More Addictions

Most of you are probably aware that I have recently come under the spell of Stanley Kubrick, that legendary auteur responsible for classics ranging from “Spartacus” to “Full Metal Jacket.” A new chapter in my addiction to the man’s work occurred last week, when I decided it was time to get even more work out of our new Blu Ray player. I headed down to our local Blockbuster looking for something I could partake of without the commitment of a purchase, and quickly settled on “The Shining” for several reasons:

1. Stanley Kubrick

2. Stanley Kubrick

3. I had seen it freshman year of college, but never since then, and my viewing at that time had been partially obstructed by obnoxious drunk people (side note: who gets wasted watching “The Shining?” People I knew in college, apparently).

I brought it home, popped it in, and when it was over I was happy I had seen it. That was pretty much that.

Until the next day…

For some reason, the disc would hum at me quietly, sitting in its little case, and watching it became like scratching an itch. I would just pop in certain scenes at first, and this didn’t alarm me, but as the number of scenes I needed to watch grew I came to recognize something was going on here. I was becoming addicted to the blasted thing. Needless to say, the movie did not find its way back onto Blockbuster’s shelves until well past the due date, and by that time I had already resolved that a purchase was necessary. So, the day after I begrudgingly returned custody to the video store, I hopped in the car and adopted my very own copy from Best Buy for a very reasonable $15. From there I proceeded to engorge myself on this thing five or six more times, including one time with an utterly befuddled Corelyn, who repeatedly wandered into our living room all week asking, “You’re watching this again?”

Yes I am. Rather than list off what makes this movie great, because that’s what you’re expecting, let me tell you some things this movie does that the average director would advise you NEVER to do. By seeing these, you may come to appreciate better how utterly mystifying the talent of Stanley was. How in the heck did he make such great movies by ignoring good, common sense so often?

1. Never center-frame everything, especially not actors. But he absolutely does. Even in dialogue scenes, the actors’ noses sit dead in the center of your television; sometimes he cuts between two center-framed actors, which should look terrible. You may not realize it, but plopping talking heads right on the viewfinder’s crosshairs is jarring as hell, modern cinema has spent the last twenty years getting you used to a frame that justifies to the left or right. At USC it is generally taught that center-framing is an amateur mistake, and a less colorful way of composing. Most of the time that’s true. When Kubrick does it, it’s somehow genius.

2. Keep the performances subtle. Nope, he refuses. Every actor, especially Nicholson, blows gloriously over the top. I still haven’t figured out why that works. Ol’ Jack himself has said he thinks that Stanley was never interested in “realism,” which is a stylistic trend in even the most absurd of modern movies, like “Transformers.” For instance: giant robots may be ridiculous, but the movie endeavors to make people react to them in a way that is somewhat like how they really would. Kubrick, it seems, didn’t really care about that, at least not in “The Shining.” He somehow knew that operatic performances would get the story done better, and he was, against all odds, correct. How did he know that?

3. Use longer lenses. “Thank you but no,” he seemed to say. Stanley lived and breathed on wide angle, even on moving shots. It’s a basic fact that these types of lenses can fish-eye the crap out of your image, and trendsetting movies like the “Bourne” films have made telephoto composition with incredibly shallow depth of field the hip way to go. I mean, sure, everyone uses them for masters or shooting scenery, but it’s unheard of to cover dialogue with these things, or track movement with them the way he did. His steadicam operators had their hands full, too, because if their camera dipped even slightlty, the whole frame was a funhouse mirror.

4. Do a couple of takes and move on. There is a medium close up on an actor named Scatman Crothers in “The Shining” which covers about 3-5 pages of dialogue. This shot was done over 100 times. Most others had at least 40 or 50. If you are anything less than flabbergasted at this, I want you to stand in front of a mirror and slowly read a paragraph from a book 100 times in a row. Shelley Duvall was required to repeat a scene of fleeing up a flight of stairs so many times that she ran the equivalent of the Empire State Building. This does not border on fanaticism, it blows right past it.

Was he right to do this? Would 99 takes have done it? That is the mystery of Stanley Kubrick. We know two things: he did an obscene number of takes, his movies are great. Those two facts almost inevitably have something to do with each other, but the exact nature of their relationship is debatable. No one can say for sure that the 40th take wasn’t just as good as the 109th, and that everything else wasn’t just the price of his genius. Or maybe take 115 really did contain something that made his movies what they are. No one will ever really know.

5. Stay loyal to your source material. Not a chance. It’s no secret that Stephen King doesn’t like the movie. I don’t blame him, “The Shining” was a very personal novel about Stephen King’s demons, and the movie is about Stanley Kubrick’s. Personally speaking, I find slavish loyalty to a book to be overrated; it worked for “Sin City” and “Atonement,” but most of the time it’s best to try and honor the piece by changing more than just the medium of its delivery. I think it’s exhilirating that the movie and the novel can be considered separately and together; neither depends on the other, but both can coexist. Best of all worlds.

6. Keep the pace snappy. Anyone who has watched five solid minutes of a space ship docking to “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” in “2001″ knows what Stanley thinks of that rule. His films are fastidious, obsessed with details and intricacies that may or may not matter to the plot. If any of his movies adhered to the three-act character arc, it was likely a coincidence more than anything else. “The Shining” is no exception to this rule, featuring massive tracking shots using the relatively new SteadiCam (operated by its inventor, Garrett Brown), and scenes that crawl at a glacial pace, attempting something more like visual poetry than stark realism.