STANLEY KUBRICK’S BARRY LYNDON “Redmond, do you mind not smoking for a while?”

© 2015 by James Clark

There is a scene, in Kubrick’s film, Barry Lyndon (1975), which offers, within the work’s encompassing an avalanche of distemper, a moment of palpable equilibrium. A British soldier in Germany during the Seven Years War (1756-1763), namely, Raymond Barry, disguised as an officer in the course of deserting (hopefully to the neutral haven of Holland), encounters a young woman living in a farm cottage nearby and left alone with her child due to her husband’s having been swept up in the chaotic warfare. Barry, still redolent of his sweet Irish ways, is accorded a meal and then a few days of love with the keeper of the home fires, a transaction in bloom with gentle recognition of the fragility of existence. “It must be hard for you to be alone.”/ “It is… It must be very danger [the discourse sharing what English and German each can provide] for you to be in the War…” Before the encounter our protagonist is shown enlivened by his escape on horseback—a voice-over, by a narrator having heard of his misadventure after the fact, declaring (with Barry’s optics to confirm the point), “The open road… he vowed never again to fall from the rank of a gentleman…” The noble tone of the couple’s first dinner together (at a table bathed in golden candlelight enshrouded by pitch darkness) is sustained by her pristine question, “Would you like to stay with me for a few days?” and the simple touching of each other’s hand. Then he asks a question—innocent enough, but loaded with the volatility being glossed over by the flourish about constantly inhabiting a lofty rank—“Is the baby a boy or a girl?” In the eighteenth century that would mean to say (flying in the face of the ready confluence between them, just revealed), “Is this person active or passive?” The young mother tells him, “He’s a boy…” And despite the presumably blissful union onstream, as they share a poignant farewell and a kiss informed by strong and true affection, the keynote of action, with all its deathtraps, comes down like a cold, thick fog on that sparkling day.

Slightly based on a novel from 1844 by William Thackeray (a novel often referred to as the first such offering of a story without a hero)—Kubrick’s film being a choice somewhat redolent of having been denied producing an account of the life of Napoleon—wherein a protagonist pleads the case for behaving badly (the serialized prelude being called, The Luck of Barry Lyndon), our filmmaker’s effort is far from the picaresque franchise turning serious bucks for a long time. (Barry Lyndon was preceded by an instance, well-known at the release of our film here, namely, Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones [1963].) In fact, it could, with justice, be called a deadly serious kind of stealth missile bringing the anomie of hard-core Antonioni, Fellini, Bresson et al to an unprepared (“no-nonsense” logical) English speaking world. As such, despite the consummate verisimilitude invested in the visual design, we have on our hands a film that, were it first produced in the 21^st century, would be totally up to the minute. The arc of energy within Barry Lyndon’s three-hour spiky funeral procession must be firmly grasped at its outset as having an unlikely preponderant and rustic navigational figure with tendencies to be way ahead of his time. And crucial to that prescience is a pervasive jet stream of natural and musical surround which works into the pores of our protagonist, especially during his youth and early adulthood (only to be later repelled by him, and then be taken up by someone we must struggle not to underestimate).  The duel (on account of some horses and their kinetic horsepower) that ends his father’s life at the film’s beginning is shot from a distance the better to secure admiration of the sweep of distant lavender hills and a grey, fretful sky, the living legacy of the fatherless boy. We soon see him in manifestations of that paradise evincing humbly gentle and at the same time poised recognition of his good fortune; but also veering to actions intent on violent possessiveness. His cousin, Nora Brady, absolutely untouched by those cues to wisdom, forces him to fondle her breasts in search of a ribbon she’s aggressively tasked him with removing from her scheming, advantage-starved person. (The card game they had been indifferently toying with anticipates a range of endeavor which a no longer youthfully supple Barry would engage with jadedness closer to that of Nora.) The voice-over takes, in view of the circumstances, a simplistically sanguine view of Raymond’s warm-heartedness. “First love, what a change it makes in a lad! He loves as a bird sings… from nature…” Barry’s being guilelessly touched by the forces of nature informing (in a strangely adulterated way) his nubile cousin (a moment wherein his presence is worshipful and his voice prayerful) rapidly sinks to coarse jealousy landing him in a strangely soft and resonant clodhopper pitch. Nora fixes her sights on one Captain Quinn, a wealthy Englishman overseeing the occupation of that district of Celtic preclusion and financing and managing a regiment of the locals in support of the King’s commitment to war with a coalition prominently involving France. Barry impetuously and viciously propels a glass of wine into Quinn’s face during a dinner to announce the marriage by which Nora’s family would handsomely benefit in the form of easy-street cash flow; the ensuant duel is rigged, involving fake ammunition, by that family only somewhat impressed by the boy’s spunk; made to understand that he must go into hiding in Dublin, the seeming killer is once again promptly manipulated by highwaymen en route, losing his horse and funds (deriving from his mother) by which he briefly felt the tang of the open road; and at the first village he plods to he enlists for six years of army life.

