Stanley Kubrick has been described by many as a
bit of an obsessive person. When he went to see Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film, Alexander Nevsky,
as a teen, he became so infatuated with the score that his younger sister was eventually forced
to break the record to stop him from playing it so relentlessly. People who knew him as a youth
found that he would become intensely fixated on things like this - chess, photography, films,
and showing zero interest in anything else. His intense enthusiasm would eventually plant
itself onto Arthur Schnitzler's psychoanalytic novella, Traumnovelle, or “Dream Story” -
a story about a man, named Fridolin, living in turn-of-the century Vienna whose discovery
about his wife Albertina’s adulterous fantasies sends him on a lust-fuelled odyssey. Michael
Herr, the screenwriter of Full Metal Jacket, would later say, “the reason I’d probably
never heard of [Traumnovelle] … was that [he had] bought up every single existing
copy of it.” Kubrick was so fascinated by this book that he spent almost
three decades attempting to adapt it. He had first considered adapting the story after
the release of Lolita in the 60s - but his wife, Christiane warned against it - arguing that
their marriage was too young to explore such themes. In 1973, Kubrick played with the
idea of shifting the Austrian setting of the book to New York, and casting Woody Allen
as the leading man. Then, in the early 80s, he considered making it a sex farce starring
none other than beloved jokester, Steve Martin. Neither of these came to fruition. By the
time the 90s came, we were almost 30 years out from when he first read the book - and
Kubrick was still floating a concept of it starring Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. This
was until his producer from Warner Brothers, Terry Semel suggested A-lister and
then-Hollywood heartthrob, Tom Cruise. Now Kubrick, like many obsessive creators of his
ilk, had a history of being pretty tyrannical with his actors. So he was initially apprehensive
about using a big star because, in his words, “stars have too many opinions”. The good
thing is that Tom Cruise, star as he was, was just as intense as Kubrick, and was
as devoted to his craft as you could get. So the two met in late 1995 at
Kubrick’s estate in Hertfordshire, where he had been living quietly with his
wife and kids since 1978. Without hesitation, Cruise agreed to take on the role - with the
suggestion that his then-wife Nicole Kidman, an acting titan in her own right, be brought on
as costar. And so it was - a renowned auteur, and two married Hollywood heavyweights,
would embark on their very own, confusing and exhausting, creative odyssey. In actor and
director Todd Field’s words, ““You’ve never seen two actors more completely subservient and
prostrate themselves at the feet of a director”. Other actors, including Sydney Pollack,
Alan Cummings, and Vinessa Shaw, would soon join - and principal photography
began the following year. Shooting would take place entirely in London, despite
the story being set in New York - one, because Kubrick scared of flying, and two -
because it was much cheaper to film over there. In reference to Kubrick’s magic budgetary touch,
Pollack, a director himself, is quoted as saying, ““While the rest of us poor bastards are able
to get 16 weeks of filming for $70 million with a $20 million star, Stanley could get
45 weeks of shooting for $65 million.” And so began the making of what would become
Stanley Kubrick’s most controversial film. His most misunderstood. And also his last. And yet, despite the fact that Kubrick’s untimely
death placed a lasting mark on this film, Eyes Wide Shut was not an
instant critical success. Now the film is, by no means, an easy, or
even at times enjoyable, film to watch. The dialogue sometimes feels stilted.
There’s this weird haze to the performances, where it feels like the actors aren’t even
acting in the same room as each other. Scenes can really drag on, with heady
pauses between almost every line. And the score repeats itself so relentlessly that
it inches into your brain and just sits there. Some have considered that maybe this is because
Kubrick never got to finish editing Eyes Wide Shut., since many people who had worked with
him over the years affirm that part of his practice was to keep editing and re-editing
his films right up until the eleventh hour. Others debate that, added to this, Kubrick was
never able to have final artistic oversight over the film’s release - particularly with regard to
the film’s most controversial scene - an intimate group activity which I will hereafter refer to
as the “big bad”. Regardless, it didn’t seem like the film people saw in theaters was
the exact product Kubrick had envisioned. And while it did go on to be a box office
success - making back three times its budget and now standing as Kubrick’s highest grossing
film - most critics agreed on one thing: Eyes Wide Shut was not the film to close
off Kubrick’s legacy. Not even close: “I can state unequivocally that the late Stanley
Kubrick, in his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, has staged the most pompous [big bad] in the history
of the movies.” -David Denby in The New Yorker “Ridiculously though intellectually overhyped
for the very marginal entertainment, edification and titillation it
provides over its somewhat turgid 159-minute running time.” -Andrew
Sarris in The New York Observer “This two hour and 39 minute gloss on
Arthur Schnitzler’s fantasmagoric novella feels like a rough draft at best.”
