Barry Lyndon: The Shape of Things to Come
by Bilge Ebiri
The old Bowman [in 2001] in his bed in the Jupiter room, looking up
at the monolith, calls to mind a statement by William Blake: "If the
doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man
as it is, infinite"
The films of Stanley Kubrick meditate upon destiny, time, and the
individual, portraying characters with limited perception who are at the
mercy of fate but not aware of it. A Kubrickean protagonist -- David
Bowman, Barry Lyndon, or Alex in A Clockwork Orange -- is definitely
of his time, integrated, for better or for worse (and often for
worse) into a society & setting that conditions his responses and
'feelings', sacrificing memory and perception. Kubrick's characters have
no recollection of the past, and no awareness of the future. It is the
disembodied voice so prevalent in his films -- the HAL 9000 computer or the
narrator of Barry Lyndon -- that see several moves ahead and see
destiny at work. These voices, however, eventually become characters
themselves, at the mercy of another being, another force, one that may be
identified with Kubrick's camera, or simply the spectator.
Kubrick is
keenly aware of the person sitting in the audience, watching the film.
A Clockwork Orange begins with Alex, looking straight at the camera,
and as we pull back we see that he is sitting in the Korova Milk Bar,
watching us watching him as he narrates his story for us. In other words,
while Kubrick's narratives transgress centuries, leap into the future or
the past, they are framed by the audience to which they are addressed.
Therefore, Barry Lyndon is a film about the Twentieth Century
watching the Eighteenth Century with narration provided by the Nineteenth
Century, and this film lends itself well to an analysis with regards to
Kubrick's work, for it presents many of his previous fascinations in more
overt fashion -- and was filmed as a substitute for his dream project, a
gargantuan epic on Napoleon that probably would have brought together every
one of Kubrick's obsessions, themes, and interests[3].
Two key aspects of the film presented themselves as problematic to Barry
Lyndon's critics upon its release[4], and indeed, they are its
distinguishing characteristics: Kubrick's use of the slow reverse-zoom,
which begins in a close-up of the events of the story and then then goes
far back to reveal the figure, motionless and unknowable, dwarfed by the
unchanging landscape or the elegant 18th Century decor, fixed as in a
painting; and the elegant third-person narrator who often states the
characters' fates before the action of the film comes around to it, thereby
depriving the film of much surprise, and distancing the spectator. The
combination of these techniques is precisely what sets Barry Lyndon
apart from other films of its genre. It emerges as a further exploration
by Kubrick of Blake's "doors of perception". Barry Lyndon is a film
set in the past, but it is about the future, about destiny and prophecy,
because it concerns itself with the impossibility of knowing the future, of
knowing what fate has in store for us besides death. But the film does not
operate wholly on this abstract level -- Kubrick creates a spatial
correlative for the film's essentially temporal concerns.
2001's
full title is 2001: A Space Odyssey; Kubrick makes, in the
title, a very conscious connection between time (the year 2001) and space.
In other words, it becomes a film about space as time, about what
constitutes the future aesthetic. The spaces in 2001 become the
experience of 2001: the film is drawn out, devoid of dramatic
conflict, forcing one to enter the spaces portrayed, resulting in a film
one has to live through. It ends, however, with the destruction of
space, which is really what outer space is -- nothingness, pure time, where
man is bound by nothing except his own mortality, which the astronaut
Bowman seems to conquer at the very end. Barry Lyndon goes back in time
and explore time as space. The great distance at which Kubrick's
reverse-zooms end is really our distance from the 18th Century. And
the narrator's removal from the unfolding of the story is an indication of
our own removal from the story.
In much the same way A
Clockwork Orange began with Alex watching us, Barry Lyndon begins with
an extreme long shot of Barry's father in a duel, far off in the distance,
a striking Irish landscape all around the characters (by no means
coincidental), a tree at the left extending its own frame across the top of
the image and, in the foreground, a snakelike stone wall extending towards
us. The presence of this wall in the composition positions us, for it
continues past the frame. Kubrick's striking use of perspective and
viewer-position in this, his first shot of the film, immediately makes us
aware of our placement in space in regard to the characters and the action.
