by David Mikics
At the end of Eyes Wide Shut Alice and Bill have awakened—but awakened to what, we wonder. Alice says to Bill, “The important thing is we’re awake now and hopefully for a long time to come.” When Bill asks, “Forever?” she responds, “Forever? . . . Let’s not use that word. But I do love you and you know there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible.” “What’s that?” asks Bill. And now comes her last word: “Fuck.”
Stanley Kubrick had a piece of advice for the people he made movies with when they faced a problem that needed to be solved: “Keep asking the question until you get the answer you want.” In Eyes Wide Shut the answer is “fuck,” the mostly unseen activity that the whole movie gravitates around. This reunited couple, chastened by new knowledge, more acutely conscious of each other, will seal their reconciliation with the simple animal act whose image has caused them so much trouble. They had sex after Ziegler’s party; now they will again after their long night of Odyssean separation. But they are in a new place. Alice has exorcised the mocking laughter that she directed at Bill when she was stoned. To move from the dream of fucking, with all its torments, at least to the reality of it—since the truth of it doesn’t exist—that is something. This is the conclusion of Eyes Wide Shut, and of Kubrick’s work. Alice’s “fuck” is surprising, because Eyes Wide Shut mostly avoids profanity, except for the Ziegler scenes. When Bill asks the prostitute Domino what she “recommends” they do, she replies, “I’d rather not put it into words.” At the movie’s end Alice puts it into words, as she did earlier when she asked whether Bill happened to fuck the two models at the party. Those two lovely girls drifted away, never to reappear, a lost chance like all the others in this movie.
The wannabe adulterer Bill suffers from what Schnitzler calls “the treacherous illusion of the missed opportunity.”28 Alice’s genius at the end is to dispel the illusion and give back to marriage its sense of healing urgency. Married love becomes a chance that the couple needs to take, instead of letting sterile fantasy and dead-end flirtation with others take over the stage.
All the seductive near misses during Bill’s night wandering have been false dramas, climaxing in the words of the mysterious woman at the orgy: “I will redeem him.” This too was playacting, words that, we were told, could never be retracted. Now, in the last minutes of Eyes Wide Shut, we hear instead the suspense that comes with an open future. Alice makes no promises, which is the only convincing way to reassure someone, especially in marriage. Hopefully, she says, the two of them will remain awake, but she doesn’t like the word “forever.” Maybe, just maybe, they will redeem each other. In place of the desperate, clinging fantasy of love at the end of A.I., Kubrick expresses a humane realism about it.
A new intimacy steals into Kubrick’s work just as it ends, with the conclusion of Eyes Wide Shut. “No one in his right mind would mistake Kubrick for a humanist,” the critic David Denby wrote about Full Metal Jacket. But he is one in Eyes Wide Shut, which exorcises Kubrick’s earlier pessimism about the chances of individual humans when they are up against the powers that be. The shadowy forces behind the orgy in Eyes Wide Shut don’t win out, unlike the aliens in 2001, the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, or the regimes of death in Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket. “It was a very good film for an older person to make,” Christiane said about Eyes Wide Shut. “You become softer and more honest with yourself as you grow older. . . . Stanley was much more pessimistic, much more cynical, as a young man.”29
Just as he took his time, twelve years, between Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick took his time, more than ever, with the filming of his last movie. At sixteen months, the shoot was the longest in film history. The movie cost $64 million to make and brought in a healthy $22.7 million on its opening weekend. But the critics were circling, ready to slice away at Kubrick’s final movie, which they mostly labeled stiff, pompous, unerotic, and boring.
Kubrick didn’t live to see the disappointed reaction to Eyes Wide Shut, partly the fault of a teaser publicity campaign suggesting that it would be an intensely sexy movie. The attacks centered on the orgy scene, which critics mostly found antiquated and phony, with its glossy Helmut Newton–style nudes in high heels: they had perhaps expected real orgasms and a leather dungeon. “Whose idea of an orgy is this, the Catholic Church’s?” one reviewer complained. But the orgy was supposed to be grandiose and frigid. Critic Lee Siegel grasped the point when he wrote that with the orgy “Kubrick wanted to show that sex without emotion is ritualistic, contrived, and in thrall to authority and fear”: “Compared with the everyday reality of sex and emotion, our fantasies of gratification are, yes, pompous and solemn in the extreme.” As Naremore points out, the orgy is both “sinister” and “silly,” exactly like a dream, and this is clearly Kubrick’s intention.30
It is not the orgy but Kidman’s final lines that define the movie. What an unexpected finale to a filmic career full of sublime alternate realities: Eyes Wide Shut ends on a quiet note, a nod to the everyday.
