Full Metal Jacket (1987, Stanley Kubrick)

Posted in Uncategorized on January 30, 2015 by kubrickblog

Telling, Not Showing!

Posted in Uncategorized on January 30, 2015 by kubrickblog

Bhdandme's Blog

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAWriting on this blog a couple of weeks back, about the narrative voices of the book, and film of ‘Barry Lyndon,’ I asserted that the film was grimmer…

That was after reading the first few pages of the novel, having seen the whole film. Having read the whole novel, I find my first impressions have to be revised. Yet I cannot say simply that the novel is grimmer. Rather it’s that the comic element that I detected in Thackeray’s narrator, an element entirely missing from Kubrick’s film, has worn thin by the time we have worked our way into the book.

I’ve long been a fan of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, but he went up further in my estimation as I reached the end of Barry Lyndon. Lyndon is a first person narrator, and one that is used by the author in that most enjoyable of ways, for the reader, by…

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Jj

Posted in Uncategorized on April 17, 2014 by kubrickblog

Kubrick Links

Posted in Uncategorized on January 25, 2014 by kubrickblog

A Look Back at Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Infographic) | Arthur C. Clarke | Space.com

Stanley Kubrick: 13 Films In 1 Minute on Vimeo

The Stanley Kubrick Handbook – Everything you need to know about Stanley Kubrick

Interview: Matthew Modine on Kubrick and His ‘Full Metal Jacket’ App | FirstShowing.net

Kubrick’s Hope: Discovering Optimism from 2001 to Eyes Wide Shut: Amazon.co.uk: Julian Rice: Books

2012 The Odyssey –Articles

Development Hell: Leon Vitali, Stanley Kubrick’s Right-Hand Man

Kubrick/Cinema – IdyllopusPress Presents

Stanley Kubrick: Visionary Filmmaker Collection Blu-ray 1962 Region Free: Amazon.co.uk: Malcolm McDowell, Jack Nicholson, Peter Sellers, James Mason, Ryan O’Neal, Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, Keir Dullea, Stanley Kubrick: Film & TV

Plumbing Stanley Kubrick | Ian Watson

Stanley Kubrick Visual essay on Vimeo

Stanley Kubrick Enters the Ring | Rope of Silicon

From Photography to Film: Stanley Kubrick Enters the Ring – LightBox

Photo Diary: Stanley Kubrick retrospective at LACMA. « C-MONSTER.net

VIDEO: Bill Gold on Stanley Kubrick – Hollywood Reporter

An Introduction to Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) » Kinnemaniac

The Busybody: Stanley Kubrick: From Best to Worst

Flavorwire » The Banal and the Bizarre: A Kubrick Design Compendium

 

 

 

 

New Links

Posted in Uncategorized on January 25, 2014 by kubrickblog

Kubrick’s Shining | Parallax View

The Shining minus Delbert Grady in 35 MM – A GROUP FOR CINEPHILES! on Vimeo

Naked Filmmaking | Stanley Kubrick

Kubrick : Todd Alcott

The Kubrick Site: Introducing Sociology by Tim Kreider

Can Analyze Kubrick blog: Eyes Wide Shut

Naked Filmmaking | Search Results | stanley Kubrick

The Vatic Project: (pt. 3 of 3) Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”

Archivio Kubrick: Vintage – Flip through

A Stanley Kubrick tumblr.

“To prevent the present heat from dissipating”: Stanley Kubrick and the Marketing of Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Kubrick’s Ulterior War

Look At All The Happy Creatures: History in Kubrick by Andras Jones

Can Analyze Kubrick blog

The Story of Stanley Kubrick and Legendary Zeiss F/0.7 Lens used on Barry Lyndon | FilmmakerIQ.com

Can Analyze Kubrick blog: 2001 analysis – part 43: More on Bowman’s assimilation of his shadow

Why Stanley Kubrick Banned A CLOCKWORK ORANGE | Badass Digest

Cinetropolis » Paths Of Glory: Kubrick’s “Monument To Barbarism”