It is important to state that the composition of the frame is by no
means a purely aesthetic or coincidental choice; Kubrick started his career
as a still photographer, the aspects of foregrounding, depth, subject
distance, and viewer placement are all crucial issues in photography, as
they are in all his films. Also, the very act of making a film requires a
director's presence on a set, within the same reality as the characters and
the actors playing them. Placing these characters so far away means that
Kubrick and his camera and crew are also literally this far away from the
unfolding story; it seems a remarkably strange position to put oneself in,
if one tries to imagine the spatial dynamics of actually filming a
scene like this, for Kubrick also does not cut into the scene with any
closer shots -- this shot is all we have of this incident. It is also
appropriate that, since this incident in the story is presented as mainly
background information, i.e., occurring before the main story itself, that
it be one of the (spatially) longest shots in the film. Time becomes
space; Kubrick is presenting history to us as distance. Our removal in
time is correlative to our removal in space within the film. Kubrick's
aesthetic in the composition of his shots in Barry Lyndon is one of
very little movement, of a rigidity that resembles the arrangement of
figures within a painting. Robert Phillip Kolker expands this idea to a
discussion of the recreation of the past as ritual:
[Kubrick] is using a painterly aesthetic to set his characters within a
design, to recreate the forms and formalities -- the rituals -- of the
past as rituals and to keep the viewer continually aware of the
external and internal rigidities of the images[5].
Thomas Nelson Allen also touches upon this subject when he states that
"Kubrick's method of visual exposition delineates how the particular human
content of one era becomes tragically lost in time and absorbed into the
aesthetic distances of art."[6] Barry Lyndon recreates the empty
vessels of the past -- painting, theatre, music, ceremony, ritual, even
military formations -- to present a rich historical narrative, at the same
time exposing those vessels to be empty and devoid of life. The film
itself very consciously lacks a life of its own. Its candlelit interiors
are full of rigid characters painted white like ghosts. These are images
of the past, often resembling exhumed corpses. And when Kubrick pulls back
to reveal his characters motionless within a landscape, or standing rigid
(often mimicking a painting in the background which seems to be much
larger than they are) he is presenting a dead world that exists in our
minds only through its representations, its shadows.
At one point, Kubrick's distancing use of the slow reverse-zoom is
undermined by the characters. It is during Brian Lyndon's funeral, when
the camera slowly zooms back from the funeral procession which is, however,
moving towards it. Therefore, though the camera is pulling back, the
figures are getting closer and, consequently, larger. The pull-back always
invariably ends with the figures dwarfed against the landscape, except for
this one solitary instance, when it actually ends on a close-up of
Barry and Lady Lyndon marching in the funeral profession. Of course, it
is quite appropriate, since the landscape of Barry Lyndon is, in a
figurative sense, one of death. The funeral procession, death,
uncontainable sorrow -- the long shot can end on nothing but this. It is
the morbid center of the film, and its dominant image. Many critic
criticize the film for being too emotional or melodramatic, and not
fitting in with the film's structure. But this is a narrow-minded view
for, here in the grave, lies Barry Lyndon's soul.
The process of exhuming is not a process evident only in Barry
Lyndon, however. The postmodern critic Frederic Jameson, discussing
The Shining, makes a similar comparison between the pockets of
history in the Overlook Hotel, peopled by ghosts who possess the mind of
Jack Torrance. Jameson even draws an analogy between the genres of ghost
story and historical novel:
...[The] undifferentiated sense of the presence and threat of history and
the past as such is enough to reveal the generic kinship between the ghost
story and that older genre with which and against which it so often
constitutively defines itself, namely, the historical novel. What is the
latter, indeed, if not an attempt to raise the dead, to stage a
hallucinatory fantasmagoria in which the ghost of the vanished past once
again meet in a costumed revel, surprised by the mortal eye of the
contemporary spectator-voyeur?... The Shining may be read as
Kubrick's meditation on the issues raised by his previous film and on that
very impossibility of historical representation with which the achieved
perfection of Barry Lyndon so dramatically and paradoxically
confronts us.[7]
Barry Lyndon tells us that time has sucked the life out of the
18th century. Perhaps The Shining is a fantasy on the existence of
that life, the same way it fantasizes the ability of an individual, the
boy Danny, to tell the future and to transgress space, through ESP and
telepathy. The ghost story materializes the unknowable, and it is only
appropriate that Kubrick's ghost story, The Shining, materialize
that which was unknowable in Barry Lyndon.
