The Country of the Mind in Kubrick's Fear and Desire (Movie Review‪)‬

Nearly forty years passed before Stanley Kubrick's first film re-emerged for general audiences. Allegorical in structure, Fear and Desire is the story of four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in a nameless war. When it finally resurfaced in 1991 at the Telluride Film Festival, Fear and Desire was understandably highly anticipated; the film, however, disappointed many devoted Kubrick followers and film cineastes. Anticipating such a negative response, the filmmaker asked Warner Bros. to prepare a press release stating that Kubrick "considers [the film] nothing more than a 'bumbling, amateur film exercise,' written by a failed poet, crewed by a few friends, and 'a completely inept oddity, boring and pretentious" (qtd. in LoBrutto 91). Despite the harshness of the words, Kubrick's self-criticism was largely justified. As a blatantly abstract war film, Fear and Desire suffers from an overriding fixation with trying to orate profound statements on life, suggesting the work of an ambitious filmmaker who had a vague sense of what social concerns he wished to tackle--war and violence--but had yet to find a cinematic and nonverbal way to explore them. Although some have kindly dismissed the movie as "an initial practice piece" (Walker 44), Thomas Allen Nelson nails Fear and Desire's faults more specifically: When the film first opened in 1953, the response was not overly negative. The New York Times movie critic Bosley Crowther noted that despite the fact that Fear and Desire "is uneven and sometimes reveals an experimental rather than a polished exterior," the filmmakers still "succeed in turning out a moody, often visually powerful study of subdued excitements" (35.2). Reportedly, legendary film critic and screenwriter James Agee even took Kubrick out and bought the young filmmaker a drink, declaring to him that "there are too many good things ... to call [Fear and Desire] arty" (as qtd. in Phillips 18). Nonetheless, the film, for all its stylistic and thematic ambitions, still relied more on showing Fear and Desire's themes than on verbalizing them. Even Crowther, for example, criticized Howard O. Sackler's script as "more intellectual than explosive" (35.2). Indeed, among other characteristics, Fear and Desire repeatedly portrays the human mind as verbalizing abstract thoughts and providing authoritative thematic meaning and narrative order to events within the film.