Though he had first become interested in the project in the early 1970’s, Kubrick’s final film would be Eyes Wide Shut (1999), a languid and dreamlike psychosexual fantasy about a New York doctor who embarks upon a nighttime journey of gradually increasing deviancy after his wife reveals her unrequited sexual fantasies for another man. Despite (or perhaps in part because of) the hype surrounding the film, especially the infamous orgy scenes and the on-screen sexuality between then-married stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, most critics dismissed the film as a relative failure, remarking that the reclusive Kubrick was out of touch with modern marriage—though the film’s marketing and notoriety did draw audiences. Controversy surrounded the film on several issues: first, that Kubrick had not finished editing the film at the time of his death, for he often made cuts after a film’s premiere, before sending prints into wider distribution; second, that this film was proof that Kubrick the mythic auteur was an uncontrollable megalomaniac (as suggested by Eyes Wide Shut screenwriting collaborator Frederic Raphael in his memoir Eyes Wide Open); and third, that the American version of the film would be rated NC-17 by the MPAA unless computer-generated figures were inserted to obscure several of the more risqué shots in the orgy sequence, thus violating Kubrick’s final “vision” for the film. [7] As had been the case with several of his earlier films, Kubrick’s “high” cultural use of transgressive sexual content was cause for much auteurist consideration, whereas similar content in a film by a lesser director would surely be construed as a typically “low” cultural employment of softcore pornography—despite the fact that many critics seemed genuinely disappointed by the lack of actual eroticism in Eyes Wide Shut, which as Siegel (1999) suggests, led to a critical backlash against the more subtle artistic touches in the film (p. 76-83). Thus, auteurist critics (e.g., Andrew Sarris) built their expectations upon the failed promise of “low,” potentially pornographic content that would then be “redeemed” for cineastes through Kubrick’s “high” culture reputation and artistry as an auteur—but instead they turned against the film precisely because the more auteurist strokes in Kubrick’s film were too subtle to outweigh the much-hyped sexual content. Kubrick’s touted role as auteur is quite apparent in the outcry that the mild censorship of the orgy sequence would infringe upon his apparent “auteur privilege” to include whatever he wished in his final cut, even if that freedom to do so would not be shared by “lower” directors. The backlash over the sexual content of the film—combined with Rafael’s diatribe, which seemed to represent the flip-side of the idiosyncratic auteurist coin that had benefited Kubrick for so much of his career—added up to a negative critical response to Eyes Wide Shut which actually used Kubrick’s own auteurdom against him. With even auteurist critics sided against the film, celebration of the film today falls more to the same “cultists and Kubrick fanatics” noted by LoBrutto (1999, p. 90). Despite its mix of “high” art and “low” softcore sexuality, Eyes Wide Shut remains one of Kubrick’s most culturally neglected films, but that very neglect (mixed with the film’s controversial content) leaves it as fodder for Kubrick fans in whom cultism and auteurism exist symbiotically. [8]

As I have hopefully shown, cult readings and auteur readings share many similar strategies and objects, especially in films where “high” and “low” elements commingle. Kubrick’s films ostensibly belong squarely in the “high” cultural category of “art,” but they clearly share crosscurrents with “low,” largely male-oriented cult films, on both the textual level of diegesis and the extra-textual level of consumption. Auteurist veneration of such films borders strongly upon (if not outright overlaps into) a sort of cultist celebration of those works under the respectable veneer of “artworthiness” and “high” cultural acceptability (and vice-versa in the case of “cult auteurs”); in this way, auteurism and cultism can be seen to intersect quite often in the spectatorship of both art films and cult films in general, for the reading and consumption practices of each commonly blur together upon closer inspection, falsely separated only by the associations of high/elite and low/mass taste that “art” and “trash” respectively garner in an economically stratified society.

