Neil Sonnekus KUBRICK by Michael Herr (Picador) Many people would have said it was impossible for film-master Stanley Kubrick to die of a heart attack; it was a contradictions in terms; the man didn’t have a heart. The noted but retired film critic Pauline Kael would have been one of them. But Michael Herr, author of what was probably the definitive book about the Vietnam war, Dispatches, has set out to dispel that and one or two other myths surrounding the man. One of them was that he was a recluse, another that he was a monster. He wasn’t a recluse, he just preferred staying at home and talking to the world (and its cousin) via the telephone and the Internet. The monster part is more interesting, because yes, he was a perfectionist and self-controlled (“to put it mildly a hundredfold”) and tight-fisted when it came to writers and a voyeur but, as Herr points out, what auteur isn’t? All of which doesn’t really matter, the
point being that Kubrick gave us some of the most calculatedly memorable images of the latter half of the 20th century: a young girl with heart-shaped shades, suggestively sucking a lollipop; an egomaniacal dictator who cannot control his limbs, let alone the Bomb; a territorial baboon hurling a bone, which becomes a spaceship; a droog with a bowler hat, false eyelashes, a stare, a sneer, and a tendency towards ultraviolence; a writer who has gone right off the handle, brandishing an axe; a Vietnamese wisp of a woman wreaking havoc, getting shot and then begging to be killed; and a Nicole Kidman telling her Wasp doctor husband a couple of home truths about women, looking as exquisitely predatory as a cheetah in a Viennese parlour. Misogynistic indeed. And he had a sense of humour. “Hey Michael, what’s the definition of a neo- conservative? A liberal who’s just been mugged, ha ha ha.” So, you either love Kubrick or you hate him. Herr obviously loved him and worked with him on Full Metal Jacket (and with Francis Ford Coppola on Apocolypse Now). If nothing else, this slim, well-written but expensive volume, which was instigated by the control freak himself – “How’d you like to write the exclusive piece on Eyes Wide Shut for Vanity Fair?” – at least proves that you can love someone you don’t necessarily always agree with, and that that is possibly what it means being (and slaving for) a mensch.