The right-hand man: Jan Harlan on Stanley Kubrick | British Film Institute

The Hidden (And Not So Hidden) Messages in Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” (pt. II)

2013 CONvergence Panel – Kubrick’s “The Shining” In Depth – YouTube

Michel Ciment Interviews Stanley Kubrick – YouTube

Faster, Pussycat! Blog! Blog!: 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Analysis: Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita” | PluribusOne™

See What’s Really Behind Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ in New Documentary | WUTC

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Undifferentiated Sense of the Present – The Shining

Posted in Uncategorized on May 18, 2013 by kubrickblog

The Kubrick Site: Historicism in “The Shining”

Shining is about where to search for this “knowable community,” to which, even excluded, the fantasy of collective relations might attach itself? It only has one direction to go, into the past; and this is the moment at which Kubrick’s rewriting of his novelistic original takes on its power as an articulated and intelligible symbolic act.

Stand the unexamined models of Freudian psychoanalysis and of a confidence in the power of self-consciousness and reflexivity generally to transform, modify, or even “cure” the ideological tendencies and positions which have thereby been brought up into the light of consciousness. This confidence is at the least unseasonable in an atmosphere where nobody believes in the active capabilities of individual consciousness any more, and in which the very ideologues of “critical theory” – the Frankfurt School – have left behind them, in works like Negative Dialectics, testaments of despair about the possibility for “critical theory” in our time to do any more than to keep the negative and the critical (that is, critical theory itself) alive in the mind.

The very triviality of daily life in late capitalism is itself the desperate situation against which all the formal solutions, the strategies and subterfuges, of high culture as well as of mass culture, emerge: how to project the illusion that things still happen, that events exist, that there are still stories to tell, in a situation in which the uniqueness and the irrevocability of private destinies and of individuality itself seem to have evaporated? – We hasten to follow orders and passively/obediently invest these first alarming visions with the appropriate foreboding: the child’s powers (and his seeming possession by a preternatural alter ego) augur poorly for a restful winter in the empty months ahead. Only it turns out we were looking for it in the wrong place: not the little boy, “possessed” in some ominous way by his phantom playmate, but the alcoholic father whose weakness opens up a vacuum into which all kinds of baleful initially indeterminable impulses seep. Yet this is in itself another kind of generic misreading, which seizes on some of the signals and conventions of the new genre of “occult” film in order to project an anticipation of some properly diabolical possession to come. but the sequence of such “dying generations” is the scandal reawakened by the ghost story for a bourgeois culture which has triumphantly stamped out ancestor worship and the objective memory of the clan or extended family, thereby sentencing itself to the life span of the biological individual. No building more appropriate to express this than the grand hotel itself, with its successive seasons whose vaster rhythms mark the transformation of American leisure classes from the late 19th century down to the vacations of present-day consumer society. The Jack Nicholson of The Shining is possessed neither by evil as such nor by the “devil” or some analogous occult force, but rather simply by History, by the American past as it has left its sedimented traces in the corridors and dismembered suites of this monumental rabbit warren, which oddly projects its empty formal after-image in the maze outside (significantly, the maze is Kubrick’s own addition). Yet at this level the genre does not yet transmit a coherent ideological message, as Stephen King’s mediocre original testifies: Kubrick’s adaptation, indeed, transforms this vague and global domination by all the random voices of American history into a specific and articulated historical commentary.

 

 

Memory Room:

Posted in Uncategorized on April 27, 2013 by kubrickblog

2001:space odyssey FINAL MESSAGE:

Here’s what happens on a very simple level during the final passage of “2001” (–there are lots of other deeper philosophical, mythological, scientific, and poetic concerns…but they are all best discovered on your own; but this can point you in the right direction):

After HAL is “shut down” (and we realize that his paranoia, egomania, and madness was the result of him being PROGRAMMED to lie –i.e., “keep the astounding secret of the mission to himself”); astronaut Bowman, who has proved himself “transcendent” as a Human (that is, superior to the mere superpowerful MACHINE MIND of HAL by “doing the impossible”: Specifically: by taking the crazy chance that he won’t survive and launching himself across the void…and into the unpressurized airlock to re-enter the ship, an action that is utterly beyond conception to HAL), continues his mission towards “the infinite”…and we see this:

Arriving at Jupiter orbit, Bowman finds ANOTHER monolith –this one massive. Checking it out in one of the pods, he discovers that it is “full of stars” –that is: IT’S A STARGATE. He enters/is drawn into this transgalactic portal, and we see the universe bend and explode and flare and be stretched into long lines of light before his astonished eyes as he moves at fantastic speeds that are beyond all Human science –and which burst the barriers of time and distance.

