Virtual Memories Show 392:
David Mikics
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“The thing about Kubrick is that the more you see the movies — they’re tantalizing, they entice you to come back to them again and again — the more you come back, the more you see.”
With his new book, Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker (Yale University Press), David Mikics explores the life and movies of one of cinema’s greatest directors. We talk about David’s intro to his work (seeing 2001 at the age of 12 (!)) and the research that went into this concise and wonderful biography, why Kubrick’s movies work as literary experiences, which of his movies speaks most to This Whole Situation we’re in, and Kubrick’s Jewishness and the holocaust movie he could never make. We get into the director’s perfectionism, right down to his movies’ newspaper advertising, how he balanced being control-freak in a collaborative medium like film, the role of masculinity and the lack of women in many of his movies, and the unmade projects we wish he had gotten around to (he wanted to adapt Chess Story, my favorite Stefan Zweig story!). We also get into David’s experiences with the late Harold Bloom, how he’s adapted to teaching via Zoom, whether Lolita (the novel, not Kubrick’s adaptation) survives the ‘cancel culture’ era, and why The Shining is his comfort movie, disturbing as that sounds. Give it a listen! And go read Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker!
“I was always inspired by how Harold Bloom combined his interest in books with his interest in people. He once said the reason we read books is that we don’t have enough time to meet all the interesting people.”
“His movies are a kind of excavation of the male psyche.”
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About our Guest
David Mikics is Moores Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Houston, as well as a columnist for Tablet magazine. His most recent books are Bellow’s People and Slow Reading in a Hurried Age. He also edited the Library of America edition of Harold Bloom’s essays, The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon. He lives in Brooklyn, NY and Houston, TX. His new book is Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker.
Follow David on Facebook and listen to our 2016 conversation.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone
