Eyes Wide Shut

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Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 film directed by Stanley Kubrick (who completed editing the film just before his death) and starring real-life husband and wife (at the time) Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. The film was based on the novel Traumnovelle by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. The screenplay was adapted by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael. Kubrick had long been interested in doing a film version of Schniztler's story; at one point he apparently considered adapting it as a comedy, with Steve Martin in the lead role.

After a famously long shooting schedule (during which co-stars Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh dropped out, to be replaced by Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson, respectively), the film was released in July of 1999. Critical reaction was mixed, some hailing the film as another Kubrick masterpiece but others regarding it as pretentious, tedious, and meaningless.

Synopsis

The storyline follows the surreal, possibly imagined, sexual adventures and misadventures of Bill Harford (Cruise), who is in shock after his wife, Alice, (Kidman) reveals that she has considered an affair, and which culminates in his admittance to a bizarre orgy held in a mysterious mansion. The orgy sequence contains some of the most explicit portrayals of consensual sex in mainstream cinema.

Interpretations

The film's puzzling narrative has inspired several interpretations, many of which see the film as a psychological allegory rather than as a straightforward drama.

Eyes Wide Shut and Schnitzler's Dream Story

Eyes Wide Shut is a fairly faithful adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (or Dream Story), but it leaves out one important piece of information that might have served as the key to understanding it. In Schnitzler's novella, Fridolin, the Bill Harford equivalent is told by his wife that her first fantasy of infidelity was when they were on holiday in Denmark. When Fridolin goes on his strange jouurney and arrives at the masked ball, the password is 'Denmark'. This indicates that Fridolin's journey is a dream and is not meant to be interpreted literally, but rather as an allegory of his psychological state.

In Eyes Wide Shut, the password is changed to 'Fidelio', a word that hints at the theme of marital fidelty, but does not indicate clearly that Bill's journey is a dream. Reading the journey as a dream helps to explain the film's bizarre events, in particular the fact that every woman Bill meets falls in love with him. However, Kubrick seems to have preferred to leave this interpretation ambiguous rather than concrete, in addition to making it unclear where and when the dream begins and ends. Furthermore, he introduced Alice's dream, in which she too appears to have gone on an even more strange and allegorical journey, one that makes Bill's journey seem relatively realistic.

Kubrick's downplaying of the dreamlike nature of Bill's journey made the film more open to interpretation, but also meant that more literal-minded viewers did not recognise its story as an allegory, finding it merely silly and implausible.

Jungian interpretation

Kubrick's films often deal with the subconscious and the impulses of the Id. When the savage impulses of "the Shadow" (from the psychological theories of Carl Jung), are not integrated with the conscious life, madness results. Kubrick said that he was interested profoundly in the Shadow (the archetype of the savage) and how it emerges despite civilization. In Eyes Wide Shut, Alice describes her fantasy affair to Bill after the couple have been to a party where Bill had treated a prostitute for an overdose. Bill's old friend Nick (Todd Field) tells him about a sexual underworld where men of absolute power have an absolute access to women, and Bill decides to explore this world. He moves into the circle of the Shadow, and he sees the ruthless, remorseless, and violent nature of power as sex and sex as power. He views the naked masculinity of the subconscious through a mask. He returns to his wife, confessing all (although he was never adulterous). At the end of the movie, she seems to forgive him and says that the two must immediately go home and have sex. In a sense, the couple have integrated their psyches. They have both seen and experienced their Shadows and decided to go on.

Stylistic features

Cinematography and mise-en-scène

Kubrick adopted several stylistic conventions in Eyes Wide Shut. Different lighting schemes appear in different situations. Scenes in which Alice and Bill interact with others are lit to produce natural coloration, while scenes that reflect Bill's inner life are lit to add a blue tone to the scenes, and ones that reflect Alice's inner life add a red tone. Scenes set in the city itself (rather than in a more specific location) are largely lit with decorative Christmas lights (the story is set in the Christmas season).

Narrative structure

The story follows a dramatic structure of leaving the familiar world, entering situations that are in some way an otherworld, and returning to the familiar world. In the third part of the movie, Bill revisits the scenes of the adventures he had the night before. This is reminiscent of the structure Kubrick used in A Clockwork Orange, in which the character Alex revisits each of the locations at which he performed violent acts in the first part of that movie.

Critical Response

Critics objected chiefly to two features of the film. First, the movie's pacing is slow. While this may have been intended to convey the nature of dreaming, critics objected that it simply made actions and decisions laborious. Second, reviewers commented on the fact that Kubrick had shot his New York City scenes in a studio and that New York didn't "look like New York."

The MPAA had a separate objection. The film was scheduled to receive an NC-17 rating for its full male nudity, and Warner Brothers digitally altered the film's orgy scene by digitally inserting still images of various characters: these 'digital figleaves' stood in such a way as to block the most explicit images. This alteration of Kubrick's vision antagonized many cinephiles, as they argued that Kubrick had never been shy about ratings: A Clockwork Orange had an X-rating.

In contrast to their usual behaviour, the British Board of Film Classification allowed Eyes Wide Shut to be released to British cinemas without the need for the digital alterations seen in US cinemas. The film was rated 18, viewable only by those aged 18 and over.

Lee Siegel, writing in Harper's, felt that most critics responded to the marketing campaign staged by the studio and were unable to address the film on its artistic merits.

Music

The film's title music is "Waltz 2" from Shostakovich's Jazz Suite 2.

External link

• IMDB page
• Lee Siegel's review in Harper's
• Introducing Sociology: A Review of Eyes Wide Shut by Tim Kreider

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