Required Viewing 03: Barry Lyndon

We're in Wayne Media. mark this and come what will of it i will fight the man who pretends the hand of nora brady i'll follow him if it's into the church i'll have his blood no he'll have mine The boy must go into hiding just for a short time till matters are blown over. That poor child has never been away from home in his life. All clever young fellows who are free and able are hereby invited to step up. My name is Redmond Barry. You ruined lad.

Then send me to the devil. You are a liar. You're an imposter. You're a deserter. He seems to me little more than a common opportunist.

I don't think he loves my mother at all. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the CultureCast. I am your host, Chris Stashew, and I'm joined by my good friend all the way from the plains of West Texas, about as far from Ireland and England as humanly possible, your friend and mine, Professor Dr. David D. Perlmutter.

Hello, Chris. Welcome to our adventure. That's right, on this episode of the CultureCast, it's technically an episode of Required Viewing, where Dr. Perlmutter and I sit and talk about film in a 360-degree approach, as opposed to the CultureCast, where I just say naughty things for an hour and a half. If you want to listen to that, you know where to find it.

As for this episode, we are conquering a film that, for many people, especially people who saw it when it came out, was a big letdown. Why? Because it was a Stanley Kubrick film, and hey, this was... This was no Kubrick film. Other than the fact that it totally is.

We're talking about 1975's Barry Lyndon. So the film is, like I mentioned, written and directed by Stanley Kubrick. It's based on The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray. The film does change the source material quite significantly. As in, there is narration in the book.

As in, there's no narration in the film. Not the kind of narration in the book, anyways. There's somewhat of an omniscient third-person narrator, I guess. I don't even know. The narrator is not Barry Lyndon in the film, but it is in the book.

And the book and film are both about the titular character, Barry Lyndon. who has a series of misadventures along the way, conducting misdeeds and having just all kinds of wild fun in what might consider to be the most exciting time in the last 300 years, 1750 Ireland. The film stars Ryan O'Neill, Marisa Bereson, Patrick McGee, Hardy Kruger, Diana Corner, Gay Hamilton, just to name a few. But primarily, it is a Ryan O'Neill picker-esque Stanley Kubrick film. Dr. Perlmutter, I am so very curious.

Your thoughts on Barry Lyndon to kick off this episode, because this is one that you picked, and you had all the Stanley Kubrick films in the world to pick, and this is the one you went with. Why, oh why, is this the one you went with? I think probably this is the least... heavily analyzed Stanley Kubrick movie. I mean, you can go to probably hundreds of websites that endlessly discuss details, including lots of theories about what Kubrick meant. on some of his other works. This one, I think people got it pretty quickly.

But the question is what it is. And in fact, this film raised at the time, because I'm old enough to vaguely remember, I did not watch this in a theater when it came out, but I watched it maybe four or five years after it came out in a film class. And by then, there had already been this discussion about, was it actually a movie? As you know, as a journalism professor, I love to just stop and say, okay, we're using this word. What does this word mean?

What did it used to mean? I mean, what did it mean in the past, several iterations in the past? I mean, this is an 1844 novel set in the past of 1844, and then it's made in the 1970s, and then we're watching it today. When the film came out, it was absolutely, and I think rightly, acclaimed for the beauty of every individual shot. And we'll talk about that, like the sequence... of scenes are actually taken and inspired by famous paintings of the era, like Gainsborough, and inspired by the famous music of the era, Mozart and Vivaldi.

And shock, no shock, shockingly, the film went on to win four Academy Awards, including cinematography, including score and things like that, and rightly so. But early on, there was a question raised. And in fact, This was the essay that I had to write in class in 1981, 82, I think it is, on, is this a movie? And now we just had a chance, and I don't know when this is going to air versus that. We had a chance to talk with Miranda about one of your other guests about the Akira Kurosawa's dreams and how intentionally it felt like a series of beautiful moments, not a coherent plot line, even maybe connections between the different vignettes within an anthology.

And that's allowable if somebody's saying, I'm doing an anthology film of ideas, dreams that I've had, literally. But Kubrick got a lot of criticism because people were expecting from him a story that wasn't just like, here's my slideshow of incredibly beautiful things. And the most famous critic was Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, who accused Kubrick of like forgetting what a movie was. So I think that this is an interesting required viewing to talk about, like what needs to add up for us to call something a coherent story, a narrative that has the things that we usually associate with the motion picture or with the narrative associated with film. And there's so many details here because of course it is this magnificent, opulent, uh, amazing spectacle and where you can just stop freeze frame as we did in class and just look at one scene whether it's people gambling inside a luxury house or it's some vista in Ireland where they're having a duel or it's a battle in Central Europe and you can just say wow look at look at the detail look at the color look at the depth of field look at the set design but does it add up to movie.

Before we talk any further, I wanted to ask you a personal question about Stanley. Thoughts on Stanley Kubrick as a director? So maybe in context, I want to say that I appreciate a lot of the work that Stanley Kubrick has done. There's no question that like in the pantheon of great directors, with the word great being defined as not only have they created the sort of masterworks that are still popular, they're still going back to them, that have become part of meme culture that new generations rediscover. I mean, if you go on Reddit or social media today, you will find 18-year-olds still voluntarily bringing up and discussing Dr.

Strangelove or Eyes Wide Shut or 2001 A Space Odyssey. In fact, if you just go down the list of Kubrick films, he sort of checked the box within every possible genre of having impact. I do reserve the right to say that for myself, sometimes I feel somewhat unfulfilled watching Kubrick films that like one of the accusations is, made against him is that he makes movies as if he's never watched a movie. And for me, Full Metal Jacket was a very good example of that because he came out with a Vietnam film and he's Stanley Kubrick, right? So he had a lot of control.

