My Stanley Kubrick.

• Author: McKissack, Fred
• Position: Column

Before I saw Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut, I began to recount how several of his earlier films had made such an impact on me.

As part of a double bill at the Tivoli Theater in St. Louis in 1982, my friend Jeff and I went to see The Shining. Back then, the Tivoli was a revival house. The Shining was the second film on the bill; the first was--get this--The Exorcist. Linda Blair and company were scary enough, but the performances Kubrick got out of Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, and Danny Lloyd were absolutely remarkable. Especially Lloyd, the child, who kept repeating "redrum" (murder, spelled backwards) in the most disturbing voice ever uttered by a human. Even the titles that appeared between scenes, like "Tuesday" or "3:00 P.M." frightened me.

Great film. Scary as hell.

Jeff and I left the theater and stepped onto the foggy street. We both lived about three-quarters of a mile away. We started walking home, the streets getting darker and darker. Neither one of us said a word, yet we were both thinking about the final scene, with Jack Nicholson chasing Danny Lloyd around a snow-covered garden maze. At the same moment, Jeff and I both broke into a run. I doubt either one of us has ever gone as fast as we did that night.

When the ending credits rolled after Eyes Wide Shut, I felt let down. I'd wanted to witness a genre-warping film like The Shining (1980) or Full Metal Jacket (1987) or Dr. Strangelove (1964). But the seamy cable television program Red Shoe Diaries has had more erotic episodes with more discernible plots.

The much-talked-about orgy scene is fabulously shot with excellent set and costume design. But what do we carry away from the scene? We learn that the difference between an orgy with the super rich and, say, people in a trailer park is simply social status and ceremony.

But I've come to praise Kubrick, not bury him. Much has been said about the brilliance of his small body of work. To that I cannot add. However, these retrospectives neglect the importance of Kubrick's political message.

Few films have had their content dismissed or, worse, misunderstood more frequently than Dr. Strangelove. The great film critic Pauline Kael denounced Dr. Strangelove as a pious liberal diatribe that "ridiculed everything and everybody it shows." The movie was without hope, she wrote, causing the young to be paralyzed rather than empowered. "It's not war that has been laughed to death, but the possibility of...