THE films of the directors Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick carry indelible marks of their faiths — Christian and Jewish.
Sam Wasson’s title quotes Dante: “the path to paradise begins in hell.” Never entirely abandoning hope, Coppola’s sights remain on the heavenly city. His recently completed Megalopolis concerns a master builder striving to redesign New York as Utopia. Kubrick, now deceased, was more interested in whichever journey he took. There was something of Deuteronomy’s wandering Aramaean about him.
All authors concentrate on the agony and the ecstasy of getting movies green-lighted, produced, and distributed. Wasson majors on Coppola’s eighth film, Apocalypse Now (1979), which relocates Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War. The film depicts the necessary cycle of life, death, and rebirth — or, in terms of Coppola’s Christian upbringing, crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. Such interpretation isn’t within Wasson’s purview: he treats it as fairy tale. He does acknowledge Coppola’s ritualism in Apocalypse Now.
Strangely, nothing is said about the juxtaposition of a baptism in The Godfather (1972) with murdering potential rivals, whereas Pauline Kael, the celebrated film critic, considered Coppola’s sensual richness derived from such traditional Catholic rituals. Wasson is on firmer ground recognising the title Apocalypse Now as expressing the filmmaker’s hoped-for vision of a realised eschatology, one doing full justice to an all-embracing celestial revelation made manifest through cinema.
Kubrick kept seeking new kingdoms to conquer. He was raised in the Bronx, and his film career brought him to Europe, where he eventually settled in England. Human folly, our falling short of who we are meant to be, pervades his output. Whatever the topic — existentialism, psychoanalysis, etc. — he would tirelessly research and master his brief, thus informing his films. The authors regard Kubrick’s obsessive personality and pursuit of perfection as stemming from feeling an outsider: Jew in a Gentile world, American domiciled in England, reclusive and yet forced to cooperate with colleagues. As such, he was a case of the spectator seeing more of the game, singing the Lord’s song in a strange land.
His films ask how people can think in the crazy ways they do. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) took up the arguments in satirical form of Canon Collins’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Kolker and Abrams describe A Clockwork Orange (1971) as a Bible fantasy.
AlamyNot horsemen, but helicopters, in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now
Kubrick never goes so far as to assert that we are made in the image of God, but he did believe that there were aspects of the human personality which were unique and mysterious and impervious to conditioning. There is also a love of the impossible: 2001: A Space Odyssey was not, in Kubrick’s view, just another sci-fi feature, but a statement that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in our philosophy.
In Spartacus (1960), the introductory voice-over foreshadows the birth of a new faith, Christianity, destined to overthrow tyranny. Such an aspiration was also dear to Kubrick’s Judaism. For Roman oppression, read segregation, injustice, slavery, cruelty — a world in need of spiritual awakening. If Coppola’s way to this was climbing Dante’s circles of hell, spiritual transformation, for Kubrick, was through navigating a multi-faceted labyrinth. Thus have both directors been soul-friends to audiences on their own journeys.
The Revd Stephen Brown is the Church Times film critic.
The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola story
Sam Wasson
Faber & Faber £20
(978-0-571-37984-2)
Church Times Bookshop £18
Kubrick: An odyssey
Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams
Faber & Faber £30
(978-0-571-37036-8)
Church Times Bookshop £27