EYES WIDE SHUT
The Iceman Goeth
"...this rough
magic
I here abjure...I'll
break my staff,
Bury it certain
fathoms in the earth,
And, deeper than
did ever plummet sound,
I'll drown my
book..."
Prospero:
The Tempest, William Shakespeare (l)
Stanley Kubrick's penultimate film, Full Metal Jacket, was released in l987. Kubrick's unsparing portrait of naieve marine recruits being molded into remorseless killing machines reprised that ironically bleak perspective upon the human condition which informed the director's great mature work. Like Full Metal Jacket's hapless warriors, other Kubrick protagonists habitually endure the inscrutable manipulation of a fate at best indifferent when not overtly inimical to our ends. Frequently, Kubrickian nemesis resides in a corrupt, corrupting social institution, exemplified by The Shining's (l980) monstrous mountain resort.
Kubrick's characters are no less vulnerable to the intrapsychic menace of our engrained irrationality and aggressivity. For the director, the angry ape of 200l (l968) was hardwired into the species' genetic code, ever threatening to burst its psychic bars, a savage mock to the thin veneer of civilization.
The chill Hobbesian vision of Full Metal Jacket -- reminiscent of Freud's grim judgements on Civilization and its Discontents (2) -- was typically couched in elegant cinema rhetoric, hallmarked by rigorous formal control. Kubrick surveyed his Vietamese hell from a customary Olympian height. Compassion for the inhabitants of the director's "world of shit" was cool indeed, yet their plight was rendered all the more poignant by Kubrick's carefully distanced sensibility. The apposite painterly allusion is to Renaissance Flemish work like Brueghel's Fall of Icarus; to sundry crucifixions from the same period, in which trauma wrought upon frail flesh is situated in the background of an blithely unconcerned universe, where peasants haggle or play at bowls.
Full Metal Jacket received respectful, if not glowing American reviews. Many critics admired the scarifying bootcamp initiation scenes, but found fault with the later Vietnamese sequences. Tasked for being disjointed, these were in fact intentionally oneiric. Little heed was paid to Kubrick's articulation of the recruit's ferocious training with their subsequent dehumanization, in a narrative which subverted the standard Hollywood war movie's jingoistic, callow novice-to-warrior trajectory. Conceivably both critics and public had had enough of celluloid Viet Nams precisely at the moment when Kubrick, never a slave to fashion, issued his unique take upon the facility with which humanity can be programmed to slaughter from one war to the next.
Twelve years then passed until the release of Eyes Wide Shut, shortly after Kubrick's death from a massive heart attack. The reasons for the unprecedented hiatus in his career and the attenuated botch-up of his last film may never be thoroughly unravelled, given Kubrick's well-known penchant for secrecy and his family's understandeable post-mortem protectiveness.
Neither lack of financial backing nor backstabbing industry politics would seem to have been a problem; nor did Kubrick expend needless time seeking out elusive megastars in aid of ensuring the success of his next feature, as has been rumored. While Full Metal Jacket didn't generate huge American box office, it did fare extremely well abroad, like most of his movies. Warner Brothers continued to perceive him as a valued architect of profitable quality pictures, always careful about the bottom line.(3)
But if the director was no erratic Orson Welles, one intuits something of the Glenn Gould about him -- sans Gould's autistic-like seclusive oddness. It will be remembered that the brilliant Canadian pianist absolutely withdrew from concertizing midway through his career to create magisterial studio recordings with relentless exactitude. Kubrick absented himself in the Sixties from the Hollywood intrusions he had been detesting at least since Spartacus (l960). He moved to a large estate outside of London where he lived and worked until his death. He quickly acquired the reputation of a control freak par excellence -- of a modern day Prospero who ruled over the minutest aspect of his pictures from "Castle Kubrick", ever eager to deploy the latest cutting-edge cinematographic wizardry.
