Inside the obsessive mind of Stanley Kubrick
He rarely handed any creative decision, however small, to someone capable of screwing it up
Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition Design Museum
You enter the Design Museum’s Stanley Kubrick exhibition with no small fanfare. In the main foyer stands a bright orange Adams Probe 16 – the concept car which Alex (Malcom Mcdowell) and fellow Droogs used to go joyriding in A Clockwork
Orange (1971).
Beside it beckons a section of that infamous orange carpet from The
Shining (1980), with its tessellated dead-end pattern, hypnotic and inescapable, serving as a perfect microcosm for the film.
Symmetry is king in Kubrick – think of those unending corridors, the twins, the maze, but also the trenches in Paths of Glory (1957), the orderly barracks in
Full Metal Jacket (1987), the Star Gate sequence and that looming monolith in
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Kubrick’s shots loved to lead the eye towards an off-screen vanishing point and this exhibition starts brilliantly with a minute-long supercut of all such compositions, flaunting his use of one-point perspective.
This is far from the first outing of the many props, sketches, costumes, script books and archive materials on display here, but it’s the first time everything has come back to the UK, where Kubrick, a son of the Bronx, spent the vast majority of his professional working life.
The show mirrors the one that Frankfurt’s Deutsches Filmmuseum launched in 2004, which has already visited 18 cities around the world before alighting in the one that’s really a natural home: London.
For British devotees of Kubrickana, it’s worth the wait. The estate, overseen by Kubrick’s widow Christiane and her brother Jan Harlan, has lent additional stuff for this particular iteration of the show. But despite their largesse and the intelligence of the presentation, it’s the
director’s legendary perfectionism that binds the whole experience together.
At every stage of the filmmaking process, from story to marketing, Kubrick’s controlling fingerprints are in evidence. There are marginalia on source books – pages from Stephen King, say, with “Danny sees the blood” scrawled in red ink down one side.
Script notes, memos about production and casting, and faxes to all his artistic collaborators have a terse, uncompromising finality. Never willing to delegate when he could micromanage, he rarely handed any creative decision, however small, to someone capable of screwing it up.
His typewriting has an almost sinister omnipresence. “This is how it types,” we read on one blank sheet of paper – new stationery Stanley was testing out – with “this is how it takes ink” scrawled in red below.
The film-by-film section of the show makes thematic links between projects: so Paths of Glory, Spartacus (1960) and Full Metal Jacket are clustered for their depictions of the battlefield, while Lolita (1962) and A Clockwork Orange nestle together with a focus on sex and controversy.
The most elaborate displays – The Shining, Barry Lyndon (1975), Dr Strangelove (1964) and finally 2001, are saved for last, perhaps because design elements were the most foregrounded of all in those pictures. A model of Ken Adam’s Strangelove war room, which