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Stanley Kubrick at the Fin de Siecle: Eyes Wide Shut and its Intertexts
[continued from last page]

by Bob Mielke
Truman State University

In the conclusion, two major changes occur. Raphael adds a key scene with Ziegler, 128, where he confronts Bill about his quest for finding out the fate of Mandy. Ziegler is not even a character in the book, let alone this major character. Ziegler basically puts a postmodern twist on the whole narrative:

Bill, suppose I told you that...everything that happened to you there, the threats, the girls...warnings, the last minute interventions...suppose I said that all of that was staged, that it was kind of a charade? That it was fake? (156)

This dialogue hearkens back to a spectacular pranks Raphael played on Kubrick by sending him a fake FBI memo about an orgy cult of the power elite that started up after JFK's transgressions called "The Free," a supposed modern-day analogue to Schnitzler's revelers. In the memo, we find that often an admitted intruder at the orgies "was a candidate for membership and the whole occasion something of a `chilling charade'" (148). Kubrick fell for his ruse hook, line and sinker to the extent of worrying if there would be repercussions if the film were made. Raphael's subversive joke makes it into this scene as another hypothesis for the events of the plot. By this reading, as Ziegler says, "Nobody killed anybody. Someone died. It happens all the time. Life goes on. It always does until it doesn't" (Kubrick 159).

The second major change in the ending is the film's substitution of a domestic reconciliation during Christmas shopping -- giving Alice the last word in the film, which is "fuck" -- for the rhetorically overblown conclusion of the original:

As so they both lay there in silence, both dozing now and then, yet dreamlessly close to one another -- until, as every morning at seven, there was a knock upon the bedroom door and, with the usual noises from the street, a triumphant sunbeam coming in between the curtains, and a child's gay laughter from the adjacent room, another day began. (Kubrick 165, 281).

Perhaps the real problem with Schnitzler's conclusion for Kubrick is not its seeming sentiment, but its potential reinforcement that the whole tale was a dream: only now are the characters awake.

If the Schnitzler as an intertext is obvious, Kubrick's visual evocation of Gustav Klimt is far more subtle. Reading Schorske, Kubrick would have found that Klimt shared a virtually identical worldview with Schnitzler, a sense that the precariousness and insufficiency of middle-class existence suffused with a terror of what lay beyond, the dark forces of the id. Klimt had a mid-life crisis, stemming mostly from a commission rejected by the Ministry of Culture and the University of Vienna for three large paintings of Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence. The increasingly critical imagery in the paintings, their profound pessimism as well as their threatening nudes, created a scandal for all concerned. Klimt responded by retreating from the public eye and producing his "golden period" of portraits and allegories (Schorske 267). I believe that these later works--such as "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I," "Danae" and "The Kiss" are recalled in the golden light of the mise-en-scene of Eyes Wide Shut, especially in the dressing room and bedroom scenes (1,3,32+) that opens the film and that match the opening of Schnitzler's novella. As if Kubrick is calibrating his cinematography to "golden period" Klimt. I could leave it at that; but surely Kubrick may have found a resonance between Klimt's woes and his social problems with A Clockwork Orange; his observant eye may have even detected Klimt's fondness for black monolith shapes as a symbol for masculine potency in "Danae" and "The Kiss."

Arnold Schoenberg may be an even more tenuous presence in the film: he is nowhere to be found on the soundtrack! But Schoenberg prominently figures in Schorske as a likeminded compeer of Schnitzler and Klimt. Musicologist David Schiff has noted narrative parallels between Schnitzler's 1926 orgy scene in Traumnovelle and Schoenberg's climactic orgy in Act II, Scene III of his 1930 opera Moses und Aron. Both scenes critique the aesthetic impulse as shifting from a grand design of order to debauchery and chaos. Just as the secret society of the Viennese elite recurs to a quasi-black mass in Schnitzler, Aron (who represents Beauty to Moses' Truth) creates the Golden Calf as a symbol of divine immanence in all things only to watch his people by turns descend from offerings to animal slaughter to human sacrifice, frenzied potlatch, destruction and mass suicide, and an orgy. Schorske even argues that Schoenberg's embrace of the twelve-tone system is a way of concealing the aesthetic, borne out of his mistrust of the Dionysian risk behind the Beautiful symbolized by Aron (360-362). From this standpoint, Kubrick's use of the Jocelyn Pook Ensemble instead of Schoenberg for the orgy scenes, like the substitution of "Fidelio" for "Denmark" or "Cape Cod" may be a red herring - although presumably the libretto of the opera would have proven a distraction on the soundtrack.

