Violence and Power in Kubrick's Later Cinema

This chapter addresses the deeper intents and meanings of Kubrick’s films and oeuvre as a whole, attempting an answer to a perpetual question posed by film critics, regarding Kubrick’s pessimistic humanist nature à la Freud or of his pessimistic and violent view of the nature of man. Unlike many previous scholars, the author believes that Kubrick never disavowed his optimistic convictions about humankind. Looking back at power and violence in his films, this chapter argues that in Kubrick’s cinema “power operates through the automatization of violence” and that it is not inherent to humans, but it has to be implemented and trained. “Despair is never for the human material lost in these webs of domination and control; it is about the ever-intensifying power of the impersonal systems our organisms feed.”