Frozen in Terror! COLD PREY, WIND CHILL, DEAD OF WINTER (AKA LOST SIGNAL), DEVIL'S PASS, COLD PREY 2

It's always nice to ride out the brutal chills of February with horror films more frozen than oneself. I'm writing this during the Winter Olympics, a time wherein watching people shooting and skiing and luging and snowboarding on TV while being all lazy and snug can after a few consecutive days make one start to feel guilty and lazy. But watching motivated, handsome, disciplined snowboarders and hikers get stuck in the middle of white-out nowhere and fight for survival against unseen foes can make one feel their decision to stay indoors, at home, the very fount of wisdom and strength.

Here are four solid examples I've seen this week, some of which are on Netflix streaming at the moment. So make sure the flask on the collar of your St. Bernard is filled with cognac and that your windows are boarded up tight. Keep the heater's close and the emergency generator closer....You'll need both.

Of course there's already some classics of this genre which hold the gold standard, now and forever, like The Thing from 1951, The Thing from 1982, and The Thing from 2011 (here). And there's also my recent most favorite, Pontypool, here.

COLD PREY

("Fritt Vilt") 2006 - Dir. Roar Uthaug
***

Viktoria Winge (above) is a gorgeous Nordic alien hybrid gone away for a weekend of snowboarding, way off the Norwegian ski map grid, with a group of friends, but when one of them breaks his leg they seek shelter at a big abandoned ski lodge / hotel and... hey, it's not totally abandoned, so it seems, and the generator still works... and there are dusty half-full liquor bottles waiting in the cozy lounge. Nice! But soft, they're not alone, and the place is mighty, mighty large. It's like a cozier Overlook if no one ever came back after Shelly and son split in dead Scat's Snowcat.

Proud of its generic slasher roots, Uthaug's film--gorgeously photographed by Daniel Voldheim--builds up careful attention to set and setting (looks like a real abandoned Norwegian ski lodge!) with measured quality, wit, and inexorable tick-tock momentum, studiously avoiding the usual dripping industrial torture basement Rob Zombie video look of so many similar 'wayfarers stranded in a remote killer's lair' horrors. Instead, the vibe is all the more unnerving for being so cozy, with just certain things 'off' that begin to mount up. As the kids take over the ski lodge lounge area, lowering the remaining booze bottle water lines, starting a fire, and goofing around, they never lapse into that annoying American imbecilic snickering kind of dialogue that feels like it was written by ephebiphobic middle-aged virgins. Here the characters interact and play off each other very well and the climactic battle way out in the middle of the frozen emptiness is unique and totally chilling, literally, figuratively, and other-ly... In Norwegian with English subtitles, not that you really need them.

WIND CHILL

2007 - Dir. Gregory Jacobs
**

Emily Blunt plays a type of college student here that very few films realize exists but whom I know very well: the old-before-her-time hottie who's gotten away with being 'difficult' for so long she doesn't know how to stop. Dismissing all the guys she meets as losers or pervs, and all the girls as jealous or fat, she grows so used to judging everyone it's only gradually she realizes how alone she's become. Having this type in a horror film is tricky --in her armored narcissistic bubble, she's impervious to threat. We have to worry for her and it's tempting not to carem especially when she's so blind to danger she even accepts a ride home to Delaware for the holidays from a creepy freshman (Ashton Holmes) who seems to know way too much about her before she even gets in the car.

Director Gregory Jacobs' film might have been creepy enough just from Holmes slowly revealing he doesn't actually live anywhere near where he's taking her, and the whole ride share thing is a ploy to meet her, but that's gradually tossed away like Marion Crane's $40,000 once they're stuck on a lonesome side road, visited by an array of ghosts, including a scary psycho cop played by an against-type Martin Donovan.

 Snowman skull subliminal!

Produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, there seems to have been some original intention to make this a creepy two-hander with a creepy freshman stalker and an antisocial upperclassman narcissist forced to depend on one another for survival, but along the way a bunch of ghosts and a complete disconnection from reality sinks in and sinks it. It's almost like the filmmakers realized there wasn't enough material for a feature in the first idea, so drug in anything they could think of along the way to keep the twists coming, hoping it would all right itself in the end. As viewers, we'll always dig the way the collapse of the social sphere that comes and disorienting symbolic structure make one privy to the tricks of ghosts, as long as there's some awesome twist or gotcha moment to snap all the disparate elements into place at the end. Not to spoil things, but there isn't. At least Blunt gets a much warranted chance to carry a film.