On March 1, 1999, an anxious Kubrick ordered the projectionist not to watch Eyes Wide Shut while showing it in an advance screening. Five days later, he was dead. Terry Semel talked to Kubrick twice on the day he died. “He had called me for about an hour apiece, and he was in great spirits . . . review[ing] millions of details on the marketing. He was more outspoken and more excited than I think I had ever heard him.”31
Kubrick had been visibly ill during the filming. Christiane said, “I thought he was awfully tired, and he never slept much—ever—in his whole life.” While he was making Eyes Wide Shut, she added, Kubrick “was sleeping less and less. He was also a doctor’s son and he wouldn’t see a doctor. He gave himself his own medicine if he wasn’t feeling well or he would phone friends. . . . It was the one thing he did that I thought was really stupid.” “He would be holding on to the wall he was so exhausted,” remembered Steadicam operator Peter Cavaciuti.32
By this time the seventy-year-old Kubrick had an oxygen tank in his bedroom; he knew he was dreadfully ill. His perfectionism, his endless focus on details had taken on a compulsive quality during the filming. Kubrick did take after take of seemingly insignificant sequences like Cruise ringing a doorbell, as if he were looking for clues within the surface of ordinary existence, unable, like the trapped Bill Harford, to break through into meaningful action.33
During the last four weeks of filming Kubrick had to operate the camera himself, since his cinematographer, Larry Smith, had left. Kubrick was getting up early to prepare for shooting, and the day’s work didn’t end until three or four in the morning. “It killed him, really, making that movie,” said Sandy Lieberson, Keir Dullea’s agent and a friend of Kubrick’s.34
Leon Vitali remembers driving back with Kubrick to his house after a day’s filming. “I thought, you’re not even going to find your way to the front door, and we’re right in front of it. . . . The last Saturday afternoon I was standing leaning up against my car and we were talking for two and a half hours. Everything was natural and gentle and more relaxed than it had been for quite a while, that same kind of gentleness as when I first met him.”35
Stanley Kubrick was buried on the grounds of Childwickbury, under a favorite tree. At the funeral Julian Senior said Kaddish, and Cruise, Kidman, Spielberg, Jan Harlan, and Terry Semel spoke about their memories of Kubrick. He went into the grave wearing one of the military jackets he loved, full of pockets for notebooks and pens.36
Kubrick’s range as a filmmaker is not often acknowledged. If Spielberg with his boyish tinkerers and Tarantino with his testosterone-driven maniacs occupy two ends of the American movie spectrum, Kubrick dealt with both extremes, and he brought in as well the gorgeous alienated vistas characteristic of the European art film.
Movies take you over, notoriously, and Kubrick’s are among the most possessive and all-absorbing in the canon. Kubrick’s characters in their moments of rapture mirror the moviegoer’s absorption, sometimes in sinister fa
shion: Alex listening to Beethoven; Private Pyle with his rifle; slack-jawed, haunted Jack Torrance; Dave Bowman thrust through the Stargate; Bill Harford mesmerized by his wife’s fantasy. These solitary transports stem originally from the inner life of the child Stanley Kubrick, so eerily secure in his own head that he rejected school as early as the first grade.
The child Stanley has a future in Kubrick’s work, whether deciphering the frightening clues of an adult world like Danny in The Shining or, now halfway grown-up, deciding what to do when faced with someone asking for death, like Joker gazing at the sniper in Full Metal Jacket. Eyes Wide Shut reverses the emphasis of Kubrick’s Vietnam film, and it ends not with death but with life. In both movies, a woman shakes a male protagonist out of his transfixed state. Only in Eyes Wide Shut, though, does the woman point to a worthwhile future. This is Kubrick’s tribute to his wife, Christiane, who played a cathartic role in Paths of Glory decades earlier. Christiane stands behind Alice Harford’s power to bring her spouse back from his obsessive, self-enclosed fantasy. Kubrick barely had time, at the end of his life, to complete this testament to the potential for a fuller relationship between a man and a woman, one built on conversation and self-questioning. His earlier movies had ignored that potential, and this was the missing piece of the puzzle. Kubrick answered the nightmare trap of the wrong marriage—Jack and Wendy Torrance, Barry and Lady Lyndon—with an appeal to the right one, just as his own marriage to Christiane superseded his previous one to Ruth Sobotka. Days later, he was dead, but he had given his audience the solution to his most personal dilemma.
