Barry Lyndon’s themes, ending, meaning, real-life application, and more
Inferiority
When trying to figure out a movie’s theme, the first thing I usually do is look at the very beginning. Many writers like to crystallize the story’s point in an image or via foreshadowing through dialogue/action.
When we look at the beginning of Barry Lyndon, it’s the duel that takes the life of Barry’s father. The narrator tells us: Barry’s father had been bred, like many other young sons of a genteel family, to the profession of the law. And there is no doubt he would have made an eminent figure in his profession had he not been killed in a duel which arose over the purchase of some horses.
When I hear that, I focus on the implication that Barry’s father died over a transaction. Instead of getting caught up on the specificity (a disagreement over the purchase of some horses), I zoom out and look at the broader concept. An entire life, full of potential, cut short because of a conflict over money. Then I form a hypothesis: the major theme is someone’s relationship with money and how that affects the course of their life.
To check this we’d ask: “Is money, or issues with money, something that ever comes up again? Does the main character have a positive or negative relationship with money that’s a major part of the story?”
Look at Barry Lyndon’s first thirty minutes. Note the sequence of events.
- The first major scene with Barry establishes a romantic relationship between Barry and his cousin, Nora.
- Then the very next scene has Barry in a crowd watching a regiment of English soldiers show-off to the public via a march. The narrator tells us that their “scarlet coats and swaggering airs filled Barry with envy.” The captain, John Quin, catches Nora’s eye.
- In the next scene, Nora dances with Quin, while Barry gazes on, helpless. He fights with Nora then angrily chops wood outside his humble farm house.
- Nora and Quin fall in love. Barry interferes and Quin seemingly calls off the marriage.
- Nora’s family, also Barry’s extended family, want Nora to marry Quin because Quin’s status means money for everyone. So they repair the engagement. But the dinner results in a duel between Barry and Quin.
- Family tricks Barry into thinking he successfully killed Quin in the duel. Then tell him he needs to flee to avoid arrest.
- He leaves home with “20 guineas in his pocket”. A guinea is 1 pound, 1 shilling. There are 20 shillings in a pound. So Barry had £21. Or about $28. In case you’re curious, the UK has a website that not only converts historical currency but tells you the purchasing power of the amount. £21 in 1750 was worth around £3230 (or $4,267). The site says that would buy you 4 horses, 5 cows, 58 stones of wool, and 16 quarters of wheat. It was apparently the equivalent of 277 days of pay for a skilled tradesman.
- Barry’s immediately robbed and loses all of his money. He tries to negotiate but his polite, humanized requests don’t sway the bandits.
Each of those scenes tells us very specific information.
- Scene 1 establishes Barry’s love of Nora.
- Scene 2 contrasts Barry’s commoner life against John Quin’s nobility.
- Scene 3 shows Nora more attracted to the man with money than the man without.
- Scene 4 is Barry’s frustration not with Quin but with his own sense of inferiority.
- Scene 5 introduces the financial stake. The family cares about money more than anything.
- Scene 6 juxtaposes Quin’s fear of having something to lose with Barry’s youth.
- Scene 7 is the sense of potential Barry feels now that he has some money.
- Scene 8 is Barry’s being preyed upon because he has money.
When you boil it down, Barry felt inferior because of his lack of money. So he spends the rest of his life trying to not feel inferior. But every time he gets a little money, something happens that pricks his sense of being less than. So he wants more and more. And nothing is ever enough.
One detail I really like is the story he tells his son, Bryan, about his time as a soldier. He exaggerates every aspect, including the reward given to him for his “valor”. In reality, the reward was two Friedrich D’or (Prussian currency). But in the re-telling, the reward is 19 guineas, “one for each head that you cut off.” While someone might argue Barry’s only trying to entertain his son, what he’s really doing is inflating his own image so he can feel, for once, superior, and relive his life as a main character rather than a regular man. That’s the role the son fills in the film—an innocent who truly believes in Barry as a hero. And that’s why Bryan is the first and only person Barry truly loves.
Metaphorically, Bryan’s death isn’t about the loss of a child so much as Barry losing the only person who saw him as he wished he could be.
