Stanley Kubrick's major films reveal his search for an unrestricted form through which he can communicate with his audience without coercing them into mistaking his particular structures for reality. Increasingly, he has come to use the popular arts as his central means for expressing that search. He does this by showing us the contradictory meanings and implications of the popular arts, their escapist as well as their life-asserting implications, the ways in which they reveal the contemporary tendencies to run away from the complex, concrete uniqueness of life, and the ways in which they reveal the desperation of our search for the complex, concrete, uniqueness of life, our search for being itself. Kubrick recognizes the primitive, vital roots of the life-asserting impulse itself, the roots that give rise to and are reflected in all the arts including the popular arts, as well as the contradictory tendencies so clearly expressed in the popular arts, the tendencies to conform, to give in to the accumulated baggage of public and traditional meanings and to lose the self in cliché and stereotyped responses to life. For Kubrick, the popular arts in fact become grand metaphors of contemporary experience, visions of contemporary man struggling desperately to reconcile his life-affirming and his life-denying drives. And in creating such metaphors, Kubrick miraculously creates art in a time most inimical to art out of the very material that would seem most hostile to it, the escapist fantasies of the popular arts. He achieves the paradoxical McLuhanesque mystery of transforming his medium, film, a popular art itself, into his message. (p. 234)

Kubrick takes sides in Paths of Glory. He sees things literally, to a significant extent, in terms of blacks and whites, good and evil. His uses of blacks and whites, light and darkness in the film illustrate this. Like Shakespeare in the destructive worlds of Romeo and Juliet and Othello, Kubrick reverses the conventional meanings of light and darkness. Light is associated with the generals, the men who destroy individuals, who send them to their deaths in battle or before firing squads. The chateau in which one almost always sees the generals is bathed in light in contrast to the darkness of the trenches and the prison in which the three men are waiting to die. (pp. 234-35)

What Kubrick is discovering in Paths of Glory is how to make his visual content express his theme. But the problem is that he does in fact see things in this film in terms of black and white, that is, in terms of having to choose between one side or the other. We are never allowed to see the complexities and contradictions of the French officers, never allowed to view the validity—at least from their perspective—of their struggle. The officers are evil, the men, even though imperfect, are good. In order to make his characters conform to his theme, he has had to rob them of complexity. He has had to show that creativity and complexity can reside only with the individual men, most specifically with Ralph Meeker as the Sisyphus-like individual who transcends his death at the hands of the firing squad by freely choosing death gracefully. The generals, on the other hand, are reduced to totally inhuman manipulators. (p. 237)

When Kubrick makes Dr. Strangelove, however, he substitutes archetypes from popular literature and film for institutions. In so doing, he frees himself to allow the complexities and contradictions implicit in his archetypes to be utilized to their fullest. Dr. Strangelove abounds with popular characters. Their very names imply their contradictory archetypal functions. General Jack D. Ripper suggests a guardian of order turned homicidal maniac; Bat Guano, a combination of Bat Masterson and manure; Mandrake, a sleight of hand artist. In fact, he is, because we see Peter Sellers, the actor who plays his part, playing two other parts, those of the president and of Dr. Strangelove. This shifting of roles by Sellers is a perfect expression of the way the use of archetypes from the popular arts frees Kubrick to indulge in invention and performance. He has shifted from visuals as expressions of thematic argument to visuals as expressions of sheer performance. (pp. 238-39)

[The character of Dr. Strangelove] allows for a synthesis of comic delights and horrible awareness. We recognize that any scientist who wears glasses and speaks in an ominous foreign accent must be a villain. We expect his villainy to emanate from his super-rationality. Instead, Dr. Strangelove's villainy derives from a series of Freudian slips and the movement of uncontrolled parts of his body. He speaks rationally, almost like a computer, but his arm and leg move irrationally, as if by their own will. And his speech adds up to a comic revelation of his own sexist consciousness. What we get is both a delight in the reversal of the stereotyped scientist-villain and a sudden horrible awareness of the subjectivity and arbitrariness that underlies supposedly objective and rational behavior.

In his treatment of Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick has stumbled on a technique that will become indispensable in his last two films. He has discovered a way to preserve and express the need embodied in the stereotype, the truth and vitality expressed in the popular arts, without succumbing to a stereotyped response. Paradoxically, he shows the validity of the stereotype of the scientist. According to the stereotype, we distrust the scientist because he dehumanizes through excessive objectivity. Kubrick shows that, paradoxically, what we take to be extreme objectivity and rationality is extreme subjectivity and irrationality. He has preserved the validity and vitality of our perception while expanding our consciousness of its underlying meaning and significance.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, he follows the same pattern, expanded to cover the whole story through its science-fiction metaphor. In following this pattern he is following the archetypal Odyssey plot from Homer through the frontiersman moving west, through the cowboy, through even the gangster. In essence, the hero moves out searching for knowledge of the external world, but ends by gaining awareness of the world inside himself. (pp. 239-41)

The archetype of the voyage tells us that discovery is never complete until it includes both external and internal revelation. It engages our vital, primitive responses, our sense of wonder, and if handled right as Kubrick handles it, it satisfies our longing for confrontation with the mysteries of existence. What is wrong with most science fiction stories is that they content themselves with external discovery or, at most, with a mere moral lesson. Kubrick, on the other hand, comples us in 2001 to desert the mechanistic, supposedly objective order of the world and to create our own subjective reality. (p. 241)

In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick uses the con-man archetype from popular arts instead of the pure science fiction archetype, and superimposes it on a futurist base. (p. 242)

We like the hero, Alex, not for any sentimental reasons, but only because he embodies the primitive vitality captured in his stereotyped con-man role; he survives as sheer con-man, by his wits and vitality. Unlike the astronaut in 2001, Alex may not discover himself, but we nevertheless discover ourselves in discovering the nature of the world in which he and we move. We are jarred into making this discovery for ourselves through the complex responses that Kubrick evokes in us. When we discover that a thief, rapist and murderer is more human than the supposedly sane and moral society in which he lives, we must become imaginatively engaged in making sense of the situation….

Kubrick violates us, shocks us, into recognizing the violation of human vitality we practice, or at least condone, by sanctioning and creating a society in which the only way to survive, the only way to be vital, is to be a con man. (p. 243)

Kubrick is reducing life in this film literally to its primitive source, its very roots, survival and sexuality. In reducing Alex to the embodiment of this primitive source of human vitality, Kubrick shows us better than any other artist the essential vitality and limitation of the pornographic impulse. He shows us that sexuality is a vital impulse without which man cannot survive and yet one which, divorced from the total person, is merely destructive. As with all of his successful uses of the popular arts, Kubrick has now passed the supreme test. He has both affirmed the essential truth of the roots of man's vital impulses embodied in the popular arts, and he has shown us the perversions to which that truth can be twisted. He has achieved the miracle of using pornography, that most escapist and fantasy-inducing popular art, as a way of forcing us to confront the reality of our escapist behavior. In achieving this miracle, he has not only created a significant work of art, he has revealed to us the capacities and limitations of the popular tradition itself. (pp. 243-44)