Lolita Derrangement Syndrome

Lolita (1962) - Infatuated by Lolita Scene (3/10) | Movieclips

 

 

 

Lolita

The Princess :

Come here — 

Still love me?

Mason :

Completely. You know that.

The Princess :

You know What I Want, 

more than anything else 

in The World?

Mason :

No. What do you want?

The Princess :

I want You to 

Be Proud of Me.

Mason :

But I am proud of you, Lolita.

The Princess :

No, I mean really 

Proud of Me.

They want me for the lead 

in The School Play.

Isn't that fantastic?

I have to have a letter from you,

Giving Your Permission.

Mason :

Who wants you!?

The Princess :

Well, Edusa Gold, 

The Drama Teacher,

Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom.

Mason :

And who might They be?

The Princess :

The Authors. 

They're here to supervise 

The Production.

Mason :

But you've never acted before.

The Princess :

They say I have 

a unique and rare talent.

Women Mean Business

  "It is a fine day in The City of London, and at an upmarket hotel just south of the river more than four hundred very smart women are gathered together. Smart, it should be clarified, in every sense of the term. Not only are the attendees all business leaders, from the top of every profession they are in, but whenever the door swings open with another arrival it is as though we are at a fashion shoot. High heels, swishing scarfs, the power clothes of the international business elite: nobody – absolutely nobody – lets the side down. And it is clear from the outset that there most certainly is a side.

  The ‘Women Mean Business’ conference has been put together by The Daily Telegraph. Its major sponsors include NatWest and BT. The day is opened by the Minister for Women and Equalities, and is followed by a panel entitled ‘How Work Needs to Start Working for Women’. Many of the most successful and well-known women in business are here, along with several of the country’s most famous female broadcasters. There is a ‘fireside chat’ between the ‘head of enterprise’ at NatWest and the first female Serjeant at Arms at the House of Commons. Then more panels: ‘What are the Real Roadblocks to Women’s Success?’; ‘Closing the Gender Gap’; ‘Are Women at a Disadvantage in a Male-Dominated Investor World?’ The panels that do address the male half of the species have titles like ‘#MenToo: Men’s Crucial Role as Allies for Women’.

  It must be said that since all this has been aimed at women and since all but a couple of the people in the room are women, the female focus is inevitable. It is also inevitable that much of the discussion centres around issues to do with women in the workplace, including childcare issues. But there is also a distinct air of alliance in the room. An alliance of people who are put-upon. Whenever somebody wants to get a warm ripple of nods or applause from the audience they stress how much we need ‘confident women’. The surest way to get the room to tut volubly is to tell a story involving the bad behaviour of any ‘alpha male’. Examples of ‘alpha male’ behaviour include stories of men dominating things by talking too much. There seems to be a clear agreement in the room that whereas there is a great need for ‘confident women’ there is also a need for ‘less confident men’. As though by these means the sexes might in time meet somewhere in the middle.

  There is one other surefire way to get the crowd on your side. And that is for a woman on the stage to express concern, nervousness or a sense of ‘imposter syndrome’. One impressive, smart and striking young woman involved in a start-up business begins her contribution by saying all of these things. She is nervous and feels almost as if she shouldn’t be there, with all these amazing women in the room who have achieved so much. They applaud heartily and congratulate her on her bravery in saying this. Women need to be confident. But it seems that one good strategy for getting other women onside is to present yourself as not being at all confident. Almost as though you fear being shot down, particularly by other women. When it comes to Q and A one attendee sends in a question asking whether any other people in the room haven’t in fact found other women to be their biggest challenge in the workplace. This female remains anonymous.

  As one of the few men asked to speak on the day, I find myself on a panel entitled ‘Is the Focus on Promoting Women Holding Men Back?’ Our chair is a journalist from The Daily Telegraph. The other panellists are a British MP called Craig Tracey who heads a Parliamentary group supporting women, the female ‘Chief People Officer’ from The Daily Telegraph and the ‘UK Head of Female Client Strategy’ at J. P. Morgan. The consensus in the room is the same as the consensus that has emerged in nearly all public discussion, and is clearly in need of disrupting.

  The most striking thing is that there appear to be a set of confusions centring around the issue of ‘Power’. Every discussion so far has centred on a presumption that almost all relationships in the workplace and elsewhere are centred around the exercise of power. Knowingly or otherwise these women have all imbibed the Foucauldian world view in which power is the most significant prism for understanding human relationships. What is striking is not just that everyone seems to have paid lip-service to this, but that these women are focused only on one sort of power. This is a sort of power which – it is presumed – has historically been held solely by mainly old, mainly rich, always white men. It is why the joking and berating about the behaviour of ‘alpha males’ goes down so well. There is a presumption that if the alpha and maleness could be squashed out of these people, in some great majestic social-justice blending device, then the power squeezed out of them might be drunk up by women like those in the room today. That it will be used to nourish, and grow, those who deserve the power more.

  Here are deep waters. But I suggest in my contribution that our conversations are being limited by this misunderstanding. Even if we concede – which we should not – that power (rather than, say, love) is the most important force guiding human affairs, why are we focusing only on one type of power? There certainly are types of power – such as rape – which men can sometimes hold over women. And there is a type of power which some old, typically white, males might be able to hold over less successful people, including less successful women. But there are other types of power in this world. Historical old white man power is not the only such source. Are there not, after all, some powers which only women can wield. ‘Like what?’ someone asks. At which point, having waded in this far it only makes sense to wade further.

  Among other types of power that women wield almost exclusively, the most obvious is this. That women – not all women, but many women – have an ability that men do not. This is the ability to drive members of the opposite sex mad. To derange them. Not just to destroy them but to make them destroy themselves. It is a type of power which allows a young woman in her late teens or twenties to take a man with everything in the world, at the height of his achievements, torment him, make him behave like a fool and wreck his life utterly for just a few moments of almost nothing.

