Please somebody tell me WHAT this movie was all about ?
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KobiyashiMauru — 9 years ago(July 14, 2016 07:56 PM)
This OP quote is EXACTLY what Rock Hudson said when he ran out about halfway through Kubricks 2001 A Space Odyssey Film. But he actually said "what the hell this was all about?"
Luke Skywalker, your Mom was hawt!
Darth Vader -
nephihaha — 9 years ago(July 26, 2016 03:59 PM)
Okay I'll bite
- It's about a bad apple that never comes good.
- It's about social pressure. Some of his problems would not exist without snobbery.He can't buy class even though he's gentry.
- It's about war, women and gambling.
- There's also a bit of Irish politics in there too.
Mostly it's the adventure of a young Irishman, drinking, whoring and gambling across Europe. He's also a liar.
The marriage is his big chance to become respectable but he is self-destructive and a victim of snobbery.
You could see it also in terms of Kubrick - an American outsider in Europe - reflecting his experiences but that's a stretch.
It's not "Sci-Fi", it's "SF"!
"Calvinism is a very liberal religious ethos." - Truekiwijoker
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tieman64 — 9 years ago(July 30, 2016 09:28 AM)
On one level, it's about a kid who hopes to climb the social ranks.
On another level, it's about human vanity, ego, free-will and man's obliviousness to Nature's games of chance (see the film's countless references to cards, gambling etc); harbouring delusions of control, every character in the film is blind to huge, beautiful, canvases around them. Canvases which are actually pulling their strings.
On another level it's about class in the late 1700s, and the cruelties these systems and petty beliefs engendered.
On another level, it's about man's unending quest for "satisfaction". Characters are constantly chasing desires, never satisfied or content.
On another level, it's about the weakening of the aristocracies in the lead up to the French Revolution and so
it's also a Vietnam Era film, Barry - played by an American upstart - emblematic of an America which, in the 1960s/70s, had begun stepping into Britain's shoes as a great Imperial power. The epilogue references both the American and French revolution, and so anticipates The Shining. -
bradhbbrd — 9 years ago(August 21, 2016 02:19 AM)
Full metal jacket was about how the powers that be manipulate normal kids into being killers for the state.
Boot camp is in every way a type of mind control just like in a cult.
Raise em to be patriotic killers for the interests of the state. -
guccipix — 9 years ago(September 09, 2016 09:22 AM)
I think it's a few things.
It's certainly a meditation on the period. After not being able to make Napoleon, I think Kubrick still wanted to depict the poetry of life from a couple of centuries ago.
It's also a rise and fall story, as the above poster said.
It's an exercise in visual cinema, and it succeeds and then some.
It's also about fatherhood and love.
Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime. -
countdown-to-zero — 9 years ago(October 13, 2016 09:31 AM)
"the older boy was his stepson, not his son. Lyndon was a golddigger. He married his wife for her money and treated her and her son horribly. He was a horrid creature."
That's just scapegoating, though, isn't it? Because near-everyone in the aristocratic-feudalist 18th century world (1750s-1780s) of the film is a 'golddigger', the film exposing the corruption and degeneracy of that era, which is why it ends in 1789, the year of the French Revolution, when elsewhere these degenerates would be heading to the Guillotine. Nora is a 'golddigger' chasing after a pathetic Redcoat: "I'm an Englishman, I am!", exclaims Capt Quinn, as if that conferred on the idiot Quinn some special rights or privileges, like invading foreign countries and slaughtering almost half the population and introducing Penal Laws that robbed the population of all resources and land, as Cromwell*** did in Ireland in the mid-17th century prior to Capt Quinn's arrival there to grab some crumpet.
Barry's relations are also golddiggers, betraying Barry and then plotting and scheming, getting him out of the way to grab some cash, sending him off, excommunicating him from the community and so on throughout the whole film. Lord Bullingdon was also much, much worse than Barry, a psychopathic madman (apart from demanding his 'right' to the Lyndon Estate - an 'estate' acquired via mass theft and murder, a vast criminal enterprise - even before he's inherited/stolen anything; if Barry hadn't attacked him at the music recital, just let Bullingdon continue to hurl obnoxious abuse and not respond, Bullingdon would have then gone into exile and Lady Lyndon would have probably disinherited the demented parasite). Bullingdon seeks to murder his own stepfather and 'have' his own mother [which he 'gets' at the end], an incestuous, psychotic oedipalism at its most perverse, revealing the underlying truth about aristocracy, a system that was based on mass theft, mass slaughter, and mass slavery, as well as incestuous*** regression and insularity, something, alas, not far removed from the present global ideology and the direction in which it's heading.
***Even Barry's and Nora's relation was incestuous, despite them seemingly being Anglo-Irish settlers rather than the indigenous population (ie they were most likely petit bourgeoise descendents of the Protestant landed gentry that engaged in a giant land-grab after Cromwell invaded Ireland) : they were cousins, Barry's uncle being Nora's father, and Nora's uncle being Barry's father.
*** "What about sanctimonious Cromwell and his ironsides that put the women and children of Drogheda to the sword with the bible text God is love pasted round the mouth of his cannon?" James Joyce,
Ulysses
"We have seen the many ties which at one time or another have joined the inhabitants of the Western islands, and even in Ireland itself offered a tolerable way of life to Protestants and Catholics alike. Upon all of these Cromwell's record was a lasting bane. By an uncompleted process of terror, by an iniquitous land settlement, by the virtual proscription of the Catholic religion, by the bloody deeds already described, he cut new gulfs between the nations and the creeds. 'Hell or Connaught' were the terms he thrust upon the native inhabitants, and they for their part, across three hundred years, have used as their keenest expression of hatred 'The Curse of Cromwell on you.' The consequences of Cromwell's rule in Ireland have distressed and at times distracted English politics down even to the present day. To heal them baffled the skill and loyalties of successive generations. They became for a time a potent obstacle to the harmony of the English-speaking people throughout the world. Upon all of us there still lies 'the curse of Cromwell'." Winston Churchill,
A History of the English Speaking Peoples: The Age of Revolution
(1957). -
SealedCargo — 3 years ago(July 30, 2022 02:22 AM)
IT'S A mind-trick of a movie.
Kubrick shows a guy you first sympathize with and then hate.
but when you rewatch it (which you must) THE ENTIRE THING is about a total bastard.
it's a masterpiece.
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https://thefearmakers.blogspot.com/