"Truth in the Pleasant Disguise of Illusion": Los mundos conceptuales de Stanley Kubrick.

Abstract

The aim of this article is to offer a systematized revision of those Stanley Kubrick movies that shaped the foundations that unified his filmic narrative. It intends to do so by sketching sorne basic, though thoughtprovoking, lines on the "obsessions" of Stanley Kubrick's conceptual world, both from a thematic -e.g. the conflicts ofthe characters with the environment, the human being's fascination for technology and for the anthropomorphic impostures, the world about to collapse, the importance of performance inside fiction, etc- and a formal -e.g. travellings, reverse trackings, zoom-out, voice over, hand camera, etc- point ofview.

To restrict the corpus o[ analysis I want to revise those films that were absolutely under Kubrick's creative control. This "creative control", in Kubrick's sense ofthe term, only took place from Lolita (1962) onwards. Thus, the following films will be taken into account: Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worryingand Lave the Bomb (1963), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1972), Bany Lyndon (1975), The Shining (l980), Ful! Metal Jacket (1987) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

If the aforementioned features give Kubrick's work a sense of stylistic, formal and thematic congruity, it is also the aim ofthis article to insist on the detailed revision ofthose features as they work in the pictures from the previous corpus, as a sort of systematic rereading of the Kubrickian universe and its conceptual categories.

Tom: Yes, I have tricks in my pocket. I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

Tennessee Williams

The Glass Menagerie, scene one