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Subjected Wills The Antihumanism of Kubrick’s Later Films  p a t j . g e h r k e a n d g . l . e r c o l i n i 101 In the summer of 2001, Steven Spielberg released what was supposed to be his homage to the work of the late Stanley Kubrick. Instead, viewers almost unanimously found A.I. disappointing. Not only did critics and audiences receive it harshly, but Kubrick fans and Spielberg fans alike largely rejected the Wlm. It was described as “muddled,” “a soggy mess,” and “a disaster.”1 John Patterson aptly ascribed the failure of A.I. to “the incongruity of its two creators.”2 It was, we believe, due to the incongruity between Spielberg’s humanism and the antihumanism of Stanley Kubrick. It is easy to argue that Spielberg is a “dedicated humanist” or that his Wlms express an “innate idealistic humanism.”3 Kate Soper deWnes humanism as the positive appeal “to the notion of a core humanity or common essential features in terms of which human beings can be deWned and understood .”4 Humanism values features such as reason, love, family, or truth and believes these values to be innate qualities of the human being. Similarly , humanism negatively refers to concepts such as alienation or inauthenticity , “designating, and intending to explain, the perversion or ‘loss’ of this common being.”5 Films such as Schindler’s List, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, and even A.I. rely upon such a belief system for their explanations of heroes, victims, and villains. On the other hand, antihumanism, as Reiner Schurman aptly describes it, refuses to place faith in such “metaphysics of man” and rejects “the program derived from such a metaphysics, a program that aims at restoring integral man.”6 It is the dominance of antihumanism in Kubrick’s later Wlms that we believe leads some critics to describe him as distrustful of humankind or misanthropic.7 From at least 2001 forward, Kubrick’s Wlms consistently work to critique and undermine notions of humanist subjectivity and, more speciWcally, rational autonomous will. Robert Kolker argues that Kubrick is an antihumanist in part because his characters undo their own subjectivity .8 This essay expands his thesis by detailing how Kubrick’s later works critique humanism through the deconstructing of three common humanist themes—reason, will, and identiWcation. In analyzing these Wlms we have tried to avoid turning to the texts upon which the Wlms were based or turning to indications of Kubrick’s intent. While many of Kubrick’s Wlms are based on books or short stories, we believe that reading material from these prior stories into the Wlms risks distorting how the Wlms themselves function. Kubrick’s screenplays, as Lee Siegel noted of Eyes Wide Shut, often followed “only the skeleton of the novel” and in some cases radically altered the storyline and tenor of the material, such as the transformation of Peter George’s dramatic nuclear thriller, Red Alert, into the parodic Dr. Strangelove.9 Likewise, it is not our desire to ask what Kubrick wanted his movies to do or what he was trying to accomplish with particular choices. How a Wlm or any communication event functions often exceeds or even contradicts the desires of its author, regardless of her or his skill. Whether Kubrick himself was a humanist, an antihumanist, posthumanist, or located elsewhere in the debate is not the concern of this investigation. Rather, we desire to study how the Wlms themselves operate. We have chosen to follow an approach to Wlm criticism similar to the one expressed by Marco Abel, by trying to avoid moral or aesthetic judgment about a Wlm in favor of working “with the visceral aspects of the Wlm, with the Wlm’s forces, according to their devices, their speeds.”10 We view Kubrick’s later Wlms as operative critiques , setting out not representations of the world as it is, will be, or should be, but interrogating both the traditional methods of Wlmmaking and the common notions of what it means to be an individual acting and operating in a world of others. In this way, we analyze how these Wlms, regardless of origin or intent, operate as critiques of humanist subjectivity by interrogating notions of reason, will, and identiWcation. Unreasonable Truths Kubrick’s Wlms are notorious for frustrating critics and audiences alike by defying their expectations and the standards of genre. For example, 2001 did not follow the form of a science-Wction Wlm, and critics...

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