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Kuorick, Thackeray and the memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.
Literature Film Quarterly, 2001 by Hesling, Willem
The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts; but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?
W.M. Thackeray, The Newcomes
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As befits highly-debated filmmakers' opinions concerning the work of Stanley Kubrick have always been strongly divided. In spite of numerous fans adulating him as one of the most important post-war filmmakers, many a critic looks upon him as merely a pretentious technician. I In particular, Barry Lyndon (1975), Kubrick's adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., has been heavily targeted by his adversaries. The film takes place in the second half of the eighteenth century and tells of the rise and fall of the Irish social climber Redmond Barry. According to critics, Kubrick's retreat into the past, after the fierce controversy around A Clockwork Orange, had merely resulted in a lifeless stylistic exercise: "far from recreating another century, it more accurately embalms it."2 Pauline Kael dealt with the exquisite way in which Barry's time was portrayed in perhaps the most venomous way: "the Kubrick message (is) that people are disgusting, but things are lovely" (105). Unlike Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon-although Warner Brothers' most prestigious release of that year-also didn't manage to find its way to the big audience. In.a climate in which Hollywood was gradually moving into the direction of sensational, special effects-- ridden blockbusters like Jaws and The Towering Inferno, the cerebral Barry Lyndon appeared to be completely out of place. Perhaps Kubrick had also drifted too far away from the cliches of the historical film, i.e. a solemnly filmed epic spectacle filled with heroic characters and impressive crowds. Instead he confronted the viewer with a thinly developed plot, filmed in a detached, pictorial style, without much action or romance and with characters who moved through the scenery like puppets. For once the film industry was of a milder opinion. In 1975 Barry Lyndon received a British Academy Award in the categories "Best Direction" and "Best Cinematography," and in the United States seven Oscar Nominations were awarded, four of which were actually cashed in.3
Only through the years-a thing that would happen to practically all later Kubrick films-- would criticism come round. One of the first explicitly to speak up for the film was Robert Phillip Kolker:
It is quite possible to say [... ] that with Barry Lyndon it was not Kubrick who failed but his audience. The film is an advanced experiment in cinematic narrative structure and design. It attests both to the strength of Kubrick's commercial position (no other director could have received the backing for such a project) and to the intensity of his interest in cinematic structures. (71)
Of course anyone slightly familiar with Kubrick's work, even then, at the time of its release, could have understood that Barry Lyndon represented a more than logical choice. Both in interviews ("one of the things that movies can do better than any art form is to present historical subject matter") as in his films (for example Paths of Glory and Spartacus), Kubrick clearly considered the historical past an obvious working space. At the end of the sixties, preparing a large-scale film on Napoleon, he motivated this project as follows:
I find that all the issues with which it concerns itself are oddly contemporary-the responsibilities and abuses of power, the dynamics of social revolution, the relationship of the individual to the state, war, militarism; so this will not be just a dusty historic pageant but a film about the basic questions of our times as well as Napoleon's. (Gelmis 388)4
Though Kubrick has never expressed himself explicitly in this way with respect to Barry Lyndon, it can be assumed that this thematically and formally complex film also did not aim for some easy escapism, but just as in the case of the prematurely aborted Napoleon-project, wanted to hold up a mirror to its audience.
In the following analysis, comparing the film with Thackeray's original novel, I will pay attention to the way in which Kubrick has provided Barry Lyndon with an elaborate narrative-symbolic structure. From this analysis the film will emerge as a complex mixture of classical and experimental film art. In spite of the strictly chronological presentation of events, Kubrick shows that, in the end, the narrative principle of linear causality can only produce an illusion of cohesion. As it happens, Barry's life appears to have been nothing more than a succession of coincidences that made him more often than not a toy of the circumstances surrounding him. The ironical way in which the narrator constantly undermines the events on the screen further contributes to the demystification of the idea that someone's life can be recapitulated in a well-balanced story. Not without reason therefore, and in contrast with the closed structure of the classical Hollywood film, Kubrick chose for an open end. Furthermore, what is striking is that he also didn't make himself guilty of any false heroism. The film is devoid of any moral and completely leaves it to the viewer to pass judgement on the characters and their predicaments. And in visual respects, too, Barry Lyndon is a rather unorthodox film; very stylized in some places, almost documentary-like in others. Moreover, contrary to the way the narrative realism of the classical Hollywood film has to rely heavily on dialogue, Kubrick appears to have primarily used his visual imagination to develop his themes and characters. As such Barry Lyndon breathes in many places the aesthetics of the silent cinema.
