Barry Lyndon: Kubrick's Cinema of Disparity

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 ofjhis 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 offortune 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 ofview and disparities between forms oflanguage and perception. By the time of Vanity Fair (1847) and its style ofauthorial 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 ofperception as existing apart from that of the many characters who inhabit his vanity fair. More emphatically • THOMAS ALLEN NELSON is 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 ofthe Editorial Board ofFilm 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." byRobert Bledsoe in Rocky Mountain Revit·» Volume 31. Number 2. pages 96-99. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW39 Barry Lyndon 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 earlier films: 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...