Life is full of coincidences; dovetailing incidents suggest a pattern, even a thread of fate. We receive reality as a kind of dream. A man tells his wife about an extramarital thought of his involving a fifteen-year-old girl, a sigh, a possibility, that occurred on their recent stay in Denmark, prompting her to tease him with a reminiscence of her own, that in their youth she accepted his marriage proposal although he failed to utter “the word” that might have swept her off her feet into his bed. The man, a doctor, becomes embroiled later that night in a fantastic mystery, a secret costumed get-together whose password to enter, which he chances upon, is “Denmark.”
Arthur Schnitzler, a Viennese Jew, died in 1931. Five years earlier a modernist, Freudian nightmare, his Traumnovelle, was published. About uncertain, mysterious matter, it is a fragile thing—like a dream; like a marriage; like life itself. The old-world Jewishness of this Dream Story isn’t embroidery; it’s part of the fabric. Selfconscious characters carry an unspecified load on their backs, shrugging their shoulders to release it. This never literally occurs in the novella; it is a constant sense, a delicate pressure on Schnitzler’s symbol-tinkling narrative.
“Hitler was right about almost everything.” Stanley Kubrick, the Jew who uttered this astounding remark (if we are to believe Frederic Raphael), drew his final film, Eyes Wide Shut (marvelous title), from Traumnovelle. He instructed Raphael (Darling, 1965), his co-scenarist, to expunge every trace of Jewishness from the script—a kind of literary replay of Hitler’s “final solution.” But if you love Dream Story (as I do), its Jewishness is inseparable from everything you love about it.
Even otherwise, the script isn’t particularly good. True enough, Raphael and Kubrick have covered their collective backside by stating in the credits that their film is inspired by the novella, not adapted from it. But it’s the spirit of Traumnovelle that’s missing. The two have kept some of the plot details and changed others; but what’s unmistakable is how blunt a film they have made, with every mysterious twist and turn cozily straightened. The action, transplanted to New York City today, causes delightful mysteries to arise which the script keeps pinning down and explaining away. And just as Raphael’s dreadful script for Two for the Road (1967) ended with a crude, clever exchange between marital partners—“Bitch”; “Bastard”—this new script of his ends with the wife taking time out from Christmas shopping to tell her spouse “Fuck” as her personal invitation to give their quavering union a second breath of life. Need I add that this is not how Traumnovelle ends? (The novella ends in the marital bed, with laughter from the couple’s daughter in an adjacent room signaling a new day.)
Kubrick died very shortly before the film’s release, his attention to its (gorgeous) visual detail, his mania for getting everything “just right,” perhaps hastening his conclusion. But what brought him to this non-Dream Story Dream Story in the first place? My guess, as good as yours, detects a complicated career path to it—one full of coincidences, as in a dream.
Two beautiful films by Max Ophüls, Liebelei (1932) and La ronde (1950), are based on Schnitzler plays. (La ronde comes from Reigen—translated into English as Merry-Go-Round.) Schnitzler died between world wars; Ophüls, a German Jew who nevertheless loved the Austrian capital above all other cities before the Second World War, died a breath or two longer than a quarter-century later. (Marcel Ophüls, the documentarian (The Sorrow and the Pity, 1970; Hotel Terminus: Klaus Barbie, His Life and Times, 1988), is his son.) Kubrick was born between the wars, in New York City in 1928. However, he abandoned his birth country in 1961 after Kirk Douglas and Universal mangled his Spartacus (1960), whose direction at Douglas’s behest he had taken over after the producer-star dismissed Kubrick’s predecessor. The former Look photographer relocated in England, thereafter making only British films, none of them good, including the fiercely funny but ridiculously overrated black comedy Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). (Some of Kubrick’s American work of the ’50s had been mildly promising.) Kubrick earned his reputation as a nonconformist and a tyrannical perfectionist. He was also a great admirer of the films of Max Ophüls, whose Lola Montes (1955), ironically Ophüls’s last completed work, seems an especial influence throughout Eyes Wide Shut. Ophüls was temperamentally and intellectually drawn to Schnitzler’s writing; Kubrick saw himself as the Second Coming of Ophüls. Kubrick found material in Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle he knew he could exploit to satisfy his appetite for psychosexual violence. Thus he came to make his “Ophüls film,” Eyes Wide Shut—in his hands, a study of nagging jealousy and marital taunting. Postscript: Kubrick and Schnitzler died at roughly the same age.
Despite the glamorous lead casting of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the film has flopped financially; despite this, many, including Martin Scorsese, consider it a masterpiece. It’s grippingly suspenseful, eerily beautiful—easily the best thing that Kubrick has ever done; but it’s Schnitzler about as much as Kubrick’s dreadful Lolita (1962) is Vladimir Nabokov, despite the fact that Nabokov adapted his own novel, one of the century’s greatest. Kubrick has a way of stomping and stamping everything with his own cold literalism, so much so that his vicious A Clockwork Orange (1971) ends up promoting the kind of unbridled criminal gang violence that Anthony Burgess’s satirical novella prophesies and decries.
One must give an artist his due. Kubrick has helped Cruise and Kidman to sparkle with vulnerability; Cruise has never been better, in fact. (Compare his breakdown here, from an accumulation of stress, guilt and remorse, with the cheesy, ludicrous one he whips up on a dime in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999).) Kubrick’s images resonate, creating an engrossing dream landscape; Larry Smith, the lighting cameraman, has done exceptional work at Kubrick’s instruction. It may be light years divided from Schnitzler’s Dream Story, then, but, taken for what it is rather than what it might have been, Eyes Wide Shut is a haunting and moving film.
Tags: Max Ophüls
