by David Mikics
Like the self-satisfied Alex in the first half of Clockwork, Barry seems to get what he wants when he marries the immensely wealthy Lady Lyndon, whose decrepit husband has expired while fiercely mocking Barry, his uproarious guffawing metamorphosing into a choking fit. (The scene is played to the hilt with a rich comic tang, one of the antic disruptions to the film’s slow pace.) But there is a nemesis ready to spoil Barry’s plan to become an aristocrat: as usual in a Kubrick movie, the hero’s scheme will fail. Barry inherits not only Lady Lyndon’s money but also her troublesome, snobbish son, Lord Bullingdon, very finely played by Leon Vitali. Barry whips the unfortunate Bully, who gasps and tearfully vows that Barry will never beat him again. The battle between Barry and his stepson stands at the center of the movie, much more than the rather lifeless relationship between Barry and Lady Lyndon.
Kubrick provides a spectacular climax to the Barry-Bullingdon quarrel when Barry throttles his stepson at a concert, in a nasty knockdown, drag-out tussle. Various onlookers pile on rugby-style while Kubrick operates his shaky handheld camera. “I know I hurt him. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I hurt him,” Ryan O’Neal remembered about the fight scene.12
Kubrick sets off the raucous chaos of the Barry-Bullingdon fight with the most sentimental scene by far in his work, the death of little Bryan, apple of his father’s eye (the pampered young boy falls from a horse). Kubrick no doubt wanted this Dickensian weepiness as a counter to the irony exhibited through most of Barry Lyndon, but I have never been able to reconcile myself to it. Here Kubrick wholly surrenders to the Hollywood tearjerker mode that he scorned everywhere else in his work. I much prefer the film’s sinuous, asexual Reverend Runt, perfectly played by Murray Melvin as a thoroughly nauseating figure of virtue, to Bryan the doomed innocent, who seems so out of place here. Bryan’s demise, complete with deathbed instructions to his parents about their forthcoming meeting in heaven, is too direct in its pathos to fit properly in the movie, and in the end he is more a Spielberg boy than a Kubrick one (though Spielberg would doubtless have suspensefully resuscitated him). I like better Barry’s amiable uncle Jack Grogan, expiring after a skirmish, who tells Barry, “Kiss me, me boy, for we’ll never meet again.”
The death of his son is a blow of fate from which Barry never recovers. Bryan, while he lived, provided Barry’s only real delight in the movie. Teaching the boy to fence, he discovers a lightly competitive playfulness he never knew before. The father-son bond is too easy and too winning in this hidebound aristocratic world, and so Bryan must die, Kubrick’s sacrifice to enforce Barry’s tragic loneliness.
Barry, utterly abandoned to sorrow after Bryan’s death, agrees to a duel with the vile Bullingdon, who has returned to assert his filial rights over Lady Lyndon’s estate. What follows is one of Kubrick’s masterpieces: a slow-moving, perfectly paced faceoff between Barry, attired like Gainsborough’s blue boy, and Bullingdon, who proves both cowardly and despicably vengeful.
The duel is Barry’s finest moment, consisting not in what he does but what he doesn’t do. Granted the first shot by the coin toss, he refuses to fire at Bullingdon, and declares he has received satisfaction.
Barry’s grief-induced insensibility gives him an advantage in the duel. With his beloved son Bryan dead, what has he left to live for? And so he behaves nobly, throwing away his shot rather than aiming at Bullingdon. The dreadful Bullingdon, who vomits from fear when he thinks he has to face Barry’s shot, now aims hard at his stepfather. When Barry falls, he yelps in childish joy. (Trying to get Vitali to vomit, Kubrick first tried semiraw chicken and then—this did the trick—raw egg.)
Kubrick began the movie with an extreme long shot of Barry’s father being killed in a duel, beautifully echoing the final scene of Max Ophüls’s masterpiece The Earrings of Madame de . . . That opening was comic: we see the father plop down abruptly in a stunning Gainsborough landscape, with the faraway death cosseted by Hordern’s exceedingly polite, refined voice-over. The climactic duel between Barry and Bullingdon, by contrast, is deadly serious, confronting Bullingdon’s petty vengeance with the nobility of spirit that desperation has brought out in Barry.
