Police Beat writer Charles Mudede pens a curious ode to Stanley Kubrick in Seattle’s The Stranger. After opening by saying that Kubrick’s contempt for mankind was “deep,” he moves on to a fuller explication of his worldview:

“I’m in a world of shit,” says Private Joker at the end of Kubrick’s unremittingly dark Vietnam War film, Full Metal Jacket. That is what Kubrick has to say about the state of everything: The world is shit, humans are shit in shit, life is worth shit, and there is nothing else that can be done about the situation. In Kubrick’s movies, progress, sustained enlightenment, and moral improvement are impossible because the powers of reason, love, and religion are much weaker than the forces of generation and degeneration, desire and destruction, sex and death.

And yet, Kubrick’s films endure, not decomposing in some celluloid wastebin but regenerating themselves in the form of spiffy new HD editions.

Mudede explains:

Yet we still watch Kubrick’s films. And we enjoy them. We enjoy them because the hate he had for humanity was only matched by the curious love he had for the most expensive and impressive art form in the world: cinema.