If the auteur theory applies to anyone, it applies to Stanley Kubrick because he was famous for like 50 takes and demanding this and just wanting to get that absolutely right. And I mean, we haven't talked about it, but like Full Metal Jacket for me was a Vietnam film that had already been made, a war film that had already been made, including partly by him because he did a much better film called Paths of Glory set in World War I starring Kirk Douglas. And so sometimes people I just wonder whether Kubrick didn't have the ability to tell these smooth stories that we sometimes demand of film. And I think this is probably the best example of that accusation. So I want to make it clear that I'm not like anti-Stanley Kubrick.

I think his achievements are legend, but every fortress has a flaw. And I just felt the storytelling was what he always seemed to struggle with. And this is one of the films where I and a lot of other people feel that comes to the fore. Because after all, a movie is the sum of its parts. It is not just a series of set piece sequences, unless that's what you're intending with an anthology film or a series of vignettes.

So all praise to Kubrick, but dot, dot, dot. As someone who considers himself a cinephile and watches a fair amount of cinema and film and everything I would say in between, from both high-end auteur pieces to films that are made solely for the intent of entertaining, which is to say there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, those intentions can be... mutually exclusive or take place within the same thing a film can be an auteur piece that is meant to be a you know piece of I wouldn't it's just weird because in this day and age like so much of our engagement with film and TV show is transactional and Barry Lyndon is almost the like antithesis of that in a way. Because it is three hours long. It is meandering at times.

It is plodding at other times. It has a lot of setup for what I would say is very little payoff in a lot of ways. But it is a lot of payoff in other ways. And I think my initial reaction to your statement on Stanley Kubrick and my shared feeling on Stanley Kubrick is he is a great filmmaker. But for me, a lot of his films are not...

It's like you said, at times I wonder if he even has ever seen a film before, or anyone else's film, where it's like, I'm just going to do it my way, and in doing it my way, it becomes so iconoclastic that my way of doing it is... therefore so unique and unto itself that that in in and of itself becomes the thing and like I appreciate that but I guess I never resonated with any of his movies enough for it to be something where I would like when people would have a conversation about a bill well well you know my favorite Stanley Kubrick film is you know Barry Lyndon or And again, or Fear and Desire, or The Killing, or Passive Glory, or Spartacus. I've never had that resonance with him as a director.

And I think for me, watching Barry Lyndon this time, because I have seen this before a couple years ago, maybe once. six seven years ago this is the first time where I watched this film and I feel like I somewhat got it as much as Stanley Kubrick would want me to get it which is to say he wouldn't want me to get it any more than he allows you to because again like you said about Kubrick as a director he was very controlling and specific and meticulous and there's nothing wrong with that per se but imagine a three-hour movie where the director is meticulous with every single shot and that sounds like a nightmare to anybody who knows about making film especially when they were making this film in 1975 with real film with actual celluloid printed film.

People take for granted now that you can just delete and edit on your phone, which is more than anyone was able to do up until pretty much the last decade, let's call it. And that's the thing about this movie that's so impressive is that this film was made in a time where... If you were to make this film now, it's impressive. In 2026, just the sets and the scenery and the blocking and all the acting and just everything is just so well done and so intentional and meticulous. If you made this film in 2026, you'd be applauded.

You and I have talked privately about The Revenant and like, oh, it's fine. It's a Leonardo DiCaprio film that has a lot of the same traits as this film in terms of like natural lighting. And, you know, it's very naturalistic and you have a lot of these, you know, kind of outdoor shots that are being done without anything other than just the outdoor lighting and the technical prowess of the film is kind of what it stands on. And I would say Barry Lyndon should have some of that criticism leveled against it because, yes, it is somewhat of a blowhard of a movie because it is three hours long. But you know what?

I don't mind that because I think if you want to boil it down to its most basic elements, sure, you could put this on in the background and have it act as a moving screensaver. which is to say anything that's on your screen that's being used for any purpose other than you looking at your screen is a screensaver, which is to say you could put this on in your kitchen, turn the audio off, and look at it every couple minutes and see something interesting and enjoy it in that moment, which is not the case in every film you watch. Not every film is this meticulously crafted by someone who knows exactly what they want, and that's intentional because most directors don't have the stomach for it, and I don't blame them because...

Grown Ups 3 doesn't need this level of directorly influence and editorial process that a film like Barry Lyndon does not every director is looking to make Barry Lyndon and that's okay because I don't think if the expectation is that every director should be making Barry Lyndon anyone would want to work in film because it to have made this film is a monumental undertaking. And this was like the case on every single one of these Kubrick films, which is the crazy part. It's just, they were all monumental undertakings of a different variety. They didn't always have the same, like, flavor and smell to them when they were a monumental undertaking. But.

Pretty much, I would say post, I don't know, maybe Spartacus. But I think it goes back to as far as like fear and desire with Kubrick. Like every Kubrick film has been an undertaking, partially self-inflicted because it's Stanley Kubrick making the film. And he's just, you know, long time ago, I interviewed Jonathan Frake, who is notoriously known as one take Frake, Riker from Star Trek. Yeah.

Kubrick is not one take Frakes. Stanley Kubrick is like one million takes Kubrick because we have to placate the genius. And I'm not saying that that's not warranted, a film like Barry Lyndon. The fact that a film like Barry Lyndon is, like you alluded to, his least talked about film, is insane because the rest of his films are masterpieces or classics in their own right in almost every genre that they're part of including this one even if people want to refuse or pretend like it's not because again like you already alluded to and I you know you beat me to it the Pauline Kael of it all like you know I mean, you know, she pretty much took it to task and called it a three-story, a three-hour slideshow for art history major.

