The Daily Feather — Powell’s Kubrickian Staredown

The “Kubrick stare” is a cinematic technique: The actor tilts their head towards the camera and looks out from under their brow line, often with a crazed look in their eyes or a menacing smile. The term was first coined by Douglas Milsome, a camera operator who worked on several of director Stanley Kubrick’s films. There are examples aplenty of this iconic look across Kubrick’s oeuvre: Malcolm McDowell drinking a glass of milk in the opening shot of A Clockwork Orange, Jack Nicholson as he slowly loses it in The Shining, and the disquieting close-ups of supercomputer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In an article for Far Out, Aimee Ferrier notes that “when a character utilizes the Kubrick stare, a psychological connection is established between them and the audience. We become invested when the character gazes back at us. We feel as though we’ve broken through the celluloid barrier and become a part of their world, no matter how scary.”

Watching Powell from the podium last week (where his favorite adjective, “solid,” was used a whopping 11 times), we had “Kubrick stares” of our own on our faces as we wondered how he persists with his “wait and see” approach. We’re not naïve to the fact that the Fed is caught between a rock and a hard place -- swift rate cuts enticing the Baby Boomers to begin liquidating their 40% share of stock holdings could quickly outweigh momentum from passive inflows and wreak market havoc. Unfortunately, millions of working men and women and small businesses in need of relief are caught in the crosshairs.