A VISION EXPRESSED THROUGH ADAPTATION: STANLEY KUBRICK'S LOLITA, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, AND BARRY LYNDON

Program year: 1986/1987Digitized from print original stored in HDRStanley Kubrick occupies an unusual position among modern filmmakers in that, even though he is known as a uniquely personal film artist, most of his films are essentially adaptations of literature. Yet Kubrick succeeds in imbuing these adaptations with his own personal artistic vision, which consists of a group of recurring themes· and concerns and of the distanced, ironic tone through which they are expressed. Kubrick's central theme is the idea of man as an "ignoble savage"; that is, as an inherently evil being. Kubrick believes that man has based his social institutions on a false view of his own nature, and as a result those institutions will not perfect man, but destroy him. Only an acceptance of man's true nature in Kubrick's films. Besides the theme of the ignoble savage, Kubrick’s films contain the recurring themes of deception and obsession with control. These themes are played against the detached and ironic tone that is Kubrick's trademark. Kubrick achieves this tone by denying the audience a realistic context and a set of realistic characters with whom to identify. He utilizes a mythic, artificial story structure and broadly drawn characters to distance the audience, then creates irony through the use of dialogue. Kubrick expresses his vision by making subtle changes in the works he adapts, changes which Serve to alter the focus of the novel and place it more in line with Kubrick's world view. Thus, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita becomes a social satire on the moral hypocrisy of modern America; Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange becomes a bleak, cynical study of human selfishness and political expediency; and William Makepeace Thackeray's Barry Lyndon becomes an indictment of the entire eighteenth-century social system. Each film is a new work of art which integrates the author's world view with Kubrick's own personal vision