Stanley Kubrick: The Playboy Interview (50 Years of the Playboy Interview)
This interview with Stanley Kubrick was conducted just after the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and one year before the NASA moon landing in 1969. So historically, given the fact that Kubrick had just completed an incredible movie about man's venture into space and his own mortality within the vast cosmos, the Playboy interview reveals Kubrick's futuristic exuberance. But with a touch of pessimism, which is a balanced assessment of the future that never was, as far as what Kubrick's 2001 production would entail; that involves man questioning and confronting his ultimate failing, which is himself - noted at the end of the interview with Kubrick reiterating mans self induced extinction "would be no more than a match flaring for a second in the heavens..." So if you look at the interview as a promotion for 2001 and Kubrick's enthusiasm regarding technology, research and humanities ingenuity, as mentioned, it is overlapped with large dashes of pessimism and missed opportunities - clinging to the hope of extraterrestrial contact. What is really fascinating about this interview is the half way point of Kubrick's career, from the 2001 (1968) production, you can sense the formulations of a creator who is now opening up the ideas of the human condition and the stresses of life, humanity, with a discussion relating to relationships, human psychology, diseases, war, the changing environment - Playboy's interview of Kubrick in it's self is a futurist time line and precursor of his future projects that followed 2001. From the futuristic nihilism and violence of a Clockwork Orange through to the psychosis of the Vietnam war with Full Metal Jacket and finally Eyes Wide Shut Kubrick's sociological crescendo of fraught monogamous relationships.
Comments
Post a Comment