Kubrick’s Films Don’t Depict Obsession. They Cause It
The Thought Is Not the Wish: On Kafka, the Zeitgeist, and Watching Ourselves Watch
I’m not diagnosing Stanley Kubrick. That’s probably important to mention. I never met the guy. Nobody gets to diagnose a man they never met, and most of the people who did meet him couldn’t tell you what was happening behind those eyes either. This essay is not about what was in Kubrick’s head. It’s about what his films do to yours.
I’ve been sitting on this theory for over a year. The year 1945 is key to it. But the reality is it began before that.
The Zeitgeist of the 20th Century
Every era’s artists drink from the same well, whether they know it or not. They don’t call each other. They don’t coordinate. They just wake up breathing the same air, and the air gets into the work.
But every well has a spring beneath it, so let me step back further than 1945 for a second. In 1915, Kafka wrote The Trial: a man arrested one ordinary morning for a crime nobody will name, judged by a court that is everywhere and nowhere, guilty of something he cannot identify and therefore cannot disprove. The feeling underneath that book fits in nine words: something is wrong, we don’t understand, it’s ruining us. Kafka died before the machinery arrived to deliver the message he tried to burn, one way or another.
But when the machinery did arrive, it defined some of the major art of the twentieth century. There were various lenses of dread: the concentration camps, the bomb, and outer space. We lived in a world built from the Tower of Babel. It was as if the software had been carried from the Bible through modern literature and finally had the hardware to mass market the feeling.
For the artists who came of age in the shadow of 1945, the air was made of two things: the bomb and the sky. The anxiety that we would all die at once, and the wonder that maybe something greater was out there. Terror pointing down, hope pointing up. Same rocket, two directions. Though I feel it might be important to mention the idea of extraterrestrials instilled some fear too.
Look at what that generation made. Pynchon wrote Gravity’s Rainbow, which opens with a scream coming across the sky and the details the whole novel hangs on are sex and physics. The V-2 rocket was supersonic. It hit before you heard it coming. Death arrived before the warning; you could not brace. And Pynchon gives post-war Europe a name that will matter in a minute: the Zone: the lawless in-between where every structure that used to organize reality has collapsed and something new and terrible is being born.
Lynch spent years chasing the film Ronnie Rocket: electricity, rockets, industrial dread. And he never got to make it. Here’s the proof that a zeitgeist doesn’t expire: forty years later, in Twin Peaks: The Return, he made it anyway. Part 8. The camera flies directly into the Trinity test (July 16, 1945), the first atomic blast, into the cloud itself, and what comes out the other side is BOB, the show’s embodiment of evil. Lynch locates the birth of evil, literally, inside the bomb. And his whole mythology runs on zones: the Black Lodge, the White Lodge, the waiting room. These are places outside of time where the rules are wrong and the court never explains itself. Kafka’s literal image rests in Gordon Cole’s office too…across from an image of the bomb. And in one great scene, Lynch rests between the two.
Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, a man unstuck in time, because after the war, linear time became unbearable. And Kubrick made 2001…humanity skipping across millions of years, ape to astronaut to star child. Same year, same broken clock. And look at the key to each work: Billy Pilgrim in a dome on Tralfamadore, Bowman in that white Louis XVI hotel room…mankind in an enclosure, fed and observed by something greater that never explains itself. The zeitgeist showed us we were but creatures in a zoo to be observed…like we were characters in someone else’s film to be watched. Keep this in mind for the meta of it all later.
And so…
These works are considered bizarre unless you’re a weirdo like me, and then they follow total logic. These works span all of time. They refuse to end properly. Because how do you end a story when the real story…the one everybody was living…was “we might all die tomorrow, and also we just walked on the moon?”
1977 arrived. The whole thing seemingly resolved into a single chord. Star Wars took the terror and the wonder and fused them into a digestible myth. The planet-destroying weapon and the mystical hope in the same movie. The zeitgeist got its fairy tale, and the era closed other than a series of copycats, sequels, and eventually TV shows. But before I get too far ahead of myself, consider Lucas’ full title of the film: Star Wars: A New Hope.
A New Zeitgeist
Things reopened for the modern millennial and elder gen-z child on a Tuesday morning in September 2001. I don’t need to describe it. That’s the thing about our zeitgeist…nobody has to describe it.
