Mammalian Politics
by Fustin Case
Stanley Kubrick’s new film, Barry Lyndon, has received unprecedentedly enthusiastic praise from the Illiterati, that band of vehement and ignorant individuals who write the movie reviews in our daily press. These nosegays of flattery are almost certainly hypocritical, and merely indicate that the Illiterati are afraid to denounce Kubrick at this stage of his career. After all, they mostly rejected 2001 and Clockwork Orange, and some of them even downed Strangelove; and, despite their carping, all three of those films went on to become box-office dynamite, and got elevated to High Art by the more prestigious critics on the slick quarterlies.
Afraid to denounce Barry Lyndon, the Illiterati have instead praised it for all the wrong reasons. It is “beautiful,” they say, it is “sumptuous”; it is even “gorgeous”; one would think they were reviewing a three-hour painting by Monet.
Barry Lyndon indeed swarms and bulges with exuberant, almost baroque loveliness, both visually and aurally. (Kubrick has drenched it in even more first-rate music than Clockwork Orange, and with more ironic effect.) But the overwhelming tone of the film is not beautiful but tragic, mordant, even moralistic. It is primarily a study in what Dr. Timothy Leary calls “mammalian politics,” the most primitive circuits in the human nervous system, concerned with power, status, and emotional game-playing. In ethological language, the subject is territorial behavior among a domesticated primate species.
Barry Lyndon is a precise neurological dissection of the robot imprints that underlie predatory politics.
The dominant image of the film is the duel. The opening sequence is a pistol duel, which kills the hero’s father and reduces the family to poverty. The dramatic pivot of the opening third is a second pistol duel, which sends Barry into exile. And the climax of the entire film is another pistol duel, one of the most shattering and emotion-churning sequences Kubrick has ever given us.
Other forms of the duel recur emblematically throughout. Card games, usually dishonest, play a repetitious role in the protagonist’s rise from Redmond Barry, impoverished exile, to Barry Lyndon, rich nobleman. Duels with the sword become his method of collecting bad gambling debts. To capture the beautiful woman he wants (for her money and status), Barry must first duel psychologically with her inconvenient husband; when the husband is done in and the lady captured, a second emotional duel, with her son, dominates the second half of the film and escalates with slow deadliness to the final pistol duel.
In all of these second-circuit contests (as Leary would call them), the motives are the classic mammalian drives: passion, status, territory (property). Barry is simply another primate, struggling to achieve the one-up position in a typical hominid tribe. Everybody else is struggling also for a one-up position, and each of these higher vertebrates accordingly is simultaneously pushing every other vertebrate one-down. These violent struggles (always inflated by mammalian heroic passions and the mysterious primate sense of “honor”) eventually resolve into grubby hustling for money. This is one of Kubrick’s prime ironies, but not really either an advance upon or a perversion from mammalian norms. Recent research shows that even chimpanzees can learn to compete for money. Cash is, as ethologists know, symbolic territory.
The naturalistic view of humanity has always been a Kubrick specialty, most notably in the grim parallels between the australopithecines and the astronauts in 2001. Even in Spartacus, burdened by a typically romantic Dalton Trumbo script, Kubrick’s Darwinian irony appeared in the cross-cuts between the Roman and slave armies, in which the totems of both the reactionary and the revolutionary forces were suspiciously tribalistic. The Killing, Kubrick’s early heist film, portrays cops and crooks as rival predator bands. You can’t forget, in watching Kubrick, that few of our ancestors were ladies and gentlemen; the majority of them, indeed, didn’t achieve the status of mammalhood, and had the morals and courtesy of Gila monsters.
But Barry Lyndon is as much Thackeray’s work as Kubrick’s—Thackeray, the least praised and (one suspects) least read of the great Victorians. Nobody is better qualified to resurrect William Makepeace Thackeray than Stanley Kubrick: the two fit each other as snugly as a key in a lock. I once claimed that Joyce invented the “alienation effect” before Brecht; but Thackeray had it even before Joyce. Both Barry Lyndon and Vanity Fair are classic examples of Brechtian-Joycean artistic judo, constantly moving the reader into highly charged emotional-political situations and deftly defusing audience identification at the most crucial points.
Bernard Shaw attempted something of this sort in his Saint Joan, explaining in the preface that he was writing tragedy, not melodrama, and defining the difference elegantly: “Melodrama deals with the conflict of good and evil, tragedy with the conflict of good and good.” Not quite; it would be better to define tragedy as the conflict of ambiguity and ambiguity. Here Thackeray and Kubrick excel and mutually reinforce each other. The magnificent, almost Euripidean complexity of the final duel in Barry Lyndon is such that, on the emotional-reflex level, one has been manipulated to sympathize with both parties and with neither of them. The alienation effect of the multiple shocks in that scene—the “turn of the screw,” Henry James called it—quite obliterates any emotional identification. One can neither rejoice with the victor nor hate him; nor can one too easily pity the loser. One has been raised above the mammalian politics of the antagonists, cannot take sides any longer, and can only see with objective clarity the idiocy of the whole value system that made the tragedy as predictable as a cycle in astronomy.
But one could write a symposium, rather than a single review, about this singularly intelligent film. The handling of the Reverend Runt, for instance, is perfect Thackeray: a caricature worthy of Dickens, but so much more human and complex than any of Dickens’ Hypocrites. The parallels with Oedipus and Hamlet are worth a whole essay in themselves (Barry Lyndon is almost Hamlet retold from Claudius’s point of view). Enough. Barry Lyndon is beautiful, yes, but it is much more than that. It is a philosophical Strangelove: a precise neurological and ethological dissection of the robot imprints that underlie war and predatory politics.
FUSTIN CASE is film critic for Confrontation magazine and author of the highly praised history of cinema, From Caligari to Vlad. He has a Ph.D. from Yale and a D.D. from the US Army. Dr. Case insists that, although he has written a book, he has never read one, since literature is obsolete. “Only the electronic media are worthy of serious consideration as synergetic cultural signals in the emerging nonlinear postindustrial omniinter-faced global village,” he told our interviewer, adding acidly that “the printing press is going the way of the brontosaurus, the dodo, the eohippus and the Vatican: from archaism, to quaintness, to Camp, to extinction.” He is usually quite stoned.