The journey is supposed to be through Pennsylvania, a very creepy place, but was actually shot in Canada, where life is cheap! 

DEAD OF WINTER

 (AKA LOST SIGNAL)

(2006) Dir. Brian McNamara
 ***1/4

In case you never tried it, driving at night in wintery weather when you're tripping way too hard on psychedelics is a very nerve-wracking and bizarre experience, especially wearing smudgy glasses. For one thing, your sense of three-dimensional space is way off: the road feels like it's just a postcard in your lap, yet the frost on the edges of your windshield seems to extend before you like a tunnel of ice. When the traffic lights change your heart jumps in your throat--the newly arrived colors prism through the salty windshield wiped dirt in extreme primary and secondary color blasts, like a UFO seen in a lake reflection after someone just fell in. DEAD OF WINTER gets that, sort of. And it's enough, mostly.

Taking place over one long crazy night, the film follows a young couple (Al Santos and Sandra McCoy) who do some flavored shots they don't know are spiked with LSD at a New Years party. They split before midnight, but the drugs hit on the drive home and soon they get lost and wind up either being chased by evil killers or just shadows from backyard fences and tree branches. This doesn't make too much sense as the couple does lines of coke at the party, so they should at least know they're high on something when they start hallucinating strange pursuers in the reflection of the gas station quick mart fridge doors. But they're clearly amateurs and they panic. At the first sign of ghost cops they abandon their car and get lost in the woods, the kind of ghost cops a seasoned tripper would know to ignore. But are they crazy or is someone really out to get them behind the hallucinations? Kudos to the film that for a fair chunk we cannot tell.

I like to think that if director Brian McNamara had the budget he could have created some nice woodland night-tripping hallucinations and I hiss like a rabid snake at this film's detractors who clearly have never been lost in the woods at night after having taken too much LSD, grown convinced that their girlfriend is trying to kill them, and/or felt the pressure from ghost bathroom attendants to dump all your drugs down into the safety of their throat all on the same night. I also know the feeling of seeing a face -- usually a townie with a thousand yard stare -- who always seems to be watching you from behind some partition in the basement while you and your friends are playing darts, and this townie represents your death, and no one else can see him, not that you ask them, because you're too fucked up to voice such an insanely complicated sentence. And when you finally go up to confront him he turns out to be a mix of shadow from the stairway and a macrame owl hung. Instead of being calmed by the sight of the owl you're even more afraid -  where did Death go? You can feel the darts hitting you and drawing blood though the game's long over. You turn to the 1.75 of Old Granddad to wipe the electric madness away and the weird genderless old face on the label seems to melt and wink at you. And if you're me, what do you do? Get your ass home, carefully. If you wig out on the way, just think about what you'll put on the VCR once you get home. I recommend Betty Boop or The Cocoanuts (1929). It will get you safely down from the ledge.

Still McNamara should have checked imdb.com before naming his film --there's about 80 movies called Dead of Winter. Lost Signal is a pretty weak title, too. May I suggest Acid Snow? Or Ice Tripping? No one comes to me with these things, but they should. Or shouldn't. What do I know?

Another problem is how much atmosphere gets lost through cutting over to the toasty police station with various phone calls to law enforcement both by and about the trippers: it saps the trippy momentum (it would have been great if we never saw who was on the other line, and had the lady cop just shows up out of the darkness), and yet this is all apparently based on a true story, with recorded 911 calls to prove it! Hell, I believe it. The woods are mysterious, dark and deep; anyone who's been to them at night, lost, scared, on psychedelics, knows how their ancient magic can bend reality and expose deep archetypal roots that are too vivid and real for normal adult daytime senses to decode. If the hallucinations in this film are much less elaborate than, say, the top shelf 'becoming-animal' visions of Kristen Stewart after a face full of swamp spores in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), at least it tries, and that's what counts, and what's better, it succeeds more often than not, because it dares to be vague. Even without CGI or LSD, Dead of Winter allows us to can see what schizophrenics, animals, and psychic mediums see all the time: the fifth dimensional vortex intelligences of the woods, and how the trees are in on the cosmic joke. Which came first, the ghost or our ability to finally see it?! Those trees know, but they'll only tell when you're too fucked up to believe their answer.

