‘Stanley Kubrick,’ a brisk new biography of a film genius
Pauline Kael was no fan of Stanley Kubrick’s movies. She deplored his “arctic spirit.” She compared “A Clockwork Orange” to the work of a Teutonic professor. In her review of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” she wrote: “It’s a bad, bad sign when a movie director begins to think of himself as a mythmaker.”
I’m not a member of the Kubrick cult, but Kael’s animus always surprised me. After all, she’s the critic who wrote, in a dismissal of the 1986 Rob Reiner film “Stand by Me,” “If there’s any test that can be applied to movies, it’s that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.” A person who feels virtuous after watching a Kubrick movie should be prohibited from owning sharp tools.
David Mikics’ “Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker” is a cool, cerebral book about a cool, cerebral talent. This is not a full-dress biography — there have been several of Kubrick — but a brisk study of his films, with enough of the life tucked in to add context as well as brightness and bite.
Mikics is an English professor at the University of Houston and a columnist for Tablet magazine. His book is part of the Jewish Lives series of short biographies, which has given us (to name but two) Vivian Gornick on Emma Goldman and Robert Gottlieb on Sarah Bernhardt.
Kubrick (1928-99) was born in the West Bronx to firstgeneration immigrant Jewish parents. His father was a doctor. The family lived on the Grand Concourse near a vast fauxbaroque movie palace called Loew’s Paradise, with projected clouds that drifted across the ceiling. This became Kubrick’s second home. Like Binx Bolling in Walker Percy’s novel “The Moviegoer,” he was happy at a movie, even a bad movie.
He was bright but a poor student. A natural malcontent, he resembled a grubby beatnik before there were grubby beatniks. Chess and photography were his things. Later, broke and in his 20s, he survived by playing chess for quarters in Washington Square Park. Kubrick didn’t attend college. He married and became a photographer for Look magazine, a grittier alternative to Life.
Kubrick sat in on classes at
Columbia University and got to know the Partisan Review crowd. There were few if any film schools then. He told an interviewer: “For a period of four or five years I saw every film made. I sat there and I thought, well, I don’t know a goddamn thing about movies, but I know I can make a better film than that.”
He borrowed money from his family to help finance his apprentice work as a director. He made two films noir in the mid-1950s (“Killer’s Kiss” and “The Killing”) that attracted attention from critics. The movie that put him on the map as a mature talent was “Paths of Glory” (1957), a morally fraught World War I story starring Kirk Douglas.
The nine movies that followed are ones that anyone who cares about being alive in the public dark has seen, probably more than twice: “Spartacus” (1960); “Lolita” (1962); “Dr. Strangelove” (1964); “2001”
Laura Lippman’s new essay collection, “My Life as a Villainess,” couldn’t be more timely. Given the selection of Kamala Harris as the Democratic vice presidential candidate, we’re in for three months of pundits droning on about her likability.
Lippman is here to serve us a cold, crisp, refreshing glass of why that’s nonsense.
Not that this is a book about politics. These are personal essays, witty and poignant and thoughtful, about Lippman’s life. One theme that runs through them is her hard-earned knowledge that many of the things our culture expects of women — likability among them — can be traps.
Many readers will be familiar with Lippman as an accomplished and bestselling author of crime fiction. She wrote the 12-book Tess Monaghan series, set in her native Baltimore, and another dozen standalone mystery novels, most recently “Lady in the Lake.” If you’ve attended the annual Writers in Paradise conference and readings at Eckerd College, you might have met her. She’s a longtime member of the conference faculty, an experience she writes about fondly in the essay “My Brilliant Friend.”
In the introduction to “My Life as a Villainess,” she tells us that its source was her decision in 2017 to challenge herself with other kinds of writing. She had a 20-year career as a journalist before she switched to writing fiction full time, and she knew her schedule didn’t have room for the research that long-form journalism requires.
So she tried her hand at the personal essay. In 2019, just before Mother’s Day, Longreads published her essay “Game of Crones,” which drew tens of thousands of reads. She thought her description of her life as “a very old, very unusual working mother” would be entertaining. “Instead,” she writes, “I was reminded that the more specific one is about one’s life, the more universal it can seem.”
“Game of Crones,” written when Lippman was 60, is one of the 15 essays in “My Life as a Villainess,” and it’s both entertaining and universal. Lippman is stepmother to a now-grown son, thanks to her marriage to TV