Professor gives speech on Kubrick's 'cold modernism'
I have never seen a Stanley Kubrick film, but I've heard them mocked and praised. I've listened to students get into huge arguments over whether his adaptation of an author's work was good or bad, but I've never actually sat down and watched one. I did not to a lecture looking to learn more or cultivate an interest in Kubrick, but it was inevitable.
I attended the annual Greiff Lecture on Thursday, March 26 at 8 p.m. in Susan Howell Hall. Dr. James Naremore, professor of English, film and comparative literature studies at Indiana University Bloomington ,presented his fascinating talk, "Kubrick and Cold Modernism." As a student currently enrolled in the Modernism seminar, it seemed appropriate that I be there. The lecture went above and beyond my expectations. Dr. Naremore's analysis of Kubrick's works through the lens of Cold Modernism was fascinating.
Modernism is an artistic movement that has an array of definitions and subcategories. Naremore's broad definition of Modernism was that it is hostile to mass culture, morally and sexually shocking. Cold Modernism, Naremore went on to say, is a subcategory that disavows psychological fiction for satire.
Kubrick, Naremore asserted, is often painted as a director who creates uncomfortable, unfeeling worlds. While in one sense Naremore agreed, stating that the camera angles, the dialogue, and so on, do lend themselves to creating a cold world in the movie, ultimately he disagreed with this simplistic view of Kubrick's movies. Naremore argued that Kubrick's worlds were full of emotion, and drew emotions out of the viewer that left them uncomfortable and unsettled.
The movies Kubrick created do not fill a typical need for emotional sentiment; they are not melodramas. However, that does not mean they don't play on our emotions. Naremore broke the ways in which Kubrick did this into four categories: black humor, the grotesque, the uncanny, and the fantastic. To explain how each of the branches worked, Kubrick referred to Naremore's films and to the history behind the idea.
Black humor is a term we hear a lot of the time, but what makes it different from other humor? And how does it play on our emotions? Naremore used a joke from a quote of Freud's to explain just how black humor worked: "A man on his way to the gallows mumbles under his breath, 'what a way to start the week.'" Naremore went on to say that Freud argued the statement is amusing because of the tension between the darkness of the fact the man is about to die and the brevity of the statement he is making. We often find this sort of humor in Kubrick's films, particularly films like Dr. Strangelove, Naremore pointed out. Without the emotional tension of amusement and something darker, this sort of humor wouldn't work; however, with films like Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick is known for being funny.
The second category, the grotesque, is often a subculture of black humor. The grotesque can be defined by the deformed or cruder aspects of the human body, like the image Naremore showed from Dr. Strangelove of a disfigured man standing up in his wheelchair. Like black humor, the grotesque can also be born out of the juxtaposition of two things that might not go together. For example, something ugly and something innocent. In essence it works similarly to black humor, creating an emotional disequilibrium.
My favorite portion of Dr. Naremore’s lecture focused on the uncanny and the fantastic, probably because he referred to Freud’s essay “The Uncanny”, which I had just read for Modernism. Naremore focused this part of the talk on the one Kubrick movie I’ve heard argued over the most: The Shining. Freud defines the uncanny as a feeling of something that is un-home-ly (the original title was Das Unheimliche, meaning un-home-ly). The other definition used by Naremore of the uncanny that ties in with the fantastic is the tension of the supernatural and reality. Both of these definitions are at a play in The Shining. The characters in the movie are quite literally in a place that is not their home (though they are trying to make it their home), but it is not a “home-ly” place by any stretch of the imagination, and this is where the other definition comes to surface. The ghosts in the movie move between the uncanny--something that could be a hallucination of Jack‘s--and the fantastic, something supernatural and real. Naremore contended that these tensions of feeling not at home, regarding the line between insanity and truth, speak to the emotional quality of Kubrick’s films.
Naremore explored the different aspects in which Kubrick is an emotional director, albeit not a typical one. From the darkly humorous scenes in Dr. Strangelove to the moments of the uncanny in The Shining, Kubrick creates worlds that are uncomfortable because of the amount of emotion the viewers are forced to feel. Though these worlds can be viewed as cold because of the camera angles and the delivery of the dialogue, I found Naremore's arguments to be persuasive and believable. Let's just say my Netflix queue just got a little longer.