The duel revolves around the grimly conventional phrase “to receive satisfaction.” Barry has never received satisfaction. Instead of truly existing, he has led a vicarious life as a pretend aristocrat. Like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Barry is a sexual hedonist, and he spends money like water, but actual enjoyment remains out of reach for him except when playing with Bryan, who is now lost forever. Barry rises in the world as the hapless Johnny Clay of The Killing could not. Unlike Johnny, he has an idea of belonging. But it remains only an idea, and finally, a broken man, he belongs only to his mother, who succors him after he loses his leg in the duel. Like Humbert, he ends a damned, wretched figure.
Kubrick cannily generates suspense as well as ceremonial stasis during the duel, which is accompanied by what sounds like an Ennio Morricone version of the Handel Sarabande we hear so often in Barry Lyndon. The duel scene crawls along at a stately pace, while birds flutter in the nave of the church where Barry and Bullingdon face off. The play of light and shadow, like the rustle of the birds, ravishes the viewer, reminding us that digital technology cannot yet approach the fine gradations available to Kubrick’s camera. As Adam Eaker notes, a single ray of light contains various tones of the same color, and different levels of shade, and Kubrick plays on this variety.13 Vitali’s 4K restoration of Barry Lyndon burnishes the film and adds 5.1 surround sound, a feature that Kubrick would surely have wished for just as Bach would have wanted a piano instead of his harpsichord. (From Clockwork Orange on, Kubrick insisted on monaural sound for his films because it was safer than stereo: movie theaters often had broken speakers.)
Tony Lawson, Barry Lyndon’s editor, remembered that the duel scene took six weeks to edit. Kubrick painstakingly matched shots from various takes, just as Glenn Gould, late in his career, patched together his recordings from short segments of different performances.
After the duel we observe the crippled Barry lying in bed playing cards with his mother, “utterly baffled and beaten,” as the narrator remarks. The least painterly shot in Barry Lyndon is the last we see of him, a nouvelle vague freeze frame as he stoops into the carriage with his mother, his shrewdest and most loyal companion.
Kubrick follows Barry’s exit with a gorgeous sterile tableau, the wordless shot-reverse-shot between Bullingdon and Lady Lyndon that ends the movie. As she signs over living expenses to her ex-husband Redmond Barry, we glimpse the date above her signature: 1789. A revolution is coming that will sweep away the stagnant hierarchy that triumphs in the movie. Yet mother and son, Bullingdon and Lady Lyndon, now reunited with no Barry between them, live forever in this moment. (When Spielberg realized Kubrick’s plan for his final film, A.I., he likewise ended with a perfect union between mother and son.) The brief intimacy between father and son, Barry and Bryan, has been shattered by fate, but there is an unbreakable bond between mother and son. This difference echoes Kubrick’s own relation to his parents: from his mother he received open-ended approval, from his father the ambition to be a doctor, which Kubrick the son frustrated by nearly flunking out of high school. Tension and disappointment animate father-son relations in Barry Lyndon as they did in the teenage Kubrick’s life.
Kubrick’s parents visited him during Barry Lyndon postproduction in late 1974. Jack and Gert Kubrick came from Los Angeles to visit their son at Abbots Mead, since Kubrick had long ago decided never to fly again, and his last trip back to America, by ship, had been for the release of 2001. (Kubrick as a young man had learned to fly a small plane and been traumatized by what he said was the uncertainty of air traffic signals: all his life Kubrick had a fear of factors beyond his control.).
The family matrix was on Kubrick’s mind. Barry Lyndon, like its successor The Shining, is a notably Oedipal movie. Critic Julian Rice describes the love scene between Barry and Lischen, a young mother who gives him shelter during his early tra
vels: “As they embrace, the child looks up at them with large, solemn eyes.”14 Later on, when Lady Lyndon says to Bullingdon, “Lord Bullingdon, you have insulted your father,” he responds like Hamlet: “Mother, you have insulted my father.”
Balibari is a father figure to Barry, but a more powerful father, George III, fails to grant him the lordship that he craves. He remains Mr. Redmond Barry, and never becomes Lord Lyndon. Telling a bedtime story to Bryan in which he boasts of cutting off heads in battle, Barry admits to Bryan that he didn’t get to keep the heads: “The heads always remain the property of the king.”
