The Making of Kubrick's 2001
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Kong in Strangelove crowns the black humor of that film with a loyalty that results in the world being blown up, and Mahar points out that Kubrick manages to trick the audience into actually rooting for the success of that loyalty.) The only conventional
love interest of importance in a Kubrick says Mahar, is that between Jean Simmons and Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, "but even there it was unconventional, having started when she was forced into his cage to satisfy his sexual appetites." Until the end of Paths of Glory there are no women. Homosexuality and bizarre sex are hinted at darkly in Spartacus; Lolita focuses on an outrageous alliance (made even more outrageous by the marriage of Humbert to Lolita's mother and, in the book at any rate, by Lolita's pre-pubescent wiles). In Strangelove mistresses abound, General Ripper suffers from premature ejaculation, Colonel "Bat" Guano (Keenan Wynn) hates and fears "preverts," and at the film's end Dr. Strangelove "led the war room inhabitants on a flight of fancy about surviving in deep mines where the monogamous way of film,
would have to be abandoned and where women would have be chosen for their sexual attractiveness, since men would be called upon to render heroic sexual service, all in the interlife
to
est of survival."
"A
certain ambivalent relationship
between man and machine,"
says Mahar, can be seen shaping up as early as Paths of Glory. In that film George Macready refuses to shell his own men because the order to do so reached him by telephone — thus leaving him without witnesses to the fact that he would be acting under orders. In Lolita the telephone again frustrates, because Humbert cannot reach Quilty or Lolita by phone, but Quilty can use it to harass Humbert. The telephone plays several important roles in Strangelove, too, as heads of state attempt to communicate over it; toward the end of the film the order that would save the world from destruction cannot be delivered because the plane carrying the crucial bomb load has had its radio damaged. "A most telling machinery scene occurs in Strangelove when Wynn has to rob one machine — the CocaCola dispenser — to make another one — a pay phone — work." And, of course, the whole plot of that film turns on the existence of the Russians' doomsday machine. in Kubrick films for many of its most important aspects, as Ted Mahar shows — which gives perspective to the widely held opinion that "because of its dazzling special effects, futuristic subject matter and unique stylistic 'feel,' nothing like 2001 has ever been seen before."
2001 has precedents