MovieChat Forums > Stanley Kubrick Discussion > Do men "get" him more than women?

Do men "get" him more than women?

posted 7 years ago by felstein
8 replies | jump to latest

Stanley Kubrick is possibly my all-time favorite filmmaker. At the very least, he is the director whose entire output (at least from 1956 on) constitutes nothing but great films, IMO. In this regard, I distinguish him from Coppola and Scorsese, who made some of the greatest films of all time but also made quite a few turkeys.
One thing that has always intrigued me though: My opinion of Kubrick has not been shared with almost all of the women I have known, past and present. It's not that they necessarily dislike his films, his films just don't do anything for them. At first blush it may seem that this is simply because Kubrick didn't have many female characters in his films, and the ones that he did have were not always very appealing or likable. But there is Alice in Eyes Wide Shut, by far the strongest character in that film. Lolita turns out to be the strongest character in Lolita. Varinia in Spartacus is not exactly a slouch either. No, most of the women I've known just don't seem to connect on any level with his work.

Guys, what has your experience been? And ladies, if you are Kubrick fans, what draws you to his films?

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[–] keyser_soze_smokes 7 years ago

Is woman wet?

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[–] Monkey_Banana_Serum_Business 7 years ago

It all depends on what you mean by male/female in these transgender times. Kubrick was, of course, amusingly astounded back in the late-1970s when Walter Carlos, who had composed the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange in the early 1970s, presented 'himself' as 'herself', as Wendy Carlos, to compose the soundtrack for The Shining. Gender is a symbolic construction, but we all behave as if it's 'intrinsic', as if it's the substantive kernel of our identity and existence. It isn't. We are all anxious and ambiguous about our identity and sexuality, because it's not something fixed or preordained, but open and conflicted, never rigid but twisted, confused, and perversely non-defined, a void.

I suppose the reason a lot of traditionally-minded women don't care for Kubrick's films is because many of them - almost half, six of his films - are basically war movies, or war-related movies. It's only the later films, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut, that properly introduce the feminine dimension into the order of things, of how the masculine is in reality subordinate to the universality of the feminine.

[–] felstein 7 years ago

Your first paragraph is a little too esoteric for my understanding.

As for your second paragraph... I don't think the war element necessarily plays into it. In fact, of all Kubrick's films, the one that is liked the most or most often by women I know is Spartacus; ironically, the least idiosyncratic -- the least "Kubrickian" -- of all his films and, perhaps not coincidentally, the one he himself liked least.

[–] LetThemEatCake01 7 years ago

Why would they like them?? His films are sexist and 100% male centered.

[–] mhsaleh 7 years ago

Find me a girl who likes clockwork orange, strangelove and I'm marrying her.

[–] Line-of-Flight 7 years ago

Just because it's not totally fixed and it's fluid, doesn't mean it's merely symbolic. A lot of it has a biological and hormonal basis.