Important to this discussion of the unknowable, and of time as distance, is
the nature of the slow zoom which Kubrick uses throughout the film. Most
filmmakers who are interested in moving the camera and utilizing the
tracking shot look down upon the zoom as a cheap and ineffective way of
presenting the appearance of camera movement. Kubrick himself fits within
this tradition, as his previous films, replete with tracking shots,
demonstrate quite clearly. The zoom however also preserves the unity of
space and composition. Again, the issue of the filmmaker's own distance
from the material action of the story presents itself. While Kubrick may
begin his shots with intimate details -- a shot of clasped hands, or of two
guns being loaded -- he pulls away to reveal not only our distance from
the action, but his own. He, too, is watching from afar, not even moving
his camera. A telephoto lens will isolate the figure in focus from the
world around him, and a wide-angle lens will give maximum depth, taking in
the entire breadth of the landscape and the surroundings. A zoom connects
the two, and provides a continuum between the personal world of the figure
and the real world which encompasses him, and of which he is a part.
In close-up, Barry does not see the world around him; sure, he sees Nora
Brady and John Quinn kissing, or the British army marching proudly, but he
cannot perceive the depth or immensity of his surroundings -- which
represents, for Kubrick, the depth or immensity of time and history. The
human figure is dwarfed by time, the same way that he was dwarfed by space
in 2001: A Space Odyssey. 'The Doors of Perception' are not open to the
Kubrickean figure situated in history. As Kolker observes:
The inability to perceive one's place in time or the universe, the fear of
the unknown, of oblivion, are all linked to Kubrick's preoccupations in
both life and films. His fondness for science-fiction may be a
manifestation of not knowing what the future holds.[9] Kubrick himself
will probably never know if the prophecies of 2001 or A Clockwork
Orange will come true; his own mortality precedes any knowability of
what the future holds. Therefore, these films are meticulously planned,
imagined, and rationalized. Again, Kolker's comments prove useful:
Kubrick's fondness for chess also provides a key for his approach to his
characters. Chess is a game of strategy, not luck; a game where one must
anticipate the coming moves and the general shape of the future; to play
chess is to dabble in prophecy, an important theme for Kubrick -- not just
in his fondness for science-fiction, but also his interest in ESP, which
attracted him to The Shining (1980). If one can know the future,
then mortality has been transcended; death ceases to matter. In 2001, the
aging astronaut Bowman, in the Jupiter room at the end of the film, sits
at a table eating. He drops a glass; as he bends over to pick up the
pieces, he sees himself, literally, much older, at his deathbed. The
dropped glass becomes a sign of his impending death; because he is able to
see this, the monolith finally opens itself up to him, and he is reborn as
the Star Child, approaching Earth. Time and space cease to exist.
Knowledge is oblivion. In the Jupiter room birth, life, and death all exist
in one instance, in one room which holds both the future of eternity and
the memory of the 18th century.
On the other end of the spectrum from the Star Child is the protagonist of
Barry Lyndon, subject to the laws of destiny, helpless and
unknowing, enveloped by the world around him (as opposed to the Star Child,
who is presented in the concluding frames of 2001 as being as large, if
not larger, than the Planet Earth itself). Central to this discussion, as
well as any discussion of this film, is the narrator, the one figure about
who critics of the film rarely agree.
The narration is taken almost word for word from Thackeray, with a key
difference: Thackeray's novel is told from the first person point-of-view,
and a very unreliable first person at that. The novel is one big lie;
nothing that Barry Lyndon says is really to be trusted. It is a novel
written in 1844, but it pretends to have been written in the late 18th (or
early 19th) century. To that end, it uses the 18th Century forms of the
picaresque novel (such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, the movie adaptation
of which was compared to Barry Lyndon negatively by those who didn't know
better) and the memoir (such as the popular Diary of Samuel Pepys). Though
Thackeray does add a fiction 19th century editor of the text, 'George
Savage Fitzboodle' (who inserts comments and footnote sporadically) it is
still remarkable the extent to which the novel itself relies upon an
awareness of its readership, the same way the film is aware of its
spectators, to generate meaning. The novel is supposed to be an 18th
century artifact, and its message is achieved through the combination of
19th century reader and 18th century book.