If you grew up before that morning, you grew up thinking America was invincible. I did. Then we all watched, live, as it wasn’t. That’s our bomb. Not a hypothetical mushroom cloud. It was an actual morning, replayed and replayed and replayed on televisions in a way our eyes could not avoid.
Here’s the strange part. The first zeitgeist put its hope in the sky. Ours just filled us with anxiety. The hope took some time to find. And it’s not in our lives. It’s on a screen. DVDs, Blu-rays, and obviously streaming.
We found hope in the meta…the stories of the past became our hope.
Think about where the comfort actually lives now. It’s Pam and Jim. It’s Monica and Chandler. It’s the shows people don’t just watch but rewatch five times, ten times, falling asleep to them like a night light. Streaming made it possible to spend as many hours with fictional people as with real ones, and a lot of us quietly do. The psychology research is almost embarrassingly on the nose about why: rewatching familiar shows lowers anxiety because the brain craves predictability under stress. No plot twists. No new losses. Researchers call the bonds we form with these characters parasocial relationships — one-sided friendships that still deliver real companionship. The characters can’t die on you. The ending never changes. Every rewatch confirms the world is still the way you left it.
Read that back slowly, though. Repeating a ritual to relieve anxiety. Checking, again and again, that everything is okay. Our entire culture’s relationship to comfort media has the exact structure of a compulsion. We binge for reassurance. We rewatch to neutralize the dread. The obsession is 2001…the intrusive image our whole generation can’t stop replaying…and the compulsion is on repeat.
By the way, I’m not saying everyone who rewatches The Office has OCD. I’m saying the programming invites the shape into minds that may otherwise not have had it.
The Same Well as Disney
Here’s something funny. Kubrick, considered one of the coldest filmmakers, and Disney, a beacon of warmth, were drinking from the same well the whole time.
But I’ve gotta say, in a weird way, both sides of the same coin gave me nightmares more than anything else.
Pinocchio and A Clockwork Orange: both ask whether a manufactured good boy is really a boy at all. Alex after the Ludovico treatment is a puppet with the strings showing. Peter Pan and The Shining: Jack Torrance is the boy who refuses to grow up, refuses the work, the fathering, the aging…and the Overlook like Neverland grants his wish by freezing him in a photograph, forever young, forever at the party. All work and no play makes Jack a lost boy. And who could forget Wendy, darling.
Then there’s Alice in Wonderland and Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick named the wife Alice and dared us to notice, then pulled the switch: she stays home, and Bill falls down the rabbit hole. A masked court with arbitrary rules.
In the end, there’s a final question: “was it a dream, and whose?”
Same myths. Same well. Disney resolved them into lullabies. Kubrick refused to resolve them at all. And that refusal is the whole difference. A story that resolves is a comfort, and a story that doesn’t is a loop. Disney gives you the rewatch. Kubrick gives you the rumination.
The Pure O Interpretation
There is a form of OCD that most people have never heard of. The community calls it Pure O…purely obsessional…though clinicians will tell you the compulsions are there, just invisible: rumination, mental checking, silent reassurance-seeking. It’s not a DSM label. It’s a lived one. The person suffering it is tortured by intrusive thoughts about the most forbidden things a mind can produce: harming a child, sexual violence, betrayal, taboo desire. These are thoughts they despise, thoughts that arrive uninvited and replay on a loop, thoughts that make them ask the worst question a person can ask themselves: what does it say about me that I thought that?
If that question sounds familiar, it’s because Kafka wrote it a hundred years ago. Josef K.’s deepest horror isn’t the court. It’s that, never told the charge, he begins searching himself for the crime. The trial moves inside. That’s the condition, before it had a name.
Now line up Kubrick’s mature filmography. Lolita. Dr. Strangelove. A Clockwork Orange. Barry Lyndon’s infidelities. The Shining…a father’s violence toward his own child. Full Metal Jacket. Eyes Wide Shut. A series of films that read, in order, like a catalog of every category of forbidden thought. Some critics have spent fifty years treating these films as thematically scattered…a war movie here, a horror movie there. Through this lens they’re one project.
But here’s the part that matters, the part that makes this more than a party trick: the films don’t depict obsession. They reproduce obsession in you.
