DIRECTORS’ FIGHT CLUB EPISODE 3: KUBRICK V. CRONENBERG

“I like Yiddish–to me it’s Jewish, while Israel is not Jewish. European Jewry is the culture that I relate to.”
(Cronenberg 1999)

1980s Hollywood is a gold mine for horror enthusiasts, especially for etymologizing the complex landscape that the “genre” inhabits today, so (sorry to break the fourth wall so soon) this essay’s delay was initially for that reason: an overwhelming cache of material. Cronenberg’s extensive œuvre, almost exclusively American distributions, was obvious for many reasons but especially technosocial history… at first. “Low-budget auteurism” prompted an examination of his early 80s work, Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983), but these were not enough, not grounded enough in the exigencies of 80s American horror cinema. While most of their content may have bespoke contemporary American politics, most of their structures and aesthetics- their formalities- bespoke not only Cronenberg’s anachronistic filmmaking but also his Canadian idiosyncrasies, an argument first articulated by Gaile McGregor (1992). However, what McGregor neglects- and what serves to yoke together him and the titular contemporary for whom he has such little artistic respect- is not simply his Jewish identity, but specifically his repression of it; both he and Kubrick are documented as not being ashamed of their Jewish heritage, but distrustful of religious institutions. Each auteur grew up in a secular household in North America during the Second World War, keenly aware of his Slavic Ashkenazi heritage, but soon considered atheism the most rational theologism for himself.

Following McGregor’s rationale for an ethnospecific analysis of horror, genre, and film, this essay hopes to investigate the extent to which these two atheist-Askhenazi auteurs, despite being separated by an alleged geocultural border, expressed such congruent themes of genre (and genocide) elision vis-à-vis scientific horror within Western institutions and technologies, from Cartesian dualism to the medical industrial complex to television. These themes coalesced in a post-WWII-cum-Cold-War context to dramatize the fear of an imminent (nuclear) holocaust and the ubiquity of genocidal terror(ism). Do they know what they are talking about, though?       

Genre (and Genocide)

Cronenberg surely believes his late elder had no idea what he was talking about, claiming to be “a more intimate and personal filmmaker than Kubrick ever was,” and that Kubrick did not, 

…understand the (horror) genre. I don’t think he understood what he was doing… In a weird way, although he’s revered as a high-level cinematic artist, I think he was much more commercial-minded and was looking for stuff that would click and that he could get financed. I think he was very obsessed with that, to an extent that I’m not. (Cronenberg 2013) 

The inquisition into his scorn of the beloved American classic has circulated throughout public discourse nearly as much as that of the dissent from Stephen King himself. While it is important to note the respective Canadian and American “king(s) of horror” in cinema and literature hold reservations about giving Kubrick his flowers, King’s contempt for the adaptation undermines Cronenberg’s, bemoaning how many horror-fying alterations Kubrick and Johnson made to Jack Torrance because the novelist felt a very potent “autobiographical” attachment to the character, feeling as though the story would not be a tragedy without the father’s apparent fall from grace whilst “trying to get better for his family and himself,” as opposed to Nicholson’s performance as “nuts to begin with.” (Stephens 160; 163) Avoiding Dr. Stephens’ optimistic mistake of reading Nicholson as a substantial critique of reified patriarchal violence, this argument here understands the director’s reinvention of the main character to be a primarily aesthetic choice, resulting from his interpretation of the narrative’s horror lying in its science fiction. In other words, the preternatural horror is suspended by the establishment of science fiction, where the same horrific unknowns can undergo a slightly more optimistic makeover as futuristic scientific anomalies to be solved rather than anachronistic spiritual entities to be slain.

In an interview with Michel Clement, Kubrick explained that not only has he read many horror stories- something Cronenberg would probably doubt- but also that the manuscript of King’s novel was one of the most riveting, “strik[ing] an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural.” (Kubrick 1) Nevertheless, despite King’s suppositions, the psychology in which Kubrick was most interested was not Jack’s but Danny’s; what drew him to the script was Danny’s extrasensory perception (ESP), not Jack’s insanity. The film’s primary shortfall- its lack of critical depth- comes from (Whiteness and) the refusal for artistic reflexivity, not just between the director and novelist- the lighthouse and beacon- but between the ilk of Kubrick and Cronenberg. Their horror was as dedicated to the destruction of arbitrary binaries as they were to upholding them. Whether or not Kubrick realizes it, his beliefs surrounding ESP allow us to view this film as much of a repressed sci-fi as it is a self-conscious horror:

I hope that ESP and related psychic phenomena will eventually find general scientific proof of their existence. There are certainly a fair number of scientists who are sufficiently impressed with the evidence to spend their time working in the field. If conclusive proof is ever found it won't be quite as exciting as, say, the discovery of alien intelligence in the universe, but it will definitely be a mind expander. (2)

From my reading of Kubrick’s adaptation and King’s response to it, the abuse engenders ESP, not just Jack’s abuse but his father’s. If Jack is “crazy” according to King (or “out of [his] fucking mind” as Jack so glibly asks his wife (00:53:52)) then so is Danny, both envisioning people that no one (except the other one, in the case of the hag) can see. Although imaginary friends are developmentally normal for children Danny’s age, (whether or not they faced abuse, but especially if they have faced abuse), someone Jack’s age envisioning a bartender before falling off the wagon would be considered a mental illness- a relapse and coping mechanism- or since Jack is an upper middle-class white man, a “substance use disorder,” if not “cabin fever” (00:09:20). If Jack was nonwhite, film scholars like Mathias Clasen would not call him a “sympathetic” and “likable” character until he destroyed the snowmobile (Stephens 160); they would call him a violent addict being self-reflexively crushed under the weight of his own self-fulfilling prophecy. If he was a woman, they would call him a terrible mother and that CPS should have driven through the snow-buried mountains to save Danny. Tracy A. Stephens is correct in surmising that patriarchal capitalism prohibits a popular reading of Jack Torrance as an irredeemable figure, but she does not fully understand this is also because he was not fully rendered as such in neither novel nor screenplay form. 