Schiff suggests behind all these figures is the dubious Viennese sex theorist Otto Weininger, who came up with a basic active/passive sex dualism in his book Sex and Character which still casts a spell on such odd followers of his beliefs as Camille Paglia. Consider Eyes Wide Shut as a sex odyssey: Bill Harford is Odysseus while Alice offers an ambiguous Penelope at home. Kubrick, despite his updating, basically replicates the fin-de-siecle worldview of Weininger, Schnitzler, Klimt, Schoenberg and (with a little more nuance) Freud. A problematic, if rich legacy for our son of Galicia, to be sure.

No doubt the ultimate intertext in any Kubrick film, however, is other Kubrick. Thomas Allen Nelson has argued that all of Kubrick's films have a three-way tension reminiscent of Herman Melville's play of free will, determinism and chance in chapter XLVII of Moby Dick, "The Mat-Maker." For Nelson, these three are 1) "the existential but dynamic terrors of life experienced in time," often visually configured as a horizontal track (the trenches in Paths of Glory, corridors and hallways throughout all Kubrick) 2) the "attention of aesthetic form," a dream of a rational order, often represented by verticals (the chateau in Paths of Glory)--but also the plans of a Humbert Humbert or a Jack Ripper or a Heywood Floyd and 3) contingency interrupting, sometimes configured as a hand-held pre-steadicam shot as in Dr. Strangelove when the Russian missile destroys the CRM 114 (Nelson 84). In Eyes Wide Shut, these structures recur with the horizontal tracking of the bourgeois couple at the beginning and conclusion and the vertical dream of aesthetic perfection in the central room at the orgy with its balcony mirroring the rational design for controlled sex of this elite group. Similarly, the film is shot through with contingency: Bill's chance encounter with Mandy and Nick Nightingale at Ziegler's party being the most striking example. Eyes Wide Shut also has a driven male character, a prevalent Kubrick trope.

Subdividing the Kubrick canon, it is one of his four "mystery" films; that is to say, a film which leaves certain problems on the level of plot for the viewer to contemplate and/or solve. His first such film was Fear and Desire (1953), his first feature which left audiences wondering about the dopplganger relationship between the universal soldiers and their victims ("It will, probably, mean many things to different people") (LoBrutto 90). The other more well-known predecessors of this kind of Kubrick film are 2001 (filled with secrets, although they are solvable: that Louis XIV bedroom, I think, gives one an exact distance of the aliens from earth based on the distance in light-years they would have to be for that to look like the latest furnishings) and The Shining (are there one or two Jack Torrances? Did he escape into the past?). Eyes Wide Shut has us wondering about exactly who's behind those masks at the orgy, and how Bill's mask ends up on their bed near the end (as in Schnitzler). Are the power elite threatening Bill? Did Alice find the mask? Was she at the orgy? Along with The Shining, it is Kubrick's second domestic mystery film. "It's just the story of one man's family quietly going insane together," Kubrick said of The Shining; it applies almost as well to Eyes Wide Shut (LoBrutto 415).

