Introduction: Kubrick and Adaptation

Stanley Kubrick (1928 – 1999) acquired the enviable reputation of only making one-off

masterpieces and never repeating himself. He completed thirteen full-length films, whose

releases were increasingly widely spaced. Strikingly disparate, they range from symbolic

dramas (Fear and Desire (1953), which he later dismissed as juvenilia), films noirs (Killer’s

Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956)), historical epics (Spartacus (1960) and Barry Lyndon

(1975)), and science fiction (Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love

the Bomb (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971)) to war

films (Paths of Glory (1957), Full Metal Jacket (1987)), a horror film (The Shining (1980))

and erotic dramas (Lolita (1962) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). But while his films inhabit and

deconstruct genres rather than exemplify them, they all share common themes and narrative

tropes, which critics and Kubrick’s considerable cult following have picked over in minute

detail – masculine gangs, plots going wrong, technology and dehumanisation, the

intertwining of sexuality and violence, and the unconscious. The unity of his films is

enhanced by his distinctive and imitable style of symmetrical tableaux in single point

perspective interspersed with tracking shots and zooms, and by his adventurous technical

prowess in special effects, camerawork and lighting. Dreamlike and blackly comic, Kubrick’s

films subtract many of the conventional pleasures of mainstream cinema, such as surface

realism, depth of characterisation, and fast action, in favour of distanced contemplation,

elliptical narrative, and spectacle. For Kubrick, ‘Film operates on a level much closer to

music and painting than to the printed word, and, of course, movies present an opportunity to

convey complex concepts and abstractions without the traditional reliance on words’

(Kubrick in Gelmis 2001: 90).)

 Given the control Kubrick eventually had over his films – Warner Bros. gave him a

free hand after the success of A Clockwork Orange – he has emerged as the model of the

complete auteur against whom the likes of Christopher Nolan are measured. Equally

compelling was his persona as an obsessive Prospero-like recluse, whose films were bleak,

Olympian and coldly ironic, even misanthropic (this persona, it must be said, was

comprehensively contradicted by his family and in the documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life

in Pictures (2001)). This beguiling notion of Kubrick as an uncompromising perfectionist and

genius whose films communicate an intense personal vision has encouraged critics and

cultists alike to interpret them as coherent auteurist statements, albeit ones wrapped up in

enigmatic narratives that combine the ambiguity of the European arthouse with the familiar

trappings of genre filmmaking. At an extreme of auteurist enthusiasm, there is Rodney

Ascher’s documentary Room 237 (2013), an entertaining compilation of baroque cinephile

theories about The Shining, which range from the plausible – the film’s being an allegory of

the genocide of Native Americans – to the certifiable – that it is a coded admission to his

wife, Christiane, that he helped fake the Apollo landings. A quick Google search of

Kubrick’s final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, throws up equally arcane interpretations, mostly

related to conspiracy theories involving the Illuminati. Such paranoid readings take Kubrick’s

films to be maze-like puzzles capable of endless interpretation, albeit overseen by the

controlling gaze of a sardonic magus.

For all Kubrick’s unrivalled status as an auteur he was nevertheless always an adapter,

mostly of little known novels and short stories. Fear and Desire, Killer’s Kiss, Spartacus and

Lolita had scripts by others and all his films from The Killing (scripted by the cult pulp

novelist, Jim Thompson) onwards were adaptations. Like most Hollywood directors,

including the most canonical from Griffith, Ford and Hitchcock to Cronenberg and Spielberg,

Kubrick based his films on pre-existing material. The exception was 2001: A Space Odyssey,
which is credited as being based on a screenplay by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote

a novelisation during the film’s production that interpreted the material somewhat differently

(Hunter 2013). Although Kubrick is credited with sole authorship of the screenplays for A

Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon, most frequently he was a co-screenwriter, whose

preference was to work with professional writers, such as Clarke, Michael Herr (the author of

Dispatches, with whom he adapted Full Metal Jacket) and Frederic Raphael (Eyes Wide

Shut), rather than with professional screenwriters. Diane Johnson, a novelist who co-wrote

the screenplay of The Shining with Kubrick, commented that

Kubrick believed in adapting already existing books rather than working from original

scripts. There were several reasons for this, most importantly that one could judge the

effect, examine the structure, and think about the subject of a book more easily than a

script. Novelists, he thought, were apt to be better writers than screenwriters are – an

idea that many would debate, no doubt. For whatever reasons in his personal

experience, he didn’t have much respect for screenwriters. (Johnson 56)

Kubrick was certainly an auteur but he was above all an ‘auteur of adaptation’, for whom

adaptation, or rather collaborative adaptation, was crucial to realising his personal vision.

This issue of Adaptation explores Kubrick’s status as an auteur of adaptation. Instead of

focusing simply on his films’ relationship with their sources, the contributors’ director-

centred approach pursues what was consistent and distinctive about Kubrick’s methods and

uses of adaptation.

