Don't Look Now Kubrick, Schnitzler, and The Unbearable Agony of Desire

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Don't look now: Kubrick,

schnitzler, and "The
unbearable agony of desire"
a
Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz
a
Assistant professor of Film Studies , University of
Colorado , Boulder
Published online: 18 Oct 2010.
To cite this article: Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz (2002) Don't look now: Kubrick,
schnitzler, and "The unbearable agony of desire", Lit: Literature Interpretation
Theory, 13:2, 117-137, DOI: 10.1080/10436920212486
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DOI: 10.1080/10436920290095686
DON’T LOOK NOW: KUBRICK, SCHNITZLER, AND ‘‘THE

UNBEARABLE AGONY OF DESIRE’’
Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz
Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz is an assistant professor of Film Studies at

the University of Colorado at Boulder. His book Buñuel and Mexico: The
Crisis of National Cinema will be published by the University of
California Press.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, a cinematic adaptation of

Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Dream Story (Traumnovelle 1926), was by
most accounts a critical and commercial disappointment. Taking into
account the enormous star power of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in
the leading roles, the film’s short run, comparatively modest box-office
returns, and lukewarm reviews made it perhaps a sad swan song for
the celebrated director. Kubrick’s films were often the target of less
than stellar reviews in their initial runs, but were later rereviewed
and rescued by critics and cult audiences alike. Eyes Wide Shut was
surrounded by a shroud of mystery while in production, then, para-
doxically, much hyped and advertised as a titillating sexy thriller after
Kubrick’s death in March 1999, in anticipation of the film’s opening in
July of that year.
Eyes Wide Shut, like other Kubrick films before it, was perhaps
somewhat ahead of its time, as were arguably 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), and Full
Metal Jacket (1987). These are films in which Kubrick openly experi-
mented with time, narrative structure, subjectivity, and identification.
He gave us an unusually slow science fiction film with a four-act nar-
rative structure, a cinematic spectator traumatized by the images of
violence on the screen, a gallery-tour without a dramatic climax, and a
war story distressfully divided between conditioning and subjectivity. In
spite of some initial reception difficulties, including government inter-
vention upon the release of A Clockwork Orange in England, these films
have eventually been acknowledged as original, stylish, and certainly
provocative, some achieving the title of classics (Walker 234 36).
Many of Stanley Kubrick’s films are based upon published novels or
stories. The literary sources range from the classical (William
117
118 E. R. Acevedo-Muñoz
Makepeace Thackeray’s The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., 1844) to

the stylish (Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, 1955), from the modern
(Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, 1962) to the unusual (Gus-
tav Hasford’s The Short Timers, 1979), and even the conventional
(Stephen King’s The Shining, 1977). Yet, Kubrick’s adaptations are
never quite conventional. The resulting films, even when based on
such famed works as Lolita and A Clockwork Orange, or enormously
popular fare like The Shining, always stand on their own and distin-
guish themselves from their original sources. The distinctions are in

part due to Kubrick’s profound sense of such cinematic qualities as
visual style, time, space, and editing.
Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, his adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s
1926 novella Dream Story, is really no different. In his last film,
Kubrick adopts the story and adapts it (with Frederic Raphael) to a
precisely cinematic version, revising the themes of the text while at
the same time experimenting and commenting on the cinema’s fan-
tastic function. This essay explores the ways in which Kubrick’s
adaptation of Schnitzler’s tale emphasizes two particular qualities of
the book that are inherently cinematic: the ‘‘visualization’’ of a sexual
fantasy or obsession and the conditions of the protagonist’s relation-
ship to the text in terms of narrative agency and spectatorship.
Kubrick’s films were often analytical of specific cinematic qualities,
such as time and narrative structure in 2001, the depiction of violence
in Clockwork, and the expressive and plastic functions of mise-en-
scène in Barry Lyndon. In Eyes Wide Shut, I argue, Kubrick exploits
Schnitzler’s novella in its surrealist qualities, exploring the relation-
ship between fantasy, visual stimulation, spectatorship, and sexual
desire.
The Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler (1862 1931) wrote his
novella Traumnovelle (also known as Dream Story, and as Rapture: A
Dream Story, in different English-language editions) in 1926, during
the period in his career when he was interested in both psychoanalysis
and surrealism (Schnitzler 1). Being a Viennese physician, it is no
surprise that Schnitzler was attracted to psychoanalysis around 1900,
and that his works owe much to the ‘‘psychoanalytical method.’’ Freud
himself is said to have praised Schnitzler’s works, acknowledging the
latter’s ‘‘penetrating insights into the behavior of the human psyche’’
(Swales 118; 119 20). Schnitzler scholars agree that his works allude
to psychoanalysis in their textual exploration of moral questions
(underscoring the conflicts between desire, duty, and repression) and
their formal basis in the use of interior monologues, dubbing as lit-
erary renditions of the ‘‘talking cure’’ (Swales 118; Liptzin 168 70).
Dream Story is particularly useful in making this connection because
Don’t Look Now: Kubrick, Schnitzler, and the Unbearable Agony of Desire 119
it is structured around the main character’s confusion between real