The low budget is no problem in that regard and in its small way, Winter is a sleeper little icicle of modernist ambiguity and film fans who groove on modernist 'collapse of objective reality' ambiguity like Blair Witch Project, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, or The Shining or Antonioni's Red Desert, will understand what director Brian McNamara and writers Robert Egan and Graham Silver are aiming for. These cats clearly know the full range of horrors that LSD can create out of the winter sights and sounds, and having gone to college (and all that entails) up in wintry, LSD-drenched Syracuse I--as we say in AA--really related. Your mileage may vary, but the world can't wait all day for you to catch up, and Dead is--at least for a decent chunk--a fine entry in the modernist alienation collapse-of-the-symbolic horror genre, the kind where we can't tell whether or not the protagonist/s (and by extension the viewer) are being fucked with by external (ghosts - gaslighting spouses, tree spirits) or internal (latent psychosis, LSD, cabin fever) forces --and if quantum physics tells us anything, there is no difference.

\ COLD PREY 2

("Fritt Vilt II") 2008 - Dir. Roar Uthaug

***1/2

The first was so good I had to go back for seconds, especially after learning that the sequel picks up right where the last one left off, ala Halloween 2, covering both that film's similar 'later that night' immediacy and 'following the final girl to the local hospital' change of territory. Character development stays as solid as it did in the original. The new flight of actors stay likable (no sleaze bag goombas like H2's EMT), and the vibe and beautiful cinematography from the first film carry over, flawlessly. The action takes its sweet time regrouping, chronicling the interaction of a sleepy little Norwegian local hospital in the process of closing (shades of Assault on Precinct 13). Suddenly confronted by all these murders and a comatose killer, they react with typical Nordic efficiency. There's a vivid sense of the vast emptiness of all those treeless Norwegian mountain regions, the lifeless still beauty of the ice and winding roads. Those of us who have misgivings about the medical community's insistence on saving the lives of mortally wounded psychopathic killers will be very pleased at the comeuppance rewarded this 'heroic' practice (they indignantly stop the final girl from pulling his plug). The crazy loner sociopath Viking murderer figure is a nice representation of the bloody past of the Norwegian people rising up from the ancient past and into the country's current sleepy socialized medication/education system to smite the sophisticated, racially uniform, and far too-trusting youths. And it's pretty gratifying to see our heroine finally wise up and go all Ripley in Aliens. 

Check out the whole issue of Acidemic devoted to their grace and hotness -- issue #7 - The Nordics. 

  DEVIL'S PASS

(2013) - Dir Renny Harlin
**

Renny Harlin is back, his ear low to the ground, budget bloody but still existant. Has there been a director who's both made and lost so much money so fast? Now he's playing it a little wiser, ala recent work by De Palma and Coppola - getting back to their low budget roots, returning to an off-the-hip approach that allows no chance for budgetary bloating. Devil's Pass (written by Vikram Weet) work a chilled found footage plot that combines elements of many other films melded to the very real mystery of the the 1959 Dyatlov Pass mystery, but there is much wodka shots! Nostrovia! 

The thing about a great mystery like Dyatlov, though, is that any 'answer' is going to be a let-down compared to the juice of the mystery. Harlin does manage to keep the diegetic cameras whiplash-free and to ensure there's always some new layer to penetrate, and the acting is pretty top flight (especially Holly Goss in the "I gave you back the map" Heather role), but Harlin never lets the inhospitable barren mountain snowscapes tear the tent fabric of anyone's objective social reality and so the paralyzing fear associated with being unmoored from the symbolic order vanishes with the first explanatory note. In the future, Harlin, don't let the symbolic or explanatory contextualize the mystery! The refusal to commit to a set point of view about what's going on is part of what made Blair Witch and The Shining (and in this list, Dead of Winter) work so well. If you can't handle the impossibility of objective truth, you should never have looked farther than your own backyard, and certainly not ventured into the white abyss... that's for trippers with balls of ice... Roar, Uthaug! Roar.

