Kubrick and Women (Stanley Kubrick Studies)

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative. It is a commonplace to say that Stanley Kubrick’s cinema is a world of men created by a man for men. And yet, as Kubrick and Women argues, women are central to Kubrick’s films, if often only as paradoxically phobic objects of desire. The centrality of women is well camouflaged, to be sure, by Kubrick’s focus on male fear. As Michael Herr observed, it takes a great respect for women to make them as dangerous as Kubrick sometimes did. Kubrick and Women responds to a question asked by Stella Louis: ‘what if women were the main character(s) in Stanley Kubrick’s films?’. It argues that Kubrick cannot comfortably be labelled either a feminist or a misogynist. The book does not damn Kubrick for misogyny nor rescue him from accusations of it but mobilizes Tania Modleski’s insight about Hitchcock, ‘the misogyny and the sympathy actually entail one another’, and applies it to Kubrick. This is, obviously, to yoke together contradictions, but this yoking creates an unease and ambiguity that renders complex truths about the relationships between men and women.