and imaginary experiences depicted in his own internal monologues.
This also exemplifies the surrealist quality of the tale because of the
surrealist’s interest in dreams as unconscious visual representatives of
desire.
The relationship between surrealist art and psychoanalysis is
rather direct, since the origins of surrealism lie in the attempt to
understand and artistically represent unconscious states of mind and
the relationship between dreams, fears, and desires (Williams 12 17).

Desire lies at the heart of both surrealism ad psychoanalysis. The
latter aims to decipher our true desires and how they are manifested
in dreams, slips of the tongue, and other memory and linguistic
expressions; the former attempts to understand the structural logic of
such manifestations. Both Dream Story and Eyes Wide Shut are con-
cerned with a man’s attempt to understand desire. The twist lies in
that this protagonist’s search is not for the essence of his own desires,
but those of his wife. Thus, the main character (named Fridolin in the
book, Bill in the film) is doomed to fail from the start because he is
seeking answers to a question he is not equipped even to ask.
Schnitzler guides his character through the (unsuccessful) pursuit of
erotic pleasures with women other than his wife, Albertina, only to
realize at the end that she is all he really desires. Kubrick, in an
appropriately cinematic rendition of the same theme, shows Bill
stubbornly attempting to recreate the mystery of his wife Alice’s desire
for another man. Bill’s complete misunderstanding of Alice’s desire,
I argue, renders an analogy of the cinematic representation of female
desire as seen by men, and by extension, by the cinema itself. In other
words, what Kubrick achieves in Eyes Wide Shut is an analysis and
critique of the cinema’s incapacity as a patriarchal institution not only
to understand but also to represent female desire.
Kubrick and Raphael’s screenplay, according to the film’s credits, is
only ‘‘insprired by’’ Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, but that claim is
deceptive. Eyes Wide Shut is in content and structure a rather faithful
version of the story, with only the prologue and epilogue sequences
fully invented by the screenwriters. The most notable variation from
the source is the transferring of the location and setting from Vienna
in the 1920s to New York City in the early 1990s. The rest of the story,
episode by episode, place by place, and even down to the verbatim
transcription of entire dialogues, is faithful to Dream Story. But, while
Schnitzler places the emphasis on Fridolin’s incapacity to experience
in reality the sexual pleasure that his wife imagines (and for which he
wants to punish her), Kubrick underscores Bill’s misunderstanding of
that desire with the addition of the husband’s visualization of the
wife’s (imagined) sexual encounter. What is most interesting is that

visual rendition of Alice’s infidelity, the representation of what are
really the most erotically charged scenes in the film, is never based on
or seen through her own subjectivity.
Both Dream Story and Eyes Wide Shut tell the story of a man who,
insulted by his wife’s confession of an imagined infidelity, goes through
a series of increasingly bizarre erotic encounters that tempt him to
violate his own moral code and to be unfaithful to her in revenge. Yet
the potentially sexual situations that never materialize become

