Barry Lyndon: Kubrick's Cinema of Disparity Author(s): Thomas Allen Nelson Reviewed work(s): Source: Rocky Mountain Review

of Language and Literature, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Winter, 1979), pp. 39-51 Published by: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1347320 . Accessed: 17/02/2012 09:11
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Barry Lyndon:Kubrick's Cinema of Disparity

by Thomas Allen Nelson*

When Thackeray in the 1840's wrote The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., he did so during a period of experimenting with the aesthetics of parody. While poking fun at the sentimentalities of the first person confessional novel, a form already worn out by Defoe and ridiculed by Fielding, Thackeray toyed with fictive forms and point of view in an age no longer impressed with an 18th century addiction to decorum in language and behavior; the language of good sense was being replaced by a fascination with the various forms and dynamics of language and thought as a means for exploring complex modes of perception. In Barry Lyndon (1844), Thackeray has its first person narrator reveal sides of his nature which remain, to the end, personally unexplored. Barry's self-exposure becomes complete only in the novel's concluding chapters and coincides with a complete absorption in his own inventions, ones which earlier stood as studied responses to the accidents of fortune and his ambition for social rank. The "esquire" in the novel's title may be Thackeray's initial irony. We come away from the novel realizing that early in his career Thackeray set out to examine levels of social and psychological understanding through the manipulation of such stylistic distancing devices as point of view and disparities between forms of language and perception. By the time of Vanity Fair (1847) and its style of authorial intrusion reminiscent of such 18th century fictionalists as Fielding and Sterne, Thackeray undercuts completely the authority of character and plot and, in the process, growing and alternative 19th century views of the novel as psychological or social history. Such a fictional strategy invites the reader to recognize, if not revel in, the various disparities between the novel's apparent "content" and its form, and to appreciate the artist's order of perception as existing apart from that of the many characters who inhabit his vanity fair. More emphatically
*THOMAS ALLEN NELISONis a professor of English at San Diego State University. He teaches courses in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, Nabokov and contemporary fiction, and film criticism. He has published a book on Shakespearean comedy and recently has published several articles dealing with contemporary film and film aesthetics. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Film Criticism and currently is working on a book-length study of Stanley Kubrick. EDITOR NOTE: The readers of this article might also be interested in reading "Kubrick's Vanity Fair." by Robert Bledsoe in Rocky Mouttain Review Volume 31. Number 2. pages 96-99.

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than in Barry Lyndon we realize that the hero of Vanity Fair (A Novel Without a Hero) can be only the artist whose identity elusively peeps out from behind the narrator's satiric mask. Stanley Kubrick brings a 20th century cinematic intelligence to bear upon a 19th century novelist's interpretation, or reinvention, of an 18th century form and subject. Demonstrating extraordinary verve and control, Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975) both interprets and transcends an age through an exploration and dramatization of various levels of understanding and perception, emotion and irony, comedy and tragedy, history and art. Through what I shall define as his cinema of disparity, Kubrick, in Barry Lyndon, both summarizes and perfects two essential areas of conceptual and formal interest found in his earlierfilms: namely, (1) the basic epistemological ironies and disparities which exist between the substance of human experience and its expression through a myriad of expressive forms; and (2) the role of art in both revealing those disparities and pointing to their creative as well as debilitating effects. In addition, I hope to demonstrate what Kubrick's severest critics (Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, for instance) too often fail to consider: that, as Paul Schrader noted in another context ("Notes on Film Noir," Film Comment [Spring 1972]), in important respects style determines thematic content in every film, and especially in Barry Lyndon do we have an example of how through the organizational claims of film rhetoric (narrative and character structures, in particular) and the visual/aural textures of film style (camera, miseen-scene, editing, sound) a film works out its "content" aesthetically rather than thematically. If Barry Lyndon says anything intelligent or intelligible to us, as I believe it does and Hans Feldmann in part has argued ("Kubrick and His Discontents," Film Quarterly[Fall 1976]), it does so through a structure of disparities created by Kubrick's strong commitment to the formal demands of his medium.

