draws compelling links that, with each passing section of Strangelove Country, do indeed form a cohesive thematic and stylistic corpus. “Dr. Strangelove and 2001 seem like apples and oranges,” he writes, “but they are remarkably alike.” Meanwhile, “A Clockwork Orange complements them.” The entire futurist cycle is therefore “a kind of vivisected abstraction of humanity, with the assembly room of our hollowed-out bodies ornamented by the décor of our machinic organs.”
Wilson is quite earnest in his evolving advance toward Kubrick, and these three films especially. As many assuredly have, he admits he initially aligned Dr. Strangelove with comedy more than science fiction, but soon realized that it does the same things as its “KSF descendants with regard to machinic inscription, conscription, and desire, mapping a gradual descent into the machinarchy of 1960s Western culture.” Along these lines, Wilson succinctly places the three films in the era in which they were made, noting for instance how A Clockwork Orange and 2001, despite their futuristic settings, bear obvious traces of when they were created (the furniture, the clothing), and remarking how realistic 2001 must have looked at the time of its release, compared to the real images of space available in the late ‘60s: “The fiction of 2001 conveyed a greater sense of verisimilitude than the ‘reality’ of the media that augured that fiction, yet the organic reality of outer space remains speculative.” Wilson also applies an artistic-cultural framework to the very making of A Clockwork Orange, declaring it is “an insane movie—insane in content, context, and conception. Given the intricacy of Burgess’s prose alone, I would argue that the decision to adapt the novel is among the most pathological acts ever committed by a famous professional director.”
Wilson’s views are often unique, frequently provocative, and largely discerning, and his unabashed, anti-academic passion is refreshing.”
Just as he is earnest about his reactions to, and embryonic impressions of, Kubrick’s work, Wilson is likewise intense in his wide-ranging cinematic analogies and his extensive artistic and historic parallels. He canvases sci-fi’s literary and cinematic roots with the sweeping meticulousness of one who clearly cares about the genre, referencing scores of books, television programs, and other films to chart the course of the field while always keeping an eye on the varying relevance to Kubrick in particular. Although he gives surprisingly little attention to cinema’s sci-fi millstones of the 1970s and ‘80s, he heaps due praise on a neglected work like 1998’s Dark City, “a gold pearl in cinematic history that has been roundly overlooked by critics, who gravitated toward The Matrix like furies.”
The comparisons don’t stop there, however. Wilson connects science fiction to films of other genres as well, like film noir, writing that Dr. Strangelove’s War Room “appears as spacious as it does claustrophobic, creating a sense of freedom to move alongside an anxious feeling of being trapped in a cave with no exit,” which he likens to noirish urban centers. Further comparative digressions—or simply digressions—link his arguments to everything from Nazism and the Holocaust as themes in sci-fi to a lengthy paragraph (in the A.I. section) about the technological advances in the sex doll industry. In most every instance of rhetorical departure, though, Wilson finds a way to meander back to his predominant propositions. He reveals a keen eye for visual analysis, remarking, for example, how the tape reels behind Dr. Strangelove’s Mandrake “perfectly align with his forehead, as if his brain as extended out of his ears (Mandrake’s ‘wheels are turning,’ as the idiom goes).” He draws a timely parallel between 2001 and its foreshadowing of current developments in actual artificial intelligence, and he makes several astute links between Kubrick’s work and other, seemingly disparate movies, a favorite instance being when he compares the way “Strangelove controls the neural switchboard” to the demon Azazel in Fallen (1998).
Wilson covers a lot in Strangelove Country. There’s an incisive extended section about surveillance in 2001, which he connects to The Shining and how that film “involves an enhanced way of seeing.” He goes into learned detail about the art and music of A Clockwork Orange. And he dispels some of the myths surrounding who did what (Kubrick or Spielberg) on A.I. He even alludes to the persistent talk of cinema’s downfall and rebirth, writing cinema’s “identity is tethered to its capacity to die and live again.”