With this in mind, I would like to return to my initial question of the young (male) film buff’s common investment in Kubrick as both auteur and cult film director. Roughly comprising the same demographic that primarily consumes both art and cult cinema, the young film buff—ascending into the academy’s realm of “higher” knowledge and cultural worth (not to mention greater capital-earning potential)—is positioned between different economic and cultural strata that seem to conflict along class divisions; as Hawkins (2000) notes, when bourgeois and working-class people have the same amount and type of formal arts schooling, bourgeois people are more likely to side with higher art preferences due to class interests alone (p. 30). Although many of his contemporary “high” auteurs have also made films into the late 1990’s, Kubrick has retained a greater share of cultural currency in both high/elite and low/mass audiences than perhaps any other art film director. With a share in both popular and elite culture, the figure of Kubrick-as-auteur proves an especially “safe” choice of filmmaker for young film buffs to idolize in cultish ways, helping to bridge the gap between those differing economic and cultural strata in the film buff’s move from low/mass tastes to the high/elite tastes associated with a higher educational and/or economic level and a wider knowledge of world film. Aside from (and also in connection with) the major studio distribution of his films in America, Kubrick’s “Americanness” may play some role in his crossover cultural currency within both high/elite and low/mass American audiences, for his films (all in the English language) tend to lack the stigma of “foreignness” typically associated with art cinema, for art cinema as a mode is most often associated with European (non-English language) film productions as distinct from common Hollywood product. The Kubrick oeuvre also consists of a rather eclectic, almost “exotic” group of quality films produced over a broad timeline of film history in varying genres, providing an automatic air of worldly viewing experience to young film buffs that are Kubrick aficionados/cultists; in addition, these somewhat disparate films tend to be seen by young film buffs as sharing a similarly dark and existential worldview (i.e., the opinion of the auteur), a general tone for all of his films, rather than a set of specific and complicated themes that might be more difficult for young film buffs to understand and articulate. Kubrick’s long career of almost 50 total years allows his films to be held in high regard by successive generations of critics and audiences, allowing young film buffs an easy point of access into the “high” film canon, but Kubrick’s “low/mass” genre crosscurrents ensure that young film buffs do not seemingly (snobbishly) compromise an earlier (“lower”) economic/cultural stratum that they might seem to leave behind when entering the academy or bourgeois society.

One of the effects of cult film criticism has been this sort of repeated traversing of high/elite and low/mass cultural strata, academically placing cult film within the context of “high” film canons, whether by positing cult film in political opposition to elite canons or by incorporating cult film into aesthetic discussions of film form and cultural consumption (for further discussion, see Read, 2003). As Read (2003) points out, the male cult film critic is often caught between the position of A) the politically enlightened academic and B) the feminized, desexualized figure of the subcultural “fan-boy” who is at once opposed to the feminine associations of “mass” culture consumption and the political correctness (e.g., feminism) that would typically denounce the disreputable (body-affecting) pleasures of many cult films (p. 56). The cult film critic, much like the young film buff negotiating high/low distinctions via the cultish celebration of an auteur like Kubrick, thus cannot escape a position that is either viewed as feminized and disempowered or as laddishly opposed to the feminism of political correctness. Although mass culture consumption is generally coded as “feminine” in a patriarchal society, less remarked upon by cult film theorists is the strong reverse element of feminization that is often associated with “high” art; from the perspective of the lower classes (i.e., when working-class males are traditionally associated with an aggressive, over-sexualized masculinity), “high” art is often seen as rather foreign and bourgeois/elite, typically less visceral and direct, somewhat unmanly and effete (hence the tellingly derogatory epithet “art fag” occasionally applied to high art elites). Read (2003) notes how the male cultist’s identification with the male director-as-auteur allows him to fight the common connotations of cultists as “nerdish,” desexualized fan-boys and feminized mass market consumers; by actively and discriminatingly choosing their cult objects (as opposed to vainly consuming, as is supposedly the case in feminine mass market consumption) and exercising a degree of supposed control over the texts through detailed knowledge/trivia of the auteur, male cultists make a “masculine” claim over their cultdom (p. 65). In the case of Kubrick-as-auteur, his use of certain genres and subject matter (often associated with low, male-oriented, and body-affecting material that is far from feminism’s various definitions of political correctness) in combination with the major studio (semi- to fully-mainstream) distribution of his films, means that his work straddles mass tastes and elite tastes, its continuing cultural currency in each category of spectatorship allowing the young (male) film buff to retain ties to a low/mass audience and yet safely stretch his interests into high/elite circles (since “art” film credentials supposedly raise a film above “mainstream” consumption) without the risk of snobbery or the potential guilt of leaving one’s previous economic/cultural level. The figure of Kubrick-as-auteur thus allows “cultists and Kubrick fanatics,” including the young (male) film buff, to indulge in (primarily) male-oriented art films that draw upon both high and low cultural elements and remain highly regarded by both low and high audiences, suspending those cultists in a transitional space where the apparently feminizing aspects of both low/mass and high/elite cultures comfortably cancel each other out [9], leaving Kubrick’s cultish auteurdom as an ostensibly unproblematic and ultimately accessible site of interest for the aspiring young (male) film buff or academic-in-training. Of course, this same sort of argument can be equally extended to other auteurs (both “high” and “low”) beyond Stanley Kubrick, but I have hopefully pointed toward a source for increased critical work on the intersection between cultism and auteurism, two overlapping reading/consumption strategies that have coexisted uneasily for far too long.

