History: Look Magazine Photography By Stanley Kubrick

Almost all Stanley Kubrick movies have a scene in or just outside a bathroom. (The more frequently cited example of this in 2001 is Dr. Floyd's becoming stymied by the Zero-Gravity Toilet en route to the moon, rather than David Bowman's exploration (while still wearing his spacesuit) of the bathroom adjacent to his celestial bedroom after his journey through the StarGate.)
Stanley Kubrick was a passionate chess player, often playing on the set of his films. Chess appears as a motif or a plot device in three of his films, The Killing, Lolita, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mario Falsetto believes that the marble floor in the room of the prisoner's trial in Paths of Glory is deliberately chosen to represent a chess board, with prisoners as "pawns in the game".
Many of Kubrick's films have back-references to previous Kubrick films. The best-known examples of this are the appearance of the soundtrack album for 2001: A Space Odyssey appearing in the record store in A Clockwork Orange and Quilty's joke about Spartacus in Lolita. Less obvious is the reference to a painter named Ludovico in Barry Lyndon, Ludovico being the name of the conditioning treatment in A Clockwork Orange.
Kubrick often employed the use of music as a "black joke" to achieve a chilling, ironic effect (one now often employed by Quentin Tarantino) by incongruously combining mismatched moods and styles. Igor Stravinsky was arguably the innovator of this musical technique during his Neo-Classic period (1920s to the 1950s), but it was Kubrick who extended this idea to the big screen. This gives the intended emotional impact of a scene even more power. Brief examples of this include Vera Lynn singing We'll Meet Again in the final scene of Dr. Strangelove (during a nuclear holocaust), using some older classical music for the futuristic 2001: A Space Odyssey, and using Gene Kelly's Singin’ in the Rain for the end credits in the dystopian world of A Clockwork Orange, and light pop music in Full Metal Jacket.