Redmond Barry's White Rabbit

Based on the serial novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon (Thackeray 1844), Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation was an extravagant over-budget box office flop: recognized with eight Academy Awards including cinematography, art design, costumes and score, Barry Lyndon’s aura of high-brow Video Essay: “Redmond Barry’s White Rabbit” (2019, Maria Pramaggiore), https://vimeo.com/33403 3962 The Cine-Files, Issue 14 (spring 2019) 2 pretentiousness was resisted not only by a public that had embraced a New Hollywood aesthetic but also by Kubrick fans in subsequent decades. 40th anniversary celebrations in 2015 brought renewed attention to the film, which accumulated credibility when contemporary media luminaries including Martin Scorsese, Lenny Abrahamson, and David Chase, referred to it as a masterpiece or a personal favorite.1 Nevertheless, the film’s overwrought mannerism remains something of an anomaly when situated within the auteurist context of Kubrick’s seemingly macho—but equally theatrical—combat films, Paths of Glory (1957) and Full Metal Jacket (1986). Barry Lyndon balances the martial with the marital, its first half emblazoned wi