• 1 Lefort C., Machiavelli in the Making. M.B. Smith (trans.). Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern Univers (...)
• 2 Hollis, A. “War and Justice.” Saturday Review, December 21, 1957, quoted in Kagan N. The Cinema of (...)

2A similar idea to this is outlined by Claude Lefort,1 writing from within the framework of auteur theory. Lefort claims that the auteur and the oeuvre represent a reciprocal system, both aspects of which serve as a mutual guarantee. Kubrick himself lends some credence to this idea when he said “I would not think of quarrelling with your interpretation nor offering any other, as I have found it always the best policy to let the film speak for itself.”2

• 3 Barabási A.L. & Bonabeau E., “Scale-Free Networks”, Scientific American, 2003, 288: p. 60-9.
• 4 Barabási A.L., Linked: How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else And What It Means For Busines (...)

3The main method I shall use is a form of textual and semiotic analysis, based upon network theory –a discipline whose impact has been amplified due to the rise of the Internet as a mass communications medium. A network is defined as an object comprising of both nodes and the links between them. For example, the nodes of a computer network are the individual computers and its links are the hardwire or Wi-Fi connections. Networks appear in many different topographical guises, although the form I am interested in using as a way to structure an analysis of Kubrick films are called “scale free networks.” These are naturally evolving networks where a minority of nodes within the network attract many more of the links than other nodes, thus forming hubs. Scale free networks are found in a wide variety of naturally occurring objects, from the cellular level of life,3 to the structure of galaxies.4

• 5 Zhang Z., Zhou S. & Chen L., “Evolving Pseudofractal Networks”. The European Physical Journal B, 20 (...)
• 6 Watts D.J. & Strogatz S., “Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks”. Nature, 1998, 393(6684): (...)
• 7 Barabási A.L., Linked: How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else And What It Means For Busines (...)
• 8 Milgram S., “The Small-World Problem”, Psychology Today 1 May, 1967: 62-67.
• 9 Ugander J., Karrer B., Backstrom L. & Marlow C., “The anatomy of the Facebook social graph”, 2011, (...)

4Scale free networks have three main characteristics that identify them.5 The first is a phenomenon known as high clustering coefficiency. The nodes of an evolving network are not just randomly distributed but tend to form into groups surrounding one particular node, which is more connected than the rest.6 The second is that these clusters then themselves cluster around one particular node that becomes a hub, or the most connected node over the entire network.7 The third characteristic is that connectivity over the entire network can be achieved involving very few steps. Communication across a network takes place in the form of a dyadic connection between individual nodes. But due to the presence of both clusters and hubs, communication occurs between any two nodes in the network in a surprisingly small number of steps. This is otherwise known as six degrees of separation, or the small world phenomenon, studied by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s.8 No matter how large or complex the network is, the steps linking its individual nodes remain about the same number. For example, there are just 4.7 steps connecting all the users of Facebook, which has over two billion members.9

• 10 Kietzmann J.H., Hermkens K, McCarthy I.P. & Silvestre B.S., “Social media? Get serious! Understandi (...)
• 11 Aarseth Espen J., Cybertext: Perspectives on Egodic Literature. Baltimore, US: John Hopkins Press, (...)
• 12 Ibid.

5The network is the cinematic universe itself. Its nodes are the various signs that can be considered meaningful elements within the individual films. Its links are the affinities between nodes that occur in different films. Clusters and hubs in network theory are today called “influencers”10, because their opinions set the trends for the whole network. In the Kubrick cinematic universe, the clusters are the pervasive themes found across Kubrick’s films and the hub is the sensibility of Kubrick himself, who, like a composer, orchestrates these themes in his work. The nodes are the sign elements found in his films that the digital theorist Espen Aarseth terms “textons”.11 These are the signs that are materially present in any text, examples of which include instances of dialogue, or elements of the mise-en-scène of a film. The interpretation of textons when viewing a film produces what Aarseth calls “scriptons”.12 These are the signs created in the mind of the reader from the textons that are available. In digital texts such as videogames, for example, the textons can be reconfigured by the user at the level of the text; however, in traditional media (such as films), textons cannot be altered, although the scriptons that make up the readings of them can differ considerably between one interpreter and another, because the interpretation that a reader makes is unique to them.

• 13 Barthes, R., Image, Music, Text. S. Heath (trans.). London: Fontana Press, HarperCollins Publishers (...)

