Barry Lyndon, Kubrick, exploitation and control

Rating: 9/10 (16 July 2005)

I am sorry that the 197 earlier comments here are just too many to read to see if anyone else has ever made this point before, but I suspect I might have an original perspective on Kubrick and on Barry Lyndon.
Kubrick directed only ten films from "Paths of Glory" in 1957 to "Eyes Wide Shut" in 1999. He had certain pet themes that he fit into his movies whenever he could. For example, telephones: the crucial call from the general to the artillery battery in "Paths or Glory"; several key phone calls in "Strangelove"; the charming video phone call from orbit to the cute little girl and the birthday call from earth to the Jupiter ship in "2001"; and the telephone on the back of the tank in "Full Metal Jacket".
But the dominant theme in all Kubrick's major films is one form or another of domination, manipulation, control, exploitation. Some of the examples are obvious: ultra-violence and brainwashing in "Clockwork Orange", slavery in "Spartacus". Others are more implicit: supernaturally induced madness in "Shining"; boot camp and nightmarish combat in "Full Metal Jacket"; obsession and seduction in "Lolita" or "Eyes Wide Shut". And on the grandest galactic scale, the manipulation of human evolution in "2001".
So what about "Barry Lyndon"? There are all kinds of manipulations and exploitations to be found in the plot, but "Barry" goes a huge step beyond these.
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To explain... Thackeray and/or Kubrick have an artistic problem. They are telling the tale of a generally worthless human, so rotten that his own son challenges him to a duel, and Barry's only moral act in the entire three-hour movie is to refuse to shoot his son. The problem is multiplied for Kubrick by casting bland, white-bread Ryan O'Neal. Why should we care about Barry Lyndon at all?
Yet somehow Thackeray/Kubrick make us care, if not for Barry, then at least for what happens to him. That is what great story-telling does. By the time of the father-son pistol duel, with its gut-wrenching tension, we really are concerned that one will kill the other and it might be the end of Barry Lyndon.
So when Barry falls, we don't know if the wound is mortal or not. After Barry is lifted into a carriage and is driven off, the narrator says words to the effect of "Nobody knows what became of Barry Lyndon. Some say he went to London and died in poverty, and some say he went to Paris and died a rich man. But none of it matters because they are all dead now". But WAIT! I WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM!!
Then I realized how silly that was of me. Barry and all the others in the story are fictional characters; none of them had ever been alive to begin with. The ultimate manipulation here is the storyteller's manipulation of his audience. I don't know if the role of puppet-master belongs to Thackeray or Kubrick or both in what proportion, but someone pulled a fast one on me and I loved it.