But it’s early days, and Barry is indeed endowed with a strong measure of irrepressibility. Whereas a more brittle boy would plunge into remorseful self-pity for having been an early scratch from the thrills and (infinite) rewards of the highway, our guide into the monstrosity of equilibrium takes to army life with a patient, alert bearing still touched by those roots that intimate so vast a bounty. (Moreover, though, the episode of Nora’s amusing and grotesque moment in the sun offers traces of Barry’s makeup presaging difficulties and travesties as the gruelling campaign [military and civilian] lurches on. The cousin asks the sex-toy [actor Ryan O’Neal fitting the bill for Kubrick in so many ways, including being an experienced boxer], “Why are you tremblin’?” He whispers, “It’s the pleasure of finding the ribbon [concealed in her bodice]/ “You’re a liar!” she triumphs, going on to induce a kiss. We’ll soon see that he relishes quite a high level of smooth-talking blarney. Later, en route to a military and post-military police career of multiple desertions, he [when having been pressed into the Prussian army] is cited for bravery by an officer and also chided by him for gross inconsistency. “You are a brave man but you will come to no good…” To which the navigator through rough terrain sweet talks, “I had never had a kind friend before… Now I would go to the devil to save the regiment.” This readiness to take liberties with the truth has been matched with underestimations of the cost of such phoniness which his instincts chafe at, not merely in a personal way but in a thrum whereby he knows in his gut that his sensibility deserves more credit in its sitedness within a wider sphere. Nora, always game to trade up, tells him, during the days when money begins to talk, “Captain Quinn is a man and you’re only a boy…” Be that as it may, the body language of Quinn—a happy peacock when dancing to country airs with Nora; but a stressed fowl when going through martial paces to a military band and facing the menace of Barry—shows the boy to be more at home with physical dynamics than the man. Barry, as we hear from Nora, seeing himself as a superior enforcer from as far back as schoolyard battles, carries with him that card of easy intimidation as a tool not in strict accordance with his ownmost and most elusive interests.)

His first days in uniform find our quickly accelerating soldier of fortune seeking moorings with mixed results. First of all he beats to a pulp a fellow recruit who had teased him for boyishly asking for a water cup that was not greasy, a feat of physical agility, intensity and destructiveness that wins him the cheers of his suddenly a bit less anonymous comrades. (This rather gruesome but brilliantly positioned scene is a form of rerun of Kubrick’s very first film, the documentary, Day of the Fight (1951), replete with a battered prize-fight contestant emitting a dark slimy flow from his mouth. Barry’s operating as an almost superhuman nemesis here establishes a sort of indelible beacon to assist orienting to the winner here being, in time, subjected, by a neglected nature, to an even more lethal and humiliating beating.) Soon after this boost of momentum, our protagonist (now near the front lines on the Continent) encounters the home-town regimental captain (taking over while Quinn stayed back with Nora) who had been particularly fond of his special nerve and who now persuades him to write to his mother who was distraught about knowing nothing of his whereabouts. Next day during an assault upon French lines entrenched with rifles braced for the British fixed bayonet approach to be randomly cut to ribbons, that bearer of good advice about staying in touch (Barry’s excuse being he was embarrassed about being robbed) and reporter as to the fix being in as to Quinn and Nora, is fatally wounded. Raymond carries him from the disconcerting slaughter—the narrator wryly observing that only a major philosopher or historian could begin to make sense of its origins (but let’s guess anyway: the prospect of material wealth)—and his fleeting friend calls out, “Kiss me, my boy, for we’ll never meet again!” At which, our guide, still clinging to the prospect of fully meaningful days, cries copiously, his head on the elderly man’s chest.

