In Thackeray’s book, there is no indication that Barry loves or even likes Lady Lyndon. He says: “Few men are so honest as I am; for few will own to their real motives, and I don’t care a button about confessing mine. . . . I made the acquaintance of Lady Lyndon with ulterior views.”28 After the death of Sir Charles, the Lady Lyndon of the book is being actively courted by Lord George Poynings, a man to whom she eventually turns to help her escape her marriage, which has become unbearable. Barry admits to using her, ignoring her, mistreating her, and not allowing her to see her own son if she is disagreeable. Furthermore, he knows that if he shows her the slightest affection, she will do what he asks. The only reason he is ever kind to her is to gain some sort of advantage.
Although she is described in the film as a woman of great wealth and great beauty, and she is played by actress and model Marisa Berensen, the Barry of the book does not find Lady Lyndon attractive at all. In describing her, and the staff that traveled with her, the Redmond of the book says, “In another [carriage] would be her female secretary and her waiting-women; who, in spite of their care, never could make their mistress look much better than a slattern.”29 After a year a marriage he says of her:
She had grown very fat, was short-sighted, pale in comparison, careless about her dress, dull in demeanour; her conversations with me characterized by a stupid despair, or a silly blundering attempt at forced cheerfulness still more disagreeable: hence our intercourse was but trifling, and my temptations to carry her into the world, or to remain in her society of necessity exceedingly small. She would try my temper at home, too, in a thousand ways.30
The second important difference between the novel and the film is Kubrick’s addition of the duel between Barry Lyndon and Lord Bullingdon. The event does not happen in the book, but its presence in the film provides a single point of conflict that effectively separates Barry and his mother from the Lyndon family. It puts the dissolution of the marriage in the hands of Lord Bullingdon, rather than Lady Lyndon. The duel also allows Kubrick to show Barry’s basic decency—he refuses to shoot Bullingdon, even when given a clear shot. The reward for his decency is a bullet in the leg. Bullingdon comes off worse here, especially because we haven’t seen more evidence of Barry’s indiscretions. In fact, Barry looks less like an evil conniver and more like a careless spendthrift with ambitions, however foolish, of moving up in class.
Conclusion
The music in Barry Lyndon is an extremely important part of the film, but it is Kubrick’s visual achievements that have garnered the most discussion. In addition to Leonard Rosenman’s Oscar for Best Score/Adaptation, the film received three additional Academy Awards. John Alcott won for Best Cinematography; Ken Adam, Roy Walker, and Vernon Dixon won for Best Art/Set Direction; and Ulla-Britt Sölerlund and Milena Canonero won for Best Costume Design. In total, Barry Lyndon received seven nominations, including three for Kubrick, for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture, and Best Director.31
Kubrick had beautiful scenery and sets to film, and he took great pains to show the lush rolling green hills and modest homes of Redmond’s native Ireland and the extravagance of the palaces of Europe. Kubrick’s art directors transformed various castles, palaces, and estate houses in Ireland, England, and Scotland (with some exteriors done in Germany) for nearly all of the locations. In filming in these castles, Kubrick was inspired to shoot scenes with natural light whenever possible, and in some cases, to shoot by candlelight. Such a feat would not have been possible were it not for the Zeiss camera lenses Kubrick used on the film. Developed for the Apollo moon landings, the Zeiss lens featured a wide aperture and fixed focal length that allowed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (among others), to take pictures in the low light on the moon’s surface. With the Zeiss lenses, and the modifications made by a few technical innovators, Kubrick was able to capture the candle-illuminated faces in Barry Lyndon.32
In such scenes, and in many other conventionally lit scenes, Kubrick opted for a fixed camera and very little movement from the actors. The result in some cases are tableaux—living paintings. This is not surprising as the production lavished the same amount of research on the visual art of the eighteenth century as they did on the music of the time. Among those works they studied were the landscapes and portraits of Thomas Gainsborough, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and William Hogarth. Their influence on the look of the film is clear.
