Kubrick and Race is the first book entirely focused on race and racism in Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. This may seem a perverse undertaking. At first glance, Kubrick’s films are very white. However, while people of colour in Kubrick’s films are few and far between, racialized representation in his work is complex.
In Kubrick and Race, editors Joy McEntee and Elisa Pezzotta bring together essays from established and emerging Kubrick scholars to consider how racial issues do appear in Kubrick’s work, albeit represented indirectly, behind and through narratives that concern themselves superficially with whiteness. Kubrick’s films are marked by a desire to perform whiteness, which is foregrounded, but whiteness is always defined and performed in relation to other racial categorizations, like Jewishness and Blackness. While Kubrick consistently features non-white actors and characters who pass for white in the background, at the same time he critiques foregrounded whiteness and the necessity of passing. Kubrick evinces ambivalent attitudes: his films simultaneously register his disgust with the failures of dominant white society and his equally strong desire to be seen as a respected member of it.
Writing on Fear and Desire, Cynthia Baron discusses how Kubrick works with racial stereotypes of characters who could pass for white—the Hispanic Mac and the Jewish Sidney. The soldiers’ hierarchical status aligns with dominant cultural norms in which Anglo-Saxon males possess whiteness securely whereas the provisional whiteness of men of marginal ethnicities can be lost.
Ari Mattes turns to The Killing, to analyse how horse racing, breeding, blood, and race are connected against the background of Kubrick’s career-long interest in the Holocaust and the violence of the technologies of modernity.
Julian Murphet describes how class and nationality are the cornerstones of Barry’s identity in Kubrick’s film. Barry’s Irishness emerges explosively when he rises to Bullingdon’s racist baiting and thrashes him, simultaneously thrusting himself out of the upper-class Anglo society from which he has always been barred by virtue of his Irishness.
Andrin Albrecht says that both Stephen King and Kubrick racialize Hallorann in their versions of The Shining, drawing attention to his Blackness. And yet, in Kubrick’s film, whiteness comes to the fore, only to be defined, as Toni Morrison points out in Playing in the Dark, in relation to Blackness. Jack Torrance kills Hallorann and finally dies frozen covered in white snow. In doing so he becomes a double of Kubrick the director who reveals himself as complicit in the perpetuation of white violence.
Benjamin Madden points out that there is a fundamental distinction between Kubrick’s participating in and representing racializing discourses. He describes how a professional critical class has arisen from the universities. It is characterized by identitarian politics and assumes, somewhat condescendingly, that other audiences are passive and easily influenced. Developing the theme of the artist’s responsibilities, Madden throws down the gauntlet to those who ‘call out’ Kubrick for racism.
Lawrence Ratna, indeed, calls out Kubrick for toxic racism, likening him to D.W. Griffith. In Kubrick’s films non-white people are absent or under-represented, and where non-white characters do appear, they are consistently placed in subservient positions and subjected to racial slurs and stereotyping, animalistic anthropomorphism, and orientalism.
Elisa Pezzotta performs a quantitate analysis of the Hollywood film system, demonstrating that it is overwhelmingly white and male. Turning her to Kubrick, she argues that he is typical of this tendency, rather than exceptional. The numbers are clear. In the director’s oeuvre, 76 % of the actors are male, and 83 % are white.
Delia Konzett asserts that the meaning of The Shining is generated in the background, in the set design, as well as in the foreground. She discusses two rooms: the red bathroom in which Grady warns Jack about losing the privileges of white masculinity due to Hallorann’s interference, and Hallorann’s bedroom, which contextualizes him in terms of the ‘Black is beautiful’ aesthetics of 1970s Blaxploitation cinema.
Karen A. Ritzenhoff analyzes key scenes in Full Metal Jacket and Spartacus in which Asian and white women assess the Black male body deploying something Ritzenhoff terms ‘the judgmental gaze.’ This gaze immediately and not coincidentally exposes its object to torture and death. The camera emphasizes the women’s temporary power over the Black men.
Finally, Joy McEntee turns the tables, discussing what a Black filmmaker—Jordan Peele—has made of Kubrick’s legacy. She argues that Get Out recalls and reverses The Shining, remodelling its key narrative points for Black audiences and potentially meeting contemporary calls for social justice. However, the film’s gender politics mean that social justice is not secured for all. Kubrick’s is an equivocal legacy for a modern Black filmmaker. As the essays assembled in this volume demonstrate, in terms of race, there isplenty to see in Kubrick’s films, but nothing that can be said about the topic is straightforward.
Joy McEntee is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide. Her work focuses on American film, Kubrick, adaptation, and revenge.
Elisa Pezzotta is an independent scholar. Her main interests are Kubrick and adaptation studies, and time in film.
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