72001: A Space Odyssey is an exemplary film to demonstrate how an interpretive method that is already applied to an individual film can be scaled up to apply to his entire oeuvre. 2001 comprises a mostly visual text; the language elements that would anchor its meaning to a preferred interpretation13, are therefore mostly absent. Consequently, thematic points and ideas are communicated pictorially rather than lexically. The trick at arriving at a satisfying interpretation for the film –one which draws all of its disparate elements together into a coherent explanation– is to link the textons intratextually as a network of signs. An interpreter does this by comparing or contrasting textons found in one part of the film with those found in other parts. In so doing, the interpreter constructs a storyline for the film that organizes its affinities and dissaffinities as scriptons into a covering explanation. For example, the prehistoric scenes in the “Dawn of Man” section are connected to events that happen later in the narrative: the glowing eyes of the leopard are linked to the glowing eyes of HAL, and this trope identifies them both as threats to the existence of humanity. Another instance is how the barren landscape of the prehistoric hominids is linked to the barrenness of the lunar landscape (or to outer space), both of these extraterrestrial environments suggesting similar challenges for human species survival.

• 14 Life, “A Silent Virginia is Discovered”, Life Magazine (11th May, 1953), p. 122 & 125.
• 15 Rhodes Gary D., Stanley Kubrick: Essays on His Films and Legacy. Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc (...)

10Kubrick’s first feature film, Fear and Desire, made when he was twenty four years old14, is a contested addition to the Kubrick oeuvre, because of the efforts the director made to disown it; allegedly attempting to purchase all the copies so that he could destroy them.15 While the film is very much an apprentice work, Kubrick’s moody black and white photography stands out. However, his handling of the performances and elementary mistakes made with the editing betray the fact that he was a filmmaking novice.

• 16 Jung C.G., Kerényi K., Science of Mythology: Essays on The Myth of The Divine Child and The Mysteri (...)
• 17 Spinks L., James Joyce: A Critical Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, p. 102.

13The reflexive strategy of foregrounding the film’s fictional status is mirrored in other places in the narrative. Kubrick and his writer, Howard Sackler, make frequent references to Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest –a play that is also concerned with its ontological status as a fiction. The opening narration, for example, echoes the themes of Prospero’s famous “our revels now have ended” speech in Act 4 Scene 1: “Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind.” The Tempest also provides the frame for Sidney’s descent into madness. Sidney, the youngest and most childlike of the four soldiers, is given the duty of guarding an enemy captive (credited only as, “the girl”). She is restrained by being tied to a tree, like Ariel in The Tempest, trapped by the witch Sycorax. Sidney’s madness involved quoting from the play and when he eventually kills the girl, he blames her death on the magician (Prospero). At the end of the film, Sidney is found wading in a river singing Ariel’s song, “Full Fathom Five.” An additional more oblique reference to The Tempest appears in the scenes between the enemy General and his dog, “Proteus”. Proteus is named after the ever-changing god of the sea, whose name means “the first being”16, the source for the adjective “protean”. Ideas of metamorphosis and the sea connects to the theme of Ariel’s song to the god, Proteus, who is also used by James Joyce as the title for the third part of his novel, Ulysses, as a metaphor for “the fluctuations of consciousness.”17

• 18 Ciment M., Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. London: Faber and Faber, 1999, p. 170.
• 19 Miller M.C., “Kubrick’s Anti-Reading of The Luck of Barry Lyndon”, Comparative Literature, 1976, 91 (...)

14While these allusions are interesting, Kubrick does not manage to find a dramatically satisfying way to weave them into the narrative. Consequently it is difficult to know how to interpret them. The filmmaker is clearly ambitious. He strives for gravitas and sophistication. But he lacks the subtlety and the artistry to achieve his aims. For example, in the film’s opening narration he uses an authoritative voice to tell us to doubt the film’s ontological authority. Kubrick thereby undercuts his own authority as a filmmaker, through telling us of his reflexive intentions. In his later works, he would find ways to hide this crude didacticism. In Barry Lyndon, for instance, the narration is used as an ironic counterpoint to the events shown in the narrative.18 The pronouncements of the Thackerayan narrator are constantly contradicted by the events that are shown in the film.19 This technique undermines the authority of the narrator, through persuading audiences to question the trustworthiness of the narrative, without directly telling them to do so.

• 20 Kubrick S., “Forward”. Kieślowski Krzysztof & Piesiewicz Krzysztof, Decalogue: The Ten Commandments(...)

