Kubrick's Men
Описание книги
A provocative re-reading of Stanley Kubrick’s work and its focus on masculine desire The work of Stanley Kubrick amounts to a sustained reflection on the male condition: past, present, and future. The persistent theme of his filmmaking is less violence or sex than it is the pressurized exertion of masculinity in unusual or extreme circumstances, where it may be taxed or exaggerated to various effects, tragic and comic—or metamorphosed, distorted, and even undone.The stories that Kubrick’s movies tell range from global nuclear politics to the unpredictable sexual dynamics of a marriage; from a day in the life of a New York City prizefighter preparing for a nighttime bout to the evolution of humankind. These male melodramas center on sociality and asociality. They feature male doubles, pairs, and rivals. They explore the romance of men and their machines, and men as machines. They figure intensely conflicted forms of male sexual desire. And they are also very much about male manners, style, taste, and art.Examining the formal, thematic, and theoretical affiliations between Kubrick’s three bodies of work—his photographs, his documentaries, and his feature films— Kubrick’s Men offers new vantages on to the question of gender and sexuality, including the first extended treatment of homosexuality in Kubrick’s male-oriented work.
Оглавление
Richard Rambuss. Kubrick's Men
Contents
Introduction
1. Men’s Pictures
Photography
Fight Films
Documentary
2. War Films
Maximal Kubrick
Generic War
What Becomes a Man: Decoration and Decorum
The Essence of Men, or Loving the Bomb
Homo Bellicus
3. Male Sexuality and Homosexuality I
Two Normal Guys
Killing Time
At the Baths
4. Male Sexuality and Homosexuality II
Homosexuals in History
Resucked
Where the Rainbow Ends
Kubrick’s Apparitional Homosexuals
5. His Fundamental Core
Head Like a Hole
Field-Fuck
“This Is for Fighting! This Is for Fun!”
“This Is Vietnam, the Movie”
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes. Introduction: Kubrick and the Men’s Film
1. Men’s Pictures
2. War Films:Fear and Desire,Paths of Glory,Dr. Strangelove,2001: A Space Odyssey
3. Male Sexuality and Homosexuality I:Lolita,The Killing,Spartacus
4. Male Sexuality and Homosexuality II:Barry Lyndon,A Clockwork Orange,Eyes Wide Shut,The Shining
5. His Fundamental Core:Full Metal Jacket
Coda: Visual Pleasure in Kubrick
Index
Отрывок из книги
KUBRICK’S MEN
Kubrick’s movies work out case study–like narratives—many of them clinical, even mechanistic in their feel, all of them highly aestheticized in their presentation—about masculinity with the screws put to it. “Torture the women” was Hitchcock’s dictum on how to make a gripping movie. For Kubrick, the interest lay in men in extremis.
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Walter isn’t concerned with the hands of the clock now, just his own hands. As he gets ready to walk out there in the arena, in front of the people, Walter is slowly becoming another man.… The hard movements of his arms and fists are different from what they were an hour ago. They belong to a new person. They’re part of the Arena Man: the fighting machine that the crowd outside has paid to see in fifteen minutes.
The mind/body processes of becoming machinic are another abiding interest of Kubrick’s work, stretching from this sports short through all his war films. Walter Cartier wielded a knockout punch both in his right hand and his left hand, twin engines of unconsciousness. The boxing claim to fame of this “fighting machine” was knocking out an opponent in the first round in less than one minute with one punch.
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