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From 'Lolita' to 'Eyes Wide Shut' Stanley Kubrick's films often focus on sexual relationships. So why, asks Linda Ruth Williams, are they so unsexy? Plus Brian Dillon looks at Jane and Louise Wilson's resurrection of Kubrick's lost film, 'Aryan Papers', and Kim Newman reappraises 'Barry Lyndon'
When 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, Playboy asked Stanley Kubrick what might become of that decade's sexual revolution. In reply he fantasised about brave new futures. "We may eventually emerge into polymorphous sexual beings, with the male and female components blurring. The potentialities for exploring new areas of sexual experience are virtually boundless." But then he suggested that people might stop touching each other altogether: "Through drugs, or perhaps via the sharpening or even mechanical amplification of latent ESP functions, it may be possible for each partner to simultaneously experience the sensations of the other." No more groin-grinding, then. Replace exchanged body fluids with exchanged thoughts and you have futuristic sex à la Kubrick.
No wonder he is thought of as more cerebral than sensual. The sexless 2001 cast a long shadow over his work, as did the aestheticised historical epic Barry Lyndon (1975). Though its picaresque tale features ample episodes of seduction, aside from a tense hunt-the-ribbon-in-my-cleavage moment, Barry Lyndon was otherwise fetishised for its classical score and painterly candlelit interiors, and for the fact that Kubrick used lenses developed for the Apollo moon landings, including the biggest lens aperture in film history. (Size isn't everything.) His last film, the sex epic Eyes Wide Shut (1999), was drooled over more for its stellar lighting than its erotic charge.
Yet Kubrick made several films examining psychosexuality and violence (A Clockwork Orange, The Shining), and at least two films showing sex sublimated through national violence (Dr Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket), as well as Lolita (1962) and Eyes Wide Shut, which focus on fraught sexual relations. In Dr Strangelove (1964), Armageddon is instigated because of General Jack D. Ripper's worries that the communists will "sap and impurify all of our precious body fluids". In fact, gallons of body fluids are exchanged or spent in Kubrick's movies. The very last word ever uttered in a Kubrick film is "fuck", not as curse but as invitation. Sex there is,...