One of the vainest movies, one of the vainest of all movies. It's like, really? Yeah, just on that one point, it's worth, for people who have not watched the film, I do not have a copy of my undergraduate essay on is Barry Lyndon a movie? But I do remember one discussion point was that uh you know you've heard of the situation of like you're trapped on a desert island and you only have 10 books right and well there's a. Science fiction version of that is that aliens come and their plan is to destroy humans because of all of our destructiveness this is sort of like a star trek episode i think it is a couple of star trek episodes And the humans have to prove their worth, like why keep us around.

And I would show 10 movies to show what we can achieve artistically. And Barry Lyndon would be one of them. And that sounds like a complete contradiction to everything I just said before and everything I'm going to say in the future. But if I wanted to show aliens from another planet who, I guess, could see in the visible light spectrum, unlike Rocky in... the delightful little Rocky in, uh, uh, project hero, Mary, if I could show it, I could say, well, look, you know, this is among the most beautiful things because this movie compacts basically, yeah, 200 years of art history, 200 years of, of romantic classical music into one movie, a one three hour movie and the colors, the depth of field, the lighting, just like Again, stop randomly at any scene and just look at it and go, yep, that is among the most beautiful scenes ever put in a film.

And so we're using the term 360 here because we want to say that we want to say like this is among the loveliest, especially today, where it just seems like every single film and TV show is filmed through a coffee filter and is sepia out and browned out and everybody is drab and like people of the future and people of middle ages all wear the same brown costumes just to see a film. That is, remember, one of the television networks when I was growing up and he said, in living color, because color television was a relatively new thing. Like, I remember looking at this movie and my eyes popping from the spectacle in color. It really does deserve to be on a giant screen. So it fulfills. this massive requirement of spectacle, but it's not an epic movie.

Like Lawrence of Arabia that would be praised as such. And so it has this imbalance, if I want to use a negative word, or he chose a balance if I wanted to say something positive. But it is absolutely one of the top 20 most gorgeous movies. And so fulfills that part of why you want to go see something on a big screen. What makes me laugh when you talk about that is the idea that now what this film looks like is the Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan.

If we're talking about a big, epic film... that's made and is attempting to be epic and tell an epic story, but is trying to do it in that grandiose scale. And I would challenge anyone who went and saw The Odyssey to watch this film and see what a film that's actually shot for real with actual technical prowess looks like. Not to say Chris Nolan doesn't have technical prowess, but he has all the modern day implements that make things easier. And he's decided to make things harder on himself because... I guess he wants to cost himself more money.

That's the thing that's hard with filmmaking from 1975 that I think we as people who watch films now take for granted. Films like this don't exist anymore because they don't make films like this anymore because times have changed. and things have gotten more economical. You don't have to shoot on film anymore. Film is not really economical to shoot on. You know, you can't reuse film once it's shot on.

That's how that works. So if you're shooting on actual real celluloid, you just go through the real, and that's why it was so cumbersome and expensive and all these other things. And. To make that harder on yourself intentionally to try and recapture this time and place in filmmaking, I understand because there is a very welcoming, warm nature to this filmmaking that is unreplicatable in this day and age, like genuinely. You can't get these results anymore, no matter how hard someone like Chris Nolan tries or Sam Mendes or any of these other directors that try to do this. naturalistic storytelling style, and they throw as much Vaseline on the camera as they can to make it glowy, but they can't replicate it.

It's because there's just, the intentionality was different. There was an intentionality behind something like Barry Lyndon that doesn't exist with something like The Odyssey. I don't know what The Odyssey is about to Chris Nolan. I know what The Odyssey is about to me. And I've seen The Odyssey at this point.

This isn't coming from someone that didn't watch it. I didn't want to spend a three-hour episode with someone else talking about it because I would rather spend three hours talking about this film because it actually deserves the praise because it's made at a time and a place where this is the only kind of filmmaking you're making. This isn't, I'm going to make an IMAX film because I want to know what it's like to be a filmmaker in 1975 who has to work on film. Like, I get it. And you're keeping like one specific niche angle of filmmaking alive, which is filming on real film in a format that nobody makes anymore.

And so you're having to essentially recreate this industry or create this industry on your own, which, okay, fine. You're allowed to do that. It's just what an epic film, like you said, looks like now. There is so much more pomp and circumstance and grandeur given to it. And this is what I perceive to be the mold for an epic film of a certain kind.

And I think of something like The Favourite, which I think owes a lot to this film. I think Yorgos Lanthimos even talks about it. the candle scene in this film inspired a lot of the interior candle lighting in that film, which, again, if you look at the look of that film, just stylistically, I understand, to go back to the Pauline Kael of it all, the, like, her kind of criticism towards the film. But I think to your point already that you've made, if one makes the case and takes the thesis of the intentionality of Kubrick are all the things that people are fomenting disapproval of, how can one really have anything to complain about other than subjective issues? If the intentionality of Kubrick is to make a film where every shot is reminiscent of a painting and you're able to watch the film, not just as a film, but also as a series of interconnected, still moving images that are so well constructed that it's like, these are static shot compositions that should, like you said, be praised everywhere in every opportunity I mean these moments where the narrator comes on and starts narrating and you have just like essentially again a static camera composition where you have the camera being set in one spot and you have him riding on his horse or you know whatever the soldiers marching in and out of frame that to me is just Again, if you don't understand what that means and what that takes to get to that point in 1975, let me, as someone who does, give you just a short example.

That is hard to do now, let alone 50 years ago when people are... Again, it's just there's a lot of things we take for granted now that in 1975 they did not have a good answer for. Like the camera in this film that they used to film the indoor candlelight. That was literally a NASA camera. Yeah, can we talk about that?