He arrives at the other side of the Stargate and is pulled along/guided across the surface of an alien world, which he perceives in a “mind-blown” and distorted frame of mind…a “shock” which doesn’t start to clear until he finds himself in “the classical white room.”

We see his blinking eyes finally “return to normal color,” and watch him “shuddering/trembling” as things finally start to settle-in, and he begins to grasp what’s happened to him…

Now he enters and “explores” the white room –which can be looked at as a perpetual “holding cell,” created by whatever super-advanced alien minds have let him draw close to their magnificent existence. This exploration is where Kubrick shows us how Editing, Mind, and Time are all interrelated…by creating a sequence that compresses the rest of Bowman’s life (perhaps a hundred or more years) down to just several minutes of observation…and this is done to show us how Bowman’s mind (and, one might say, his very “soul”) has been altered and “advanced” by having traveled through the Stargate Light Tunnel: He now sees “Time” as massive “leaps” of thought (just as the Ape’s bone being thrown into the sky presages a massive leap forward in intelligence and technology –with the millions-of-years edit that jumps from “murderbone weapon,” all the way to the “first orbital nuclear bomb”).

Now, here’s how Bowman’s “leaps of thought” progress: First, in “real time” (so to speak), the spacesuit-wearing astronaut finds himself IN the room, exploring it. The pod has vanished. He enters the elegant chamber’s bathroom and sees himself in the bathroom mirror, and for the first time realizes that he’s aged considerably –although he never noticed it during the Stargate travel. He suddenly hears something in the main room, and, frightened, looks around the doorway into the other room. What he sees is himself, even older, just as the older self “looks back towards” him. What Kubrick does in this shot is make PHYSICAL a “paired thought” that EVERY “REFLECTIVE” HUMAN BEING EXPERIENCES: It illustrates that moment when you think about yourself IN THE FUTURE, who you will be, what you will be doing (and in this case, it’s “younger Bowman” coming to grips with the thought that he’ll be living out his life in this magnificent Hotel-Room-like “cage,” as he sees himself as an old man still there, having a meal); then we leap across time –both metaphorically and ACTUALLY– and the second half of the Human thought occurs: That moment when we are older, and WE LOOK BACK ON OURSELVES AND REMEMBER THE TRANSCENDENT INSTANT when we saw that this future would play-out in a certain way –and now, in fact, ithas…for Bowman; and we see this “memory”/Reality come-to-be as the aged man walks, limping (showing us that he’s still “all too human”) to the bathroom, where he checks it out and finds it empty… –Literally, youth is gone; time has passed.

We are now ACTUALLY “with” the “old Bowman,” and watch a few moments of what his endless captivity/observation/”Monk like contemplative life” is like in the White Room, as he very precisely eats a fine meal and enjoys a glass of wine –all provided by his never-seen (and most-likely “bodiless”) alien captors/mentors.

His movements have become as graceful as possible, simple and without wasted motion…but he’s still just a frail human, a glorious mind trapped in a decaying body. And Kubrick shows us, once again, Man’s “limitations” through a casual act of clumsiness (like the moment Bowman “forgot his space helmet”) –Bowman knocks his wine glass over, breaking it. This takes us to the next “leap forward” moment, as Old Bowman, considering the broken glass and the pool of blood-like wine, realizes he’ll be in this room forever, his body growing as brittle as the wine glass until one day it must inevitably shatter –and in that instant, THIS thought once again “becomes flesh,” as Old Bowman looks across the room and sees “Ancient, Dying Bowman” —himself; the being he must ultimately become(as must we all, as we fly towards Death, turning into different older versions of ourselves along the way).