The issue comes at a time of tremendous critical interest about Kubrick, who has

become the centre of an academic industry. As well as earlier standard texts updated since his

death (Ciment; Kolker; Nelson; Walker), publications over the last decade or so encompass
an encyclopedia (Phillips and Hill), auteur studies (Naremore; Falsetto; Pezzotta); makings of

(Bizony); and books devoted to single films (Chion; Krämer 2010, 2011, 2014; Luckhurst;

Pramaggiore) including ones that Kubrick never made, such as Napoleon (Castle 2011); and

analyses of Kubrick’s work as a photographer at Life magazine (Mather). Key to this was the

opening of the Stanley Kubrick Archives at the University of the Arts London, which houses

a massive collection of his papers and other artefacts and has encouraged a revisionist

understanding of Kubrick’s creative process that is based on primary materials rather than

theoretically framed textual analysis and which highlights the centrality of collaborative

adaptation. As Peter Krämer has said, he would ‘select collaborators and establish work

procedures which were likely to produce results he could not have come up with on his own’

(2015: 61).

Kubrick’s films were not, on the face of it, ever autobiographical, though Eyes Wide

Shut can be read as an encomium to his final happy marriage, but his identity as a Bronx

Jewish intellectual is arguably an important but overlooked context. Jewishness and Jewish

themes are not foregrounded in any of Kubrick’s films, though they are present in his

persistent interest in psychoanalysis, ‘the Jewish science’, and in the Holocaust. The latter is

notoriously glossed in Cocks’s The Wolf at the Door, which reads the Holocaust as an

obscurely hidden subtext of The Shining, a theory he also expounds as an interviewee in

Room 237. Kubrick was to have approached the Holocaust directly in his unmade film, Aryan

Papers, whose development he dropped after Schindler’s List (1993) (Braund: 170-73).

Nathan Abrams, in this issue’s first article, addresses the coded Jewishness of Spartacus

through a fine-grained analysis of screenplays and correspondence in the Stanley Kubrick

Archives. Abrams shows how the Jewish themes present in Howard Fast’s original novel and

Dalton Trumbo’s contributions to draft screenplays were suppressed in the final film but are

recoverable by attending in particular to its representation of masculinity.

 Spartacus was a studio film and Kubrick a hired hand rather than an auteur. His next

film, Lolita, was one over which he had much more authorial control, though it was based on

a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, an author with a very distinctive voice, who also wrote the

screenplay. Lolita, the novel, might have been classed as ‘unfilmable’ as much for its

unreliable narration as for its scandalous subject of paedophilia. Elisa Pezzotta’s article looks

at how Kubrick’s adaptation radically alters Nabokov’s novel and screenplay (a double

adaptation, in other words), not only to appease censors and re-orientate the material around

Peter Sellers’ improvisatory performance, but also to pay homage to the novel’s contradictory

time frames.

A Clockwork Orange, which like Lolita addressed the perversities of masculinity, was

seemingly as ‘unfilmable’ as Lolita. In part this was for its violent content, though that was

more permissible once the ratings system had loosened, and in part for being written in

‘nadsat’, a teenage lingo, through which events were filtered via the consciousness of Alex

DeLarge, the novel’s delinquent hero. Kubrick addressed these challenges in a film that is

structurally close to Burgess’s book but notably different in its ending. In keeping with the

version of the novel published in the USA, the original ending of the British edition, in which

Alex seems on the verge of maturing out of his youthful viciousness, is dropped and the film

culminates with Alex returning to unregenerate hooliganism. Kubrick added a coda based on

neither edition in which Alex fantasises having energetic celebratory sex with a young

woman in front of an applauding audience in Victorian dress. Kubrick’s ending not only

wrenches the material away from Burgess, but, as Joy McEntee argues in her article, depicts

Alex freed into untrammelled masculinity in keeping with the film’s troubling representation

of woman as objects of fear and desire.

Barry Lyndon, based on Thackeray’s first novel, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, was

in striking contrast with the futuristic dystopia of A Clockwork Orange. An eighteenth

century picaresque epic, Barry Lyndon took an unusual approach to representing history and

adapting an historical novel. Distanced, ironic and slow, the film is constructed around

austere zooms that flatten the image into tableaux of static candle lit interiors and

reconstructions of landscape paintings, while depicting a frigidly hostile world of social ritual

in which the Irish hero is defeated by class and Fate. The tone is utterly different from that of

Thackeray’s comic novel. Of all Kubrick’s films it is Barry Lyndon whose reputation has

grown most over the years, not least among filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, who wrote

that: ‘I’m not sure if I can say that I have a favourite Kubrick picture, but somehow I keep

coming back to Barry Lyndon. I think that’s because it’s such a profoundly emotional

experience’ (Ciment vii). Marc Napolitano’s article focuses on the issue of the film’s irony as

it is encoded in the dynamic interplay between authorial voices, particularly the omniscient

voiceover provided by Michael Hordern’s narrator. The voiceover, though often decried as an

‘uncinematic’ device, was one of Kubrick’s key narrative devices, used in his films since the

early newsreel shorts such as The Day of the Fight (1951) and Flying Padre (1951) and most

extensively in A Clockwork Orange.