15Fear and Desire is an instructive film because it demonstrates that Kubrick was always interested in incorporating big themes into his stories, therefore countering accusations that his admirers are suffering from interpretive overreach by reading too much into them. In Fear and Desire the allegories and symbolism are blatant. Kubrick in later life would find more sophisticated and subtler ways to disguise them. However, he remained the ambitious and intellectually curious person who was the director of Fear and Desire. In his preface to the published scripts of The Dekalog, Kubrick discusses that, “very rare ability of writers and directors who are able to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them.”20 In Fear and Desire he had clearly not mastered this ability yet.

• 21 Esslin M., Brecht: A Choice of Evils. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1971, p. 129.
• 22 Ciment M., Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. London: Faber and Faber, 1999, p. 156.

16In his subsequent films, Kubrick deploys many reflexive strategies to separate an audience’s intellectual appreciation from their emotional engagement. Like Bertolt Brecht, he would specialise in alienation effects.21 Reflexivity operates across a number of dimensions in his films. For example, stylistically the sugar-glass bottles and the break-away balsa-wood furniture featured in the fight between Alex’s Droogs and Billy Boys gang in A Clockwork Orange are reflexive because they recall many of the standard gags used in the choreography of saloon bar brawls from Classical Hollywood Westerns. He also shot Alex’s daydream of a crucifixion scene in the style of a Hollywood Biblical epic –similarly Kubrick remarked that the characters of Dr Strangelove and Dr Zempf from Lolita were parodies of movie clichés about the Nazis.22 This preference for stylistic artifice is also shown in A Clockwork Orange with the obvious rear projection used in the Durango 95 scenes, and in the self conscious use of dialectical montage to represent Alex’s masturbatory daydream sequence –which include the intercutting of other films– the hanging scene from Cat Ballou (Silverstein 1965) and the rocks falling on cave people from Creatures the World Forgot (Chaffey, 1966). These techniques are the visual equivalent to the phrase, “it’s only a movie”; they function both to show the full horror of Alex’s actions, but also to soften them sufficiently, so that the anti hero character can still serve as a sympathetic protagonist.

• 23 Nordern E., “Playboy Interview: Stanley Kubrick”, 1968, in Stanley Kubrick Interviews, Gene D. Phil (...)

19The futility of war theme is one that Kubrick will return to again and again. Like Joker in Full Metal Jacket, Mac and the General are in a “world of shit”, not of their making. And like the soldiers who are sacrificed in Paths of Glory, or the millions who die at the end of Dr Strangelove, they are people who are the victims of forces beyond their control –a failing that Kubrick suggests is hardwired into the human condition itself. This sense of futility as a motivation for human heroism and anxiety is also present in films that are ostensibly not about war. For example, in 2001:A Space Odyssey it is referenced in the central preoccupation of the film: the question of the possibility of alien life. Kubrick stated in a Playboy interview promoting 2001 that: “The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning… however vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”23

• 24 Ciment M., Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. London: Faber and Faber, 1999, p. 170.

24Foreshadowing events in the narrative, a favourite storytelling technique of Kubrick, is also present in this film. Kubrick was attracted to this technique because it minimised the effect of surprise. As he stated in an interview with Michel Ciment: “What is important is not what is going to happen, but how it will happen. […] to gain a greater sense of inevitability and a better integration of what might otherwise seem melodramatic or contrived.”24 In Killer’s Kiss, the entrance to the taxi-dance hall is at the end of a long flight of stairs where a sign that reads, “watch your step” is prominently displayed. Undoubtedly the presence of this sign is serendipitous, given the guerrilla filming techniques that Kubrick used. However, its presence symbolises the sense of dread faced by Gloria. In later films, Kubrick would utilise foreshadowing frequently. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the point of view shot of the astronauts’ lips moving reveals to the audience that HAL knows they are plotting against him. Similarly the scene depicting the strained marriage at the beginning of The Shining already suggests fault lines that will open up later in the narrative. Finally the death of Barry’s son, Bryan, in Barry Lyndon, removes all sense of surprise and shock over the tragedy and lends instead a sense of inevitability about Barry’s impending downfall. The narrator also underscores this sense of fatalism through dramatic irony.

• 25 Caillois R., Les jeux et les hommes (Man, Play and Games). M. Barash, (trans.). Chicago, IL: Univer (...)
• 26 Caillois R., Les jeux et les hommes, (Man, Play and Games). M. Barash, (trans.). Chicago, IL: Unive (...)