The imagery arrives like a lightning bolt of a thought. Danny’s visions of the twins. Bill’s black-and-white flashes of his wife with the naval officer…literal intrusive images, involuntary, repetitive, escalating each time. The camera won’t cut away; the slow zoom holds you in the thought past the point of comfort. The Ludovico scene is nothing but a pure representation of the Pure O mind: Alex with his eyes clamped open, forced to watch…that’s not a character, that’s the audience. And then Kubrick withholds the release. No catharsis. No reassurance. You leave the theater still carrying the imagery, still turning it over, asking why it stayed with you and what that says about you.
An ordinary thought completes. An intrusive one recurs. Kubrick made films that recur. Like the V-2, they land before you hear them coming and like Kafka’s court, they follow you home.
Intentional or not…and I want to be clear: we cannot know, and I am not claiming Kubrick had intrusive thoughts…the effect is that for two hours, a Kubrick film puts every viewer inside the phenomenology of one.
A spectator may leave with a horrifying image in their head. But they know it’s a movie. Someone with Pure O wishes they could just claim their thoughts were a film imprinted on the brain.
Why This Matters More Than Kubrick
This is beyond Kubrick. Because the zeitgeist matters. But showing a group of unseen people a way to convey their experience matters most to me.
It’s difficult to explain that watching The Shining…leaving you with abusive imagery in your head for a day is a suffering someone with Pure O can’t escape every day, because the images start in their own head.
You see, the cruelest part of this condition is invisibility. Film critics spent twenty-five years calling Bill Harford blank, a cipher, an enigma. An entire interpretive community staring at a man and reporting nothing there. That is exactly what it looks like from the outside when everything is happening on the inside. Some people watched that movie and recognized that particular quiet instantly, because they’ve watched people misread their own quiet their whole lives. Recognition and translation are not the same act.
And I can’t help but drive this a little further here with Eyes Wide Shut.
Think of the way Bill as a doctor has built his life around making sex clinical. His rabbit hole is trying to understand the pleasure of it all. And only his wife saying she wants to fuck can cue him in. Or at least give him some momentary insight.
I took so long to express this because no matter how clearly I say I’m not diagnosing Kubrick, some of the comments will say I’m diagnosing Kubrick. There’s nothing I can do about that, and even though you’re reading this and I posted it, it’s still eating at me.
But notice the shape of it…being believed to mean something monstrous, no matter how plainly you state that you don’t. That’s the Pure O predicament itself. That’s Josef K. The gap between the thought and the self, judged by observers who can’t tell the difference.
Remember. The thought is not the wish. You’ve proven it to yourself every time you’ve watched one of these films.
Kubrick, knowingly or not, built the demonstration. It’s been resting in the ether for fifty years, waiting…
I know a little about being at war with your own mind. I’ve written about it before, and I’ll probably write about it again, because the writing is how I say goodbye to things — and some things you have to say goodbye to more than once. So please. If your brain torments you with thoughts you’d never act on, thoughts that make you feel like a monster in a body doing dishes — you are not the thought. You’re the one who’s horrified by it. Those are different people, and only one of them is you.
And that understanding of duality is also established through all of Lynch’s work.
Good Cooper. Evil Cooper. Dougie Jones.
We’re all a varied, shifting multiplicity of parts. Some of us just see it more than others.
So…
There is help. There is language for what you’re experiencing, even if the DSM hasn’t settled on a name for it. You’re in line with all of us — all of us rewatching our comfort shows, checking that the world is still there, hoping something greater is out there in the vast dark.
Kubrick pointed the camera to tell stories that penetrated through our minds. His stories became a part of some of us. And so it makes sense that we’re all filled with the dread and hope of the rocket. Up and down.
I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know what zeitgeist the next cloud of artists will rise up from. All I know is some artists nail it. Not always in their lifetime, but in the span of all time. Like Kubrick. And that’s probably why Criterion can sell a set of all his work for a suggested retail price of $600 with more discs of special features than films itself.
Oh. I should mention. Through all the dread, sometimes it’s okay to joke around. Like ending your movie with a bomb as a dick. And titling it: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Same essay spoken aloud and represented with visual accompaniment: https://youtu.be/ygBs34e0iW0