Screen, Culture, Psyche

A Post Jungian Approach to Working with the Audience

John Izod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415380164
• eBook ISBN: 9781317724360
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Screen, Culture, Psyche illuminates recent developments in Jungian modes of media analysis, and illustrates how psychoanalytic theories have been adapted to allow for the interpretation of films and television programmes, employing Post-Jungian methods in the deep reading of a whole range of films. Readings of this kind can demonstrate the way that some films bear the psychological projections not only of their makers but of their audience, and assess the manner in which films engage the writer's own psyche. Seeking to go beyond existing theories, John Izod explores the question of whether Jungian screen analysis can work for ordinary filmgoers - can what functions for the scholar be said to be true for people without a background in Jung's ideas?

Through detailed readings of a number of films and programmes, John Izod builds on the work previously done by Jungian film analysts, and moves on to contemplate the level of audience engagement. Offering deep readings of films directed by Kubrick and Bernardo Bertolucci, as well as satirical comedy, documentaries and twenty-first century Westerns, the book explores the extent to which they manage to make the psychological impact on spectators that films of a similar kind have done on Jungian writers. The author concludes that the screen texts with the best likelihood of impacting the culture of the audience through their collective psychological force fall at opposite ends of the size and budget range: highly personal documentaries, and the most affecting of mainstream genre movies.

This innovative text will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and therapists, as well as students and scholars of film with an interest in understanding how screen products work psychologically to engage the viewer.

Chapter 1 Barry Lyndon and the limits of understanding¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315787725-1

1 This chapter was written with Jana Branch.

Introduction

I have chosen to begin with an analysis of a film which repudiates my thesis. Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, UK, 1975) refuses the kind of cohesion that I shall argue can occur between the psychology of characters and the metaphoric meaning for audiences of the story world. That cohesion will in some instances implicate audiences deeply, not merely engaging their emotions in the fiction but mirroring and playing back to them formative elements of their culture. Barry Lyndon refuses audiences this intimate engagement, most obviously by denying their appetite for ‘identification’ with the hero. However, the manner in which Kubrick blocks the spectator’s appetite for psychological engagement demonstrates his complete understanding of the regimes that channel desire in mainstream fiction. Indeed, the disappointing box office returns of this gorgeous film can be seen to be a consequence of his having challenged audiences’ reluctance to forego a sense of emotional fulfilment when the fiction reaches its culmination.

Barry Lyndon and eighteenth-century realism

In the instance of this film in particular, set as it is in a historical period, one might have expected that Kubrick’s famously obsessive attention to authenticity would be directed toward taking the viewer into a more complete experience of the eighteenth century. It matches this expectation that the entire film was shot on location, much of it in great houses. The director of photography, John Alcott, has described the lengths to which he went to light from sources appropriate to the time (’Photographing’ 1976). And the costume designer has spoken about selecting fabrics to ensure they looked exactly like the paintings of the period (Harlan 2001). Overall, however, the attention to historically accurate detail can be shown to have another objective because the very intensity of attention to authentic lighting, costumes, sets, language, music and manners ultimately exhausts the idea that it is possible to recreate the past.

Critics and audiences alike were fascinated with Kubrick’s sumptuously framed vision of the life of Redmond Barry. Similarities between the director’s compositions and eighteenth-century portrait and landscape paintings were immediately noted (Combs 1976: 4; Houston 1976: 79). In fact, the carefully composed attention to the frame has the effect of flattening what is being captured. This is not surprising since both painting and film reduce three dimensions to two; but Kubrick went further, using a range of cinematic devices to distract us from looking too deep. Among these, Martin Scorsese remarked on the director’s unexpected use of the zoom lens and recognised that it has the precise effect of flattening the image like an eighteenth-century painting (in Harlan 2001). Then too, a Zeiss lens originally designed for NASA to use in satellite photography was, at Kubrick’s instigation, adapted for the shoot. The 0.7f lens being exceptionally fast, Kubrick and Alcott were able to employ it on the interior night scenes, which they lit exclusively with candles. The low light levels obliged them to film with the lens wide open and as a consequence they had almost no depth of field. In addition, the characters in the court scenes followed high fashion of the time by wearing white make-up. The combination of light, lens and cosmetics all augmented the flattening effect.