Because the parallel with Christopher Nolan is interesting, right? So there's this story going around that Tom Holland was on the set of The Odyssey, and he was confused at first because Christopher Nolan kept yelling cut, like really quickly, right? And Matt Damon explained, yeah, you know, the IMAX camera only has... Three minutes, I think, because it's such a gigantic frame. It only has three minutes of film.

So, you know, that doesn't allow for very long takes or the actor to sort of warm up in the scene and say, OK, let me just do that again or something like that. So there is an... One of the parts about film that we want to emphasize that maybe occasionally gets attention like this issue with the IMAX and, of course, raising the issue of, OK, 99.9% of people can't see an IMAX film because they don't exist nearby to them. And they haven't made an IMAX camera in, what, 50 years or something like that. The technology is lost, sort of.

But so Kubrick had it's not true that he had lenses, cameras created like from scratch, but he was adapting, as you said, other other existing cameras and lenses. And I remember looking this up in 1980X, and I remember looking it up just recently. The Zeiss, the famous Zeiss lenses, you know, super clear. My dream as a photo student was to have a Zeiss lens, you know. The Zeiss Planar 50mm f0.

7 lens. With a ridiculously shallow depth of field, which added to the stillness effect, because if you moved just a few inches forward or backward, you were out of focus, right? So the actors and actresses, even within, as you said, like a battle, had to maintain absolute rigidity. And that's why not only do they feel stiff, like they're in a period movie. But like, I mean, we've been saying like stillness, like a painting, but it's almost like a daguerreotype, you know, like the lenses back then you had to pose.

You've seen those old pictures where people were fuzzy because they didn't stand still long enough for the camera to take its picture. And we have to be honest and true that we've said that we will talk about whether a film is successful or not and what it's trying to do, not saying there's some objective standard. Stanley Kubrick mission accomplished of trying to show, and I guess if you want to get into morals and themes. And he was showing an extremely rigid caste class society with very limited roles that you could play depending on your wealth and your status and your birth and your gender and where you came from. And boy, that was well encompassed by the movie.

So the criticism of the movie, as you're saying, could also be the praise of the movie because he did accomplish what he set out to do. Well and that's I you know that's the thing for me that I feel like with all the criticism that I read about the film is that it's just you know oh well this it's just you know it's boring and it's slow and it's plodding and not much happens it's like well yeah but it's also a like the story itself that it is based on is a story about a, a, it's a coming of age story about a boy becoming a man in a world that has no need for such, I don't know. It's like for, for such triviality, I feel like it's just, it's the world of Barry Lyndon. I wouldn't say it's Shakespearean because like, there's so much of this, like Barry Lyndon can't get out of the way of things, you know, early on in the film, he, he, he, he thinks he kills Barry, The man who's courting his cousin's hand, which, you know, great.

Awesome. You want to marry your cousin. All right. First off. Secondly, so he's on this path.

He's leaving where he used to live to get away to go to Dublin. And instead of stopping to eat, he continues on the path. And the people that asked him to stop and eat end up robbing him. I think he would have been robbed either way, whether or not he had sat and ate with them or whether or not he had gone up along the path, which is what he ended up doing. There's some level of just not fadedness, but lack of autonomy. in one's choices and a film like that where it's just kind of like the characters just kind of bumbling from one set piece to another of no fault of their own and it just kind of seems like they're on a string being drug through things and they're not able to control anything That makes sense with this kind of film.

And like you said, if that's what Kubrick was going for, 100% success. But it's almost there was a there's a board game channel I watch on YouTube. And my girlfriend and I play a lot of board games. And we had played this board game recently. It's called Moon Colony Bloodbath.

With a title like that, one can assume what it's about. And that is an incredible hit. Right. It is. It's like the game of the year, right?

Millions of copies sold. Right. And the company that I watch on YouTube did not like it. And their complaint was, it's too punishing of a board game. Too many bad things happen.

And I'm like. Too many notes? Well, it's just one of those things where it's like, if you're subjectively upset about something achieving what it's trying to achieve... but that's not what you like about the film, that is a subjective issue. And so much of what I have seen as the criticism of this film at the time is, A, it's boring, which I don't agree with. I mean, again, it's an epic drama.

So if you're expecting Transformers and robots flying out of the sky and all kinds of stuff, A, I don't know what director you're watching in 1975, but B, also. It's just, I feel like the film is achieving exactly what it is setting out to do, which is be, again, not a vibe. I think the term vibe film is one that we would use now, but it's just, it's a very specific time and place. And the film evokes that in every single scene. And I don't understand why that is not a success for the people that were watching the film in 1975 when someone watching in 2026 said, is well aware as to why this film is successful and what this film is doing successfully. because I think that's the other thing about this film that we haven't talked about on any kind of any other films that we've talked about.

And I mean, maybe a little bit with, with water world, but this film has found its audience in the years since it's come out and has been heavily reappraised in the 50 plus years since it's come out as one of Stanley Kubrick's best films, which is to say like all of his films are that way. So, you know, for the most part, like each of his films is a seminal film from the director who, who it's not that he did or didn't make a good or, you know, a single bad film, but each of his films had something worth watching. This one included. I, I just really appreciate, you know, having done the research now for, you know, this episode that, you know, This film is similar to Blade Runner and other, you know, The Thing and other films that came out in, you know, the 70s and 80s, you know, late 70s, early 80s that people just didn't get.

They weren't ready for. Yeah, I sort of half agree. Well, maybe two thirds or four fifths agree. This film, you could argue it's a genre of one. I mean, first of all, as you point out, like, nobody could make a film like this anymore.

And I don't think any studio would accept this cut anymore either, right? Three hours and five minutes? No. I could imagine, like... Uh, in anyone really in a movie studio going like, wait a minute, like 20 minutes have gone by and they, he took a handkerchief and then he looked in that other direction that was there.