  Earlier we heard from the young, attractive woman, who was heading a start up, that she had a couple of times in her search for capital received inappropriate advances from men who were potential funders. The room had understandably tut-tutted. For that would indeed have been an abuse of power. But there is unspoken knowledge – and there are unspoken hypocrisies – beneath all such tut-tutting. Was everybody in the hall – including the tut-tutters – absolutely sure that the woman in question did not also wield some power? Are they certain that she would have been able to raise an equally large amount of capital if instead of looking rather strikingly like an international model she had (while equally smart and savvy) more closely resembled Jabba the Hutt? Or a mangy-looking old white man? It is no disservice to the abilities of the woman in question (and no let-off for any man behaving badly) to say that even the prospect of being in future proximity to such a person may not have worked entirely against her. Studies repeatedly show that – all else being equal – people who are attractive manage to climb higher in their chosen professions than their less attractive peers. Is physical attractiveness plus youth and womanhood such a negligible set of cards? Might not one or more of the men among her investors have thought at some point that even if nothing could, would or should ever happen between them, at least investor meetings with her would be looked forward to slightly more than another investor meeting with an elderly white male? And is this not – unpleasant as it is to admit – a type of power? One which is either denied or harnessed only outside of the realms of current mentionability, but a power that exists in the world nonetheless?

  This was not a point which was received warmly in the room. This was very definitely not what attendees wanted to hear. Before being able to proceed to my next unpopular point the Chief People Officer of The Daily Telegraph decided to take us there herself. Inappropriate behaviour in the workplace was a problem to be emphasized. A lot of women had terrible stories of this. Many women in the room doubtless had stories of their own. But it was suggested that the whole matter of relations between the sexes was really a very straightforward matter to arrange. Especially in the wake of the MeToo movement, everything had become clear. Men needed to realize that there was behaviour that was appropriate and behaviour that was inappropriate. And while conceding that the categories for both had changed again only very recently, it was also suggested that the mores were in some sense timeless as well as always obvious.

  My suspicion is that anyone who has ever worked in an office knows that it isn’t at all as straightforward as that. ‘Is it permissible to ask a colleague out for a coffee?’, I wondered aloud. This appeared to be a borderline case. If the coffee was requested more than once then this was an obvious problem. ‘Men have to learn that no means no’, it was suggested. ‘Don’t do anything you wouldn’t do in front of your mother’ was suggested as one basis for a moral norm – ignoring the fact that there are plenty of perfectly legal, acceptable and very enjoyable acts that adults perform in their lives which they would not do in front of their mother. This was nit-picking, it seemed. ‘It’s really not that difficult,’ the Chief People Officer reiterated.

  Except that it is, isn’t it? And every woman in that room – like the vast majority of women outside it – knows that to be the case. For instance, they know that a considerable percentage of men and women meet their future life partner in the workplace. Even though the internet has changed much about dating life, most studies even from recent years show around 10–20 per cent of people still find their partners at their place of work. Given that successful people like those in the room are the sort of people who have a work-life balance that disproportionately favours work, they are going to be spending more time with their colleagues than at social engagements. So is it entirely wise to cordon off this significant tributary of potential life partners? Or to limit it to the tiny slivers of potential permitted by their organization’s Chief People Officer? To do so would be to demand the following: that every man had the opportunity to pursue only one woman in their work life. That that woman could be asked out for coffee or a drink on only one occasion. And that this sole shot must have an absolute, 100 per cent accuracy rating on the one occasion on which it was deployed. Is this a sensible, orderly or indeed humane way to arrange relations between the sexes? Of course most of the room laughs at the very suggestion. Because it is laughable. And it is risible. And it is also the law of the modern workplace."

Kubrick/Southern

An Interview

with

Stanley Kubrick, director of Lolita (1962)

An Interview with Stanley Kubrick Director of L O L I T A 

by 

Terry Southern 

Unpublished; 1962; NYC

 

Terry and Stanley had a starcrossed relationship--like two planets dancing in orbit with each other--achieving perfect alignment--then veering off into remote areas of the universe. They met when they needed each other most: Stanley was making a movie about the annihlation of planet earth--and needed a miracle to make it funny. Terry, about to be dubiously crowned 'The Candy Man' needed a break from the 'Quality-Lit' scene he was getting bored of teasing. They found each other through Peter Sellers, who, at Christmas time, bought 100 copies of his favorite novel, The Magic Christian, and gave them to friends--friends like Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick saw in the novel a talent which could be orchestrated--a writer of dialogue who could be cut loose like Charlie Parker.

Before Stanley read The Magic Christian, Esquire sent Terry to do an interview with the unknown director who had just finished Lolita. Upon meeting Kubrick in England, Terry's New Journalism investigations were bursting out across the pond in Esquire, including: "How I signed up for $250 a Day For the Big Parade Through Havana bla, bla, bla and Wound Up In Guatamala Working For the CIA," and "Twirling at Ole Miss"--which Tom Wolfe cites as the story which started New Journalism and Gonzo. Upon Strangelove's release, with Terry so popular, and with the previously contraband Candy making her debut as a controversial best-seller --the press turned Terry into the 'author' of the film--a tresspass Kubrick never completely forgave.

 

An Interview with Stanley Kubrick

by Terry Southern

July, 1962; NYC

Probably the most talented, surely the most ambitious, and absolutely the youngest full-fledged film-maker on the American scene today, is Stanley Kubrick -- who, at only 33, has created a body of work (six features and two documentaries) as richly diverse as it is substantial.

Paths Of Glory, acclaimed by critics throughout the world as one of the best war pictures ever filmed was made when he was 28 years old -- certainly as remarkable a cinematic achievement as that of any contemporary American.

At 30, he was given the singular distinction (if not exactly honor) of directing the super production, Spartacus, with a budget of ten million dollars. Aware, intuitive, and deeply attuned to his times, Kubrick is a chess-playing poet and extremely articulate, speaking in visual metaphor, with the kind of relentless honesty of principle and direction that is a rare felicity indeed.

The following interview took place in the New York office of Harris-Kubrick Productions, and is a transcript of the taped recording.

