Barry Lyndon - 4K Blu-ray (Criterion)

Sometimes my reviews tend to favor a stream of consciousness style because I’m still sifting through my own thoughts. I’m taking you long for the ride for better or worse. This is one of those reviews.

After a lifetime of somehow missing this gem I finally watched Barry Lyndon for the first time last September via the Criterion Collection Blu-ray. Not totally sure why I passed on it. Happy, though, that I finally got to it.

This is a remarkable film. I almost can’t praise it enough. It’s destined for multiple rewatches.

As for the Blu-ray quality, Criterion has done its usual terrific job with the remaster, scan, and transfer. It’s beautiful.

I was however a little thrown at the start by the 1:66:1 aspect ratio. For the first 10 minutes or so I wondered if the TV had auto-selected the so-called “stretch” aspect ratio feature. Shouldn’t this be letterboxed? For a film so celebrated for its cinematography was I missing the widescreen grandeur of, say, 2:39:1? But then I noticed the aspect ratio on the back of the disk box’s sleeve and relaxed. (I’ve since read up about 1:66:1 which features some interesting ideas about it capturing the golden ratio, which is pretty neat.)

Barry Lyndon is a cinematographic treasure. This film is a parade of one magnificent shot after another of the European countryside, ornate baroque interiors, and period clothing and makeup. The four Oscars that the film won for cinematography, costume design, art-direction/set-direction, and score were clearly deserved.

All the actors use their ability to communicate nonverbally about as well as I can ever recall seeing. There’s so often an emotional and relational subtext at play that belies the spoken word. The acting performances are all deliciously subtle.

I’m an American who has yet to spend time in the UK and therefore a poor judge of European accents. To my untrained ear it sounded like Ryan O’Neal’s attempt at an Irish accent was roughly passable. Those with more discerning ears, please forgive me.

I guess my main takeaway from this movie is that it illustrates something I’ve been thinking about for a long while now. The idea has been very active in my thoughts, and I’ve been seeing evidence for it in many forms. So it’s the lens through which I found myself appreciating the story.

For around 2 million years homo sapiens and our hominid predecessors lived as hunter-foragers. For most of our existence we have lived directly within the natural world and our attention was focused on raw physical survival in the wild. Our brains evolved to operate that way. We achieved a style of functioning as the apex predator that evidently didn’t need to change much for a very, very long time.

This is not to say that hunter-foragers didn’t have complex human interactions and social systems. I’m sure they did. Indeed, social cooperation, i.e., working as a team, was presumably key to physical survival. There may have been great subtlety and complexity to that which continues in some form into the present day. But it seems a fair assumption that the rules of that game socially were consistently set by the life and death demands of the natural environment. And for 99.5% of our existence as upright hominids we have been programmed by this relatively simpler lifestyle.

However within a very short period of time on the grand evolutionary scale, over about the last dozen millennia or so, we have formed increasingly complex social structures to live within. This apparently arose as a byproduct of the development of tools and technology. And today the wilderness or “jungle” has become one of social existence. The tremendous momentum and inertia of literally millions of years of hunter-forager hardwiring in the brain has recently been transposed over to the environment of social existence.

So what was for ages a rustling in the bushes that could be a saber tooth tiger in modern life has become the threat of losing social status and acceptance, and the safety and security that that affords. There are some earnest, authentic relationships in the story such as between Redmond and his mother, his uncle, Lady Honoria, Lord Bullington, and the Chevalier de Balibari. And he is at times surprisingly honest with others given the risks that exposes him to. But for the society overall it seems that deception and subterfuge is a necessity of survival for the most part.

My main point here is the proposition that our brain still reacts instinctively to that from millions of years of hunter-forager hardwiring. Civilization has existed only for about 10,000 years, or .05% of the time hominids have been walking upright and using tools. That is a tiny, tiny sliver of the pie. It’s very little time to adjust to such a substantial change of paradigm.

And more recently I’ve been thinking about the role of technology with respect to an ongoing continuing evolutionary transposition of hardwired survival drives and instincts. The ideal of both the species DNA and the human psyche changing through use of tools is obviously well familiar to Stanley Kubrick as we see with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

During the watch I was struck by the idea that without all the modern conveniences that we have today, especially the “screen time” we engage in, what would our instincts and libido flow towards to occupy our brains?

In Barry Lyndon we have human civilization at the stage of commonly using gun powder in war, with canons commonly in use for about three centuries and muskets for about two centuries. But beyond that the technology other than for building construction and other craftsmanship seems fairly primitive by modern standards.

Lurking just beneath the facade of all that exquisitely ornate finery is a quite savage existence. The most brutish of which was Europe in a constant state of warfare. The rulers of these societies developed a code of military honor to fire upon one another entirely vulnerable at killing distance. (Which is also echoed in the pistol duels.) The men who either weren’t born into or married into nobility were conscripted into such carnage. They were placed in wars constantly waged by leaders that simply used soldiers as pawns on a chess board according to a “gentleman’s” game.

So one survival strategy for a man during that time not born of nobility was to somehow achieve the social station, a noble rank, that permitted him to avoid such a gruesome fate. One form of that is represented in the film by the Chevalier de Balibari. As is Redmond Barry assuming another soldier’s identity to desert, at least temporarily. By the same token, I would imagine that Redmond Barry is probably something of an outlier as a commoner marrying a countess. Normally I would assume that nobles commonly arranged marriages between families to try to increase political power and wealth, etc.

In any case, to me the movie serves as a reminder that despite the fact that human technology has for the last several centuries assured our core physical survival, our brains are still triggered and driven by instincts that are primitive. And the threats to survival, and domination of thetas/omegas by alphas, and so on, that were for millions of years rooted directly in a natural environment now take places in the jungle of social existence.