So, but it has entered the museum, right? It like it, like people refer to this film. I don't think it's talked about in the sense of like, well, what was Stanley Truber trying to say? Uh, in the photograph, in the shining, in the final scene, is that actually the Federal Reserve Board? I mean, really, with a lot of.

You've seen Room 237, then, clearly, I assume. Yeah, no, I mean. No, that's, I mean, it's overanalyzed into the ground, seemingly for no reason. I mean, I get it. Kubrick was very meticulous, but...

Being meticulous doesn't mean every single thing has meaning. Some people are just perfectionists, and that's the way they are. And that's why I said I don't know enough about Kubrick to make judgments like that. I just find it interesting that this is a film that is not.... It's entered the art museum, and it's up there on the wall, and people will talk about, like, oh, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, one of the most beautiful films ever made, but... they're not going to that sort of social media era of like endless analysis of what was he trying to say here?

Because part of it is there is this narrator in the book, by the way, which I read in the 80s as well. And I don't think I want to reread. This is a situation where I do think Like The Godfather, the movie is better than the source material. The book has Barry Lyndon as a narrator. And there's a two or three times in the movie where Barry Lyndon's book voice comes through because in the book, he's boastful.

He lies to you. He's the perfect almost narrator. knuckle-headed, unreliable narrator in the book. And in the movie, you talk about one scene. He's leaving his home in Ireland because he thinks he's killed his rival for his Irish girlfriend's love. And He meets up total strangers at an outside tavern or tavern and starts boasting to them.

Right. And that gets him in trouble. And then you fast forward. He's escaping disguised as a British officer and he meets a German officer who takes him to dinner and he starts boasting. And that gets him in trouble again.

So that's the time where his flawed, failed, ridiculous character, which so completely doesn't fit his ambitions to be a wealthy lord and have a castle and have a princess and all these things. But it is interesting how I don't think that there are hidden meanings in this film. There's no conspiracy associated with this movie. But it has entered the museum and we can respect it for that. Well, in this one shot in Barry Lyndon, I believe it's actually talking about Negro League baseball and Satchel Paige being able to throw a curveball.

No, I don't. I agree. Like I've seen Room 237 as clearly you have. And I appreciate that there are films in Kubrick's library of films, his filmography, as it were, that are like that. Maybe I have such conflicting feelings about something. like Room 237 and Kubrick, because I think it's kind of unintentionally infected the groundwater of like analysis into his films because it makes everything like, well, what's the secret hidden meaning?

It's like, what? Just because like 10 people on the planet wanted to go in front of a camera and talk about their, I wouldn't say unhinged beliefs, but definitely conspiratorial beliefs about Room 237, or I guess The Shining and how it applies to astronauts or the moon landing or westward expansion, I believe is one of them in there. It's kind of turned, like you said, everything into this question of like, well, what is actually going on? I don't think, I think Barry Lyndon is as intentionally vapid as the character of which it is based on the title. Barry Lyndon is, and I think this is the thing that really resonated with me this time around, Barry Lyndon is a horrible person.

Like, he's terrible. He would fit this, you know what, this would be perfect for This would be perfect for an HBO series. We talked about this with Miranda a couple times ago on the CultureCast. This would be perfect for an HBO series because we are ripe now for shows about terrible people. In a post-Sopranos world, we are ripe for a thing about a terrible character who's unrepentantly terrible.

I wouldn't say all the way until the end because I think Barry Lyndon, by the end of his story, redeems himself. But to be fair... That's also a Kubrickian invention, the ending of the film, as it were, with him firing the gun into the ground and not, in fact, shooting his stepson. I just I think the point of this film is to show how someone who has ambition and is also kind of a terrible person can in the end. not only get what they deserve but get what they had coming to them because again like Barry Lyndon yeah he's he's in the book he's an unreliable narrator but in the film he's just he's not a great character he's immensely flawed which makes him an interesting lead but I also can see watching this film and going like well it's a film about a terrible character who's terrible for more or less three hours and by the end of it the only thing we have to take away is we're all equal in the eyes of God.

And it's like, all right, like, whoa, man. Like, and there's nothing like, and like you said, like there's so many other Kubrick things that could just be picked apart to death and have been Barry and Lyndon. It's not like immune to it, but it's almost like intentionally idiot. Yeah. That brings up something, Ryan O'Neill.

So I am now going to say my one allotted, I'm old enough to remember line for this podcast. I'm allowed to say once per, episode. I'm old enough to remember Ryan O'Neill being a mega star. And Ryan O'Neill played very adequately, Ryan O'Neill, in every movie that he was in. He was not one of those adaptive English actors who, you know, they lose themselves in the part.

I don't think he was a method actor. I think he was a star. He was a very handsome star who was cast in star vehicle movies. And I don't completely know the story of him being Barry Lyndon. I mean, the actual Barry Lyndon from the story is a shallow story. boastful guy.

And I don't know, Brian O'Neill had a lot of, um, issues, which today would be so, so much in social media about his relationship with, with his family. But that was true of a lot of stars back then, you know, you, you heard all these things, but, but in terms of the screen, uh, I'm going to make an obscure literary reference here, but, but, but it is a 19th century one. So I guess it makes some sense. Uh, The great French novelist Flaubert, he wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover, probably something that's still repeated today. You can still see like a BBC production or something of that.

But he also wrote probably considered to be in the top five historical novels of all time. Salambo, which is set in ancient Carthage. And if you read the novel, it's this unbelievable spectacle of like Carthaginian armies and mercenary revolts and elephants charging and battles. And at the center of it, there's this Carthaginian young woman who falls in love with a mercenary general, and her name is Salambo. And one of the criticisms of the book at the time, which Flaubert reacted to, and then, this happens every once in a while, he wrote summing up the criticism, and his summing up of the negative criticism of his own book became more famous than the negative criticism.