Then, again, we are ACTUALLY with this vastly old man, trapped with him as he breathes his last breaths, dying in a comfortable bed. As he begins to die, the Aliens perform their second miracle: They make another Monolith appear at the foot of his bed. (The “first miracle” was when the impossibly-ancient-and-wise aliens made a Monolith appear at the “Dawn of Man”: THAT time, we see that this “device” has the ability to super-accelerate the evolution of the ape’s minds, as we are shown how all of the small group of proto-humans who were first drawn to reach out and touch the perfect black creation INSTANTLY learn to use weapons and contemplate the Heavens –shown when one of them is seen looking up at the moon in wonder. This “miracle” of almost “God-like guidance” actually made Mankind possible –as these Monolith-Advanced ApeMen became the dominant force on the planet –illustrated when they drove the “lesser apes” away from the water hole).

Now, dying ancient Bowman receives the alien’s next “blessing,” as he proves himself truly WORTHY of being once-again given a superjump in Evolution by the Monolith device. Here’s what made him worthy: His endless desire to KNOW what is beyond himself –which Kubrick sees as Humanity’s greatest strength, and the key to our grandeur. That’s why the aliens buried A DIFFERENT SORT OF MONOLITH on the moon; because IT COULD ONLY BE UNCOVERED if Man continued to grow and improve as a species, becoming smart enough and questing enough to make it to the moon. Then, there, the Moon Monolith was programmed to give Humans the next “clue” to follow –if they were advanced and inquisitive enough: It fired a signal towards Jupiter. Following this signal is what took humanity to the Stargate.)

But “now,” in the White Room, as Bowman is dying, he PROVES what Humans really are: WE ARE THE QUESTING MINDS OF GODS TRAPPED IN FLESH THAT IS DOOMED TO DIE. But the Will to Know, the Need to Understand is so huge in us as a species that, even as we are dying, we still reach out to grasp that which stands “beyond us.” And THAT’S what we see Bowman embody, as he reaches out to touch the Monolith from his deathbed, mirroring the exquisitely Human gesture of those first Apes who showed they had minds that were beyond those of “mere animals” (and INTERESTS that extended beyond their bodies) in the movie’s first “chapter.” As Bowman has proved that he is still a glorious vessel of hope and desire-to-know…the Aliens give him the “next evolutionary leap forward.” Whereas the Apes in the “Dawn of Man” sequence only had their MENTAL ability improved…Bowman receives THAT, along with a shift in his actual physical being: He’s not quite the Invisible, Non-Corporeal Entities that is the apparent state-of-being to which the aliens have seemingly evolved…but he is, now, “a Star Child.”

And that’s what we see at the end of the film: Bowman, reborn as a “giant” fledgling superbeing, now able to exist in the Universe without the petty trappings of “technology” –and, in the film’s momentous crescendo, we observe as this near God-like being looks down upon our Earth…and, in the film’s final moments, gently contemplates HIS next move…and our astounding Future.

Links

Posted in Uncategorized on April 6, 2013 by kubrickblog

2001: A Space Odyssey :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies

NBC’s ‘Hannibal’ contains ‘The Shining’ shout-outs | Inside TV | EW.com

Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine: Authorship and Genre in Photojournalism and Film: Philippe D. Mather: 9781841506111: Amazon.com: Books

Stanley Kubrick, The Shining, & New York City: The Filming Locations of Eyes Wide Shut « Scouting NY

Interview: Rodney Ascher | Film | Slant Magazine

PART 8: 2001: A Space Odyssey

Blu-Ray Review: A.I. Artificial Intelligence – – Film.com

KDK12 | The 13 Secrets Of The Bear Man

2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick – Genius – Conspiracy – Symbolism – Mystery! : General Conspiracies

Stanley Kubrick exhibition looks back on legendary director who ‘knew he looked Jewish’ — Jewish News & Israel News – JNS.org

Stanley Kubrick: a retrospective – Art – Domus

almost kael: MATTHEW MODINE on STANLEY KUBRICK, FULL METAL JACKET & BEING HUMAN

The Shining: Horror’s Greatest Achievement? – YouTube

Unlived Lifes Through The Eyes Of Danny – A Jungian Interpretation Of ‘The Shining’

Posted in Uncategorized on March 1, 2013 by kubrickblog
By Wills Duffy

What if the source of the problems in the world is the age-old tradition of “child abuse” which has informed all of us and to which Danny represents.

