Throughout those films are many common subject matters; distinguished amongst them are era and conquest. All three revolve around the idea of generation's courting to modern Man and his quest to manipulate the Unknown, represented by using the Doomsday Machine in Strangelove, HAL (voiced by means of Douglas Rain) in 2001, and the Ludovico Technique in Clockwork.
In Strangelove, the opening images of a B-fifty two bomber being refueled in midair, endorse both copulation and, to some diploma, a form of mechanical breastfeeding. These symbols of intercourse, dying and beginning (or rebirth) are everyday for the duration of the 3 movies, with the phallic bone and the Star-Child in 2001, and the violent sexuality of Clockwork. This is likewise just the first of many phallic symbols in Strangelove, inclusive of General Jack D. Ripper's (Sterling Hayden) cigar, which step by step burns down to a stub as his base is conquered, and of course the apocalyptic erection straddled with the aid of Major "King" Kong (Slim Pickens) whilst he's dropped, screaming and hollering joyfully, from his womb-like bomber.
Kong's call, like Ripper's, is not any idle joke: Ripper, who effectively kills every body on this planet due to his own sexual inadequacies, is named after history's most well-known sexual predator, and Kong's call is a hint of the primitivism at paintings in the highly technological constructs of all three films (Man's relative loss of non secular advancement from the time of its Dawn in 2001; Alex's (Malcolm McDowell) primitive brutality vs. The technological "remedy" of the Ludovico Technique in Clockwork). Similarly, General "Buck" Turgidson's (George C. Scott) name, which decodes as "swollen male who is the son of a swollen male animal" (in line with Thomas Allen Nelson's superb 1982 book Kubrick: Inside A Film Artist's Maze), suggests the shortage of progress made with the aid of "Civilized" Man within the evolution of humanity from the "lower" animal. President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) is every other call with apparent sexual which means; a "merkin" is a slang time period originating within the 17th century meaning "pubic wig," and "Muffley" alludes to a slang term for the female genitalia.
Throughout all three movies, the human characters are constantly surrounded by using generation, especially inStrangelove and 2001. Like 2001's HAL-9000 computer, the technology in Strangelove is essentially made up of devices that had been as soon as equipment of communique and development, however now function as guns of destruction: the CRM 114 aboard Kong's B-52, the Big Board in President Muffley's War Room, and even the phones used all through the movie on the whole expedite instead of save you the destruction of existence.
Of course, the last technological weapon of destruction is the Doomsday Machine, that is anthropomorphized in the title man or woman (Sellers once more), himself part gadget, with his mechanical arm and automatic wheelchair. Just as the Doomsday Machine will kill its creators together with their enemies, Dr. Strangelove's mechanical arm assaults its owner at the quit of the film. In truth, Strangelove's original call, Dr. Merkwuerdigichliebe (which roughly translates as "cherished destiny," denoting his extraordinary love of Armageddon), even bears the same initials because the Doomsday Machine (I am indebted to Richard Corliss's ebook Talking Pictures: Screenwriters within the American Cinema for this perception into the thoughts of screenwriter Terry Southern). Strangelove reverts to the shadows, brooding, whilst plainly the Doomsday Machine will no longer be detonated, best to revel in a rebirth on the stop of the film when he learns to walk.
Strangelove ends with the ironic use of tune (Vera Lynn singing "We'll Meet Again" over footage of nuclear explosions), any other common thread in Kubrick's paintings. His use of tune during those 3 films is nothing short of extraordinary, however it is his use of '40s and '50s pop music that has the greatest comedian impact (as in HAL's dying rendition of "Daisy" in 2001, and Alex's "Singin' in the Rain" in Clockwork, the latter of which in reality becomes a plot device unto itself).
From the very commencing frames of Kubrick's subsequent film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is clear how a good deal wider his scope has grow to be: the movie become shot in lovely 70 mm, and the outlet sequence has gone from planes to planets, with the ironic use of "Try A Little Tenderness" being replaced by way of Richard Strauss's majestic "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." It is that this movie especially that has stimulated destiny generations of filmmakers, being imitated and/or referenced by using filmmakers from Ridley Scott (Alien) to Mel Brooks (Spaceballs) to Noe (Irreversible), and of direction it's also the direct predecessor of films like George Lucas's Star Wars and Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
From this stunning beginning collection, Kubrick cuts to similarly stunning pictures of Earth earlier than Mankind, unspoiled and natural; tellingly, the primary sign of existence we see is surely a signal of death: a vaguely humanoid skeleton mendacity at the floor. On a 2nd viewing, one would possibly even conjecture that the film's timescape is round and that that is the skeleton of astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea), deposited returned on Earth even before the monolith is despatched again to enlighten the apes and create Man.
