Kubrick Shuts One Eye

I was skeptical of Eyes Wide Shut from the moment I first heard about it. I was one of the lucky few to get my hands on Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (Dream Story), the novella upon which the movie is based, before Kubrick bought the rights and blocked its sales. It's a small, 110-page book; I read it six times.

As I work back through Schnitzler's convoluted narrative, one thing becomes very, very clear. Kubrick made a dreadful, almost impossible mistake in choosing Dream Story as a source for a cinematic narrative.

Eyes Wide Shut is difficult to summarize, but it's organization is practically identical to Schnitzler's novel (Kubrick's insistence on an "inspired by" credit for Schnitzler seems not only wrong, but ego-driven). Cruise and Kidman play Bill and Alice Harford, a couple that seemingly have it all--looks, boatloads of money, great sex, an adorable child and a London-esque apartment in New York City. When they attend an ostentatious Christmas ball thrown by a wealthy friend (Sydney Pollack), Alice gets plastered and finds herself dancing with a skeezy Hungarian player; he whispers cheesy pick-up lines in her hear and she mumbles incoherent responses (not only does she mumble them, she mumbles them so damn s-l-o-w-l-y that you have to wonder whether Kidman was simply exhausted by Kubrick's repetitive takes). Meanwhile, Bill is entertained by a bevy of models before he is called to attend to a hooker who overdosed in the host's bathroom.

Kubrick's opening is so numbingly boring that he almost loses his audience before the real plot kicks in. The scene that actually rekindles the audience's attention is the one we've been watching for months: the couple stroke each other in front of a mirror while Chris Isaak's perfect "Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing" messes with the tone of the moment. Though Kidman and Cruise don't have sex on-screen (what a tease!), the short scene is wonderful because it is so loaded. Combine Kidman's glances into the mirror, her height advantage over Cruise, Isaak's strange lyrics (the verse Kubrick chooses is an interesting one) and the couple's blatant awkwardness, and you have a classic piece of cinema in 90 seconds.

The following night Bill and Alice find themselves embroiled in an argument about sex and jealousy. Both accuse the other of harboring lascivious thoughts from the night before, and their logic is playfully incisive until Alice launches into an odd (there's no other way to describe it) monologue about her dangerous attraction to a sailor the previous summer. Speaking even slower than the night before (now she's on pot!), Kidman tries to chew the scenery and ends up choking bigtime. Her monologue should be the key to the movie--a thorough exploration of how unrealized emotions can inspire the most potent jealousy--and yet Kubrick has Alice on marijuana before she begins her speech. Why? Why cheapen the moment? In Schnitzler's novel, Alice is perfectly lucid; she virtually relives her erotic desires for the sailor as she recounts her lust. In the film, the exchange isn't balanced; Alice isn't rational, the emotions are cheapened, and the scene flops. Bill retaliates by diving into an underworld of sexual deviance that takes him far from the Upper West Side. In these strange scenes which valiantly try to capture the dream-like thread of Schnitzler's narrative, Kubrick effectively conveys the image of Manhattan as a series of portals to sex. Every street, every door is its own pathway to sexual fulfillment. But Cruise doesn't work within this symbolic environment. He's too one-dimensional--Cruise has never been capable of subtlety. The only realization he comes to is that sex isn't as vanilla as he once thought. And what of the much balleyhooed orgy scene?

Schnitzler's fascinating account of an opulent palace of sex and mirthful ritual has been turned into much the opposite. True, most critics and fans have raved about Jocelyn Pook's spooky score, the beautiful costuming, the fantastic lighting and the haunting ceremony. The problem, however, is that Kubrick's vision misinterprets Schnitzler's theme: That sex is so deceptive and dangerous because it involves a playout of fantasy. That reality only kicks in once sex is over. Yet, in Kubrick's orgy scene, the mood is menacing from the outset. This isn't erotic sex--this is a museum of frigidity. Sex and death are linked from the beginning, preventing the audience from feeling the lustful charge and understanding the potent connection between sexual fantasy and fatal reality.

The rest of the film is, sadly enough, a simple exercise in presenting unneeded answers to the many mysteries Bill encountered the night before. In Schnitzler's novel, Bill is left without a true explanation to his journey. But Kubrick inserts a scene where all loose ends are tied up and the result is almost laughable. The film limps to its finish, without catharsis or meaning. The "moral" of the film, according to Alice who had her own horrifying dream adventure the night before, is that "no dream is only a dream" just as no one night symbolizes all "reality." It's a direct quote from the last page of Schnitzler's novella--a very sad example of Kubrick's uneven adaptation of the text.

So much could be said about Kubrick's failure to realize that Bill is also entrapped in his own dream and Kubrick's revamping of Alice's dream (in the book, she dreams of her husband being tortured and crucified). It may seem unfair to criticize a movie because it is its own story, and not Arthur Schnitzler's. But this film has Dream Story's narrative structure, and throughout the movie--especially when the novella's closing moral is repeated verbatim--Kubrick commits himself to Schnitzler's theme.

But that theme is never realized. The problem is that Kubrick's vision of sexuality needs character revelations--a dramatic device which he has always detested. Kubrick is only interested in the generic character, the allegory which reveals human nature rather than idiosyncrasy.

Indeed, as in most of his films, his characters here are nothing more than props. And while such an approach worked wonders in 2001, A Clockwork Orange and Dr. Strangelove, here it's an unforgivable error. In Eyes Wide Shut, sex is so unerotic, so frigid, so unfulfilling that the story exists as a two-dimensional vision of perversion and nothing more.