Kubrick’s Panopticon / Marvel’s Labyrinth

Few images stand out in Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre more than the unblinking eye of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that would be practically unthinkable today (except in watered-down forms like Arrival or Blade Runner 2049): certainly Kubrick’s opus would be virtually unrecognizable to a film like Avengers: Infinity War. The point that links the two, Lucas and Spielberg in the 1970’s and 1980’s, distorted the legacy of this great science fiction epic. Visual effects win out over visual poetry. We — that is to say, popular U.S. cinema — learned the wrong lessons from 2001, and now we’ll sit through yet another year of Marvel movies. Infinity War was, by my admittedly offhand count, the 19th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Back to the Future Part II was right.

And through it all, HAL stares on. The eerie eye(s) of the now-infamous computer are a terrifying surveillance system; precise and rigid, HAL is the ultimate Kubrickean panopticon. Kubrick, known for his harshly perfectionist methods, built a cinema of completeness, continuing the narrative project started by people like D.W. Griffith. The refinement of cinematic language, a standardization of the ways of looking and thinking, teaches us to seek out the unobstructed angle, the clear linear causality, the complete picture: in other words, cinema as the ultimate form of surveillance, training us to watch and be watched with unflinching, brutal constancy. Despite what I suspect are deliberate cracks in Kubrick’s sense of completeness, most notably the finale sequence of 2001, modern U.S. cinema is immersed in Kubrick’s panopticon, to say nothing of Marvel’s labyrinth.

As long as Marvel continues to threaten the world or the galaxy or the universe with at least a couple of apocalypses per year, audiences will probably watch them. After all, the universe is at stake, or something. Marvel has built a clever complex of plots, characters, settings, and objects, a labyrinth that, in the truest sense of the word, has but one long, winding path to some hypothetical, probably-never-arriving conclusion. Completeness drives Marvel Studios: bring together The Avengers or gather the set of infinity stones and everything will go your way.

This is all to say that I think modern moviegoing is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Kubrick project. Kubrick’s vision of the world is utterly terrifying, whether in the maddening isolation of The Shining, the deadly fatalism of The Killing, the dehumanizing effects of war in Full Metal Jacket, or the disastrous incompetence of Dr. Strangelove. Of all Kubrick’s films, it is The Killing that perhaps best sums up the ideology of his films: trapped in a machine outside of their control, beneath a constantly observing camera eye, the characters of The Killing struggle in true film noir fashion to navigate this labyrinthine chamber — not unlike Bowman and Poole in the HAL-controlled vessel — looking for escape or release.

Marvel, on the other hand, sells its labyrinth as popcorn entertainment. Just sit back and enjoy the show. The arguably progressive sophistication of Kubrick’s disturbing vision has given way to a kind of crypto-fascist cinema steeped in a support for forms of state violence — militarism, surveillance — that Kubrick critiques. Captain America, the ultimate figurehead of U.S. neoliberalism, will keep you safe, if you just accept his limitless power. Kubrick wasn’t perfect, but at least his films recognize structural violence and its representatives when they see it.

[originally posted here]