Conflict is also mounted very early on, first among the apes and the tapirs who later emerge as their prey, after which among the apes and the leopard who preys upon them. The yellow glow of the leopard's eyes foreshadows HAL's unmarried purple eye with its yellow student, and starts offevolved an eye motif that continues during this movie and into A Clockwork Orange.
A subject that continues from Strangelove is that of the device as weapon, as seen in the ape's discovery of the bone's ability to kill after having touched the enlightenment of the mysterious monolith. The famous and often imitated fit cut, from bone to spacecraft, foreshadows HAL, the technological equal of the bone: a tool this is also a powerful weapon of destruction. The ship proven on this shot is a illustration of the futuristic technology that created HAL, and of Man's violence to the Universe in his egocentric conquest of area. The indoors of the ship suggests over again the top notch soar forward in scope and technical fulfillment from the already outstanding B-52 interiors of Strangelove.
2001, a film about the evolution of Man, should itself be visible as a excessive point inside the evolution of Kubrick's artwork. After the apocalyptic ending of Strangelove, Man's best opportunity to the mine-shafts would, of path, be outer space. In truth, Arthur C. Clarke, author of the fast tale "The Sentinel," on which 2001 is based totally, initially noticed the film "as an extension of Kubrick's previous movie (jokingly titled 'Son of Strangelove') and supposed to emphasise terrestrial topics wherein nuclear bombs orbited the Earth simplest to be detonated by way of the Star-Child in an act of cosmic purification... But Kubrick steered the film model... Toward an emphasis on mythic journeys and modifications" (as quoted in Nelson's previously noted book).
But the greater things change, the extra they live the same. Just as the telephones at Burpleson Air Force Base are cut off in Strangelove, 2001's Dr. Heywood R. Floyd (William Sylvester) is informed early on that the phones at Clavius have now not worked for ten days. Ironically, this is at once after Floyd is visible to be the primary man or woman inside the film to communicate with any other completely via technological way: he speaks to his daughter (Kubrick's real-life daughter Vivian) thru a video-smartphone and wishes her a happy birthday (the primary of several overt references to start in the movie); when he asks her what she needs for her birthday, she asks him for a phone (generation) and a "bush infant" (conquest).
As in Strangelove, the formal meeting scene in 2001 has a bureaucratic artificiality to it. The meeting starts with idle chatter as a photographer snaps images; handiest whilst he leaves does the real meeting start, however even then very little of real import is communicated, and Floyd's speech earrings fake. This meeting additionally recollects the gathering of the apes across the waterhole inside the "Dawn of Man" collection (as does the Korova Milkbar in Clockwork), with Floyd appearing because the bone-carrier and tribal chief, the alpha male, as is Alex while he chastises Dim (Warren Clarke) along with his cane at the Milkbar.
On board Discovery with HAL, Bowman and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) are at once hooked up as mirror twins (persevering with to propagate the movie's start metaphors), by using their bodily resemblance in addition to the contexts in which they're positioned: Bowman is left-surpassed and Poole is right-surpassed; Poole loses at chess to HAL (foreshadowing his demise at HAL's "hands") at the same time as Bowman sleeps, and Bowman indicates HAL his drawings while Poole sleeps; in most photographs presenting both astronauts, Bowman is to the proper and Poole to the left; HAL, too, has a dual 9000 pc again on Earth.
Poole, like Floyd's daughter, additionally gets a video-cellphone birthday want from his mother and father. Like the entirety else regarded by the two astronauts, the message is acquired with cool, torpid detachment; the isolation of space seems to have made them less human even than HAL, who indicates a peculiar mechanical moral sense when he asks Bowman if he has any "2nd mind" approximately the mission. Once he becomes aware of his personal "humanity," he realizes his fallibility and initiates a plot to break contact together with his "ideal" dual 9000 laptop on Earth. Once he reaches this superhuman country, Bowman and Poole come to be his gear, to be discarded while they are no longer beneficial.
In all three movies, there is a experience of the inevitable: the Forces of Evil (Ripper in Strangelove, HAL in 2001, Alex in Clockwork) set in movement an unstoppable, technological conquest of the unknown (the Doomsday Machine, the monolith, the Ludovico Technique), which ultimately ends in their own demise and/or rebirth. Indeed, suicide is a popular subject throughout the films as nicely, with Ripper killing himself after setting in motion the omnicide of all life on Earth, Bowman assembly his very own loss of life and rebirth as the Star-Child as a result of having destroyed HAL, and Alex's suicide try, which leads to his rebirth as his true, uninhibited self ("I become cured all proper").
All three Forces of Evil consider in their personal advanced judgment: Ripper says he believes he can answer for what he's carried out in the afterlife; HAL attributes his "mistake" to "human blunders"; and Alex's entire demeanor in the first Act of Clockwork indicates his consummate perception in his personal know-how and superiority to each person in his world. In all three films, the era that brings about violence does so as a result of running too well, instead of malfunctioning; in a manner, HAL is right: our "human blunders" is in growing those technology (nuclear weapons, omniscient computer systems, mechanical "healing procedures" for human violence) although we are not mentally and evolutionarily geared up to apply them. In this manner do the equipment we create turn out to be weapons that may spoil us.