The film, true to Kubrick’s faith in far-reaching atmospheric mood trumping narrative conclusions, has given a wide berth to moralistic platitudes. Its initial stage rolls out a viscerally recognizable precinct of intimacy being implacably infected by ravenous and clannish machinations. Nora’s free-lance lasciviousness becomes harnessed to a family cash-grab; rural tasks of self-maintenance become harnessed to sustaining a vast international coalition for the sake of material treasure and imaginative self-aggrandizement. The army, hoping to swallow up our already challenged boy, is a monolith devoted to methods bordering on suicide. From out of the cold heart of this snare Barry begins to claw his way to a survival still having to accommodate an imperative of hot blood.

Like many other boys, Barry had strongly taken to the excitements of games. His game of hide-and-seek amidst the troopers is, after the moment of promising but complicated truth with the young German mom, promptly curtailed by a Prussian officer who sees right through the boy’s blarney in hopes of reaching Holland. He never sees Holland; but, being dealt the hand of become-a-Prussian soldier-or-face-the-firing-squad, he survives that protracted alienation in conjunction with what the (remote in time and place) narrator refers to as some kind of spectacular decadence to the fore with Prussian soldiers. Stepping back from that conjecture, we can, I think, put into perhaps more helpful play Barry’s well-exposed deceptive and violent proclivities. As we said, he never reaches the tranquility of Holland where he might have addressed with less compromise his nagging sense of being out of step with those dull armies. But he does get as close as Belgium when, after the war and sponsored by the captain who spared him and was in turn spared by the young man in the form of rescuing the officer from being pinned by a heavy beam in the heat of battle, he deceives his benefactor within a supposed spy mission focused on a gambler (Barry’s ticket to bounty and disgrace in Belgium and beyond). Barry’s roiling compass here consists of a flood of nostalgic vision in finding the “Austrian” gambler to be in fact an Irishman. Thus, in the course of betraying a person of measured energy, wit, consistency and generosity with whom he might have opened a beachhead for everyday progress affording a smidgeon of poetry amidst distasteful chores, he befriends a powdered, rouged and beauty-marked fop adept at glitter and deception which would spark traces of his Celtic, mystical, poetic godsend; but traces within a battlefield as abstract and vicious as those he left behind.

Skipping out of the stolid demands of Germany with his flighty new partner, Barry becomes immersed in a world of chateau-based gambling spas: their effete and yet nobly textured and proportioned cladding concealing ruthless, brutal plunder and atrophied instincts for something more real. The signature image of Barry Lyndon is its cinematically fertile delivery of those fabulous precincts in sheer, inspired candlelight brimming surrealistically from Cocteau-evoking candelabras. They stand out in marking sensually, intuitively, a measure of the heights of sensibility our protagonist (a long-term deceiver) has chosen to deceive himself into believing he can do without. Their serene beauty includes an unforgiving primal elegance. After a spate of our beholding the one-time highway connoisseur and one-time highway robbery victim himself becoming a member of a type of highway robbery constellation (cards up sleeves; still-agile Barry using fencing-duel prowess as a form of collection agency) there comes a moment when the mechanics and rewards of gaming begin to pall for that still restless player. (His restlessness, however, as we so clearly discern at the imminent change of pace, does not involve saving so much as a shred of the affection he once held for his Irish-rogue companion.) But the malaise does not pan out to something beyond fool’s gold, but rather the even bigger travesty of marrying into money. “And he began to have it in mind, like so many men before him [uniqueness now in very short supply], to marry a woman of fortune and condition…” This scheme comes to mind for him on the vast patio of a Belgian chateau irresistibly situated amidst formal, geometrically-inspired grounds (radiant in their river setting) recalling those in the film, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). There comes, at that hour, into Barry’s view the beautiful Countess of Lyndon and her elderly, sickly and crippled husband, a British notable. That very night, at the gaming table amidst myriad, beckoning candles and a slice of the crème de la crème, Barry regards her longingly, his melancholy homage perhaps vestigially touched by his best (and now effectively Lilliputian) self. The plunge of her eyes and the difficulty of her maintaining poise are palpably intense to an extent Barry hasn’t mustered for years. Unlike the fervid pursuit and protracted vacillation of Robbe-Grillet’s uncanny love affair in the service of Alain Resnais’ film noted above, here we encounter a dearth of cogent energy. We see Lady Lyndon having vacated the table and its warming candles to take in the fresh night air and the venerable moonlight (magically and a bit reprovingly silver—one of a myriad breathtaking moments due to the brilliance of cinematographer, John Alcott)—actress Marisa Berenson, coincidentally and marvellously the granddaughter of Surrealist fashion designer, Elsa (“Shocking”) Schiaparelli—and also, hopefully, to take in some sensual magic; and then we have the suitor, as hearty as a jewel thief, expertly taking her two hands in his and kissing her. (Our narrator presents the accepted rumor that, “…in 6 hours Lady Lyndon was in love…” [He prefaces the mathematics with some unwitting ontology, however: “To make a long story short…” A long story indeed!] On watching her closely in the action following that night, we might amend that account along lines that she is more than a recreational gambler herself, of necessity—a surrealistically uncanny gambler to the commonness that Barry’s comportment has feebly settled into.)

