Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Kubrick gave you everything



YouTube has made the world a shittier place by giving unmitigated fuckheads a platform to spew their hateful garbage, but I stay away from all that by using it almost entirely to watch music clips and video essays about cool shit.

You still have to stay away from a huge amount of things - like fuckin' Star Wars videos - because they're not healthy for anybody. But that's okay, because there are 10,000 hours of batshit Kubrick theories - the ones that find meaning and patterns in the most random nonsense.

Sometimes, like the one above, there is actually enough evidence to sound convincing. I know it's bullshit, I know you can read anything to it, but it can be a lot of fun looking for new patterns in old favourites.

They can still get too serious, and there are a lot that genuinely believe that Kubrick littered his films with moon landing stuff because he felt guilty about fooling the world, and they can get a bit fucking desperate and intense.

But most of it is harmless, and offers more questions than they answer, and there is some beauty in that. When he wasn't being an abusive shit to his cast-members, Kubrick would fill his movies with all these clues to mysteries that have no answers, just to have people still asking these questions, 20 years after he merged with the infinite.

No doubt most of this was unintentional. That some tiny piece of set dressing that unlocks everything was just some dumb set dressing, and that a continuity error with a chair might be part of a deliberate attempt to unsettle audience 

And just look hard enough at the world, and you'll see the five and two diamonds thing everywhere. It doesn't mean shit, other than the real magic is happening in the brain that sees a pattern. And if anyone was going to make movies like this, it was Kubrick. There is so much going on in his films, on emotional, technical and metaphysical levels, that this kind of talk was always inevitable.

But discussion of a work that opens it up is so much more fun than the usual good/bad dynamic of movie talk. I'm off to check out 2001's horror of the void.

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