Missing out on love
Storytelling often relies on the “rule of 3”. Which is exactly what it sounds like. You repeat something three times. Why? Because it adds rhythm, creates contrast, and allows for a sense of conclusion (see what I did there?). Basic story structure is “beginning, middle, and end” for a reason.
Let’s use the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. It’s boring if she enters the home of the bears and tries one bed and it’s perfect. Instead, the first one is too soft. Now what? You have her try a second bed. If that was perfect, it’s also a little boring. So the bed is too hard. That brings us to the third bed. Because you’ve established one extreme and another, the reader is left to wonder if the third bed will be just right. Suddenly, there’s anticipation. And if the bed is perfect, great, the reader feels relief. If the third bed is also trash, there’s a dramatic gap that the story can later fill. Maybe Goldilocks escapes the bears and winds up back at home, in her own bed, and that’s the one she’s happy in. Even though it’s not a perfect use of “rule of 3”, it’s a delayed pay-off that’s earned by employing the rule.
Setting up extremes and finding the “just right” middle is one version of the rule of 3. But it can be employed in any number of ways. Barry Lyndon applies it to Barry’s relationship with women. You have the first relationship with his cousin, Nora. Then the second with the German woman, Lischen. Then there’s Barry and Lady Lyndon. When you analyze each relationship, it says a lot about Barry and the themes of the movie.
Nora wanted someone of means, who also wasn’t her cousin, so she abandoned Barry for John Quin. Lischen wanted anyone because her husband had gone to war and was probably dead. The narrator tells us her heart had been “stormed and occupied many times before Barry came”. There’s a version of Barry’s life where he stays with Lischen and they have a simple, happy existence. But Barry didn’t want happiness. He wanted to not feel materially inferior. And Lischen couldn’t provide him that. So he leaves her.
And that brings us to Lady Lyndon. She had wealth, was also beautiful, and, for reasons unknown, loved Barry. That should be enough, right? Except it’s not, because her wealth wasn’t Barry’s own. So his sense of inferiority persisted. So he embarked on his foolish campaign for a title, no matter the cost.
It’s so…idiotic. Barry’s an example of a materialist who can’t see the good fortune life keeps putting in front of his face. And because he only valued status, possessions, and money, he lost out on the things money can’t buy.
Coming full circle
There are two poignant moments where Barry’s story comes full circle. First, Bryan, like Barry’s father, passes due an equine-based transaction. Second, the duel Barry has with Lord Bullingdon mirrors Barry’s own with John Quin. Except this time Barry is the older man who doesn’t wish to duel or take the life of a youth (and suffer the fallout). And Bullingdon is the young man whose need for superiority overwhelms his tremendous fear.
Barry had, for years, shat on Bullingdon’s self-esteem. He would talk down to the boy, whip him, and embarrass Bullingdon’s mother in spectacular ways. So Bullingdon becomes a version of Barry, someone who wants nothing more than to heal the wounds inflicted on their ego. Meaning Barry’s defeated by himself. Which is what we witnessed over and over again throughout the movie. Barry’s nature leading him into a better situation than he could have ever imagined, only for that same nature to ruin everything. Recall the narrator’s line: Barry was one of those born clever enough at gaining a fortune but incapable of keeping one. For the qualities and energies which lead a man to achieve the first are often the very cause of his ruin in the latter case. And his life at this period seemed to consist of little more than drafts of letters to lawyers and money brokers and endless correspondence with decorators and cooks.
What we see in Barry’s story is that what Barry pursued didn’t bring him any value. The more wealth he gained, the more he became burdened, enmeshed. His wealth and upward mobility yielded no greater joy than he had before. The only time we see Barry actually happy is with Bryan. So the film is, ultimately, a chastisement of materialism, status, and ambition for ambition’s sake. The original novel by William Thackeray has the title The Luck of Barry Lyndon. The use of “luck” is an irony because Barry isn’t the victim of bad luck but his own poor choices. Kubrick dropped “luck” from the title but maintained the theme of a character entirely unaware of his responsibility in his own demise.
Barry Lyndon is a cautionary figure, someone we should aspire to be nothing like.
The role of fate?