For the sake of clarity, I need to differentiate terms, as child abuse is a loaded and charged phrase. Many people associate child abuse with physical beating, sexual abuse, severe neglect and the like. But child abuse is something that we have all suffered from in more elusive, hard-to-see, forms, to the extent that our parents were not fully enlightened (and whose parents were?). When there is “conditional” love based on our performance or behavior, when we become “domesticated” and are supposed to be a “good boy or girl,” when our parents vicariously live their unlived lives out through our accomplishments, or when our parents unconsciously abuse their power and enact their own unhealed abuse, all “for our own good” – these are all various forms of subtle but very real child abuse. When we receive crazy-making, double-signals from our parents, in which they say one thing but their energy is expressing something else, when our urges towards emotional independence and autonomy are subtly rejected, when our perceptions are denied, or when our expressions of our own unique and creative self are marginalized or criticized – these are all various forms of covert child abuse. All of these seemingly innocuous actions can potentially obstruct the child in the natural process of growing into who they truly are. These unconscious re-actions by the parents can potentially be introjected and internalized into the child’s psyche where they become inner, oppressive voices which, to the extent they aren’t integrated, develop a seemingly autonomous life of their own.

When I first conceived of this article, I realized its contents were exclusive, in that it would only be relevant to parents and/or children, but then I realized this includes everyone. We are all metabolizing our ancestral legacy of subtle or overt abuse which has been passed down and propagated throughout the generations. The archetypal idea of the sins of the fathers (and mothers) being visited upon the sons (and daughters) is psychologically true, and has found expression in inspired sources as varied as ancient mythology, the Bible and Shakespeare. We all have a subjective knowing of the validity of this phenomenon based on our lived experience. Every one of us, whether we know it or not, has become who we are, at least in part, as a result of our parents’ unconscious. It is not just our bodies that are the offspring of our parents; our psyches are the offspring of our parents’ unconscious, too. Jung emphasizes this very point when he says, “Not only the child’s body, but his soul, too, proceeds from his ancestry.” Our parents, who Jung suggests viewing as “children of the grandparents,” are formed, in turn, by their parents in a lineage that goes back throughout the generations. Jung explains, “We ought rather to say that it is not so much the parents as their ancestors – the grandparents and great-grandparents – who are the true progenitors, and that these explain the individuality of the children far more than the immediate, and so to speak, accidental parents.” This perspective expands the time-frame through which we relate to our family, and ultimately, ourselves.

Jung felt that the “unlived lives” of the parents deeply impacted the lives of the children, as if “branding” the children with a particular destiny. The unlived lives of the parents is an ancestral inheritance which has great weight and gravitas, in that it literally shapes the lives of the children. Jung elaborates on the notion of the parents’ unlived lives when he says it is “that part of their lives which might have been lived had not certain somewhat threadbare excuses prevented the parents from doing so. To put it bluntly, it is that part of life which they have always shirked, probably by means of a pious lie. That sows the most virulent germs.”

The repressed, unlived lives of the parents acts like a contagious and malignant psychic virus which infects the surrounding field. Speaking about repression, Jung makes the point that, “whatever you repress, whatever you don’t recognize in yourself, is nevertheless alive. It is constellated outside of you, it works in your surroundings and influences other people. Of course, you are blissfully unconscious of these effects, but the other people get the noseful.” This psychic virus is like a nonlocalized bug in the system which creates a dis-ease and disturbance in the coherence of the family. This virulent psychic pathogen germinates in and replicates itself through the unconscious of the children, which is the medium it uses to reproduce itself through generations, i.e., over time.