Southern: What was it mainly that appealed to you in the novel, Lolita?

Kubrick: Well it's certainly one of the great love stories, isn't it? I think Lionel Trilling's piece in Encounter is very much to the point when he speaks of it as "the first great love story of the 20th century." And he uses as his criteria the total shock and estrangement which the lovers, in all the great love stories of the past have produced on the people around them. If you consider Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Red and the Black, they all had this one thing in common, this element of the illicit, or at least what was considered illicit at the time, and in each case it caused their complete alienation from society.

But then in the 20th century, with the disintegration of moral and spiritual values, it became increasingly difficult, and finally impossible, for an author to credibly create that kind of situation, to-to conceive of a relationship which would produce this shock and estrangement -- so that what was resorted to achieve the shock value, was erotic description. Whereas Trilling felt that Lolita somehow did succeed, in the classic tradition, having all the stormy passion and tenderness of the great love story as well as this element of the lovers being estranged from everyone around them. And, of course, Nabokov was brilliant in withholding any indication of the author's approval of the relationship. In fact, it isn't until the very end, when Humbert sees her again four years later, and she's no longer by any-stretch of the definition a nymphet, that the really genuine and selfless love he has for her is revealed. In other words, this element of their estrangement, even from the author -- and certainly, from the reader--is accomplished, and sustained, almost through the very end.

Southern: I want to ask you some questions more about the actual filming of Lolita, but first I'd like to go back for a moment--to the time when you were 21, working as a Look photographer, and ask you how you got started as a filmmaker.

Kubrick: I just rented a camera and made a movie--a 28 minute documentary--Day of the Fight was the name of it, a day in the life of a boxer, from the time he wakes in the morning until he steps in the ring that night.

Southern: I understand you made the film entirely by yourself--did you also finance it?

Kubrick: Well, it didn't cost much--I think the camera was ten bucks a day--and film, developed and printed, is ten cents a foot. The most expensive thing was the music...the whole film cost 3900 dollars, and I think about 2900 of it was for the music, having it sync'd in.

Southern: Your first feature was Fear and Desire?

Kubrick: Yes, a pretentious, inept and boring film--a youthful mistake costing about 50,000 dollars--but it was distributed by Joseph Burstyn, in the art houses and caused a little ripple of publicity and attention. ..I mean there were people around who found some good things in it, and on the strength of that I was able to raise private financing to make a second feature-length film, Killer's Kiss. And that was a silly story too, but my concern was still in getting experience and simply functioning in the medium, so the content of a story seemed secondary to me. I just took the line of least resistance, whatever story came to hand. And for another thing I had no money to live on at the time, much less to buy good story material with--nor did I have the time to work it into shape--and I didn't want to take a job, and get off the track, so I had to keep moving. Fortunately too, I wasn't offered any jobs during this period--I mean perhaps if I had been offered some half-assed TV job of something I wouldn't have had the sense to turn it down and would have been thrown off the track of what I really wanted to do, but it didn't happen that way. In any case, I made that picture Killer's Kiss, and United Artists saw it and bought it.

Southern: It was about that time, wasn't it, that you met James Harris and formed your own company?

Kubrick: That's right. He was running a television distribution company at the time...together we made The Killing. That's the first film I made with decent actors, a professional crew, and under the proper circumstances. It was the first really good film I made, and it got a certain amount of attention...then we bought the rights to Paths of Glory. That was a book I had read when I was about fourteen, and one day I suddenly remembered it.

Southern: I understand there was some controversy over the ending of the film--where the French soldiers are executed for desertion--that you asked to change it so that the men would not be shot at the end of the film.

Kubrick: It wasn't a controversy--I mean there were some people who said you've got to save the men, but, of course, it was out of the question. That would have been like making a film about capital punishment in which the executed man was innocent--it would just be pointless. And also, of course, it actually happened--the French Army mutinies of 1917 were fairly extensive, whole regiments marched out of the trenches, and men were executed, by lot.

Southern: Is Paths of Glory still banned in France?

Kubrick: Yes--it's also banned in Switzerland, Spain, and Israel, because of reciprocal agreements these countries have with France.

Southern: Did the film in fact, make any money?

Kubrick: It's probably made some money by now. But what you have to realize is that the period of movies, starting from about the middle fifties, began to decline in terms of box-office, right down to where it is now, which is about 40% of what it was before television. Television, you know, was a big threat in the beginning because it was free, but then they ran out of things to show and it started to get boring -- and at that point the major studios, in order to show better balance sheet, very unwisely began unloading their pictures, selling them to TV, which then gave the networks something at least as good and sometimes better than what could be seen in the theatres. Now Paths of Glory was made about the middle of this period of decline in movie business, and by comparison to the average 'A' picture during that time it did average business. So it wasn't exactly a smash success, and I suppose there are a lot of films which can't be expected to be, but which are still worth making -- if you feel like making them.

Southern: There are always a few films which, after their initial round of distribution, start being recalled -- and this seems to be happening to Paths of Glory, as though it were becoming a sort of cinema-club classic.

Kubrick: Well, the owner of the New Yorker theatre called me the other day, for example, and said they didn't want to give him a print of the film. You see, the distributor gets about fifty bucks for renting a print, and so he doesn't even want to bother dragging it out of the vault. I mean they've got so many other things working for them they just don't want to be bothered.

Southern: Now, after Paths of Glory, you got involved with Brando's production of One-Eyed Jacks, which you were supposed to direct, I believe-- what happened there?

Kubrick: Well, we became friendly, you know, and he told me about this 'western' he was doing . . . and it's really a very long and involved story, but anyway we worked on it, the script, for about six months--Marlon, Calder Willingham, and myself . . . and Guy Trosper, Carlo Fiori, George Glass, Walter Seltzer, Frank Rosenberg. . .

Southern: I suppose it must have become apparent at one point that Brando wanted to direct the picture himself.

