Study Questions: Week Four

Seeking Easy Street and Strange Loves at Home

The Killing (1956) and Lolita (1962)

Stanley Kubrick's films, with a few exceptions, are variations on the major Hollywood film genres. Of his first five feature films, two were film noir Killer's Kiss, 1955 and The Killing, 1956; two were war films (Fear and Desire, 1953 and Paths of Glory, 1957), and one was was from a sub-genre that enjoyed popularity during the 1950s: the biblical epic (Spartacus, 1960). He went on to science fiction (2001, 1968), the historical romance (Barry Lyndon, 1975), horror (The Shining, 1980) and another war film (Full Metal Jacket, 1987). Even films which are not easily identified with a major genre regularly employ their conventions Lolita (1962) borrows from the road film; Dr. Strangelove (1964) draws on the war narrative; A Clockwork Orange (1971) uses the futuristic setting of science fiction. Kubrick, however, never just reworks familiar narrative patterns; he transforms those patterns into films which express his very personal view of life.

Sex and death are never far apart in Kubrick's films (especially in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and the relationship is evident in both Lolita and Dr. Strangelove. Lolita marks Kubrick's departure from the familiar genre films which he had made during the 1950s. In adapting Vladimir Nabokov's novel, the director turned his satirical eye on both American culture and on the destructive obsessions which drive supposedly intelligent and sophisticated characters to murder. The same themes move from the personal and domestic in Lolita to the public and the political in Dr. Strangelove. The latter film was begun as a serious drama about the dangers of nuclear war in the manner of Stanley Kramer's On the Beach (1959) and Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe (1964), but soon Kubrick decided that the absurdity of the situation was best treated as a black comedy. Thus the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union becomes an arena where chaotic and demonic inner lives of both countries' leaders end in a nuclear holocaust.

The Killing: After today, We'll Be on Easy Street.

1. Why does Kubrick use the elaborate narrative structure of flashbacks and parallel plots? How does it help point up the contrast between the elegance of the plans for the robbery with the traps and missteps of actual events?

2. How many elements of the noir style can you find in the use of visual imagery, the motifs of traps and betrayals, the fate of the protagonists, the construction of the various characters?

3. How does Kubrick give his characters a sense of individuality by using flashbacks to give biographical information?

4. How do the motives for taking part in the robbery set the members of Johnny's crew apart from the typical gangster?

5. How are women presented in the film? Are they individualized, or do they pretty much reflect familiar stereotypes?

6. How do human instincts (especially love and sex) serve to frustrate intellect and reason in this film?

7. What is the purpose of the racial outburst in the race track parking lot? Does it serve for more than a diversion to allow Nikki to do his job?

8. How effective is the voice over in this film? How does the cold, clear newsreel style of the voice seem at cross-purposes with the chaos at the end of the film?

9. How does Sherry's lover serve as Johnny Clay's nemesis?

10. Why does Johnny let Sherry go after catching her eavesdropping? What flaw in Johnny's character is revealed in this scene?

11. What small, unanticipated events threaten the success of Johnny's plan?

12. What is the significance of the film's title (which Kubrick changed while adapting the novel)? Does it have more than one meaning? Sherry's dying comment is that her life has been "a bad joke without a punch line." Johnny's reaction to the failure of his plan is "what's the difference." How do these bitter statements tend to sum up the world view of the film noir?

Lolita: When My Mother Finds Out

1. Why would Kubrick begin the film with scene in which Humbert shoots Quilty? How does the scene insure that the audience knows that Humbert's dream will not be fulfilled?

2. What does the decor of Quilty's house reveal about the man and his life?

3. How does the film present Lolita's mother. What does the decoration of her house and her intellectual interests tell us about her? To what degree does she represent the spirit of Ramsdale?

4. What is Humbert's attraction to Lolita? How does the film make this desire seem funny?

5. Why does Kubrick use Peter Sellers in three different roles? How do the multiple roles help to transform the character into Humbert's nemesis, the figure whose function is to embody the fears and anxieties that accompany Humbert's desires?

6. In what ways might the theme of a destructive sexuality be compared to similar themes in The Killing and Dr. Strangelove?

7. How do the names of places create the impression of a society that is both repressed and highly eroticized?

8. How does Kubrick use the high school dance to satirize American culture?

9. What does Charlotte Haze's attraction to Quilty say about her intellectual and cultural pretensions? What does it say about our culture's tendency to over value celebrity?

10. What is the importance of Quilty, in the guise of a police officer at the Enchanted Hunter, talking to Humbert? How does his speech manage to seem both innocent and accusing at the same time?

11. Why is the figure of the psychologist who visits Humbert so sinister? Why does he appear to materialize out of the darkness? In what way is he similar to the figure of Dr. Strangelove? How does Kubrick use him to satirize popular views of psychotherapy.

12. What does the final encounter between Humbert and Lolita reveal about the difference between his fantasies and reality?

13. What is your final judgment of Humbert? How is he to be compared to the other major adult characters?