Luck of the outsider: Stanley Kubrick, "Barry Lyndon"

Stanley Kubrick's film "Barry Lyndon," based on the Thackeray novel, may be the most visually faithful evocation of the eighteenth century on film. I can only think of Raul Ruiz's late masterpiece "Mysteries of Lisbon" as rival in this regard, though Kubrick's film is more painterly. He also gets the Irish, with their innocent charm and guileless sincerity (which excludes not guile but its semblance), the English, with the officiousness and discretion of their officers, noblemen, and lawyers, and the Irishman's sense of exile in modern European culture. Not infrequently the voice-over narrator proffers this as Barry's excuse, and why not? Kubrick was a great ironist and many of his characters are on the edge of caricature. The title personage is a scoundrel who becomes a parvenu, and the story is of his rise and fall. In fact, there are few signs of unblemished virtue in this story, and Raymond Barry, later Barry Lyndon, is a sensitive and rather shy fellow who is capable of being genuine in a world where more or less everyone is a Machiavellian. His defining desire is one that should endear him to Americans: he just wants to succeed in the "society" of his time. In time we see that he will do anything to become a "gentleman" and then to enjoy the gentleman's life. It is also easy to see that he adheres fairly consistently to a certain behavioral code. Though the only goodness we ever glimpse in the film is the love a few people are capable of for the people who seem to have something to offer them. Barry will be undone indirectly by accumulating debts resulting from an improvident lifestyle, but the direct agent is a person of the only kind who could be his nemesis: A stepson who like him is rather attached to his mother, and whose demonic Oedipal character renders him less hesitant with the opponent of his desire, whom he cuts off, using money as weapon, from the eternally suffering Lady Lyndon, Barry's neglected wife, as well as corporeally and not without some symbolism, at the knee.

But novel and film are more sociology than psychology. For what other options could Barry have had in this society? What possibilities did it offer someone from the lower classes or otherwise an "outside" for a good life? And in all the film's dramatic conflicts, whose victory might we have preferred? It's hard to succeed happily at success. The film's final word is a judgment on the world it presents: Lady Lyndon, now freed from husband by son, seated at her side, signs one of innumerable checks. It is to her now permanently estranged husband, but this payment has a name. It names the film's sole possible point of view of unambiguous judgment; it names a debt that this whole world must pay to one that is hors-scène. This name is a date: "1789."