Kubrick’s appeal has outlasted his death, even extending to pop music of the 2010s. Frank Ocean recently sampled Eyes Wide Shut’s Nicole Kidman on “Love Crimes,” and rapper J. Cole name-checked “that nigga Stanley Kubrick.”37
Mostly, of course, Kubrick has left his mark on film. Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) follows after 2001, and carefully composed epics from Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (2011) to Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) also emulate Kubrick, reminding us that there is no limit to what cinema can accomplish, if you approach it with a chess grandmaster’s intuition and skill, and a sense of the screen as a vast canvas, with every detail fully in the director’s hands.
Stanley Kubrick asserted total control over his vision, demanding take after take and looking into every last detail. But he also had a sense of how to use chaos, and he clearly enjoyed the bumper car ride that is filmmaking. In his work Kubrick brought together order and madness, mastery and wild defiance, fulfilling a key dream of cinema, to show human energy at its most dangerous and exciting while also presenting a supremely organized world. And so he changed what movies look like.
NOTES
Introduction
1. Kirk Douglas, The Ragman’s Son (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 186.
2. James Naremore, On Kubrick (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 40.
3. Robert Emmet Ginna interview with SK, University of the Arts, London, Stanley Kubrick Archive (hereinafter SKA), SK/1/2/8/2.
4. Dalia Karpel, “The Real Stanley Kubrick,” Haaretz, November 3, 2005, https://www.haaretz.com/1.4880226.
5. Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, dir. Jan Harlan (2001).
6. Mary Panzer, “Stanley Kubrick: Eyes Wide Open,” Vanity Fair, January 22, 2007, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2005/03/kubrick200503 (Marcus quotation); Michael Herr, Kubrick (New York: Grove, 2000), 53.
7. Vicente Molina Foix interview with SK, Cinephilia and Beyond, 1980, https://cinephiliabeyond.org/interview-stanley-kubrick-vicente-molina-foix/.
8. Pauline Kael, “Stanley Strangelove” (review of A Clockwork Orange), New Yorker, January 1, 1972, https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2016/09/18/a-clockwork-orange-pauline-kael/; Alex Ross, “Stanley Kubrick: Take One, Take Two,” Slate, March 8, 1999, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1999/03/stanley-kubrick-take-1-take-2.html; Robert Kolker, The Extraordinary Image (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 141, 205.
9. Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (first Herr quote); Dan Richter, Moonwatcher’s Memoir (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2002), 136; “For Him, Everything Was Possible,” Ken Adam interview with SK, Kinematograph 20 (2004): 94; Terry Southern, “Strangelove Outtake: Notes from the War Room,” Grand Street 49 (Summer 1994): 69; Herr, Kubrick, 54; Filmworker, dir. Tony Zierra (2017) (Leone quote); Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick (New York: DaCapo, 1999), 348 (McDowell quote); Douglas, Ragman’s Son, 333.
10. Jay Cocks, “Stanley Kubrick,” in The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, ed. Stephanie Schwam (New York: Random House, 2000), 3; Filmworker (Vitali quote).
11. Michael Benson, Space Odyssey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 176 (Unsworth quote); Peter Bogdanovich, “What They Say about Stanley Kubrick,” New York Times Magazine, July 4, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/04/magazine/what-they-say-about-stanley-kubrick.html (Howard quote).
12. Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick (1997; New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 402.
13. Nathan Abrams, Stanley Kubrick (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 13, 59; Karpel, “The Real Stanley Kubrick” (Christiane Kubrick quote).
14. Naremore, On Kubrick, 23–24.
Chapter 1. I Know I Can Make a Film Better Than That
1. Jeremy Bernstein interview with SK, 1965, https://www.indiewire.com/2013/12/listen-rare-76-minute-interview-with-stanley-kubrick-about-his-start-in-films-nuclear-war-chess-strategies-248700/ (first quote); “Kubrick on The Shining: An Interview with Michel Ciment” (1980), http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/interview.ts.html?LMCL=gCIFLU.
2. Mary Panzer, “Stanley Kubrick: Eyes Wide Open,” Vanity Fair, January 22, 2007, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2005/03/kubrick200503.