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The distance created between the narrator (Michael Hordern) and the world inhabited by the characters of Barry Lyndon points to an easily discernible narrative disparity. The narrator'svoice, steady and deliberate in its ironic and sympathetic reflections on the rise and fall of Barry Lyndon (Ryan O'Neal), provides an omniscient, although limited, detachment from the many ordinary-some petty and some touching-strivings and struggles of the film's principle characters. He
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creates in Part I an atmosphere of Comic fate and irony, while in Part II his comments become increasingly sympathetic and support a growing mood of tragic irony. He alerts us to the patterns of fortune and chance which the film's protagonists, especially Barry himself, fail to comprehend: BarryLyndon in Part I accepts fortuity with confident and unreflected assurance, while in Part II the narratoranticipates for us the death of Barry's son and our hero's eventual ruin. In such a manner, Kubrick structures a narrative vise of irony and fate, one comic in Part I and tragic in Part II, and reminds us of an historical context from which no character, not even the narrator, can hope to escape. The titled "Epilogue," taken from a different context in Thackeray's novel (Chapter I), stands as Kubrick's most obtrusive intrusion into the film's historical level, one which usurps the narrator's limited frame of reference in order to indicate time's irrevocable obliteration of the private struggles of an entire era. "They are all equal now," we read, as most of us shall be sometime in the 21st century: except for those of us, like Kubrick, who seek to preserve in art a vision to withstand the rust of time. The narration, to include the titles to Parts I and II, either comes directly from or appears to be inspired by Thackeray's novel. Except Kubrick, by not allowing Barry to tell his story as does Thackeray, further narrows the perceptual range of his main character; in the novel, for instance, Barry makes observations and voices opinions about his historical and social milieu, even though his authority in such matters is seriously challenged and even he admits to his shortcomings as a "philosopher and historian." Rather than have his protagonist tell his own story, as both Humbert and Alex are allowed to do respectively in Lolita (1962) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), Kubrick chooses a strategy which creates a more emphatic disparity in narrative perspectives. And, one must remember that Barry Lyndon represents Kubrick's third major film which adapts a novel using the convention of an unreliable first person narrator. In both Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and Burgess' A Clockwork Orange (1962), the astute reader recognizes both Humbert and Alex as imposters who attempt to manipulate sympathies for their esoteric and at times vicious obsessions. Nabokov provides us with the narrative means to transcend Humbert's clever plea bargaining, while in Clockwork Burgess, through the confidences afforded by his "humble narrator," puts us in the paradoxical position of defending the principle of free will so that a young thug may fulfill a perverse aesthetic of violence. The narrator of Barry Lyndon stands as a more complex
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refinement of Kubrick's earlier attempts at narrative disparity and distancing. Although the narrator offers us a comfortable ironic detachment from the struggle of Barry'srise and fall, one which allows for both scorn and pity, and provides an historical awareness which strengthens the sense of fate in the film, his omniscience is seriously limited. His is the voice of detachment and irony to be sure, a mixture of 18th century urbanity and Thackerayean amusement toward an age of dying ideals and shoddy corruptibility, but one confined within the plot level of the film. His superiority to Barry Lyndon and his milieu exists on a scale limited to the immediate history and circumstances of the film's story. He has access to knowledge of Barry's ultimate ruin and sorrow, to the nuances of Barry'sromantic intrigue with Nora and Quin, to the complexities of 18th century European politics, and in general to the simple dynamics of social intercourse. Beyond the level of story, that rudimentary urge to tell a tale, the narrator has little or nothing to say. Significantly, he does not comment on most of what we see and hear; he has no access to the cinematic order of which his narration is only a small part. The narrator appreciates some easy incongruities between individual aspiration and fate, but not those larger disparities communicated to the audience through Kubrick's complex manipulation of cinematic form and content. Within the two-part structure of Barry Lyndon, and its balancing of comic and tragic irony, Kubrick develops additional narrative comment through his treatment of formalized activities in which his characters repeatedly engage. Among these dramatized motifs three stand out-dueling, card playing, and debt-paying-as Kubrick's method for deepening the film's content beyond that rendered in its narration. All three of these activities can be construed as dramatic extensions of fate and as supportive of a vision of an accidental and disparate universe. As the characters duel with one another over the ephemera of love and personal honor, we comprehend their losing battle with fate; as they idly pass the time playing cards, or attempt to fulfill personal ambition by cheating these games of chance, we realize their time is short and running out; and that while Barry and the Chevalier (Patrick Magee) may cheat and win in one game, in a larger order of reference, they inevitably must pay up. In Part II of the film, Kubrick isolates the piling up of debts and signing of bank drafts as another ritual activity accomplished at a table, on two occasions with three present (Barry, Lady Lyndon, the book-keeper) as in the games of ombre seen earlier, and again captures in microcosm a portrait of the film's thematic content.
