Fear and Desire is a fascinating effort containing a host of ideas, images, and themes which continue to appear in Kubrick's later films. (p. 18)

The first theme in Fear and Desire, stated in the poem at the opening, is that the story is made up of "imaginary worlds": each man's "war," "enemies," and "conflict" are his mind's way of dealing with the enigmatic events and inconsistent behavior that surround him. This is objectified throughout the film: in the powerful shocking images of animal-like passion, in the dreamlike retreats, chaotic killings, idle and absurd "philosophical" conversations. The images of the dead men are grotesque, eerily backlighted—they are no longer real men, but "pure enemies"—corpses stylized into ideas. In the end, Corby sums up life this way: "It's all a trick we perform, because we'd rather not die immediately." It recalls T. S. Eliot's "Human beings cannot stand...