A man at war with the cosmos

Rating: Null/10 (18 July 2007)

Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" project was initially a project about Napoleon Bonaparte. Simply titled "Napoleon", the film aimed to portray the life of a lowly man who had seemingly conquered his environment. Like an obsessive film director (guess who), Napoleon tamed his surroundings, forcing the cosmos to bow to his own singular vision.
Kubrick envisioned this film as being awash with intricate plans, strategies, military formations, and animated schematics. His Napoleon was a man who took control and waged war, not against the Spanish, Russians or Italians, but against an indeterministic, malevolent universe.
But of course, like Johnny Clay in "The Killing", Napoleon does eventually fail. He suffers a series of military defeats which leads to him realising that, even without his obsessive micromanagement, all his battles would have achieved the same results. Variables far beyond his reach governed the final outcome.
The Napoleon project failed to materialise for various financial reasons. Always the pragmatist, however, Kubrick then decided to make the complete thematic opposite of Napoleon.
And so we have "Barry Lyndon". Unlike Napoleon, Barry doesn't scheme or try to force things into position. A man at the mercy of (or oblivious to) the cosmos, he does as told, taking fortunes and misfortunes as they occur.
While Kubrick's "form as content" approach dictated that Napoleon be awash with intricate plans. . .plans in which a mere man seemingly thwarts nature (a largely Gnostic nature that is evil, malevolent and hostile), Barry Lyndon's "form as content" approach dictates that Kubrick's universe completely subvert Barry the man.
And so we have a cosmic tragedy in which the very form of the film attempts to reduce man to nothingness. Kubrick's painterly canvas locks his actors into predetermined compositions, such that they appear to have no free-will, unable to break free. He portrays the universe (director) as the ultimate artist, its beautiful brush-strokes concealing its suffocating ugliness, life itself portrayed as being the artistic result of the universe's unmappable web of rules and formulae.
Similarly, each event in the film is portrayed as being the direct result of some prior occurrence. The first scene highlights this continuous past/present relationship. Watch too how the clouds, trees and walls in the first shot "frame" Barry' father; man is a spec on the horizon, playing his ritualised games as the cosmic order engulfs him.
Likewise, the character's are all bound by duty and rigid social roles. Their lives are ritualised, robotic, learnt and rehearsed. While "Dr Strangelove" and "2001" are swathed in birth and sex imagery, here Kubrick uses a semiotic fabric of chance. Every scene is awash with games of chance, duels, courtship, cards, gambling, luck etc, all of which bolster the notion of fate on Barry's life.
Even the narrator subverts Barry's story. While the acting and visual compositions attempt to relegate Barry to the background, the narrator attempts to undermine his tale by negating all drama and tension. Why are you watching this man, he says? He is nobody. ("Though this encounter is not recorded in any history books, it was memorable enough for those who took part")
Of course, visually, the film is unsurpassed. But this is a film in which beauty and cosmetics seduce us away from innate malevolence. This is a Schopenhaueren world in which finiteness is at war with the infiniteness of Time and Space. A world in which the present is constantly Becoming without Being, man a desire machine continually wishing without being satisfied, his efforts always thwarted, victory rarely won. Time, and the transitoriness of all things, are merely the form under which the will to live, has revealed to Time the futility of its efforts. In this world, no man is happy, always living in expectation of better things, always striving or demanding "satisfaction". A world in which man accepts the present as something that is only temporary and regards it only as a means to accomplish his aims. Beauty, sensuality, aesthetics, splendour and riches, are thus futile attempts to escape the inherent misery. Disillusion behind illusion.
Thus, Kubrick places emphasis on the landscape and background to such an extent that his visual style subverts the character's on screen drama. Typical cinematic language is therefore REVERSED, such that we have a BACKGROUND which is constantly fighting to drown out Barry's FOREGROUND story. Expanding the metaphor further and we have a universe which gradually dwarfs and suffocates Barry's life.
Kubrick's constant use of long zoom ins and zooms outs further highlights this theme. Here is man, ZOOM OUT. . .and here is man put in context. The irony is that whenever Barry attempts to assert himself over this natural law, he's punished terribly.
The most severe punishment occurs during the duel at the end of the film. After a misfire, fate rolls in Barry's favour, giving him the opportunity to shoot his opponent down. But no. Refusing yet again to be a pawn, Barry altruistically chooses to exhibits free will at its most pure. He sacrifices himself. And of course he's punished dearly for this. Frozen in time, he's robbed of his leg, immobilised, pinned in place by history, no longer able to prowl his pretty canvas.
And so the entire film is about the inevitability of loss. Barry loses his father in the first shot, his first love (cousin) in the next. He loses his home, his family, his surrogate father (the general), his second surrogate father (chevalier), his son, his wealth and finally his leg. With the loss of his leg, he is then literally frozen as "art". As historical image.
Significantly, the only object in the film able to outpace Kubrick's zoom out is a coffin, which moves inexorably toward the moving camera. As death is constant, all history is about loss.
20/10 - Doomed to never be fully appreciated.