entangled with his imagination and possibly his dreams. In both
versions the couple exchange stories of sexual temptations that have
transpired at a party they attended together. Schnitzler comments on
how both Fridolin and Albertina ‘‘exaggerated the degree of attraction
of their unknown partners’’ (6 7), each purposely trying to provoke
their spouse’s jealousy and anger in a sort of fidelity test. They also
each tell stories of desire involving strangers from the previous year’s
summer vacation. Both confessions are equally chaste in their
respective outcomes, but while Fridolin is enraged by his wife’s tale of
desire and resolves to take revenge by actually being unfaithful,
Albertina is clearly more emotionally devastated because of Fridolin’s
vast and real sexual history before meeting her. She, by contrast,
married as a virgin, and has only been unfaithful in her imagination.
Fridolin’s arrogant confidence in his wife’s eternal fidelity triggers
what is probably the most important line of dialogue in the novella and
the film when, insulted by her husband’s presumptions about her
virtue, Albertina exclaims: ‘‘If you men only knew’’ (Schnitzler 15;
italics in the original). Not only does this serve as the narrative excuse
for what constitutes Fridolin’s ‘‘search’’ (a typical plot structure), but it
establishes the key point of the narrative: that men do not know, and
do not understand, female desire.
In the novella, Albertina recounts her story of briefly seeing and
desperately desiring a man, a young naval officer she had seen at
their beach resort the previous summer. Although she only saw him
for a moment, Albertina confesses that is all it took for her to
experience the most intense of sexual desires: ‘‘Our eyes met [ . . .]
had he called me I could not have resisted. I thought I was ready for
anything. I had practically resolved to give you up, the child, my
future . . .’’ (Schnitzler 8 9). Fridolin’s real sexual experiences are
apparently never as intense in spite of their reality. But Albertina’s
‘‘infidelity’’ turns out to be more real precisely because it is pure,
unfulfilled desire. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905), Freud describes the human fixation with pleasure as being
partly governed by the build-up of tension that follows the initial
stimulation of visual contact. The distance that necessarily exists

between a person and his=her object of desire characterizes our
initial responses to visual stimuli (Freud, On Sexuality 129 30).
Desire is, according to Freud, initially a visual activity (it begins
upon seeing ‘‘the object’’) which then may or may not lead to the
actual pursuit of pleasure. But the conditions of distance and visual
and other sensorial stimuli are inevitable if there is to be desire
itself. Because desire is temporarily interrupted by the consumma-
tion of pleasure (when one indeed possesses the object), the purest
state of desire is that in which the object is never possessed, and it is
by definition insatiable as long as it remains unfulfilled. These are
both Fridolin’s and Albertina’s situations. But while Fridolin stub-
bornly tries to fulfill his sexual wants, thus experiencing only, in
Schnitzler’s words, the ‘‘unbearable agony of desire,’’ Albertina is
satisfied, in another surrealist theme, by desire itself (76). The theme
of desire and its pleasures is, of course, a classic topic in surrealist
literature and film. Like Schnitzler’s novella, Luis Bu~ nuel’s early
films Un chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or (1930) are structured
around the narrative principles of dreams and explore precisely the
pleasures and agony of desire.
Fridolin flirts with sexual temptations unsuccessfully, trying to
elaborate desire through means that are not logical or natural. He is
‘‘goal oriented,’’ so to speak, and he repeatedly suggests through the
novel that he will not be satisfied until he has in fact had relations
with another woman (Schnitzler 34 35; 58; 64; 79, etc.). Interestingly,
Fridolin’s real sexual pursuits are constantly interrupted by his own
imagination. Seemingly incapable of achieving success physically,
Fridolin seems to yield to his imagination as part of the agony of
desire. In what is formally one of Schnitzler’s most interesting
experiments in this novella, the third person omniscient narration is
regularly intersected by Fridolin’s internal monologues. In these
narrative detours, Schnitzler allows his character to inject into the
flowing narrative sharply subjective sexual scenarios (imagined by
Fridolin), as well as the character’s viciously judgmental musing about
the people he meets on the street or talks to or with whom he comes in
contact. This may be formally the most direct debt of this novella to
surrealist literature because it allows for access to the character’s
thoughts and gives him an outlet for his own prejudices, in a way
letting us ‘‘see’’ inside his mind. The result itself is a commentary on
subjectivity because we can see what he is thinking, and we are wit-
nesses to the evolution of the character’s state of mind.
Throughout Fridolin’s seemingly incessant search through the city,
he faces temptation many times, all of which are faithfully recreated
in Kubrick’s film. First, a friend confesses love for him. Later, he runs
into a young and beautiful (but fatally sick) prostitute. A costume
salesman offers to sell him his little daughter, and finally, at the
mysterious orgy, a woman refuses to have sex with him and, in the
process, saves his life. Throughout his adventures, however, what
emerges from Schnitzler’s novella is that Fridolin is inevitably faith-
ful. He elaborates sexual fantasies that never materialize because, as
it emerges at the end, all he really wants is Albertina. He is forced to
experience ‘‘the unbearable agony of desire’’ from the margins. At the

