Stanley Kubrick by Nathan Abrams

Author:Nathan Abrams [Abrams, Nathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER018000 Performing Arts / Individual Director (see Also Biography & Autobiography / Entertainment & Performing Arts), BIO005000 Biography & Autobiography / Entertainment & Performing Arts, SOC049000 Social Science / Jewish Studies
Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Mr. Barry Kubrick

Kubrick identified with Barry, perceiving in him an avatar. As an American Jew living in an English country house in rural Hertfordshire, Kubrick surely felt removed from the society that enveloped him, as somewhat of a social pariah. When Thackeray writes, “You who have never been out of your country, know little what it is to hear a friendly voice in captivity.” Kubrick surely empathized with the feeling of exile. “Clearly,” B. F. Dick writes, “Kubrick saw something of himself in the novel: the boy from the Bronx, now London based, who compensated for his lack of university education by acquiring a knowledge of the arts that few academics could match.” Norman Kagan adds, “Perhaps it was Stanley Kubrick’s stately and beautiful eighteenth-century English manor home itself that eventually led to his choosing a novel of that period for his next film.” Gavin Lambert feels, “There’s a lot of that character in Stanley. Not the defeated Barry but the fuck-the-world Barry. That great moment after the marriage when they go into the coach and Marisa Berenson says something stupid, and he just blows smoke rings. Fabulous! It’s very Kubrick-esque. A gesture I could very easily see him do. It’s his wicked, humorous side coming out. It’s a wonderful comment on her, and why he’s married her, and this extraordinary cold indifference is there at the centre of him. It’s a fable, not a realistic film in any sense. It’s his Ophüls side.” After all, O’Neal was the only American among a European cast, much resembling Kubrick’s own position within a British film industry.8

Barry is an outsider, a theme that has distinct parallels with Kubrick’s previous films. Kubrick, as we know, admired such types. Back in 1960 he had praised the “outsider who is passionately committed to action against the social order.” He was referring to such criminals, maniacs, poets, lovers, and revolutionaries as Johnny Clay, Dax, Spartacus, and Humbert. To this list can be added Alex and Barry. All were “outsiders fighting to do some impossible thing.”9

Kubrick communicated Barry’s loneliness and isolation in spatial, color, and musical terms. Many critics complain that the film was cold, alienating, beautiful but empty. Pauline Kael describes it as “chilly,” “an ice-pack of a movie,” “a coffee-table movie; the stately tour of European high life is like a three-hour slide show for art-history majors.” But they misunderstand that the medium is the message, as Kubrick surely intended us to feel this way. His glacial style in Barry Lyndon not only communicates Barry’s estrangement from the surrounding society but also transmits Kubrick’s feelings about it. This society is as empty as the void that envelops Bowman in 2001. (And, anticipating Barry, Bowman ends up on Jupiter in a bedroom decorated in an eighteenth-century style.) Georg Friedrich Handel’s mournful, slow, and sad sarabande accompanies Barry throughout the film at the same time as, in Frank Rich’s words, “Kubrick’s austere pictorial style emphasizes the lonely spaces and chilling desolation.” Kubrick typically positioned Barry as a tiny figure in a large frame, often utterly alone in a cold and inhospitable world.

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