The importance of the music cannot, however, be discounted. Every single cue for the film was preexistent, and Leonard Rosenman did a brilliant job of arranging Kubrick’s choices into viable music cues. Kubrick once again showed that his instincts were dead on, especially considering the amount of musical excerpts that he must have heard in the course of production. The musical choices convey everything from yearning to delicacy to grief to playfulness to melancholy. The use of a single cue for more than one scene draws those scenes together thematically or recalls earlier references. Kubrick develops a musical language within this score and effectively expresses the hope and then tragic downfall of Redmond Barry.
Final note: The sharp-eyed viewer of Barry Lyndon will notice that Kubrick used three actors who appeared in his previous film, A Clockwork Orange: the minister from A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Sharp, plays Lord Hallom in Barry Lyndon, the man with whom Barry discusses getting a title; Patrick Magee, who played the victim and later torturer F. Alexander in A Clockwork Orange, plays the Chevalier de Balibari; and Alex’s father in A Clockwork Orange, Philip Stone, plays Graham, one of Lady Lyndon’s advisors. Stone also appears in Kubrick’s next film The Shining, as the previous caretaker of the Overlook Hotel before Jack Torrance, Delbert Grady, making him the only actor to appear in three consecutive Kubrick films.
Notes
1. Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Faber and Faber, 1999), 170.
2. Peter Cosgrove, “The Cinema of Attractions and the Novel in Barry Lyndon and Tom Jones,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen, ed. Robert Mayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21–22.
3. Kubrick did this to great effect in 2001, where the music of Ligeti represented encounters with alien intelligence.
4. Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill, “Leonard Rosenman,” in Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick (New York: Checkmark Books, 2002), 300.
5. Luis M. Garcia Mainar, Narrative and Stylistic Patterns in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999), 57.
6. All letters discussed in this section were found in the Stanley Kubrick Archive, University of the Arts London, Barry Lyndon files.
7. Another thing Rosenman had in common with Gerald Fried was writing for Star Trek. Rosenman provided the score for 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
8. Phillips and Hill, “Leonard Rosenman,” 301.
9. Marshal Berges, interview with Leonard Rosenman, “Home Q&A with Marshal Berges,” Los Angeles Times Home Magazine, 40.
10. Interview with the author, April 20, 2011.
11. For a complete synopsis of the film, see appendix B.
12. “Chieftans’ Big Chance,” Evening Herald, October 24, 1973.
13. Victor Davis, “Film Boost for Chieftans,” Daily Express London, September 30, 1975.
14. Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 398.
15. http://footguards.tripod.com/06ARTICLES/ART27_BritGren.htm.
16. William E. Studwell, The National and Religious Song Reader: Patriotic, Traditional, and Sacred Songs from around the World (Philadelphia: Haworth Press, 1996), 55.
17. http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/institutional/2009/03/000000_ws_sig_tune.shtml.
18. Reprinted in Choyce Drollery: Songs and Sonnets: To which are added the extra songs of Merry Drollery, 1661, and An Antidote against Melancholy, 1661. Edited, with Special Introductions, and Appendices of Notes, Illustrations, Emendations of Text, &c., by J[oseph] Woodfall Ebsworth, M.A., Cantab. Boston, Lincolnshire: Printed by Robert Roberts, Strait B
ar-Gate. 1886, p. 151. From the Ebook and Texts Archive from the University of Toronto Robarts Library http://www.archive.org/details/choycedrolleryso00ebswuoft.
19. http://the-american-catholic.com/2011/04/09/lilliburlero/.
20. This distinction is sometimes referred to as diegetic music and non-diegetic or extra-diegetic music. The former is music that is part of the diegesis, the milieu on-screen, and the latter refers to the score.
21. A tempophon is a device that allows one to modify the pitch or speed of something recorded on magnetic tape. In Germany, where the device was pioneered, it is called zeitdehner, or time-stretcher, and in English, it is also known as a rate-changer. http://www.granularsynthesis.com/hthesis/gabor2.html.
22. Frederick’s authorship of this piece is doubtful. Eugene Helm and Derek McCullough, “Frederick II,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), 219.