Further flattening is achieved by the narration: it pre-empts suspense by telling us ahead of time what will happen. Finally, the dramatic style is flattened such that audiences observe characters’ lives as if from a distance rather than live them vicariously as spectators did in Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, UK, 1963). Barry Lyndon was compared with this film since both originated in picaresque novels. However, contrary to Barry Lyndon, in the earlier film (in common with most mainstream cinema) spectators were given points of view from within the scene and offered the illusion of being caught up in the action. Tom Jones exploits the complex apparatuses of formal realism, Barry Lyndon refuses them.

All in all, Kubrick takes us as close as we can get to the lost actuality, yet what results is still a flat, choreographed approximation of what might have been, based on a collection of artefacts. The impression of studied superficiality led some critics to conclude that this was the whole of Kubrick’s point. But when so much effort is made to draw our attention into the gorgeously composed frame, another suspicion immediately arises: what is just beyond the frame? What is this carefully arranged version of events trying so hard to keep out? What is Kubrick, from a twentieth-century perspective, trying to tell us through the agency of a life lived and told from an eighteenth-century perspective?

On the surface Barry Lyndon is a simple ‘rise and fall’ story taking its form and manner (as Thackeray had done for his nineteenth-century serialised plot) from eighteenth-century picaresque novels. Closer scrutiny shows, however, that numerous voices and perspectives contribute to the film’s account of one man whose story, as a consequence, is not at all a simple linear tale. Even the function of Kubrick’s painterly style in supposedly recreating the past comes into question because it is not only concerned with achieving a retrospective realism through portraits and landscapes that resemble Reynolds and Gainsboroughs. As Penelope Houston noted, such images as Leonard Rossiter’s absurdly vainglorious Captain Quin prancing a jig, and the cuckolded Sir Charles Lyndon (Frank Middlemass) gobbling in fury over the card table, bring to mind the grosser caricatures of Gillray, Rowlandson and Hogarth (1976: 78–9).

Barry's fall and rise – and fall

The story of Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal) does not actually follow the simple bell curve of rise and fall which its two-part structure suggests. It is more like a switchback ride. At the start of the tale his father is killed in a duel. Thereafter, his mother (Marie Kean) is only sustained by the generosity of her brother-in-law, himself close to bankruptcy. Barry (as the narrator calls him throughout) thinks of himself as a gentleman, but mother and son are only by grace and favour able to maintain the status of gentlefolk. A succession of personal disasters soon robs the young man of even this standing. He loses his cousin and first love Nora (Gay Hamilton) to John Quin, a captain in the English army; fights a duel with his rival, and appears to win but has to flee to escape the law; is robbed by highwaymen of everything but the clothes he stands in; volunteers for service in an Irish regiment of the English army; and has his first experience of war in a battle where his mentor Captain Grogan (Godfrey Quigley) is killed.

Only when he steals an officer’s horse, uniform and identity to desert from the army do things begin to improve: ‘Barry felt once more that he was in his proper sphere, and determined never again to fall from the rank of a gentleman’, the narrator comments (but the hero’s newly-acquired name Fakenham hints at the doubtful validity of this claim). While deserting, he meets a German girl, Lischen (Diana Koerner) with whom he stays, and they become lovers (perhaps the happiest point in his young life); but the risk of discovery soon obliges him to move on. Sure enough, in his next encounter he is uncovered as an impostor by Captain Potzdorf (Hardy Kruger), one of the recruiting officers of the Prussian army, and is cashiered into the brutalising ranks of that Great Power.

When the Seven Years’ War ends, his fortunes begin to rise again, albeit from an insecure base. Potzdorf transfers him into the service of the Minister of Police as a counterspy. His target is the Chevalier de Balibari (Patrick Magee), an Irish libertine suspected of espionage on behalf of the Austrian empress. But Barry is so affected by meeting this elegant fellow-exile from his own country that he teams up with him. And when the Prussians decide to expel the Chevalier from their country, it is Barry wearing the old man’s apparel whom they unwittingly convey across the border to freedom, missing his master who had slipped away the night before. Thereafter Barry joins the Chevalier at the gaming tables of Europe’s courts. The older man’s ingenuity as a cheat and Barry’s willingness to use his sword to enforce bad debts enable them to fleece many a silk-clad gambler.