This is a bit of a personal gripe, if you’ll indulge me for a second. As of October 2024, the Wikipedia page for Barry Lyndon has a whole thematic analysis section that says:
A main theme explored in Barry Lyndon is one of fate and destiny. Barry is pushed through life by a series of key events, some of which seem unavoidable. As Roger Ebert says, “He is a man to whom things happen.” He declines to eat with the highwayman Captain Feeney, where he would most likely have been robbed, but is robbed anyway farther down the road. The narrator repeatedly emphasizes the role of fate as he announces events before they unfold on screen, like Bryan’s death and Bullingdon seeking satisfaction. This theme of fate is also developed in the recurring motif of the painting. Just like the events featured in the paintings, Barry is participating in events which always were.
No, no, no, no, no. No.
First, paintings don’t have a poetic association with fate. Not the way water is a common metaphor for renewal, or babies symbolize the future, or seasons represent the stages of birth, the prime of life, middle age, and old age. If anything, paintings capture a moment in time, much like a photograph, so would be associated with history. The only way the argument for paintings as a motif for “events which always were” would make sense is if the movie would show a painting then later have Barry in a similar situation. Then there is an established connection between the paintings, fate, and Barry. But the film having scenes presented as paintings has no inherent connection to fate. It’s an unsubstantiated conclusion.
And Barry is not “pushed through life”. He actively makes choices. That’s the whole point of the movie—Barry’s ambition and the trouble it gets him into. Ebert, in the very review cited by the Wikipedia entry, eventually reaches the conclusion that Barry Lyndon, falling in and out of love and success, may see no pattern in his own affairs, but the artist sees one for him, one of consistent selfish opportunism…. Against magnificent settings, the characters play at intrigues and scandals. They cheat at cards and marriage, they fight ridiculous duels. This is a film with a backdrop of the Seven Years’ War that engulfed Europe, and it hardly seems to think the war worth noticing, except as a series of challenges posed for Barry Lyndon. By placing such small characters on such a big stage, by forcing our detachment from them, Kubrick supplies a philosophical position just as clearly as if he’d put speeches in his characters’ mouths.
While Ebert did not expound on what that philosophical position is, I think it’s pretty clear. Paintings are art. They’re beauty. And the world around Barry—whether back home in Ireland, on the road in England, at war, in a mansion, all over—is almost always gorgeous. Yet he’s so concerned with what he doesn’t have, with who he isn’t, that he doesn’t realize the inherent wealth of the natural world. Barry would pay a fortune for a piece of art to hang on a wall, rather than look out a window or observe the room he’s in. It’s the same reason the film dismisses the importance of the war. Because the war, like Barry’s ambition, was the byproduct of flawed priorities. Kubrick not only actively diminishes the gravity of Barry’s feelings, of the feelings of nations, but laughs at them. And so asks us to take a step back and have some self-awareness about what’s actually important, what’s actually meaningful, what’s actually valuable.
Why did Barry fire into the ground during his duel with Bullingdon?
I kind of answered this earlier but let’s make it more explicit here.
The viewer should be aware of the fact that Barry’s duel with Bullingdon mirrors the earlier duel Barry had with John Quin. Except this time Barry is the older man facing the wrath of someone younger. Quin was more than willing to call things even and walk away from the duel, but Barry, galvanized by his youth, was the one who persisted. Because of the parallel between the two duels, we can surmise that Barry’s now feeling similar to Quin. Angry at the boy but also fearful for himself. So firing into the ground is Barry doing what Quin did and giving the younger man a way out of an event that could ruin both their lives.
In some ways, Barry’s duel with Quin was the inciting event that led to the duel with Bullingdon. So Barry essentially fired on himself. It just took the bullet nearly 25 years to reach its target.
Cast
- Redmond Barry – Ryan O’Neal
- Belle Barry – Marie Kean
- Narrator – MIchael Hordern
- Lady Lyndon – Marisa Berenson
- Lord Bullingdon – Leon Vitali
- Kid Bullingdon – Dominic Savage
- Bryan Lyndon – David Morley
- Chevalier de Balibari – Patrick Magee
- Nora Brady – Gay Hamilton
- John Quin – Leonard Rossiter
- Lischen – Diana Koerner
- Based on – The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Thackeray
- Written by – Stanley Kubrick
- Directed by – Stanley Kubrick
