Kubrick Confronted Holocaust--Indirectly

Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s career was haunted by the Holocaust, so haunted that, ironically, he seems not to have been able to address the subject straight on. With his death, therefore, it might seem a special tragedy that he never brought his artistry directly to bear on it. Kubrick’s genius, however, allowed him to treat the Holocaust indirectly--and thus all the more powerfully--in his life’s work.

Kubrick, with his films on war, violence, alienation and evil, was constantly accused of having too bleak a view of humanity. He held that the universe was not created by God alone but by powers of good and evil. This made him a realist rather than a cynic, a realist who viewed the glass of humanity as half-full rather than half-empty.

Kubrick argued that it was those who expected too much of humanity who scarred history most deeply through attempts to fill the half-empty glass of presumed human perfection. Kubrick’s reluctance to confront the greatest human evil of all must therefore be seen as an indication of despair rather than cynicism. To acknowledge directly the horror of the Nazi Final Solution would be to fully contemplate creation’s empty glass.

Kubrick was born into a Jewish family in the Bronx in 1928. The original European branches of his family resided in the region of Galicia in eastern Austria and western Ukraine. Before he had graduated from high school, the Jews of Galicia had been wiped out in the Holocaust.

All his life, Kubrick would display a curious approach-avoidance syndrome toward all things German. He repeatedly considered properties and screenplays on or by Germans--Stefan Zweig’s “The Burning Secret,” Albert Speer’s “Inside the Third Reich,” Louis Begley’s “Wartime Lies”--and dropped them. He displayed a predilection for fast German cars, but when he made a World War I film on location in Germany, he depicted not a single German soldier. The only German in the film is a young woman who sings of love and loss to a crowd of French soldiers. The actress became Kubrick’s wife (as fate would have it, she was the niece of Veit Harlan, who in 1940 had directed the vile anti-Semitic Nazi film, “Jew Suss”). The only actual Nazi in a Kubrick film is the eponymous Dr. Strangelove and he is a cartoon character in a black comedy.

The Holocaust itself, however, turned up in 1980 as an almost invisible but shattering subtext in Kubrick’s recasting of Stephen King’s horror novel, “The Shining.” It is in this film that the genius of the director’s indirect discourse on the Holocaust creates a deeply laid artistic statement on how humans forget to remember that which they want to forget. As Kubrick said during the filming, “One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious: We can see the dark side without having to confront it directly.” The allusions to the Holocaust in this film appear as tiny terrifying symbols, such as Volkswagens, Bartok’s 1937 night music (written in protest to Nazism), a German typewriter (symbol of the bureaucracy of extermination) and the number 42 (as in the year 1942, the year the Nazis launched the Final Solution).

Kubrick’s last film, “Eyes Wide Shut,” which is scheduled for release in July, betrays this same creative tension. For the first--and only--time, Kubrick has changed the time and place of the action of the film from the original source. Instead of Arthur Schnitzler’s Vienna in the 1920s, we are in Kubrick’s hometown of New York in the 1990s. There is thus no Galitzinberg villa, with its echoes of Kubrick’s family home of Galicia, where the novella’s fateful rendezvous is staged. Perhaps the echoes of the hiss of gas around the Jews of Galicia were too loud in that name for Kubrick.

Now that Kubrick’s eyes are closed, what traces of the great horror there are in his last film await audiences with their eyes wide open.