Listening to Stanley Kubrick by Gengaro Christine Lee

Author:Gengaro, Christine Lee [Gengaro, Christine Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2012-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

“I Was Lucky Enough to Have Superb Material to Work With”

Barry Lyndon

Stanley Kubrick’s work on A Clockwork Orange seems to have greatly influenced his next film, Barry Lyndon. Although on the surface, the two films might seem very different, there are aspects of the adaptations and the stories themselves that seem to suggest a connection between them. First, they are both period pieces—Barry Lyndon takes place in the eighteenth century, while A Clockwork Orange occurs in some unspecified future time. Second, they feature protagonists who are callow and selfish young men. And third, in both cases, Kubrick changed or omitted small details from the source material to make the protagonist more sympathetic. The music in Barry Lyndon likewise seems to bear the marks of Kubrick’s experience with the music in A Clockwork Orange. His collaboration with Wendy Carlos must have convinced Kubrick that what he truly needed on Barry Lyndon was an arranger—someone to manipulate Kubrick’s chosen excerpts in a way that would suit the film without interfering with the music’s integrity. By setting out to hire an arranger, Kubrick was fully embracing his method of “scoring” films using preexistent sources while also assuring that he would have the musical expertise of a composer without having to deal with a composer’s ego.

Once again, Kubrick drew from a literary source, this time William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, later published as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. In both A Clockwork Orange and Thackeray’s book, the main characters’ points of view are strikingly similar. Both novels are narrated in first person, and both main characters are rogues, who, despite their selfishness and questionable morals, can, at times, be charming. They are unreliable narrators in that they rationalize their behavior, fully believing in the rightness of their actions. In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick achieved a great intimacy between the protagonist and the audience by letting Alex narrate his own story, as he had in the book. Kubrick decided against this in Barry Lyndon. Instead, we have three title cards and an unnamed narrator. We lose some of the intimacy with the character, and sometimes Barry’s motivations remain obscure, whereas we are hardly ever in the dark about why Alex is doing something. The Redmond Barry of the book is very honest and forthcoming about his motives, and he is usually driven by greed or revenge.

In an interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick explained his decision to give the voiceover announcements to a neutral narrator. While acknowledging that Thackeray’s use of the unreliable narrator made the book “more interesting,” he claims that such a device “could not be repeated on the screen. It might have worked as comedy by the juxtaposition of Barry’s version of the truth with the reality on the screen, but I don’t think that Barry Lyndon should have been done as a comedy.”1 Ciment does not ask about the use of the device in A Clockwork Orange, which does sometimes add comedic elements, but does not in any significant way turn the film into a comedy.

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