orgy, he is only allowed to observe, which causes him pain. As he puts
it in the book, ‘‘the delight of beholding was changed to an almost
unbearable agony of desire’’ (Schnitzler 75 76). And when Fridolin
witnesses the costume shop owner’s prostitution of his own daughter
to a couple of foreigners, he exclaims, ‘‘I took part in it, or was at least
a spectator,’’ because he cannot separate, or cannot understand the
limits between fantasy, reality, and desire (Schnitzler 119). There are
other references in Dream Story to the act of seeing and its ties with
sexual desire. These are reminiscent of contemporary treatments of
the same topics that are even more directly associated with the sur-
realists, like George Bataille’s The Story of the Eye (1928) and of course
Luis Bu~ nuel’s films Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or (1930).
The relevance of Schnitzler’s rhetorical treatment of these events
for this specific analysis is that Kubrick elaborates on the problem of
desire, putting the emphasis on the figuration of desire in the cinema.
As I have suggested above, in Eyes Wide Shut the ‘‘agony of desire’’ lies
in the man’s misunderstanding of female desire, translated into a clear
misrepresentation of that desire based on its own cinematic conven-
tions. While in the novel the main protagonist’s test consists of his
failure to distinguish between dreams, fantasy, and desire, in Eyes
Wide Shut Bill Harford’s predicament is presented through his
inability to see Alice as either a desirable or a desiring subject (thus
the film’s symbolic title). Paradoxically, Bill’s failure to see Alice
properly in the terms of her own subjectivity leads him to imagining or
fantasizing about her sexuality. Seemingly, the only way he has of
understanding (or rather, misunderstanding) the mystery of female
desire is through his pursuit and mental staging of a visual repre-
sentation.
In Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick both challenges and criticizes the
representation of women and their sexual subjectivity with multiple
references to mise-en-scène (and the role of women’s bodies in it) and
direct scrutiny of the woman’s gaze. Exactly as in Dream Story, where
Fridolin can see the women’s bodies but is incapable of deciphering
‘‘forever a mystery [ . . .] the enigma of their large eyes’’ (75), Eyes Wide
Shut opens with an enigmatic glance at a woman’s naked body, which

is quickly negated by the black title screen. The image appears with-
out a clear narrative function or place, with the sole apparent purpose
of fulfilling voyeuristic desire, somewhat unsettling because of the
aggressiveness of the woman’s gesture. The film follows a similar
theme throughout; Alice ready and clear, pure about her desire, Bill
unable to see it, his eyes wide shut. Alice’s eyes are, in contrast,
usually open, her gaze never lost, which is further emphasized in the
film by the multiple images of Alice looking at her reflection in mirrors