His taste for the lifestyle of the rich confirmed and, we are told, with youthful notions of romantic love dispelled, Barry sets about conquering the heart of a ‘woman of fortune and condition’. He courts the Countess of Lyndon (Marisa Berenson) without waiting for the death of Sir Charles, her antiquated husband. But disease, long years of indulgence and apoplexy brought on by Barry’s carnal insolence swiftly carry off the old man. A year later Barry marries Lady Lyndon, fathers a son, Bryan, on her and thereafter confines her to nursery and domestic duties. Now he occupies himself with pleasures of the flesh, stooping to infidelity even with his wife’s maids.

It is not, however, his raffish behaviour that undoes him: that too closely resembles the conduct of other gentlemen to command notice outside the family. Three factors bring him down. One is the cold anger of his stepson, Lord Bullingdon, whose gorge rises with Hamlet-like disgust at his mother’s hasty marriage to an opportunist who does not love her. His feelings are compounded in that Barry, although a tender father to his own son, acts like a harsh parent toward Bullingdon. As the boy (Dominic Savage) grows into manhood (Leon Vitali), his hatred of Barry grows in intensity and cunning, but is held in check by his cowardice. This stalemate breaks only when what the young man perceives as outrages done to his family reach a level he can no longer tolerate and he engages Barry in a duel.

The second factor leading to Barry’s destruction is his inability to refuse his son Bryan anything he wants. As Mark Miller (1976) says, his tolerance and indulgence are unbounded because he tries to take on the role of the father he has always missed. Pitiably, this passion indirectly causes the child’s death through Barry’s inability to deny him a horse which is far too powerful, and from which Bryan falls. Loss of his shining boy destroys Barry’s hopes (which mirror his own mother’s) for a glowing future lived through the reflected glory of his offspring.

The third factor is Barry’s attempt to gain a peerage. Had he not striven by fair means and foul to reach this goal, Bullingdon might not have found the courage to destroy him. The narrator says of Barry’s endeavour:

He made great sacrifices to bring it about. He lavished money here and diamonds there. He bought lands at ten times their value and purchased pictures and articles of virtue at ruinous prices. He gave repeated entertainments to those friends to his claim who, being about the royal person, were likely to advance it. And I can tell you, bribes were administered, and in high places too, so near the royal person of His Majesty that you would be astonished to know what noblemen condescended to receive his loans.

The narrator is mistaken in his first assertion. In the accompanying images we do see much evidence of lavish expenditure which maroons Barry far from his true social milieu. Whilst viewing a painting, for example, he admires gauchely ‘the artist’s use of the colour blue’. Nakedly, his only interests are the price of the picture and the cachet that owning it might bring. However, it is Lady Lyndon and Lord Bullingdon who make the sacrifices because the money squandered is theirs, as Bullingdon is well aware.

Limits of the narrator's understanding

Our picture of Barry’s life is substantially shaped by the film’s narration. Kubrick said that he used this device to get information across in an economical way – which it does. Also as intended, it gives hints in advance of the main plot developments, lessening the risk of their seeming contrived. In addition it ensures, by running ahead of events, that nothing comes as a surprise – everything seems inevitable (Ciment 1983: 170). At first hearing, therefore, the narrator appears omniscient, not only outlining Barry’s history but doing so in a tone of voice (for example, deploying at Barry’s expense mild irony arising from an overarching wisdom) which implies that his pronouncements should hold true for all eternity. Nonetheless there are distinct limits to his comprehension of his subject, limits characteristic of eighteenth- not twentieth-century values.

Kubrick emphasises the gap between our times and the eighteenth century by having all his characters (not only the narrator) deliver lines distinguished, even in times of exigency, by their literary formality. When highwaymen surprise Barry, perpetrators and victim converse in exquisitely balanced prose while the villains rob him at gunpoint. Though Barry begs to be allowed to keep his cash, being himself (after the duel with Quin) a fugitive from the law, the highwayman responds, ‘Mr Barry, in my profession we hear many such stories. Yours is one of the most intriguing and touching I’ve heard in many weeks. Nevertheless, I’m afraid I cannot grant your request…’. Exchanges such as this delight our ears because of their incongruous and ironic delicacy; but we have to register the fact that no other fitting language is available to the characters themselves. It emphasises that we are watching a re-creation of history and observing characters who, in part because their language does not allow it, do not think in the ways we do.

