Michael Wood teaches at Princeton. Literature and the Taste of Knowledge came out in 2005.
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Vol. 21 No. 19 · 30 September 1999
pages 51-53 | 5012 words
Quite a Night!
Michael Wood
- Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrik and ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ by Frederic Raphael
Orion, 186 pp, £12.99, July 1999, ISBN 0 7528 1868 6
- Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler, translated by J.M.Q. Davies
Penguin, 99 pp, £5.99, July 1999, ISBN 0 14 118224 5
‘I can’t say he’s reasonable,’ a colleague remarked of Stanley Kubrick, ‘I can only say he’s obsessive in the best sense of the word.’ Because he was obsessive without being crazy, many people have thought Kubrick was a genius, but the word is chiefly a gesture of admiring incomprehension. What Kubrick’s films suggest is that he was some kind of meticulous master, but a master of the obvious, and anyone who is surprised by the ponderousness of his new work, Eyes Wide Shut, must have forgotten what the other films were like. Vincent LoBrutto, from whose biography (Faber, 1998) I’ve borrowed the above quotation, inadvertently sums up a whole career when he says: ‘Stanley Kubrick didn’t take vacations.’ We could sum up the master’s film style by saying: ‘Stanley Kubrick didn’t hint.’
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 20 · 14 October 1999
From Neil Hornick
In his article about Stanley Kubrick (LRB, 30 September), Michael Wood says that when HAL, the computer in 2001, is slowly dismantled and ends up singing 'Daisy, Daisy', 'pathos instantly turns to bathos, lapses into one of Kubrick's broad and unfunny jokes.' First, the song is clearly regressive – HAL is reduced to pure childishness – and in consequence the effect is surely as disturbing as it's bathetic, is disturbing because it's bathetic. Secondly, the choice of 'Daisy, Daisy' was by no means arbitrary. Although no one has ever noticed it, this particular song was selected, not just for its simple-mindedness and 'half-crazy' reference, but because it was one of the first songs ever 'taught' to a computer. It can be heard on a 1965 Brunswick LP called Music from Mathematics, arranged by M.V. Mathews, 'sung' by an IBM 7090 computer and Digital-to-Sound Transducer. And a spooky little number it is.
Neil Hornick
London NW11