Production of Kubrick's later films was shrouded in mystery. Participants were frequently kept in the dark beyond their piece of the action. He rarely ventured from sound stages or locations around London, where he was well known for shooting scenes to the point of general exhaustion. His modus vivendi was intense and gratifying, if hardly healthy. He was widely read and highly knowledgeable across the arts. He kept odd hours; reversed sleep rhythms; ate lavishly; eschewed exercise, and -- a doctor's son -- avoided physicians whenever possible.
The path to Eyes Wide Shut was convoluted. Following Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick became consumed with a film tentatively entitled Artificial Intelligence. In alternate versions, its central character remained a sentient robot boy, searching for the mother who raised him, and who then tossed him away like a used up toy after she became pregnant.(4) By all accounts, the hero's plight and progress would have recapitulated many of Kubrick's priveleged themes -- the dehumanizing or liberating potential of technology; the clash between reason and instinct; the psyche's vulnerability to illconceived social engineering; the yearning after transcendence.
The AI venture went through a dizzy procession of writers and other talents, but remained on perennial hold while Kubrick continued to worry away at his conception. Another picture about the Holocaust was also set aside, possibly because Kubrick thought it would be overshadowed by Schindler's List, as Platoon (l986) had conceivably compromised the reception of Full Metal Jacket. Eventually he returned to a story he was attracted to as far back as the Sixties -- Traumnovelle (Dream Novel), by the gifted Viennese author and playwright, Arthur Schnitzler.(5) A physician much attracted to Freudian psychology, Schnitzler is chiefly remembered today for La Ronde.
Schnitzler's evocative tale was written in l926, and set in fin-de-siecle Vienna. A young physician and his wife, Fridolin and Albertine, confess their florid extra-marital sexual fantasies to each other after a ball in which both were sexually tempted, without yielding. Devastated by the wife's overheated account of an infatuation from afar with a naval officer, the doctor stumbles out of his house into bizarre, frustrating and ultimately dangerous erotic adventures. Inter alia: a sweetnatured prostitute nearly seduces him -- the wife of a freshly deceased patient declares her love for him, precipitating his flight -- he intrudes into an orgy of masked aristocrats where, unmasked and threatened with execution, he's redeemed by a young beauty who may or may not sacrifice her life for his freedom.
Shaken to the core, the doctor returns home at daybreak to ask forgiveness of his wife. Her sleep has been haunted by a sensuous nightmare that resonates uncannily with the orgy he witnessed. The husband grasps, if dimly, the hypocrisy of a patriarchal double standard which has thwarted genuine intimacy with his spouse. (He's at least been with prostitutes, without much heed to his derelictions). Schnitzler's ambiguously happy ending has the couple reunited in an implicit contract to sublimate the disruptive fantasies both had nearly acted out. A marginally more liberated bourgeois status quo is recuperated, complete with loving child.
Kubrick and Frederic Raphael's screenplay has been lauded for its faithfulness to Dream Novel. In fact, their rewrite coarsens Schnitzler's delicately ironic tone; contains major fatal, as well as jarring minor departures. Time and locale have been shuffled to contemporary Manhattan. The protagonists are now a socialite physician and his wife, Bill and Alice Hartford. Their respective portrayals by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are informed by Cruise's peculiar woodenness, and Kidman's no less offputting foul-mouthed, hysteroid agita.
Despite the heavy flackery about their nude scenes, the two stars -- married offscreen -- project not a jot of passion towards each other -- and zero warmth towards a child who could be made of wood. However maladroitly acted, the Hartfords are hardly the uptight late Victorians of Schnitzler's story. One doubts these urbane sophisticates would be more than temporarily nonplussed, if moved at all by the divulging of mere extramarital fantasy.
One's cavil on this score is debatable; but it's of negligible importance set against the imprudent, yet instructive elimination in the screenplay of the confessions Fridolin makes to Albertine after she discloses her passion for the naval officer. Bill is thus positioned to become a hapless victim of Alice's marijuana-driven provocative revelations, rather than a hypocritical cheat.
