ABSTRACT

Barry Lyndon refuses audiences this intimate engagement, most obviously by denying their appetite for 'identification' with the hero. Critics and audiences alike were fascinated with Kubrick's sumptuously framed vision of the life of Redmond Barry. The confluence from within and in front of the screen of so much desire and longing in a film experience dominated by the emotional and sensorial suggests that it should respond with fruitful insights to a reading based on psychoanalytic principles. Barry's largely unreflective existence as a wanderer marries with the idea that manifestations of consciousness in his time were much less robust than those to which our generation is accustomed. As Barry moves up society's ladder, the narrator closes his eyes to the impact of the nobility on the people they govern. Seeing Barry wrecked but by the film's account left unreflective by his life's course is frustrating to today's viewer who is usually invited to see beneath the surface of heroes' lives.