-J. Hoberman in The Village Voice “In Eyes Wide Shut nothing works.” -Louis
Menand in The New York Review of Books “An unfortunate misstep.” -Michiko
Kakutani in the New York Times “It’s empty of ideas which is fine, but it’s
also empty of heat.” The Washington Post. “This is a film about sex that isn’t sexy, a
movie about love with a cold heart.” - Total Film Ultimately, there was something off about
Eyes Wide Shut - it was wooden, sterile, unsensual, and distant. What seemed to
be unanimous was that the film was just as cold and lifeless as the rest of Kubrick’s
filmography, but without any of the precision. So after being deemed a critical flop, you would
think Eyes Wide Shut would disappear into the ether of film history. But like any piece of
art entangled with the death of its creator, Eyes Wide Shut has undergone a critical
reevaluation in the past twenty years. Some, like they’ve done with Kubrick’s other
films, have placed it under a conspiratorial microscope. Its portrayal of a secret society
in which New York's wealthy elite engage in licentious behavior has given rise to a
host of illuminati theories - particularly regarding the Rothschilds and,
more presciently, Jeffrey Epstien. Others have deemed it a misunderstood masterpiece - arguing that Eyes
Wide Shut is Kubrick’s best work. Yet despite the renewed critical and
conspiratorial attention on the film - critics, audiences, and scholars are still divided
over what Eyes Wide Shut is actually about, and whether the film lives up to the director’s
legacy. Really, I think some answers can be found if we take into account the making of
Eyes Wide Shut, the director’s own persona, and the many players in his orbit. After all,
Kubrick was a notoriously obsessive auteur. By unraveling the history of its production, we
just might find the devil lurking in the details. This is Eyes Wide Shut -
Stanley Kubrick’s swansong. Traumnovelle or “Dream Story” is just that:
a story about dreams - where the boundaries between fantasy, reality, and paranoia become
increasingly entangled. Set in Vienna at the turn-of-the-century, the novella follows
a prominent physician named Fridolin, who undergoes a psychological transformation after his
wife confesses to fantasizing about another man. The plot unfolds like this: Fridolin and his
wife Albertina attend a Mardi Gras party, where they both flirt with other guests. They
confess their flirtations to one another, which leads Albertina to confess her fantasies about a
young naval officer she saw while on holiday the previous summer. The confession shakes Fridolin
to his core, and sends him on a two-day dream-like odyssey where he experiences several strange,
and increasingly dangerous lustful encounters. First, the daughter of one of Fridolin’s
recently-deceased patients confesses her love for him. Second, a lady of the night approaches
Fridolin as he restlessly wanders the streets. Third, he runs into an old friend named
Nachitgall, who tells Fridolin about a secret party he’ll be playing piano at later that night
which is attended by beautiful, unclothed women and mysterious masked men. Enticed, Fridolin sets
his mind on getting in. Fourth, he witnesses the owner of the costume store he’s renting a mask
from discover his daughter fraternizing with two men. Fridolin’s journey finally culminates in this
masqued party, a mysterious event of ritualized sex. After being exposed as an uninvited outsider,
Fridolin is only permitted to leave once a young woman (who had previously warned him to leave)
announces that she will sacrifice herself for him. Shaken, Fridolin returns home and wakes up
Albertina, who tells him about a dream she was having where she was sleeping with the naval
officer and coldly watching Fridolin crucified right before her eyes. Fridolin is further
shaken. The next day, the five encounters Fridolin experiences seem to happen again, but devoid of
any dream-like surreality or sensualityl: Fridolin finds out that Nachtigall has been escorted away
by two strange men; it is revealed that the shop owner is pimping out his own daughter, and the
lady of the night is dying of tuberculosis; his experiences a cold encounter with the patient’s
daughter; and a newspaper article reveals that a young baroness, who Fridolin suspects is
the woman who sacrificed herself for him, has been poisoned. Fridolin goes to the morgue to
look at the baroness’ body, but he is only able to see his wife in the dead woman’s face. Finally,
he goes back home, and finds his mask from the night before lying on the pillow next to his
sleeping wife. He breaks down and tells Albertina everything. She comforts him by saying that
they’ve now survived many adventures. They sleep next to each other, until they hear a knock on
the door from their daughter, signaling a new day. In 1994, Kubrick hired screenwriter Fredric
Raphael to help him adapt Traumnovelle into a script. Raphael would later publish a
decidedly searing memoir about his working relationship with Kubrick, and has gone on in
interviews to speak quite poorly of the film. This guy is a hater if there
ever was one - I’m not kidding, after Eyes Wide Shut he embarked on
a two decade battle with a dead man. But aside from being an overall curmudgeon -
Raphael did have a bit of a leg to stand on. Kubrick was difficult to work with - he was
incredibly paranoid about people plagiarizing his screenplays - which is partly why the
two fell out before the film’s release [part about sharing script with agent]. He also
made a lot of changes to Raphael’s original script - which insulted the writer - whose ego was
just as big, if not larger, than Kubrick’s was. Some changes were minor, others much
more monumental. Raphael alleges that Kubrick has taken out all instances of
comedic wit or “sparkle” from his draft. But for all the changes he made, Kubrick’s take
on Traumnovelle would be pretty faithful to the novella in terms of plot, with mostly
aesthetic differences between the two. Eyes Wide Shut would take place in
late 90s Manhattan instead of turn of the century Vienna. Mardi Gras would turn
into Christmas. Fridolin, an Austrian Jew, would become Bill Harford, an American WASP.
