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The Blind Spot

In this essay I examine the critique of current liberal democratic consensus implied in Kubrick’s last film, specifically where it suggests in the shifting boundaries of public and private space an illusion of the freedom we experience as expression, autonomy, self-determination, the pursuit of happiness. This illusion indexes for Kubrick a contradiction between the horizontal identifications (with those who are ‘‘like you’’) that inform an egalitarian democratic polity and the vertical identifications (with those ‘‘not like you’’) running through a hierarchical social structure. Kubrick does not hesitate to call this contradiction oligarchy. And he foregrounds this oligarchic structure by positioning Bill and Alice Harford in the top fraction of its dominated class, the function of which is essentially service. Everything they feel, say, do, or understand in the film is the processing of their compliance with this function, and hence of their complicity in the fact of domination. That they are not conscious of this processing, and indeed won’t ever be, is only the sign that consciousness has become the mode proper to that complicity: it cannot be registered except in a nexus of power and logos, which is to say enmeshed in a cynical reason that it is Kubrick’s virtue to have given us a compelling dramatic form.