Caretaker Sparkle: ROOM 237

\

from top: "Autobiographical Nexusplation" (Erich collage), ROOM 237, THE SHINING.

ROOM 237, Rodney Ascher's documentary about THE SHINING's many interpretations, is a lightning crack to the head, the rush of oxygen into the brain via such sudden trepanation is invigorating even as your reality fades. Paranoid psychosis is very contagious and even more terrifying than the film itself, it mirrors all our film deconstruction / analysis any piece of art, especially one that taps as many deep murky subconscious aquifers as THE SHINING. From the dry Bordwellian breakdowns (as in "before getting started, we all have to agree what we mean by a film") to the ultimately meaningless doctoral theses of professors caught in publish-or-perish bid for tenure, to the gonzo freaks like me who see what we want to see through magic glasses, it's all valid, regardless those who consider every Rorshach blot solvable might think. Those of us who aren't nailed to the cross of reductionism, we know the truth - the blot is fluid in its interpretation, the more it starts to move around on the page, to animate itself. To fix it to one meaning is death, or boredom, which is worse.

'See,' he entertainment PR gods have conditioned us to 'recall' movies with an ever-dwindling series of studio-sanctioned iconic images and quotes that work as 'touchstones' - "Say hello to my leedle fren" or "Frankly, Scarlet..." . In  THE SHINING's case it means the grinning Jack Nicholson Torrance peering through his bathroom axe crack exclaiming "Heee-rree's Johnny!" The more it's reduced to that, the fewer interpretations our left-hand sides of the brain allow. But hey, the SHINING's power is that it's just crazy enough to survive and resist any chance to dumb it down, to reduce it to a few fun quotes ("and a nice chianti"). The more we try to reduce it to grinning Jack T-shirts the less we remember the actual details of a film that seems to lose all contact with the outside world. Forget about being reduced to a simple icon, Mr. Torrance. the SHINING is all about losing all connection to icons, all signifiers, until objective consensual 'meaning' vanishes into the fog of the purely subjective, and even Shelly Duvall starts seeing the ghosts. 

In ROOM 237 however, we get as close as we are likely to in quantifying at least some aspects of madness, the madness of obsessive fans, likely loners with a good liberal arts education, enhanced by some wild psychedelic experiences along the way ("ahem"), making them 'legally insane' (as they used to think tripping more than seven times did to you).  Ascher has taken the kind of patient intellectual time a paranoiac collage demands, showing the same thoughtful approach to the subjective nature of human analytic perception that Kubrick did with the source material. As a result, the madness of cabin fever within Kubrick's film (the death of consensual reality when the 'real' world is cut off) becomes refracted into a dozen different facets of meaning. These theories are gold, far too shiny to take seriously (even Jack Torrance roll his eyes at some of the theories-via the constant editing collage, blooming with chance or otheer synchronicity), but you have to wonder at touches like the decal of Dopey from SNOW WHITE on Danny's closet that is visible on his door before his first 'shine' of the bloody torrent (torrent-torrance) but gone afterwards, reflecting, perhaps, Danny's getting wise to what horrors are in store and taking his first steps towards his inevitable survival.

Hey, if Kubrick did put in that little touch intentionally, how nice it was finally recognized. I like to imagine that one day my own weird details will be recognized--even if they were put there purely by unconscious 'accident' (as in the Kubrick fashionista above, for whom I added an axe which I thought at first would look like it was just a real axe coming out of her chest, but then noticed to my surprise it looks like part of her fur coat--does it make it less valid if I didn't 'intend' that?). Artists do intentionally odd touches for just such a reason, like messages in a bottle tossed seaward. If it turns out the bottle reaches someone across the ocean, then you succeeded, even if the wrong person found it. Maybe it will take a hundred years, but there's a strange satisfaction, a hope, that sooner or later even the most arcane and oblique subliminal messages we leave in our art or writing will be found by someone, or something, after it crosses time's ocean, and that the one who finds it will recognize they are not alone in being obsessive and reading way too much into everything they see. 

