With Kubrick, the duel, or the confrontation between two adversaries, is a metonymy for larger, more important combats on the battlefield that are found in a certain number of his films. As a good reader of Aristotle, he knew that conflict is the source of drama but, with him, that also corresponded to a more profound preoccupation, a radical pessimism which posits that man is fundamentally aggressive.
In the Napoleon script, which remains in the planning stages, one has the impression of hearing his voice when the young Bonaparte, in a salon of the Tuileries Palace, states: "The Revolution failed because the foundation of its political philosophy was erroneous. Its central dogma was the original transfer from man to society. It had the rosy idea that man is good by nature and is only corrupted by a poorly organised society. It would suffice to destroy the bad institutions, crank up the machine a bit and hup!, you have the utopia of the natural man back in all his goodness... That is a very attractive idea but it is quite simply fallacious. We have got everything backwards. Society is corrupt because man is corrupt since he is weak, egotistical, hypocritical and greedy."
Confrontation in Kubrick's films often takes place in an unusual setting, which acts as a counterpoint and accentuates the intention. In Killer's Kiss, the young boxer, Davy, pursues Vince, a shady bar owner, to a warehouse littered with dummies. They confront each other like present-day gladiators, one with a spear, the other with an axe, amidst these wax statues from which they rip a torso or a leg to throw in the other's face. The protagonist's boxing match, which his rival in love watches on a television screen, evokes Kubrick's first short feature, Day of the Fight, devoted to the preparation and match of Walter Cartier, a pugilist to whom Kubrick had already devoted a photo feature.
In the opening of Lolita, we see Humbert Humbert come to murder Clare Quilty, who has stolen his nymphet from him, in the surroundings of a disturbing Gothic castle. A 17th-century portrait presides over their confrontation in a ping-pong game (sports or games – cards, chess or billiards – are "soft" versions of war combats) before Humbert empties his revolver into his adversary.
2001 is punctuated by hostile encounters that underscore the permanence of the aggressive instinct, from the monkey, using a bone to smash the skeleton and skull of the dead animal (that an editing effect puts together with a living tapir), to the astronaut who cuts off the vital functions of HAL 9000, the computer. In the opening of Barry Lyndon, the pistol duel, in which we see Barry's father die, is echoed by the one opposing Barry and his stepson, Lord Bullingdon, towards the end of the film (two scenes invented by Kubrick that are not in Thackeray's novel). Another pistol duel, a swordfight and a bare-handed fistfight give emphasis, by their ritual, to the permanence of a society where violence is concealed behind refined morals. In The Shining, Wendy, armed with a bat, is climbing a staircase backwards when she runs into Jack, who has come to 'bash her brains in'. It is in the barracks' toilet, in Full Metal Jacket, that Gomer Pyle, the obese recruit, in his shorts with a loaded rifle in hand, shoots down his drill sergeant before killing himself. With Kubrick, the return of the suppressed and the death instinct are always present and, capital stakes, often linked to Eros.
Michel Ciment