If Barry Lyndon has undergone the most dramatic critical re-evaluation, it is The

Shining has attracted the most cult interest over the last few years as well as becoming a key

film in popular culture. While commercially quite successful, The Shining was widely

dismissed critically as a failed attempt to make a horror film by someone who didn’t

understand the genre. Two articles in this issue investigate why Kubrick’s film deviated so

radically from King’s novel. Graham Allen centres on a crucial image from King’s novel that

does not appear in the film, the empty wasps’ nest, as a figure to explore Kubrick’s method of

adaptation. Moving away from the idea of Kubrick as controlling the text, he emphasises the

elements of contingency and chance at work in Kubrick’s films and indeed in any adaptation.

As Allen says, in the transition between a literary and a visual medium, ‘the idea of an all-
controlling intentionality on the part of the film-maker becomes untenable, even ludicrous’.

Catriona McAvoy’s article, based on an interview with Kubrick’s co-screenwriter, Diane

Johnson, further explores the intertextual aspect of adaptation, as a layering or palimpsestual

overloading. Highlighting the film’s deliberate intertextual breadth McAvoy describes how,

for Kubrick and Johnson, adaptation was a process designed to expand on the novel and

contextualise it within psychoanalytic theories. In particular she shows how Johnson and

Kubrick worked in ideas from Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment and Freud’s

essay ‘The Uncanny’, so that the film becomes a meditation on the psychic economy of

Gothic and its mass culture presentation in King’s bestseller.

Finally, Peter Krämer uses the Stanley Kubrick Archives to explore in detail the pre-

production of A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), adapted from a short story by Brian Aldiss,

which Kubrick worked on for a number of years. It was eventually filmed after Kubrick’s

death by Steven Spielberg and released to mixed reviews. Spielberg alone is credited with the

screenplay, but early versions were essayed by Neil Gaiman and Sara Maitland. Krämer’s

article is a case study in the complications and reversals of film adaptation, where the original

text and its intentions are soon overlaid with multiple other drafts in which authorial voices,

including Kubrick’s, are irreversibly confused. Krämer makes the important argument that

this kind of archival research into ‘lost projects’ or what Simone Murray calls ‘phantom

adaptations’ (Murray) is crucial to understanding an authorial career. The ‘shadow history’ of

his unmade or aborted films helps explain the films that were made: the research into

Napoleon, for example, fed into Barry Lyndon, while Aryan Papers glosses the Jewish

themes otherwise suppressed.

Focusing on adaptation complicates but does wholly obscure Kubrick’s status as an

auteur. With the exception of Lolita and The Shining, the material he chose to adapt tended

not be especially well known or to come with too much critical baggage. In fact his film’s
distance from their originals, insofar as audiences were aware of them, and the agonistic skill

with which he made them his own emphasised both his independence and his desire to trump

the literary in order to remake cinema as a ‘pure’ audio-visual experience. As Thomas Leitch

says, Kubrick ‘earned his auteur status […] by taking on authors directly in open warfare’

(240). His adaptations can veer radically from the source text, in ways that infuriated the

authors, such as Anthony Burgess, who came to resent how Kubrick’s film of his novel, A

Clockwork Orange (1962), overshadowed his other books, and Stephen King, who hated

Kubrick’s film of The Shining so much that he made his own (dreadful) 1997 version for TV

that stuck closely to the novel. Kubrick adapted in order to get a ready-made story that suited

his purposes but also because it enabled him to emphasise in the process of adaptation the

difference between cinema and the literary. Crucial to this is what Ciment calls his ‘defiance

towards verbal expression’ (232). Kubrick’s intention seems to have been integrative, seeing

in cinema a combination of the other arts that wrested merely literary texts away from their

authors and relocated them in a dizzying intertextual spectacle of unusual intensity and

duration, which worked on the unconscious as well as the intellect. As Kubrick said, in a

much-quoted interview, ‘The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to

verbalise it. I tried to create a visual experience which directly penetrates the subconscious

content of the material’ (Kubrick in Phillips 153). This is film as Gesamtkunstwerk in pursuit

of a distinctive non-literary vision of what Pezzotta, in the book reviewed here by James

Fenwick, calls ‘the sublime’ (Pezzotta).

Kubrick is therefore central to Adaptation Studies, not least for his unusually

transformative approach to texts and because they remind us that, first, adaptation is a

creative but pragmatic use of texts as convenient sources of inspiration, and, second, it is a

process engaged in collaboratively over time, with cameramen and set decorators as well as

screenwriters, rather than a confrontation between two rival media. As Peter Krämer
remarks, Kubrick ‘is probably best understood not as a dictatorial genius but through his

interactions with collaborators’ (Kramer, 2015a: 61).

References

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