There are certain ground rules that come with the decision to become a recluse. The most obvious one is that you should never announce that you are a recluse. Greta Garbo can be forgiven for making this tragic mistake since she had little precedent on which to go. The result of her pronouncement that she truly wanted to be left alone made her the iconic symbol of the non-mentally disturbed recluse. (Howard Hughes, of course, is the iconic figure for that particular brand of recluse.) Garbo’s announcement that she was intent on becoming a recluse also served to make her the target for the rest of her life of prying fans, most of whom were not, fortunately, stalkers.
J.D. Salinger cannot be so easily excused; he should have learned from Garbo’s mistake. Instead, he too became the target of generations of misguided fans who believed that Holden Caulfield was a model on which to base their own lives. Salinger had to deal with that particular type of literary fan who not only wants to meet the creator of his favorite character, but expects the author to be like that character. By contrast, of course, there is Thomas Pynchon who has had far greater success at avoiding his fans than Salinger, in part because he seems to have a sense of humor. (One oddity of pop culture is that a newspaper reporter once claimed that Pynchon was, in fact, really J.D. Salinger.)
Examples of Pynchon’s ability to maintain his privacy while also not taking it too seriously can be illustrated by the fact that a man who at the time was rather famous within his comic persona of Prof. Irwin Corey accepted Pynchon’s National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974 and many people actually believed the wild-haired comic actor was Pynchon. Pynchon has also twice lent his voice to episodes of The Simpsons while his animated self appears with his face concealed beneath a bag. In a Rolling Stone story on Sidney Lumet’s attempt to recreate the magic of Serpico by trading in Al Pacino for Treat Williams as the star of his other movie about corruption in the police force, Prince of the City, Williams was queried by the reporter about what his life might be like if the movie turned out to be a role that made him so famous he could no longer walk down the street.
The fact that Treat Williams had contemplated this possibility to the extent that he had formulated a plan is quite laughable now, of course…and it was just as laughable then. Nonetheless, it is clear that Treat Williams recognized something that had eluded J.D. Salinger. Williams said he would avoid the Greta Garbo route toward reclusivity and instead adopt the more subtle approach taken by Robert DeNiro. At the time, DeNiro hardly ever granted official interviews, rarely appeared at public functions and it was even rumored that he might, just possibly, occasionally talk with his mother. DeNiro has undergone a significant transformation since those days, but early in his career he was the very epitome of how to retain privacy while being a public figure.
There is another rather significant element to becoming a recluse that must be taken under advisement. If you go the route of Thomas Pynchon or Salinger and avoid having your picture taken or your likeness known around the world, you set yourself up for the kind of thing that happened to another well-known artistic recluse, Stanley Kubrick. Stanley Kubrick, of course, is the director of such landmark films as Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining. Although his visage was hardly the mystery of Pynchon’s, Kubrick was certainly never among those directors whose face was as well known as his actors; directors like Hitchcock or Spielberg. Still, it’s not as if it was all that hard to track down a photo of the guy.
Which makes the true story that forms the basis for the movie Color Me Kubrick all the more bizarre. This film stars John Malkovich as a Briton named Alan Conway who somehow manages to convince many, many people that he is the famed director. This he does despite looking absolutely nothing like Kubrick physically. One might well question whether anyone in their mind would have accepted that Stanley Kubrick was such a flaming queen, but that is perhaps a bit easier to explain. After all, many of Kubrick’s films contain not a single important female character; many of them revolve around strictly male relationships, and when he does present a major female character she is rarely someone to be admired. So, yeah, I suppose I could accept that Kubrick fans might believe a screaming queen was their hero.
Color Me Kubrick is hardly a perfect movie, but it does entertain, in large part due to John Malkovich’s brilliant performance. He’s a hit or miss actor, but when he does hit the bullseye, he’s great. Malkovich hits a bullseye here. The movie is also funny in the way it uses most of the recognizable music from Kubrick’s films and skews them to fit the reality of the story. For instance, the opening shot is of two punk rockers walking down one of those typical gray British sidewalks to accompaniment of The Thieving Magpie, used to such profound effect in A Clockwork Orange. Throughout the film the classical music that you know mainly as a result of Kubrick’s inclusion of it in his films is used to very subtle effect, ending with “Midnight, the Stars and You” from the closing scenes of The Shining. There are also clever little homages to scenes from Kubrick’s movies and it is a delight for any fan.