But the really trippy moments, for me, come when one fan talks about playing the film twice at the same time with two projectors, one running the film backwards, and overlaying the images (below). The effect is so perfect  -- at least in the parts they show us --- that it seems intentional on Kubrick's part. Who knows? any rate, Ascher clearly uses the idea of subliminal strange messages to heart, and with it the understanding perhaps of the joys to be found when when signifiers-signified chains are finally broken in the mind. When we no longer know what is coincidence, intentional, what you see vs. what there is, when symbols no longer point to one thing, then the true ambiguous freedom created by our super ego's surrender becomes electric.

Backwards and forwards - makes Wendy an alert girl

PART 2:

In which the ROOM 237 Strategem is employed by me for all of the Kub's films. 

In other words, even if it's not intentional, if it's there it has meaning. In the ingenious editing schemata of ROOM 237, images we forgot from the film are taken out of context and highlighted for their otherworldly brilliance - and they connect perfectly to shots from Kubrick's other masterpieces. 2001, CLOCKWORK ORANGE, even DR. STRANGELOVE all bring home the vibe of pure murderous madness that most war footage cannot capture (1). Hence as illustrations here, some of my own collages, mixing THE SHINING with the films 2001 and CLOCKWORK which were his preceding best films, and one can argue SHINING is his last great one, unless you dare to count EYES WIDE SHUT, which in my mind is the work of a man having a nervous breakdown from trying to crack open Tom Cruise's hard nut candy shell (PS - I recently reviewed EYES with the ROOM 237 mind control enhancement vision, and if I don't quite love it any more than I used to, I am now more unnerved by it, truly).

The mission of Acidemic - inherent in the title - stems from the original phrase of Aldous Huxley, "if the doors of perception were cleansed everything, would appear as it really is, infinite."  I mention this because cleansing the doors of cinematic perception is Kubrick's chosen task in all his films, though in this case he's using beauty and formal design to shine light on the darker truths we'd prefer to keep hidden (and perhaps when we find his films boring it is because our subconscious is doing just that, refusing to recognize itself in the mirror, so intentionally misreading the symbols, dismissing that which would incriminate it), but for better or worse or much, much worser, the dark heart is in there. The obelisk in 2001 teaches apes how to use his first tool, not for constructive purposes, but crush their enemies skulls in, so they--the chosen, the apes who dared touch it--can vanquish and destroy those who refused this knowledge, who listened to God and didn't eat from the forbidden tree. It is who we are the aggressors. Our genes survived centuries because our ancestors killed the meek competitors for the bread of the earth. The strong apes procreate and endure, the weak die and are killed --or endure only as food for the living. We can judge the evil of the Nazis all we want, but what makes America 'great' in the end is that we wiped out millions of people and got away with it, and they didn't. We were lucky - we were were massacring a people with no relatives in the legal profession, or with friends in high places. No sense of the mad colonial game that had caught on over the 'civilized' European nations, we just walked right in and took their shit. And when they squawked, killed them down to the infants.

And above all, there were no video cameras. No Twitter. No UN. No witnesses = no crime. At any rate, we got what we wanted, and now we're really sorry. Not enough that we'd give anything back, though.

"We're going to make a new rule" 

That kind of genocide seems barbaric now, to us, but part of that is because it is so far away in the past, or so it seems. Kubrick is maybe telling us that the old growth trees and stark Donner Party mountains may have taken pictures as durable as any Panaflex. At any rate, it may feel that way to Kurbick, for if he studied history what other determination could he arrive at? The Gandhis are few and far between and they suffer well but hardly cinematically. A Kubrick hunger strike film would be unbearable. We want to see the crimes behind our fortunes, what outside/alien force, its technology 'indistinguishable from magic' - gave our parents the evil cajones to pay for our schooling and grad present Jaguar? The nice guy parents spend money on funerals and bail bonds, and anything left over goes to the church plate, or lottery tickets. The guys who get 'help' are the killers, the parents with smart investments.

