Thoughts On The Similarities in Kubrick and Fincher Directing Styles

From Musick Hund

Stanley Kubrick and David Fincher are often compared because both had/have notoriously exacting standards for their films, demanding brutally high rates of takes, and psychologically terrorizing actors in order to to push them deeper into their respective directorial visions of the characters. The two most well-known examples are Shelley Duvall (Wendy Torrence in The Shining) and Jake Gyllenhaal (Robert Graysmith in Zodiac). 

Kubrick claimed that he treated Shelley more harshly than Jack Nicolson because he wanted to bring out the blubbery hysteria that characterizes her behavior when she finally realizes her husband has lost his mind and turned into a murderous psychopath.

Fincher has said that Jake was not successfully making the transition from mild-mannered boy scout cartoonist to obsessed private investigator who breaks up his own marriage in pursuit of the Zodiac throughout the 1970s. The cordial relations between Jake and Fincher apparently really broke down—not the case with Shelley and Kubrick—to the point where Jake has sworn off ever working with the director again, saying that Fincher “paints with people.” The other difference is that even though she would not care to repeat the Kubrick experience (before his death in early 1999, obviously), she admitted it made her a much better actor, a fact remarked on by Robert Altman when she worked with him on Popeye (1980) after she had previously worked with him on 3 Women (1977).

As far as I know Jake has not come to that self-realization, but Olivia Armstrong in a fine post that can be found here, makes the case convincingly. It really is hard to imagine Gyllenhaal so brilliantly pulling-off the sociopath Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler without the trial-by-fire inflicted upon him by Fincher.

My second remark about Kubrick and Fincher has to do with method. Both really did/do HUGE numbers of takes. Ken Adam, who did production design on Dr Strangelove and Barry Lyndon said there were times when he thought actors would simply go to pieces and conceivably threaten the integrity of the production itself (Ryan O’Neal, in BL for instance). Fincher, in his own way (probably less mellow than SK…) does the same thing. There are reports of Fincher demanding 50+ takes of scenes that last less than one minute (like someone getting into a car) which invokes Tom Cruise’s tale of Kubrick making Sydney Pollack in Eyes Wide Shut spend two weeks walking 15 feet and opening a door.

Stanley Kubrick famously never used storyboards, so high take rates were, to some extent, his way of figuring out HOW the movie should be shot (“I’m waiting for the magic” he used to say). Cursory research reveals Fincher does use storyboards, and is purported to be as obsessive about them as Hitchcock or the Coen Brothers. So one can only conclude that his high take rates are about wishing to totally shape performances. I admit that it must take a remarkably thick-skinned actor to endure the feeling of another person taking away their creative process and imposing his own.

Musick Hund On The Coens

As someone who fervently believes in and admires the genius of the Coen Brothers, I sometimes find myself pondering the question of their artistic fallibility. What I mean is: no artist stands above criticism, but geniuses are usually out ahead of their critics in most cases. Take for example the case of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Professional academic critics have been attacking the play for years on the grounds that it is a work of the most depraved misogyny ever in the English language. Well, Lear’s tragic flaw is his misogyny. You might not like him (who “likes” Lear or Macbeth, or Hamlet anyway?) but claiming that Shakespeare and his art are unethical, never mind unsuccessful, is critically disingenuous. 

The Coen Brothers deepest artistic instinct is a form of what one might call “dark silliness,” but when they punch that up to eleven in the most glorious fashion, those who like them, but don’t love them, frown. There are a lot of folks out there who claim to be Coens fanatics who think The Lady Killers is not only the worst movie they ever made, but one of the worst movies of all time. That movie is a spectacularly self-indulgent homage to existential stupidity, but it means every frame of what it says and shows, it’s not a “misfire” or “mistake.” 

I would not argue against the idea that their very best movies are the one’s where they find some kind of balance in, or restraint of, their most excessive impulses. But we as their audience should be grateful, not offended, that they are not shy. They are brothers having a good time writing crazy movies. They show us more about America’s special form of dumbness by occasionally making movies like The Lady Killers, or Burn After Reading than if they always made their go-to neo-noir.

Musick Hund: Sir Patrick And The World War II Interpretation Of The Scottish Play

Macbeth (2009)

We began with Shakespeare and Patrick Stewart, so let’s end that way too! Not much to say about this production except to note that it sets the action of the play in WWII era of the Soviet Union, so Arendt’s comments on the Stalinist terror are seen to apply remarkably well to this play written circa 1606.