One observes that most of Kubrick's women are ciphers. When portrayed in any depth, they tend to be unpleasant; even frankly predatory, e.g., Lolita's (l962) perverse nymphet; Full Metal Jacket's deadly young Viet Cong sniperess. Arguably intended to be Kubrick's most fully realized and sympathetic female character, Alice/Kidman registers instead as a cold, preoccupied dominatrix, champing with suppressed frustration at the domestic bit, until her literal last word -- an appalling, conciliatory invitation to "F--K!" that must have set Schnitzler spinning in his grave. Of Alice's divergence from Albertine, more presently.
Like Hitchcock and Antonioni, two of his favorite directors, Kubrick often promotes anxiiety about the not-yet-known/never-to-be-known through cannily limited or ambiguous disclosure (e.g. his hedging vis-a-vis the origin or purpose of 200l's monolith). It's a strategy which would seem apt for realizing Schnitzler's cryptic description of the nocturnal orgy, which fosters an impression that the erotic ritual just might be a febrile product of the husband's disordered imagination.
But Eyes Wide Shut robs the orgy of mystery and uncanniness by situating it in a ludicrous Playboy Hellfire club, and by the subsequent revelation of Bill's crass magnate patient (an unexpectedly crude turn by director Sidney Pollock) that the absurd seraglio of masked Bunnies is being maintained by a consortium of his fellow perverse plutocrats. The viewer is thus primed to puzzle out the identity and fate of Bill's lovely rescuer (she may or may not have been murdered), instead of pondering the far more piquant possibility that the orgy never took place at all.
Kubrick's usually accomplished visuals are as cliche-ridden in Eyes Wide Shut as its labored dialogue (e.g., Bill/Cruise's leaden Pinteresque repetitions of questions just asked). Saturated colors, emptied Gotham streets, other worn-out surrealist icons cribbed from DiChirico and Dali lack the eery, oneiric power of the ravaged Viet Nam the director had constructed in an abandoned East London smelting plant for Full Metal Jacket.
Portentous Steadicam tracking, plentiful allusions to old master paintings as well as other films (6) -- all the tricks in Kubrick's bag are summoned up -- but as if by rote, to purvey a peculiar dispirited quality. Pacing is achingly slow, even for this most leisurely of storytellers. Kubrick's distinctive Olympian perspective here engenders little cause for reflection on his ideological aims, and certainly less compassion for the characters. The viewpoint is merely icy, sui generis.
One recurs to the riddle of why Kubrick's illustrious career has ended with such tedious and trivial stuff. Be it duly noted that most important auteurs have delivered the occasional dud. But when a director's output is small, a failure is likely to draw even more fire. Eyes Wide Shut had to bear the added freight of anticipation accruing from Kubrick's long silence, as well as the post-mortem expectation that his last picture show should comprise some sort of magisterial summing up, Kubrick's ave atque vale to cinema posterity.
Artists may venture into a new subject, medium, or style, only to discover that the undiscovered country has become vexed territory. Sheer boredom with the task at hand may afflict its creator; some obscure shard of disavowed psychopathology or past psychic trauma may be shaken loose by novel subject matter; uncustomary aesthetic means/methodology may provoke the artist's anxious or irritated resistance.
Under the best circumstances, struggling on leads to significant breakthrough. However, the artist may deem it the better part of valor not to venture much further into troublesome waters; may finish the work quickly and superficially, or even abandon it altogether. Withdrawing the work from public scrutiny after completion; destroying or disavowing it when destruction isn't possible comprise still other resolutions. The ebb and flow of engagement and disengagement with conflictual material may constitute a recurrent, not always fully appreciated factor in the evolving creative process.
One speculates that, beguiled by Traumnovelle in the abstract, Kubrick found bringing it to the screen problematic for a conflation of reasons beyond his well known perfectionism. To argue out a few possible sources of conflict: it was common for the director to slimly sketch his characters, using them chiefly as metaphors to convey intellectual cargo. With the exception of Lolita, he was not given to deeply interrogate individual psychology or psychopathology. By its very essence, Schnitzler's intricate, Freudian-inflected narrative required exploration of the Hartfords' (notably Bill's) inner life at some depth. Would Kubrick have been more comfortable with his usual cursory gloss of personality?
