The Perfect Distance¶
Stanley Kubrick occupies a strange position in Maarten’s library: the most-rated director by a wide margin, with nine films judged and a mean of 4.67 stars, yet not a single one of those films appears in the top spot. That belongs to Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, a documentary that shares almost nothing with Kubrick’s method — no control, no choreography, no constructed frame. Just restored footage, left to speak.
This is the first thing worth noticing. Kubrick is the most consistently admired director in the library, but he is not the most loved. The distinction matters. Love implies warmth, identification, the kind of porous boundary between viewer and film that makes The Big Lebowski or Parasite feel like a conversation with a friend. Kubrick does not permit that. His films are admired from a distance, the way one admires a precision instrument.
The ratings tell a clear story about what Maarten values in Kubrick. The five-star films cluster in a specific zone: Spartacus, The Shining, Barry Lyndon, Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove, Paths of Glory. What unites them is not genre — they span history, horror, drama, comedy, war — but a particular relationship between form and subject. In each case, Kubrick takes a genre container and fills it with something that strains against the edges. The Shining is a horror film that becomes a study of domestic violence and institutional rot. Dr. Strangelove is a comedy that never lets you forget the real bombs exist. Barry Lyndon is a period drama shot like a museum catalogue, but about a man who has nothing inside him.
The four-star films are instructive too. Eyes Wide Shut, A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey — these are the Kubrick films that announce themselves as Important. They are ambitious, philosophical, structurally audacious. And they are rated lower. Not because Maarten fails to recognise their significance, but because significance alone does not earn a five-star rating in this library. What separates Paths of Glory from 2001 is not quality but proximity. The former is about something specific — the mechanics of military injustice, the cowardice of command — while the latter is about everything, which risks being about nothing. Kubrick’s reach exceeds his grasp in 2001, and the data suggests Maarten respects the reach more than the grasp.
The pattern across the filmography is one of escalating distance. Kubrick’s early work — The Killing, Paths of Glory, even Spartacus — still operates within recognisable human scales. Characters have motivations you can track. The camera moves to serve the story. By 2001, the human figures are props. By Barry Lyndon, they are insects pinned under glass. By The Shining, the hotel is the protagonist and Jack Torrance is a symptom. By Eyes Wide Shut, the characters are so flattened into social types that the film plays like an anthropological study of a species the director finds faintly alien.
This is what Kubrick gives that other directors do not: the permission to look without feeling. His films are experiments in what happens when empathy is removed from the equation. You don't identify with Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket; you observe him. You don't root for Barry Lyndon; you watch him rise and fall with the same clinical interest you'd give a cell dividing under a microscope. The experience is not cathartic but cognitive. You leave a Kubrick film having understood something rather than having felt something.
This aligns with Maarten's documented preference for rigour and intentionality over warmth. The taste data shows a director library dominated by figures who mean what they say — Loach, Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Buñuel, Polanski, Cronenberg, Von Trier. None of these are comfort-viewing directors. All of them, in different ways, demand that the viewer meet them on their terms. But Kubrick is distinct even among this company. Loach's politics are warm and humanist; his films want you to care. Bergman's despair is intimate; you feel it in your chest. Kubrick's despair is systemic. He is not interested in your feelings. He is interested in the structures that make feelings irrelevant.
The highest-rated Kubrick film in the library is Dr. Strangelove, and this is the most revealing choice. It is the only Kubrick film that is also a comedy, and it is the only one that directly engages with a political subject that remains live. The Cold War is not history in Dr. Strangelove; it is a machine that is still running. The film's humour does not come from jokes but from the gap between human stupidity and mechanical inevitability. The generals are buffoons, but the bombs are real. The laughter is a defence mechanism, not a release.
This is the Kubrick that Maarten values most: not the visionary of 2001 or the provocateur of A Clockwork Orange, but the structural analyst. Dr. Strangelove is about systems — military, political, psychological — that produce outcomes no individual wants. The film's genius is that it shows this without a single moment of moralising. Kubrick does not tell you that nuclear war is bad. He shows you how it happens, step by step, and trusts you to draw the conclusion.
The same method applies across the filmography. Paths of Glory is about the system of military justice that demands scapegoats. Full Metal Jacket is about the system that turns boys into killers and then has no use for them. The Shining is about the system of domestic violence that repeats across generations. Barry Lyndon is about the system of class mobility that rewards the ruthless and destroys the naive. Kubrick is not a pessimist in the emotional sense; he is a pessimist in the analytical sense. He looks at how things work and finds the design fundamentally flawed.
This explains why They Shall Not Grow Old sits above all of Kubrick's films in the library. That documentary is the opposite of Kubrick's method: it has no director's hand, no constructed frame, no argument imposed from above. It simply presents the footage and lets the men speak. The distance is collapsed. The viewer is not observing a system but encountering people.
Kubrick cannot do this. His method requires distance. He is at his best when he has something to say about how the world works, and at his weakest when he tries to say something about how it should work. The endings of his films are famously unsatisfying because he has no interest in resolution. Dr. Strangelove ends with a mushroom cloud and a song. 2001 ends with a fetus. The Shining ends with a photograph. These are not conclusions but ellipses. The system continues.
Maarten's library suggests he values this honesty. The four-star films — the ambitious ones — are the ones where Kubrick reaches for meaning and comes up short. The five-star films are the ones where he stays within his range: the analysis of systems, the diagnosis of failure, the cold eye on human institutions. Dr. Strangelove is the most accomplished because it never pretends there is a solution. The bomb drops. The song plays. The credits roll.
What Kubrick gives, finally, is permission to think without feeling guilty about it. His films are arguments, not experiences. You can disagree with them. You can find them cold, clinical, even inhuman. But you cannot dismiss them as unserious. Every frame is intentional. Every choice serves the argument. In a library full of directors who mean what they say, Kubrick is the one who means it most completely — and the data shows that Maarten respects this even when he does not love it.