Another essay on EWS Intertexts
Padraig L Henry
places, particularly this speculation about EWS' sources: "Between
1971 and 1995, another source text appeared that I would submit casts
a long shadow on Eyes Wide Shut: Carl Schorske's magisterial
interdisciplinary study Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture
(1980). This book provides a major point of entry into much that is
going on in Eyes Wide Shut visually and conceptually."
Really? That's quite a claim. If anyone has read or perused this book,
perhaps they could comment further?
Padraig
Stanley Kubrick at the Fin de Siecle: Eyes Wide Shut and its
Intertexts
by Bob Mielke
Truman State University
For St. Stanley (1928-1999), who got me first interested in film as an
aesthetic medium; and my Dad (1908-2000), who swapped me a ticket to
2001 for a trip to Disneyland
Frederic Raphael's recent memoir of Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Open,
does a fair job of misleading its readers about the level of thought
that Kubrick gave his most recent, and last, film. Raphael thought
that Kubrick "has virtually no ideas at all. He's like Diaghilev with
Cocteau; he wants to be surprised by joy" (43). In the
co-screenwriter's opinion, Kubrick wanted to film the Arthur
Schnitzler novella because of its unusual emphasis upon married sex
and because of its "atmosphere of eroticism" which hearkened back to
discussions with Terry Southern about doing an "elegant blue movie"
under studio conditions (43, 117). In Raphael's portrait, Kubrick
seems like an idiot savant passively letting the co-screenwriter
generate text which the director will then remove the flash from.
This record is not a complete distortion of Kubrick's process of
filmmaking, but it is a bit like the visually impaired gentlemen
describing the elephant. For a long time, Kubrick decided to give out
information about his projects on a strictly "need to know" basis. For
Kubrick, written dialogue is one filmic element to be put in balance
with mise-en-scene (sets and acting and lighting), music and
(especially) editing. Inspired by Pudovkin's treatise on Film Acting,
Kubrick realized that one could create a performance in the editing
room.
As he explained to a journalist,
Everything else [in film] comes from something else. Writing, of
course, is writing, acting comes from the theatre, and cinematography
comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see
something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it
creates a new experience. (in Baxter 40).
Kubrick's method of operating thus became a quest for an emergent
vision in the editing room, when all the elements of a film could be
assembled. The price of this method, beginning as early as Spartacus
(when he first had an ample budget for film stock), was endless
exploratory reshooting of scenes--not because actors necessarily
failed to hit certain thespian marks, but because Kubrick wanted to
investigate all the possible variations of a scene. This exhaustive
approach enabled him to walk into the editing room with a copia of
options. What Raphael fails to realize, I think, is that for Kubrick
editing was an intellectual as well as an intuitive process. There are
intertexts that emerge from editing choices as well as from the actual
screenplay. I want to consider the following intertexts in Eyes Wide
Shut, confident that alert cineastes will find many more: fin de
siecle Viennese culture in general; Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Klimt
and Arnold Schoenberg in particular; Kubrick's other films (for his
self-referentiality kept growing by leaps and bounds).
As his biographers reiterate, Stanley Kubrick had an abiding interest
in Viennese culture and Arthur Schnitzler, the author of his
Traumnovelle source text. His great-grandparents came from Galicia, a
region between eastern Poland and the western Ukraine which was part
of Austria at the time they lived there. Viennese culture, in a sort
of personally mythic way, embodied for Kubrick his civilized origins
(Baxter 15). He began reading the novels and plays of Arthur
Schnitzler in the early 1950's, when he was dating his Viennese second
wife Ruth Sobotka, whom he would eventually direct in Killer's Kiss
(1955). He heard of Schnitzler through his admiration of director Max
Ophuls, who pioneered fluid camera movement and long tracking shots
(stylistic obsessions that persist in Kubrick's oeuvre: think of the
opening track of Eyes Wide Shut when the couple go down the corridor
of their apartment). Ophuls adapted Schnitzler's stories in his film
La Ronde (Baxter 60). Kubrick thought of the Austrian writer again
when actor James Mason initially turned down the Humbert Humbert part
in Lolita because of a prior commitment to acting in a musical based
on Schnitzler materials on Broadway, a vocal disaster that sent him
back to Kubrick (Baxter 146).
