Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid: a walk through the Kubrick Universe

Since last December and until the next day, May 8, the Círculo de Bellas Artes, one of the most relevant cultural spaces in Madrid, is on display.

In its excellent facilities, located in that vital artery of the capital, which is Alcala Street, all lovers of the Seventh Art have an unavoidable date with the work of one of the most brilliant and charismatic directors of that inexhaustible factory of dreams, what is Hollywood: Stanley Kubrick.

Kubric, born in the New York Bronx in 1928 and died in the United Kingdom in March 1999, was, without a doubt, one of the greatest hermeneutists on the big screen and favorite son, continuing with the metaphors, of Janus, the Roman god with two faces, an ambivalence that was amply collected in practically all of his extensive work.

A work, considered, with all justice, as an invaluable cultural legacy, in which he recorded, through extensive exploration, both external worlds and those other worlds, perhaps closer but no less interesting, such as the interior ones - Do you remember the assertion of the surrealist poet, Paul Eluard, that there are other worlds, but they are in this one? - an extraordinary range of situations, behaviors and conditioning, which would have made the ideal scenarios, even for Sigmund Freud, the so-called father of the psychoanalysis.

Hundreds of scripts, ideas, plans, photographs, libraries, coffee, sleep, tiredness, false takes and a long etcetera, it could be said that of causalities, in Kubrick's universe everything had a place, including that driving force, that of desire, which borders on the limits of the great transgressors, like Sade.

But, silence, it rolls: we live a paradox. After the third of the 21st century and overcoming the syndrome of the year two thousand, we go back to the year 2001 to live an authentic space odyssey. While man walks around his lunar bases to the rhythm of Strauss's waltzes, the American spaceship Discovery - an offspring of that romantic Mayflower, whose Atlantic pilgrimage also took him to the eastern shores of another sleeping giant, which over time would become the United States of America - orbits Jupiter. Inside, another Miltonian Lucifer rebellion is about to take place, when the supercomputer, HAL-9000 becomes aware of itself and decides to turn against its creators, starting one of the most exciting sagas of science fiction, before that James Cameron picked up the gauntlet with Terminator.

Duty and conscience, is the dichotomy in which that true intrusion into any license to kill that a war entails unfolds, even though in the 12th century Saint Bernard, in his praise of the new Templar militia, tried to justify two conflicting concepts and brand new to the West: holy war and the soldier of God. This ambivalence is transferred, with Kubrick, to the Vietnam War, whose criticism is amply justified in the helmet of the leading marine, who wears the hippie symbol of peace and the phrase: born to kill.

Dr. Freud, I suppose!, could have been called, due to the brutality of the argument and the sterility of that resource to soften behaviors, in force until relatively modern times, electroshock therapy, from A Clockwork Orange. Is rebellion born or made? Is it madness to get out of the established, to be different, to be oneself?.

It is difficult that with such a background, Kubrick did not touch the subject of diabolical possession, in his terrifying film The Shining. But does diabolical possession really exist? Are there sacraments of evil in the same way that there are sacraments of good, as that member of the Golden Dawn and unforeseen writer, Arthur Machen, thought? Just in case, try not to stay in an isolated hotel in the Rockies.

The far we have come from Spartacus or it is better to die on your feet like a man than to live your whole life dragged like a dog, even with its tragic final drama, highlights the belief in that brute force, in that resilience that moves everything human being for defending and conserving an asset as important or more important than his own life: his freedom.

And of course, although in the present script it doesn't give for more, how to avoid that suicidal incursion into the most passionate of the objects of desire, sex? The old taboos, the forbidden borders, revealed in films such as Lolita and transgressed, as has been scandalously seen in recent times, not only by other directors, such as Roman Polansky, but also by great producers and relevant personalities in world politics, a theme which, as if it were a prophecy, also included part of his latest film, Eyes white sut, where elitism, power, sex and a large proportion of corruption sometimes leave their golden sewers to show themselves in the light of day.

In 2010, odyssey two, HAL-9000 asked its creator: will I dream, doctor Chandra?. Kubric is no longer with us, but his work remains and with it, the answer is more or less clear: we will continue dreaming.

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