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A careful look at how Kubrick shapes and patterns these three narrative motifs reveals something in addition to the simple mechanics of fate. The film's initial scene, shot from afar and expostulated upon by our avuncular and ironic narrator, tells of Barry'sfather, who, we are told, had a promising legal career cut short by the exigencies of honor in a duel over the purchase of some horses. Immediately we are forced to look at such human struggles from a distance, at once cinematic and historical, and to note the disparities between form (a duel) and content (a human life sacrificed for a quarrel over horses). Barry's duel with Quin (Leonard Rossiter), drawn out sufficiently by Kubrick to capture the ritual and aesthetics of 18th century dueling, likewise has an inconsequential substance. Later, we and Barryrealize that deception, not high drama and emotion, determined the duel's outcome. In such ways is fate momentarily forestalled and the forms of things manipulated. Barry, we soon see, learns his lessons well and in succession manages to extricate himself from military and political entrapments which, although they may be games of state functioning on a scale grander in their formal properties than Barry's puerile involvement in a romantic triangle and a family's greed, also lack a correspondingly noble substance. By the end of Part I, Barry has developed an art for dueling, and in their card playing he and the Chevalier, amid disconnected wandering through the courts of 18th century Europe, manage to thrive on guile and good form. Significantly, Part I concludes with Barry moving into a new sphere, a milieu with a separate code of formal social language and gesture, one whose artful splendor is symbolized by the name of Lyndon. Barry woos Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson) on a chillingly blue moonlit terrace outside the gaming parlors of a Belgian spa and later confronts her crippled husband with a newly acquired confidence and cruelty as the old man rails and dies at his own card table. Part I reaches for a unity of structure and concept in this brilliant scene, as its static and candlelit composition comes alive before our eyes, only to conclude with Sir Charles gasping for life and the narrator's unemotional reading of the old man's obituary, reducing him in the process to another item on the obscure rolls of history. We realize, as the reading of the obituary slowly drowns out and the screen cuts to black, his esteemed name shortly will be usurped by Redmond Barry. For Kubrick in Part I of BarryLyndon to dwell on the ironies in the cynical ambitions of Redmond Barry, not to forget those in that world represented by the social and political contexts through which he journeys, would be on the order of his films before Strangelove.
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Kubrick, in several important episodes, indicates his full maturity as an artist when he complicates these ironies and, primarily through visual means, attempts to develop emotional nuances which for Barry and his world remain tragically unexplored. In the ribbon scene early in the film between Barry and Nora Brady (Gay Hamilton), Kubrick captures both the charm and triviality of sentimental love; he allows the scene to play itself out, to assert a temporal and emotional integrity, and consequently solicits a level of understanding which is involving as well as detaching. During the scene the performers embody familiar sentimental gestures, a subtle turn of the head or closing of the eyes too studied to be profound, and following this scene the narrator rushes to tell us of Nora's shallow emotional character and the avarice of her family; yet Kubrick, within the scene's integrity, forces us to apprehend a world separate from the narrator's perceptions and to acknowledge a fuller human content. Later, when Barry sits by candlelight with the German girl and her baby (a remarkable performance by Diana Koerner) at another table, but in this case not one for card playing, Kubrick again preserves a scene's integrity, allows it a full emotional and visual exposition, and communicates something other than just the irony of Barry'slies and posturings. He (and Ryan O'Neal) shows how simple and human it is for Barry to become enveloped within the magic of his own invention and how, for a brief moment, we, too, share that magic. This charming sequence completes itself the next morning with a closeup of the two lovers, heads together, in a tableau of bright sun and soft focus, as we relish its beauty and the charming innocence of its exaggerated sentiment. That is something the film demands we see and feel, while the narrator's comments upon Barry's departure (that, in effect, the young German girl's affections had been stormed a number of times before Barry) provides an easy irony, a more emphatic verbal formulation of a chance meeting during war which stands apart from the scene's emotional and temporal reality. Kubrick asserts the validity of both reactions, no matter what subsequent disparities and contradictions arise. For Barry Lyndon, this scene foreshadows his later tragedy as he waits too long before exploring the emotional possibilities of his character. For us, it is a special experience made possible by Kubrick's cinema of disparity. As card playing diminishes into an empty social gesture, debtpaying, one final duel, and an array of social rituals provide Kubrick with appropriate narrative contexts through which to mirror in Part II the film's steady movement toward tragic irony. Time becomes a