Stanley continued to have Schnitzler on his mind after 2001: A Space
Odyssey when he was trying to get MGM to finance his aborted Napoleon
project. He told a film critic that Napoleon's "sex life was worthy of
Arthur Schnitzler" (LoBrutto 322). Kubrick expressed such interest in
Schnitzler and Traumnovelle that Warners executives announced to the
press in 1971 that this would be his next film after A Clockwork
Orange (Baxter 260). In that same year, Frederic Raphael published his
novel Who Were You With Last Night?, a stream-of-consciousness tale of
marital infidelity with a very similar feel to the Schnitzler (Baxter
263). As we know, Kubrick got sidetracked by other projects for some
24 years--most likely because of his inability to resolve how to
package the Schnitzler for a modern audience. But in 1995 when he
resolved to find a way to tell the story, Kubrick turned to Raphael as
the most likely collaborator for an update.
Between 1971 and 1995, another source text appeared that I would
submit casts a long shadow on Eyes Wide Shut: Carl Schorske's
magisterial interdisciplinary study Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and
Culture (1980). This book provides a major point of entry into much
that is going on in Eyes Wide Shut visually and conceptually. In
addition to its particular attention to Schnitzler, Klimt and
Schoenberg to be considered below, I think this book is a source text
for the title of Kubrick's film. The last essay in Schorske repeatedly
quotes ocular imagery, an obsession of Kubrick's since 2001.
(Consider, for example, Bowman's blinking eye in the Star gate
sequence, followed by his squinting as an old man in the Louis XIV set
before he has the wide-open gaze of the Star Child at the conclusion
of the film [Nelson 120].) Carl Schorske describes an Oscar Kokoschka
self-portrait as having "tired eyes, wide open" (342); a few pages
later, he quotes Arnold Schoenberg's definition of art as the
production "not of those who avert their eyes to protect themselves
from emotion, but of those who open them wide to tackle what has to be
tackled' (357). Any casual exploration of Kubrick's later life turns
up his use of serendipity in making aesthetic choices: these few
indications may well have suggested a title possibility to be
permutated.
Kubrick would have read Schorske for his background on Arthur
Schnitzler. As Schorske suggests. Schnitzler's central theme in his
writings is what happens when his bourgeois characters receive "a call
to a Dionysian existence, which involves a plunge into the torrent and
is thus also a call to death" (11). If the world of comfort they leave
is "impotent," a Beidermeieresque insulation from instinct and desire,
the new world of passion can be terrifying. Schnitzler can neither
"condone nor condemn" his characters; his works are sad. but not
tragic (14). They seem caught between two worlds: a bankrupt rational
order and a glimpse of modernity that can only manifest as monstrous
eruption trampling upon the old dispensations: in Schnitzler's
Traumnovelle, for example, the orgy scene has an explicitly
ecclesiastical context. The rutting partygoers are dressed as "monks
or nuns" (Kubrick 220). Such monstrous liminality, able to tear down
but not to reassemble, is the very hallmark of the Gothic sensibility.
I shall consider later why, aside from questions of both heritage and
whim, Kubrick might have wanted to film the Schnitzler. First, let's
see what he did with it. Most obviously, he moved the setting to
1990's New York from turn-of-the-century Vienna (although published in
1926, the novella in no way seems post-World War I). Fridolin and
Albertine are Anglicized to Bill and Alice Harford, a last name
Raphael thinks both invokes the "Harrison Fordish goy" he wanted to
convert Schnitzler's main character into and Kubrick's Hertfordshire
home (59). Schnitzler's novella begins with the couple discussing
their flirtations at a party the night before and their mutual sexual
fantasises that occurred on a vacation in Denmark "the previous
summer" (Kubrick 178). In the film, this is scene 32, which begins
with Alice rolling a joint. Kubrick and Raphael added 30 earlier
scenes to show the party (and provide motivation for the "sacrifice"
on behalf of Bill/Fridolin at the orgy with Mandy's overdose scene).
Kubrick's scene 19, the notorious mirror shot of the trailers, is a
complete invention which hearkens back to his lifelong obsession with
the mirror world in such diverse films as Killer's Kiss, Dr.
Strangelove and The Shining. Another perspective on these added scenes
is Kubrick's quip that "it's easier to expand a small thing into a
large one than vice verse" (Baxter 304) -- the difference he had
between adapting Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Sentinel" into
2001 and filming Thackeray.