Kubrick’s omission of Jack’s backstory and interiority- his and his mother’s torturous abuse at the hands of his father, exposing the cycle of abuse- robs King’s narrative of one of its most important themes (the relay race of abuse, à la Fiona Apple) in Kubrick’s most daring rewrite, and the final product suffers because of it. Jack’s redeeming qualities- or at least the rationale for his abusive behaviors- need not be explained to the audience with childhood sob stories, but shown through complex action implying a troubled past and competing needs. If screenwriting was King’s specialty, he would understand this, but he is used to the luxury of being allowed to spoonfeed his reader. With an audiovisual medium, it would be much more difficult to dramatize the violent terror of Jack’s childhood while not (if only subconsciously on the part of the viewer) excusing his abusive adult behaviors, because it is precisely this terror of receiving domestic violence- child and spousal- that buttresses the narrative’s tragic horror: the fear of one’s benefactor becoming one’s executioner, figuratively and literally trapped. For King, his fear was to become the executioner; the tragic horror was to face the music not to face the monster. In a rather egotistical way, then, King misses the beat of his own drum. Whether because of his Jewry or masterful understanding of American culture and cinematic horror, Kubrick still did in fact know how to extricate the emotion and dramatize the horror of a homicidal benefactor truly believing his work is for the greater good. 

So why does Cronenberg not appreciate Kubrick’s foray into horror? Where is Kubrick’s “misunderstanding” laid bare? It is still rather unclear, even after investigating Cronenberg’s two films following The Shining, Scanners (1982) and Videodrome (1983). Interestingly enough, the simultaneously most potent and overlooked motif shared between the directors is their terrifying destabilization of Cartesian dualism. Kubrick’s fascination with ESP also brings the doctor’s cameo into perspective, claiming she’s “quite sure there’s nothing physically wrong with Danny. (emphasis added)” (00:14:44) This is how the doctor opens her conversation with Wendy, the latter closing it by disclosing Jack’s past alcoholism and physical violence, which then bookends the first sequence. It could certainly be argued, then, that while Danny’s ESP is an implicit status quo (sci-fi), the physical violence that separates the first act status quo from a previous, exposited character/story arc of sorts now returns for a heretofore unexplained inciting incident (horror), leading the characters to their point of no return: the site at which the sci-fi and horror coalesce for a genocidal violence. Cronenberg perhaps does not understand such subtlety, for his cohesion of sci-fi and horror in the 80s consisted primarily of taking the infinite potentialities of scientific and technological expansion and horror-fying them, but this does not leave much room for genre intercommunication. Scanners is much closer to horror talking to science fiction than Videodrome in which horror talks at science fiction, instructing it across time. 

Perhaps the difference between these co-instructive genres is their relationships with these anachronisms, science fiction at the very least promising a future on which to speculate- even if not a good one- while horror is very diegetically grounded in the exigent. While both focus on the bounds and necessities of survival under the most varied circumstances, the ingenuity of the human spirit is always on display and under intense scrutiny. This speaks to the experience of the most marginalized groups (along McGregor’s ethnospecific lines: Black and indigenous folks, and of course, Jews) as well as artists. Reorienting the most painful experiences and severe tests of human will into forces for good- predicting the future and saving your mother or preventing your race from conquering the world, whether that race be telepaths or chip-implanted Americans- represents a clear continuum of counterrevolutionary 60s politics into 80s Jewish auteurism. Unfortunately, time and space prevent further investigation into all the hypocritical genocide denial and misogyny that ultimately render these political statements rather useless, but that does not mean the formal and aesthetic statements are any less timeless.

Works Cited

Howell, Peter. “David Cronenberg at TIFF: Evolution, Mugwumps and Kubrick.” Toronto Star, 31 Oct. 2013, www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/david-cronenberg-at-tiff-evolution-mugwumps-and-kubrick/article_237c96e4-2fa3-5e45-925a-dae76506d38e.html#.  

Kubrick, Stanley. Kubrick on the Shining. 1981, www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/interview.ts.html.

McGregor, Gaile. “Grounding the Countertext: David Cronenberg and the Ethnospecificity of Horror.” Revue Canadienne d’Études Cinématographiques / Canadian Journal of Film Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 1992, pp. 43–62. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24402081. 

Stephens, Tracy A. ““Dear God, I Am Not a Son of a Bitch”: Justifications for Patriarchal Violence and the Mischaracterization of Stephen King’s Jack Torrance.” Horror Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 1 Oct. 2021, pp. 159–174, intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/host_00035_1, https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00035_1.