Barry never gets to exercise fatherly authority. Like Clockwork’s Alex, he is in the end a grown-up boy, but unlike that happy-go-lucky ruffian, he is conscious of being dwarfed in a world much bigger than he is. Finally he remains a minor figure framed in a faraway scene, thwarted in every possible way. Kubrick’s next hero, Jack Torrance of The Shining, will be another such case.
7
Something Inherently Wrong with the Human Personality:
The Shining
IN EARLY 1977 Warners executive John Calley sent Kubrick the galleys of a new novel by a young horror writer. The novel was The Shining and its author, Stephen King, was already well known for Carrie (1974) and Salem’s Lot (1975). Kubrick had been thinking of making a horror movie, but most books in the genre left him cold. King’s book was different. Despite its flawed, baggy style, it had a mythic punch. The book was all about a father going to pieces and terrorizing his wife and son. A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon featured two sons, Alex and Bullingdon, whose angry energy triumphed over an older generation. The Shining’s son, Danny, is much younger—a boy of about six—and the contest between him and his father is a matter of life and death: bloodthirsty Jack chases Danny with his axe.
The Shining is the story of Jack Torrance, a schoolteacher from Vermont and an aspiring writer. Looking for seclusion that will allow him to write, he takes a job as winter caretaker of the Overlook, an immense, empty hotel in the Colorado mountains. The hotel turns Jack into a “thing,” a monster aching to murder his wife and child. King’s book is about a writer trying to escape, like King himself, from alcoholism. Kubrick cuts the novel’s elaborate backstory, its flashbacks to Jack’s childhood and his life in Vermont, and makes The Shining puzzling and spare in a way that King never could.
King’s novel dealt with two themes dear to Kubrick’s heart: the failure of mastery and vicarious, hollowed-out existence. Jack’s violent effort to control or “correct” (kill) his wife and son falls short, and in Kubrick’s film he ends up frozen to death in a snowy hedge maze. The Shining, which confronts family violence and male rage even more directly than Barry Lyndon, would turn out to be Kubrick’s most personal movie so far.
In June 1977 Kubrick chose a screenwriting partner: Diane Johnson, a novelist and professor at Berkeley. Kubrick had read Johnson’s adroit, spooky 1974 novel The Shadow Knows, told in the scared voice of a woman whom the reader can’t entirely trust. Johnson got a phone call from Kubrick and went to London, where the two of them, working at Kubrick’s home, produced draft after draft of The Shining’s screenplay. They talked about Freud, horror fiction, and Bruno Bettelheim on fairy tales.
Kubrick rather than Johnson invented the most hideous and memorable scenes in the screenplay: Room 237’s bathtub nude turned into a decomposing old woman—an echo of a shocking moment in Clouzot’s Diabolique (1955)—and the twin elevators gushing blood. The latter shot became the film’s preview, omnipresent in movie theaters during Christmas season 1979. As usual, Kubrick needed to get the shot exactly right: he used so much fake blood during the many takes of the elevator scene that the villagers downstream from Borehamwood Studios were convinced a massacre had occurred.1
Kubrick felt a surprising affinity for the murderous Jack. Johnson said that Jack Torrance “had to be a specially demanding verbal combination—intelligent, unpleasant, mordant, and sarcastic. What struck me was how well Stanley wrote Jack. Much better than I could. Considering the ease with which Stanley wrote Jack, you wouldn’t imagine Stanley to be the pleasant, kindly husband and father he is.”2 Jack is in fact Kubrick’s doppelgänger: his madness reflects the director’s own work ethic. Jack the writer is more than dedicated, he is obsessive, just like Kubrick the filmmaker. Unlike Kubrick, though, he has no partners in his creative project, no sense of spontaneity or teamwork, just a will to control. And unlike Kubrick, he answers frustration with wrath. Losing control makes him a monster.
Jack is a type, an empty vessel filled by the anger that storms through the American male. No one embodied such anger with more panache than Jack Nicholson. The hopped-up Nicholson, with his big bad wolf grin and agile quotation mark eyebrows, made gonzo fury look charming.