The behavioral modification techniques of CLOCKWORK and FULL METAL JACKET are examples of dehumanizing conditioning that has backfired, and then the last minute rescue of Tom Cruise in EYES as if some patient girl plucked the ape's hand from that obelisk at the last minute, keeping us, as it were, blind forever. Through evil parents only does a child has the luxury to be good. The ape-like violence may be what holds us back, keeps us in a continual loop of paranoia and hostility, but it fuels our drive forward. Where would our moon landing be without the Russians snapping at our heels (as in Floyd's stonewalling the Russians in 2001)? War without a divided self is impossible. Jack is told he must kill his family because the boy has contacted an 'outside party' (Jack has made contact with the 'inside party' which is fine - he's white). In other words, the boy has 'talked' to the Russians; he's betrayed the trust of the big other...  He's "disclosed."

"Maisie Squared" 

Hence I made the collages in this post from images taken not only from THE SHINING but 2001 and CLOCKWORK ORANGE, to tie them all in together the better perhaps to illuminate continuing themes on the nature of perception, the manipulation of consciousness for external purposes, and the dawning of madness almost as a stage of advanced hyper-evolution.

"He went and did a very silly thing" 

Still, even half one of my fish doesn't buy everything. And ROOM 237 itself seems to be snickering at some of these more loco ideas, such as the singing of The 3 Little Pigs refrain ("I'll huff and I'll puff") as a link to the Holocaust.

The ever-didactic The Onion AV Club spoke to Kubrick's assistant to see if the insane theories on the film were 'correct' mainly:

"The suggestions that Kubrick was commenting on the Holocaust by having Jack Nicholson echo an old, anti-Semitic Disney cartoon by reciting “Three Little Pigs” (it was improvised in the moment) or do his writing on a German Adler typewriter (it was Kubrick’s and it looked good). Or the theory that briefly glimpsed cans of Calumet baking powder are supposed to be reminiscent of the Native American genocide (the cans had pretty colors). Or that Kubrick was actually retelling Greek myth by featuring a poster of a Minotaur (“It’s a downhill skier,” Vitali says. “It’s not a Minotaur”). Or that Kubrick was admitting complicity in faking the moon landing by having Danny wear an Apollo 11 sweater (a friend of the costume designer knitted it, and Kubrick wanted something handmade (more)

"A few extra foot-pounds of energy per second" 

It is course contrary to purpose to ask the assistant if Kubrick intended any of this as a secret code. ROOM 237 itself avoids all contact with the actual filmmakers. It's rare filmmakers are as able to deconstruct their unconscious' secret code as obsessive viewers who see the thing in itself, as divested of authorial post-release meaning-assignation as a patient trying to argue what his dreams mean with a therapist. When a baseball flies at your head out of nowhere do you call your assistant and let him know you plan to duck? No, then how can you say you really ducked the baseball? Our unconscious is where real art comes from, without it all you have is cold, dead craftsmanship. And, while the craft is solid in THE SHINING, if any film can be said to exist almost entirely in the unconscious it's this one. The Onion article backtracks on that to point out that Of course, all of Vitali’s protests ignore the separating of authorial intent that is key to any deconstruction of a work of art, as well as the fact that Nazis are still clearly watching Vitali from their secret, Indian blood-powered moon base. So take this all with a grain of salt. Yeah but which part? Using the phrase 'grain of salt' to describe both your inane moon vest anecdote AND Vitali's assertions is very slippery. In the end, the only one who looks untrustworthy is.... you, AV Club!

That'll teach you to ignore my letters!

"Forever and ever and ever"

Call the critics in ROOM 237 paranoid, overreaching, seeing too deeply, perhaps paranoid schizophrenic on some level. At least theyknow how to look deeply into the crystal ball, and as long as it’s well written I’ll read good crazy over banal sane any day, To the average bore, a crazy person is merely one who really sees just how awfully close death and blood and pain is to the surface of our skin-thin reality at every given moment. The problem is, the schizophrenic goes crazy because he can’t shut it out of his mind; it doesn’t go away after eight hours like it does for the humble tripper. Maybe our teeth really are used by someone as crystal sets to receive our thoughts…Stranger things are used for stranger purposes every day.

It’s only madness when you lack the self awareness necessary to distrust your senses. As the Yogi says, any man who only trusts his five sense, who only believes what he can see right in front of him, is a truly gullible idiot, and should be fleeced immediately.