Kubrick's adaptation of the novel's first-person narrator to a highly
distanced, emotionless third-person narrator leads to an important
question, the answer to which holds the key to the understanding of the
film's structure: Is the narrator to be trusted? Is he just another version
of the unreliable 'liar' of Thackeray's novel? or is his cool and erudite
detachment to be taken at face value? many critics, such as Mark Crispin
Miller[11], have suggested that this narrator is unreliable, that his
observations pretend to great truths but are undermined by the reality the
images provide. Arguing against this approach, Sarah Kozloff suggests that
the narrator is unreliable, but that his ironic musings serve to distance
us from the narrative:
Indeed, the narrator presents the story as if he were presenting an exhibit
at an art show. He often tells us what will happen next in the story in
general terms, adding "as you shall soon see," referring to our position as
spectators. This distancing, however, still maintains the narrative
integrity of the film. As Allan Speigel notes:
Spiegel's observation seems to correspond with Kubrick's own statement
that "the commentary creates the same dramatic effect as...the knowledge
that the Titanic is doomed while you watch the carefree scenes of
preparation and departure...Being told in advance of the impending disaster
gives away surprise but creates suspense."[14] Many have noted the
distancing provided by the narrator's telling us that Barry is doomed to
die childless, at the same time showing him playing with his son. In fact,
this scene is quite powerful precisely because of the narrator's comments
(One could compare the death of Barry's son to the death of Scarlett's
daughter in Gone with the Wind, a film which plays out the melodrama to
its fullest extent and which might have been the film many of Kubrick's
critics were expecting).
The narrator tells us that which Barry cannot see. He lifts one important
perceptual block -- that of the immediate destiny of the story -- and
privileges us to watch the unknowing characters at the mercy of this
destiny. However, the narrator's reliability is by no means to be taken
for granted, for he has important limitations. Which brings us again to the
question of his curious detachment. While he fits into the film's dynamic
of involvement and distance, his statements of 'great truths' at certain
points in the film cannot possibly be overt statements of the film's
message. The narrator is omniscient and reliable, but he is not a vocal
correlative for our eyes. Thomas Allen Nelson correctly argues that this
narrative is curiously incomplete, taking Spiegel's observations further:
In short, the narrator himself becomes a character in the film. Kozloff
even goes so far as to say that "This voice is the kindly, yet incessantly
ironic, narrator of Vanity Fair, surely this is what 'Thackeray' sounds
like"[16] It appears Kubrick's displacement of the first-person point of
view has yielded an altogether new, 19th century frame to the film, one
that is alternately framed by the film itself.
It is interesting to note, in light of these comments, the use of titles
in the film. The first one, announcing "Part I -- By What Means Redmond
Barry Acquired the Style and Title of Barry Lyndon" appears during the
opening credits; indeed, as an extension of the opening credits,
before the sound of Handel's sarabande has given way to the narrative of
the film. This is an unorthodox approach to the opening title of a film; it
usually comes after the opening credits have finished, a "The Dawn of Man"
in 2001 was announced well after the credits. Likewise, the
announcement of the "Intermission" follows upon the narrator's voice
fading out as he reads the obituary of Sir Charles Lyndon. The "Epilogue"
of the film -- "It was in the reign of George the III that the above named
personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or
poor, they are all equal now" -- is taken from the opening chapter of the
novel, yet the narrator does not speak it. This expression of man's
mortality therefore seems to encompass this narrator as well.
Perhaps why so many find the narrator of Barry Lyndon unreliable is
because of his anachronistic nature. The words used are Thackeray's. The
narrator does not belong to the latter part of the 20th century, to the
generations of 2001. At best, he belongs in 1844. Thus, the
narration distances us not only by its very presence, but also by its
specific nature. It is analogous to the foreground figure in a composition
that also reveals our position as spectators. We 'watch' the narrator
watching the story, the same way that today we might read Thackeray's novel
about the 18th century. Thus, Kubrick's central concerns of space and
narrative converge to form an aesthetic of time which leads from Redmond Barry
straight to us. This 19th century narrator -- or "Thackeray", as
Kozloff would have it -- emphasizes our spatial and temporal distance from
the story by his own distance from the story. He is removed from the tale,
and can foretell the end. In turn, we can foretell even his
end. Thus, the privileged, powerful narrator is ironically undermined by
his very own mortality. And if he, representative of destiny in so many
ways, is susceptible to irony and mortality, then so are we. Like the
science fiction films, Barry Lyndon too becomes a meditation on the
creator's, and the spectator's, own mortality and impending doom. One day,
we will all be "equal" to the narrator and to each other.
[2] Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of
Loneliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p.124
[3] The 'dream projects' of great directors, realized
or not, often indicate preoccupations which are key to the director's
entire body of work. Kubrick discusses the Napoleon project at length in
Joseph Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar (New York: Anchor
Press, 1970), pp.293-316
[4] As with any long-anticipated film by Kubrick,
everybody had something to say about Barry Lyndon when it came out.