Children see more than the parents suspect or want them to see, as they are empathically tuned into the unconscious of the parents. The parents’ unconscious, which seems to be in the background, is actually in the foreground of the child’s psyche. The parent’s unconscious flows into and in-forms the child’s psyche. “Nothing influences children more,” Jung reflects, “than the silent facts in the background. They have an extremely contagious effect on the children.” The parents’ relationship to their unconscious influences the children’s unconscious through the avenue of the collective unconscious in which both are contained.

Children sense the underlying spirit of things. Describing the sensitivity of children, Jung knows from his own childhood, as do we all, that “Things that hang in the air and are vaguely felt by the child, the oppressive atmosphere of apprehension and foreboding, these slowly seep into the child’s soul like a poisonous vapor.” This toxic vapor is like an ancestral spirit which penetrates and insinuates itself into the core of the child’s being. This living spirit is the family inheritance, as it patterns, shapes and in-forms the offspring, who become compelled, to the extent they are under the spell cast by the parents, to unconsciously act out and become an instrument for the incarnation of the ancestral unconscious. They become the unwitting purveyors and living revelation of the “hidden gospel” of the unconscious of the ancestors.

We don’t exist in isolation from each other, but rather, in relation to all of the members of our human family who have existed over time. Jung re-contextualizes our family relations when he points out that, “…a human life is nothing in itself, it is part of a family tree. We are continuously living the ancestral life, reaching back for centuries, we are satisfying the appetites of unknown ancestors, nursing instincts which we think are our own, but which are quite incompatible with our character; we are not living our own lives, we are paying the debts of our forefathers.” We are the heirs to the family “fortune,” the current karmic fruition of our family tree.

“The child is so much a part of the psychological atmosphere of the parents,” Jung contemplates, “that secret and unsolved problems between them can influence its health profoundly. The participation mystique, or primitive identity, causes the child to feel the conflicts of the parents and to suffer from them as if they were its own. It is hardly ever the open conflict or the manifest difficulty that has such a poisonous effect, but almost always parental problems that have been kept hidden or allowed to become unconscious. The author of these neurotic disturbances is, without exception, the unconscious.” “Participation mystique” is a phrase that Jung uses often which he borrowed from the French anthropologist Levy-Bruhl. Developmentally speaking, it is a primitive and un-evolved state of consciousness in which we are magically fused and merged with our environment so as not to be able to differentiate between ourselves and others at a fundamental level. When participation mystique happens between a parent and a child it is a state of mutual unconscious identification in which they are co-dependently entangled with each other and aren’t able to experience their psychic autonomy and independence from each other. When there is participation mystique, the parties are psychically bound and tied to each other in a way which reciprocally inhibits their intrinsic freedom. To the extent that the parents are still fused in a state of participation mystique with the unconscious of their parents and haven’t fully psychologically separated and individuated, is the extent to which they themselves will not relate to their offspring as autonomous and independent beings, but rather, as unconscious extensions of their own psyche. Parents who still haven’t worked out their parental baggage dream up the kids to be psychic appendages of their own unresolved process, which is a subtle but very real form of child abuse. The author of these real life dramas, as Jung points out, is the unconscious itself.

“The ‘parental imago’ [the image of the parents in the psyche of the child] is possessed of a quite extraordinary power; it influences the psychic life of the child so enormously,” Jung writes, “that we must ask ourselves whether we may attribute such magical power to an ordinary human being at all.” What gives the parents such power over their children is that our particular, earthly parents are merely re-presentations and animations of the underlying archetype of the “divine parents,” which exists inside the collective unconscious itself. Our parents are instruments to play out, embody, and activate the pre-existent parental archetype which lives within the psyche of all of us. It is the underlying, numinous archetype which the actual parents are mediating that amplifies their effects upon the children. Just as a bird’s migratory and nest-building instincts are not individually learned, but are inherited from its collective ancestry, the power of the parents is derived from the primordial, archetypal image which resonates deep within the psyche of our species.

