Out From ‘Neath The Ferris Wheel
I think about the end a lot these days — not my individual life, per se — but the capital-T, capital-E, The End. As we emerge, coma-like, from a monstrous pandemic into the sun, which has been blasting its way deep into our pores and the pores of the earth, it’s easy to feel confused, frightened, and a little nihilistic about the whole thing crashing down on us.
In times like these, I turn to the arts. During my quarantine isolation, I have drawn, written, photographed, and sang more than ever in recent memory. The impulse is part-habit, as I’ve done these things since childhood, but I think there has been a deeper purpose. I create to remind myself I’m alive, that I’m human, capable of more than destruction, able to feel still. I need to tell myself a story about potential and goodness, even though stagnation and failure meet me every day.
I think about stories all the time, and I sometimes lay awake at all hours, despairing whether storytelling matters: is it delusion or truth?
This past night, around 4 am, Stanley Kubrick — the Stanley Kubrick — answered, “Yes.”
I was tossing and turning because the rain loop I use to sleep, and the car alarm that goes off seemingly like clockwork were fighting again. I flung the blanket off my sweaty frame in frustration. I flipped on the light and was stunned to find the great (and long-dead) Kubrick sitting on my carpet, arranging my movie collection into release years. He looked up between his glasses and bushy eyebrows.
“I-I’ve meant to do that, Mr. Kubrick, for a while,” I stammered.
“Of course, you have. But you haven’t even started. It would have made you happy doing it for its own sake, and yet here you are, and here I am, and here is the 1933 King Kong next to my The Killing.”
“Which was, ok, 1956. Well, alphabetically…”
“A hodgepodge. Where is the rest of my work?”
“In a set. Sets belong in a different — oh, never -”
“- Where is A.I. Artificial Intelligence?”
My breath caught in my throat.
“I’m sorry, speak up. Being dead hasn’t helped my hearing.”
“It’s at my parents’ house.”
“What seems to be your major malfunction? Isn’t it one of your favorites?”
“Yes. It’s Spielberg’s 21st-century masterpiece.”
Kubrick then pulled out a cellphone and dialed a number. I was surprised he knew how to use one, but this guy used lenses from NASA for Barry Lyndon, so I guess anything’s possible.
A voice said, “hello,” and Kubrick put his finger to his lips.
“Now, Steven. It would be best if you didn’t say anything. Just listen. This young-ish man has something to say about our collaboration.”
The director waved his hand, apparently directing?
“I, uh…”
“Can’t hear you!” Kubrick bellowed in his nasally Bronx accent.
“Well, sirs, uh, A.I. is the best film you, Mr. Spielberg, have made in the past twenty years. I know the anniversary is coming up. I went to see it with my girlfriend at the time, and we liked it, but she, like everyone, wanted David, the robot, to be left at the bottom of the ocean, pinned under the ferris wheel. It’s the platonic ideal for a Kubrick ending — being trapped for all time, desiring and never receiving. I think back then people assumed you, uh, Steven, had messed up, uh, Stanley’s movie with sentimentality by jumping into the distant future, and the Blue Fairy, and then David gets his wish granted. By the way, can I call you guys by your first — ok…”
Dead silence.
Kubrick traced his finger over Pinocchio’s frayed slipcover.
“Anyway, it isn’t true.” I wrapped myself in my blanket again, reflexively squishing Barclay, my teddy bear, under my chin, the way one does when one hallucinates legends in one’s bedroom.
At that moment, Kubrick held the phone aloft in my direction, motioning again like a mad conductor.
“See, the movie’s about the disappointments of growing up and being in an uncertain world full of violence and death. It’s about having to endure all that as a supposed immortal and coming to realize that selfishness is what makes us human. Our ability, or failing, to see no one but ourselves is what becomes our undoing. It’s about self-realization as self-annihilation. That robot teddy bear was really cool. I wish mine…anyway…”
“The ending?” Kubrick asked, trying to cuddle with me and the phone now.
“Was that a question?” That came out sharper than I meant because the filmmaker who dared make Lolita was uncomfortably close.
There was laughter on the other end of the phone. Kubrick snatched Barclay away, and I suddenly felt very alone.
“You’ll get him back when you elucidate for your captive audience — and I’m starting to actually feel captive — what it all means. And we’ll do this a hundred times until you get it right.”
“To me?”
“No, the people who made it. Yes, you!”
I tugged on my hair the way I do to remind myself my head’s still there.
“It’s about delusion. See, everyone accused Spielberg of softening the message, but all he did was what you wished and then applied a thick Spielbergian sheen to the final moments to drive home the irony.”
“I think I’ll die all over again. Get to the point.”
“Says the man who spent 15 months filming Eyes Wide Shut.” Kubrick seemed to admire my gall, handing Barclay back to me, where he belonged.
“If you remember, David asks the Mechas that rescue him from the ice for one last wish: to spend a day with his mother, the one who abandoned him, as if he were a real boy. The mechas agree to this, but they use a hair, the last remnant of humanity besides David, and after that, humanity will be nothing but a memory. David only wants what he wants, and demands his wish be granted. So, he spends the day with his “mother,” being, to his mind, truly loved. They end the day together in bed — how did people miss that? — and Ben Kingsley whispers to us about a place where dreams are born as David finally sleeps, as his battery dies, and with him, everything human. Fade to black. Credits roll. Enjoy your food court teriyaki chicken.”
Kubrick tapped my nose with sudden affection. “Ouchhhhh!”
“Yeah, weird. Anyway, what we’re seeing is the last record of human life, the only thing the mechas could use to build a meaningful society, slowly snuffed out. Human beings, and all the glorious, terrible things we’ve done, disappear into ash. This little boy was selfish and hurt, like we all are, and needed some sign that his pain was surmountable, which it isn’t. In the end, the movie teaches us nothing, except, maybe, that we are alive, we fail, we try harder, we die. It is the most despairing, darkest, most wicked ending in Spielberg’s canon. Yet, something trembles beneath it, which suggests there’s purpose in searching for meaning. The mechas don’t have that kind of consciousness, and David’s‘death’ unmoors them from any future context that would help them evolve. We can find ways to go on in our delusions, but the machines that dethrone us cannot. The great trick of this movie is Spielberg is the ironist, while you, sir, bely a certain humanism in mourning our ultimate passing. See, honestly, Stanley — if I can call you that — you’re a teddy bear, and I so don’t believe that’s Steven Spielberg on the phone.”
The phone then gave a soft click.
I looked to Kubrick, who was now fast asleep. I nudged Barclay under his beard and switched off the light.
I did not dream any dreams.
When I awoke the following morning to the birds singing and the meth heads and head-cases trying to outmatch them with their chorus of nonsense beneath my window, Stanley Kubrick was gone, like he was never there in the first place.
“I will break…” I heard myself say but then pushed the words away.
It had been a year and a half in this godforsaken, numbing hole, where it was evident longevity was not a given, and nothingness would undoubtedly prevail, but I felt a sharp sting I hadn’t in some time.
It was the crush of hope, and it made me sick. I felt the pressure of the pearly air and the pull of the earth. I heard my heartbeat rung in my ears and the crack of my slowing bones.
My batteries would run out, yes, but I was alive for that moment. The next moment as well. And the next. And the next. And the -
It was all mine — ours — delusion or not, to keep going through, to keep believing in this stupid little life.
It was all forward motion, and it was good.
