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  • Love and Death in Kubrick: A Critical Study of the Films from Lolita through Eyes Wide Shut by Patrick Webster
  • Jason Sperb
Patrick Webster , Love and Death in Kubrick: A Critical Study of the Films from Lolita through Eyes Wide Shut (McFarland, 2010); 334 pp.; $45 Paperback.

The world doesn't really need another Kubrick book. Yet given the dependability of university libraries and the voracious reading habits of his [End Page 42] well-read fan base, academic and quasi-academic presses will continue to pump them out for the paying crowd. Certainly, there is still room for another great study of the director's remarkable films, but such a hypothetical work would emerge more likely from a wholly untried approach, such as audience or industry studies—a more properly historical account of the production and distribution of Kubrick's body of work which would somehow provide a truly innovative perspective. But any further textual analysis of his films' dominant thematic and stylistic patterns—absent some yet-unearthed archival or biographical material—would seem wholly unnecessary.

With that in mind, Patrick Webster's Love and Death in Kubrick perhaps sets itself an unachievable task: to provide a thematic analysis of Kubrick's films which highlights something thus far overlooked. The book claims to provide one of the first detailed theoretical readings of this subject, awarding Kubrick the intellectual heft he deserves. However, no shortage of authors exist who have already provided the familiar sort of gender-based, psychoanalytic and post-structuralist readings put forth in Love and Death in Kubrick. This assertion is still more frustrating given how well researched the book is. Webster's work is clearly well versed in the rich body of Kubrick scholarship, which makes some of its initial claims all the more puzzling.

Since Thomas Allen Nelson's landmark Inside the Film Artist's Maze was published in 1982, Kubrick scholars have generally been running in place (Robert Kolker and Michel Chion come to mind as prodigious exceptions). In the last ten years, only James Naremore's On Kubrick (2007) has approached Nelson's level of insight, and in no small measure because he fully historicizes Kubrick and his films within a larger discourse of Modernity. Too often, scholars approach Kubrick's films as self-contained texts uprooted from the cultural, artistic and historical contexts in which they were made. Historical context is largely limited to cursory biographical information about the director himself or generalized discussions of cultural environments like the Cold War.

Yet, aside from questions of originality, the deeper issue is that Webster does not really present a coherent theoretical argument. Love and Death in Kubrick references "theory" as though it were its own justification without any attempt to articulate a specific theoretical position—not just a particular theory (Marxist, Lacanian, etc.) to anchor the analysis, but a clear goal for which he proposes employing that theory. The argument ultimately is that Kubrick's films are so full of possible readings as to be beyond one simple interpretation. In the conclusion, the author argues that

one must accept that interpretation is, in itself, an ambivalent enterprise. The detailed examination of a text does not reveal a central meaning. Instead, it releases a polysemantic range of latent, fragmentary and often contradictory meanings, invariably with little relationship to what the author (filmmaker) originally intended. Thus [End Page 43] the interpretations of Kubrick's work, offered within this book, merely represent one individual point of response.

(186)

This isn't a particularly new or helpful account of the idiosyncratic challenges inherent to textual analysis; but, more to the point, such an assertion reads in the end like a reason to avoid a more rigorous or well-thought-out structure to the present analysis. Even the claims of Geoffrey Cocks' The Wolf at the Door (2004) or Julian Rice's Kubrick's Hope (2008), as questionable as they might be, are not short on theoretical clarity and ambition. A Wolf at the Door, as Webster notes, argues that all of Kubrick's films were really allegories for the Holocaust, while Rice posits that the director's body of work was consistently more optimistic than scholars...

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