Jung notes that “the power of the archetype is not controlled by us, we ourselves are at its mercy to an unsuspected degree. There are many who resist its influence and its compulsion, but equally many who identify with the archetype….and because everyone is in some degree ‘possessed’ by his specifically human preformation, he is held fast and fascinated by it and exercises the same influence on others, without being conscious of what he is doing. The danger is just this unconscious identity with the archetype: not only does it exert a dominating influence on the child by suggestion, it also causes the same unconsciousness in the child, so that it succumbs to the influence from outside and at the same time cannot oppose it from within.” The child’s outer process with the parent becomes internalized and becomes an inescapably compelling inner process.

Parents play a key and fateful role in their children’s karmic destiny. When the parents are repressing their unconscious and not responsibly doing their own “inner work,” Jung comments, “it radiates out into the environment and, if there are children, infects them too. In this way neurotic states are often passed on from generation to generation, like the ‘curse of Atreus’ [in Greek mythology the ‘curse of Atreus’ is symbolic of an ancestral, family curse which is passed down through the generations]. The children are infected indirectly through the attitude they instinctively adopt towards their parent’s state of mind: either they fight against it with unspoken protest (though occasionally the protest is vociferous) or else they succumb to a paralyzing and compulsive imitation. In both cases they are obliged to do, to feel, and to live not as they want, but as their parents want. The more ‘impressive’ the parents are, and the less they accept their own problems (mostly on the excuse of ‘sparing the children’), the longer the children will have to suffer from the unlived life of their parents and the more they will be forced into fulfilling all the things the parents have repressed and kept unconscious.”

When the parents succumb to the compulsion to turn away from their own darkness, resist the illumination of consciousness and hence, avoid relationship with parts of themselves, Jung states that “they do not know that by succumbing to the compulsion they pass it on to their children and make them slaves of their parents and of the unconscious as well. Such children will long continue to live out the curse laid on them by their parents, even when the parents are long since dead.”

If the parents get in the habit of compulsively avoiding their responsibility to self-reflect, a toxic atmosphere is conjured up in the family system which is very disturbing to the family’s emotional body. “The repressed problems and the suffering thus fraudulently avoided secrete an insidious poison,” Jung tells us, “which seeps into the soul of the child through the thickest walls of silence and through the whitest sepulchers of deceit, complacency, and evasion. The child is helplessly exposed to the psychic influence of the parents and is bound to copy their self-deception, their insincerity, hypocrisy, cowardice, self-righteousness, and selfish regard for their own comfort, just as wax takes up the imprint of the seal. The only thing that can save the child from un-natural injury is the efforts of the parents not to shirk the psychic difficulties of life by deceitful maneuvers or by remaining artificially unconscious, but rather to accept them as tasks, to be as honest with themselves as possible, and to shed a beam of light into the darkest corners of their souls.”

Parents are not asked to be perfect, which is both impossible and would be a catastrophe for the kids. Parents cannot be expected to have no faults or unresolved complexes, which would be superhuman, but rather, they should make sincere efforts to not deny and repress their weak points and unconscious areas but recognize them for what they are. With regards to their unconscious issues, parents, according to Jung, “should at least come to terms with them consciously; they should make it a duty to work out their inner difficulties for the sake of the children.” It is an ethical responsibility for the parents to deal with their own unhealed complexes. “Parental influence only becomes a moral problem,” Jung continues, “in face of conditions which might have been changed by the parents, but were not.” In other words, it becomes a “moral sin” when the parents are potentially able to shed light on and deal with some unconscious area in themselves, and choose not to, “remaining,” in Jung’s words, “artificially unconscious.”

When the unconscious is dealt with responsibly by the parents, however, this relieves the kids of a burden which ultimately was not theirs to begin with. Parents can genuinely bless their children to the utmost by stepping into their own authenticity, vulnerability and transparency. When a parent deals responsibly with their own unconscious, they are modeling and activating the very same process in the child, as parents and children are nonlocally interconnected and intimately co-related through the collective unconscious. Self-reflection by the parents is instantaneously and reflex-ively received and reflected by and through the child. Occurring in the depth of the psyche, this process of self-reflection mirrors back to both parent and children who they are, and it empowers, instead of obstructs, the children to naturally flower and blossom into who they are here to be.