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dominant theme in Part II, as when in its opening scene we witness Barry's marriage to Lady Lyndon amid his new ambience of art and luxury, and the narrator provides us with the first specified date in the film, June 15, 1773. Barry Lyndon, at his pinnacle, now will play a losing game with time. In very quick succession we witness a marriage, a birth, a marriage's gradual dissolution, a birthday, Barry's fervent quest for peerage and another name, a second birthday, and the death of Barry's only love, his son. One recalls the birthdays in 2001, touchingly disparate in their expression through the gargantua of space-age technology, and their ironic foreshadowing of Bowman's rebirth as star-child. In Barry Lyndon, Kubrick blends them with the film's treatment of other ritual activities and deepens the development of individual and historical disparities. A pattern of touching and tragic irony is captured at the sight of Bryan's white and ornate coffin leading his world in a procession of regal sorrow, transported as it is by the carriage which had been his birthday present the year before and which receives his body only after a riding accident with another birthday present from his father. The boy's bed serves for two scenes, the first of charming innocence with father and son and Barry's bedtime embellishments of his past, the last of Bryan's death and our recognition of Barry'sloss as he breaks down in tears while telling the same story. Bryan's innocence and beauty represent Barry's single perception into something fine, something beyond his own ordinary ambitions. We are allowed to sense, through Kubrick's enforcement and compression of time, an emotional growth in Barry's character beyond that found in Thackeray, but one which tragically comes too late; he no longer plays at sentiment as before, but now experiences a tragedy so immense that no appropriate verbal language exists for its full expression. Kubrick lets us read it on his actors' faces. Four debt scenes provide Kubrick with another narrative device for capsulizing not only Barry'spersonal decline, but that of an entire era. We watch Lady Lyndon methodically and tirelessly sign her name, while Kubrick embodies in a single activity a culture's fall into the morass of its own trivialities and petty entanglements. As "H. Lyndon" increasingly becomes a dominant visual motif, Kubrick reminds us that such documents are all that survive to account for the myriad personal realities of a given age. Barry and Lady Lyndon leave behind no art or beauty to express their personal sorrows and visions. Barry's hope for futurity, his son, dies, as do his ambitions in a tangle of debts and writs. Kubrick climaxes the film's use of ritual activities for conceptual
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and emotional expansion of narrative content with the final duel between Barry and Lord Bullingdon (Leon Vitali). Again, although in more extensive terms than in Part I, Kubrick draws out a scene and preserves its integrity; again, he points to complex disparities between formal properties and content. An old church, now functioning as a barn and storehouse, provides a complex and ironic background to the scene's deliberate exposition. One might say that for Barry Lyndon Part II begins and ends in a church: the beginning cast in a resplendent social and aesthetic symmetry, the ending reminiscent of his rural beginnings, yet furnishing a context for Barry'sonly deliberate moral act. Barry's refusal to fire on Bullingdon after the misfiring of his opponent's pistol, a moment apparently structured by Kubrick to indicate Barry's capacity to act independent of a fortuitous turn of chance, represents an instance within the film's narrative where the elaborate mechanics of social form embody a correspondingly significant moral and emotional content. Unfortunately and ironically, such gestures are not enough to save Barry and his world.
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Complementing Kubrick's careful rendering of the two levels of narration and narrative structure, what could upon reflection be termed the disparities of film content in Barry Lyndon, is an impressive technical strategy which binds the film into an aesthetic and philosophical whole. Kubrick's use of camera and the film's compositions, its mise-en-scene, and a musical score which develops a baroque regularity of beat and recurring cadences, produce a grandiosity of form which could redefine prevailing concepts of the film epic. Barry Lyndon shows many of the characteristics traditional to a genre developed first by Griffith and the Italians, refined by Eisenstein and Russian theories of epic montage, and exploited for its full commercial value through bravura technical feats by such filmmakers as Abel Gance and Cecil B. DeMille: a display of innovative visual and technical skills, impressive formal compositions, rhythmic editing, and an actual or pseudo-historical ambience. Yet, as Kubrick himself has noted, while such films historically resulted in significant advancements in film technique and film language, they rarely embodied content equal to their formal pretensions. In an interview included in Joseph Gelmis' The Film Director as Superstar, Kubrick's comment that "Eisenstein is all form and no content, whereas Chaplin is content and no form," coupled with a statement from a later Sight and Sound (Spring, 1972) interview, articulates
