It turns out that Kubrick ordered this filing in case he ever wanted to have a local cinema checked out. If 2001, say, was being screened in Daly City, California, at a cinema unknown to Kubrick, he would get Tony or one of his secretaries to telephone a fan from that town to ask them to visit the cinema to ensure that, say, the screen wasn’t ripped. Tony says that if I’m looking for the solution to the mystery of Kubrick, I don’t really need to look inside the boxes. I just need to watch the films.

“It’s all there,” he says. “Those films are Stanley.”

•   •   •

ALTHOUGH THE KUBRICKS always guarded their privacy inside Childwick, I come to the end of my time at the house just as Christiane and her daughter Katharina decide to open the grounds and the stable block to the public. They’re going to hold an art fair, displaying their work and the work of a number of local artists. Christiane has decided to let the boxes go. She’s donating them to the University of the Arts London—to a special climate-controlled Kubrick wing, where film students and other students can look through them. She’s letting them go because, she tells me, “I get very upset at seeing some of his old things. The paper is so dusty and old and yellow. They look so sad. The person is so very dead once the paper is yellow.”

I’m there to watch a fleet of removal vans arrive to take them away. During the months and years that follow, Christiane oversees the publication of two books about the things inside the boxes—The Stanley Kubrick Archives (Taschen) and Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made (Taschen). She turns up for special screenings of his films—I watch her introduce Paths of Glory in the open-air cinema at Somerset House, Central London, and we have dinner afterward. I mention this to a friend, a Kubrick buff. “Oddly, I was just thinking about her today,” he replies. “A Twilight fan said to me, ‘Is there anything more romantic than Edward and Bella?’” I immediately thought, “Christiane Kubrick’s protection of her husband’s legacy.”

One of the very last boxes I opened before the removal vans came contained a videotape. Kubrick was on the tape, addressing the camera, looking nervous. It was an acceptance speech. He’d been awarded the D. W. Griffith Award. It was just a few months before he died.

“Good evening,” he says. “I’m sorry not to be able to be with you tonight . . . but I’m in London making Eyes Wide Shut with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and at just about this time I’m probably in the car on the way to the studio. . . .”

All this time I’ve been looking for some kind of Rosebud and I think I find it in a few lines in this speech.

“Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film,” he says, “also knows that although it can be like trying to write War and Peace in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.”

I think Kubrick knew he had the ability to make films of genius, and to do that—when most films are so bad—there has to be a method, and the method for him was precision and detail. I think his boxes contain the rhythm of genius.

PART THREE

EVERYDAY DIFFICULTY

“I’ve thought about doing myself in loads of times.”

—“Bill” to Christopher Foster

Santa’s Little Conspirators

It is a Monday in late October and I’m standing inside a smoke-filled Lotto shop in the tiny Alaskan town of North Pole, population 1,600. This shop sells only two things: cigarettes and Lotto scratch cards. Chain-smoking inveterate gamblers sit at the counter and frantically demolish mountains of the scratch cards. They have names like Royal Jackpot, Blame It on Rio, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Outside, people are going about their business on Frosty Avenue. Friends are chatting on Kris Kringle Drive. A gang of hoodies are slouched against the candy-cane-striped streetlights on Santa Claus Lane, having just emerged from the Christmas-themed McDonald’s.

Everything in North Pole is Christmas-themed. It is Christmas Day here 365 days a year. The decorations are always up. It never stops being Christmas here. Never. Wherever you are in the world, if you write a letter to Santa, and address it simply “Santa, North Pole,” your letter will most likely end up in this tiny Alaskan town.

Actually, specifically, your Santa letter will end up right here, in this smoke-filled scratch-card and cigarette shop. It’s late October, and boxes of them are already piled up on the counter near the fruit machine. They’re automatically forwarded here from the post office. I pick an envelope up at random. It has only one word scrawled on it, in a child’s handwriting: “Santa.” It’s postmarked Doncaster, UK.

I get talking to Debbie, who works here, selling scratch cards to the gamblers. Debbie is herself a chain-smoker, a blowsy strawberry-blonde with a tough, good-looking face. She says she can frequently be found alone in here in floods of tears, having just opened yet another heartbreaker.

“Just before you got here,” she says, “I opened one that said, ‘Dear Santa. All I want for Christmas is for my mother and father to stop shouting at each other.’ I just fell apart.”

“We get a lot of ‘Could you bring my father back from Iraq?’” says Gaby, the shop’s owner. Debbie answers as many Santa letters as she can, whenever she gets a break. She writes back using her elf name: Twinkle.

And she has help. Each week in November and December, a box of Santa letters is sent over to the nearby middle school, where the town’s eleven- and twelve-year-olds—the sixth graders—write back in the guise of elves. It is part of the curriculum.

Six of last year’s middle school elves, now aged thirteen, were arrested back in April for being in the final stages of plotting a mass murder, a Columbine-style school shooting. The information is sketchy, but apparently they had elaborate diagrams and code names and lists of the kids they were going to kill. I’ve come to North Pole to investigate the plot. What turned those elves bad? Were they serious? Was the town just too Christmassy?

I need to tread carefully. So far I’ve tried to ask only one person about it—James, the waiter in Pizza Hut—and it went down badly.

“North Pole is the greatest place I’ve ever been,” James told me as he poured my coffee. “The people here are always ready to do! We stay on track and we move on forward! We don’t let anything get us down. That’s the spirit of North Pole and the spirit of Christmas. People here are willing to put their best foot forward and be the best kind of people they can be.”

“I heard about the thing with the kids over at the middle school plotting a Columbine-style massacre,” I said.

At this, James let out a noise the likes of which I’ve never really heard before. It was an “Aaaaaah.” He sounded like a balloon being burst by me, with all the joy escaping from him like air.

“That was a, uh, shock. . . .” said James.

“You have to wonder why. . . .” I said.

“This is a very happy, cheerful, cheery place,” said James. “Anything more you need?”

“No,” I said. And James walked back to the counter, shooting me a sad look, as if to say, “What kind of a Grinch are you to bring that up?”