His wife, Albertina, would become Alice, and their daughter would get a name - Helena.
Kubrick and Raphael would also add a new character - a tycoon named Victor Ziegler
- Bill’s top patient who hosts the couple at his lavish Christmas party at the start of the
film - and who becomes pretty important later on. Despite Raphael’s endless snarks about the
adaptation, I think the result is actually really interesting. Remember, when you’re
adapting print to screen - you need to consider that film is a primarily visual medium.
Themes can be conveyed through lighting, artful camerawork, music and so on. And by
this point, Kubrick was a master of using these technical elements to imbue
his films with mood and atmosphere. Traumnovelle is super esoteric - it’s all
about lust, desire, dreams, and the uncanny. And honestly, what we get with Eyes Wide Shut
is something even more cerebral and unsettling than the book. The vibe this film is emitting
can be best described with one word: Freudian. And who was a close friend and admirer of
Freud but none other than Arthur Schnitzler himself? While the two often exchanged ideas
and writings, Schnitzler had his own view of psychoanalysis and dream theory. Writing
to one of Freud’s disciples, he expressed: You have especially seen, observed, recognized,
relationships in my works that went right past most professional critics. And where you stay
with consciousness, I often follow you. However, about my unconscious, let us better say my
half-conscious -, I still know more than you do. There are more paths into
the dark depths of the soul, I feel this ever more strongly, than the
psychoanalysts permit themselves to dream of. Traumnovelle is a sleep walk through the
unconscious mind - which is really difficult to put to screen. Kubrick gets this across in many
ways. Eyes Wide Shut was filmed in the standard 1.85:1 format in 18mm - with frequent use of a
Steadicam - something that he helped to pioneer with The Shining in 1980 - which allowed him to
evoke a similarly ominous feeling with this film. His unique, almost vulgar lighting suffuses
every frame and gives the film an overall haze. Cruise and Kidman, in states of exhaustion, are almost sleepwalking through their
lines - with little immediate emotion. The long pauses between each line kneecap quick
reactions - every character is slow on the come up, like they’re in the process of being animated
each time they’re about to speak. Even the cuts are weird - sometimes you have no idea where you
are spatially in a scene, which really throws off the eye. And a bright blue light creeps through
every window - making the characters and setting look like they’re floating in some sort of dream
space. The film is uncanny because our characters are drifting between dream and reality -
we never know at any time which is which. Kubrick was also tasked with adding a
layer of desire to this dreamy atmosphere. Bill has been existing in the stupor of married
life - completely, if not lazily at bliss until Alice awakens him to the idea that she’s
been having adulterous dreams. This is what kicks off the plot - it’s not out of explicit desire
for his wife that Bill embarks on his odyssey, but out of a desire to act against the thought of
her sleeping with other men. This movie is unsexy because it’s not about the act itself - it’s about
the power and politics behind it. Make note that, especially with the studio’s alterations, we
never see the act consummated on screen - except in dream sequences. In an essay on the film’s
Freudian elements, Peter Loewenberg says, “Eyes Wide Shut is a paean to desire
by anxiously feared and postponed sex, which always remains unaccomplished
and unfulfilled. Kubrick teases us, repeatedly building expectation of realized
sexual contact, holding us in suspense, then frustrating us, letting us down
from anticipated sexual consumation”. So I do think Kubrick pulled off the mood of the
film - in spite of what Raphael seems to think. But there’s one area of critique
that I think Raphael is justified in. While Kubrick’s intentions were to be
as faithful to the story as possible, there are a couple subtle, but major changes he
made that betray Schnitzler’s work. Schnitzler, a Jewish man, was very strong in his stance
against anti-seminitism. If you were to look at his body of work as a whole, it’s easy to
see how he weaves themes of social exclusion into his writing. This was so much so that Hitler
called his texts “Jewish filth” and had them banned under the Nazi regime. Both he and Freud’s
books would end up in fire pits during this time. While the protagonists are not explicitly
Jewish in the story, there are hints towards their identities. This is what Fredric Raphael,
a Jew himself, had to say about Traumnovelle: “The students who bump into Fridolin as he
walks the streets insult and alarm him (and are, in fact, based on anti-Semitic fraternities of
the period)... Nachtigall is a ‘typical’ Jew, a wanderer available for hire, outrageous but
willing to be blindfolded and made a servant. The episode at the [big bad] in which Fridolin