Kubrick: That became apparent, yes. . that I was there just as a sort of wing-man, you know, to keep him from getting shot down by the studio. It also became apparent that we were going to have extreme difficulty agreeing on the story, and...well, finally it just didn't seem that it could work out as far as my directing it was concerned.

Southern: Brando has been quoted as saying of you, "Stanley is unusually perceptive and delicately attuned to people. He has an adroit intellect and is a creative thinker, not a repeater, not a fact-gatherer,. he digests what he learns and brings to a new project an original point of view and a reserved passion." This being his attitude towards you, it seems strange that you should not have been able to work together on the film.

Kubrick: It's possible, of course, for two adroit, perceptive, delicately attuned people not to agree in any way, shape or form.

Southern: Well, from there you went to direct Sparticus--this is the only picture you've done, isn't it, where you weren't pretty much your own boss?

Kubrick: Yes, its the only picture I've worked on where I was employed--and in a situation like that the director has no real rights, except the rights of persuasion...and I've found that's the wrong end of the lever to be on. First of all, you very often fail to persuade, and secondly, even when you do persuade, you waste so much time doing it that it gets to be ridiculous.

Southern: Now that brings us to your chef d'oeuvre, Lolita. After the script was finished you began casting--and I imagine you must have looked at quite a few young girls. Did you actually look for a girl who was between 12 and 13?

Kubrick: Well, she had to be between 12 and 13 at the beginning, but between 16 and 17 at the end--I mean one girl who could play both parts--and we did look at quite a few young girls, some of them very young indeed. It was amazing how many parents would write in, you know, from Montana and so on, saying: "My daughter really is Lolita!"--that sort of thing. But we looked at them all, and of course, Sue Lyon was just one of them--but the moment we saw her, we through 'My God, if this girl can act--because she had this wonderful, enigmatic, but alive quality of mystery, but was still very expressive. Everything she did, commonplace things, like handling objects or crossing a room, or just talking, were all done in a very engaging way...and, incidentally this is a quality which most great actors have, it's a strange sort of personal unique style that goes into everything they do--like when Albert Finney sits down in a chair and drinks a bottle of beer, and, well, it's just great and you think 'God, I wish I could drink a bottle of beer like that,' or the way Marlon, you know, pushes his sun-glasses on his forehead and just leaves them there instead of putting them in his pocket...and, well, they all have ways of doing everyday things that are interesting to watch. And she had this, Sue Lyon--but of course, we still didn't know whether she could act. Then we did some scenes, and finally shot a test with Mason, and that was it--she was great.

Southern: And Mason--did he occur to you right away as the choice for Humbert?

Kubrick: Yes, I always thought he had just the right qualities for Humbert--you know, handsome but vulnerable...sort of easy-to-hurt and also a romantic--because that was true of Humbert, of course, that beneath that veneer of sophistication and cynicism, and that sort of affected sneer, he was terribly romantic and sentimental.

Southern: One of his big scenes, of course, is at the end, when Humbert finds Lolita again, and breaks down when he fails to persuade her to go away with him. This is a long and very complex scene--how long did it take to shoot it?

Kubrick: We shot that for twelve days. One of the things I wanted to get there, as completely as possible, was this element of disparity, which you see in life but practically never in film, where two people meet after a long time and one of them is still emotionally involved and the other one is simply embarrassed--and yet she wants to be nice, but the words just sort of plunk down, dead, and nothing happens...just sort of total embarrassment and incongruity.

Southern: For the film, you greatly expanded, or at least developed the role of Quilty, didn't you?

Kubrick: Yes, well, it was apparent that just beneath the surface of the story was this strong secondary narrative thread possible--because after Humbert seduces her in the motel, or rather after she seduces him, the the big question has been answered--so it was good to have this narrative of mystery continuing after the seduction.

Southern: This role, the role of Peter Sellers as Quilty, and his disgusted recurrance throughout the film, seems unique. I don't recall any other instance in movies of such an elaborate combination of the comic-grotesque--was this treatment derivative of something you had seen or read?

Kubrick: Well, that aspect of the picture interests me very much-- I've always thoughtt for example, that Kafka could be very funny, or actually is very funny -- I mean like a comic nightmare, and I think that Sellers in the murder scene, and in fact in the whole characterization, is like something out of a bad dream, but a funny one. I'm very pleased with the way that came off and I think it opens up an avenue, as far as I'm concerned, of telling certain types of stories in ways which haven't yet been explored in movies.

Southern: Now, this is an erotic film--I mean, in the sense that sexual love is necessarily treated, and is sometimes in the foreground of a dramatic scene. Do you have any particular theories about the erotic?

Kubrick: Only that I think the erotic viewpoint of a story is best used as a sort of energizing force of a scene, a motivational factor, rather than being, you know, explicitly portrayed. I thought, for instance, in Les Amants, when the guy's head slides down out of the frame, it was, well, just sort of funny--though it shouldn't have been...when you're watching it with an audience it just becomes laughable. I think it's interesting to know how one person makes it known to another person that they want to make love, and it's interesting to know what they do after they make love,--but while they're doing it, well, that's something else...it's such a subjective thing, and so incongruous to the audience that the effect is either one of vague embarrassment, or just the feeling of mischief on the part of the filmmaker.

Southern: In any case, since this was your own picture, there was no pressure on you to be overly prudent or anything like that?

Kubrick: None whatever. We had complete freedom about every aspect of the production.

Southern: You have some interesting double-entendre things in there -- like this "Camp Climax" for girls, and lines like: "Your uncle is going to fill my daughter's cavity on Thursday afternoon." Were there any objections to those?

Kubrick: No. And, of course, the general public is a good deal more sophisticated than most censors imagine--and certainly more so than these groups who get up petitions an so on can believe. After all, if a film is really obscene, it simply doesn't play in a theater, because the police of that city close it down--so that if a movie is playing, it's obviously not obscene...prevailing law-enforcement takes care of that, so there's really no point in those petitions. It's a matter for the courts.

Southern: How do you account for this increased sophistication on the part of film audiences?