and removing and replacing her eyeglasses. In our first view of the
couple, in a characteristically Kubrickian long, mobile shot, Bill fixes
his tie in the bedroom, and walks to the bathroom. The camera follows
to show Alice standing up from the toilet, looking at her reflection in
the mirror and taking off her eyeglasses. She asks Bill, ‘‘How do I
look?’’ Without looking at her he replies, ‘‘You look stunning.’’
At the lavish Christmas party they attend, one of the three
sequences that Kubrick and Raphael do not take directly from
Schnitzler, Bill and Alice play parallel seduction games with stran-
gers. Bill’s flirting seems childish, as two young women offer to show
him ‘‘where the rainbow ends’’ (itself a reference to an optical illusion),
but he is removed from the situation, summoned by the host, Victor
Ziegler. Alice, however, at once flirts and keeps the handsome, exotic
stranger (played by Sky Dumont) away, her gestures and manner
seductive, but her eyes always inquisitive and aggressive. While Alice
is in her dance of seduction with the handsome stranger who is
actively pursuing her, Bill attends to Ziegler’s needs. The scene is
important because it establishes a striking contrast between Alice’s
active gaze and aggressive sexual position (as suggested by the
opening shot of her removing her dress) and the image of women’s
desirability as seen by the male protagonist. The host Victor Ziegler is
a secondary character but is meaningfully invented by the screen-
writers and played by film director Sydney Pollack (Tootsie 1982).
Ziegler calls Bill, a physician, to attend to one of his mistresses, Mandy
(Julienne Davis), who has overdosed in Ziegler’s bathroom, pre-
sumably during sexual activity. The young, beautiful woman lies
totally nude, inarticulate, almost unconscious, on a big armchair. As
she lies on the sofa-like armchair, sexualized yet immobile, she is the
precise image of female desirability in the cinema, her function solely
‘‘to be looked at’’ (Mulvey 19). The image is so self-reflexive that not
only is a movie director himself, Pollack, the creator of this situation,
but there is a painting on the wall suspiciously imitating the film’s
mise-en-scène. Framed on the wall, the painting depicts a naked
woman, seemingly asleep, lying down in a similar position. Kubrick’s
camera slowly pans across the painting before revealing Mandy in the
same pose. The repetitive, self-reflexive mise-en-scène demands a
connection between the ‘‘real’’ woman of the film and her framed
counterpart in the painting: nakedness, passivity, immobility, repre-
sentation, silence, and blindness. Bill gently asks Mandy, ‘‘can you
open your eyes for me?’’ but she appropriately does not respond. Seven
times Bill commands her to open her eyes, and tells her, ‘‘look at me,
look at me.’’ When Mandy finally responds, she is apologetic as Bill
reprimands her like a little girl: ‘‘You’re a very lucky girl, you know
that,’’ he says. Juxtaposed to Mandy’s rescue by Bill and her
mechanical assent (all she says is ‘‘yes’’) is the parallel scene of Alice
sharply dealing, like a star matador, with the Hungarian would-be
seducer. Alice, with her gaze fixed in his eyes, swiftly answers ‘‘no,’’ ‘‘I
can’t,’’ and ‘‘I don’t want to’’ to every sexual insinuation.
The scene of Ziegler, Mandy, and Bill in the bathroom, with its
strangely self-reflexive quality, establishes a sharp contrast with Ali-
ce’s searching gaze and subjective, inquisitive nature. Mandy is a
dramatization of the role of the woman in classical cinema; she is there
only to serve as spectacle in the exploitation of the cinema’s scopophilic
function, an erotic object for both the protagonist’s and the spectator’s
pleasure (Mulvey 19). Women characters are customarily denied
narrative agency in films, and in Eyes Wide Shut Mandy’s passivity
indeed serves only as a plot point without giving her any real narra-
tive responsibility or meaning. Furthermore, the woman in classical
cinema is also denied subjectivity and desire. Her desires, when
expressed, are actively repressed by the elaborate patriarchal
mechanisms of the narrative (Doane 18 19). Alice Harford in Eyes
Wide Shut presents the rare case of a woman who is in touch with her
subjectivity (as we see repeatedly in her actions of looking and
inquiring) and who expresses her desire without concerns about how it
may upset the men around her. She thus causes the male protagonist a
great deal of distress. Alice does not function as the passive, blind, and
mute ‘‘body’’ to look at that Mandy is. Without ever surrendering her
desire or her subjectivity, Alice poses the same challenge to Bill in the
film’s pivotal scene that Albertina does to Fridolin in Dream Story: ‘‘If
you men only knew.’’
Kubrick plays with mirrors and eyeglasses in the only scene sug-
gestive of lovemaking between the couple in the film. It is a properly
cinematic rendition of the power of Alice’s subjectivity and desire, the
mystery of which arguably conducts the narrative. The scene of Bill
and Alice in front of the mirror summarizes the film’s position in terms
of the expression and representation of female desire. After returning
from the Zieglers’ party, we see Alice naked in front of a large mirror,
her body delicately dancing to the music of Chris Isaak’s song ‘‘Baby
Did a Bad, Bad Thing.’’ Challenging the customary notions of the
relationship between the gaze, desire, and eyeglasses in the cinema,
Kubrick stages the lovemaking prelude showing Alice from the waist
up, her back to the camera, but her front reflected in the mirror. She
stands slightly off frame-center, taking off her earrings, but her eye-
glasses still on, looking at her own reflection. Her dance is thus a
performance for herself. The camera slowly tracks in, isolating the
mirror frame-within-the-frame. Bill enters the scene, now entirely