Until Eyes Wide Shut, intense scrutiny of ordinary spousal and family relationships -- including the burdens of fidelity -- lay well outside Kubrick's interests (The Shining's extravagantly dysfunctional family hardly rates as ordinary). Depiction of a married couple, when it occurred at all, was often informed by the indifferent towards or frankly unfriendly view of the feminine previously alluded to.(7)
Thus, the eponymous anti-hero of Barry Lyndon (l975) is propelled into wandering across the map of Europe by his erstwhile sweetheart's treachery; he later weds a rich widow, a blank non-entity. The marriage of Alex's parents in A Clockwork Orange (l97l) is a hollow travesty of working class conformist values; his mother, who clearly rules the roost, offhandedly replaces Alex with a new, improved model during her real son's imprisonment. Lolita's mother is an engulfing widowed harpy who Humbert Humbert romances in aid of seducing her daughter, and otherwise avoids like the plague until her convenient death.
Wendy, the sympathetic wife of Stephen King's The Shining is rendered curiously loathsome in Kubrick's adaptation by virtue of her gaggingly saccharine demeanor, as well as gross physical distortions the director's unfriendly camera practises upon Shelley's Duvall's idiosyncratic features (it's admittedly moot whether the director is presenting Wendy from his perspective, or one is seeing her through the eyes of her alcoholic, demon-possessed husband.)
In Eyes Wide Shut, the contrast between Albertine's inherently sweet nature and Alice's/Kidman's unattractive coldness is even more striking. I submit that the disparity between Schnitzler's novel and Kubrick/Raphael's screenplay on this score does not stem from the Kidman's quirky portrayal, but from Kubrick's (mis)conception, which significantly taints the redemption that Alice, like Albertine, holds out to Bill after he confesses his nocturnal ramblings.
Kubrick's implicitly darker view of Alice is at striking odds with the positive light in which he clearly wished her to be viewed by the audience. Did a fundamental uneasiness in the filmic text stemming from this split perspective mirror a corresponding uneasiness in the director's psyche, both of which articulated to further vex his efforts?
Kubrick congenially dominated soundstages (and possibly his home) for decades. Was the aging maestro moved to undertake Eyes Wide Shut in the service of resolving his patriarchal propensities -- like Shakespeare's elder wizard in The Tempest and Schnitzler's young doctor -- only to wax ambivalent about mellowing; equivocate about coming down from his pedestal and softening his rule?
Reportedly only Kubrick, Cruise and Kidman were present when the bedroom scenes were shot in a high-tech private sanctum. Did the prolonged nude takes of the star couple represent a heady erotic adventure for the director analogous to Bill Hartford's, one that became laden with conflicted voyeuristic fantasies -- unexplored territory turned taboo?
Whatever the external or internal difficulties involved, a work in progress which has grown disagreeable to its author's personality or purposes may act as a kind of traumatic internalized object. For a creator like Kubrick it can provoke ruminative procrastination: like the red hot iron ball in the ancient Zen aphorism, it can neither be swallowed down or vomited up, as the maker unconsciously resists drawing to the very conclusion he desires.
Kubrick was always the consummate professional to the point of obsession. One submits that for such a meticulous craftsman, finishing a project to fit less than his ideal measure, let alone forsaking it altogether, would constitute a painful admission of defeat, a substantive narcissistic injury -- particularly with weightier and worthier pictures still languishing in preproduction limbo. Regarding the latter, one must wonder if the director took on Eyes Wide Shut as a provisional substitute for the AI movie, then lived -- and died -- at least partly regretting his choice.(8)
While filming Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick appeared to be fatigued but not obviously unhappy, nor did he labor under conscious intimations of mortality as far as can be determined. He may well have been receiving subliminal warnings from an overtaxed, aging body as he forced many extra months of shooting upon himself. But I expect some part of him believed that he would live, if not forever then long enough to complete Artificial Intelligence; or perhaps the biography of Napoleon which for years had intermittently engaged his attention.(9)
I believe that had he subsequently brought forth another picture of symphonic scope, Kubrick would have eventually looked back upon Eyes Wide Shut as an interim chamber piece. Film scholars are still plumbing this profoundly flawed, definitive final cut for riches it simply doesn't possess. Better to treasure the disturbing intellectual force; the lapidary, austere beauty of his abiding legacy.