Kubrick: Well, for the past few years, they've been getting used to better and better movies...Television was the best thing that ever happened to American movies, because it knocked out this middle-of-the-road mediocrity type picture which had so long dominated the field.

Southern: What do you think to the techniques and stated philosophy of the French New Wave directors--Vadim, Resnais, Truffaut--and of the reigning Italian directors: Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, etc.?

Kubrick: Statements of philosophy aside, they've made some superb films.

Southern: What do you feel would be the best training ground for a movie director: television, the stage, or still photography, as in your case?

Kubrick: I don't know--the main thing is to want to make a film bad enough to get some sweet, trusting and insane friends or family to lend you the money to do so.

Southern: I understand that you often play music on the set, to help everyone get in a particular mood.

Kubrick: Yes, well, that was a device used, you know, by silent-film actors--they all had their own violinists, who would play for them during the takes, and even sort of direct them. And I think it's probably the easiest way to produce an emotion...which is really the actor's main problem--producing authentic emotion. We play it before the take, and if the dialogue isn't too important, during the take and then post-synchronize the dialogue--its amazing how quick this will work, and I mean making a movie is such a long, fragmented, dragging process, and you get into, say. about the ninth week, you're getting up every morning at 6:30, not enough sleep, probably no breakfast, and then at 9:15 you have to do something you feel about as far from doing as you possibly can...So it's a matter of getting in the right mood--and music I've found is the best for this, and practically everyone can respond to some piece or other.

Southern: What were the piece you used in making Lolita?

Kubrick: Well, there were a couple of bands of West Side Story that must have somehow been very important to Shelly Winters--we used those in her crying scene--and she would cry, very quickly, great authentic tears. And let's see, yeah, Irma la Douce, that would always floor Mason. And I've forgotten what Sue's was...a ballad by someone--not Elvis, but someone like that.

Southern: In making this film, do you feel you encountered any problems or considerations which were categorically different from those you've dealt with in other films?

Kubrick: Yes, I think the thing of gradually penetrating the surface of comedy which overlies the story into the, well, the ultimate tragic romance of it puts it in a category apart. And then, too, treatments of mood, subtleties and range of mood...I mean Lolita is really like a piece of music, a series of attitudes and emotions that sort of sweep you through the story.

Southern: I'd like to ask you now about your general attitude towards filmmaking, other than what you've already indicated--first, what particular advantages do you feel that films have over other media of expression and communication?

Kubrick: Well, for one thing I think it is fairly obvious that the events and situations that are most meaningful to people are those in which they are actually involved--and I'm convinced that this sense of personal involvement derives in large part from visual perception. I once saw a woman hit by a car, for example, or right after she had been hit, and she way lying in the middle of the road. I knew that at that moment I would have risked my life if necessary to help her...whereas if I had merely read about the accident or heard about it, it could not have meant too much. Of all the creative media I think that film is most nearly able to convey this sense of meaningfulness; to create an emotional involvement and a feeling of participation in the person seeing it.

Southern: Do you feel you have some specific goal or direction as an artist?

Kubrick: In making a film, I start with an emotion, a feeling, a sense of a subject or a person or a situation. The theme and technique come as a result of the material passing, as it were, through myself and coming out of the projector lens. It seems to me that simply striving for a genuinely personal approach, whatever it may be, is the goal -- Bergman and Fellini, for example, although perhaps as different in their out-look as possible, have achieved this, And I'm sure it is what gives their films an emotional involvement lacking in most work.

Southern: I understand that you cut and edit your own pictures -- don't you feel there are experienced editors who could do this?

Kubrick: I feel that the director, or the film-maker as I prefer to think of him, is wholly responsible for the film in its completed form. Making a film starts with the germ of an ideal continues through script, rehearsing, shooting, cutting music projection, and tax-accountants. The old fashioned major-studio concept of a director made him just another color on the producer's palette -- which also contained all the above "colors". Formerly, it was the producer who dipped into all the colors and blended the "masterpiece". I don't think it so surprising that it should now fall to the director.

Southern: Do you think that a young director, with new ideas, can get ahead in Hollywood--making films the way he wants to--without creating enemies?

Kubrick: I don't think you make enemies by doing films the way you want to do them; I think you make enemies by being rude, tactless and nasty to people.

Southern: You have won 'unreserved critical praise for a least three of your pictures. At 33 you have already directed one of the biggest pictures ever made. Will success spoil Stanley Kubrick?

Kubrick: Fifth Amendment.

UnLike The Book

“Cinema is a Machine for 

Building Empathy.”

— Roger Ebert.

 

 

“I'm Not Saying 

‘We Didn't Go to The Moon’. 

I'm just Saying that 

‘What We Saw was Faked.’ 

and that 

‘It was Faked 

by Stanley Kubrick.’

And I've had Hollywood special effects people from the '60s and '70s 

who were front-screen projection experts tell me that I absolutely have nailed the Apollo footage as being the result of front-screen projection.

Just go to any Apollo site 

and Look, and You'll See that 

They have to hide 

The Bottom of The Screen. 

And you can always see the set/screen separation line 

in every Apollo footage, every Apollo image, 

and the video footage that has a background. 

And Richard Hoagland, the researcher, 

has looked into the Apollo imagery. 

And he has found all sorts of problems with it because in the sky around the astronauts, he's found reflecting lights and refracting things and... kind of a junk and geometry of things that are in the sky. 

And he concluded, wrongly, 

that there are gigantic alien cities 

made out of glass. 

What he's really seeing 

is the reflections of light of the tiny beads on the scotch light screen which is being used in the front-screen projection process. 

And so, once I nailed the front-screen projection process inside the Apollo footage, 

then I became interested in seeing if Kubrick left any clues in the rest of his career to his possible involvement in faking the Apollo moon footage. 

And I was overjoyed about two years ago when I received my Blu-Ray copy of The Shining. 

And I put it in my Blu-Ray machine 

and sat down one night to watch it. 