Unfortunately, Wilson’s eccentric style can also take Strangelove Country into less engaging territory. His tone fluctuates a great deal, including humorous (or at least unexpectedly incongruous) phrases like when he notes how Kubrick “vetted potential source material constantly, and if it resonated with his artistic sensibilities, he would have adapted a toilet into a movie,” or when he teases the stilted interactions of characters in 2001: “Compared to Bowman and Poole, Floyd is a firecracker.” But then, there will be a sentence like this, when he writes about the KFM: “And the filmind isn’t just a Deleuzoguattarian schizo that specializes in speed, style, and rhizomatic multiperspectivalism.” These instances of more pretentious prose are a spell checker’s worst nightmare and can often muddy his principal claims, though they do uphold Wilson’s often-stated desire to write something unconventional. Rare is a book that so fervently touts its own purposeful idiosyncrasies. “My strategy may disturb more biographically inclined scholar,” Wilson writes, adding later, “This book takes a different, more experimental approach. My method is fundamentally structuralist and schizoanalytic, and I use a hermeneutic style that violates the academic status quo in the interest of generating unique avenues of inquiry.” Whatever his intentions (presumably to clarify and promote why Strangelove Country is so unlike other works of Kubrick study), these jarringly affected boasts read more like samples of Wilson’s proposed cover blurbs about his own book. He is nothing if not confident in what he set out to do, though, writing later in the book how he wrote Strangelove Country “to operate like an SF novel (in four acts) as well as a critical monograph on KSF.” “Like Kubrickian cinema,” he adds, “I have tried to exercise style as a way of seeing, critiquing the KFM with its own complementary logic, from cosmic/cognitive theories about the filmind’s film-thinking to a schizophrenic, tech-academic prose and tone that oscillates between hard (i.e., cold, acerbic, machinic) and soft (i.e., colloquial, unassuming, ‘human’) registers of language.”
There are also a few extracts that will likely court debate and confusion. “With Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles,” Wilson writes, “Kubrick is among the most written-about twentieth-century American filmmakers.” But if Hitchcock is to be considered American because he made his most famous movies in the U.S., then wouldn’t that make Kubrick British? He also writes that Dr. Strangelove was “adapted from Red Alert (1958), a suspense novel by Peter George,” and later adds, “George collaborated with Kubrick and [Terry] Southern on the screenplay. His novel was titled Two Hours to Doom (1958) in the UK. Like Red Alert, it didn’t have the humor that Southern and Kubrick wanted.” “Like” Red Alert? Isn’t it the same book?
There are also occasions for admittedly subjective disagreement. Wilson seems to especially have an irregular view of Sam Peckinpah, whose Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), Wilson writes, “achieves comparatively outlandish heights [as A Clockwork Orange], but Peckinpah’s filmind lacks the lucidity and logic of Kubrickian psychosis.” I would argue the lack of lucidity and logic of Alfredo Gracia is exactly that film’s point. Relatedly, writing how the “marauding gangs of droogs [also in A Clockwork Orange] are essentially Peckinpahesque ‘wild bunches’” seems to disregard how complex, maturely self-aware, and contemplative Peckinpah’s anti-hero outlaws actually are in The Wild Bunch (1969), in ways totally incomparable to Alex and his heedless posse. Wilson also contends that scholarship of A Clockwork Orange “often discounts the film’s science-fictional backdrop in favor of issues like screen violence, censorship, sexuality, and morality.” That’s true, but when he continues by declaring the “moral dilemma at the center of the film is its least interesting trait,” the statement flies in the face of, yes, preexisting scholarship, but also the stated motivations of Burgess and Kubrick. Still, it is Wilson’s opinion, just like his argument that the creation of 2001’s special effects “have no bearing on the KFM. What matters transpires onscreen (i.e., on the brain-screen); how it got there is the business of Kubrick and his behind-the-scenes argonauts.” Perhaps, but it’s hard to reconcile Wilson’s own observations about 2001, like his comments about its verisimilitude noted above, without exploring the effects that made it so.
All the same, despite the few but striking instances of overt self-praise and curious contentions, the bulk of Wilson’s book is insightful and intriguing. Strangelove Country is an obviously well-researched work of personal scholarship, with an array of sources and citations utilized to substantiate Wilson’s own arguments or to initiate new avenues of thought. His views are often unique, frequently provocative, and largely discerning, and his unabashed, anti-academic passion is refreshing. If his essential goal was to shed new light on Kubrick’s work, specifically his science fiction films, and to consider said work in a way not seen in prior books about the filmmaker, then Wilson surely succeeds. Despite all that has been written before about Kubrick (including, full disclosure, my own book), Strangelove Country affirms that the final word on this influential and controversial director has not yet been printed.
Jeremy Carr is a Contributing Editor at Film International and teaches film studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of Kubrick and Control from Liverpool University Press and Repulsion (1965) from Auteur Publishing and a contributor to the collections ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May, from Edinburgh University Press, David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation, from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and Something Wicked: Witchcraft in Movies, Television, and Popular Culture, from Bloomsbury Academic. He writes for the publications Cineaste, Senses of Cinema, MUBI/Notebook, Cinema Retro, Vague Visages, The Retro Set, The Moving Image, Diabolique Magazine and Fandor.