Ave atque vale, then, to this singular innovator and mordant philosopher/magus of cinema. Stanley Kubrick's staff is broken; his book drowned. We shall not soon see his like again.
REFERENCES
l. Shakespeare, William. "The
Tempest", in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, W.J. Craig, Ed.,
New York: Oxford University Press, l949, p. l9.
2. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Tr. Joan Riviere, London: Hogarth Press/Institute of Psycho-Analysis, l930/l953.
3. Unpublished manuscript, Professor Dennis Bingham.
4. For an account of Artificial
Intelligence's vicissitudes as well as the status of other Kubrick enteprises
prior to Eyes Wide Shut, see Gregory Feeley, "A Masterpiece a Master Couldn't
Get Right, Sunday Arts and Leisure Section, l8 July l999, pp. 9, 22.
In the versions of the
A.I. scenario Kubrick last labored over (he called the project Pinocchio),
David, the mechanical youngster, is reawakened millenia after being thrown
on the scrap heap by the robot race ruling the planet since humanity has
become extinct. The robots use his memories to construct a cyber-replacement
for the apartment where he had lived with his shadowy father and beloved
alcoholic mother. Virtual technology then fails to sustain the mother's
re-creation. Kubrick wanted to end the film with David in her bedroom watching,
heartbroken, as she slowly fades away. (vide infra).
5. "Traumnovelle (Dream Story)", in Eyes WIde Shut: A Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael and The Classic Novel That Inspired the Film: Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler. New York: Warner Books, l999.
6. To cite but two of Eyes Wide Shut's references: Blume In Love (l973) plays soundlessly on the TV during an early sequence in the Hartford's apartment. Directed by Paul Mazursky (whose work Kubrick particularly admired) Blume traces the history of a man who falls in love with his wife after she expels him after catching him in flagrante delicto.
The nocturnal orgy takes place on an estate in Glen Cove, Long Island. In Hitchcock's North by Northwest (l959), Cary Grant is kidnapped to a Glen Cove estate after being mistaken for a spy, from which he barely escapes with his life.
These allusions are clearly relevant to Eyes Wide Shut's narrative, notably the second (indeed, Hitchcockian tropes are threaded throughout the film -- an ordinary man plunged into extraordinary, perilous circumstances, so forth). But they are thin, perfunctory, fail to spur the complex resonances and ironies Kubrick's allusions create elsewhere (e.g., Alex's miming of Gene Kelly's joyous tapdance to romance in Singing In The Rain (l952) as he cavorts through a Sadean orgy of mayhem and rape).
7. I have repeatedly cited the pitfalls of pathobiography. This study only references several instances of the doubtful views on marriage, cursory treatment of women, frank mysogeny expressed in Kubrick's films. No attempt is made to hypothesize about their roots in Kubrick's life history -- ever a dubious enterprise, especially when relevant intimate biographical details are largely lacking.
8. What must be judged as an inadvertent, thus all the more poignant trace of the uncompleted AI movie may be discerned near the end of Eyes Wide Shut, in the bedroom scene where Bill tearfully confesses his adventures to Alice -- the Alice whose abandonment he fears; the Alice who Kubrick has conveted from Schnitzler's gentle, empathic Albertine into a schizoid ice queen. Bill's predicament and Tom Cruise's robot-like impersonation uncannily echo the plight and figure of David, robot hero of Artificial Intelligence, who according to Kubrick's last conception recuperates his cold, rejecting mother -- only to tragically contemplate her loss once more in her bedroom.
9. At this writing, rumors are circulating about the possibility that Steven Spielberg might take on the Artificial Intelligence project. I cannot imagine a more wrongheaded decision than supplanting Kubrick's measured pathos with Spielberg's wretchedly excessive bathos, which has been especially incited by the figures of abandoned children (ET [l99l], so forth).
The author thanks Professor Dennis Bingham and Darryl Wiggers for their assistance with background material for this review.