And I realised that all of the things that one could imagine that Stanley Kubrick would have had to go through to fake the Apollo moon footage... 

and there in the movie,

 every time that Stanley deviated from the Stephen King novel, 

he deviated into those exact questions. 

You know, what was it like to 

Make a Deal with The U.S. Government? 

What was it like to 

accidentally tell someone 

what you were doing 

and to watch them 

possibly have to suffer the consequences 

of your lack of integrity? 

 

What was it like to 

Lie to Your Wife 

and tell her that you were 

Doing One Thing 

when you were 

Doing Another? 

 

What was it like when 

Your Wife found out 

What You were really Doing? 

 

These are the questions that I had long before I had seen The Shining again after a maybe an eight... or nine-year absence. 

And I didn't... wasn't sure I was right for the first hour. 

I wasn't sure that I had actually... 

you know, I wasn't sure if I was 

blurring the line between 

What I wanted to see 

and what I was seeing. 

And then at about 58 minutes in the film 

is the famous scene where Danny's playing with his trucks, and he stands up and he's wearing the Apollo 11 sweater with the rocket taking off. 

Then I knew I'd nabbed it. 

And then I started watching the film with an intensity that I don't think I'd ever watched a movie before, 

and every line began ringing true. You know, 

"Wendy, that is just so typical of you. 

"Don't you... Don't you know 

I have obligations to My Employers?"

"Do you have any idea what a contract is?"

Do you know what an agreement is?" 

 

Jack Nicholson's whole tirade 

against His Wife... that's Stanley. 

 

That's Stanley telling His Wife that 

after she discovered what he was doing, 

which was the Apollo footage. 

 

No, that's actually Not True. 

If you call the Mount Hood Resort 

and you ask for room 217 you will find 

there is no such room. 

 

So that's just Not True. 

That statement's Not True. 

And so what... 

 

Stanley was Lying. 

Its not The Reason that he changed 

the room number from 217 to 237. 

 

The Reason that he changed it from 217 to 237 was because the room, room 237 in the film is... 

represents the Moon Landing Stage where he worked. 

 

And The Moon, the standard science textbook said... 

and they still say... but now with lasers, 

we've gotten a little better reading. But... 

Is that the mean distance of The Moon from The Earth

is exactly 237,000 miles. 

 

So he changed that so that 

you would understand 

that this was The Moon Room. 

 

So Danny stands up. He's got the Apollo 11 sweater on. 

He begins walking down the hallway towards Room 237. 

And there's A Key in The Lock. 

And on The Key are... 

is the words "ROOM" and then the word "N-o," 

which is an old acronym for "Number." 

 

So "Room Number 237," except that 

the only capital letters on The Key 

are R-O-O-M and then the "N" from the acronym n-o. 

 

And if there's only two words that 

you can come up with that have 

those letters in 'em. 

 

And that's "MOON" and "ROOM." 

And so on The Key, The Tag, it says "MOON ROOM." 

And that is the moon room. 

This is where Everything Happens, and NONE of it's Real. And it ALL has to be lied about. 

And he can't let anyone know what's really going on in room 237. And there's many, many other deviations from the book to the movie. 

It isn't real. 

The deviations drove Stephen King out of his mind. He just ranted and ranted for years how much he hated The Shining. And he hated it because he'd given Kubrick all this great source material and Kubrick threw it out. And the whole idea of this is best exemplified by the scene where Dick Hallorann is driving up the highway, trying to get to the Overlook during a winter storm and he passes a wreck. 

 

And in the wreck, a semi has crashed 

and crushed a red Volkswagen. 

 

And this is a direct message 

from Kubrick to King, because in the novel, 

Jack Torrance's car is a red Volkswagen. 

 

But in the movie, it's a yellow Volkswagen. 

 

And what Kubrick is saying in that scene 

is a big "F you" to Stephen King. 

 

He's saying, 

"This is My Vehicle."

 

"I have wrecked Your Vehicle. 

And everybody in The World can see it.' 

 

And this drove King crazy. 

And it should have. 

 

But what was really going on 

and what is just much more deliciously fascinating 

about all of this is that, in fact, 

Kubrick was faking the making 

of the Stephen King novel 

in order to reveal the idea of 

what he went through 

to do The Apollo Moon Footage. "

My Argument, as far as Kubrick goes, is that 

He was a preternaturally observant child. 

He read omnivorously. 

He went to Movies all the time.

Lolita - The Monster

The film Humbert, Charlotte and Lolita watch at the drive-in is The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). When the film cut to the three characters in the car, Stanley Kubrick had a different soundtrack recorded to make the film sound scarier.

Yes, it is.

Because The Creator WAS The Monster; the Creation was an innocent.

It wasn't HIS fault that his Creator accidentally endowed him with the pre-deceased cerebral cortex of an executed murderer that was hanged for being criminally insane.... BUT, he got better. And stopped killing people. All by himself.

Saturnalia

Yes, because in 1963, they saw "Lolita" and thought THIS IS THE GUY WE NEED..!!

This is the guy for The Job!!

Well, the chronology in the song presents it as "We gotta get the President out of the way and hire Stanley Kubrick".

You know - the Spartacus guy...!

All of which Kubrick/Apollo nonsense is, for me, a MASSIVE distraction from the REAL question :

 Why is Stanley so afraid of Saturn...?

The God who ate all his own children and castrated his own father with a scythe in his sleep to steal his power and his throne -

Well - Wouldn't You Be...?

III - BETWEEN PLANETS

 15 - Discovery

 The ship was still only thirty days from Earth, yet David Bowman sometimes found it hard to believe that be had ever known any other existence than the closed little world of Discovery. All his years of training, all his earlier missions to the Moon and Mars, seemed to belong to another man, in another life.

 Frank Poole admitted to the same feelings, and had sometimes jokingly regretted that the nearest psychiatrist was the better part of a hundred million miles away. But this sense of isolation and estrangement was easy enough to understand, and certainly indicated no abnormality.

 In the fifty years since men had ventured into space, there had never been a mission quite like this.

