Kubrick’s Obscene Shadows

There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all. This chapter examines aspects of the fundamental ambivalence toward human cultural productions conveyed in Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic works. Through exquisitely distilled images and innovative soundtracks, the films articulate a fascination with such topoi (in Aristotle’s sense: places to go to construct an argument) as the machine, symphonic music, the labyrinth, and various kinds of ritual as sublime forms of cultural expression. At the same time, Kubrick’s films depict these cultural forms as arising from or intricately linked to what we might call foundational violence. But violence is only one, though perhaps the most important, of what I will term the “obscene” social underpinnings that subtend Kubrick’s work.