Atheist?

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"Does anybody know what his views on religion were and if he was an atheist or a religious person? or an agnostic.?"

In the way that the term 'atheist' is usually bandied about he was an atheist in that he had no time for supernatural conceptions of a God, he was not a theist in this sense. But this does not mean that he had no interest in either religion or metaphysics or the nature of the cosmos and so on. He was very interested, and like Einstein, he took a keen interest in the philosophy of Spinoza (a monist who equated the cosmos itself with 'God'), though he also was keenly interested in all the sciences and the insights of psychoanalysis. He most certainly was not an agnostic, as an agnostic is someone who gives up all interest in such metaphysical matters, who is opposed to the gnostic, opposed to gaining any deeper knowledge of the world, is indifferent to such things, someone who claims to be neutral on all of that in order to avoid it, to remain ignorant and go through their life in a state of willed and stupid blindness.
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Quite. And there have been a number of commentators on Kubrick's work, myself included, who have drawn attention to this aspect of Kubrick's metaphysical vision. Critic Mark Fisher was among the first to do so about a decade ago, and here's what he had to say at that time:I want to celebrate Kubrick's coldness and impersonality. Kubrick is no Romantic: he does not buy into the over privileging of the subjective and the emotional. Nor is he, in any sense, a humanist. Human beings are not at the centre of his cosmos, and his account of humanity is, to say the least, not positive. No arguments there, perhaps.

But concluding that his rejection of these doctrines makes him a cynic, a nihilist or a remote modernist is to be misled by the humanism and Romanticism his work so effectively challenges.

Odd that someone who made “The Shining” should be described as populating his films with 'emotionless zombies'. Jack's homicidal fury might be many things, but emotionless? Likewise Wendy's sustained pitch of hysterical terror.

'Emotional zombies' would be a better description of Jack and Barry Lyndon- helpless coquettes of the passions, dancing to someone else's tune.

Kubrick is clinical, analytical, and that is his greatest service to us. There is a difference between a director capable of depicting emotions and one who is emotionally manipulative. Kubrick's films, yes, are cold and impersonal. But we have to think carefully about why 'hot' and 'personal' are the automatically privileged terms in our post-Romantic culture. Kubrick shifts the focus away from the subjective experiencing of emotions to the (social/ cultural/ biotic) machines which produce those emotions.

Unlike most Hollywood filmmakers, Kubrick is no emotional pornographer - the point is not to identify with the characters. Such identification would merely reproduce the redundant subjective narcissism upon which consumer culture runs. What if the point were to escape from this hall of mirrors? To see ourselves in these characters, yes, but from outside, instead of from inside, so that we appear not now as passionate subjects but mannequins trapped within the hideous, remorseless machines that produce and feed upon our subjective intimacies.

We are all in the Overlook [the hotel in The Shining, the spectre of the mortifying Symbolic Order, the collective fiction or hallucination we mistakenly term 'reality']], locked into the treadmill repetition of someone else's past mistakes, the viral time of abuse-begetting-abuse, yet escape is possible. But such escape is precisely out into the impersonal, the emotionless, the cold of the Overlook snow rather than the heat of Jack's passion.

In this respect, Kubrick resembles Spinoza - someone who correlated passion with passivity, and who thought that freedom, far from being the default position for human beings, was something attained only when the dense accretion of repetition-compulsions and habit-programs which constitute human subjectivity was hacked through. God, Spinoza thought, could not feel hate, or love.

I wonder why it is that 'cold' and 'slow' are automatically deemed to be negative?

It is precisely Kubrick's coldness and slowness that are missed in a contemporary culture that is so obsessively 'warm' and 'fast'; ingratiating, emotionally exploitative, relentlessly fidgety. Kubrick took us out of ourselves: not via the transports of ecstatic fervour, but through the icy contemplation of what drives and traps us, and the vision of a universe indifferent to our passions. To see the mechanical deathliness of the human world from the perspective of that indifferent universe: that is what Kubrick offered us. A vision of God (which is also an approximation of God's vision).

Kubrick returns - why deny it? - to an essentially religious sensibility, although his religion is 'atheistic' in the same sense Spinoza's was. For Spinoza, God = immanence, matter in itself, the gloriously dispassionate, desolated cosmos. Kubrick evokes the desubjectified affects of awe and dread, rather than the compulsory, socially-endorsed, 'warm' emotions of empathy/ sympathy, as homage to a universe whose indifference entails not pessimism, but freedom: freedom from the miserable prison house of the human.

I used Spinoza as a comparison to Kubrick because Spinoza does very much what you suggest Virgil does, in the respect of offering detailed diagrams of the way human beings systematically trap, impede, and destroy themselves. 'Why do human beings love what makes them miserable?' is the question Spinoza - in anticipation of Freud - relentlessly poses. For Spinoza, passions are correlated with passivity; freedom consists in leaving behind emotions, and achieving an attunement to a cosmos that is - in the best sense - pitiless. ('God is affected with no emotion of joy or sadness.')

2001 is the film that most obviously fits the description of the Kubrick oeuvre, not so much because of its absence of sympathy/empathy in it, but because of its awestruck vision of the cosmos, which isn't quite so evident in any of his other films, before or after.

I think we must distinguish the depiction of emotion in a film from the emotion it stimulates in the audience - and from a film's emotional ethic (the kind of emotion a film, implicitly or explicitly, recommends, privileges or endorses). In 'Hollywood', the first two tend to collapse into each other, and the emotional ethic is usually an invitation to wallow in a drippy sentimentality. With Kubrick, there is a clear distinction between the emotions his films depict and the reaction the audience has: the distanciation effect you talked of before, which not only happens within the films, but between what the film is showing and how the audience responds to it.

All of Kubrick's films depict passions, but none of them is 'passionate': they are about emotions, NOT 'emotional.' This is as true of Eyes Wide Shut and Barry Lyndon (and The Shining, for that matter) as it is of 2001.

BL, TS, and EWS all anatomize human emotional folly; all three are about problematics of empathy/ sympathy; but it's not clear that they make us feel sympathetic or empathic. It's not clear, for instance, that we identify with Dr Bill or Barry.

The fascination lies in the ambiguity of Kubrick's emotional ethic: what does 'he' want us to feel? This isn't clear, to say the least, since, thankfully, the films refuse to corral us into a simple response. Evidently, that's why some choose to read the films as cold (in the normal 'bad' sense), pessimistic, or disdainful and misanthropic. I prefer to read them as attempts to simulate the dispassionate perspective of the Spinozist 'God' - a perspective which, because it feels 'neither joy nor sadness', can liberate us from our own 'joys and sadnesses.'


Yes, of course I completely agree, but aren't you actually completely wrong?

No clue but being an agnostic is so much less of a burden

Mark Fisher nailed it. That was one of the best write-ups on Kubrick's aesthetic and effect I've ever read.

Most atheists are agnostic: they don't know there is no god, but won't waste time assuming there is until there's good evidence one way or the other.

Kubrick sounds like a deist.

The restitution of life is no great feat. A variety of deaths may well enter into your punishment

when ANY other director acts like that, he's called a pretentious armchair-intellectual "le artiste"

MOVIES ARE NOT ART. THEY ARE ENTERTAINMENT MEANT TO MAKE MONEY. STOP BEING A PRETENTIOUS LIBERAL.