End Notes

¹ When Kubrick died in March 1999, I was but a young high school student familiar with only a handful of his films—but by the time his final film Eyes Wide Shut was released four short months later, my idolization of all things Kubrick was at a fever-pitch. This idolization continued through high school and on into my first few years of college, when my tastes became more eclectic and drifted toward more obscure filmmakers, partially as a response to my new-found awareness of the flaws of auteur theory and no doubt inspired in some regard by an elitist desire to distance myself from the figure of Kubrick as an “easy favorite” for other aspiring film students. If this personal admission seems unnecessary, I am merely following a common convention of cult movie criticism by naming my own investment and origins of interest in the subject matter, then widening my scope somewhat. As such, my observations in this article should be taken as rather speculative, being based largely upon my own experience and my conversations with fellow film buffs, most of whom have been young white American males.

² Although Sconce’s observations center around what he terms “paracinema,” which he locates around the mode of exploitation film (Sconce, 1995, p. 372), cult film actually comprises a larger set of films, as Jancovich, Reboll, Stringer, and Willis (2003) point out (p. 1). Thus, “cult” films can even include Hollywood or “high art” productions that are read ironically, subversively, or “for all the wrong reasons.” Hawkins (2000) and Betz (2003) are among the scholars who have noted how art cinema’s consumption in America has often overlapped dramatically, even indistinguishably, with the consumption of exploitation film. It should also be noted that although the low-budget nature of many cult films is often a cause for celebration for cultists viewing such films as being in opposition to big-budget Hollywood products, budget and production values do not a cult film make: take the glossy, well-made films of Dario Argento, for example, as Hutchings (2003) shows (p. 135, 137).

³ To an extent, Kubrick’s post-1950’s films (i.e., the ones in which his auteur identity was fully formed) that seem to be the least enduring in popular cultural currency today tend toward being those which fall furthest outside the popular male-oriented genres in which he traditionally worked. For example, Lolita (black comedy, romantic melodrama), Barry Lyndon (costume drama), and Eyes Wide Shut (psychosexual melodrama) all seem somewhat neglected compared to Kubrick’s other post-1950’s films; while none of them lacks for artistry, all three share considerable melodramatic elements that might mark them as more “feminine” than the rest of Kubrick’s output.

⁴ While the number of films produced by a cult director does not necessarily impact that director’s subcultural “worth,” some cult critics are prone to celebrating directors who have made hundreds of films outside the Hollywood system (e.g., Jess Franco), while other critics focus on directors with a rather scarce output (perhaps scarce due to the films being lost or censored out of existence) that is subsequently inflated with worth, most often in retrospect in the process of “reclaiming” a neglected filmmaker. Though Kubrick was certainly not a neglected filmmaker, nor primarily a cult director, the mix of zealously positive and negative critical responses that attended his films upon their release (often with the same critics, such as Richard Schickel, coming to similar conclusions from one film to the next) points toward a more “cultish” response to the figure and critical reputation of Kubrick-as-auteur than to unbiased opinion. Of course, in this sense “fandom” and “cultdom” are hard to distinguish from one another, as the auteurist critic will often overvalue the more positive or progressive aspects in a lackluster film made by an auteur that he/she celebrates, in order to help bolster the cultural “worth” of a film that might not otherwise seem particularly important to members of their readership (who are commonly academics, art house patrons, and “high culture” cineastes) who are not “inside” when it comes to knowledge of a particular auteur.

