In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

262 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut Writing about Eyes Wide Shut in Time, Richard Schickel had this to say about its source, Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 Traumnovelle: ‘‘Like a lot of the novels on which good movies are based, it is an entertaining, erotically charged fiction of the second rank, in need of the vivifying physicalization of the screen and the kind of narrative focus a good director can bring to imperfect but provocative life— especially when he has been thinking about it as long as Kubrick had’’—that is, at least since 1968, when he asked his wife to read it. This more or less matches the opinion of Frederic Raphael, Kubrick’s credited cowriter, as expressed in his recent memoir, Eyes Wide Open. But I would argue that Traumnovelle is a masterpiece worthy of resting alongside Poe’s ‘‘The Masque of the Red Death,’’ Kafka’s The Trial, and Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. Like the Poe story, it features a phantasmal masked ball with dark and decadent undercurrents, and like the Kafka and Hedayat novels, it continually and ambiguously crosses back and forth between fantasy and waking reality. But it differs from all three in having a development that might be described as therapeutic—Schnitzler, a doctor, was a contemporary of Freud—making Eyes Wide Shut a rare departure for Kubrick and concluding his career with the closest thing in his work to a happy ending. Moreover, the question about the novella isn’t whether Kubrick has ‘‘brought it to life’’—it lives vibrantly without him, even if he has brought it to a lot of people’s attention, including mine—but whether he’s done it justice, a problem also raised by his films of Lolita and A Clockwork Orange. I read Traumnovelle before I saw the movie, which hindered as well as helped my first impressions. The last time I tried this with a Kubrick film was when I read Stephen King’s The Shining before seeing the film and found that King’s novel, whatever its literary limitations, was genuinely scary, whereas Kubrick’s movie, for all its brilliance, generally wasn’t. Yet practically all of Kubrick’s films improve with age and repeated viewings, and, scary or not, his version of The Shining fascinates me a lot more than King’s. I can’t say the same about Lolita; Vladimir Nabokov’s novel improves with rereading a lot more than Kubrick’s film improves with reviewing. And A Clockwork Orange is a draw: I embrace the moral ambiguity of Anthony Burgess’s novel and detest the morality of Kubrick’s film, yet I’d rather see the film again than reread the novel. In the case of Eyes Wide Shut I’m DISPUTABLE CONTENDERS 263 inclined to think Kubrick has done Schnitzler’s masterpiece justice. Allowing for all the differences between Vienna in the 20s and New York in the 90s and between Jews and WASPs, it’s a remarkably faithful and ingenious adaptation. Kubrick made this movie convinced that relationships between couples haven’t significantly changed over the past seventy-odd years, and whether you find it a success probably depends a lot on whether you agree with him. I won’t attempt a full synopsis, but I have to outline chunks of the first twothirds of the plot to make certain points. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise), a successful New York doctor, and his wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), the former manager of a Soho art gallery, attend a fancy Christmas party at the town house of Victor Ziegler (played to perfection by Sydney Pollack), one of Bill’s wealthy patients, where each engages in flirtation—Alice with a Hungarian lounge lizard, Bill with a couple of models. Bill recognizes the orchestra’s pianist, Nick Nightingale (Todd Field), as a former classmate and chats with him briefly; later he’s called upstairs by Ziegler to help revive a naked hooker he’s been screwing who’s overdosed on drugs. Bill and Alice make love when they get home that night, clearly stimulated by their flirtations, but the following evening, after they smoke pot, Alice begins to challenge Bill’s total confidence in her faithfulness by telling him a story that shocks him, about her passionate attraction to a naval officer she glimpsed only briefly when they were at Cape Cod with their little girl the previous summer. Called away by the death of...

Share