When Stanley Kubrick Called Us All Murderers

This unbelievable shot in his "Paths of Glory" speaks much about Kubrick's political aesthetic

Everybody’s got their favorite Kubrick movies. Mine are “Barry Lyndon,” “Dr. Strangelove,” and . . .

“Paths of Glory,” his early 1957 war movie, the first of four explicit war movies he made, set during World War 1 in France.

This film ruffled feathers. The French effectively banned “Paths” for 17 years. It was first shown in that country in 1975.

Why would they ban it? If you assume the movie is about the French military, it more or less calls them weasels, cowards, hypocrites, and unprincipled killers.

However, like all historical movies, “Paths” is as much about its present-day context as it is the past WW1 scenario that it depicts. Moreover, “Paths” can be semi-universalized; in other words, it can be taken as being about *everything*, or at least about everything in terms of matter of human warfare.

I think the French took things too hard. The French military depicted in the movie isn’t all terrible. Some of the men — actually nearly all of them — are genuinely good soldiers.

Instead, it’s the military command, including the generals who hobnob with elites, far from the men in the trenches, who are backstabbing Machiavellians grubbing for their own power and prestige within a bloated bureaucracy.

In the movie, the moral conscience of the film, Kirk Douglas’ Colonel Dax, is a witness to these war pigs. He witnesses their fundamental injustice, including forcing a show trial put on by a military kangaroo court that executes three soldiers for doing their duty. He hears about his commanding officer, a general, who during battle orders his artillery to fire on his own troops for not charging over the top of a trenchline.

While “Paths of Glory” has battlefield deaths, the ones we personally witness in the movie are all friendly-fire deaths. The French soldiers kill themselves, thanks to either their own cowardice or the ambitiousness of their commanding officers.

With Dax as the strong face of the movie’s conscience — foregrounding such a highly conscientious personality would be much rarer for Kubrick immediately after this movie — we the audience strongly feel the horrible injustice of the way the war is being waged.

We might then take that as an indictment of World War 1. But also, because of the movie’s contexts, it might also be somehow about World War 2 or, most recently, the Korean War.

Or it might be about war in general.

No matter what, Kubrick doesn’t allow us to get away with being smug or condescending. The audience isn’t allowed to be the righteous moral critics of anyone in the movie.

And that’s because of one amazing shot, pictured below. Spoilers to follow.

The climax of the movie is an execution scene, where three soldiers are picked to serve as scapegoats for a failed charge on a German position known, tongue-in-cheek by the screenwriters, as the Anthill.

The French generals have ordered this charge. It fails, so they seek to pass blame onto others. Colonel Dax serves as the defense attorney to the three men, but to no avail. They are sentenced by a military tribunal to an execution, even though they all obeyed orders given to them.

The trial takes place outside this chateau, presumably commandeered by the French during the war. It serves as not just the headquarters for the highest-ranking officers in the film; it also is their palatial spot to dine well and hold fancy balls. This is in contrast to the dirty trenches that Dax and everyone ranked below him must live in.

Check out that estate, pictured immediately below. Kubrick loved this kind of thing: the ultra-strong contrast between the aesthetic heights of European civilization, symbolizing the power-elite, and the nefarious deeds their offspring or their heirs would enact. The chateau is incredible, and yet right outside it is the most sham spectacle of injustice imaginable.

No, this isn’t the shot I want you to look at. We’re getting there.

As this execution scene proceeds, the guilty soldiers are marched down the middle, tied to their execution posts, are read their final sentence, and then given their last rites by a priest.

During this long build-up to the execution, Kubrick shows us the firing squad setting up. Another long shot with the chateau in the background accentuates the palatial aspect of the grounds, along with the contrast between high-civilizational beauty and the firing squad’s death sentence.

We also get the typical close shots of reactions by major characters. First is a shot of Dax, solitary, tough, beaten. And then the two generals who are responsible for this travesty of injustice, at low-angle, puffed-up witnesses to war crimes they would never acknowledge.

Okay, now here’s the amazing shot coming up.

What’s the shot of the execution of these men? What exactly do we see in it?

This is a great exercise for future filmmakers. I enjoyed asking a class recently what they think the next shot would be, the one that depicts the execution.

A typical movie, typical Hollywood at least, would show us a wide shot of the execution. Probably the movie would cut into a shot of the firing squad shooting the soldiers, followed by a strong reaction shot that would give us a lot of emotional weight, telling us how to feel about the execution. Maybe one that looks like this.

Another possibility, maybe more artistically ambiguous, would be to not show the execution at all. Maybe we just hear the guns fire as we look at Colonel Dax’s face. And then cut to the dead bodies of the guilty on the ground.

Not one for any sentimentality or emotional excess, Kubrick chooses neither of these options. His is far more of a knife-in-the-gut.

Here is his choice for the shot that shows us the execution and how to feel about it.

The incredible artistic significance of this shot can’t be described fully by entire books written about it.

You see where Kubrick puts us, the audience who has felt terrible injustice for these men, who are rooting against the execution because it’s a total sham under any moral system?

He puts us in the firing squad, as members of the firing squad.

Now, just at the climactic point where you might feel anger towards the French military bureaucracy, and even towards the ordinary firing-squad soldiers doing their sworn duty to obey, you get to be one of them.

You get to shot the gun and kill the three scapegoats. Bang! You do kill them — they are shot in this shot.

Here, he men get hit, dying, thanks to a gun that this shot says you would pick up and fire.

“You” means all of you, all you sentimentalists and pacifists, too.

I read this shot as Kubrick implicating the entire modern world, circa the mid-20th century, in the travesties of justice — wartime or not — whereever they are perpetrated. That world includes Kubrick himself, who is the “you” of this shot. And Colonel Dax, who could watch the movie.

Everybody who looks at this is in the same guilty-as-charged position of executing justice which we know to be injustice.

Essentially, maybe this shot is saying that we would all obey this heartless, ambitious, anti-human bureaucracy that would create scapegoats out of these ordinary soldiers. They did their duty, and got shot. We do our duties, and we do the shooting.

Either get shot or shoot — that is the modern existential choice that this shot, note the intentional pun, forces upon us.

“Paths of Glory” is not, to me, just about the French military, or any military. It’s about the gigantic mechanism of the 20th century that grows to enormous proportions, one that Kubrick seemed to worry about in his art, the state bureaucracy that can give and take life that it please.

What is that bureaucracy? This shot says it’s “you.” You and you and you. All of us, together, shooting that gun at those boys, doing our duty as ordered by the perverted State.

I don’t think Kubrick was an anarchist. I don’t think he really had a strong, positive political position. But he was a prophet of anti-human systems—bureaucracies and degenerate, psychopathic self-interested people taking advantage of those systems—taking too much control of all of our lives.

But it’s not us vs. the system.

We are the system, as his “you in the firing squad” shot above may declare!