Vietnam: Pynchon and Kubrick

[Mr Craig Clark]

This is an attempt to start a new thread arising out of an old 
one...It's also an attempt to provoke discussion about the one film 
director whom I think would be able to render Pynchon accurately on 
screen.

All this discussion of Vietnam and TRP's treatment thereof has gotten 
me thinking about Stanley Kubrick's treatment of Vietnam. Here I have 
not so much the brilliant "Full Metal Jacket" in mind as some of the 
films Kubrick made during the era of the Vietnam war - "Dr Strangelove", 
"2001", "A Clockwork Orange", and "Barry Lyndon."

Like GR, none of these splendid works deals overtly with Vietnam, yet 
Kubrick (an American whose self-imposed exile in London is almost as 
reclusive as Pynchon's "exile" in secrecy) could hardly be presumed 
to have been unconcerned with Vietnam.

I believe that the above films all deal with the issues which lay 
under the surface of the Vietnam war, in ways often reminiscent of 
Pynchon's treatment of the themes which lay underneath the surface of 
the War - the superficial "Germans and Japs" war of WW2, the superficial 
"Gooks and Slopes" war of Vietnam. Compare for a moment the sexual allure
of the technologies of destruction in both "Dr Strangelove" and 
"Gravity's Rainbow"; or consider the recolonisation of Europe theme 
in "GR" with the end of "Barry Lyndon", where Barry exports his 
disease (insatiable greed and love of violence) to the virgin territory
of America...

In both cases, Kubrick and Pynchon seem to deal with the American 
experience of Vietnam in oblique by omnipresent ways. Let's hear some 
ideas (and some of this stuff should probably get cross-posted to the 
fine alt.movies.kubrick newsgroup...)

Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"