Word: kubrick
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...thing we ought to clear up right away: Stanley Kubrick was not, as careless journalism always insisted, reclusive. Elusive was a better word for him; seclusive the best one, implying, one hopes, that his refusal of fame's odious and stupefying obligations was a conscious, clarifying choice he had embraced, not a neurotic compulsion to which he had surrendered...
...Internet--and, indeed, in person, if you happened near the admittedly narrow British realm where he had sequestered himself since 1961. Among this group in the days after his sudden death, at 70, on March 7, there was a more powerful need than usual to talk fondly about Kubrick, as if by so doing they could fill the sudden silence that had descended on their lives...
...that the latter had carelessly missed. To a filmmaker desperately behind schedule, he might offer to share his state-of-the-art editing suite to speed things up. To a harried studio executive, he might provide an evening of baseball nostalgia, centered on the New York Yankees, beloved since Kubrick's Bronx boyhood. Maybe Warren Beatty caught the delicious dynamic of those encounters best when he observed, "You always assumed Stanley knew something you didn't know...
That was clearly true of many facts and ideas. But the significant thing about Kubrick was that he built his life-style and life's work around a few simple, widely acknowledged verities: that our universe is ruled by chance, that life is too short, that movies are, or ought to be, primarily a visual medium. The difference between him and us was that he didn't regard these as mere talking points. He acted on them. Obsessively...
Take the question of chance, for instance, and recall The Killing (1956), the first true Kubrick movie. The elaborate heist of the day's handle at a race track, a model of rational planning, goes perfectly. And then, at the last moment, the sappy lady and her yappy little dog appear--mischance absurdly personified--and ruin everything. Remember 1964's Dr. Strangelove as well. How delicately the title character and his ilk poised the balance of terror, how little they considered the possibility that there might be someone out there like General Jack D. Ripper. Best of all, think...