Barry Lyndon: The Odyssey of a Nowhere Man

by Richard Combs

“When I take up a person, Mr Lyndon, he or she is safe. There is no question about them any more. My friends are the best people. I don’t mean that they’re the most virtuous, or indeed the least virtuous, or the cleverest of the stupidest or the richest or the best born. But the best. In a word, people about whom there is no question”.

Lord Wendover (André Morell) appears only briefly in Barry Lyndon – he’s even less prominent, under a different name, in the original novel by William Makepeace Thackeray – but this initial speech he delivers to the hero is magical. It’s a kind of open sesame to a world beyond the world of struggle he has known. So important is it that Kubrick imports it from Thackeray’s later, best-known novel, Vanity Fair. Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal) is introduced to his lordship after fleeing the consequences of a duel in Ireland, serving in the Seven Years War, scraping a living as an itinerant gambler, and marrying a woman “of fortune and condition”, Lady Honoria Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), and taking her name. But marriage, Barry’s mother warns him, is not enough to secure his future and that of his son Bryan. He must have something entirely of his own to fix him in the world: a title.

Lord Wendover, “one of the gentlemen of his Majesty’s closet”, is the route to such preferment. Acting on his advice, Barry begins a campaign of lavish entertaining and expenditure – funded by his wife – which includes raising a company of troops to fight the rebels against his Majesty King George III’s rule in America. George is grateful but doesn’t exactly embrace the giver: “That’s right, Mr Lyndon. Raise another company and go with them too”. Unembraced, Barry will drive himself to ruin pursuing the elusive title and finally disappear – broken and childless – from the picture.

He doesn’t make it to that place of perfect safety, that dream estate evoked by Lord Wendover. The curious thing, as his lordship’s list makes clear, is that these people are neither one thing nor the other, they have no particular qualities. If this doesn’t disqualify them, what qualifies them? It’s in his scramble to resolve this – to define himself, as it were, by identifying with that group nullity – that Barry destroys himself, and spreads not a little unhappiness around him. That place of perfect safety retreats before him like a mirage.

It is possible, of course, that things are meant to be that way – that this special estate is made to seem so indefinable, so ever-unattainable, deliberately to keep it out of the grasp of social undesirables like Barry. But his story is not the roistering account of an adventurer trying to claw his way up in the world, an arriviste on the make. It’s more an epic – with a hero who traverses a century in pursuit of his goal – about the historical uncertainties of ever actually arriving, which also makes it an absurd comedy of non- arrival. The indefiniteness of “the best people” points to the real issue at stake: the indefiniteness of Barry himself. Barry is not a man with the wrong qualities, he is a man without qualities (the voice-over narrator insists on a few, but they’re nowhere apparent). The great peculiarity of Barry Lyndon is that the plot of this period epic, running over three hours, is nothing more or

1 less than the story of its hero’s life. Yet its hero remains from beginning to end a nobody. He’s a vague romantic shimmer, with or without soft focus, perfectly conjured up by Ryan O’Neal (a good performance none the less; describing so many of the fusions of subject and screen persona in Kubrick can sound like a put-down of the performer). Through Barry’s life, the history of the 18th century is sketched; he can so perfectly embody his times because as a character he consists of so little. He represents his times while he struggles so futilely for a life in his times.

Can the absence in Barry be overcome by the titled nullity offered by Lord Wendover, by admission to the crème de la crème of nobodies? It’s a funny end to social ambition and existential longing, an absurd assimilation, though the impulse behind it is familiar enough – familiar in a modern context, in the absurdist tradition of much literature and film. This Barry Lyndon is a Georgian Being There; through the period trappings, through the mooning features of a hero apparently stuck in some iconic pose of 18th century ‘sensibility’, we can make out the anxious gaze of Woody Allen’s chameleon hero, Leonard Zelig.

Barry is a negative subject and the history of his century flows through him and around him. The film is divided in two (rather unequal) halves: in the first, Redmond Barry, the plucky Irish farm boy thrust out into the world after fighting a duel over his cousin Nora (Gay Hamilton), is a blank sheet of paper on which the 18th century will write lessons in brutality, hypocrisy and fortune-hunting; in the second half, Barry Lyndon will carry out the lessons. By the film’s end, the sheet of paper will have become a banker’s draft, bearing the date 1789, which cancels the Age of Enlightenment – and Barry – in favour of the Age of Revolution.