The middle third of the film is quite faithful to the Schnitzler,
though updated, with a few striking exceptions. The password to the
orgy in Schnitzler is "Denmark," not "Fidelio." Kubrick has several
agenda here. Most likely, he made the change to downplay Raphael's
reading of Schnitzler's whole novella as a dream, as its title
implies. The "Denmark" password explicitly echoes the two Denmark
fantasies of the couple (only the story of Alice's officer survives in
the film). Kubrick fretted to Raphael: "If there's no reality, there's
no movie" (Raphael 39). "Fidelio" removes the surreal linkage between
the password and the couple's fantasies -- if translated into the
film, the password would have to be "Cape Cod," where Alice meets the
naval officer in her narration. "Fidelio" is a wonderful substitute,
since it raises other kinds of ambiguities. Since Beethoven's opera is
about a wife who assumes a disguise to save her husband, this password
evokes a possible reading that suggests Alice attended the orgy and
may even have helped save Bill in some way -- an ambiguity Kubrick is
far more interested in conveying than the prospect that the whole
narrative is a dream. I have already noted how the orgy is more
secularized in the film, and how the woman who sacrifices herself for
Bill has a motive, unlike the Schnitzler character (which seems to
support the Raphael reading of the book as running on dream logic).
Still, overall, the middle third follows Schnitzler closely.
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.
dutch_angle
> places, particularly this speculation about EWS' sources: "Between
> 1971 and 1995, another source text appeared that I would submit casts
> a long shadow on Eyes Wide Shut: Carl Schorske's magisterial
> interdisciplinary study Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture
> (1980). This book provides a major point of entry into much that is
> going on in Eyes Wide Shut visually and conceptually."
>
> Really? That's quite a claim. If anyone has read or perused this book,
> perhaps they could comment further?
Whether Kubrick has read it, I don't know.
I haven't read it.
Kubrick also might have read Hertha Krothkoff's Zur Geheimen
Gesellschaft in Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (German Quarterly
46).
>
> Stanley Kubrick at the Fin de Siecle: Eyes Wide Shut and its
> Intertexts
>
> by Bob Mielke
> Truman State University
>
> For St. Stanley (1928-1999), who got me first interested in film as an
> aesthetic medium; and my Dad (1908-2000), who swapped me a ticket to
> 2001 for a trip to Disneyland
>
> Frederic Raphael's recent memoir of Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Open,
> does a fair job of misleading its readers about the level of thought
> that Kubrick gave his most recent, and last, film. Raphael thought
> that Kubrick "has virtually no ideas at all. He's like Diaghilev with
> Cocteau; he wants to be surprised by joy" (43). In the
> co-screenwriter's opinion, Kubrick wanted to film the Arthur
> Schnitzler novella because of its unusual emphasis upon married sex
> and because of its "atmosphere of eroticism" which hearkened back to
> discussions with Terry Southern about doing an "elegant blue movie"
> under studio conditions (43, 117). In Raphael's portrait, Kubrick
> seems like an idiot savant passively letting the co-screenwriter
> generate text which the director will then remove the flash from.
A little too cheap a reading of Raphael's text, I think.
This could well be a misleading way of explaining Raphael's
intentions, which are not only negative.
(I don't really "like" EWO, but to dismiss it as misleading is bit too
unfair, I would say. Raphael doesn't seem to acknowledge the fact that
Kubrick was deeply delved into Schnitzler's source material, and that
this film should not be as easy as one fair gentleman's agreement, the
stakes were too high for Kubrick, I think, despite Raphael's efforts
as a screenwriter.)
>
> This record is not a complete distortion of Kubrick's process of
> filmmaking, but it is a bit like the visually impaired gentlemen
> describing the elephant. For a long time, Kubrick decided to give out
> information about his projects on a strictly "need to know" basis. For
> Kubrick, written dialogue is one filmic element to be put in balance
> with mise-en-scene (sets and acting and lighting), music and
> (especially) editing. Inspired by Pudovkin's treatise on Film Acting,
> Kubrick realized that one could create a performance in the editing
> room.
>
> As he explained to a journalist,
>
> Everything else [in film] comes from something else. Writing, of
> course, is writing, acting comes from the theatre, and cinematography
> comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see
> something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it
> creates a new experience. (in Baxter 40).
Whether Kubrick "realised" that he could create a performance in the
editing room, I don't know. I have my sincere doubts. I think he
realised/came to knew that he could improve it, or that he could focus
it better, or something like that. Only "to create a performance in
the editing room"; no, there's more to it.
>
> Kubrick's method of operating thus became a quest for an emergent
> vision in the editing room, when all the elements of a film could be
> assembled. The price of this method, beginning as early as Spartacus
> (when he first had an ample budget for film stock), was endless
> exploratory reshooting of scenes--not because actors necessarily
> failed to hit certain thespian marks, but because Kubrick wanted to
> investigate all the possible variations of a scene. This exhaustive
> approach enabled him to walk into the editing room with a copia of
> options.