He said, I understand that people think that Salambo is a gigantic, ornate pedestal with a tiny statue because the actual character of Salambo, the young woman, is very underdeveloped. She hardly gets to say anything and do anything, but she's surrounded with this massive spectacle. But that was his choice as an author. And again, you have to say, okay, Kubrick, I mean, he had just done 2001. And by the way, he picked actors there who were not known and never became known for their massive charisma.

And he picked an actor who was a good, an okay American actor, a star vehicle actor, surrounded this actor with these amazing British, mostly British actors. Some of which we've seen, we see again and again in our famous British character actors and so on. And he gets lost in all this because he, I don't know how to put it in any other way, but like I'm uninterested in his fate. Yeah. And he's dull.

So it is like watching this amazing spectacle and you're like, wow, what a battle. And wow, look at that room and with all the paintings and the candles and look at that vista of Ireland. And there's this little tiny guy there who just I'm not particularly interested in his story. I'm not particularly interested in his point of view. And any charisma Ryan O'Neill had is sort of drained completely because of the staticness and stillness of the movie.

So again, Kubrick is succeeding in what he wanted to do, but I think that that did contribute to this being less of what we would consider to be a movie than some of the other films that he's done. I don't dislike the casting of Ryan O'Neill in this film. And I think that the casting of Ryan O'Neill, again, if you wanted to have someone doing this exact kind of role and the expectation is this is what you're getting out of them, why not cast one of the biggest 70s American actors? who you are trying to get this, if this is the intention behind this kind of film and this performance, how can you say anything other than bravo to perfect casting? That's my whole issue with a lot of the, again, a lot of the criticism that was being leveled at this film.

And I think that this film is a success in the post tense, because again, like, like you've already alluded to so much of what makes this movie amazing is the fact that it is ryan o'neill opposite all these great british character acts not really much to do with ryan o'neill himself but that in and of itself is kind of the point he is kind of so inconsequential in his own story because he again like so much of this is just faded he just bumbles from one thing to another and he can't stop anything from happening like you said he eats with the people that end up robbing him Or he doesn't eat with the people that end up robbing him. And if he had eaten with them, they probably would have robbed him right then and there anyway.

Like, it's just that nothing of what he does has any consequence. And he literally bumbles from one thing to the next. And that, I think, helps reinforce this idea of just because Stanley Kubrick robs Barry Lyndon of being the narrator of his own story, it turns this into less of a rogue trying to lie to you all the time. but the director kind of making a condemnation of this kind of character and this kind of behavior and acting this way. And, you know, ultimately taking the side of Barry Lyndon in the end that I think Barry Lyndon is not in the right as it were, but, you know, he makes a promise by the end and he sticks to it, which the other character, you know, his stepson cannot say the same for himself.

But I think for most of the film, Stanley Kubrick is condemning Barry Lyndon Because again, like he's just he's so flippant with everything around him. And I think that again, like we don't have that narration allowing us to understand the unreliableness of Barry Lyndon. We don't get his interior monologue, but we do get a kind of third party, third person narrator condemning him. and doing kind of other things and kind of robbing him of any agency, not that he had any to begin with. And I like that about the story. It really does make the film seem a lot more literary and novel-esque than if it had just been Barry Lyndon narrating his own story.

Yes, Ryan O'Neill does, I'm sure, because Kubrick wouldn't have allowed it otherwise, what Kubrick intended. And you could argue that maybe in terms of narrative, that makes sense, because this is somebody who physically is very capable. I mean, when he's in a fistfight, he wins the fistfight. When he's in the duel, he could win. He does win one duel.

It's just his family history. just made sure that he didn't actually kill the guy. And then he's in another duel. He actually chooses not to win the duel. So like he's physically capable. He, he, he, he does fight as a successful soldier.

You know, the, the, The warfare of the time was sort of famous for rigidity, you know, with soldiers being treated as automatons and you just lined them up and they fire and you wanted to get a high rate of fire with these muskets. And then in that one battle scene... He does take action and he saves his commander. And then he gives this little speech there when he's getting, I like the fact that he didn't get a medal. He got, got a gold piece, you know, that he's, you're thinking, well, he's going to spend that all on wine and song. uh and other things but he gives this little speech which is a good speech about like well you know i know you're accusing me of being a wastrel who maybe just did one heroic act but i've really never had a chance and of course he's lying he had lots of chances he was he was a favored son of a middle-class family there he could have just kept living in ireland uh and lived a reasonable life as a minor gentry.

It wasn't like he didn't come from extreme poverty, but there's just an emptiness in his core. And I think one of the challenges for the movie when it first came out was people kept saying about how beautiful but empty it was. And I think that that's an interesting question to ask now. If you're making a movie, right? I would say most, most filmmakers, whether they're making like a proof of concept movie for YouTube or a studio has given them a hundred million dollars would not take it as a compliment.

If somebody said your movie was beautiful, but empty. And I, I, I didn't identify or care about the fate of the main character. That's sort of, considered to be a terrible failing today. I did get the feeling that maybe Kubrick was just fine with it, but he was the only person who could get away with it. And you could also say he didn't actually get away with it because the film did not do very well.

It had some revenue, but it Not it wasn't a big hit. Let's put it that way. But like he did accomplish the empty vessel as the hero. Well, and that's I think for me, what the film deserves to be lauded as is as a success on its own terms for the terms that it's set, which is to be a film about a vapid vein of. empty not soulless because I think he does have a soul but he has no agency of his own other than like maybe that moment where he saves his commander that's about it like he's not completely beyond reproach I guess is what that scene is attempting to give us as the audience but he is a character that creates a lot of his own undoing. I mean, his undoing is his own.

