ABSTRACT
In a letter addressed to Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick expressed his admiration for the Swedish author’s “unearthly and brilliant contribution” to cinema and unabashedly called him “the greatest film-maker at work today.” This chapter analyses important similarities, as well as differences, in Kubrick’s and Bergman’s representations of marriage and the role of women within it. It is significant that in filming the marital life of a male artist, both Kubrick and Bergman resorted to psychological horror. In The Shining, writer Jack Torrance’s wife and his son Danny are to him annoying distractions that he wishes to eliminate; he is creatively castrated and troubled by their mere presence, to the extent that he becomes haunted by demonic visions and tries to kill them. In Bergman’s The Hour of the Wolf, painter Johan Borg is so dismayed by his expecting wife (played by Liv Ullmann, who was at the time pregnant with Bergman’s child), that he is unable to produce any work apart from obscene sketches; in his diary, he testifies to slowly sinking into madness and having visions of killing his unborn son. But the chapter also demonstrates the other constricting aspects of domesticity in films that are not in the horror genre—Eyes Wide Shut and Scenes from a Marriage.
