SHIT HAPPENS

By in News
on Saturday, August 25th, 2007

Police Beat writer Charles Mudede pens a curious ode to Stanley Kubrick in Seattle’s The Stranger. After opening by saying that Kubrick’s contempt for mankind was “deep,” he moves on to a fuller explication of his worldview:

“I’m in a world of shit,” says Private Joker at the end of Kubrick’s unremittingly dark Vietnam War film, Full Metal Jacket. That is what Kubrick has to say about the state of everything: The world is shit, humans are shit in shit, life is worth shit, and there is nothing else that can be done about the situation. In Kubrick’s movies, progress, sustained enlightenment, and moral improvement are impossible because the powers of reason, love, and religion are much weaker than the forces of generation and degeneration, desire and destruction, sex and death.

And yet, Kubrick’s films endure, not decomposing in some celluloid wastebin but regenerating themselves in the form of spiffy new HD editions.

Mudede explains:

Yet we still watch Kubrick’s films. And we enjoy them. We enjoy them because the hate he had for humanity was only matched by the curious love he had for the most expensive and impressive art form in the world: cinema.

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  • kara

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  • The Third Man in Space

    As a lover of Kubrick’s films, I really don’t think he hated humanity as much as his critics and Mudende’s article would lead you to believe. I think the end of 2001 is incredibly hopeful. That mankind is capable of transcending beyond his animal instincts and be able to channel his inner child. I think the inner child in all of us can help us grow and possibly live in a world free of war and greed etc. thats what the starchild symbolizes for me anyway.

    (The starchild makes an appearance in my documentary Auteurvision. (three years in the making and I still cant decide if I should release it)

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