The subject of start is illustrated again, in opposite, in HAL's regression to his personal "beginning" on the point of his "demise," when he sings, "Daisy." This is the cease of HAL and a brand new starting for Bowman whilst he discovers Floyd's pre-recorded briefing and embarks on the adventure to "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite," leading to his very own dying and rebirth. When he finds himself in an ornate, eighteenth century room as an vintage man, he has emerge as some thing more than himself: he is Man, now not simply a man and, as the Star-Child, he will become the New Man, an embodiment of the possibilities of humanity's evolution in the destiny. As Kubrick says, as quoted in Gene D. Phillips's 1975 ebook Stanley Kubrick: A Film Odyssey, "Somebody has said that Man is the lacking hyperlink between primitive apes and civilized human beings.... The problem exists, and the trouble is basically a ethical and non secular one."
Kubrick persevered to explore moral and non secular troubles in his next movie, A Clockwork Orange, which incorporates possibly his most ironic synthesis of music and photo; as Kubrick himself has said, "All the scenes of violence are very specific without the music" (as quoted in Rolling Stone mag, January 20, 1972).
Returning to the Swiftian satire of Strangelove, the otherworldly feel of Clockwork's not-too-remote destiny environs should lead one to accept as true with that Alex and his "droogs" and sufferers may be the New Man of the post mine-shaft international. The inherent evil of Man has been surpassed thru his era (HAL) and lower back into a human vessel (Alex, who later will become something of a technological assemble himself); we can see HAL's unblinking mechanical eye in Alex's own (accentuated by using a false eyelash) in the very first body of the movie.
Kubrick turned into inquisitive about B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), which he says "works on the idea that human freedom and dignity have grow to be inconsistent with the survival of our civilization... And Clockwork Orange may be very worried with this kind of concept" (also quoted in the aforementioned Rolling Stone article). Like the "fail-safe" systems and Doomsday Machine of Strangelove and the superhuman intelligence of HAL in 2001, the Ludovico Technique is a case of moral choice being relegated to machines or, in this case, a mechanical technique, which subsequently forces people (the government/military men of Strangelove, Bowman in 2001, and Alex in Clockwork) to reevaluate their own humanity.
Though Clockwork is visually and audibly greater like 2001, with its art deco environs and use of classical music, its satire and wordplay recollect Strangelove: like Generals Ripper and Turgidson, Alex's full call (Alexander de Large, which remembers Alexander the Great) has a greater subtle import; Alex sees himself because the remarkable conqueror of his global. Nadsat (Russian for "teenage"), the Slav-primarily based mystery language of Alex and his droogs, additionally has diverse symbolic meanings, Alex's favored phrase, "horrorshow," being the maximum good sized. From the Russian horosh, meaning "best" or "extraordinary," horrorshow is an ideal verbal symbol of the pleasure Alex feels on the aesthetics of violence, a feeling apparently shared by Strangelove's Turgidson ("Boy, I wish we had one of those Doomsday Machines"). Perhaps the maximum controversial aspect ofClockwork is its thesis that this is a herbal human trait that can't without difficulty be "civilized" away; in any case, Mr. Alexander (Patrick Magee) does no longer near or forestall his eyes during the rape of his spouse within the infamous "Singin' within the Rain" collection, and he later takes apparent pleasure in his revenge on Alex.
The Ludovico Technique, which transforms Alex into the titular metaphor (flesh on the outside, gears on the interior), is Clockwork's Plan R ("R for Robert" - see Strangelove): an ironic "shield" that secures peace by way of violent means; as the movie's Minister (Anthony Sharp) says, Alex "is impelled towards the good by, ironically, being impelled in the direction of evil." He then entreats the target audience to "examine all" of the horrorshow that proves Alex is cured. Ultimately, we the viewer are culpable as nicely, and the violence of the movie is incredibly stylized so as to make sure our amusement of it.
Though Alex seems the maximum perversely evil of the 3 Forces of Evil, he surely simplest murders one character (, counting Alexander's spouse, who dies sometime after the rape), even as HAL kills four and Ripper, who appears the least evil and the most simply deranged, correctly kills the whole international. Alex, too, is the only one left alive to exchange for the better at the cease of the movie, even though it is dubious that he'll. In the novel, but, there may be an additional chapter ignored of many versions (together with the only Kubrick study), in which Alex does ponder settling down and turning into a "proper citizen." Kubrick reportedly in no way preferred the e book's ending, but his film (in truth, all 3) quit on a observe of some ambiguity. Ultimately, Kubrick leaves it as much as the viewer to decide whether Man can ever evolve beyond his primitive desire for conquest and his willingness to desert proper morality in want of a "best" technological answer.
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