A Cursory Meditation on Scorsese, Nolan & Kubrick

I’m a huge fan of Scorsese, Nolan, and Kubrick’s work. These three really defined the parameters of what it means to be a film director in the modern age. Nolan, especially, tries to innovate and is undoubtedly the most clever of the three. He just might be the most innovative, clever, and ambitious director, period. The other two, however, are the world’s masters of adaptation.
But one thing always bothered me about Nolan’s films. Most of the time, I can’t help but feel as though they are “empty” — like they have no “soul.” They are filled to the brim with wildly clever ideas, moments, scenes, and comebacks, and it’s amazing being on the receiving end, but it just feels so hollow. His films have always been about ideas, never about what some would call “heart.” His world’s are intricately beautiful, but lifeless like the inner-workings of a fancy clock. Even the color palette of Nolan’s films, compared to the other two, is very gray, blue, and drab.
I think this emptiness makes itself even more apparent for Nolan as he tries to make his characters identifiable. He has to, I guess, to be Hollywood-friendly. It never really worked for me. I never really cared about the fate of any of his protagonists.
Although Scorsese never really tries to be as clever as Nolan, he usually manages to create exciting, fast-paced, quality moments one after the other. In the process, no matter how sinister or amoral his characters are, they are always interesting, human, and even identifiable.
The best work of Kubrick, on the other hand, never really attempts to make his characters people you might relate to. His protagonists are completely irredeemable or “irrelevant,” and much like that of Nolan, his work is mostly about grander ideas. A Clockwork Orange, however, was a confusing film in this regard, since the protagonist Alex is so vile but sometimes shone a sympathetic light. In my viewings, he was still not meant to be identified with, and the film was grander than just one person. Similarly, can Barry Lyndon ever be relatable? Or the characters that populate Dr. Strangelove and 2001? No. I don’t think so.
Like the majority of Nolan’s work, the majority of Kubrick’s has the same partiality to ideas rather than people. Kubrick’s films, however, “work” because he never attempts to inject his films with relatable characters like Nolan does. But Kubrick did try to include identifiable characters in Eyes Wide Shut, and I think this is why the film completely failed for me.
A Clockwork Orange image from https://pixabay.com/en/drawing-cinema-geek-fanfic-alex-1603625/
