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In Dreams Begin Responsibilities  j o n a t h a n r o s e n b a u m 245 Writing about Eyes Wide Shut in Time, Richard Schickel had this to say about its source, Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (1926): “Like a lot of the novels on which good movies are based, it is an entertaining, erotically charged Wction 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”—i.e., at least since 1968, when Kubrick asked his wife to read it.1 This more or less matches the opinion of Frederic Raphael, Kubrick’s credited co-writer, as expressed in his recent memoir, Eyes Wide Open.2 But I would argue that Traumnovelle is a masterpiece worthy of resting alongside Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), Kafka’s The Trial (1925) and Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (1937). 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 diVers from all three in containing 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 is not 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 Wlms of Lolita (1962) and A Clockwork Orange (1971). I read Traumnovelle before I saw the movie, which hindered as well as helped my Wrst impressions. The last time I tried this with a Kubrick Wlm was when I read Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) before seeing the Wlm and found that King’s novel, whatever its literary limitations, was genuinely scary, whereas Kubrick’s movie, for all its brilliance, generally was not. Yet practically all of Kubrick’s Wlms improve with age and repeated viewings, and scary or not, his version of The Shining (1980) fascinates me a lot more than King’s. I cannot say the same about Lolita; Vladimir Nabokov’s novel improves with rereading a lot more than Kubrick’s Wlm 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 Wlm, yet I would rather see the Wlm again than reread the novel. In the case of Eyes Wide Shut I am inclined to think Kubrick has done Schnitzler’s masterpiece justice. Allowing for all the diVerences between Vienna in the 1920s and New York in the 1990s and between Jews and WASPs, it is a remarkably faithful and ingenious adaptation. Kubrick made this movie convinced that relationships between couples have not signiWcantly changed over the past seventy-odd years, and whether you Wnd it a success probably depends a lot on whether you agree with him. I will not attempt a full synopsis, but I have to outline chunks of the Wrst two-thirds 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 Xirtation—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 brieXy; later he is called upstairs by Ziegler to help revive a naked prostitute who has overdosed on drugs. Bill and Alice make love when they get home that night, clearly stimulated by their Xirtations , but the following evening, after they smoke pot, Alice begins to challenge Bill’s total conWdence in her faithfulness by telling him a story that shocks him about her passionate attraction to a naval oYcer she glimpsed only brieXy when they were at Cape Cod with their little...

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