RadixJournal - October 23, 2024


Kubrick： Paths of Glory


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

137.81055

Word count

1,078

Sentence count

53

Harmful content

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we take a look at Stanley Kubrick's latest film "Dr. Strangela" and try to figure out if it's an homage to Kubrick's first film, "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 This film is so fascinating to watch retrospectively because all of these, it's almost like this, this is a, this is a very good Hollywood film.
00:00:13.940 And, but when you watch it, knowing where Kubrick will be over the next decade, second decade and third decade, it, it, it takes on a whole life of its own.
00:00:30.700 It's, it's almost this ironical, ironic, like master key to his works. Because if you think about the final scene with, you know, Christiana, Christine Kubrick, it, it resembles to such a degree, the final scene of Full Metal Jacket.
00:00:54.120 And it's the, you, you know, with Full Metal Jacket, you're storming this, you know, the perch of the sniper and you finally find him. And it's a young girl and who's begging, you know, you know, kill me, kill me at the end. 0.96
00:01:14.000 Um, in this one, you, it has this very similar parallel structure of you finally reach the enemy. And as Alberto just said, they never, they, they don't come anywhere close to seizing the anthill.
00:01:30.180 In fact, um, in, in, during the show trial, um, you know, it was like our no, or, or something like that says, you know, we reached our own line. We reached our barbed wire. So they, they didn't come anywhere close.
00:01:43.080 So this is as close as you get to the enemy. And it's this young girl.
00:01:46.760 Um, I, there are many other examples of this. The, the other is the, um, uh, Kirk's Kirk Douglas's character, Colonel Dax is going to relay the information that Miro, who's, who's the villain slash scapegoat in this film fire ordered his, um, regiment to fire on French troops in order to spur them into action or, or punish them by destroying.
00:02:16.760 Uh, they're playing a Johann Strauss waltz. And, and there's evident irony in that, in the sense of the general staff are whining and dining while the troops are, you know, sleeping in dugouts and entrapped in the trenches.
00:02:35.740 And there's this Johann Strauss waltz playing this three, four time, um, you know, elegant and youthful and lustful, but at the same time, mechanical.
00:02:51.880 And it has this deeply ironic quality to it.
00:02:57.880 And again, watching this movie backwards, so to speak, you, it's hard not to hear that and think of the amazing, um, blue Danube sequence from 2001, where these rockets and space stations, spaceships that are ultimately weapons of war.
00:03:22.600 Which Kubrick lays out, which Kubrick lays out very clearly in that the most famous jump cut of all time, where a eight man is throwing a bone into the air, and it's actually circling clockwise.
00:03:36.620 And then there's a jump cut and then there's a jump cut and then there's a jump cut and it begins to circle counterclockwise.
00:03:41.620 You can read into that what you will.
00:03:43.920 And then it jump cuts to a spaceship.
00:03:45.980 So what Kubrick is saying to you explicitly is that all of this scientific achievement, all of the wonder and majesty of space travel is at the end of the day, a bigger bone that you can beat someone over the head.
00:04:06.620 Um, Rob Ager, who's done interesting research onto this, has looked at that.
00:04:13.300 And this is probably imperceptible when you watch it, although it might be resonating unconsciously or subliminally.
00:04:20.880 Uh, there, there are actually little like German ships with a German imperial flag on it in the space situation.
00:04:28.600 Now you already have the Americans versus the Soviets that's made explicit where Americans and their Soviet counterparts are meeting and there's a sort of old discussion of what's happened with the moon base.
00:04:44.760 And underneath it, you can see that though they're being very diplomatic, they might even be friends.
00:04:50.600 Uh, there, there's a cold war that is still raging and raging in space.
00:04:55.340 And so again, you, you see this, I don't know what to make of it is whether these are, this movie was deeply important to Kubrick and in some way he's offering an homage to it in later films.
00:05:12.720 Uh, or you could say that there's actually a lot more to those scenes.
00:05:17.620 Those scenes are pregnant to use a phrase that's repeated in the film and whether there's, there's, there's actually a lot more meaning to this film.
00:05:30.060 Although he was constrained at the time due to the fact that he's working in the Hollywood system due to the fact that he was even willing to give it a happy ending, if that would make it more commercially successful, uh, et cetera.
00:05:43.520 And there, there's some other elements to this.
00:05:45.980 I mean, it's hard.
00:05:47.220 I mean, the, the most obvious one I think is the way in which this movie is a sort of prelude to Dr. Strangelove.
00:05:54.640 The, the, the notion of this impossible task being asked of the colonel and the, and his soldiers, you, there's no way to get beyond your own barbed wire.
00:06:10.300 There's no way to impregnate the ant hill that just even the notion of an ant hill is significant here.
00:06:17.540 And there are these impossible tasks.
00:06:19.900 Uh, there's a crazy general general general Moreau who's firing or at least wants to fire on his own men to spur them into action.
00:06:29.980 This, this, you know, he's putting them on a suicide mission and he probably knows it or should know it. 0.99
00:06:35.540 And he he's even willing to kill them all. 0.94
00:06:38.640 It reminds you of Colonel Jack Ripper who, you know, is launching this, uh, attack on the Soviet union so that we can just bring this whole thing to a head. 0.95
00:06:51.140 Uh, and because we, we understand the, you know, the Marxist subversion that is going to sap the nation's bodily fluids and all it.
00:07:01.140 Um, all of these things are present in this film and I, I do think there's a little bit of, I guess you could say almost sub rem going on as well.
00:07:15.620 Little indications of the way that Kubrick will start to encode characters.
00:07:21.980 Um, although it's not, you know, he's constrained by the novel, although he's always constrained by a novel and all his works.
00:07:31.960 Um, he's constrained by just his, you know, youth at the time he's constrained by the Hollywood system.
00:07:37.200 He's constrained by the fact that this is a Kirk Douglas vehicle.
00:07:41.500 Um, but there are little, little indications that there's, there's more going on with these characters.