One bar chocolate Beyond

"Pull it Together"  (note phallus fingers)

PART II: THE RIGHT MADNESS FOR AN OVERSANE WORLD

Shelly Duvall's stretchy face used to really bother me as Wendy until ROOM 237 'corrected' my perceptions. Now I know why her mouth gets as wide and long as the Munch figure, for this isn't a film about fighting back and acting logically and the audience shouting at the screen "bitch don't open that door!" For there is nowhere to run. Help will not be coming. Sheer overwhelming horror is the only 'sane' response when one sees that life is just a transparent overlay on death. Lift off the transparency and boom- there they are--the corpses and ancient evils.

Apparently one of Kubrick's quickest shoots was CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which came out a mere four years after 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. This was apparently, largely, because of Malcolm McDowell, who said Kubrick was easy to work with "if he trusted you." If he didn't trust you, as he didn't trust Shelly Duvall or Scatman Cruthers, he puts actors through living hell, with torturous exercises like filming one walk from a car into a hotel like 40 times over and over, for no other real reason than to maybe to 'achieve madness" the hard way, or maybe to just be a sadist, or maybe because Kubrick actually was looking for something he couldn't explain. Hitchcock apparently did this when his hot ice queens invariably spurned his grubby advances, such as forcing Tippi Hedren into that bird-filled room over and over for two straight days, or making Kim Novak jump into the freezing San Francisco bay over and over after getting his take in the first shot (or Von Sternberg forcing Marlene to ride the steps up to the bell for the final scene of THE SCARLET EMPRESS until she looks as crazy as her late ex-husband) Are the great artists of our time all just naturally screwed up bully sadists, punishing actresses who won't sleep with them? Is that all art is?

Hitchcock certainly got his insanity money's worth out of Hedren in that climactic final bird scene, and to my mind that's what Kubrick is trying to do with Duvall, because by SHINING's climax Wendy doesn't even look human anymore, she's just giant eyes on a stalk of crazy. Malcolm seems to tap into that kind of berserk madness for CLOCKWORK, as does Nicholson, (and Peter Sellers, of course) all of whom  apparently got favorite treatment.

No wonder Kubrick was so contemptuous of Stephen King's claims that in Nicholson's interpretation of Jack starts out crazy he has nowhere to go, crazy-wise (I paraphrase). For Kubrick there is always father to go crazy-wise. Starting out at a Nicholson-smarm level crazy is as far sane as Kubrick wants to ever get. I personally think it's just fine - he's clearly an average idiot in the early stages of alcoholism aspiring to write, but really just a bum. He married Wendy probably because he likes feeling superior to her. He's canny enough though to tap into frequencies that entice him. He has no problem seeing the ghosts and delving into madness. He's all in. 

"Grady's Correction"

In EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) it's clear that the one with the effortless crazy, the 'caretaker sparkle' in Kubrick's next married couple depiction is Nicole Kidman. Kubrick's first genuinely sexy yet complex female character (i.e not a sex object but a woman who likes sex and men and has no problem fantasizing about men other than her narcissist husband and then torturing him by telling him those fantasies. She plays a woman who likes she likes to have sex; husband Tom Cruise only likes to imagine himself having sex, because he could then see his sculpted body in the full length mirror. In SHUT, Cruise is a cipher trying to break into a a social circle that sees through his facile front in ways he cannot. His sexual life is built on jealousy and a kind of abashed tourism. Even driven by jealousy into the mire of sexual perversion and high strangeness he still is never able, except maybe by the very end, to see the world except in reverse angle, the 'selfie side' of the camera app; but he's finally trying to see rather than just be seen seeing. One wonders the extent to which this role reflects Kubrick's distrust of Cruise, who has a habit of trying to take over shoots with his intense energy.

The actors with the shine in his eyes, the one who can do both: who can be seen actually 'seeing' the world outside the mirror: Malcolm. Jack. Nicole. Hayden. Sellers... As Mick Jagger says in PERFORMANCE, "the only performance that truly makes it is the performance that achieves madness." It's this madness Kubrick aims to achieve, that he seeks in his performances. He knows there can be no falseness in madness. It's either there or it isn't. If it's not there, maybe 40 straight takes of the same scene will help the actor find it. 