He buys the horse that his son ends up riding and dies. And he does that. He couldn't wait to buy it. He couldn't control himself around his stepson. So that ends up being the undoing.

There's a lot of things in this film that are Barry Lyndon's own undoing. He can't control himself at the beginning of the film with the captain around his cousin like there's just a lot and it's like, you know what? I think of The Sopranos where it's like, man, like you had every opportunity to go left and you went right. And it's like, I don't know how much of that is Barry Lyndon's own fault or how much of that's just like, that's the path the character is always going to go down no matter what he did, because that's just the way he is. And it's like, like I said, it's like in a lot of ways, it's like he doesn't have any agency of his own and he's always going to be making these bad choices until the end where he breaks free, you know, to quote Westworld, he breaks free of his loop at the end, and he actually, you know, makes the somewhat right decision to not shoot his own stepson.

But you do wonder, like, why did Barry Lyndon make that choice to not do that? Why, oh why, now did he rise above when he hasn't really risen above any other time? Again, like, he was. you know, him blowing, uh, him blowing the cigarette smoke in his wife's face is that scene for me where I'm just like, man, this guy is just kind of, kind of a turd. And, and it's hard again, like it's not hard to want to see him have his downfall or get his comeuppance or have an arc. Because again, I am a lover of the Sopranos and other shows where the lead characters are broadly worse than Barry Lyndon is.

But again, If you're not on board with that being the case, I could see why you would not resonate with this film. Because again, you've talked about the thing to reference Blade Runner. Those films also had that same criticism of like, well, I don't like it for X, Y, and Z reason. Well, it's like, well, X, Y, and Z reason are why these films were being made. So what are you supposed to do if you're not willing to meet the film where it wants to be met?

I don't know. And that's such a hard thing with the older critics because the older critics... went back and reappraised things. I mean, even Ebert gave it three and a half stars originally in 75. And then, you know, in 2009, he gave it four stars. I mean, again, I don't I don't know how much that matters, if it matters at all.

But as we're sitting here trying to find a reason to give this film compulsory reason for you to watch it, I don't think we need to give more than two or three. But I feel like this film has five. It's a technically impressive film. Like you've already mentioned, from an art history standpoint, it melds and mashes so many different artists into like, again, like not any one artist, but all of the artists all at once. I don't know how else to describe it, but it's, it's not any one specific artist, but it's also a bunch of different artists at the same time being kind of utilized and referenced.

And again, And again, to go back to the music or the acting or all the things that make this film so interesting and appealing to me are the reasons other people didn't like it. But that's the intention of the film. If you watch this and said, I don't like that there's not any narration, the reaction is, well, the lack of narration is intentional. If you can't if you if you can have that conversation about that in 1975. Why couldn't you have a conversation about, well, he made the film like this intentionally because look at the main character.

He's trying to reflect the state and mindset and existence of the main character. I don't understand why that wasn't readily apparent as well. Yeah, I think this is a great example of if I were, again, to try to prove to aliens that we deserve to exist, but also if as part of required viewing, we say, you know, you really should view this. You really should view this, aliens. You really should view this, humans.

I don't think you should go through life on this earth without watching this movie. I'm not exaggerating because, going back to something I said earlier, it is a genre of one. It's unrecreatable. It's unrecreatable in terms of budget. It's unrecreatable in terms of who would get away.

I guess Christopher Nolan, there's a few directors out there, if they went to a studio and pitched anything... The studio would say yes, but that's a very, very small number of directors who get to do almost anything that they want. So the time was right. He did it. It's there in the museum.

You should go watch it. Like everybody should go see the Mona Lisa in person. I'm not saying it's exactly that level of of great art, but it is something that is almost unique in film experience. I mean, I do think some of the great works of Akira Kurosawa have that level of brilliance and beauty in individual scenes. His narrative films like Ran and some of the others, plus a driving story, plus deeply interesting characters.

But Kubrick made this choice and I don't think it's, it, should have any controversy associated with its place in the museum. And then my other point was sort of really prompted by what something you were saying, because we have this character, Barry Lyndon, who does the right thing every once in a while. Once in a while being the key phrase. Yeah. And so you wonder, like, is there a decent human being there that if he had had different circumstances, you would see more decency than less?

Or is this a cad? You know, is this a rogue, not in a good sense, who just occasionally feels a paying price? of conscience or, and I think the third choice, I mean, to me, if I were trying to do some sort of deep thematic analysis, I'd say that the whole film is shot to show the rigidity of class and money and, and, and who you are in that. And, and him trying to break through that is ultimately punished horribly in different ways. You know, we, we, in the end of the movie, I, I don't feel like giving everything away, but he suffers. And he has his moments where he has broken through some of the weight of class barriers and wealth barriers and tradition barriers.

But Again, trying to be thematic here, it does raise the question of if you're saying that societal values are wrong and they're oppressive, it is incumbent upon you to say, what are you going to replace them with? Because Barry Lyndon is no revolutionary. He's not trying to reform society. He's just trying to climb to the top of it. And so I thought that was also interesting, is that he chose not to make a film about about Spartacus.

He's the anti-Spartacus. Spartacus is, in the movie, we don't necessarily know what Spartacus' actual aims were, the real Spartacus, but in the movie Spartacus, Kirk Douglas quite enjoys himself making some speeches about, you know, we want freedom and we don't want an empire anymore. We want everybody to live free and things like that. Those kind of speeches that we are more familiar with from Mel Gibson movies about freedom and, you know... down with the evil king and thinks, Barry Lyndon is not any kind of revolutionary like those people. He just wants part of the action, right?