What kind of person could the invisible narrator (Michael Hordern) be? He shares generic characteristics with other eighteenth-century narrators. Whilst the differences between Barry’s solemn demeanour and that of the rambunctious Tom Jones are easily noticed, the narrators of Kubrick’s film and Fielding’s novel have qualities in common. Kubrick’s is his own invention, since Thackeray had Barry relate his own story with an absurdly pompous nourish. A member of the educated elite, Kubrick’s narrator attempts to tell Barry’s story with sometimes amused paternal insight, and to report on the action (which for him is already in the past) like a fair judge of men. However, the presumption upon which the cycle of English-language picaresque novels (such as Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Roderick Random and, a century later, Barry Lyndon) relied, was that the rise and fall of the hero followed mainly from the moral worth of his deeds.²Here Kubrick’s film breaks with its antecedents: though the narrator’s measured intonation occasionally sounds like a moralist’s, the actual words he uses seldom express moral judgement.

2 Kubrick named his hero ‘Roderick’ in one version of the screenplay.

Like all the characters, the narrator is confined within the straitjacket of what eighteenth-century gentrified English was able to convey. So placed, he has a function comparable to that of Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe in Heart of Darkness (1902) or the figure who literally occupies a corner of the frame, the journalist Thompson in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). Each is a shadowy character in his own right, and none is completely reliable in his observations since all are limited in their comprehension of what they witness by the ideologies which circumscribe them. The effect in Barry Lyndon is occasionally to open a divide between what we see and hear concerning the hero. The narrator reports, for example, that Barry has led his fellow Prussian conscripts in dissolute behaviour; but we see no evidence of ill conduct other than a coarsening of his complexion. Equally, the narrator builds the idea that the events to which he refers are linked causes and effects that have made Barry’s life turn out in the way that he, the narrator, judges it to have done – but this pattern may not actually explain Barry’s rise and fall. For instance, the narrator asserts that, on marrying, Barry ‘by his own energy had raised himself to a higher sphere of society’. The evidence on screen, in contrast, suggests that at this point in his life Barry has for the most part either fallen by accident into misery or seized chance openings onto good fortune. His efforts to win Lady Lyndon amount to no more than a vigorous pursuit of the rituals of adulterous seduction in the courts of the nobility.

The telling of Barry’s life abounds with irony. Sometimes the narrator shows off his superior wisdom: ‘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’. These words are spoken at the start of the film over voices uttering the ritual phrases that bring the confrontation to the moment when shots ring out and the distant figure of Barry’s father falls dead. There is wry humour in the claim that we can be sure a man who has never practised law must have succeeded in it had his death not intervened. That the duel arose over a contract of sale – a matter which a lawyer should readily be able to settle – only compounds the irony.

Sometimes irony arises from the narrator’s inevitable ignorance of the gap between his eighteenth-century perception of the way the world runs and that of the twentieth century. For example, in the second scene, Barry’s mother strolls with a man who has given her a bouquet of wild flowers. The narrator informs us that Mrs Barry, ‘after her husband’s death, lived in such a way as to defy slander. Many a man who had been smitten by the charms of the spinster now renewed his offers to the widow; but she refused all proposals of marriage, declaring that she lived now for her son only, and the memory of her departed saint’. The ironic tone is present (for both eighteenth- and twentieth-century listeners) in Mrs Barry’s description of the losing duelist as a saint. However, the narrator’s words raise for the post-Freudian audience alone the concern that the mother’s investment of her own future in Barry may put the son at risk. Indeed we shall see her in later years exercise undue influence over her son in urging his pursuit of a peerage.

Overall, the narrator adopts perspectives on Barry’s story that alter with the circumstances of his subject’s life. Consider our guide’s shifting attitudes toward war and those who wage it. Early in the film, when an Irish regiment of the English army comes recruiting in Brady town, he seems to respond to the exhilaration of the local populace, reporting as the camera cuts close in on Nora’s hungry gaze at Captain Quin, ‘the whole country was alive with war’s alarms, the three kingdoms ringing with military music’. A few weeks later, when Barry has joined the English army to escape his pursuers, the narrator refers to the regiment preparing to join ‘their gallant armies fighting in Germany’. The tone alters with Barry’s first taste of wa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Barry Lyndon and the limits of understanding1
• 2 The hero as failure: Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut1
• 3 What the camera took: Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty
• 4 Personal and national politics in Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged
• 5 The politics of youth remembered: Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers
• 6 Anima and the political dynamics of cultural stasis: the case of S1møne1
• 7 Myths in British documentaries of the 1980s and 1990s
• 8 Westerns, local and global imperialism
• Filmography
• Guide to further reading
• Bibliography
• Index