This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comThe gang discusses Stanley Kubrick’s little-known masterpiece Paths of Glory (1957), a film that can be watched “in reverse” in that it includes themes Kubrick will explore later in Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Stangelove, and 2001.
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| This film is so fascinating to watch retrospectively. | |
| Because all of these, it's almost like this, this is a very good Hollywood film. | |
| But when you watch it knowing where Kubrick will be over the next decade, second decade, and third decade, it... | |
| It takes on a whole life of its own. | |
| It's almost this ironic master key to his works. | |
| Because if you think about the final scene with Christiana, Christine Kubrick, it resembles to such a degree the final scene of Full Metal Jacket. | |
| And it's the, you know, with Full Metal Jacket, you're storming this, you know, the perch of the sniper, and you finally find him, and it's a young girl. | |
| And who's begging, you know, kill me, kill me at the end. | |
| In this one, it has this very similar parallel structure. | |
| You finally reach the enemy. | |
| And as Alberto just said, they don't come anywhere close to seizing the anthill. | |
| In fact, during the show trial, it was like Arnaud or something like that says, we reached our own line. | |
| We reached our barbed wire. | |
| So they didn't come anywhere close. | |
| So this is as close as you get to the enemy, and it's this young girl. | |
| There are many other examples of this. | |
| The other is Kirk Douglas' character, Colonel Dax, is going to relay the information that Miro, who's the villain-slash-scapegoat in this film, ordered his regiment to fire on French troops in order to spur them into action or punish them by destroying them. | |
| They're playing a Johann Strauss waltz. | |
| And there's evident irony in that in the sense of the general staff are whining and dining while the troops are sleeping in dugouts and trapped in the trenches. | |
| And there's this Johann Strauss waltz playing, this three-four time elegant and Youthful and lustful, but at the same time, mechanical. | |
| And it has this deeply ironic quality to it. | |
| And again, watching this movie backwards, so to speak, it's hard not to hear that and think of the amazing Blue Danube sequence from 2001, where these Rockets and space stations and spaceships that are ultimately weapons of war, | |
| which Kubrick lays out very clearly in that the most famous jump cut of all time, where an ape man is throwing a bone into the air, and it's actually circling clockwise. | |
| And then there's a jump cut and it begins to circle counterclockwise. | |
| You can read into that what you will. | |
| And then it jump cuts to a spaceship. | |
| So what Kubrick is saying to you explicitly is that all of this scientific achievement, all of the wonder and majesty of space travel is, at the end of the day, | |
| a bigger... | |
| Rob Ager, who's done interesting research onto this, has looked at that, and this is probably imperceptible when you watch it, although it might be resonating unconsciously or subliminally. | |
| There are actually little German ships with a German imperial flag on it in this space. | |
| Now, you already have the Americans versus the Soviets. | |
| That's made explicit, where Americans and their Soviet counterparts are meeting, and there's a sort of old discussion of what's happened with the moon base. | |
| And underneath it, you can see that, though they're being very diplomatic, they might even be friends, there's a Cold War that is still raging and raging in space. | |
| And so again, you see this, I don't know what to make of it, is whether these are, this movie was deeply important to Kubrick and in some way he's offering an homage to it in later films, | |
| or you could say that there's actually a lot more to those scenes. | |
| Those scenes are pregnant, to use a phrase that's repeated in the film. | |
| There's actually a lot more meaning to this film, although he was constrained at the time due to the fact that he's working the Hollywood system, due to the fact that he was even willing to give it a happy ending, if that would make it more commercially successful, etc. | |
| And there's some other elements to this. | |
| I mean, it's hard. | |
| I mean, the most obvious one, I think, is the... | |
| Way in which this movie is a sort of prelude to Dr. Strangelove. | |
| The notion of this impossible task being asked of the colonel and his soldiers, there's no way to get beyond your own barbed wire. | |
| There's no way to impregnate the anthill. | |
| Just even the notion of an anthill is significant here. | |
| And they're these impossible tasks. | |
| There's a crazy general, General Moreau, who's firing or at least wants to fire on his own men to spur them into action. | |
| He's putting them on a suicide mission, and he probably knows it or should know it. | |
| And he's even willing to kill them all. | |
| It reminds you of Colonel Jack Ripper, who... | |
| You know, is launching this attack on the Soviet Union so that we can just bring this whole thing to a head. | |
| Because we understand the Marxist subversion that is going to sap the nation's bodily fluids. | |
| All of these things are present in this film. | |
| And I do think there's a little bit of... | |
| I guess you could say almost sub-rem going on as well. | |
| Little indications of the way that Kubrick will start to encode characters. | |
| Although it's not... | |
| He's constrained by the novel. | |
| Although he's always constrained by a novel in all his works. | |
| He's constrained by just his... | |
| You know, youth at the time. | |
| He's constrained by the Hollywood system. | |
| He's constrained by the fact that this is a Kirk Douglas vehicle. |