A good sampling of critical opinion is provided by Film Review Digest
Annual/1976 (New York: KTO Press, 1976), pp.20-25
[5] Kolker, p.143
[6] Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film
Artist's Maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p.195
[7] Frederic Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New
York: Routledge, 1992), pp.90-93
[8] Kolker, p.82
[9] Besides the trilogy of 'science fiction' films
(Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange) that he
made in the 60's and early 70's, Kubrick has begun work on a new science
fiction project entitled AI, which concerns itself with artificial
intelligence in a distant future in which the polar icecaps have melted and
many great cities are underwater. Even this brief description implies the
work of a director who is pondering every possible alternative for the
future by contemplating all possible outcomes, as one would in a chess game,
one of Kubrick's favorite pastimes. His obsession with the future
continues, though it has been more than two decades since his last science
fiction film.
[10] Kolker, p.79
[11] Mark Crispin Miller, "Barry Lyndon
Reconsidered", Georgia Review 30, No.4 (Winter, 1976), pp.827-53.
Kolker also toys with the notion of the unreliability of the narrator, but
settles for a thesis which recognizes that the narrator is telling "another
tale", and is sometimes not to be trusted.
[12] Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over
Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988), p.119
[13] Alan Spiegel, "Kubrick's Barry Lyndon",
Salmagundi, Fall 1977, p.203
[14] Quoted in Michel Ciment, Kubrick, trans. by
Gilbert Adair (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1982), p.171
[15] Nelson, pp.170-1
[16] Kozloff, p.123
[17] Kozloff, p.125
When we consider how great our sorrows seem, and how small they are; how
we think we shall die of grief, and how quickly we forget, I think we ought
to be ashamed of ourselves and our fickle-heartedness. For, after all,
what business has Time to bring us consolation?
-- William
Makepeace Thackeray, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. (1)
-- Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness (2)
...in Kubrick's films we learn more about a character from the way a
character inhabits a particular space than (with the exception of Dr.
Strangelove) from what the character says. Kubrick's is a cinema of
habitations and rituals, of overwhelming spaces and intricate maneuvers, of
the loss of human control, of defeat.[8]
2001 is not only a narrative of space travel but a way of seeing what space
travel should look like.The film is a design for our imagination and
a notion of modernity, creating the lineaments of a modern environment and
enunciating the metamorphosis of human into machine. His cinema becomes
the image of what we think this and other worlds should look like...[10]
Although this narrator never openly destroys the film's dramatic illusion,
all of his deliberate foreshadowing implies a certain self-consciousness.
Omniscient, prescient, and ironical, the narrator drives a wedge between
audience and events, and, through occasional remarks directly addressed to
us, invites us to observe the story from his removed vantage point.[12]
The primary function of the commentary...qualifies, challenges, 'mutes' the
present tense condition of the visualized action; finally determines the
status of the action as the ineffable, transient, and sometimes irregular
inflection of lives already packaged by memory. If the action is affecting,
it is so not in spite of the narrator, but precisely because of his
presence, and if the perspective of the narrator is limited, so too is that
of the action. Each contains insights denied the other; the action reveals
the intimacies of the part, the narrator the ironies of the whole.[13]
Like those disembodied voices of objectivity in The
Killing, Paths of Glory, and Dr. Strangelove, and like HAL in
2001, the narrator of Barry Lyndon knows something about time
but nothing about space...His is the voice of reason and wit to be sure, a
mixture of 18th century urbanity and Thackerayean bonhomie, but one
confined within the temporal frame of the film...Like others in the film,
his existential presence metaphorically turns to dust and is absorbed into
an expressive film art which looks backward in time and outward toward the
duration of cinematic space.[15]
The narrator/"Thackeray" is the voice of reason, morality, and kindliness,
but the extremes of emotion implied by the mise-en-scene and the music are
out of his province. Someone else is narrating this story, someone
with less easy confidence and less sense of humor, someone more
calculating, someone more willing to dignify these people and their
sorrows, someone infinitely more passionate. Kubrick has said
revealingly: "The most important parts of a film are the mysterious
parts -- beyond the reach of reason and language." "Thackeray" is
trustworthy, but he is not the image-maker.[17]
References:
[1] William Makepeace Thackeray, The Memoirs of
Barry Lyndon, Esq. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.35-6