That moment when the two god-like paragons of glamor seem to evoke a future filled with mutual triumph opens out upon a years-long stomach-churning brawl bringing to mind Raymond’s taking apart the trooper when he at least had remarkable dynamics to show and an impudent brute to fell. Soon after their marriage (paved by Barry’s provoking her husband into a fatal heart attack), we behold the English countryside in all its rolling, green splendor, with a sun-kissed sky above. Then we are within the handsome coach that seemed to fairly dance along the road, and who should be there but the newlyweds, Barry smoking a steaming pipe as if to exorcize the freshness of the inspiration that no longer speaks to him, though he looks out the window, ignoring the lady of the moonlight. Lady Lyndon speaks to him, gently but without joy. “Redmond, do you mind not smoking for a while?” Barry, too, speaks, after a fashion, blowing smoke in her beautiful face, which quietly registers that crude want of respect. His follow-up of a tepid kiss only deepens the chill. Though it is his misadventure we most readily absorb, I think that the nuances of his too trusting and too reckless prisoner join in some ways the forces of fresh air and thereby set in relief gambits perhaps far from thrilling but possibly edifying in face of the rout of that formerly ardent sensibility. (The title, Barry Lyndon, after all, encompasses both of them. It puts us on notice to realize that that Barry is not a first name.)

Soon they have a baby boy (Redmond’s first but her second, the first, a boy, coming from the incongruous invalid); and, after a scene of the parents still and pensive with their new mystery—she, perhaps, measuring formidable obstacles; he, perhaps, measuring easy clichés)—there is a cut to Barry at an orgy, half-heartedly pawing and receiving pawing by a pair of very young girls, a scene so devoid of mystery that, in its reflux, it brings to us a universe of impotent violence. (Lady Lyndon had, it seems, ironically placed her bet on another weakling.) Redmond’s visiting tyranny upon his wife/banker has about it not simply the rage of feeling humiliated by the pulse of life itself and plunging into spectacular outrage in reaction to being so overmatched; but it addresses the current of a cash-cow-wife who turns out to have mastered at an appreciable level that conundrum of composure which vitally informed his best days of long ago. She comes upon him embracing the new baby’s attendant in a lush bower on her property, the baby carriage nearby. The mother who is much more beholds that faux affection with a stifled distress on the order of a Field General surveying a setback for her army. She turns and reactivates her promenade through the friendly forces of her grand park—an asset in an organic, English style in contrast to the far more tightly-knit Continental, geometric lightning rod. Later that day Barry enters her boudoir (in strict French, a sulking place) where a lady in waiting reads to her in (lightning-rod) French while she bathes, that is to say, while she finds a way (one of many standbys, no doubt) to fully regain her equilibrium in face of the raging disaster of her latest liaison. (The reading comes down to “steadfast as light [and] its vision of blessedness…” –“…constante de lumiere…son benis…quelle spectacle!”) In soft sugary court of law smarts he smooth-talks the staff he so fastidiously cares for. “Good morning, ladies. Would you mind leaving us alone?” His apology, delivered in a delicate whisper, benefits from a backlog of no longer effective stabs at integrity. He takes her hand (proffered by her, her face enigmatically reflective along the arc of the apology she will invest in, strategically, no longer wholeheartedly)  in a manner recalling the prowess on the moonlit patio, and their kiss at this time is a union of carnal symmetry ever so briefly overtaking the fragmentation of carnal entropy. (The text of their wedding vows—delivered by long-standing ascetic, precious advisor to her family, Reverend Runt [feebleness once again?]—includes the seeming pipe dream to rise above, “…carnal lusts, like brute beasts that have no knowledge…”)

Barry, however, despite extravagant clothing and decor expenses, is not only well described by Runt’s homily on “brute beasts,” which most viewers exposed to his long-term predatory disintegration would not require explicitness about; but he is targeted as such by his step-son, Lord Bullingdon, and thereby brute-beast savagery looms to the detriment of not only the parasitical scheming but—now more importantly—to the detriment of his wife’s subtle and elaborate purchase upon true refinement. (This minuet about to go ballistic must not distract our obligation here to fully absorb the hyper-refinement of the cinematic progression whereby the real story becomes Lady Lyndon’s.) Rather than continuing to fixate upon the dangerous and cowardly loser guiding us hitherto, we must fully appreciate a career taking us somewhere very special, very redolent of aristocratic energies (that nobility which Redmond came to imagine being shoplifted).