And I think the comparison to Sopranos is very interesting. You know, Tony Soprano doesn't want to overturn the social order. He wants a big house and wants to live the good life. And what's funny is in that show, there is always the question of why is it acceptable for well-regarded businessmen to rip people off and make money exploiting other people and they're lauded for it. And yet someone like Tony Soprano is looked down on by taking advantage of people just because of the framework of the business that he does it inside of.

And it's like, well, the American dream, as perverse as it sounds, the American dream should have a seat at the table for both of those people. And yet we we constantly reject one over the other because we have been told that one is more, you know, societally acceptable over the other. And when you look at a film like Barry Lyndon, it says, well, look, it doesn't even matter if you're able to have upward mobility because the upward mobility will just look down on you either way. I mean, his stepson looks down on him and would have regardless. And that's just because of who he is.

He's because he's Irish, because he comes from, you know, not as upper class stock as he does, even though he was not technically upper class stock because his... His mother seemingly married his father for his immense wealth. And it's just like the rigidity of the class structure is the joke of this movie. It is the punchline to the joke that the movie is telling. It's like, well, even if you are able to move upwards, it doesn't matter because the system will still push down on you and the system will never accept you no matter how much money you have because it only accepts its own.

It has that smell on it. They can smell their own for whatever. And I mean, that ties directly into the epilogue of the film, which is like in the only equalizer in all of this is death. It's just like time is the equalizer of all. But I think that that's so important in a film like Barry Lyndon, because I think if we are to, you know, again, look into the film and make statements about what the film is trying to do and what the film is trying to achieve, I think that the film is making what it's trying to achieve obvious with that ending quote about like, You know, regardless of what they were doing at the time, once they're all dead and gone, they're all equal.

So none of this ultimately matters. None of what they were dealing with on Earth mattered because at the end, we're all equal. So maybe that should be the driving force behind people treating one another well as opposed to trying to. pad your bottom line and i i think the film gets that across in multiple multiple different faceted ways if you want to go down that avenue of analysis which i think that's what the film's offering up to you but i don't think that's the only line of analysis to go down yeah if i. Were to wrap up this film for me anyway i i again i thinking about my 1981-82 self, being so impressed by the beauty of this. I wanted to be a photographer.

Actually, my first book was a photographic study of a police department, and I used a Nikon 8008 film camera, and I actually developed the film in the photo lab at the University of Minnesota myself. And the pictures appeared in the book, like my pictures that I've developed. And I just remember actually having these moments there. It was black and white film because I was doing a documentary and I felt it made sense to have black and white pictures. But I remember a moment there where I was going like, man, I am not shooting Barry Lyndon.

In fact, it became sort of a catchphrase like this is not Barry Lyndon. Movies of this level of beauty, there's... There are other directors, again, Kakeru Kurosawa from China at that, I think just about to start making films at that time. Zhang Yimou made just an astonishing series of films, which Siskel and Ebert really loved and talked about, in fact, comparing the two, The Satchman. the saturation color of the film that he used, where just the reds were overwhelming, the yellows were overwhelming. And I almost think that this film could also be called a time capsule to an era when Hollywood felt that the color, the scale, the dazzliness of imagery was part of visual language.

And you could lament that maybe that just doesn't seem to be the the case today so definitely we require you viewing this but for different reasons that maybe some other films which of course that is the reason we look at many films and. I think to your point and kind of the point of a film like this look if if you want to go watch the kubrick films that you've heard so much about that are the ones that everyone can't stop talking about Go watch The Shining. Go watch A Clockwork Orange. Go watch Eyes Wide Shut. Those, you know, go watch 2001 A Space Odyssey or Full Metal Jacket.

Those films are all as amazing as you've heard they are. Like, they are. Like, they are as good, or even Dr. Strangelove, or anything even pre-Dr. Strangelove.

Like, you know, any of his films. I think this is a weird, odd man out that doesn't deserve the kind of, it deserves the expectation that it's, or the kind of reputation it's been given, but it also, I think, doesn't need to be compared anymore as like it is a high watermark in terms of making film and no films are made like this anymore and like you said like that that is something in and of itself that that needs to be kind of talked about and we've we've done a we've done a lot of talking about that about kind of the singularity of this film. But I also think, like you said, if you just watch it from other angles that were the ones that were being intended to be looked at from, I think the film succeeds in all those aspects as well as a as a class study, as a art history study, as a study of how to portray imagery of the time through the filmic language.

Like all of these are things that Kubrick was doing that he succeeded at doing. And I think some people just looked at it and said, well, it's a beautiful film, but it's boring. And it's like, but what if the boring is intentional? Have you asked that? And it's like, again, it's counterintuitive.

And we've both, I think, already talked about that as well. It's massively counterintuitive to think that way. But at the same time, it's Stanley Kubrick. So I don't know why that's so kind of outside of the realm of possibility. So yeah, another one in the books, Barry Lyndon, a film that I enjoyed immensely this time around.

Even if I hadn't enjoyed it, I would say definitely give it a watch in terms of the things that are not Kubrick, like always being mentioned, but At the same time, I enjoyed it, so I can double-heartedly kind of suggest it. But this was a good one. If you want to hear me and The Professor talking about film in another setting that's technically an audio setting, but just my show, not the required viewing feed, you can find those episodes of The Culture Cast here or at weirdingwaymedia.com, where this show and so many other great shows can be found, including 80s TV Ladies, The Projection Booth Podcast... Never Tell Me the Odds and so many more. If you want to help the show out financially, patreon.com slash culturecast is where you can go to do that. $ 5 gets you access to bonus episodes like Ranking on Bond, which is over and is now becoming Never Tell Me the Odds, which is a show about Harrison Ford.

So if you want to go hear those, go on over there. You know where to find it. And as always, come on back for the next episode of Required Viewing and the Culture Cast.