On William Thackerayās Barry Lyndon and Stanley Kubrickās choice to adapt an obscure and trying novel
āBarry Lyndon is a boring movie. It is wonderfully shot. It is beautifully costumed.Ā But it is a film made by a guy who is bored.ā āJay Weidner from Room 237
Near the end of my extended stay in Hotel Graduate School, one particular blowhard of a professor boasted he was quite sure he had never experienced the emotional quality of boredom before. No one in the class believed him. Was it possible for someone, anyone, to go through the decades-long crucible of schooling without succumbing to at least one soul-crushing, mind-numbing brawl with boredom? Surely one teacherās droning delivery style or an underwhelming book selection would stun even the sharpest and most curious intellect into mental paralysis. But what if a slow-paced and seemingly boring film was secretly a smokescreen for an exploration into the horrific psyche of a historical man?
I remember back when I worked at Blockbuster, I came home from work to find my manager/roommate halfway through a free-employee rental of Barry Lyndon. My buddy told me Barry Lyndon took so long to make because it was only filmed with natural light. Other than knowing it had amazing cinematography, I knew it was a period piece aristocratic war film, but that was about it. In the summer of 2013, I saw Rodney Ascherās documentary Room 237, and it tickled my brain in all kinds of ways. One of the most marvelous features of the documentary is how it seamlessly stitches together footage from Kubrickās entire filmography to make the case that there is a remarkable continuity of themes, composition, and symbols embedded across his films, howeverĀ Barry Lyndon didnāt get much admiration in the documentary. According to one of the obsessive critics in Room 237, it is a boring film made by a bored genius, so I backburnered getting around to see it. (Perhaps there was an unconscious urge to keep at least one Kubrick film in the yet-to-see category?)
A few years went by and I got around to reading Stephen Kingās The Shining, but I realized there was no way for me to appreciate the novel on its own terms because Kubrickās version was so indelibly stamped in my consciousness. This gave me an idea: because I had seen all of Kubrickās Warner Brothers output, except Barry Lyndon, I decided Iād read the book first, to get some idea of why he chose to dedicate four years of his lifeĀ adapting it.
I had heard two anecdotes about Kubrickās process for choosing books to adapt. The first one is that he would walk through a bookstore or library and pick up a novel at random and begin reading. If it didnāt grab him and activate his imagination after a few pages, he set it back on the shelf and would continue his search.
The other anecdote is specifically related to how he chose Kingās novel: Kubrick had decided his follow-up to Barry Lyndon would be a horror film, so he had his assistant bring a box full of horror novels to his office. The books were stacked on the desk, and Kubrick would go through them one by one. As soon as he realized a novel was not worth adapting, he would throw it across the room, where it would hit the wall and then fall back into the cardboard box on the floor. While this process occurred, the assistant residing in the adjoining office became accustomed to the semi-regular thwap of hearing paperbacks hit the wall, until one afternoon the assistant noticed a significant amount of time had elapsed without hearing that familiar thwap. That is how the assistant knew Kubrick had found his next project.
This amusing anecdote aside, what I sought to determine from reading William Thackerayās novel was: Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā
1) Why Kubrick chose this book,
2) What activating imagery, plot points, or themes would come across as common Kubrickian elements, and
3) Which scenes could I predict would make it into the film adaptation?
So after I checked with my local bookstores and found out none of them had the mid-19th-century novel, I ordered a copy from Amazon. Unfortunately, the copy I got was published by some non-profit community arts group that set their edition from a crappy public domain copy nā paste job. This made an exceedingly old-style of prose harder to read because the pagination meant there were no paragraph indentations. Hereās a photo of what an average page looked like:
Barry Lyndon, by any modern measurement, is not an easy read. Many of the storytelling conventions of prose fiction from its time period donāt work for modern audiences, even ones accustomed and trained to read difficult prose styles (such as English majors and grad students.) Despite some savagely witty putdowns and clever lines scattered throughout the novel, the prose relies far too much on summary, telling the reader the story rather than showing it through dramatic action. Most of the inconsequential plot events involve a vast cast of underdeveloped characters. Barry Lyndon is one of many novels in a genre called the picaresque (which you can read all about at this helpful Wikipedia article: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picaresque_novel) Suffice to say, this book lacks most of what makes other novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote, and Candide enjoyable and memorable reads. If Kubrick had not adapted Barry Lyndon, I doubt it would even be remembered today.
That being said, here are a few similarities between Barry Lyndon the novel and Kubrickās The Shining:
* Both Barry Lyndon and Jack Torrance are writers, although the former is only doing so near the end of his lifeĀ when he writes his memoirs
* The Lyndon Castle is similar to The Overlook Hotel in its impressive grandeur
* Both protagonists demonstrate a violent contempt for their wives
* Both struggle with alcoholism
*There is significant animosity in a battle with a willful little boy (although in Lyndonās case, it is with his stepson Bullingdon)
* The protagonists are both vain and have an unreliable sense of their own talents, reality, and self-worth
* An old hag character repulses the protagonist in both (The beautiful blonde who transforms into a zombie crone in the bathroom of Room 237 and Madame de Liliengarten who is described as a āhideous fat Dutchwomanā)
* Both feature a certain fascination with an elite, fashionable society (āI never had a taste for anything but genteel company, and hate all descriptions of low lifeā and āall the best peopleā)
* Gold & red are frequent, reoccurring colors in both
*In the end, both main characters end up āstuckā/frozen in an isolating imprisonment
One other thing to consider when comparing these two works is their reputation, specifically their cultural footprint. Iām sure a cursory Google search might yield some results, but what I haveĀ in mind is salient, recallable instances of these artworks, things the average pop-cultural obsessive would recognize, even if they hadnāt read or seen the works. (Think about all the people who know āHeeeeeeereās Johnny!ā or recognize when a family goes in costume as the Torrance family for Halloween.) To the best of my recollection, when it comes to either the novel or the film, I can think of no allusions, no quotable lines of dialogue, no memes, and very little in the way of critical appreciation. (Knowledgeable readers of this Tumblr are encouraged to send me proof to the contrary.)Ā
This raises a question for me: is there a good reason for this lack of conspicuous cultural relevance? Is Barry Lyndon (the novel) just a minor work compared to Thackerayās Vanity Fair? Is Barry Lyndon (the film) merely a minor work by a genius, a stepping stone between two masterpieces?
The only way to answer this question is to watch the film and report back in a follow-up post. (The link will be forthcoming following the viewing.) At 184 minutes in length, it is this humble writerās hope the film will be more than a āfilm made by a guy who is bored.ā
UPDATE (10/3/2018)
Well, I saw the film, and the original plan was to make a follow-up post about its merits, but I decided this brief addendum would suffice. Hereās the skinny: the cinematography IS gorgeous and yes, the pace of the film can seem slow at times, but it was a much more entertaining story filtered through Kubrickās skillful sensibilities. At times, the cinematic image is like seeing a classical painting come to life. What is particularly interesting is how the narrative action replicates the pace of what modern audiences might imagine life moved āback in the dayā, but that doesnāt make it boring, just decompressed. There is much rich symbolism woven throughout, which Juli Kearns has analyzed and documented in far greater detail than I ever could at her amazingly thorough website:Ā http://idyllopuspress.com/idyllopus/film/bl_toc.htm.Ā
So, in conclusion, when it comes to the eternal battle between novels and films, Barry Lyndon (the film) is the winner, and it is most definitely worth seeing if you love Kubrickās other films.Ā