Which doesn’t mean that the period trappings can be taken lightly. In fact, they’re an important part of how Barry’s place in time is defined. Kubrick not only faithfully reproduced the look of the period – its stately homes, its furniture – he reproduced the way the period saw itself as looking. The furniture is bathed in a light which the inhabitants of the stately homes would have known. In one of his most famous experiments, to expand the light spectrum on film, Kubrick adapted a 50mm lens that had been developed by the Zeiss Company for use by NASA so that he could shoot interior scenes solely by candlelight.

18th century painters – Gainsborough, Reynolds, Zoffany, Hogarth – are used to key compositions, and occasionally as the source of exact images. The film seems to relish those moments when it can arrest itself, turn a dramatic scene into a frozen tableau, as if this part of his research for the film became an important part of Kubrick’s structure. It’s a way not just to frame the subject but also to conceptualise it, and as important as narrative flow. Adding to the static, distanced quality of the drama is a stylistic device Kubrick employs throughout like a self-conscious ‘frame’: a reverse zoom will open a scene on a close-up of some detail – like the pistols being loaded for Barry’s duel with the English Captain Quin (Leonard Rossiter) over the hand of his cousin Nora – before drawing back to compose a tableau: the duellists and their seconds by a lake in another painterly landscape.

The duel, incidentally, is the first time Barry will be replaced by a sum of money. Unwilling to lose Quin’s £1,500 a year, Nora’s brothers load the pistols with balls of tow;

2 Barry flees after he thinks he has killed Quin, who has only fainted from fright and later marries Nora. The culmination of this is Barry’s final disappearance in 1789, despatched back to Ireland on an annuity of 500 guineas. But throughout the film, the world Barry most seeks to occupy – that of business and money transactions to secure his position – is a death-like realm: the cheque-signing sessions with Lady Lyndon and their estate manager, as Barry sets about plundering her estate, have a distinctly funereal air. The episodes of Barry’s replacement by a sum of money are like so many little deaths.

What kind of hero does this leave us with? There is a significant mistake which Kubrick makes in an interview with film critic Michel Ciment when he says that Thackeray referred to Barry Lyndon as “a novel without a hero”. In fact, this is the subtitle that Thackeray gave to Vanity Fair. Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon is without a hero in the sense that his film is full of growing pains, the processes of character formation, but we never see a finished product. After his own father is killed in a duel (“over the purchase of some horses”) in the film’s very first shot, Barry passes through the hands of several father figures. His gambling mentor, the Chevalier de Balibari (Patrick Magee), even has a name that echoes Barry’s. Kubrick deletes the fact that in the original novel the Chevalier is Barry’s uncle.

Having been so frequently and yet still, it seems, incompletely fathered, Barry’s later disaster is that he fails to make it as a father himself: his enmity with his stepson Lord Bullingdon leads to his own wounding in a duel; his natural son Bryan dies in a riding accident. One article on the film (in the journal Film Criticism, Summer 1976) made the interesting claim, in relation to Ryan O’Neal’s “baby-fat sleekness” in the film, that he was “instructed to gain weight…in order to communicate Redmond’s infantile identity”.

In the articles and books on Kubrick which have come to the defence of Barry Lyndon over the years, a fascinating attempt at a kind of double rehabilitation has been carried out. Generally, efforts to rescue the film from the largely negative press it first received have been linked to efforts to rescue Barry as a character, to rewrite his story as that of a romantic outsider who is the victim of social malice and class antagonism, an adventurer who achieves ‘moral growth’ by the end.

But the greatness of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon is not dependent on falsifying Barry’s record as a hero. He remains, to use a term with a Woody Allen-ish spin, the eternal nebbish. As the fairy-tale analyst Bruno Bettelheim – one of the ‘experts’ used as talking-head commentators in Allen’s Zelig – says of its chameleon hero, he is a freak and outsider whose efforts to win acceptance make him, far from being a rebel, “the ultimate conformist”. ______

3