We three kings

The great works of Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola and F.W. Murnau make today's movies look like bags of tricks or boxes of soap.

By Michael Sragow

Jan 25, 2001 | Near the start of "Shadow of the Vampire," the producer of the 1922 vampire classic "Nosferatu" tells reporters that his 34-year-old director, F. W. Murnau, is Germany's greatest filmmaker. In 1964, when he commenced four and a half years' work on "2001: A Space Odyssey," you could argue that Stanley Kubrick, at age 36, was America's greatest young director. By 1974, the mantle had passed to Francis Ford Coppola, 35, who had already done the first two "Godfather" films and "The Conversation."

All these filmmakers came to mind in the last three weeks. Murnau via "Shadow of the Vampire." Coppola because of the recent A&E abortion of "The Great Gatsby," a novel he adapted differently, and superbly, 30 years ago. And every time we look at the calendar and see the year 2001, Kubrick again commands attention.

The best work of this trio makes today's most acclaimed releases seem like bags of tricks ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon") or boxes of soap ("You Can Count on Me"). They opened up complete new worlds for audiences through that mixture of expansive conceptions and machete-sharp perceptions that used to be the hallmark of film as a popular art. Kubrick, the moviemaker I'll consider first, turned an entire universe inside out.

Since our entrance into the new millennium, magazines and newspapers have filled feature pages with stories about whether reality has caught up with the mechanical marvels of Kubrick's space movie, from HAL the talking computer to the moon shuttle that runs more smoothly than our intercity air shuttles. Nearly all the coverage is by science writers who reduce Kubrick's groundbreaking, space-shattering spectacle to a piece of technological prophecy. Even the DVD included in Warner Home Video's Stanley Kubrick Collection contains as its one significant extra a prerelease press conference with Kubrick's co-writer, Arthur C. Clarke. The sci-fi guru positions the movie as a psychic shock absorber, preparing mankind for the first jolting contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.

Once those science topics are exhausted, what's left are the enigmas within and around the movie itself. How did Kubrick manage to make a big-studio epic without a conventional plot? What held audiences then and continues to fascinate them now?

"2001: A Space Odyssey" endures not as crystal-ball gazing, but as a mad amalgam of science and showmanship. Its beauty and bombast are as much a part of our culture as "The Wizard of Oz." A TV commercial for a minivan has only to play Kubrick's thundering quotes from "Also Sprach Zarathustra" and we know that the ad guys are referring to the director's big black slabs. Watching the film straight through for the first time in 21 years, I was amazed to see how its shadow stretched not merely over obvious candidates like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Contact" but also over a kids' classic like "Toy Story." When Buzz Lightyear cries out, "To Infinity and Beyond," he echoes Kubrick's title card, "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite."

The "Dawn of Man" opening of the movie has been endlessly pillaged and parodied and spun off; it's hard to imagine even films like "Dinosaur" and "Cast Away" without it. With typical audacity, Kubrick began his picture with tribes of ape-men competing for food and water and being nudged into humanhood by a mysterious perfect ebony slab that inspires their use of weaponry. Is Kubrick saying that man is innately vicious -- or that he just needs technology to survive?

The film's directorial poker face is part of its blend of challenge and charm. What's crucial is that Kubrick thrusts us into vast and undefined landscapes that make us feel -- like those man-apes -- helpless before natural forces or more aggressive animals. We experience the chaos of those prehistoric times -- of living without a sense of time and space -- and instinctively appreciate the bone tool as the world's first ordering agent. If it enables man to secure his position on Earth, it also gives him a greater capacity to destroy.

The movie starts with the emergence of Homo sapiens; it ends with the emergence of homo who-knows?. Keir Dullea, the lone survivor of a space mission to Jupiter, undergoes a strange death and transfiguration under the spell of the same (or an identical) black slab. He becomes a figure in an astral fetal sac, leaving us in the exact dilemma we experienced two hours before. Is he an upwardly mobile, evolutionary mutation? Should we be singing those lyrics from "Hair": "Good Morning, Starshine, the Earth says 'hello'"? Or is he a monster capable of crushing a planet between his fingers?

The British critic Clive James, in his Cambridge University student days, ascribed the shifts in the film (which he thought was a masterpiece) to a clash in sensibility between Kubrick and Clarke. According to James, Kubrick, unlike Clarke, believes in neither progress nor entropy: What draws out this director is the spectacle of change. For example, in the movie's midsection, a paralyzingly dull squad of scientists analyze a black slab buried in the moon, trace a homing signal to Jupiter and then send astronaut-scientists Dullea and Gary Lockwood (and three other hibernating crew members) to investigate it.

Even the most famous jokes in the moon sequence are warmed-over burlesque. "What's that?" asks one bland scientist of another who is eating a synthetic mystery-meat sandwich. "Chicken?"

"Something like that," he replies. "Tastes the same anyway." Most of Kubrick's defenders chalk up the banal dialogue to an Orwellian parody of the poetry-denuded vocabulary of the future. (It's telling that the movie describes the astronauts' hibernation as sleep without dreams.) But James sees it as an indication that, in years to come, verbal poetry will lose out to visual poetry. It's a neat argument: a solid-state theory of beauty!

I think it's Kubrick's contradictions, not his syntheses, that make the movie fascinating. In one of Kubrick's funniest and most graceful cuts -- OK, one of the funniest and most graceful cuts in movie history -- the ape-man's jagged bone-weapon, flung into the air in victory, becomes a streamlined nuclear weapons satellite. The edit from a somersaulting bone tool to a lithe 21st century spacecraft emphasizes the wonder of man's tenacity and the intelligence mirrored in his technology. As soon as we go inside, Kubrick seems to be condemning future men for ceding their human qualities to machines. Yet when he plays "The Blue Danube" as the shuttle and a space station do an extended waltz, the director is doing the humanizing.

Next Page: Coppola's "Gatsby"

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