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Kubrick's Vanity Fair ROBERT BLEDSOE Thackeray published Barry Lyndon in 1844, when he was still something of an apprentice novelist, and artistically his novel is merely "promising." Why should Kubrick, the director of few words, base a movie on Thackeray, one of the talkiest of the talky Victorians? Critics are naturally interested in comparing the two works. It is, however, more revealing to compare Kubrick's movie not to Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, but rather to his later novel, Vanity Fair. The movie gives us a director in the Thackerayan role of lay-preacher, one whose sermon topic is Thackeray's cry of vanitas vanitatum. Moreover, the movie appropriates the thematic maturity of Vanity Fair and telescopes it into the earlier story. And by grafting the themes of the master writer of 1847-48 onto the more crudely ironic themes of the developing writer of 1844, Kubrick has produced a considerably more ambitious, and more successful work of art than Thackeray did. The implications of Kubrick's movie are profoundly depressing because , like the narrator of Vanity Fair, he apparently can show us no alternative to a world of hollow vanity. As Pauline Kael puts it, "the film says that all mankind is corrupt. By Kubrick's insistence that this is a piece of wisdom that must be treated with Jansenist austerity and by his consequent refusal to entertain us, or even to involve us, he has made one of the vainest of all movies" (The New Yorker, 29 December 1975, p. 49). Kael's analysis is persuasive, but her conclusion that the movie's "vanity" somehow detracts from its merit is not, since the movie is vain in the same way that Vanity Fair is vain (and no less "entertaining" for that). It does not confine itself to the poindessly specific task of recreating Thackeray's Barry Lyndon. For example, the novel's narrator can say of Lady Lyndon that "there was nothing divine about her at Robert Bledsoe is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso. % KUBRICK'S VANITY FAIR all. She was very well; but no more" (chap. 13) and can add slyly that "she had grown very fat" (chap. 17) — a far cry from Kubrick's ethereal creature. And for Kubrick, the simpering Lord Bullingdon is anything but Thackeray's "manly, noble-looking lad" (chap. 18). These discrepancies are of passing interest, but of not great critical importance , since the movie has assumed the same task as Vanity Fair: to create a vision of a world that is one long "novel without a hero." The same kind of pushy opportunism that makes Becky Sharp tick also motivates Redmond Barry-Lyndon, even down to the important point that for all their aggressive intercourse with society they choose the most showily isolating means for advancing. For them both, advancement in society amounts to alienation from it and withdrawal into unproductive egotism. Throughout the movie images of poindess, empty splendor emphasize the parallels between the "Becky Sharp" social world of the two works. For example, many readers of Vanity Fair will recall the following sardonic comment on London's postWaterloo social scene by the pseudo-omniscient narrator; viewers of the movie will recall that Kubrick appropriates it almost word for word: Here, before long, Becky received not only "the best" foreigners . . . but some of the best English people too. I don't mean the most virtuous, or the least virtuous, or the cleverest, or the best born, but "the best," — in a word, people about whom there is no question — such as the great Lady Fitz-Willis . . . that Patron Saint of Almack's___ When the Countess of Fitz-Willis . . . takes up a person, he or she is safe. There is no question about them any more. (Vanity Fair, Chap. 51) In the movie it is not a part of the narrative commentary, but part of a speech by Lord Wendover, whose good will Barry (just like Becky with Lord Steyne and Lady Fitz-Willis) craves, gets, and finally loses. Another example of the ties between the "high society" worlds of the two works is the spoken "obituary" of the first Lord Lyndon, whose...

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