Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker

This book was disappointing. I found it shallow and pretentious. The director is a fascinating and enigmatic person but this book a rehash of what can be fairly easily found on the internet. The intended audience would be fans of Kubrick films so restating the plot points is boring. We already know that. The analysis reads as fake smart a lot of the time. If there were interesting details that arent widely known it may have been more interesting.

A good option to get a quick reading on Kubrick, conveniently ordered to follow his films.

Adds some information to the large volume of books and documentaries available.

Recommended to get a general overview of Kubrick and his films.

Since his death in 1999, the legacy of Stanley Kubrick’s life and work certainly entitles him to a major critical biography, but this isn’t it. The author has uncovered some interesting details about Kubrick’s early life and first marriages, and his access to the voluminous Stanley Kubrick Archives in London has afforded him further fresh information from the films’ productions, but his brief book largely skims the Kubrick canon.

Most of the cinematic “insights” offered here will pretty familiar to Kubrick buffs, and, like too many analysts of the director, Mikics is overawed by Kubrick’s reputation to a point where every one of his movies is treated as an equally brilliant artistic success: surely “Full Metal Jacket” and “Eyes Wide Shut” don’t match the achievements of “Dr. Strangelove,” “2001,” and “A Clockwork Orange”? In my 2014 book “Calling Dr. Strangelove,” I made an effort to contrast and compare the filmmaker’s greater and lesser productions, but no such discrimination is apparent here, and I was also disconcerted by Mikics’ references to the documentary “Filmworker” (about Kubrick’s longtime assistant Leon Vitali) and other printed and filmed studies – few self-respecting biographers would so simply point their readers to competing material. Even the “Jewish Lives” element here, addressing someone who didn’t much deal with Jews or Jewishness in his finished films, seems rather strained (though not nearly as strained as in Nathan Abrams’ 2018 book on Kubrick). All in all, this is a decent but not definitive appraisal of a career that still deserves one.

“Stanley Kubrick – American Filmmaker” (2020 publication; 244 pages) is a non-fiction book by David Milkies, an English literature professor at the University of Houston. After a 14 page Introduction that really could serve as an Essay on Kubrick on its own, the author then revisits the entire Kubrick film catalog, startng with “Killer’s Kiss” and “the Killing”, and, going forward starting with “Dr. Strangelove”, each film gets its own chapter, averaging roughly 20 pages each.

Couple of comments: let’s start with the obvious, namley that the author is intimately familiar with, and admires and respects, Kubrick’s works. Even though most of the movies get their own chapter, the author looks at the bigger picture, and how certain films are connected with each other. On “lolita” and “Eyes Wide Shut”: “The toughness of the pregnant Lolita becomes, four decades later in Eyes Wide SHut, Alice Harford’s knowing confidence at facing down a man. Both films show the man’s fear of the woman, and in both, his blind insistence shows he doesn’t want to know bur, but instead to have her.” Later on, the author has this to say about the flawed character played by Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”: “It waas just like Kubrick to describe evil as something ‘wrong with’ humans, a kond of misfiring. In many Kubrick movies characters stumble over a malfunction, a design flaw, from Johnny Clay in THe Killing to HAL in 2001. ‘What is your major malfunction?” Full MEtal Jacket’s Drill Instructior Hartman shouts at Private Pyle, who promtply shoots him in the chest. Jack’s breakdown in The Shining is a catastrophic design flaw that comments on the American wish to live large, to express one-self with terrific power.” Yea, thus type of analysis and insight will stick with you for a while as you ponder and reassess Kucbrick’s works in way you may not have thought of before.

I admit that I think of Stanley Kubrick as one of the all-time giants of film makers. I’ve seen most of his works (I haven’t seen his earliest films and this book makes me want to do that, badly), and havereseen them on many occasions. Meanwhile, if you are a fan of Stanley Kubrick or are simply interested in a slice of movie history, I’d readily suggest you check this out and draw your own conclusion.

Kubrick is a fascinating character let alone a filmmaker, but to the public he was an introvert. To Kubrick’s friends, cohorts, and family he could be emotionally available and intimate. The book seeks to draw out the hidden Kubrick and make him accessible but theres so much of the iceberg that remains underwater. Melding Kubrick’s life journey to that of his films is the true achievement of this book. At times the exploration of his films seems to dwarf the creator but perhaps thats because Kubrick’s films are still so extraordinary. Like Hitchcock, its nearly impossible to separate the artist from his art but the book does achieve this to a satisfying degree. There is however more to Kubrick than we will ever know.

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