Kubrick early on settled on Nicholson to play Jack Torrance. Nicholson had just won an Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), in which he starred as the rebel misfit Randle McMurphy. At the time Nicholson’s life was in turmoil. He was breaking up with Anjelica Huston, and he had just found out that the woman he thought was his mother was actually his grandmother, and his elder sister really his mother. Nicholson was a refugee from the coked-up LA scene, but there were drugs in London too. He modeled his mad Jack partly after Charles Manson, whose gang had murdered actress Sharon Tate, girlfriend of Roman Polanski, a good friend of Nicholson. He called his performance “sort of balletic,” and he was right: Nicholson moves with grace as he jabs the air with his fists, thumping and hollering in macho release.3
Kubrick wanted Shelley Duvall as his Wendy. He and Johnson had earlier thought that Wendy would be a strong, defiant character, perhaps to be played by Jane Fonda or Lee Remick. But Kubrick went in the opposite direction with the gangly, twitchy Duvall, who was so high-strung as to seem almost otherworldly. A regular in Robert Altman’s movies, she had just won at Cannes for her role in Altman’s Three Women (1977). Duvall’s job in the film was to be terrified, at times to the point of hysteria. To this end, Kubrick made her life miserable on set, yelling at her over her mistakes, and he warned his crew not to show her any sympathy. Duvall knew why Kubrick was making her suffer, and she acknowledged later that she learned more about acting from him than she had from Altman. But the filming was no fun for her.
Vivian Kubrick depicts her father taunting Duvall in her short documentary about the making of The Shining. (She shot more than 100,000 feet of film, but the movie that exists is just half an hour long.) Gordon Stainforth remarked that Kubrick wanted the scenes cut out in which “he was very warm and nice” and “what was left were the sequences of him shouting at Shelley in the snow.”4 He wanted to play the ogre, not papa bear, and align himself with the madly irate Jack.
The last two members of The Shining’s ensemble were both inspired choices. For Dick Hallorann, Nicholson recommended his friend Scatman Crothers, a singer and television and film actor. Crothers, then seventy years old, was a kind, genial man with a bowlegged stride. As Hallorann he played the nice guy, cautious by instinct, with a touch of severity underneath. Kubrick’s practice of doing take after take—invariably saying something like “Let’s go again” rather than telling his actors what they had done wrong—took its toll on Crothers. When Nicholson axed him, Crothers had to fall thirty times. Kubrick filmed more than a hundred takes of one seven-minute sequence, Hallorann’s early conversation with Danny over ice cream.
Crothers sometimes had trouble remembering his lines, but that wasn’t the case with the boy who played Danny. Leon Vitali headed a crew that interviewed more than four thousand American boys before selecting five-year-old Danny Lloyd, the son of a railroad engineer. Vitali was Danny’s dialogue coach and constant companion on set. Lloyd had no idea that he was making a horror movie: he saw none of the paralyzing frights of the Overlook Hotel, no blood, no ghosts.
The Shining relies on Danny Lloyd’s firm and assured performance. When he crouches in his hiding place and hears his father’s mad bellowing, he is
a boy in a Grimms fairy tale, stark and still. We see Danny watching a Road Runner cartoon: like Chuck Jones’s agile hero, he outwits his enemy. Danny finally wins by retracing his steps in the maze, tricking the ogre of a father who wants to murder him.
Along with the actors, the star of The Shining is the Steadicam. Kubrick’s cameraman Garrett Brown had recently invented a device to produce tracking shots without tracks or a dolly. (Brown first used it in John Avildsen’s Rocky [1976].) “It’s like a magic carpet,” Kubrick said.5 A spring-jointed platform attached to the cameraman eliminated the bumps and jerks that came with handheld shots. The Steadicam created shots that were perfectly smooth, the camera gliding forward without a ripple.
Kubrick wanted the Steadicam to accompany Danny’s Big Wheel as he pedaled through the halls of the Overlook. So he put Brown in a wheelchair equipped with a speedometer, his camera about fifteen inches above the ground. As Wendy wheels the hotel’s room service cart to give her husband a late breakfast, Kubrick crosscuts to Danny manically driving his Big Wheel through the Overlook’s corridors. Forward-driving Danny, whose play has the determination of work, will turn out to be the hero of the movie. Like the pulsating heartbeat that later invades the film when Jack goes crazy, the sound rhythm of Danny’s endless rolling sets the pace: muffled when on the hotel’s carpets, loud when he crosses its hardwood floors. (Kubrick is fond of sound-based timekeeping: remember Dave’s heavy breathing in 2001 when he crosses the spaceship to disconnect HAL.)