Scorsese is right. Kubrick stepped into a “time machine” with his camera and crew, recorded a movie, and returned to the present to show us the footage. It literally transports you backward in historical time to a world that is so vivid, so painterly, so elegantly manicured that it puts other period dramas to shame. Shot with obsessive detail, Kubrick’s search for verisimilitude touches every aspect of the frame. He’s not even painting with light anymore. He’s god-injecting natural sunbeams into real locations, with real candles, no sets, no artifice detected, and where soft grainy textures lull you from the countryside of a peasant farm into the parlors of a high decadent society. 

I won’t belabor the film’s immaculate production design, though in keeping with Kubrick’s biggest paradoxes, BARRY LYNDON relies on its formal beauty as a way to ironically mask the worse vices of humanity. Inner ugliness is disguised as eighteenth-century enlightenment. Gorgeous, civilized landscapes hide the depravity lurking within its characters. The warm country exteriors and cold human interiors are but proof that Kubrick’s plush aristocratic society is nothing more than a ruse, a bluff, for social climbers to hang their want, lust and bold ambition on. And, true to Kubrickian form, the mechanical workings of fate and chance are dramatized in the rise and fall of Redmond Barry, whose evolution from Irish primitive to artificial elite reveals to us the next iteration of the Star Child.

As mentioned, this is the eighteenth-century era of Enlightenment, a period when men and women sought to control not only nature, but their own nature by building elaborate systems defined by rigid social codes, peerage games, and etiquettes of behavior. In nearly every Kubrick film, the indifferent presence of the institution—i.e. that place where humans become dehumanized by external forces — is reimagined in BARRY LYNDON as a highly artificial cultural world that sells the masks of wealth, titles, and fashion to its greedy constituents. Players can hide behind these dignified masks as a way to disguise their fraud and roguery, similar to the anonymous masked voyeurs in EYES WIDE SHUT. It’s a system where the appearance of value is more important than having real value itself, and where the pursuit of peerage leads not to an elevation of character, like Barry falsely assumes, but to the annihilation of dignity, integrity and moral autonomy. 

Barry, at first a low-ranking scrape of a man, is eager to fight for this system and all its ideals of love, honor and country, but he lacks the enlightened work ethic to make them authentic. He’s a trickster, a rascal who revels in fakery, an opportunist who prefers gaming the system over working hard and educating himself in the spirit of his century. He never wants to better himself, but prefers to cheat his way into glory and social standing. What’s fascinating about this fool is that he truly believes his world will be secured and ordered if only he can attain higher rank and wealth, but in pursuing this course he completely fails to comprehend how the patterns of fortune are thrown to him by accident, rather than of his own determination. He’s a reverse Johnny Clay from THE KILLING. Barry doesn’t lose fortune by accident, he gains fortune because of the contingencies of the accidental universe. Capriciously flung from one duel, war and loveless manipulation after the next, he somehow emerges into a wealthy swindling habit, then marries into a decadent aristocracy at the center of vanity fair. Barry accepts these fortuitous patterns of misadventure with a confident, unreflective self-assurance. He orchestrates a destiny he believes himself to be in control of, but humorously, and tragically, he falls, like a pawn piece, into the mechanics of fate. 

If Part 1 defines Barry’s comedic rise in power through the accidents of fortune, then Part 2 defines his tragic fall into crushing debt through the mechanical workings of fate. Part 1 is all about Barry learning the rules of the game, gaining the required skills to master the politics of the high trade. Kubrick’s leisurely pacing at times feels like a bug, but it always allows Barry plenty of time to learn the symmetry of his new surroundings. Whether he’s strolling through forests, riding in carriages, lingering over sumptuous meals, sauntering over hills and plains, playing cards, fishing in boats, or admiring works of art, these mundane activities provide a formal guise for Barry to hide himself in as he slowly masters his environment enough to exploit it. As his obsession with wealth and status increases, so do his debts. Extravagant weddings, birthdays, gifts and clothing start to add up. Infidelities with maids and concubines tax a toll on his wife and her 10-year old son. The film progresses in such a heavy way, showing how Part 1’s atmosphere of wooing and playing slowly decays into Part 2’s cosmic atmosphere of debt-collecting and imprisoning. Kubrick’s moral universe is visualized in the piling up of Barry’s debts, his endless stacks of notes and checks, and the scratching sounds of Lady Lyndon’s quill signing eternal bank drafts. 

