“I am The Instrument of Providence.
She will use me as long as
I accomplish Her Designs,
then She will break me like a glass.”
Napoleon :
The Great Complex
The First Modern Complex
Napoleon The Great? -- A Debate.
“One of the attractions of a War or Crime Story is that it provides an almost unique opportunity to contrast An Individual of our contemporary Society with a solid framework of accepted value, which The Audience becomes fully aware of, and which can be used as a counterpoint to a Human, Individual, Emotional Situation.
Further, War acts as a kind of hothouse for forced, quick breeding of attitudes and feelings.
Attitudes crystallise and come out into the open.”
— Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick's House
looks as if
The Inland Revenue
took it over long ago.
Tony takes me into a large room
painted blue and filled with books.
"This used to be The Cinema," he says.
"Is it The Library now?" I ask.
"Look closer at The Books,"
says Tony.
I do. "Bloody hell," I say.
"Every book in this room
is about Napoleon!"
"Look in The Drawers,"
says Tony.
I do.
"It's all about Napoleon, too!" I say.
"Everything in here is about Napoleon!"
I feel a little like Shelley Duvall in The Shining,
chancing upon her husband's novel
and finding it is comprised entirely of the line
"All Work And No Play
Makes Jack A Dull Boy"
typed over and over again.
John Baxter wrote, in his unauthorised biography of Kubrick,
"Most people attributed the purchase of Childwick
to Kubrick's passion for Privacy,
and drew parallels with
Jack Torrance in The Shining."
This room full of Napoleon stuff seems
to bear out that comparison.
"Somewhere else in This House,"
Tony says, "is A Cabinet full of
25,000 Library Cards,
three inches by five inches.
If you want to know
what Napoleon,
or Josephine, or anyone
within Napoleon's inner circle
was doing on the afternoon
of July 23 17-whatever,
you go to that card
and it'll Tell You."
"Who made up The Cards?" I ask.
"Stanley," says Tony.
"With some assistants."
"How long did it take?" I ask.
"Years," says Tony.
"The late 1960s."
Kubrick never made his film about Napoleon.
During the years it took him to compile this research,
a Rod Steiger movie called Waterloo
was written, produced and released.
It was a box-office failure, so MGM abandoned Napoleon
and Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange instead.
"Did you do this kind of massive research
for all the movies?" I ask Tony.
"More or less," he says.
"OK," I say. "I understand how
you might do this for Napoleon,
but what about, say, The Shining?"
"Somewhere here," says Tony,
"is just about every ghost book ever written,
and there'll be A Box containing
photographs of the exteriors
of maybe every mountain
hotel in The World."
There is a silence.
"Tony," I say, "can I look
through The Boxes?"
