Kubrick's not nihilistic, he's misanthropic. By condemning the human
race as thoroughly depraved, the films occupy a highly moralistic
position. As with the Sex Pistols, who merely pretended to be
nihilists, revolution is the absent presence. It doesn't appear in
Dr. Strangelove or Barry Lyndon or Clockwork Orange or Full Metal
jacket, but we know that Spartacus (or The Clash) is just down the
shelf. (Do not Kubrick's films offer themselves as our monoliths?)
Many horror films are nihilistic -- especially indy shockers like
Night of the Living Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have
Eyes... There's no implied critique, unless "everything is hopeless
so you might as well give up let the Zombies eat you" is your idea of
criticism. But the nihilism in these films is balanced by a sense of
play (the overt artifice of the cheesy plots being a factor). It's no
accident they become Halloween classics, there's an element of
play-costume to the philosophy (or lack thereof), made all the more
evident in the many sequels and pastiches in the slasher genre, which
get more steadily more self-aware, superficial and spectacular.
Cronenberg's early stuff is pretty nihilistic, with less of an easy
path out than NLD or TCM, but there's too much satire and/or genuine
emotion in Videodrome, The Fly and Dead Ringers. The guy's a closet
humanist! The Coen brothers consistently play nihilism as a joke.
That may be, itself, kind of nihilistic, but it just does too good a
job of tying the room together...
I don't know... I'm a very cynical guy, but I can't think of any film
off the top of my head (or even cutting into the middle of my head)
that approaches the utter inescapable despair of say, Nathaniel
West's writing. I've got to be forgetting something, right?
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