is literally unmasked, and called on to say who he is, seems to emphasize his alienation
from the ‘gentlemen’ who mishandle him. Fridolin is an outsider, like
every middle-European Jew, and his medical dignity, whatever
untouchable status it may seem to bestow, somehow compromises his virility. Transferring
the story to New York seemed to me to offer an opportunity for keeping the Jewish aspect of
the story, however it might be modernized.” This would have been a good opportunity for
Kubrick, whose oeuvre also seemed to explore similar themes. An auteur who made a relatively
small amount of films throughout his lifetime, Kubrick often favored plots that
featured social and cultural outsiders. Critics have often tried to link this
thematic tendency to Kubrick’s own jewishness; critic David Ehrenstein regarded Barry Lyndon as
Kubrick’s most Jewish movie in its depiction of social exclusion. A shabby-genteel Irishman, Barry
Lyndon was clearly an infiltrator in 18th-century elite Anglo society. But Ehrenstein only
regarded this as Kubrick’s most jewish film, until he saw Eyes Wide Shut. And I
think this is a bit of an odd takeaway. As Raphael has recounted, Kubrick went to great
lengths to erase Jewish identity from the film. He had actually done this with a lot of
the source material he worked with before. The two strongly disagreed on the level
of Jewish identification to keep in the script - with Kubrick insisting that Fridolin
be made into a, quote, “Harrison Ford-ish goy”. So we get Bill, a WASPish man living in America. Not only does this erasure occur,
Kubrick also made concerted decisions to add certain elements to the film
that are ethically iffy at best. For one, the big bad scene is very different
tonally and aesthetically from the book. In Traumnovelle, we aren’t given much information
about the masked party other than the fact that people are masked and women are unclothed.
The scene also doesn’t appear to be completely salacious - with people breaking off into
individual couples - unclear whether or not they consummate. It comes across like a bit of a
fun, albeit exclusive party with “loose” morals for its time. The way it plays out in Eyes Wide
Shut is a bit different. It takes place in an opulent mansion in what seems to be Long Island
- with well dressed, but dangerous looking men flanking the doors. Kubrick adds what looks to be
a very drawn-out satanic ritual at the beginning, with the masked women all kissing each other
before they disperse into a ritualistic, salacious group activity. The mood of the scene is less so
exciting and lustful as it is a bit eerie - and a long shot of a masked man nodding at Bill adds a
level of intrigue that isn’t present in the book. Kubrick also added a Jewish-coded character to
the film: Ziegler. And not only is Ziegler an uber wealthy and mysterious tycoon, he’s also a
member of this secret society. In a big change, Bill finds Ziegler with an unconscious woman
at the holiday party, who he helps to revive. Ziegler also attends the secret party, and
chastises Bill for compromising himself, in a particularly expositional
scene near the end of the film. Over the years, Eyes Wide Shut has become fodder
for a host of conspiracy theories - most of which interpret it as the ultimate expose of uber-elite
secret societies that rule the United States. These conspiracy theories are very much tethered
to an antisemitism that’s been rumbling just under the surface of American culture for decades
- sometimes exploding in acts of violence and brutality against Jewish citizens. So this
switching of identities from outsider to WASP, power-holders to coded Jews, and masquerade party
to satanic cult - should not be taken lightly. We can’t say why exactly Kubrick, a Jew himself,
betrayed Schnitzler’s ethos. Raphael strongly disagreed with his omissions, accusing him
of trying to escape his own Jewishness. I don’t really know if it's
Raphael’s place to publicly speak about Kubrick’s relationship to
Judaism - I know it’s definitely not my place. But these personal choices
are interesting when considering them in relation to the few instances Kubrick did
reveal his relationship to his identity. Loewenberg suggests that Kubrick has been quoted
as saying that although he had two Jewish parents, he was not really a Jew. Kubrick had also been in
the process of writing a film about the Holocaust called The Aryan Papers, until Schnindler’s List
came out and he no longer found it necessary. He made a strange and controversial remark about
the Spielberg hit, saying it was not so much a film about the Holocaust as it was a film about
success. “The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. Schindler’s List was about
600 who don’t”. I do think this plays into his aversion to emotive storytelling. Friends
from his childhood maintain that he opted out of having a Bar Mitzvah - in the vein of paying
zero attention to things he wasn’t obsessed over. All this to say, we’ll never know why he made this
decision - but we can continue speculating about whether it was derived from a deeply-rooted place.