Lord Bullingdon, a rather frail and quite high-strung little creature, ardently attached to his serene and lovely mother, was, even at the outset of the remarriage, aghast at her hasty investment in the matrimonial equivalent of a Florida swamp. He tells a pleased Runt, “He [Barry] seems to me a common opportunist. I don’t think he loves my mother at all.” That would well coincide with the narrator’s painting the situation of Lady Lyndon (an object lesson herself, in the difference between wise and smart) at the outset of her picturesque nuptials: “She was soon destined to occupy a place not very much more than the elegant carpets and pictures.” But even here, where catastrophe is all but certain, we should recognize that that beautiful networker (not expecting perfection, or even a little inspiration, in her entourage—but only perhaps fortuitous assistance in relation to her solitary way [The voice-over opines [too cleverly], “She preferred quiet or he preferred it for her…”]) comes equipped with what could never be mistaken for great warriors—Runt being, against all odds, a key player—but who in fact still constitute an effective (even if inefficient) and totally loyal army. Before long the articulate pipsqueak is making clear that Redmond is not by any stretch of the imagination a relation of his, a punchiness that his mother tries to curb without real conviction. “Is that the way to behave to your father?” The combatant, far too young to see where she’s really going, sticks to days of easy advantage. “You have insulted my father.” This leads to his first feeling the application of Barry’s whip; but it is the second and third beatings that give us a sense that something far more compelling is in the works than a bully’s futile revenge. Before a squabble involving the young half-brother (of Bullingdon) whom Barry has taken up as a means to convince himself he has fine feelings, the little child, Bryan, irritatingly interrupts his late-adolescent half-brother on account of pretending needing to know the meaning of the word, “strenuous.” He is promptly given this definition, so loaded in the circumstances: “It means an effort requiring strength.” Barry’s being at the point of almost completely lacking the strength to inform a body language with a convincing communicative future, now so embarrassingly and compromisingly exposed, unfortunately undoes his campaign (prompted by his mother, now ensconced in the Lyndon palace) to secure a title which would be proof against Bullingdon’s inheriting the estate. The third attack upon his stepchild pertains to the latter’s perceiving an afternoon of chamber music (designed for enchantment) to be the brain child of his step-father’s sponsor, a lofty deal-maker due to his being in very good standing with the King. Lady Lyndon at the harpsichord and Runt making his way with surprising authority on the flute, in the company of lords and ladies, Bullingdon (a crafty bull in a china shop) bursts into this joy division, leading Bryan along, wearing a pair of big brother’s clattering boots. Having finally induced therewith a version of the day the music died, he uses the child as a prop in some shock tactics. “Don’t you think the shoes fit very well? Dear child, what a pity it is I’m not dead for your sake… [Regarding his mother with an accusatory glare] The Lyndons would then have a worthy representative [Glaring at Barry, seated in the first row [ringside, as it happens] with his sainted mother], the illustrious Barrys of Barrington…Would they not, Mr. Raymond Barry?” Lady Lyndon, caught up in a nightmare she cannot find the cleverness to exit, scolds, “From the way I love this child [Bryan], my Lord [Bullingdon], you would know how I’d have loved his elder brother had he proved worthy of any mother’s affection!” With that she takes Bryan to an exit; and as she retreats in nearly delirious confusion, her hot-blooded and effete son cries out, “Madame, I have borne all I could endure from the ill-treatment of the insolent Irish upstart you’ve taken to your bed… [Lady Lyndon, architect of a house of cards in the process of serious collapse, now with angry eyes and sadly wilting stature to the point of a problematic crisis has to hear Bullingdon out, as follows] The low quality of this marriage disgusts, chiefly on account of his conduct toward your Ladyship…brutal and ungentleman-like behavior…open infidelity [Close-up of Barry, if looks could kill]…his shameless robberies and swindling of my property and yours…And as I cannot personally chastise his low friends and ruffians and as I cannot bear to witness his treatment of you and loathe his horrible society as if it were the Plague, I’ve decided to leave my home and never return, at least during his detested life or during my own.” Lady Lyndon weeps and leaves, only to immediately return as Redmond dashes to Bullingdon and administers a bully’s assault upon the young man, far more uncouth than the fist fight—smashing his small opponent repeatedly in the face as he lies helpless. Many of those men who were performing a study of his being suited to a title rush to prevent his hysterical peasant frenzy causing a murder. We find that Lady Lyndon’s unique poise has deserted her. We have to ask, “How can she bring it back?” (Our test from Kubrick here is to realize that her task of recovery is far more compelling than his.)

