Nelson Kubbrick Sparknotes

There is an inherent truth that most film critics seem to believe with Stanley Kubrick, that he was an obsessive, detailed oriented genius. That no area of his films was left to chance, giving every decision and detail meaning. This association of filmmaking masterclass with Kubrick is so fascinating that is has led people, like the author Thomas Allen Nelson to develop an obsession with decoding a Kubrick's obsession.

In this book, Nelson takes great care to go through all of Kubrick's filmography, even delving into his lesser know documentaries he did at the beginning of his career. Nelson goal is to take the confusing concepts of Kubrick's films. The first thing to understand is that Nelson isn’t doing this in vain, there is some reason

This is why Nelson approaches the films the way he does to shed light on this interesting deeply emotional conceptual aesthetic that Kubrick has created. Nelson goes on to say at the end of chapter one that “I hope to trace through the following chapters how Stanley Kubrick's film imagination increasingly took the shape of a series of conceptual and formal paradoxes. As early as the Look photographs and Day of the Fight, his film work aspired to be both realist and formalist in structure and style. From the time of Paths of Glory and Lolita, his films increasingly would balance a traditional humanism against the surrealist's fondness for satiric dislocation in their poignant and ironic depiction of the tragicomic nature of human experience.--- End of first chapter”

This is the only Fault with Nelsons writing; he offers some interesting theories, but the language he uses seems to talk down to any reader to doesn’t view Kubrick's work with the same flawlessness as he seems to. If anything the book is overly analytical and seems to get lost in itself. “To understand how Kubrick converts and epistemology into anesthetics, something that will be of practical rather than theoretical concern in subsequent chapters we might pause to consider his films through a concept know to a reader of science-fiction as “conventionalization.” So what conventionalizations does Nelson try and extrapolate, well one of Nelsons more hard to follow arguments is his explanation of Dr. Strangelove. In “Dr. Strangelove, however, the machine assists a descent into time rather than ascent into space, one where the perfection of its logic and the beauty of its form paradoxically objectifies a human retreat into fantasy and death. It stimulates Ripper's desire to play God and turn the clock back to a world of purity and the stasis of death. It creates the illusion in the War Room that mini-universe can be created and insulted from existential truths (i.e., death no longer is even real) outside computerized gameboards”