Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick are two of the first directors whose names young cinephiles get to know. They’re also names between which quite a few of those young cinephiles draw a battle line: you may have enjoyed films by both of these auteurs, but ultimately, you’re going to have to side with one cinematic ethos or the other. Yet Spielberg clearly admires Kubrick himself: his 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence originated as an unfinished Kubrick project, and he’s gone on record many times praising Kubrick’s work.
This is true even of such an un-Spielbergian picture as A Clockwork Orange, a collection of Spielberg’s comments on which you can hear collected in the video above. He calls it “the first punk-rock movie ever made. It was a very bleak vision of a dangerous future where young people, teenagers, are free to roam the streets without any kind of parental exception. They break into homes, and they assault and rape people. The subject matter was dangerous.” On one level, you can see how this would appeal to Spielberg, who in his own oeuvre has returned over and over again to the subject of youth.
Yet Kubrick makes moves that seem practically inconceivable to Spielberg, “especially the scene where you hear Gene Kelly singing ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ ” when Malcolm McDowell’s Alex DeLarge is “kicking a man practically to death. That was one of the most horrifying things I think I’ve ever witnessed.” And indeed, such a savage counterpoint between music and action is nowhere to be found in the filmography of Steven Spielberg, which has received criticism from the Kubrick-enjoyers of the world for the emotional one-dimensionality of its scores (even those composed by his acclaimed longtime collaborator John Williams).
Less fairly, Spielberg has also been charged with an inability to resist happy endings, or at least a discomfort with ambiguous ones. He would never, in any case, end a picture the way he sees Kubrick as having ended A Clockwork Orange: despite the intensive “deprogramming” Alex undergoes, “he comes out the other end more charming, more witty, and with such a devilish wink and blink at the audience, that I am completely certain that when he gets out of that hospital, he’s going to kill his mother and his father and his partners and his friends, and he’s going to be worse than he was when he went in.” To Spielberg’s mind, Kubrick made a “defeatist” film; yet he, like every Kubrick fan, must also recognize it as an artistic victory.
Related content:
Steven Spielberg on the Genius of Stanley Kubrick
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
