Stanley Kubrick: Interviews

Chapter 5: Dreamy Worlds

115 Chapter Five DREAMYWORLDS kubrick: There is a very wide gulf between reality and fiction, and when one is looking at a film the experience is much closer to a dream than anything else. —(Houston, 1971: 111) What are truly characteristics of dreams are only those elements of their content which behave like images, which are more like perceptions , that is, than they are like mnemonic presentations . . . we shall be in agreement with every authority on the subject in asserting that dream hallucinates—that they replace thoughts by hallucinations. Dreams construct a situation out of these images, they represent an event which is actually happening, as Spitta puts it, they dramatize an idea. —(Freud, 1900: 50) A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut seem to be shrouded in dreamy atmospheres. The director’s first concern does not seem to have been to realistically depict the extradiegetic world, but, rather, to break the illusion of reality, to create a diegetic world as far as possible from the extradiegetic world, even if the latter world is often cited in the diegesis, as is argued in the next chapter. This dreamy atmosphere is manifest in the very first scenes of A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut. As already discussed, the first film opens with a close-up of the protagonist who, in an imaginary pub in an unspecified future, looks directly into the camera, while his voiceover addresses the spectators using nadsat. The mise-en-scène clearly indicates to the audience that the diegetic world is imaginary, unreal, and that DreamyWorlds 116 the rules that dominate it are dissimilar from those that govern the extradiegetic world (see Figure 3.1). The Shining opens with aerial footage that seems, from the very beginning of the adaptation, to invite the spectators to wonder about a natural or a supernatural explanation of the diegesis. The camera follows the protagonist’s car, which is reaching the Overlook Hotel in the mountains of Colorado on a deserted road that verges a savage lake. But, in the very first shot, Jack’s Volkswagen is not in frame and the camera moves forward, towards an island in the middle of the lake. During this same sequence, first, the camera moves forward passing the car and, then, when the Volkswagen enters into a tunnel, the camera moves forward past the mountain, and the car enters again in frame only when it comes out from the tunnel. Thus, the camera movements are not strictly linked to the car’s movement, and the spectators begin to wonder whether the camera represents an evil, supernatural presence that flies over the protagonist. This effect is emphasized by the second piece of the fifth movement of the extradiegetic piece Symphonie Fantastique (by H. Berlioz, 1830, rearranged by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind in 1980). The fifth movement represents a witches’ sabbath, and the second piece is a burlesque parody of the “Dies irae,” the Gregorian hymn for dead men. Thus, an uncanny presence, evoked by the camera movements, is stressed by the extradiegetic piece that recalls witches and death. Similarly, in the very first shot of Eyes Wide Shut, Alice undresses, but in the next sequence, the spectators are shown Alice as she is dressing for a Christmas party. Thus, the very first shots do not seem to be linked in a chronological chain. In this case, the montage introduces a dreamy element. The dreamy atmosphere that characterizes Kubrick’s adaptations results from features that also appear in dreams. For example, the director ’s films are constituted by tableaux vivants and/or unrelated episodes, which are usually separated by ellipses and are full of unexplained enigmas . I have shown how much a cause and effect logic is often unable to fill in the ellipses and solve the mysteries. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud claims that the sequences that constitute dreams cannot be linked in a causal chain: “Dreams are disconnected, they accept the most violent contradictions without the least objection, they admit impossibilities, they disregard knowledge which carries great weight with us in the daytime” (1900: 54). Citing Strümpell, he argues that in dreams “there is an eclipse of all the logical operations of the mind which are based on relations and connections.” Similarly, citing Spitta, he claims that “ideas that occur in DreamyWorlds 117 dreams seem to be completely withdrawn...