With pressures seemingly out of control, it might be useful to back-track to the placid outset of that remarkable explosion. Lady Lyndon’s performance of Bach’s Adagio in C minor is complemented by a continuo flute motif in support of the former’s elicitation of nobility. Reverend Runt eternally moved to facilitate what he perceives to be sublime in her ladyship, strives, quite successfully here, to rise to her level. Her Ladyship and Bullingdon both horribly wounded on the battlefield constitute only one wing of the constellation of (shaky) stalwarts she had invented, none more shaky than Barry—but, in their Bryan, a far more viable entity. Bryan dies in a horseback riding mishap which his father’s careless (and calculated) indulgence effects; at the deathbed, Redmond loquaciously and tearfully grasps for solace and reprises a boastful fantasy for the boy, pertaining to his standard bedtime story of military heroics. At the other side of the bed, Lady Lyndon is prostrate in silent bereavement. Bryan pleads, “Please don’t quarrel so… Love one another…” (She hears herself join Redmond’s desperate and empty response, “We promise.” Barry is reduced to tears. She isn’t.) While the aftermath finds Barry in a non-stop drunken stupor, his wife, after a desultory stab at suicide by poison, has a breakdown wherein she screams in despair. Runt is dismissed by Barry’s mother who has taken upon herself to run the household. But yet another loyalist, a rather colorless bureaucrat, rallies Bullingdon in exile, who realizes, in the spirit of Lady Lyndon’s informal but inherently solid coterie/cabal, “I have by my cowardice and weakness allowed the Barrys to overrun… I know I am despised and justifiably so.” This unathletic figure returns to the regal exterior with the violated interior; he challenges his hated adversary to a duel by pistols; he vomits when, after muffing his first shot, he must stand to receive Barry’s shot, which the latter, in self-contempt, vanity and alcohol-soaked nostalgia fires into the ground; he (perhaps having spent more time than they reflecting on what makes the menace tick, especially the lack of strenuousness in his comportment) refuses to concur with those officiating that such magnanimous optics graciously resolve the grievance; he shoots Barry, his bullet hitting his leg which subsequently has to be amputated below the knee causing him to leave forever the precincts on crutches, his mother assisting him.

It may seem implausible that perhaps the most thrilling moment of a flood of intense and dazzling action could inhere in three men and a woman seated at a table in a large room somewhat lacking commensurate furniture, where the woman, Lady Lyndon, displays poise (unique poise), in signing promissory notes. Her face is solemn but with a topspin of expansiveness as she regards the declaration of one of a yearly stipend of 500 guineas to Redmond Barry, a mistake the likes of which she is not apt to repeat. (The measured sally of her choice quill in touching ink to high-quality, flesh-like parchment casts a fleeting spell of sensuous well-being.) During the wider process of endorsing for the sake of freeing her estate from the pillage, Bullingdon casts his big, hungry and haunted eyes in the direction of his mother, now restored to fragile goddess stature. Hovering over this most quiet resumption of affairs is the question of a more unbroken serenity henceforth. Will a cordon sanitaire impede her researches?

The difficulty of fully engaging this figure as at least equally significant a world historical force as those military and financial affairs induced by and outflanking the lost and mutilated man of action consists in the matter of her privileged situation, what the narrator calls her “condition.” We’ve been trained to assume that the essential challenges of existence are equally manageable to everyone, with prompting from world religion, world science and world humanitarianism. Our keyword here, namely, “strenuous,” packs a wallop far transcending that venerable assumption. The amount of concentration and waywardness required to steer effectively amidst the storms of humbugs is a very catch-as-catch-can condition. That dilemma, that suspense and that meaningful thrill are at the heart of Kubrick’s work.