And the result makes for a very different story. In Kubrick’s take, Bill doesn’t really face
social exclusion. The book is quite forthright about Fridolin’s feelings at all times - he’s
often uncomfortable, confused, and lonely - he speculates about whether the party was a cruel
joke because he’s familiar with being outcasted and ridiculed. Comparatively, Bill floats through
every situation in a passive, at times even indifferent way. Bill is no longer alien - the
secret society is. And since his unmasking is no longer a metaphor for exposed social identity,
the power this secret cult is exerting over him is not a systemic, societal power - but power,
for power’s sake. This is when the grounds for conspiracy, which creates folk devils in
the place of systemic issues, take place. I find it interesting that Kubrick, a notoriously
obsessive person, was obsessed with a story about obsession. We’ve seen in his
directorial history that he is someone who wielded power in all aspects of his
artistic practice. So in that breath, Eyes Wide Shut is a reflection of
his own person, career, and legacy. During the scriptwriting process, Kubrick reached
out to his friend, Michael Herr, who I quoted earlier, to help him and Raphael colloquialize the
script a bit. Herr, knowing this was a Tom Cruise vehicle, said he’d only come on if Kubrick spoke
to his agent first - which Kubrick never did. This is what Herr surmised: “[Stanley] wanted this to
be between us, for a complex of reasons involving money and secrecy, affection and control,
respect and pathology and old times’ sake”. Herr declined. He had a rising suspicion that
he would be severely underpaid and overworked for this gig. “If you had anything even
resembling a life, time and money - and Stanley’s will could be a deadly infusion”.
And boy, was this a powerful premonition. As I hinted earlier, by this point in his
career, Kubrick had developed a reputation for being exhaustive and sometimes even
being emotionally abusive towards his actors. Most infamously, on the set of The Shining,
it’s alleged that he made poor Shelley Duvall’s experience on set miserable in an attempt to
draw out her character’s submissive terror. He allegedly alienated her from the rest of
the cast and crew, and forced her to repeat the baseball bat shot 127 times, threatening a world
record. In behind the scenes footage of the film, Duvall is shown expressing concern over an
extreme loss of hair that she was suffering as a result of what looked like a mental
breakdown. When asked about whether Kubrick was unusually cruel to her in an interview last year
with the Hollywood Reporter, Duvall said, “He’s got that streak in him. He definitely has that.
But I think mostly because people have been that way to him at some time in the past.” Adding more
confusion to Kubrick’s already complicated legacy, she also maintains in that same interview that
Kubrick was very warm and friendly to her. So given this reputation, rumours spread as
the filming schedule for Eyes Wide Shut began to bloat, that Kubrick was similarly
exhaustive with Kidman and Cruise, allegedly making Tom walk through a door over
95 times - but I wouldn’t say he was employing the same meticulous micromanagement over his
actors as he was with, say, his set. In a 15th anniversary article on the film for Vanity Fair,
Amy Nicholson argues that the intention behind these repeated takes was to break down the idea
of “performance” altogether - but she affirms that Tom and Nicole also had a lot of freedom with
how they could about the scene in each take. She says, “The theory was that once his actors
bottomed-out in exhaustion and forgot about the cameras, they could rebuild and discover
something that neither he nor they expected”. And if you watch their scenes together, you really
do get a sense of delirious unrealism - the kind of circular, half-asleep conversation you
have with a partner at 5 in the morning. And there seemed to be almost no
pushback from Cruise or Kidman. Cruise was particularly subservient. A bit of a
keener, he put aside all his other obligations, including Mission Impossible 2, to fulfill
a perceived duty to Kubrick - and for a gig that got less lucrative and
more frustrating with each day. For example, Kubrick had apparently refused
to let Cruise review footage from each shooting day - inhibiting him from developing a
cohesive understanding of his character’s arc. To be honest, many critics and scholars have
noted that from the outside, Kubrick seemed to revel in cucking Tom Cruise at every opportunity.
Whether he’s flirting with call girls at a party with all the charm of Mitt Romney, or getting
called homophobic slurs by a group of frat boys (Cruise was navigating rumours about
his sexuality in real life at the time), it almost seems like Kubrick was intentionally
flattening Cruise’s heartthrob image This production would actually have an
indelible impact on Cruise and Kidman’s real life marriage as well. Kubrick went
to great lengths to psychoanalyze their relationship when building his story, prying
about their fears of commitment and asking them to bring their personal habits to set. He
was also very secretive about what information was shared where - forbidding the two from
exchanging acting notes and forbidding Tom from being on set during filming for the intimate
dream sequences between Kidman and a male model. Rumours about Cruise’s sexuality abound, the
couple had to sue Star magazine for alleging that they were attending a sex therapist during
filming - because, you know, Nicole was his beard. Their widely publicized divorce just two years
after the film’s release led many to speculate that Eyes Wide Shut was the beginning of the
end for Tom and Nicole - and perhaps even for Cruise’s career. Almost immediately Eyes Wide
Shut, he seemed to revert into the comfort of being an action star - a major shift from the
diverse range of movies he was making in the 90s. Nicholson observes, “At its core, the
Cruise/Kubrick combination seems cruel: an over-achieving actor desperate
to please a never-satisfied auteur. The power balance was firmly shifted to
Kubrick, yet to his credit, Cruise has never complained”. In fact, he and Kidman have
both vehemently defended Kubrick and the film. According to a biography of Kubrick by David