23. Charles Osbourne, The Complete Operas of Mozart (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), 143.
24. Osbourne, Complete Operas of Mozart, 156.
25. Michael F. Robinson, “Giovanni Paisiello,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), 911.
26. John Reed, Schubert: The Final Years (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972), 173.
27. Neal Zaslaw, “Leclair,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), 446.
28. William Makepeace Thackeray, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., ed. Andrew Sanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 188.
29. Thackeray, Barry Lyndon, 184.
30. Thackeray, Barry Lyndon, 244.
31. AMC Filmsite, http://www.filmsite.org/aa75.html.
32. Tim Robey, “Kubrick’s Neglected Masterpiece,” The Telegraph, February 5, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4524037/Barry-Lyndon-Kubricks-neglected-masterpiece.html.
Chapter Six
Midnight, the Stars, and You
The Shining
With Barry Lyndon, Kubrick came close to perfecting the use of music as an element of time and place. The music, carefully chosen and expertly arranged, became an element of setting that suffused the beautiful images and static scenes with additional significance. From 2001 through A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon, Kubrick’s musical choices were becoming ever more precise and effective. His next film, 1980’s The Shining, continued this process, achieving what some consider the pinnacle of his success in marrying music to film: “The Shining (1980) exemplifies a level of both sophisticated interaction of music and moving image, and general reliance on music for contextual, characterization and narrative purposes, rarely equaled in his output.”1 As Kubrick had put his stamp on black comedy, science fiction, and the period drama, The Shining allowed the director to bring his unique vision to the genre of horror. Those who appreciate this vision have discussed the film as a high artistic watermark for the genre.2
Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining would not be as eerily effective without his musical choices. The aural landscape of The Shining features Lontano by György Ligeti, whose music Kubrick had already used to great effect in 2001; Bela Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, which lends an eerie, lonely sound that seems to mirror the isolation of the Overlook Hotel; the Dies Irae plainchant realized on the synthesizer by Wendy Carlos, suggesting the specter of death at the Overlook Hotel; and the music of Krzysztof Penderecki, which accompanies some of the most terrifying moments of the film. These musical choices effectively evoke both desolation and Jack’s descent into madness, but The Shining also features the 1930s-era tunes Jack hears in the Gold Room. Far from being a comforting respite from the atonal music of the hotel, this music appears in the context of Jack’s visions, as the hotel gradually causes Jack to slip away from sanity.
Technological Innovation
Kubrick did the unthinkable in Barry Lyndon, lighting scenes with only candles, pushing the envelope of technological innovation to its limit. Kubrick continued to make films on the cutting edge of technology by using a fairly new invention in The Shining, a camera stabilization system invented by Garrett Brown in the early seventies and eventually sold by the Tiffen Company. Called the Steadicam, the system allows a camera to be mounted on an armature that absorbs any unsteady movement made by the camera operator, resulting in fluid movement without the limitations of a dolly track. In her book about the Steadicam system, Serena Ferrara describes how the device works:
The Steadicam isolates the camera from all but the largest movements of the operator by means of the stabilizer arm and gimbal. The gimbal prevents unwanted effects from the angular movements of the operator (and allows the camera to be aimed with the lightest possible touch), and the arm’s two-spring system absorbs the up-and-down jerks caused by the operator’s movements through exploiting the high inertia of the rig (camera and electronics) and the flexibility of its support (the arm).3
In the context of The Shining, the fluidity of the movement contributes to a sense of large space, as the camera travels through the hallways and rooms of the hotel—and later through the hedge maze—with a startling level of freedom. Kubrick likened it to a magic carpet, and it allowed the camera an even more intimate way of inhabiting the scenes, especially as it follows young Danny on his explorations of the hotel.4 When Kubrick first wrote to Ed Di Giulio of Cinema Products Corporation, after seeing a demo reel, he was already thinking about filming from a low angle. The last thing he said in his communication to Di Giulio was, “Is there a minimum height at which [the Steadicam] can be used?”5 He might have been thinking about shooting from Danny’s point of view, or perhaps he was thinking of the sequence in which Wendy drags the unconscious Jack into the pantry. The use of the Steadicam on a low mode rig—essentially with the rig turned upside down to allow the camera to move across the floor— was one of two unique innovations that were developed on the set of The Shining.6 The other innovation was Garrett Brown’s use of the so-called two-hand technique, in which one hand controls the arm of the Steadicam to control position and height, while the other hand pans and tilts.7
