Gotta love Stanley Kubrick, right? Iconic filmmaker, he should be on everyone’s Top 10 list. Dr. Strangelove... 2001... A Clockwork Orange... he produced an astonishing body of work. And that work is, well, all over the place: like so many great artists, Kubrick went wherever his interests of the moment led him, never repeating himself, and was always creating something new and fresh.
Within that maelstrom of creativity, however, it’s easy to detect some common themes. In the three pictures listed above, which are a black comedy, a science fiction opus and a crime film, respectively, there is violence – wildly varied in both motivation and execution, to be sure, but violence all the same.
This is also true of The Shining... and Full Metal Jacket... and Spartacus... and Barry Lyndon... and even Lolita...
This noteworthy consistency is no accident. Kubrick openly articulated his attraction to the theme:
“Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage,” he said. “He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved - that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.”
Gotta love Stanley Kubrick – and he certainly teaches us a lot about the nature of violence in those movies. There’s the straight-up insanity of the military perspective on the sanctity of civilian life, captured so brilliantly by George C. Scott; the far reaches of madness, articulated by Malcolm McDowell, Jack Nicholson and Vincent D’Onofrio; the cold equations of HAL, who turns to murder as a solution to a logical contradiction.
But when I read his quote above, I find myself convinced that Kubrick has missed some essential truths – and his work only underscores that error, providing us with insights that bring the truth he’s missing into high relief.
The “brutal and violent” are among us, certainly, but they are by no means the norm. They are the vanishingly rare exceptions. Most of us have only known a small handful of such people in our lifetimes; human beings in general are peaceful and want to stay that way. They are generally happy to cooperate with others when cooperation is asked of them, and are able to live in harmony with some select set of family or friends.
Kubrick may be more on-target with the “irrational... weak, silly” part. We see lots of that in his films, too (Strangelove in particular), but even so, his highlighting of these traits serves not to illuminate our perspective on human nature but, again, to highlight the exception.
Human nature shines through most brightly, not in Strangelove’s creepy grimace, but in the heroic urgency of Group Captain Mandrake; not in the bloodthirsty Animal Mother, but in the introspective, compassionate Joker.
Those who do fall into Kubrick’s rubric in the world around us get the spotlight and the clicks, not because they are particularly clear exemplars of human nature, but because they generate drama that fascinates us, not for its familiarity, but because it is beyond our personal experience. We huddle around Shakespeare not because we’re all violent, deceitful, and cunning, but because we are on the lookout for those who are.
“Human nature” is about our being the universe’s ultimate cooperators, not its ultimate competitors. Kubrick may not have intended it, but this is the point his films ultimately make.
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