Mikics, Kubrick actually became very good friends with Tom and Nicole. Nicole even said
he knew her better than her own parents, and Tom was a pallbearer at his funeral. This may
have been a new development for Kubrick and how he interacted with his actors, likely due to
the closeness he felt to the subject material. I think one reason as to why actors have this
complicated relationship with Kubrick - on the one hand having their boundaries trespassed
upon and abused, and on the other continuing to speak quite reverently of him, is because
he was slated from the get-go as a genius. I’ve been heavily critical of directors
in the past for the way they use the line between artist and genius to facilitate
abuse. I think the way we revere directors as geniuses reflects the ways we place value
on masculine traits in society - logic, ration, control, and precision. These are all
facets of Kubrick’s legacy and filmography. Unlike many other artforms, directors are
at the helm of a collaborative process. Once you reach auteur status, it’s your
vision alone that’s recognized in the work. So I think this role as controller of the
ship is inherent to directing at this level. In many ways, we’ve made it so that it’s one of
the only ways to get an edge in the industry, and also one of the only ways to secure a legacy. Kubrick’s work alone, like any other
artist/genius, is not what’s kept us talking about him all these years later. The artist/genius
is often created through their own personal mythology. I think Kubrick's particular mythology
is how deeply intertwined his private persona was, with the infamy of his sets. We’ll never
know him in full, but we can get glimpses of him through the stories of his productions
- the most palpable of which is Eyes Wide Shut. If it wasn’t clear from Tom and Nicole’s
experiences, production for Eyes Wide Shut has gone down in infamy. Kubrick’s
decades-long reputation as a “perfectionist” culminated in what would later win a Guinness
World Record for the longest constant movie shoot in history. Spanning the course of a whopping
15 months - Eyes Wide Shut came at major cost to the time of its cast and crew. Why did
it take so long? Well Kubrick, having spent three decades mulling over this story, was
painfully particular about what he wanted. Okay, for example: In his typical fashion, he
sent set designers to New York to measure the exact width of the streets, and the distance
between newspaper vending machines in an effort to accurately recreate Greenwich village. But
his attention to detail did not end there. He demanded oversight on just about every step
of the process. According to cinematographer Larry Smith, who also worked as a gaffer on Barry
Lyndon and The Shining, Kubrick was explicit with the production designers about exactly what types
of lamps, chairs and decor he wanted. He required the highest quality materials - opting for real
plaster, cement, or brick, over typical set materials like paper and wood. He had also, during
the production of his other films, developed a distaste for “movie lighting” - preferring instead
to use existing light fixtures. He created a detailed and rigid plan for what the light would
look like in each and every scene. Smith said in an interview with American Cinematographer that
Kubrick would provide his crew with comprehensive information about the red, green, and blue lights
in each sequence - carefully watching each scene and writing up very specific corrections for
what they’d have to re-do the following day. Of course, this attention to detail is a marker
of any great artist - but in film, you’re working alongside hundreds of people who are
dedicating their time and labour to your vision. I mean, added to Tom and Nicole, as well as the
crew, - it wasn’t exactly a cakewalk for the other actors either. During the filming of the big
bad scene, Kubrick wanted the models he had hired to simulate the act in its entirety - to which
they responded that they had not agreed to such explicitness. This is something a director should
probably disclose before contracts are signed. Kubrick’s scrutinous mindset also led to weeks and
weeks of reshoots. Vinessa Shaw, who only appears for about 7 minutes of screen time was initially
scheduled to film for 2 weeks - but this ended up extending to two months. And then, again, Cruise
and Kidman, both of whom were in incredibly high demand at the time, had expected to commit to
six months - finishing in the spring of 1997. Instead, they stayed on until Christmas of that
year - and even when filming wrapped up in 1998, they were brought back in May for
another few months of reshoots. I do think Kubrick had cultivated a bit of
a “living set” during the production of Eyes Wide Shut. A set that closely mirrors the
themes of its film - like all those stories about spooky stuff happening during the filming
of The Exorcist. Eyes Wide Shut is a paranoid film - destabilizing your trust in just about
every character you meet, including Bill himself. Shots and scenes linger for so long that they
give space to question what you’re watching several times over, and a single, monotonous
piano note follows you through all the action, creeping up the back of your neck. Kubrick
was a paranoid man - like I’ve recounted, he was incredibly secretive during filming -
siloing all the different collaborators from actually… well, collaborating. Eyes Wide Shut
is about control and the fear of losing it. Bill is arrogantly comfortable, until he
realizes that he does not know his wife at all, signaling a loss of access and understanding
between them. And when everything is finally revealed to him by Ziegler, this knowledge does
not grant him more access, but only further confuses him. The ultimate truth being that people
were pulling the strings for him the entire time. Kubrick was famously a control freak - demanding
oversight and absolute power over his vision. And lastly, as we’ve discussed,
Eyes Wide Shut is about power. Now there is a logical connection between
paranoia, control, and power - in his paranoid, deeply private mind, Kubrick demanded control
for fear of losing it. This led him to exert and play around with power over his collaborators.
His artist/genius status granted him access to extremely personal aspects of his actors lives
that he would not see otherwise - he could pull their strings like little marionette dolls.
