Viewfinder Images & Politics

For the artist and educator John Pilson, the film director Stanley Kubrick was “the greatest twentieth-century Jewish comedian (and I’m not just talking Dr. Strangelove) and artist as Cold War psychosexual completist.”

It is no surprise that Pilson, whose 1990s photographs from his time working at Merrill Lynch transformed depressed, robotic office drones into clowns of the mundane, is able to laugh with Kubrick, “even at his darkest, especially at his darkest.”, —but also at the apex points of his crueler films: the childlike sing-along performed by HAL 9000 as it (he?) deactivates in  , the standing ovation Alex DeLarge receives after enduring the Ludovico Technique in , Gunnery Sergeant Hartman traumatically beating his platoon into submission in .