This version is available on Amazon Prime and you may also stream it free here.

Musick Hund On World War II And Jewish Resistence

Next up "Defiance" (2008). Based of the true story of two brothers in Nazi occupied Belarus who led a community of Jews hiding in the forest where their family ran a smuggling operation before the war.

This well-made film tells a story that is compelling without any help from theoretical concerns about the nature of violence. However, it's in the mix today because it deals with a group of individuals that must find a way to form a community in the midst of war, occupation and mass murder, without resorting to unnecessarily coercive methods. 

The movie opens with the SS murdering thousands of Jews across several communities, both rural shtetl and urban ghettos. The two protagonists, Tuvia and Zus Beilski (Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber) both want revenge against the Polish gentiles that informed on their family, but the task of killing the man responsible goes the the elder and less hot-tempered Tuvia. This denial of specific personal vengeance, along with all the other unimaginable losses of loved ones, including parents wives and children drives Zus into a near perpetual state of homicidal rage that threatens to tear the forest community apart. Zus soon leaves to join the Red Army, leaving his brother to lead the fragile camp of refugees. The pivotal scene comes when a group of fighters attached to the camp refuses to do their share of the work and demands a greater share of food. In order to preserve the egalitarian spirit of the camp, Tuvia kills the leader of the rebellious fighters with a bullet between the eyes. The movie lingers on the deeply paradoxical, but ultimately just nature of this act. I merely wish to call attention to the idea that film depict this killing as both morally and politically just. Reasonable people can disagree on whether it is morally just. But it seems to me harder to dismiss the political justice of it. I think the film SHOWS it to be politically just because even though there are community members who would object to the killing on moral grounds (even if the film does not), Tuvia is shown to lead and act by mutual consent of the whole group. The camera does not show him taking matters into his own hands, but rather reveals him at that moment as a political actor in the public space that has evolved in their little community.

Musick Hund On The Zodiac (2007)

David Fincher’s “Zodiac” seems like a good followup to “CWO” for a couple of reasons. First, Fincher seems to be quite influenced by Kubrick’s obsessively meticulous methods. Second, the Zodiac killer, or killers (the film strongly suggests it may have been the work of two men) seemed to view what they were doing as some kind of game (as in the book and movie “The Most Dangerous Game”). It’s as if they never grew out of the mindset of Alex in the first act of “CWO” but as adults they are not content to merely kill and maim, they concoct their violent acts as public provocations designed to whip up a grotesque media opera of lurid curiosity, fear and paranoia.

The importance of the theory that two men and not a lone serial killer did these crimes cannot be overstated, for it suggests a pathology that needs to share the created spectacle with another in the know, turning individual killings into a perceived threat to the entire community. That feeling that the whole community—a major city—is under threat is what is to be shared and savored. It’s as if the Zodiac killers were taking revenge against American society for consigning them to ordinariness. That’s not a pathology that the psycho-sexually oriented forensic psychologists of that time were were likely consider, nor were the media likely to deviate from the comfortably inscrutable story of the lone psycho, which fits much more neatly into the grooves of various American myths of rebellious individualism and outlawry. Perhaps now this kind of pathology might bubble up in comparative youth, in, say, the recent mass shootings perpetrated by frustrated and angry young men. Most of those men were or are mentally ill, however, and it is by no means clear that the Zodiac, lone wolf or duo, though undoubtably a deviant or deviants, could be called such. He was, or they were, content to remain unknown, to relish the stupendous private joke whose butt was the whole of the public realm. The Zodiac killings were utterly unique to their time.

Musick Hund On A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange” is one of the deepest movies ever made on the subject of violence. Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel sets up the issue in a very unsettling way. We cannot help but be drawn into Alex’s point of view, and this is unsettling precisely because he finds violence to be a joyous celebration of pure agency. The movie forces us, vicariously, to feel that too.

There’s a sense in which—in the first act of the film— Alex and his droogs exist, as it were, in a “state of nature” insofar as violence is concerned. This is underscored by Alex’s response to the idea of going after the “big big money” (instead of the hardcore mayhem and petty theft he is drawn to, as he is drawn to the music that makes up the soundtrack to his violent fantasies), “And what will you do with the big, big, money? Have you not everything you need? If you need a motor-car, you pluck it from the trees. If you need pretty polly, you take it.” This sounds a lot like Rousseau’s description of labor-free humans in the state of nature in “A Discourse on Inequality.” Planning a score starts to sound a lot like work to carefree Alex. So he reasserts his pack leadership through an act of violence that Kubrick presents as a slow-motion ballet. 

