Stanley Kubrick's Quest for the Heroic: Turning Wartime Lies into Aryan Papers

Abstract

This article asks why Stanley Kubrick's longstanding wish to direct the film version of Louis Begley's 1991 novel Wartime Lies never came to fruition. In Begley's novel, the protagonist Maciek recounts the experience of living in hiding under a false identity in Nazi-occupied Poland. Kubrick drafted a series of quite different plotlines and conclusions for the film version, to be called Aryan Papers, in which Maciek's aunt Tania takes a highly dramatic role in their destiny. The more Kubrick changed Aryan Papers, in response to the pressure of Hollywood expectations and the cultural valorization of active Holocaust resistance, the less it resembled the very work he had chosen to adapt. This impasse shows why the director could not ultimately bring Aryan Papers to the screen.