A plan can fail because of something unforeseen and still have accumulated vulnerabilities before the accident. Kubrick’s films let us distinguish contingency, calculation, and choice rather than attributing everything to bad luck.
A plan organizes actions; it doesn’t control everything around them
The Killing presents a scheme that depends on coordination, timing, and assigned roles. Each participant knows one part and must act in relation to other actions they can’t always observe. The precision of the organization creates an expectation of control. At the same time, that dependence multiplies the points where a local variation can affect the whole.
The interest lies not only in discovering whether the plan succeeds. The narrative shows how an apparently minor decision can intersect with another. A procedure can be detailed and still depend on other people’s behavior, information shared unequally, or materials that don’t hold up as expected. Planning reduces some uncertainties, but it doesn’t turn the environment into an extension of the person in charge.
The incident involving the suitcase and the small dog near the baggage transfer concentrates this relationship. Contingency acts on an object and a situation that are already in place. It’s not enough to say that chance destroys a perfect plan: we have to ask what made it possible for an incident to have that much impact. The vulnerability lies in the connection between an unforeseen event and prior conditions.
The ending of The Killing examines the full sequence. When considering chance, it’s enough to distinguish the immediate cause from the preparation. The fact that no one intended a certain outcome doesn’t mean there isn’t a causal chain. An accident may be unintentional and yet reveal material limits and decisions that had concentrated too much risk in a single place.
The rules of a duel don’t eliminate unequal information
Barry Lyndon features duels that seem to subject participants to shared rules. That appearance doesn’t guarantee that everyone knows the same things or faces identical consequences. An encounter can be presented as a test of courage even when others control part of its setup. A character’s uncertainty may result from a contrived situation, not from neutral chance.
The duels in Barry Lyndon let us distinguish these variations. At some points, what matters is who knows the procedure; at others, it’s what a participant decides to do within it. The rule establishes a framework, but it doesn’t automatically determine every action. Reducing the outcome to luck would erase the deliberate gestures that alter a power relationship.
Choosing not to take advantage of an opportunity, for example, isn’t the same as an unintentional failure. That choice can change the risk and the way the encounter is interpreted. Analysis must follow the specific action before assigning it a general meaning of fate. A decision can have consequences that the person making it doesn’t fully control, without ceasing to be a decision.
The question of freedom and responsibility arises in that space between intention and outcome. Not every consequence faithfully reflects what someone wanted, and a lack of control doesn’t necessarily erase their causal role. The character acts within inherited conditions, but their responses can change who is exposed, what opportunity opens up, and what obligation is accepted.
Risk isn’t distributed equally
Money changes a person’s ability to withstand a contingency. A loss can be a setback for one person and a definitive disruption for another. The relationship between money and debt reveals what room is left after a failure. Chance may affect everyone in principle, but its consequences are experienced from different material positions.
Social class introduces another difference. Barry can temporarily gain access to certain spaces without having the status to protect him when his circumstances change. A failed action doesn’t land on a blank slate: it encounters relationships, reputations, and resources that are already unevenly distributed. That’s why interpreting his journey only as bad luck would obscure the social mechanisms the film makes visible.
Institutions also classify outcomes after they happen. They may call something an error that they previously accepted as a risk, or assign individual responsibility to protect a collective decision. The analysis of institutional power lets us compare this process with personal plans. The label given to a failure can benefit whoever controls the narrative, even if it doesn’t fully explain how the failure happened.
Narrative form influences how we perceive chance. Knowing an outcome in advance can make every detail seem to lead inevitably toward it. Seeing an action without knowing its consequences keeps more possibilities open. The sense of fatality may be an effect of the narrative, not proof that no one in the film’s world could have acted differently.
Comparing these situations requires asking different questions: What was unforeseeable? What could have been anticipated? What was chosen despite an awareness of the risk? The Killing and Barry Lyndon don’t offer a single theory of luck. They make perceptible the distance between a plan and its execution, and between a rule and the people who use it. That distance preserves both contingency and responsibility, without requiring one to erase the other.
References: Stanley Kubrick, The Killing (1956) and Barry Lyndon (1975). A comparative reading of planning, accident, and dueling; references to the ending are limited to the mechanism discussed and don’t presuppose that the director held a doctrine of fatalism.
View all articles in Themes and Conflicts in Kubrick's Cinema