So this production really can’t be untethered from Kubrick’s persona at all, and you can
see how much it bleeds through this movie. Shooting had finally wrapped up after 400 days
- and he immediately entered an extensive post production process - editing and re-editing
the footage over and over and over again. Herr recounts of this period: “[Stanley] called in extreme distress and said
that he couldn’t possibly show me the movie in time for my deadline—there was looping
to be done and the music wasn’t finished, lots of small technical fixes on color and sound;
would I show work that wasn’t finished? He had to show it to Tom and Nicole because they had to
sign nudity releases, and to Terry Semel and Bob Daly of Warner Bros., but he hated it that
he had to, and I could hear it in his voice that he did. But once that screening was over, and
the response to it was so strong, he relented.” It was clear from many who knew him that
his health was waning in these final weeks. Emilio, his assistant, says that
on the last night he saw him he had to help Kubrick to his room because
he didn't have the strength to go himself. The next day Stanley then called Emilio confused,
thinking he was calling someone in the U.S. Kubrick screened Eyes Wide Shut privately
for Cruise and Kidman on March 1st 1999, and passed away from a heart attack on March 7th. Without Kubrick there to oversee the release,
decisions were made by the studio that incensed many. The most notorious was that Warner Brothers
digitally imposed figures in front of the big bad in their effort to avoid an NC-17 rating -
which would lead to the film being banned in certain theaters. Now, I had trouble figuring out
whether Kubrick was privy to this before he died. Larry Smith, the film’s cinematographer, seems
to insinuate that he was, saying “"Naturally, I'd have preferred if [the MPAA] hadn't required
that, but Stanley had to comply in order to get an R rating”. But critics like Roger Ebert seem
to suggest otherwise - “Kubrick died in March. It is hard to believe he would have accepted the
digital hocus-pocus. "Eyes Wide Shut'' should have been released as he made it, either "unrated''
or NC-17”, earlier saying, “It's symbolic of the moral hypocrisy of the rating system that it would
force a great director to compromise his vision, while by the same process making his adult
film more accessible to young viewers.” There’s a lot of disagreement on how Kubrick
felt about Eyes Wide Shut in his final days. R. Lee Ermey, an actor from Full Metal Jacket and
good friend of his suggested in a 2006 interview for Radar that Kubrick hated the film. “He
called me about two weeks before he died, as a matter of fact. We had a long conversation
about ‘Eyes Wide Shut.’ He told me it was a piece of shit and that he was disgusted with it and
that the critics were going to have him for lunch. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way
with him—exactly the words he used.” But this has been widely disputed by
members of the crew, both Cruise and Kidman, and members of Kubrick’s immediate family. His
brother in law, Jan Harlan, has been adamant that Kubrick considered Eyes Wide Shut to be
his greatest contribution to the art of cinema. Time has been kind to Eyes Wide Shut. Like
any art imprinted by the death of its creator, people are more willing to give it a second
glance. Lee Siegal of Harper’s Magazine scorched detractors in 2017 when he said this:
“Not a single critic, not even those few who claimed to like Eyes Wide Shut, made any attempt
to understand the film on its own artistic terms. Instead, the critics denounced the
film for not living up to the claims its publicists had made for it, reduced it
to a question of its director’s personality. Again, I don’t think it can be untethered from
Kubrick’s personality - but he’s right about this: no one bothered to assess Eyes
Wide Shut for its artistry alone. The biggest problem was that they paired it
up against Kubrick’s entire body of work. And while this is common practice for any
filmmaker or even artist - it’s really hard to do with Stanley Kubrick because his
filmography is incredibly sparse and diverse. With each new film he essentially invented
or innovated an entirely new genre. Given Kubrick’s obsessiveness over his art, it’s
strange that people came away from Eyes Wide Shut thinking that the overall tone was
somehow a misfire. Like Nicholson says, “If Kubrick was a perfectionist who demanded
Cruise repeat himself 95 times on the set, and in the editing room
rejected 94 of those takes, then the “terrible” take Kubrick chose
must be the take that Kubrick wanted.” So going on that view, I think the film's “off”
quality needs to be assessed as intentional. And if he intended for the audience to come away with
an “off” feeling, then what’s the reason for it? Stefan Mattessich finds that the film’s
strangeness is a result of how it echoes typical Kubrickian caricatures - Kubrick doesn’t
write specific people as he does figures that represent big esoteric ideas. But Eyes Wide Shut
is a bit different because his caricatures are placed within a hyper-realistic setting - leaving
them with a very uncanny artifice. He concludes, “the estranging anachronisms of its
setting, no less than its stilted dialogue, its hermetic and generic interiors, its random
or pointless plot twists, work to thwart the aesthetic categories which require of narrative
art that it seduce its viewers via identification and dramatic unity” (Mattessich). Eyes Wide
Shut is not really giving us any sort of viewer satisfaction or catharsis. This, for Mattessich,
guarantees it to be received as a “bad film” - all the while subtly conveying thoughtful ideas