 It had begun, five years ago, as Project Jupiter - the first manned round trip to the greatest of the planets. The ship was nearly ready for the two-year voyage when, somewhat abruptly, the mission profile had been changed.

 Discovery would still go to Jupiter; but she would not stop there. She would not even slacken speed as she raced through the far-ranging Jovian satellite system. On the contrary - she would use the gravitational field of the giant world us a sling to cast her even farther from the Sun.

 Like a comet, she would streak on across the outer reaches of the solar system to her ultimate goal, the ringed glory of Saturn. And she would never return.

 For Discovery, it would be a one-way trip - yet her crew had no intention of committing suicide. If all went  well, they would be back on Earth within seven years - five of which would pass like a flash in the dreamless sleep of hibernation, while they awaited rescue by the still unbuilt Discovery II.

 The word "rescue" was carefully avoided in all the Astronautics Agency's statements and documents; it implied some failure of planning, and the approved jargon was "re-acquisition." If anything went really wrong, there would certainly be no hope of rescue, almost a billion miles from Earth.

 It was a calculated risk, like all voyages into the unknown. But half a century of research had proved that artificially induced human hibernation was perfectly safe, and it had opened up new possibilities in space travel. Not until this mission, however, had they been exploited to the utmost.

 The three members of the survey team, who would not be needed until the ship entered her final orbit around Saturn, would sleep through the entire outward flight. Tons of food and other expendables would thus be saved; almost as important, the team would be fresh and alert, and not fatigued by the ten-month voyage, when they went into action.

 Discovery would enter a parking orbit around Saturn, becoming a new moon of the giant planet.

 She would swing back and forth along a two-million-mile ellipse that took her close to Saturn, and then across the orbits of all its major moons. They would have a hundred days in which to map and study a world with eighty times the area of Earth, and surrounded by a retinue of at least fifteen known satellites - one of them as large as the planet Mercury.

19 - Transit of Jupiter

 Even front twenty million miles away, Jupiter was already the most conspicuous object in the sky ahead. The planet was now a pale, salmon-hued disk, about half the size of the Moon as seen from Earth, with the dark, parallel bands of its cloud belts clearly visible.

 Shuttling back and forth in the equatorial plane were the brilliant stars of Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto - worlds that elsewhere would have counted as planets in their own right, but which here were merely satellites of a giant master.

Through the telescope, Jupiter was a glorious sight - a mottled, multicolored globe that seemed to fill the sky. It was impossible to grasp its real size; Bowman kept reminding himself that it was eleven times the diameter of Earth, but for a long time this was a statistic with no real meaning.

 Then, while he was briefing himself from the tapes in Hal's memory units, he found something that suddenly brought the appalling scale of the planet into focus. It was an illustration that showed the Earth's entire surface peeled off and then pegged, like the skin of an animal, on the disk of Jupiter. Against this background, all the continents and oceans of Earth appeared no larger than India on the terrestrial globe.

 When Bowman used the highest magnification of Discovery's telescopes, he appeared to be hanging above a slightly flattened globe, looking down upon a vista of racing clouds that had been smeared into bands by the giant world's swift rotation. Sometimes those bands congealed into wisps and knots and continent-sized masses of colored vapor; sometimes they were linked by transient bridges thousands of miles in length. Hidden beneath those clouds was enough material to outweigh all the other planets in the Solar System. And what else, Bowman wondered, was also hidden there?

 Over this shifting, turbulent roof of clouds, forever hiding the real surface of the planet, circular patterns of darkness sometimes glided. One of the inner moons was transiting the distant sun, its shadow marching beneath it over the restless Jovian cloudscape.

 There were other, and far smaller, moons even out here - twenty million miles from Jupiter.

 But they were only flying mountains, a few dozen miles in diameter, and the ship would pass nowhere near any of them. Every few minutes the radar transmitter would gather its strength and send out a silent thunderclap of power; no echoes of new satellites came pulsing back from the emptiness.

 What did come, with ever growing intensity, was the roar of Jupiter's own radio voice. In 1955, just before the dawn of the space age, astronomers had been astonished to find that Jupiter was blasting out millions of horsepower on the ten-meter band. It was merely raw noise, associated with haloes of charged particles circling the planet like the Van Allen belts of Earth, but on a far greater scale.

 Sometimes, during lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and as meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon.

 Even at her present speed of over a hundred thousand miles an hour, it would take Discovery almost two weeks to cross the orbits of all the Jovian satellites. More moons circled Jupiter than planets orbited the Sun; the Lunar Observatory was discovering new ones every year, and the tally had now reached thirty-six. The outermost - Jupiter XXVII - moved backwards in an unstable path nineteen million miles from its temporary master. It was the prize in a perpetual tug-of-war between Jupiter and the Sun, for the planet was constantly capturing short-lived moons from the asteroid belt, and losing them again after a few million years. Only the inner satellites were its permanent property; the Sun could never wrest them from its grasp.

 Now there was new prey for the clashing gravitation at fields, Discovery was accelerating toward Jupiter along a complex orbit computed months ago by the astronomers on Earth, and constantly checked by Hal. From time to time there would be minute, automatic nudges from the control jets, scarcely perceptible aboard the ship, as they made fine adjustments to the trajectory.

 Over the radio link with Earth, information was flowing back in a constant stream. They were now so far from home that, even traveling at the speed of light, their signals were taking fifty minutes for the journey. Though the whole world was looking over their shoulder, watching through their eyes and their instruments as Jupiter approached, it would be almost an hour before the news of their discoveries reached home.

The telescopic cameras were operating constantly as the ship cut across the orbit of the giant inner satellites - every one of them larger than the Moon, every one of them unknown territory.

 Three hours before transit, Discovery passed only twenty thousand miles from Europa, and all instruments were aimed at the approaching world, as it grew steadily in size, changed from globe to crescent, and swept swiftly sunward.

 Here were fourteen million square miles of land which, until this moment, had never been more than a pinhead in the mightiest telescope. They would race past it in minutes, and must make the most of the encounter, recording all the information they could. There would be months in which they could play it back at leisure.