25The climax of Killer’s Kiss is a fight scene between Gordon and Rapallo that takes place in a warehouse full of tailor’s mannequins. It is a scene that attests to Kubrick’s fascination with masks. At the end of the fight Gordon spears Rapallo and Kubrick cuts to the face of one of the mannequins. This is a shot choice that is recapitulated in A Clockwork Orange, with a crash zoom into a painting as Alex kills the Cat Lady. The mask motif is one that will appear in many Kubrick films. In The Killing, Sterling Hayden wears a clown mask when robbing the racetrack. Alex’s droogs wear masks in A Clockwork Orange when they invade the homes of both the Writer and the Cat Lady. And the Somerton orgy sequence in Eyes Wide Shut depicts a masked ball, with the rich and powerful disguised by striking Venetian and expressionistic face coverings. As Roger Caillois points out, masks have long been associated with erotic fetes and with conspiracies.25 The mask liberates its wearer from social constraints, in a world in which sexual and power relationships are otherwise taboo. In addition to actual masks, Kubrick is also drawn to the face depicted as a mask. Especially in times of heightened emotional intensity, his characters wear the rictus grins and frozen expressions of both agony and ecstasy. Notable examples of this trope are the painted face of Dolores Haze in Lolita in her confrontation with Humbert, the astronaut Bowman as he prepares to blast through the airlock in 2001, and Jack’s famous “Here’s Jonny!” line as his head appears through the shattered bathroom door in The Shining. Masks are also part of the mise-en-scène of Kubrick films. In the scenes that take place in the derelict casino in A Clockwork Orange, the sides of the stage are framed by two enormous carnival masks, their comic, and exaggerated features are associated with indecencies, jostling, provocative laughter, exposed breasts, mimicking buffoonery, and a permanent incitement to riot.26 Also, masks feature in the apartments of Marian’s dying father and Domino the prostitute in Eyes Wide Shut.

• 27 Wilde O., “The Critic as Artist”, Complete Works, Vol. 4, Robert Ross (ed.). Massachusetts: Wyman F (...)

26On many occasions throughout his oeuvre, Kubrick uses the dichotomies between the sacred and profane to shine a light on the otherwise private aspects of the human condition. The Kubrick Cinematic universe is, for the most part, a Godless place, but one in which the vestiges of a divine absence are to be marked everywhere, in the rituals that Kubrick’s characters perform. As with his fascination for bathrooms (which arguably perform a similar functions to masks, in that they hide the user’s identity), Kubrick focuses on these secular rituals as ways to reveal hidden facets possessed by his characters. Oscar Wilde said “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”27 And Kubrick incorporates this insight into his storytelling.

• 28 Festinger L., A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. London: Tavistock, 1962, p. 1.

29The antihero of The Killing, Johnny Clay, is a professional criminal, although he is presented a little too sympathetically in the narrative for his criminality to be entirely credible. The moral universe of The Killing is one in which bad deeds must not go unpunished. Possibly Kubrick was anxious about maintaining audience sympathy, so he includes several scenes where Johnny’s virtues are fulsomely praised by other characters such as Fay, Marvin, and Maurice. In later films, Kubrick would gain more confidence as a storyteller and make his hero less overtly likable and more interesting, so that the narrative did not suffer whether audiences cared for them or not. Kubrick would discover that he could be a more effective moralist if he confronted hegemonic moral frameworks rather than endorsing them. By placing audiences in the duplicitous position of sympathisers, Kubrick allows a productive tension to develop between the emotions that his films elicit and the ideas they raise. Kubrick’s cinematic universe is one in which immoralities produce a sense of cognitive dissonance. The psychologist Leon Festinger defines this as the struggle for internal consistency when a person is presented with inconsistent events.28 Kubrick uses this dramatic technique to place moral questions at the forefront of his narratives. In The Killing, for example, one of the characters, Maurice, a chess-playing wrestler, becomes a kind of conduit who articulates this very Kubrickian perspective.

• 29 Gerrard D., “The Heard and Self Reflexiveness”. The Kubrick Site, 1999. Online URL: http:// www.vis (...)
• 30 Hollis A., “War and Justice.” Saturday Review, December 21, 1957, quoted in Kagan N., The Cinema of (...)

