Kubrick's Men by Rambuss Richard;

Author:Rambuss, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

So Barry Lyndon is another of those Kubrick film adaptations that adds some minor homosexual incident or texture that is not part of its literary source. Kubrick, who wrote the screenplay, apparently came up with this scene himself.6 There was a storytelling problem to be solved, and a splash of homosexuality turned out to be the answer to it. But then Kubrick further explains that the whole thing is “purely expositional,” a mere contrivance of narrative convenience.

Let us return to that drawn-out encounter in Kubrick’s Lolita, discussed in Chapter 3, when Quilty impersonates a cop who seems bent on picking up Humbert at the hotel. In terms of plot, that scene (also not in the book) leads nowhere, even as it goes stutteringly on and on for five minutes of screen time. In contrast, the raison d’être of the gay scene Kubrick inserts into Barry Lyndon is, according to Kubrick himself, strictly narratological: no more than just a storyline shortcut to get Barry out of the English army—and, as it happens, alas, into the far more brutal Prussian army. A drawn-out scene of Barry leading the way for a shirtless muscular and mustached soldier forced to walk the gauntlet for desertion, his hands bound in front of him, provides our introduction to it. This is the martial BDSM scene referred to earlier. It also gives us a foretaste of the male corporal punishment that will play such a prominent role in Part II of the movie, when Barry tyrannically assumes control of the Lyndon estate.

Let’s return to the interpolated homosexual scenes in Lolita and Barry Lyndon, one made during the regime of the Production Code and the other after the industry’s liberation from it. These two scenes—Quilty mock-cruising Humbert at the Overlook and the gay English army officers in the lake—appear to be, with respect to their ends, opposites. The latter is “purely expositional” (whatever that means), the former expositionally extraneous. But that scene from Lolita and this scene from Barry Lyndon amount to much the same thing: a homosexuality of apparent insignificance. What D. A. Miller’s alluring, ultra-auteur study of Fellini’s 8½ reports in passing about the anonymous good-looking young men who keep popping up in that film’s background might also be extended to the recurring homosexual presence in nearly all Kubrick’s movies: “They are there and yet they don’t seem to matter; they don’t seem to matter and yet they are there; in a word, they merely persist.”7

The way that Kubrick downplays his gay officers may come as a letdown. But the notion of a homosexuality that is merely incidental to Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, as well as to Kubrick’s men’s films more generally—and this persistently so—seems to me rather interesting. As if to maintain: What is a men’s film without some homosexual presence, however marginal, some gay ambiance, however evanescent? But then we hardly need Kubrick’s highly wrought cinematic case studies of men and male sexuality to tell us what we otherwise already know from the standard issue

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