Stanley Kubrick, by his meteoric rise to the top of the industry, has so far managed to outpace critical appraisal. At first he was greeted as the regenerator of the thriller; suddenly he turned to good causes and social content. And then no sooner had he won new friends with Paths of Glory than he strained their allegiance to the limit by choosing to make a blockbuster, Spartacus. Next, Lolita confirmed Andrew Sarris in the dark view he had taken of Kubrick, but was welcomed by Jean-Luc Godard in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema as ‘simple and lucid’, a ‘surprise’. Finally, Dr Strange-love split the more orthodox critics as unexpectedly as Lolita had split Sarris and Godard. To some it seemed a deeply serious film, courageous and progressive; to others, sick and nihilistic. By and large, two broad currents of opinion seem to have formed. One the one hand, Kubrick can be seen as trying bravely—and more or less successfully—to make ‘serious’, non-conformist films which, at the same time, reach a mass audience and benefit from all the resources usually available only to the mere ‘spectacular’. Or, on the other hand, Kubrick can be seen as stretching his powers too far, as dissipating his talent in grandiose projects and ‘big ideas’, attractive for their scope, but which he can mark with his own personality only in quirks and fragments. But either way, uneasy doubts remain.

One crucial ambiguity in Kubrick’s work lies in the relationship between his bien-pensant liberalism and his obsession with disaster. Kubrick has mentioned that Max Ophuls is his favourite director: most critics have thought this a stylistic preference and noted it alongside his addiction to tracking-shots. But there is another, more profound, common quality: Kubrick’s films are pervaded with the Ophulsian bitter-sweet. Lolita, of course, is bitter-sweet through and through. In Killer’s Kiss, the two lovers, Gloria and Davy, are both failures—a failed dancer, overshadowed by her ballerina sister, and a failed boxer, whom Gloria watches on the tv pummelled ignominiously onto the canvas. Two of Kubrick’s films, Paths of Glory and Dr Strangelove, end with sentimental songs, used to counterpoint total defeat. In Paths of Glory the song mocks the order for battle-weary troops to return to the front after the execution of three among them for cowardice—three who were, in fact, innocent, who were arbitrarily chosen as scapegoats to cover up the blunders and savagery of a high officer. In Dr Strangelove, the irony is even more fierce: a Vera Lynn song accompanies a long sequence of atomic explosions and mushroom clouds. Yet there is a vital distinction to be made between Ophuls’s pessimism and Kubrick’s. Ophuls was a romantic—indeed, an arch-romantic. In Lola Montez, his greatest and most pessimistic film, the myth of Lola is that of Icarus: Lola’s aspiration to an ideal, individual freedom is shattered by the reality of human history, a reality which since her own vision remains pure, she cannot grasp even after her fall. She ends up in a cage in a circus menagerie, imprisoned, degraded, fallen—but still attached to her broken dream, which she re-enacts each night. The re-enactment— fictive and theatrical—is a heroic reassertion of the value of the aspirations of her wrecked life: the triumph of myth over reality through art. But for Kubrick, there are no myths, no freedom, no hope: only their absence. The counterpart of Kubrick’s jejune liberalism is a jejune nihilism. Kubrick’s Lolita is dominated not by the quest for an impossible passion (impossible because Lolita must live in time) but by the search for Quilty, tracking him down and killing him. Kubrick’s world is dehumanized; human passions are fatuous. His pessimism is cold and obsessive.