But what really makes Color Me Kubrick worth a rental is the perspective it takes on this bizarre footnote in the life of one of the true cinematic geniuses. It would be far too easy to simply castigate Conway for what he pulled off; to turn him into the poster boy for identity theft. In fact, Conway didn’t engage in identity theft as we think of it now; his was more a spiritual theft. And it is the fact that Conway didn’t actually rip off Kubrick-as far as the movie asserts, anyway-that keeps him from being an actual villain. Obviously, I’m not endorsing what Conway did, but I agree with the filmmakers that the real targets here are those who were so willing to be duped. As I indicated earlier, Stanley Kubrick may not have been the most camera-friendly director in the world, but he was a photographer himself and there are many, many images of him in existence. I mean, this was the 1990s, for crying out loud; by then there had been any number of books written about Kubrick that contain at least one photo of the man.
Alan Conway was a sad little self-professed nobody who merely wanted to be happy. He couldn’t find happiness as himself, so he became Kubrick. The subtext of the film is that the people who bought his ridiculous stories have no one but themselves to blame. And further, there is an eagerness to believe something you really want to be true to the point that a person will blissfully avoid trying to find out if it is true or not. (It may not be entirely true, of course, but it is signficant that the first people to question Conway’s assertion come not from the lower class, but are upper middle class snobs, one of whom is the ultimate snob: a theater critic for the New York Times.) Those who bought into Alan Conway’s deception are really not that different from those who pop in a DVD of Kubrick’s films. Movies are a lie, both figuratively and literally.
Literally in the sense that there actually isn’t any movement in a motion picture; it’s just a series of still photographs that our eyes and brain trick us into believing really move. Figuratively in the sense that it is all illusion and this is especially true in the case of Kubrick who preferred to recreate reality inside a studio whenever he could and thereby avoid dealing with nature. Kubrick made a name for himself by presenting apes who weren’t really apes, breathtakingly magnificent spaceships that were actually small models, and creating the war-ravaged Vietnam city of Hue entirely inside a soundstage. Kubrick was a control freak extraordinaire and preferred to trim down any potential outside influences to a bare minimum. The stories we see in a Kubrick film are visceral, powerful, and moving. But, in the end, they are just entertainment designed to make Kubrick happy.
Is it ironic or merely coincidental that the man Conway chose to impersonate happens to be the director of A Clockwork Orange, the ultimate cinematic depiction of just how incredibly easy it is really is to convince someone to believe what you want them to believe? In fact, it verges on the surreal that Alan Conway’s real life ties in so perfectly with the story of young Alex. (What a shame his real name wasn’t Alex.) Alex is a punk who cares about nothing and nobody until he is conditioned to believe what his jailers want him to think. Alan Conway is a symbol of the inescapable truth that modern society has been conditioned to believe not necessarily figures of authority, but people whose names are recognized across the globe. A Clockwork Orange is a textbook study illustrating the ease with which human emotions can be manipulated to create a desired response that may be entirely antithetical to what would be considered natural. It is certainly not natural that modern society is so reluctant to question so much of what we are told. Suspicion was a primal component of human evolution. And it is also less than natural that so many people put such stock in the words of people who have absolutely no credentials and even less credibility.
The story of Alan Conway, which may or may not have been authentically told in the movie, is one that seems so ridiculous as to border on the plot for a reality TV show. Who could possibly accept this pathetic loser as capable of producing the masterpieces of Stanley Kubrick? You might better take a good long look in the mirror before you answer. The deeper subtext of Color Me Kubrick is that most people are far less likely to question a famous person. If I came up to you and told you that I was a casting agent and you were perfect for a new part in a movie I’m working on you would probably be far more suspicious than if I were to tell you I was the director of Donnie Darko or Little Miss Sunshine. And as long I seemed relatively sure of what I was talking about and kept telling you what you wanted to hear, many people probably wouldn’t even bother logging onto Internet Movie Database to check up on me. To paraphrase a catchphrase from The X-Files, we all want to believe. And the willingness to suspend suspicion increases exponentially according to the fame of the person we want to believe. WMDs, anyone?
As if you need further evidence than that, consider how quickly Americans are willing to forgive the flaws of its celebrities. Mel Gibson exposes his Nazi beliefs about Jews, but millions still flock to see a movie about an ancient culture with English subtitles. (Hey, Mel, your Nazi friends didn’t speak English, either, but we accepted it when Steven Spielberg had them speaking English in Schindler’s List.) Paris Hilton commits the kind of crime responsible for killing more Americans every year than all the terrorist acts combined, and when she says she has changed and become a better person millions eat it up and take her for her word. The story of Alan Conway may be extreme, but don’t make the mistake of thinking it is unique. Anyone who ever believed that American soldiers would find WMDs in Iraq has no right to judge anyone who believed Alan Conway’s outrageous claim to be Stanley Kubrick.