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what I take to be his primary goal as a film artist and his actual achievement in Barry Lyndon: "Obviously, if you can combine style and content, you have the best of all possible films." In Part I of Barry Lyndon, Kubrick enlarges the narrative disparities of the film through the use of reverse zooms which allows us to move into and away from both the absurd incongruities of Barry's gradual rise and a complex mise-en-scene: which, in a series of impressive spatial and formal compositions, blend with the conceptual and transcend the temporal levels of narrative content. As the love tryst involving Barry, Nora, and Quin develops, Kubrick zooms back from the particulars of film content (Barry chopping wood, Nora and Quin's hands, a pistol being prepared for a duel) to assert arabesque landscape compositions similar to those found in Gainsborough, a lyrical ordering of Barry's rural world which dwarfs and engulfs the temporal conflicts of that world. Because Barry fails to perceive such basic disparities between his ambitions and the expressive possibilities of his natural context, he lacks the necessary imagination to transcend his own fate. In a larger historical sense, Kubrick suggests how painting and film correspond as mediums wherein the artist reshapes available experience and escapes the tyranny of time. In subsequent scenes, Kubrick captures the aesthetics of 18th century warfare through a blending of reverse zooms and striking horizontal compositions. While Barryfeels trapped within the confining rigors of military life, Kubrick allows us to see what he has referred to as "a weird disparity between the sheer visual and organizational beauty of the historical battles sufficiently far in the past, and their human consequences." The aesthetic of the zoom lens allows Kubrick to capture closeup the triviality, absurdity, and tragedy of various human entanglements, some of which collectively add up to what we call history, while from a distance it suggests a release possible only through art and the integration of form and content. As Part I moves to Barry'sintrusion into the ranks of 18th century aristocracy, Kubrick's camera becomes more static, especially during those impressive candlelit scenes made possible by a Zeiss still-camera lens, preferring to establish static compositions reminiscent of those glittering paintings by Adolf Menzel of Frederick the Great'sconcerts at Sanssouci. In particular during Part II does Kubrick's camera and composition first establish a static and extremely artificial tableau before cutting into a scene to explicate its content. Such a method visually suggests Barry Lyndon's unknowing entrapment in a world which communicates through the dynamics of a rigid and decorative
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social language. As Barry appears to move smoothly through the formal gardens and artful social splendor of this milieu, perceiving neither its code nor moral emptiness, one cannot help but recall Kubrick'searlier treatment of the Dax-Broulard relationship in Paths of Glory; what Barry does not perceive is his own diminution and that of a society which only knows how to make for itself beautifully attractive cages. One particular scene which stands out as pure Kubrick shows Barry's first entrance into this environment of aristocratic decadence when he meets for the first time the Chevalier. Kubrick begins the scene in the Chevalier's palatial apartment, from a distance looking down from a slight angle; as we observe the Chevalier sitting at his breakfast table, his back to the camera, engulfed by an immense and spacious room, we cannot help but be reminded of that artful zoo inhabited by Bowman toward the conclusion of 2001. Barry fails to comprehend what Kubrick'scinematic art communicates: that art and form without substance-without that vital urgency gained through an inner struggle to shape a vision of experience into revealing forms and models of reality-imprison rather than release human
perception.

During Barry's fall in Part II, Kubrick moves him out of the context of candlelit comfort and social symmetry through a successive series of scenes in which the mise-en-scene declines in its artifice as Barry undergoes emotional and moral growth: (1) as Barry attacks Bullingdon in full view of those he hopes to impress (and Kubrick brings hand-held cinematic commotion into their midst), he offends that society's sense of form and decorum, not its moral outrage, and precipitates his social downfall; (2) following Bryan's death, the final scene with Barry at Hackton Castle shows him being literally carried out by two servants, but only after the camera dwells for a final look at the symmetrical and ornate composition of a candlelit wall; (3) in a Hogarthian setting of static and composed sloth, but invigorated by the film's most extensive travelling shot, Bullingdon asserts his challenge to a slumping Barry; (4) then, we move on to that abandoned church for the climatic duel where Barry commits his single moral act; (5) and finally, we go to a small room at a local inn where Barry, silently playing cards with his mother, must come to terms with his sorrow and tragedy. Kubrick concludes BarryLyndon's story within the film's only freeze frame as the camera reveals Barry from behind (no doubt a one-legged double for Ryan O'Neal), artlessly suspended in midair without either the support of good fortune or good form. This series of frames, repeating and freezing the same