Frederic Jameson gives us an even more interesting lens to view the film by applying it to his dense essay "Historicism in The Shining." In this essay he argues that Kubrick, like Altman and Polanski, produces "metageneric" works as a way of being an impersonal auteur in a way comparable to modernist art's use of pastiche (e.g., Stravinsky, Joyce, etc.). For Jameson believes that the "triviality of daily life in late capitalism" negates the possibility of high culture except as a ghost. The absurd enterprise of Barry Lyndon as a solipsistic memento of high culture distracts us from the greater absurdity of why any setting in the acidic dissolution of history and geography under late capital? (88,92). The Shining, for all of its false leads of "bad seed" telepathic children and a diabolic house, is (according to Jameson) a ghost story. Jack Torrence is haunted by History as a way out of his status as a failed writer; ironically, his utopian possession takes him back to the twenties, "the last moment in which a genuine American leisure class led an aggressive and ostentatious public existence" (95). I would extend Jameson's analysis by suggesting that Jack is a stand-in for Kubrick, a writer manqué who is always dependent on source texts and a figure out-of-sorts with the zeitgeist who turns to the 1920s as a great, good place. (The major difference being of course that Kubrick had the zeitgeist in the palm of his hand for three films--Dr. Strangelove, 2001 and A Clockwork Orange - before crapping out on Barry Lyndon.) (See Henriksen).

Viewed from this perspective, Eyes Wide Shut is a metageneric porno film, the elegant blue movie Kubrick has long wanted to make against third wife Christine's wishes ("Stanley, if you do this I'll never speak to you again") (LoBrutto 330). Now you know what a Stanley Kubrick porn film would look like--pretty swank...and pretty tame. He may have even felt the hot tickle of the zeitgeist with the Monica and Bill scandal unfolding as he filmed, more trouble for the (first) bourgeois family. If, as Nelson suggests, The Shining is 2001 in reverse gear, the devolution of modern man, then perhaps Eyes Wide Shut is a sequel to The Shining where the whole audience gets to jump into Jack's picture and experience 1920s Vienna thinly veiled as 1990s New York, an escape from contingent time into dream eternity reflected in the very look and rhythm of the film.

Recall that Kubrick once told Stephen King that he thought The Shining, and ghost stories in general, were "optimistic": "the concept of the ghost presupposes life after death. That's a cheerful concept, isn't it?" (LoBrutto 414). Kubrick admitted that he did not believe in hell or damnation. For Kubrick, Jack Torrance was the hero of The Shining and the ending was happy in part. The time travel of Eyes Wide Shut is Kubrick's own fantastic cinematic heaven. Feminism, the return of the repressed for a Bronx kid who grew up with about the same gender attitudes as his contemporary Hugh Hefner, only bubbles up in scene 32, when Alice echoing Albertine cautions "if you men only knew..." (Kubrick 46). Otherwise Kubrick's "shaggy cunt story" (as he described it to Frederic Raphael) (Raphael 109) stays well on the nether side of the vast social changes that global feminism has slowly wrought on our lives. Gorgeous to look at and listen to, its narrative terrors are eclipsed by its heavenly golden sheen. It may well be our director's Baedekker into film heaven: consider the dead body of Lou Nathanson in scene 39, arrayed like the elderly David Bowman, a man who "died peacefully in his sleep," like his recorder did on March 7, 1999. It may not be our notion of heaven, but it could have been Stanley's, who thought Eyes Wide Shut was his best film. So next time you examine an historical photograph of fin-de-siecle Vienna, look closely: there might be a funny looking Bronx kid with a cigar somewhere in it.

Works Cited

Baxter, John. Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1997.

Henriksen, Margot A. Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age. Berkeley: University of California, 1997.

Jameson, Frederic. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Kubrick, Stanley, Frederic Raphael and Arthur Schnitzler. Eyes Wide Shut. New York: Warner Books, 1999.

LoBrutto, Vincent. Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. New York: Da Capo, 1997.

Nelson, Thomas Allen. Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze. Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1982.

Raphael, Frederic. Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick. New York: Ballantine, 1999.

Schiff, David. "Schoenberg and Kubrick: A Cool Eye for the Erotic." E-mail forward from Louis Goldstein. 8/8/99.

Schorske, Carl E. Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Vintage, 1981.

Issue 2, July 2000 | next article


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The Kiss by Gustav Klimt (above) courtesy of Mark Hardsen's Artchive