3. Peter Bogdanovich, “What They Say about Stanley Kubrick,” New York Times Magazine, July 4, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/04/magazine/what-they-say-about-stanley-kubrick.html.
4. Nathan Abrams, Stanley Kubrick (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 7.
5. Robert Emmet Ginna interview with SK, University of the Arts, London, Stanley Kubrick Archive (hereinafter SKA), SK/1/2/8/2.
6. Bogdanovich, “What They Say.”
7. Bogdanovich, “What They Say.”
8. Bernstein interview.
9. Abrams, Stanley Kubrick, 35.
10. Bernstein interview.
11. Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick (New York: DaCapo, 1999), 94.
12. David Vaughan in Walter Sobotka, ed., The Book of Ruth (New York, 1968), 78 (chess); Bogdanovich, “What They Say” (early quote).
13. Gene Phillips, “Killer’s Kiss,” in The Stanley Kubrick Archives, ed. Alison Castle (New York: Taschen, 2004), 282 (first two quotes); Ginna interview (third quote).
14. Sobotka, Book of Ruth, 52.
15. Cited in Dalya Alberge, “Newly Found Stanley Kubrick Script Ideas Focus on Marital Strife,” Guardian, July 12, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jul/12/newly-found-stanley-kubrick-script-ideas-focus-marital-strife.
16. Brown Wallet E, SKA, SK shelf 11.
17. Brown Wallet E, SKA, SK shelf 11.
18. Romain LeVern interview with James B. Harris, Chaos, 2018 (my translation), http://www.chaosreign.fr/james-b-harris-eyes-wide-shut-est-le-moins-bon-film-de-stanley-kubrick/.
19. Bogdanovich, “What They Say.”
20. Robert Polito, Savage Art (New York: Knopf, 1995), 394.
21. LeVern interview with James B. Harris (first quote); Samuel B. Prime interview with James B. Harris, Notebook, November 13, 2017 https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-other-side-of-the-booth-a-profile-of-james-b-harris-in-present-day-los-angeles (second quote).
22. Interview with Sterling Hayden, 1984, The Killing Blu-ray.
23. Hayden interview.
Chapter 2. Keep Doing It Until It Is Right
1. John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1997), 86.
2. Baxter, Stanley Kubrick, 86.
3. Romain
LeVern interview with James B. Harris, Chaos, 2018 (my translation), http://www.chaosreign.fr/james-b-harris-eyes-wide-shut-est-le-moins-bon-film-de-stanley-kubrick/.
4. Author interview with Nathan Abrams, July 16, 2018.
5. Author interview with Jan Harlan, July 6, 2018 (Chess Story).
6. Gary Giddins, Paths of Glory Blu-ray commentary.
7. Baxter, Stanley Kubrick, 93.
8. Giddins, Paths of Glory commentary.
9. Alexander Walker, Sybil Taylor, and Ulrich Ruchti, Stanley Kubrick, Director (New York: Norton, 1971), 14 (first quote); Raymond Haine interview with SK, 1957, in The Stanley Kubrick Archives, ed. Alison Castle (New York: Taschen, 2004), 309 (second quote).
10. Giddins, Paths of Glory commentary.
11. Gene Phillips, “Paths of Glory,” in The Stanley Kubrick Archives, 300.
12. Interview with James B. Harris, Aero Theater, Santa Monica, September 28, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAQbxkv6vVs.
13. Author interview with Christiane Kubrick, July 8, 2018.
14. Jon Ronson, “After Stanley Kubrick,” Guardian, August 18, 2010.
15. Valerie Jenkins interview with Christiane Kubrick, Evening Standard, September 10, 1972.
16. Author interview with Christiane Kubrick.
17. Author interview with Christiane Kubrick.
18. Author interview with Christiane Kubrick (first and third quotes); Geoffrey Cocks, The Wolf at the Door (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 26 (second quote).
19. Michael Herr, Kubrick (New York: Grove, 2000), 48.
20. Calder Willingham letter to SK, December 14, 1959, University of the Arts, London, Stanley Kubrick Archive (hereinafter SKA), SK/10/8/4.
21. Robert Emmet Ginna interview with SK, SKA, SK/1/2/8/2.
22. Baxter, Stanley Kubrick, 129.
23. Ginna interview.
24. Danielle Heymann interview with SK, published in Le Monde, October 17, 1987, here quoted from SKA, SK/1/2/8/5.