 From a distance, Europa had seemed like a giant snowball, reflecting the light of the far-off sun with remarkable efficiency. Closer observations confirmed this; unlike the dusty Moon, Europa was a brilliant white, and much of its surface was covered with glittering hunks that looked like stranded icebergs. Almost certainly, these were formed from ammonia and water that Jupiter's gravitational field had somehow failed to capture.

 Only along the equator was bare rock visible; here was an incredibly jagged no-man's-land of canyons and jumbled boulders, forming a darker band that completely surrounded the little world.

 There were a few impact craters, but no sign of vulcanism; Europa had obviously never possessed any internal sources of heat. There was, as had long been known, a trace of atmosphere. When the dark edge of the satellite passed across a star, it dimmed briefly before the moment of eclipse.

 And in somr areas there was a hint of cloud - perhaps a mist of ammonia droplets, borne on tenuous methane winds.

 As swiftly as it had rushed out of the sky ahead, Europa dropped astern; and now Jupiter itself was only two hours away. Hal had checked and rechecked the ship's orbit with infinite care, and there was no need for further speed corrections until the moment of closest approach. Yet, even knowing this, it was a strain on the nerves to watch that giant globe ballooning minute by minute. It was difficult to believe that Discovery was not plunging directly into it, and that the planet's immense gravitational field was not dragging them down to destruction. Now was the time to drop the atmospheric probes - which, it was hoped, would survive long enough to send back some information from below the Jovian cloud deck. Two stubby, bomb-shaped capsules, enclosed in ablative heat-shields, were gently nudged into orbits which for the first few thousand miles deviated scarcely at all from that of Discovery.

 But they slowly drifted away; and now, at last, even the unaided eye could see what Hal had been asserting. The ship was in a near-grazing orbit, not a collision one; she would miss the atmosphere. True, the difference was only a few hundred miles - a mere nothing when one was dealing with a planet ninety thousand miles in diameter - but that was enough.

 Jupiter now filled the entire sky; it was so huge that neither mind nor eye could grasp it any longer, and both had abandoned the attempt. If it had not been for the extraordinary variety of color - the reds and pinks and yellows and salmons and even scarlets - of the atmosphere beneath them, Bowman could have believed that he was flying low over a cloudscape on Earth.

 And now, for the first time in all their journeying, they were about to lose the Sun. Pale and shrunken though it was, it had been Discovery's constant companion since her departure from Earth, five months ago. But now her orbit was diving into the shadow of Jupiter; she would soon pass over the night side of the planet.

 A thousand miles ahead, the band of twilight was hurtling toward them; behind, the Sun was sinking swiftly into the Jovian clouds, its rays spread out along the horizon like two flaming, down-turned horns, then contracted and died in a brief blaze of chromatic glory. The night had come.

 And yet - the great world below was not wholly dark. It was awash with phosphorescence, which grew brighter minute by minute as their eyes grew accustomed to the scene. Dim rivers of light were flowing from horizon to horizon, like the luminous wakes of ships on some tropical sea. Here and there they gathered into pools of liquid fire, trembling with vast, submarine disturbances welling up from the hidden heart of Jupiter. It was a sight so awe-inspiring that Poole and Bowman could have stared for hours; was this, they wondered, merely the result of chemical and electrical forces down there in that seething caldron - or was it the by-product of some fantastic form of life? 

These were questions which scientists might still be debating when the newborn century drew to its close.

 As they drove deeper and deeper into the Jovian night, the glow beneath them grew steadily brighter.

 Once Bowman had flown over northern Canada during the height of an auroral display; the snowcovered landscape had been as bleak and brilliant as this. And that arctic wilderness, he reminded himself, was more than a hundred degrees warmer than the regions over which they were hurtling now.

 "Earth signal is fading rapidly," announced Hal. "We are entering the first diffraction zone."

 They had expected this - indeed, it was one of the mission's objectives, as the absorption of radio waves would give valuable information about the Jovian atmosphere. But now that they had actually passed behind the planet, and it was cutting off communication with Earth, they felt a sudden overwhelming loneliness. The radio blackout would last only an hour; then they would emerge from Jupiter's eclipsing screen, and could resume contact with the human race. That hour, however, would be one of the longest of their lives.

 Despite their relative youth, Poole and Bowman were veterans of a dozen space voyages, but now they felt like novices. They were attempting something for the first lime; never before had any ship traveled at such speeds, or braved so intense a gravitational field. The slightest error in navigation at this critical point and Discovery would go speeding on toward the far limits of the Solar System, beyond any hope of rescue.

 The slow minutes dragged by. Jupiter was now a vertical wall of phosphorescence stretching to infinity above them - and the ship was climbing straight up its glowing face. Though they knew that they were moving far too swiftly for even Jupiter's gravity to capture them, it was hard to believe that Discovery had not become a satellite of this monstrous world.

 At last, far ahead, there was a blaze of light along the horizon. They were emerging from shadow, heading out into the Sun. And at almost the same moment Hal announced: "I am in radio contact with Earth. I am also happy to say that the perturbation maneuver has been successfully completed. Our time to Saturn is one hundred and sixty-seven days, five hours, eleven minutes."

 That was within a minute of the estimate; the fly-by had been carried out with impeccable precision. Like a ball on a cosmic pool table, Discovery had bounced off the moving gravitational field of Jupiter, and had gained momentum from the impact. Without using any fuel, she had increased her speed by several thousand miles an hour.

 Yet there was no violation of the laws of mechanics; Nature always balances her books, and Jupiter had lost exactly as much momentum as Discovery had gained. The planet had been slowed down - but as its mass was a sextillion times greater than the ship's, the change in its orbit was far too small to be detectable. The time had not yet come when Man could leave his mark upon the Solar System.

As the light grew swiftly around them, and the shrunken Sun lifted once more into the Jovian sky, Poole and Bowman reached out silently and shook each other's hands.

 Though they could hardly believe it, the first part of the mission was safely over.