However, as Alex soon finds out, his power over his mates must be consensual, not coercive. In Arendtian terms, he conflates power and violence, not realizing that his strength as a leader derived almost entirely from the willingness of his droogs to be lead. Alex ends up in the hands of the state, and the state ends up making the same mistake he did. The “Ludovico Technique” is high tech version of the sorting out of obedience that Alex thought he had successfully administered to his droogs. It backfires for the same reason, namely that moral or immoral behavior is, a the padre remarks, entirely matter of choice, or else it is merely a matter of instrumental coercion, which, in Arendt’s terms, can only be applied instead of power, not as a means to it.

Hamlet With David Tennant And Patrick Stewart

Let’s get some concepts on the table while we watch Hamlet (BBC, 2009)

In her 1969 essay “On Violence” Hannah Arendt argues for a more rigorous distinction between violence and power in the discourse of political theory. She especially wants to challenge the conventional notion that violence somehow underwrites power. In her view, violence and power have a reciprocal inverse relation, since for her “power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert,” so someone “in power” by definition harnesses (“consensually” as it were) the strength of this group action. In the movie Miller’s Crossing Tom (Gabriel Byrne) says to Leo (Albert Finney) “you run this town because people think you run it; when they stop thinking it, you stop running it.” For Arendt, the conduit of any show of strength in response to a loss of power is inevitably violence of some kind. In the most fundamental Arendtian terms, violence is what individuals, interest groups and governments turn to when they can no longer derive enough strength through power.

Perhaps the most primordial violent impulse among humans is that of revenge. In communities where justice is (still) a moral/religious category unconnected to the polis, personal or familial revenge is what comes ready-to-hand. The problem, as Rene Girard points out in Violence and the Sacred, is that “Vengeance is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process,” one which “every time it turns up in some part of the community..threatens to involve the whole social body.” In such so-called “primitive” communities, ritual sacrifice, according to Girard, is what inevitably developed as a means of deflecting such “self-replicating” violence away from from the community and on to outside human (or animal) scapegoats. The great literary critic Tony Tanner, making clever use of Girard’s ideas, observes that Western tragedy begins with Orestes pausing momentarily before taking murderous vengeance on his own mother Clytemnestra who had killed his father Agamemnon for sacrificing his sister Iphigenia. The pause is very brief:

Orestes: What shall I do, Plyades? Be shamed to kill my mother?

Plyades: What becomes thereafter of the oracles declared by Loxias at Pytho? What of sworn oaths? Count all men hateful to you rather than the gods.

Orestes: I judge that you win. Your advice is good.