And all of these options already are, in some ways, "fixed" creations
of "performance", that are merely waiting to get "focussed" into the
directions that Kubrick is after, further discovering it in the
editing room.
> What Raphael fails to realize, I think, is that for Kubrick
> editing was an intellectual as well as an intuitive process.
Why does the author think so?
To me, all phases of filmmaking seem intellectual as well as intuitive
to Kubrick, that's what I think.
> There are
> intertexts that emerge from editing choices as well as from the actual
> screenplay.
And what I think that Kubrick is able to already consider these
intertexts, as well as the options, once he's started the process of
writing the screenplay.
And I can understand why he does not want to share this with Raphael.
Raphael is not hired so that Kubrick can share "everything" with
Raphael. He's hired to contribute to the writing of the screenplay.
How does the author know that Kubrick resolved to find a way to tell
the story in 1995?
>
> Between 1971 and 1995, another source text appeared that I would
> submit casts a long shadow on Eyes Wide Shut: Carl Schorske's
> magisterial interdisciplinary study Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and
> Culture (1980). This book provides a major point of entry into much
> that is going on in Eyes Wide Shut visually and conceptually. In
> addition to its particular attention to Schnitzler, Klimt and
> Schoenberg to be considered below, I think this book is a source text
> for the title of Kubrick's film. The last essay in Schorske repeatedly
> quotes ocular imagery, an obsession of Kubrick's since 2001.
> (Consider, for example, Bowman's blinking eye in the Star gate
> sequence, followed by his squinting as an old man in the Louis XIV set
> before he has the wide-open gaze of the Star Child at the conclusion
> of the film [Nelson 120].) Carl Schorske describes an Oscar Kokoschka
> self-portrait as having "tired eyes, wide open" (342); a few pages
> later, he quotes Arnold Schoenberg's definition of art as the
> production "not of those who avert their eyes to protect themselves
> from emotion, but of those who open them wide to tackle what has to be
> tackled' (357). Any casual exploration of Kubrick's later life turns
> up his use of serendipity in making aesthetic choices: these few
> indications may well have suggested a title possibility to be
> permutated.
Possible, yes.
>
> Kubrick would have read Schorske for his background on Arthur
> Schnitzler. As Schorske suggests. Schnitzler's central theme in his
> writings is what happens when his bourgeois characters receive "a call
> to a Dionysian existence, which involves a plunge into the torrent and
> is thus also a call to death" (11). If the world of comfort they leave
> is "impotent," a Beidermeieresque insulation from instinct and desire,
> the new world of passion can be terrifying.
Sounds Freudian.
> Schnitzler can neither
> "condone nor condemn" his characters; his works are sad. but not
> tragic (14). They seem caught between two worlds: a bankrupt rational
> order and a glimpse of modernity that can only manifest as monstrous
> eruption trampling upon the old dispensations: in Schnitzler's
> Traumnovelle, for example, the orgy scene has an explicitly
> ecclesiastical context. The rutting partygoers are dressed as "monks
> or nuns" (Kubrick 220). Such monstrous liminality, able to tear down
> but not to reassemble, is the very hallmark of the Gothic sensibility.
>
> I shall consider later why, aside from questions of both heritage and
> whim, Kubrick might have wanted to film the Schnitzler. First, let's
> see what he did with it. Most obviously, he moved the setting to
> 1990's New York from turn-of-the-century Vienna (although published in
> 1926, the novella in no way seems post-World War I). Fridolin and
> Albertine are Anglicized to Bill and Alice Harford, a last name
> Raphael thinks both invokes the "Harrison Fordish goy" he wanted to
> convert Schnitzler's main character into and Kubrick's Hertfordshire
> home (59).
Is this "true" or "misleading"?
> Schnitzler's novella begins with the couple discussing
> their flirtations at a party the night before and their mutual sexual
> fantasises that occurred on a vacation in Denmark "the previous
> summer" (Kubrick 178).
It begins with reading out loud a fairy tale, doesn't it?
As Michel Chion noted, like the film's very first shot, the reader of
Traumnovelle is "frustrated", like Fridolin's and Albertine's
daughter, because just before something exciting is about to happen,
Schnitzler cuts off the promise...
I wouldn't call this beginning unimportant, but that's me.