about society, fidelity, marriage, and power. I think when critics say that Eyes Wide
Shut fails as an erotic film - they’re genuinely misunderstanding what eroticism
is. Lust and desire in this film operate both alongside and against the social order of
Bill’s world. Scholars like Georges Bataille and Audre Lorde both find that true eroticism is a
feeling of mutual embodiment between individuals. Bataille says that “the whole business of
eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participants as they are in
their normal lives”. In destroying the separate, self-containedness between individuals,
eroticism introduces a common humanity that threatens a social order which thrives upon
individual isolation. Lorde feels a similar way: “The erotic is a resource within each of us that
lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our
unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression
must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that
can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered
source of power and information within our lives”. Both Bataille and Lorde see the fundamental
characteristic of the erotic as an act of sharing – with each other, with life, and with
all aspects of the self – so that the erotic is a joy that animates all aspects of being. Alice’s
disclosure to Bill of her extra-marital desires sends him on his odyssey, and ends up bringing
them closer together. And a major change Kubrick made was in now allowing Bill to respond to
her dream story with one of his own - unlike Fridolin does. I don’t think it’s a mistake
that almost every woman he entertains is a tall, strawberry blond - multiple variations of his
wife. Loewenberg even goes so far as to theorize that Bill’s discovery of his Venetian mask lying
on the pillow next to his sleeping wife is not so much a threat from the secret society as it
is an unconscious act. He posits, “Leaving his rented mask at home suggests that Bill wanted to
be found out by his wife and to confess to her, include her, and he succeeded”. Alice
then closes off the film with this: Mikics suggests in his biography that the film’s
two protagonists mirror Kubrick and Christiane. He says, “"Christiane stands behind Alice Harford's
power to bring her spouse back from his obsessive, self-enclosed fantasy." He ruminated on Eyes Wide
Shut for three decades, allowing his marriage to ferment and produce new aromas as time passed.
Mikics says: "Eyes Wide Shut, a slow ritual of a movie, was designed to free Kubrick from the
obsession with control that it also embodies, to provide a release into renewed relationship
with the wife who had been at his side for four decades..." I think Kubrick had a true
understanding of this fundamental aspect of Traumnovelle. As Siegal argues, “Kubrick’s
film is hardly, as some critics have said, an instance of anti-erotic moralism. It is,
instead, honest about the power and necessity and permanence of erotic life. It is about
the simultaneity of irreconcilable desires”. In many ways, Eyes Wide Shut is
Kubcrick’s most personal film. Always a deeply private person and
someone who took his art very seriously, Kubrick was not one to divulge. This could possibly be a reason
as to why so many of his films, his own death even, have been subject
to conspiracy. And with Eyes Wide Shut, we’ll never figure out just what
exactly it’s supposed to be about. Hell, we don’t even know if it’s good or not.
Much like Stanley Kubrick himself really. It’s a favourite of many renowned
directors - Spielberg, Scorsese, and Soderbergh among others. Christopher Nolan,
a Kubrick devotee, has been honest about the fact that he didn’t understand the film when
he first watched it. He says, “Watching it with fresh eyes, it plays very differently to
a middle-age man than it did to a young man”. This aged enlightenment towards Eyes Wide Shut
is something Christiane Kubrick spoke about with regards to her husband’s relationship to the film:
Some called the film outdated, but I would say it’s wisened. It’s a film that I think I’ll
only come to appreciate more as the years go on. Eyes Wide Shut refers to seeing beyond sight.
To waking beyond sleep. As Loewenberg says, “Oedipus first “sees” after he has blinded
himself”. It’s about a refreshed perspective on love, marriage, fidelity, lust, power, and
control - and the ways they become enmeshed as we grow older, or wiser. Rejecting all
the conventions of satisfying cinema, Kubrick was willing to let this film be
misunderstood for the sake of these themes. And this is why I think it’s such a perfect
testament to Kubrick’s legacy - in a crass way, it’s a big final f you to those who willfully
misunderstood his films time and time again. This is a deeply personal, emotional
film - being created by a deeply private, unemotive filmmaker. His assistant Emilio
has spoken about how uncomfortable he felt at Kubrick's funeral because Kubrick himself would
have felt uncomfortable there. It appears Kubrick didn't quite care for seemingly forced emotional
exchanges. He also didn’t seem to like being the center of attention. And this is why I think Eyes
Wide Shut, cold and loveless as critics found it, is a startlingly candid film. I can’t even
say I enjoy watching it, but I think about it a lot. The adaption is distant, the
film is confusing, the production was hell - and yet I like it anyway - because this
is true art - a director giving himself to us. This is who Kubrick was - complicated, closed
off, paranoid, controlling, and passionate. Eyes Wide Shut is Stanley Kubrick’s
swansong - and we will spend the rest of eternity trying to figure out
just what exactly is wrong with it.