And so he kills her, and is later put on trial by the gods. Western tragedy recommences with Hamlet, in which, as Tanner inscribes in his preface, this pause of revenge has become the whole play. Ever since, our theater, and more lately cinema, has seen personal vengeance in terms of a conflict between justice as a moral category and justice as a political category, as a function of the state.

~~~~Musick Hund

Musick Hund On Cronenberg Novel

MUSIK HUND (who's currently about two-thirds through the book) says:

All the stuff you would expect to find in a novel written by the director of "Videodrome" and "ExistenZ" is in "Consumed": it is a meditation on the interface of technology and the body, disease, human psychology, and the history of philosophy. It is interesting to take note of the fact that the last movie Cronenberg wrote himself, "ExistenZ," (1999) was released several years before computer technology went truly mobile, hence "Consumed" is, ahem, consumed with Apple products as extensions of--tools of expression of--the body, sexuality, disease, etc. For example, a creepy scene gets set up in the novel, but instead of being "shown" the scene directly, Cronenberg has two characters  scrolling through photos of it on a MacBook and allows the narrative to be carried forward by their conversation about what they are seeing on the screen. Other devices--iPhones, iPads, esoteric cameras and audio recorders--serve similar narrative functions.

On the other hand, as a fan of Cronenberg's films, what's so interesting about this novel is the presence of a narrative voice that can tell the reader stuff, stuff that the camera could show us only obliquely. Much of this telling has to do with how the characters express their inner lives through their technological preferences. Or it may be that their inner lives have been replaced by technological preferences as the two protagonists are consumed by sex and gadgets in a novel about a mysterious act of cannibalism.

Musick Hund: Couple Of Famous People On Cronenberg's Novel

"Coming from David Cronenberg, the originality, wit, preoccupation with technology, and uncompromising carnality of Consumed should come as no surprise. He will probably be accused of every sin that can be invented to compensate for human fear of mind and body. This fiercely original book, with the scope and poetic exactitude of Nabokov's best work, has the power to unsettle, disarm, and finally make the reader absolutely complicit." (Viggo Mortensen)

"Consumed is an eye-opening dazzler. Not for the fainthearted, but for those of us who relish a trip into the shadowy depths, a must-read. Cronenberg's novel is as troubling, sinister, and as enthralling as his films." (Stephen King)

From Musick Hund: Cronenberg Publishers Novel Description

About the Book 

Stylish and camera-obsessed, Naomi and Nathan are lovers and competitors – nomadic freelancers in pursuit of sensation and depravity in the social media age, encountering each other only in airport hotels and browser windows.

Naomi finds herself drawn to the headlines surrounding Célestine and Aristide Arosteguy, Marxist philosophers and sexual libertines. Célestine has been found dead and mutilated in her Paris apartment. Aristide, suspected of the killing, has disappeared. Naomi sets off in pursuit, but the secrets she discovers are as seductive as they are disturbing.

Nathan, meanwhile, is in Budapest photographing the controversial work of an unlicensed surgeon named Zoltán Molnár. After sleeping with one of Molnár’s patients, Nathan contracts a rare STD called Roiphe’s. Nathan then travels to Toronto, determined to meet the man who identified the syndrome. Dr. Barry Roiphe, Nathan learns, now studies his own adult daughter, whose bizarre behaviour masks a devastating secret.

These parallel narratives become entwined in a gripping, dreamlike plot that involves geopolitics, 3-D printing, North Korea, the Cannes Film Festival, cancer, and, in an incredible number of varieties, sex. ‘Consumed’ is an exhilarating, provocative debut novel from one of the world’s leading film directors.

Notes On Eyes Wide Shut & Inside Llewyn Davis From Musick Hund

Inside Llewyn Davis is the only Coen Brothers movie (apart from some road scenes) both shot and set in New York (the Georgetown scenes in Burn After Reading were shot in Brooklyn, Hudsucker Proxy although set in NewYork was shot in Chicago, while the beginning of Barton Fink was shot in LA). Stanley Kubrick only shot one of his films in his hometown, Killers Kiss, but his last film is something of a love letter to Manhattan despite having been shot entirely (second unit exteriors aside) in England. Eyes Wide Shut transforms New York into a psycho-sexual dreamscape, while the city setting of Inside forms the bleak backdrop for Llewyn's delusions of authenticity. 

What both films share is an episodic, almost picaresque structure. It's a structure that in Eyes serves to underscore how much of dreams are about encounters--that is often the only sense in which dreams make sense. Oscar Isaac's Llewyn is, outwardly, much more of a picaro figure than Tom Cruise's Dr Bill, but even though he pisses off nearly everyone he encounters, Llewyn is mostly dishonest with himself. Where Bill Harford wants to take what he feels to be his "share" of sexual adventure within his marriage, he's not really very good at it. Llewyn thinks of himself as a lovable rogue, and although he serially imposes on the patience and generosity of others, the only person he actually rips-off is himself. Next time we'll pair Llewyn with Barry Lyndon!  

Notes On Barton & Clockwork Pairing From Musick Hund