> In the film, this is scene 32, which begins
> with Alice rolling a joint. Kubrick and Raphael added 30 earlier
> scenes to show the party (and provide motivation for the "sacrifice"
> on behalf of Bill/Fridolin at the orgy with Mandy's overdose scene).
To me, that is not the only motivation that these scenes provide...
> Kubrick's scene 19, the notorious mirror shot of the trailers, is a
> complete invention which hearkens back to his lifelong obsession with
> the mirror world in such diverse films as Killer's Kiss, Dr.
> Strangelove and The Shining. Another perspective on these added scenes
> is Kubrick's quip that "it's easier to expand a small thing into a
> large one than vice verse" (Baxter 304) -- the difference he had
> between adapting Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Sentinel" into
> 2001 and filming Thackeray.
How about first delving into Victor Ziegler?
>
> The middle third of the film is quite faithful to the Schnitzler,
> though updated, with a few striking exceptions. The password to the
> orgy in Schnitzler is "Denmark," not "Fidelio." Kubrick has several
> agenda here. Most likely, he made the change to downplay Raphael's
> reading of Schnitzler's whole novella as a dream, as its title
> implies. The "Denmark" password explicitly echoes the two Denmark
> fantasies of the couple (only the story of Alice's officer survives in
> the film). Kubrick fretted to Raphael: "If there's no reality, there's
> no movie" (Raphael 39).
Why keep using Raphael if Raphael is misleading, I wonder? Raphael
writes about many occasions where he and Kubrick discuss dreams,
dreaming and how all of that should be taken into account for the
film.
> "Fidelio" removes the surreal linkage between
> the password and the couple's fantasies -- if translated into the
> film, the password would have to be "Cape Cod," where Alice meets the
> naval officer in her narration.
Then again, Fidelio is the surreal linkage between the password and
the couple's little "adventures" at Ziegler's party, that triggers
their argument. Cape Cod would be too static, I would say. Fidelio is
far more vibrant, far more fluid, far more representative for one's
internal/external "behaviour"...
> "Fidelio" is a wonderful substitute,
> since it raises other kinds of ambiguities. Since Beethoven's opera is
> about a wife who assumes a disguise to save her husband, this password
> evokes a possible reading that suggests Alice attended the orgy and
> may even have helped save Bill in some way -- an ambiguity Kubrick is
> far more interested in conveying than the prospect that the whole
> narrative is a dream. I have already noted how the orgy is more
> secularized in the film, and how the woman who sacrifices herself for
> Bill has a motive, unlike the Schnitzler character (which seems to
> support the Raphael reading of the book as running on dream logic).
> Still, overall, the middle third follows Schnitzler closely.
And the author completely forgets about a very important difference
between Traumnovelle and EWS: in Traumnovelle, Fridolin does not
remove his mask. In EWS, Bill removes his mask. Very, very important,
I think. This is a very specific alternation, chosen by Kubrick.
>
>
> 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)
A little late to come up with Ziegler now, but ala...
>
> 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).
As well as the repeated "But you do know that, don't you?", now
uttered by Ziegler, first by Bill, much earlier in the film, in
Ziegler's bathroom, while looking in Mandy's dopey eyes...
Strange the author uses the word "orgy" without ever wondering what he
is saying...
>
> 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.
Or: is the very important thing that Alice and Bill have to do as soon
as possible "waking up", that is to "fuck"?
>
> 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."
Interesting, time to hunt books again.
>
> 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.
(great opera, btw)
> 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.
Yes, but that is far more obvious than it is in EWS, I would say.
> 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.
Don't think that would have been a typical choice for Kubrick, because
it would have been too obvious.
>
> 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.
Would like to read more on that.
What, according to the author, does Kubrick end up with, more
specifically, by "replicating"?
Familiar stuff...
>
> 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).
Nice references.
>
> 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.
All of this isn't exactly new, but rather familiar stuff, isn't it?
> 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.
The "if you men only knew" vibrates through the whole film, I would
say, and is echoed by Ziegler's "if you knew who these people were".
> 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.
Lou Nathanson is a judge, David Bowman an
astronaut/space-/timetraveler.
The author should take that into consideration as well, I think.
Especially within the context of this essay.
> 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.
LOL!
Interesting essay.
Many more to follow, coming years, I hope.
d.a.
dutch_angle
The Perils of Post-holing:
Arthur Schnitzler versus Hugo von Hofmannsthal in Carl Schorske's
Fin-de-Sičcle Vienna
By Yvonne M. Ivory.
d.a.