oh yeah wrote:So basically, all he's got is his wife, and what is there do to but... fuck? A pretty bittersweet ending, if you think about it.
Yes, exactly. I've seen an amazing number of interpretations of the implications of this one last word and I think their plenitude is meant and deserved. Certainly I never took that final scene as any absolutist prescription for anything wholly positive (where the characters are and what they are doing is not incidental, though it may be for them).
For my own part I've always wanted to write a piece on this film reading everything that happens retrospectively through the lens of the Harford-Ziegler pool room scene. There are a number of reasons for this but to put it simply I think that scene is Kubrick at his most astonishingly visionary. It is, for me, the absolute equal in terms of sheer scope, depth and audacity to any of his greatest single "moments". And I am sure that a reading of the film set up in this way would yield some very profitable findings.
I have seen little actually written on this scene (really almost nothing since the premiere pieces in
Sight and Sound and
Harper's) and it's too bad as it demands treatment as a determining set piece, not just some scene of arbitrary resolution. The only thing I ever see mentioned about the pool room scene is that it's either evidence of the film's half finished state (with dodgy edits and shots that "clearly" run on too long) or that it more or less acts as confirmation of Harford's (and, by extension, our) suspicions. But it's the very fact that it is so aggressively neither of these things that its potential for explosive and propulsive multidimensional possibilities emerges.
Whether or not this scene or any other in the film was meant to be altered or would have been altered is impossible to know (though I'm sure Kubrick would have been cutting all the way into summer of '99) but the awkwardness and seeming inauthentic formality of the scene as it plays adds immeasurably to its effect as theatrical spectacle; a spectacle for some
one or in the service of some
thing. We may be inclined to think we know who it's for and what it's about because Ziegler is lavishly rich and exploitative (his excess of wealth acts as automatic code for evil within a limited purview, the awareness of which Kubrick plays into for heightened ironic effect) and such a scene is obviously reminiscent of many other such exposition rich scenes of explanation and resolution. And it can certainly work that way if that's what satisfies a particular reading but it also resonates profoundly with the potential to shift away from what we are normally allowed or allow ourselves. Kubrick employs a deceptively familiar and jejune rhetoric to flush out all the collected habits of interpretive diminishment we as spectators have accumulated over the years.
It's too much to get into in detail (hence the piece I want to write) but the structural element itself is what shapes this radical opportunity. It has to do with the meta-textual self-awareness and the hyper-emphasis on spaces between words, pauses, rhythm or cadence of language and affect (Pollack's sitting down and standing up in quick succession for instance or Cruise's intensity of expression throughout, an effort to make dramatic what is resolutely intended to be anything but). The film itself is replete with this kind of affectation and that fits within the dream logic but here it culminates in a scene designed to make use of these elements to make access to the store house of interpretive possibility.
On the simplest possible level, Kubrick is having fun with the intent for definitiveness in this kind of scene and making a spectacle of it in itself, which makes of it a parody. But beyond this, the profundity of it exists within the fact that it is more than parody; it is
refutation, and that is the intent of its spectacle (at least in broad terms). The scene functions as equivalent in power and implication to, for one, the cosmic hotel room sequence of
2001, but the difference is in the deception of its small scale and its seemingly banal intent. Here, as there, it's the effect that maters most. In a sense we want what Ziegler says to be the accurate reading on events because we want resolution and, more to the point, we want the power made available through authoritative and incontestable knowledge; it eradicates the fear of investing in the purely subjective and, by comparison then, the purportedly irrelevant, illegitimate and inauthentic. We don't want to live in the delusion of fantasy, in false "significance". And yet we don't want
this explanation because it's Ziegler's explanation and beyond whatever bias we may have for him going in, his grinding literalism annihilates the worth of any more transcendent or expansive poetic meaning. It is the emblem of a pure pragmatism, an empirically motivated vision of truth and its fire raid upon the irrelevant deceptions and distractions of the imagination.
Needless to say, I think Kubrick wants us to reflect on that and to what degree we desire that level and that kind of certainty and at the expense of what. What
kind of knowledge is seen as definitive, must it
be the measure for the authenticity of all other forms of knowledge and does its authenticity exist independently of all other approaches to understanding? Certainly I would suggest that the commitment to Ziegler's particular ideology of wealth, power and all inclusive controlling knowledge contains within it an implicit hierarchy of worth that exists at the expense of any more comprehensive integration of meaning. It may, in fact, testify to the film's peculiar contemporary relevance as the heart of our current crumbling economy also contains the seeds for a similar unavoidable capitalist eschatology, a pragmatic end point to any further appeals.
For reasons similar to what I just described, I vacillate between this one and
The Shining for Kubrick's best. All the others are great too of course but those two in particular offer something on a super structural level that I really like and respond to as valuable; particularly in terms of utilizing all too familiar genre tropes and structural devices to not just invert expectation but to expand the limits of vision itself.