⁵ It should be noted here that “sword and sandal epics” like Spartacus are one of the subgenres of “paracinema” mentioned by Sconce (1995) as recipients of cult attention (p. 372). Although most of these epics produced by Hollywood during the 1950’s-1960’s were glossy, often award-winning historical films with big budgets, big stars, and high production values (unlike, say, the more myth-inspired Italian peplum, a more definitively paracinematic and “exploitation”-based foreign subgenre), these epics still foster cult reading strategies today through the use of campily excessive spectacle supposedly justified by vaguely historical “facts,” not to mention the pervasive homoeroticism that begs for ironic viewing. Case in point: the long-censored scene from Spartacus (finally restored to the film 30 years later) featuring an attempted seduction between characters played by Lawrence Olivier and Tony Curtis.

⁶ According to Tarantino, interviewed in the October 20, 2003 issue of The New Yorker: “I always thought Kubrick was a hypocrite because his party line was ‘I’m not making a movie about violence, I’m making a movie against violence.’ And it’s just like, get the fuck off. I know and you know your dick was hard the entire time you were shooting those first twenty minutes; you couldn’t keep it in your pants the entire time you were editing it and scoring it. You did it for those first twenty minutes. And if you don’t say you did, you’re a fucking liar.”

⁷ Of the controversy over the MPAA’s de facto censorship (to which most filmmakers bend to ensure a much more marketable “R” rating) and Warner Brothers’ eventual addition of computer-generated figures to Kubrick’s orgy scene, it is worth noting briefly that, as Hutchings (2003) points out, “cult” culture sets up an us/them opposition positing cultists as “freedom-seekers demanding the right to see forbidden material” vs. mainstream conformist values or the apparatuses of censorship (p. 131). As the Eyes Wide Shut controversy shows, this cultish “desire to look” at that which is forbidden manifests itself in the consumption of “high” auteurist work as well, since “high” art (a longtime site of crossover for spectators seeking both “high” and “low” material, especially in explicit sexual content, as the history of foreign art cinema has illustrated) has long been similarly positioned in opposition to both mainstream conformist values (i.e., bland Hollywood product) and the apparatuses of censorship (e.g., the MPAA’s censorship restrictions). Although the notorious orgy scene contains no more sexual content than the sort of softcore simulated sex symptomatic of the very “low” (sometimes even vaguely cultish but almost certainly campy) erotic movies shown on late-night premium cable TV, the American version of Eyes Wide Shut featured the computer- added obscuring figures as a form of mild censorship, while European cuts of the film did not (suggesting that European art cinema is still more free and potentially transgressive than its American cousin, especially when Hollywood studios like Warner Brothers are helping to fit the latter’s bill).

⁸ The screenplay for Kubrick’s unrealized final project (another science-fiction film) would be rewritten and directed by Steven Spielberg as A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). The resulting film was a messy combination of Kubrick’s dark futuristic vision and Spielberg’s typically schmaltzy Hollywood product. Because of the organic way that Kubrick often re-wrote his scripts during filming and included little specific visual detail in his written screenplays, it is impossible to extract Kubrick’s ideas from Spielberg’s re-conception of the film, just as it would make little sense to fully judge the relative “auteur” status of each director. As such, I am excluding A.I. from my analysis.

⁹ Although I have followed other cult film critics in their delineation of masculinity vs. femininity in different types of consumption practices, it may ultimately be more useful to view the transition from young film buff to academic/elite as akin to the transition from child to adult. Mass tastes (including most cult films) are generally associated more with juvenile tastes, while appreciation of art cinema would seem to demand a greater degree of adult maturity and worldly knowledge. Of course, this is not necessarily a reality, for cult readings are often just as complicated as art film readings, but associating the young film buff with a child (while closer complying with the youth demographic comprising both aspiring students and cultists) still retains the association of cultism with the desexualization of the aptly named “fan-boy.” Either way of conceptualizing the anxious transition from mass/low tastes to high/elite tastes (and certainly the ever-continuing fluctuations and lapses between the two categories, for it is very rarely a permanent one-way transition that subsequently eschews all “low” texts) may be used here.

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Author Bio: David Church is a Ph.D. student at Indiana University, and the editor of Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin (University of Manitoba Press, 2009). He has also contributed to Disability Studies Quarterly, Senses of Cinema and several other publications.