Last time this blog did such pairings Barton Fink's counterpart was The Shining and the similarities are both deep and obvious: hotel, writing, typewriters, and in the background subtext, Nazis and WW II. Pairing Fink with Clockwork bring out the theme of violence and cinema in interesting ways. Most obvious is the link between Alex's "treatment" (torture) through cinema and Barton's viewing of the wrestling picture dailies ("I will destroy him!"). Although Barton does not have his eyes clamped open, the look of existential dread on his face is priceless (only a truly un-self-aware philistine could be so spiritually ambushed by the vulgarity of wrestling movies). The Nazi subtext is imported by Kubrick into his adaptation of Burgess's novel through his use of Goebbels/Riefenstahl propaganda footage. It would be interesting to work out how each film deals with the philistinism (or in the case of Alex, something like anti-philistinism) of their respective protagonists. Perhaps it would be useful to think of Barton and Charlie as Alex divided over two characters (in much the same way the Coens divided the real-life Dude over Jeff Lebowski and Walter).

Third Pairing: Dr. Strangelove & The Big Lebowski

Musick Hund Guest Blogger Comments:

DR. Strangelove and The Big Lebowski

Well, both titles refer to scheming men in wheelchairs! But seriously, the Coens have a tendency to blur the distinction between terrible violence and shenanigans. I think that tendency comes from the influence of Kubrick, Strangelove in particular, where a war room pie fight scene almost made it into the final cut. The criminality of the "nihilists" in TBL and that of Generals Ripper, Turgidson and the other inhabitants of the war room comes from the same need to be taken seriously along with a simultaneous refusal to actually be a 
grown up. 

Second Pairing: The Shining & Barton Fink

Musick Hund Guest Blogger Comments:

The Shining and Barton Fink

OK, this is pretty obvious, in fact I'm almost inclined to claim that Fink is the result of Joel and Ethan shining The Shining through the prism of their own peculiar cinematic and existential obsessions. In any case, it's certainly the closest thing to a horror movie in the Coens oeuvre. Furthermore, Kubrickian ambiguity is literalized grotesquely throughout, but especially in the exchange between Barton and the beautiful woman on the beach who notices that he is clutching a box that may or may not contain someone's head:

Woman: What's in the box?

Barton: I don't know.

Woman: Isn't it yours?

Barton: I don't know.

But even more importantly, I think the hotels in both movies represent America. In The Shining it is America writ large, the haunted genocidal landscape of manifest destiny always lurking on the edges of each frame. In Barton Fink, it's the America of Meadows/Munt, the sticky theater floor of mass society, whose reality eludes Barton's earnest and empty idealism.

First Pairing: 2001: A Space Odyssey & No Country For Old Men

Musick Hund Guest Blogger Comments

2001 and No Country for Old Men

When I first saw NCFOM I was struck by how the opening shots of the West Texas landscape evoked the opening shots of the (primitive) African landscape in 2001. Beyond that aesthetic evocation there’s Anton Chigur, who behaves a lot like a malevolent malfunctioning computer. Beyond that there’s the theme of humans having to pretend they have a grasp on their destinies even as the universe continually refuses to play along (I mean, for instance, a doomed astronaut blandly receiving his parents “See you next Wednesday" message sign-off, a doomed West Texas welder’s macho desperation in the face of Chigur’s blank implacability).

Guest Blog From Musick Hund: On Herzog's Oddness

It's not easy to put one's finger on what Herzog's characteristic oddness consists in (is this the same question as how to characterize his oddness?). We can make a start by noting his pervasive tendency to sublime the ordinary, or, if we are sympathetic to his point of view, to create the conditions for reality to appear in its sublimity. And that precise ambiguity between what he creates and how things appear to him is what, perhaps, can be said to be uniquely his and his alone. 

This is an intensely romantic ambiguity from a philosophical perspective--perhaps one way of describing Hegel's dialectic would be to say that Hegel wishes us (those smart or foolish enough to read his texts) to consciously live this ambiguity, acknowledge it, because otherwise we would-be sages have no hope of leading philosophically examined lives. 

Herzog makes such acknowledgement (of the ambiguity between what he creates or reveals with his camera and how things appear to him) the mission of his art, specifically through the depiction of a hubris that, though it may range from the relatively innocent (say, Tim Treadwell) to the near demonic (Aguirre/Kinski) shares the characteristic of wishing to tell oneself a story that is both more compelling and easier to accept than the narrative Herzog's camera--and crucially, later, voice--reveals. Herzog as documentarian seeks to depict his subjects talking to themselves while believing they are telling us/him how things are. 

So, the later emergence of Herzog's voice as an "aid" to his camera is either a betrayal of his art or part of its natural development depending on one's point of view. It might be more accurate to simply observe that Herzog's narrative intrusions in his own voice reveal him to share in the hubris that attracts him as much, or more, than his subjects. So then Herzog's dilemma as an artist (the paradox he wishes to shine a light on) becomes how to honestly document his own self deceptions, or less sympathetically, how to be a humble megalomaniac. 

(All of these threads seem to come together when, on camera in My Best Fiend, Herzog claims to be "clinically sane" but in the same breath matter-of-factly states/confesses that he had only been prevented from firebombing Kinski in his home by the vigilance of Klaus's dog).