seen in the mirror image, and kisses Alice passionately in a suggestive
initiation of foreplay. Bill’s first action, interestingly, is to look at his
own reflection in the mirror as well. Alice looks at him too, over the
frame of her eyeglasses. As Bill sinks his face behind her neck to kiss
her, Alice looks at the mirror image. A wicked little smile appears on
her lips as she fixes her gaze intensely upon her own image. Even as
Bill kisses her, Alice keeps her glasses on, returning and controlling
the gaze. Again she smiles suspiciously as if her mind, like her eyes, is
somewhere else. While her husband kisses her over the neck,
shoulders, and face, and caresses her breasts, Alice’s look is even more
intensely fixed upon her mirror image. She finally takes off her eye-
glasses and scrutinizes the image from top to bottom, then top to
bottom again. The visible pleasure of the consumption of her own
image is intensified by the closing-in of the shot from the medium shot
of the two together to a close-up of Alice’s face concentrating on her
eyes (while gradually displacing Bill’s image from the shot). The scene
ends with the enigmatic Mona Lisa smile back on Alice’s lips, her eyes
returning the gaze, followed by a slow fade to black. Her eyes are,
however, the last point of attention.
Alice’s look in this scene is unusually powerful (as it has been from
the beginning). It is also in control of the action, suggestive of her
experience of desire, and yet somewhat paradoxical, since it is when
she takes off her glasses that she is evidently more empowered.
According to Mary Ann Doane, the leading lady’s removal of her
eyeglasses in classical cinema is usually a symbol of her yielding
power and subjectivity. The woman with glasses, argues Doane, is
seen as a threat to the male lead’s control of the image, the narrative,
and the structure of desire in classical films. In short, if a woman
wears glasses she is thought to be returning the gaze, a sign of
empowerment that upsets her customary function, which is not to
look, but ‘‘to be looked at,’’ to supply voyeuristic pleasure in fulfillment
of other people’s desires (Doane 26 28). The woman’s action of
removing her eyeglasses constitutes a sign of her desirability to the
male protagonist, not only because it is often a step in her way from
being undesirable to being glamorous, but because it does not threaten