Kubrick gets a clinical reputation but it's only because he is going places that would collapse into complete subjection without cold mathematical logic. All of his films are about the weird liminal space that reveals itself when one is cut off, in effect, from a consensual reality--the inner self and outer reality merge. Even BARRY LYNDON touches on this, via the maze of presumed identities played by Ryan O'Neal, the blank canvas of a soul whose life is never the same after killing a man in a duel, so needing to flee town, and being robbed of all his possessions on the way by a highwayman (a scary, very eerie moment that functions as a kind of herald / guardian of the next reality (doorkeepers abound in Kubrick: Lloyd, the debonair dance partner of Nicole Kidman in EYES). PATHS OF GLORY finds it in the transitions between men suffering in the trenches and the pampered cluelessness of the generals in their lofty mansion toasting the glories of war amongst themselves --each side clueless about the other to the point of contempt. The generals essentially are like the ghosts of the Overlook, Grady's urging of Jack to 'deal with' his family mirrors General Ripper's unauthorized military air strike, or the Highwayman's cold, terrifying instructions, or the ordered execution of the three soldiers in PATHS. Kubrick brings this cold, clinical reason deep into the murky homicidal core of man's decision-making skills, the unconscious self-sabotaging core, the center of the bouncy rubber center of the conscious personality's tennis ball. When the system that controls consensual reality is highjacked by a figure from the unconscious, the result is... well... violence, armageddon, and occasionally a light show. 

But along the way, the system breaks down: Jack continually lets his family get away from him, the troops refuse to charge into certain death, HAL goes insane, Lyndon refuses the call to bravery, Kidman escapes the devilish dance partner and Tom is rescued from his trip "over the rainbow" in EYES.

Only our isolated flying boys have what it takes to get the job done, because only Slim Pickens is high enough to see they're all just ants.

 Gimme the bat!

Kubrick became a recluse towards the end of his life, and its easy to read that his whole career was one long planning out of reclusiveness. Did the stress of 'faking the moon landings' lead to his being terrified and weirded out by the reptillian illuminati ceremonies he witnessed amongst the paperclip Nazi/NASA/Illuminati elite, so that he feared for his life if he ever returned to America? Or is the idea that only in deep solitude can one's inner demons really manifest in the external, that reality is only as sick as your secrets, and that when your secrets come out its usually because everyone else has gone to bed.

Writing is like that, when you get deep into your work, time stands still and then vanishes, and the best work always occurs between 3 AM and dawn. The real genius fiction can only occur when this deep break with conventional sanity is possible and this deep break with conventional sanity can only occur when the cops, kids, and parents, the normies, have all gone to bed, as it were, and taken the tiresome curtain of tedious convention with them. We can drop our sanity, or decency and normality, at last, and get a better view of the yawning void outside the window. This sanity (such as it is) is borne bravely by such long-suffering foils as Peter Sellers' Captain Mandrake and the president in STRANGELOVE, Kirk Douglas in GLORY, Shelly Duvall in THE SHINING, Alex's parents in CLOCKWORK. They struggle to carry the torch of conventional reality into the deep troughs of true madness and are suddenly made into the thing that doesn't belong. For the truly mad, it is the ultimate revenge-served-cold satisfaction of our collective unconscious. The sane are now the insane ones, the outsiders are now free to unleash their full potential... and oh how they danced... at Stonehenge.

NOTES:

1. One of the theorists, a photojournalist, notes most newsreel war footage is faked after the fact
2. Thinking on Full Metal Jacket - the whole film being about the process by which that madness is achieved, 
I don't think any of the actors convincingly achieved it the way, say, Kevin Dillon did in Platoon..

More Erich on Kubrick:

SHINING Examples: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror (from 10/11)

EYES WIDE SHUT: Paters Horribilis: Harvey, Hookers, and a Man Called Pollack (from 3/10) 

Mid-Life Crisis Superstar Humbert, Lo, and the Bait-Switch Cycle

All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives: Stanley Kubrick's LOLITA