Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut: A Masque in Disguise (Critical Essay‪)‬

When Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut appeared in 1999, it was titillatingly billed as a film about sex and jealousy starring a genuine Hollywood couple, and the element of the film to stir the greatest pre-opening excitement was generally dubbed "the orgy." Once the film opened, some critics hailed it as a masterpiece, but far more called it a catastrophe, and the scene that embarrassed even the film's most positive critics was in fact the "orgy." Yet it was not the fornication vignettes or even (in the American version) their digital revisioning that were most troubling; it was the scene's alarming "staginess," which critics such as Richard Schickel of Time described as "risible." This staginess was seen by harsher critics to plague the entire film--in its mannered dialogue, the artificiality of the New York set, the implausibility of Cruise in his role, the sheer ludicrousness of the plot. (1) Most critics either rationalized or critiqued the film's tone and plot by declaring it, as Philip Hensher does, a "scrupulously faithful adaptation" of Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 Traumnovelle. But Kubrick did not adhere to Schnitzler as closely as most have assumed; the film is just what the credits assert: "inspired by" the novella. Precisely how the film departs shows Eyes Wide Shut to be more mischievous and playful than many at first saw, and hints at another dream-story that may have inspired it as well. The "orgy" itself, in both its faithfulness to and deviations from Schnitzler, provides a clue to the film's larger strategy. First, a look at how Kubrick departs. Both novella and film present a comfortable young couple with a child; the husband, whose point of view we follow, is a doctor; soon after attending a party he and his wife have a discussion that leads to revelations of adulterous fantasy; he then sets out for a series of wanderings, meeting along the way a patient, a prostitute, and an old friend; ultimately he goes (uninvited) to a party, where he becomes involved with a masked woman, who tells him that his presence endangers her and will be discovered; later he learns, or thinks he learns, that she has died. This, roughly, is Schnitzler's plot, and to this Kubrick roughly adheres.