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image, holds still Barry's personal decline within time, while suggesting the larger tragedy of his world within a stunning work of cinematic art. Kubrick's musical choices for Barry Lyndon, primarily baroque rather than purely classical, with the heavy grandeur of Handel's "Sarabande" providing the central musical theme, reinforce the film's complex weaving of levels of narrative and formal disparities. The brief selections from Bach and Vivaldi suggest minor harmonic progressions common to the baroque, while the lighter pieces from Mozart and Schubert blend with the more simple and traditional melodies found in such choices as "Lilliburlero" and "British Grenadiers." Together these selections form a baroque whole which supports the film's visual mixture of lyrical simplicity and formal artifice, its narrative merger of the comic and tragic, an epical grandeur and a vanity fair. Barry Lyndon, to include its music, traverses shifts of style, mood, and concept which move from the simple to the sublime, from the sublime to the ironic. And through the film's system of aesthetic analogy (to several forms of 17th, 18th, and 19th century art and music), Kubrick provides Barry Lyndon an historical vision which both documents and universalizes the end of an era. Kubrick's interpretation of the late 18th century suggests a belief in a period's tragic entrapment within its own rational and mechanical formalism. He embodies throughout Barry Lyndon that divorce between rational and emotional life common to that century's reliance upon forms of reason and fears of individual imagination; to an age which obsessively sought to maintain the forms of its world at the expense of its moral and emotional vitality; of an age which feared its own mortality and found refuge in either the chimera of social ritual or the uncomprehended forms of art. Kubrick implies that only the artists of the 18th century escaped this plush and painted cage, not necessarily through the injection of profound content into their various artistic achievements, but because the genius of men like Bach and Mozart, Gainsborough and Hogarth, provides later epochs with that sense of exhiliration which enriches the inner life and counters those forces of stupidity and tyranny which, on all levels of social and psychological life, threaten the individual's capacity for profound experience. Kubrick, however, does not make films about artists, nor does he indulge in empty aesthetic performances (although if he did, his films probably would still be notable). His films, and Barry Lyndon extends this basic assertion to its fullest to date, deal with ironic, absurd,
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touching, and philosophical disparities which find expression in human history and imagination through a myriad of forms and ritual activities, visual and abstract structures, the shapes of societies and histories, the struggles of individual consciousness and articulation. Kubrick's Barry Lyndon represents another such form and structure, one visual and aural, but one which seeks to embody those principles of disparity in a single work of cinematic art. The last scene of the film expresses both Kubrick's film intelligence and his personal vision: Interior, large room at Hackton Castle, long shot, static composition, large window left, with light flooding in, table to right with three people sitting and one standing, balance and static spatial composition suggests general social-period content, but not a specific human content, music on soundtrack adapted from Schubert's "Piano Trio in E-Flat"; cut to close-in view, no dialogue; to Lady Lyndon's slow and methodical signing of bank drafts, her hesitation as Bullingdon, to her right, places before her another form to sign; camera concentrates more on her face than the activity itself; cut to closeup of a bank draft made out to Redmond Barry, with date at lower left corner of frame indicating the year as 1789;to closeup of Lady Lyndon's distracted and sorrowful stare, and following a moment's hesitation and muted emotion, she continues the ritual of affixing her signature to the documents; cut back to long shot, static composition as before, cut to black; Handel's "Sarabande" heard on soundtrack as the film's endtitles begin. The above description contains several of the film's basic concerns and points to an historical context beyond its period. By selecting 1789 for the terminating date of the film's story (no such ending date exists in Thackeray), with its allusion to the French Revolution and the beginning of a new age in Europe, Kubrick reminds us of both an historical and cinematic context. Historically, we witness a society trapped within its own forms and rituals, its own folly and moral irrelevance; Kubrick's handling of this last scene suggests an era's particular content and struggle tragically lost in time, while the forms of that era remain frozen in art. In addition, Kubrick points beyond this age to the Romantic (here the Schubert selection may be significant) and Napoleonic eras in Europe. Yet, our perspective remains 20th century and cinematic, as today we can comprehend the passing glories and tragic failures of 19th century heroic individualism. Perhaps, the film suggests, the disparities between different periods of human history may not be disparities at all, but particular instances of a universal condition. As Kubrick historically points beyond one age
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to another, he likewise points beyond Barry Lyndon, the film, to his own ambitious Napoleon film project. Disparity in Barry Lyndon represents something more than a narrative principle, but a way Kubrick undercuts and enlarges the narrow logic of traditional film storytelling. Disparity in Barry Lyndon stands for something more than a system of conceptual paradoxes, but a recognition of a universe of differences and alternatives, and therefore an appropriate and legitimate form of perception for this century. Disparity in Barry LYndon represents something more than cinematic grandiosity, but an instance of creative film intelligence discovering in the concept and logic of disparity a complexity and challenge equal to, if not beyond, its reach.

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