31This anti-mediocrity theme also underpins Mac’s speech in Fear and Desire. As David Gerrard points out,29 Kubrick also spoke about this theme in a 1957 interview: “the criminal and the soldier at least have the virtue of being against something… in a world where many people have learned to accept a kind of grey nothingness.”30 The admiration Kubrick felt for the criminal, the soldier, as well as for the artist is one directed at society’s outsiders. In challenging hegemonic norms, these characters have the potential to jolt people out of their complacency and to address issues of true existential import. But, in his later films Kubrick became more subtle in his presentation of this theme. His characters for the most part remain outsiders, but they do not speak of their predicament so directly. They lie, they euphemise; they mask their condition in obfuscation. For example, Bill Harford in Eyes Wide Shut repeating back what other characters have just said to him, the repetition functioning to cast their words in an ironic new light through the partly naïve, partly knowing doubling, or Jack Torrance in The Shining, burying his anger in platitudes in his conversation with Lloyd the barman. The challenge to hegemonic norms is only occasioned by the narrative in these films, their ideas are dramatised in the situation the characters find themselves in, rather than being spoken of directly. This was the main lesson Kubrick learnt from making Fear and Desire.

• 31 Ellroy J., “Feast of Death”. BBC Arena Documentary, directed by Vikram Jayanti. BBC, 2001. (The quo (...)
• 32 Kubrick S., “Kubrick’s, ‘Notes on Film’”. The Observer Weekend Review. 4th December, 1960, p. 21.

32A final important theme of The Killing is the loveless marriage between George and Sherry Peatty (their names a play on petty). George and Sherry are the first in a long line of Kubrick screen marriages, from Spartacus to Eyes Wide Shut. Marriage for Kubrick is depicted as a domestic battleground, that mirrors the director’s interest in the theme of war in the public sphere. Kubrick uses marriage not just to explore issues of fidelity and betrayal, but also to unmask the complex motivations and failings of the human condition. The novelist James Ellroy, in a conversation with his wife, stated, “It’s easy to write the hot fast love story where the man meets the woman… but the long haul of monogamy that’s something else.”31 Kubrick’s focuses on this challenge rather than on romance. Kubrick wrote in 1960 the one thing that has always disturbed him is the endings of films, because they tend to introduce a false note: “When you deal with characters and a sense of life, most endings appear to be gratuitous.”32 This is what separates his earlier work –especially Killer’s Kiss and The Killing– from his later films. The moral universe in which Kubrick’s stories are set becomes more ambiguous and less certain as his confidence as a filmmaker and the opportunities afforded him to tell such stories increased.

• 33 Barry D., “Stephen King Hates The Shining Because It’s Misogynistic”. Jezebel, 2013.Online, URL: ht (...)
• 34 Nelson T. A., Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2000, p. 296.

33The work of making meaning is something that is often left for audiences to decide. In his depiction of marriage, Kubrick was not a polemicist. He was happier showing the way things are between men and women rather than presenting an idealised vision of how they should be. In this regard, he was often accused of misogyny, in the critical responses to The Shining, notably by Stephen King.33 Critics picked up on the fact that the character of Wendy is not framed according to the grammatical conventions of Hollywood films. Like Bowman and Pool she is not heroic, although critics miss how capable she is, running the hotel and then saving Danny and herself from Jack. Kubrick’s critics accuse him of misogyny, not because of what is shown on screen, but because of his reluctance to sentimentalise or idealise. Compared to his later depictions of married life, the marriage in The Killing is easily read according to the conventions of Hollywood Film Noir. And yet there is something in the duplicity, inventiveness and intelligence of Sherry, the wife, that starts to sketch out an approach that will later transcend Hollywood conventionality. As with his moral outlook, Kubrick realised that it was far more dramatic to show behaviour and not to explain it. This desire is most successfully realised in the character of Alice from Eyes Wide Shut, whom Thomas Allen Nelson calls the most “complex and layered” and “the strongest of all of Kubrick’s female protagonists.”34

• 35 Barabási A.L., Linked: How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else And What It Means For Busines (...)
• 36 Chandler D., Semiotics the Basics. (Third Edition). London: Routledge, 2017, p. 117.

35When you consider the totality of a director’s oeuvre as a cinematic universe, it also creates an image of the director as the sovereign of that universe. In this paper, I have utilised network theory to begin the task of identifying the links that connect the hubs, which I have identified as the dominant themes and aesthetics found in Kubrick’s work. In different phenomena across many domains, scale free networks have been identified as a naturally occurring mode of self-organisation.35 In the context of semiotics, scale free networks are a candidate for the deep structures that underpin the organisation of meaningful systems.36 In subsequent papers I hope to revisit this topic to construct a more complete picture of this universe.