American Cinematographer made The Shining its cover story in August of 1980. One of the articles dedicated to the film explored the challenges of using the Steadicam system, including how to design lighting that was actually part of the set (and looked like it was part of the hotel), so the camera could move and turn freely without running into or revealing the theatrical lighting.8 The Steadicam also contributed to the narrative, as the freedom of movement suggests a presence that is not bound in regular “earthly” ways. Serena Ferrara believes that Jack’s descent into madness “makes itself felt almost in a material dimension, through which the Steadicam moves.”9 After seeing the film, Di Giulio wrote to Kubrick and said of the Steadicam, “It was like a malevolent POV. Evil was following the kid.”10
The Shining in Popular Culture
Although The Shining was the first Stanley Kubrick film since Paths of Glory not to receive an Academy Award nomination, it was among the top ten highest grossing movies in the year of its release and among the top fifty moneymakers of the decade. It has become a pop culture touchstone, parodied on the mainstream animated television shows The Simpsons (“Treehouse of Horror V,” segment titled “The Shinning”), Family Guy (episode “Peter, Peter, Caviar Eater,” in which Stewie encounters twin girls who ask him to come play), and Cartoon Network’s Venture Brothers (in which father Rusty Venture advises his son Hank that “not all black men have ‘the Shining’”). Excerpts of The Shining are seen at a drive-in during the film Twister. As a tornado destroys the drive-in screen, a famous scene from the film—the “Here’s Johnny” scene—can still be recognized as it is projected on a wall of rubble as it travels through the air. The Shining has also been mentioned on numerous other television shows, even recently; a 2012 episode of USA Network’s comedy Psych featured a Shining-themed episode called “Heeeeeere’s
Lassie.”
In addition to its presence in popular culture, there is perhaps no other Kubrick film that has inspired so much speculation as to hidden meanings. It is full of symbols and symbolism, and it lends itself to multiple readings. In 2011, Rodney Asher created a full-length documentary, Room 237, which outlines some of the most prominent theories that have been shared in various media since the release of the film in 1980. In many of these readings of The Shining, the Overlook Hotel is often interpreted as a stand-in for America, an America that is powerful, secretive, or corrupt. And many of these theories originate in one particular deviation from Stephen King’s source material. While taking the Torrances through the Overlook Hotel in the film, Wendy asks, “Are all these Indian designs authentic?” to which the manager Ullman replies, “Yeah, I believe [they’re] based on Navajo and Apache motifs.” He goes on to explain that, “The site [of the hotel] is supposed to be located on an Indian burial ground, and I believe they actually had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it.” The inclusion of news like that—in light of Kubrick’s rigorous attention to detail—suggests that it is not a casual piece of information. Perhaps Kubrick simply wanted to convey that the site of the Overlook was a contested piece of land, the final resting place of spirits who have never been able to find peace. (A similar idea was used in the 1982 film, Poltergeist, in which a family whose house is built over a supposedly relocated cemetery is terrorized by hostile ghosts.) The production design’s choice of Native American decorative motifs throughout the hotel is another aspect of the film that has no antecedent in King’s novel.
One of the first interpretations of The Shining was presented by David A. Cook in 1984, who viewed the film as a metaphor for “the murderous system of economic exploitation which has sustained the country” since our ancestors came here and made an Indian burial ground of the entire country.11 Another prominent theory also draws upon the Indian burial ground theme. In 1987, journalist Bill Blakemore suggested that the film refers to the genocide of Native Americans.12 Blakemore sees meaning in the presence of cans of Calumet baking powder in the pantry, a brand named after a Native American peace pipe and featuring in the logo a stylized Native American in a headdress. Blakemore argues that the cans represent treaties, some honest, but most broken, dishonest, and false. The presence of former caretaker Grady’s twin daughters (not described as twins in the book) represents the duplicity of the white man.13 In 2012, Blakemore published additional commentary on his original 1987 article online.
Listening to Stanley Kubrick Page 24