The parent’s self-reflection not only helps to heal both parent and children, but it nonlocally sends ripples back through time, initiating a process of healing the entire ancestral lineage. It is as if we are the culmination, crystallization and carriers of a higher-dimensional and multi-generational process of working something out. Potentially, in this very moment, we have the precious opportunity to liberate these ancestral, rhizomic strands of trauma which extend far back in time and equally far into the future, but which also converge and are spread throughout the present in the form of the society and culture in which we live. We can be the ones to break the link in the chain and dissolve these insidious, mycelium-like threads, which are literally the warp and woof upon which the tapestry of the past, present, and future history of our species is woven. As the current lineage holders of an ancient, ancestral tradition, our task, whether we are in the role of parent and/or child, is to alchemically transmute this potentially destructive spirit which animates the “family” abuse (both in our nuclear family and the greater, human family) so as to liberate our own creative brilliance which it seemingly holds captive.

To the extent that we see how the transmission of child abuse works – in our own lives, with our own parents and children – we are able to consciously re-engineer the vehicle of human relationship, both within and between ourselves, thereby catalyzing the evolutionary up-leveling of human consciousness itself. Maybe, like Alice Miller implies, we can genuinely begin to heal the world in the process.

 

Links

Posted in Uncategorized on February 2, 2013 by kubrickblog

Cinephilia & Beyond • Posts Tagged ‘Stanley Kubrick

The Overlook Hotel

Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made – YouTube

Collected Essays by Jeffrey Bernstein on the Works of Stanley Kubrick

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – Stanley Kubrick « The Mind Reels

Stanley Kubrick Exhibition – Paris – YouTube

A Movie Odyssey: Three decades of conversation with Stanley Kubrick, part 2

Watch: Sizzle Reel For Stanley Kubrick & Nicolas Winding Refn Cinematographer Larry Smith As He Plans Directorial Debut | The Playlist

What The Hellz?! » Blog Archive » LACMA x Stanley Kubrick

The career of director Stanley Kubrick, from his first film, ‘Fear and Desire,’ to his last, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ – Grantland

Stanley Kubrick’s Fear And Desire released in Masters of Cinema series – Film-News.co.uk

A Movie Odyssey: Three decades of conversation with Stanley Kubrick

Wilson Sisters Explore Stanley Kubrick’s Unfinished Business | LACMA

Stanley Kubrick’s “Reddit”

Touring Stanley Kubrick exhibit lands at LACMA and its a cinephiles dream

Photo Gallery: Inside the Stanley Kubrick Exhibit at LACMA | Shock Till You Drop

Stanley Kubrick: Stars share secret history of legendary director | Inside Movies | EW.com

Stanley Kubrick Enters the Ring | Rope of Silicon

From Photography to Film: Stanley Kubrick Enters the Ring – LightBox

Stanley Kubrick Exhibit at LACMA: Our Review – Page 1 – Film+TV – Los Angeles – LA Weekly

Photo Diary: Stanley Kubrick retrospective at LACMA. « C-MONSTER.net

Inside the Very Striking Stanley Kubrick Show at LACMA – This is the War Room – Curbed LA

VIDEO: Bill Gold on Stanley Kubrick – Hollywood Reporter

An Introduction to Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) » Kinnemaniac

The Busybody: Stanley Kubrick: From Best to Worst

Stanley Kubrick on Vimeo

5 Things You Might Not Know About Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’ | The Playlist

Cinephilia&Beyond • Shooting 2001: A collection of black and white production stills from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Chicago, 1949, by Stanley Kubrick | Retronaut

The Wrong Way Wizard: Dr. Swamplove, Or: How I Learned To Open My Eyes Wide Shut And Hate Stanley Kubrick

The Wrong Way Wizard: Stanley Kubrick

[Cannes Interview] Rodney Ascher On Stanley Kubrick, ‘The Shining,’ and His Documentary ‘Room 237’