Barry may have temporarily cheated his way into prosperity through the accidents of fortune, but the cosmic, impersonal dealings of fate inevitably trap him within a painted cage of his own making. He assumed the disguise of an English gentlemen only to be exposed as a near-catatonic ape sitting withered in a chair of his own decadence and depravity. Kubrick captures in that single image the truth of “Redmond Barry Lyndon,” along with the illusion he’s created and the collapse of his appearance to an unforgiving reality. A small part of us may even feel bad for the guy at this point, but karma, like a machine, is a blind automated force that is a respecter of no persons, playing into the film’s larger moral order that demands payment. As it turns out, Barry’s callow fascination with cultured surfaces is no different than those gorillas’ fascination with the mysterious, sleek surfaces of the monolith. Barry is not a machine like HAL, Alex or Private Pile, nor is he a crazy like Ripper or a pervert like Humbert, though he does share something in common with all of them. They’re all individuals engulfed by the system. They’re all prisoners of cold external forces or dark internal selves that offer a false sense of security. On the outside, they might appear progressive, rational or beautiful, but on the inside the specter of self-destruction and anti-enlightenment looms on the darkening horizon. 

I’m not really a style over substance kind of guy, but what’s fascinating about BARRY LYNDON is that its beautiful, ceremonial style works to counterpoint the ugliness of its substance. Kubrick keeps a cool, distanced perspective on Barry the whole three hours, and that directorial choice mirrors the film’s overall themes of dehumanization, alienation, and the impersonal nature of the systems he’s critiquing. Well-groomed backdrops are nothing but stratagem for masking dirty, unkempt souls. Museum-like photography is a ploy that resists a life of cheating, lying and womanizing. These kinds of Kubrickian ironies allow the style to enhance the substance, which further allows Barry’s rise and fall evolution to constantly oscillate between scenes of personal decay and scenes of unparalleled beauty. The irony of style runs even deeper with Kubrick himself, a director in control of a masterful, enlightened aesthetic who in turn is casting a light on a character who is out of control, stupid, and regressive. Barry’s trajectory advances from primitive ape to pseudo-enlightened gentlemen, only for him to be scorched by his unmasking and returned to his primal state of craving. As our good friend Hutch has asked, “is human evolution a continuum or is it an endlessly repeating cycle?” To answer that question is to see Barry as another iteration of the Star Child’s future. It’s also to confront Kubrick himself, a secret optimist(?), who believed in the potential of humanity. Consider, for example, the following quote taken from an interview post-DR. STRANGELOVE. I’ve tweaked some words to make it fit the thematic conversation around BARRY LYNDON:

“I believe in man’s potential and in his capacity for progress. In [Barry Lyndon], I was dealing with the inherent [decadence] in man that threatens to destroy him; that [decadence] is with us as strongly today, and must be conquered. But a recognition of [decadence] doesn’t imply a celebration of it — nor a sense of despair and futility about the possibility of curing it.”

To Hutch’s eternal question, I would say Kubrick wants to believe humans are on a continuum of progress, knowledge, reason and sovereignty — that is, he wants to believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment — but he’s also not naive to the circling, self-destructive powers of humans regressing back to gorillas, Rippers, Alexes, and Barrys. He acknowledges the truths of these nihilistic characters even when the truth is no longer beautiful to look at, with the exception, of course, of how he stylistically represents it. Put differently, Kubrick’s visionary style repeatedly consists of beautiful compositions, sumptuous photography, and elegant mis-en-scene as a way for him to express a style of presentation that encourages hope and symmetry against the darker, more nihilistic layers of his thematic content and characters. That paradoxical relation between Kubrick’s thematic content and the style of its presentation may perhaps be the cipher to unlock the man’s mysterious, often misunderstood perspective. Was he a secret optimist? A craven nihilist? Somewhere in between? Look to his style and content. It has the answer. Barry is not the fulfillment of Kubrick’s hope for humanity, nor is he the crowning achievement of the Star Child’s gaze. Kubrick’s characters are still stuck in an “endlessly repeating cycle,” but boy oh boy with BARRY LYNDON’S production design can you feel that he desperately wants them to escape it.

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