the male’s control of the narrative. In Eyes Wide Shut, however, Alice
is dramatically empowered when she removes her glasses, while it is
always Bill’s eyes that remain ‘‘shut.’’
Alice’s gaze determines content and narrative agency in this scene,
which is a prelude to the pivotal encounter the next day in the bed-
room that sends Bill on his blind quest to recreate his wife’s desire. For
the second time in the film, Alice is in front of the mirror, observing the
erotic image of herself and Bill. (The first time is the short bathroom
scene when she asks, while removing her glasses, ‘‘How do I look?’’). In
this ‘‘foreplay’’ scene, Alice again consumes her own reflected image,
arguably standing in for the cinematic spectator, since she clearly
derives pleasure from her own position of spectatorship. It is indeed
the male lead who is visibly removed from the equation; he is first
added, then left out almost entirely, as the shot closes in on her eyes.
But Alice’s articulation of desire is paradoxically represented as
unrepresentable, left only for herself to understand.
Interestingly, all the action of the film’s first act is invented by
Kubrick and Raphael. Schnitzler begins his novella with the appro-
priately literary device of Albertina and Fridolin’s dialogue about the
party of the previous night (where they first meet temptation).
Kubrick, however, concentrates on the visual representation of desire,
but emphasizes the impenetrability of the woman’s view. As described
above, Alice derives erotic pleasure from a combination of voyeurism
(a theoretically male position in the cinema) and narcissism (a theo-
retically female position). By substituting the male’s usually active
gaze with hers, Kubrick further removes the experience of real desire
from the male protagonist, whose ignorance of female desire directs
his misguided erotic quest through the film’s second act.
In the film’s second act, Kubrick finally arrives at Schnitzler’s story.
Bill and Alice are winding down after a busy day, and as in the film’s
opening, she talks to him about some trivial matter (suggesting they
wrap some Christmas presents). Bill, who is watching some sports
event on television, does not pay attention and the annoyed Alice goes
to the bathroom and stands in front of the mirror for the third time in
the film. She is again initially wearing her eyeglasses. She scrutinizes
her own image once more, looking into the reflection of her eyes, as she
holds her hands to the sides of her face. She then opens the medicine
cabinet and from a Band-Aid tin box extracts marijuana and paper.
Before wrapping a joint, she looks at herself in the mirror once more,
for the last time in the film. The choice of marijuana is doubly inter-
esting because it suggests or prefigures the forthcoming moment of
revelation in which Alice gets in touch with her subjectivity, unin-
hibited by the effect of the drug. The action in front of the mirror
restates the privately subjective meaning of the moment, since we
have already witnessed Alice having a private moment (even with Bill
in the room) in a similarly staged situation.
The mirror=marijuana prelude leads to Alice questioning Bill
about his activities at the party. A close-up of Alice taking a long
draught from the joint zooms out to reveal Bill sitting at the margin
of the bed, waiting his turn for the cigarette. In a challenging tone
she wants to know if he ‘‘by any chance happened to fuck’’ the two
young women with whom she saw him flirting. Of course he didn’t,
and gallantly denies her inquiry. He then asks her about the stran-
ger with whom she was dancing: ‘‘what did he want?’’ She replies,
without a moment’s hesitation, that the man wanted sex. Alice
objects to Bill’s suggestion that the reason men want to talk to her is
because she is a beautiful woman, but that it is not the same when it
comes to women’s interest in men. ‘‘Alice, women don’t think that
way,’’ he fatally states. She answers by invoking clichés about
women’s expressions of sexuality and desire, including his own sug-
gestion that for women relationships are about ‘‘security and stabi-
lity’’ and not the pure pleasures of sex. Truly the turning point in the
movie, as in Schnitzler’s version of the scene, is Alice’s assertion of
men’s ignorance, ‘‘if you men only knew.’’ She challenges his own
security about her fidelity after he declares, with the usual patri-
archal expectations about women, that he has never been jealous of
her ‘‘because you’re my wife and the mother of my child, and I know
you would never be unfaithful.’’ In response she laughs hysterically,
losing her composure, even falling on the floor. And then she con-
fesses to Bill not a real infidelity, but, as in Schnitzler, an imagined
one. It expresses the power of her desire in similar words as those
found in the novella, putting the emphasis on the visual experience
that triggers her desire. ‘‘Just a glance,’’ she says, ‘‘nothing more.’’ As
Albertina reveals in the book, Alice states in no uncertain terms that
she was ready to give up her life as she knew it for one night with
the stranger.
Alice’s desire, which Kubrick has already underscored with the
three scenes of Alice in front of mirrors, is an effect of her gaze. But in
the cinema, the power of the gaze is not only a condition of desire, but
is a statement of power and subjectivity. Alice’s confession restates
that power unequivocally since her gaze in the film so often deter-
mines the structure of agency and desire, while Bill repeatedly fails to
see her or even to look at her. Appropriately, Bill responds with a
rather blank stare. He simply cannot understand. From this point on,
following the exact narrative structure of Dream Story, Bill embarks
on the same erotically charged (yet unfulfilled) encounters that

Fridolin does in the novel. He first goes to his dead patient’s house,
where the dead man’s daughter confesses to love him. He then goes on
to the street where he meets the young prostitute, before going to the
bizarre orgy where he seems to be the only man denied sexual plea-
sures. In all these encounters, it is the women who take the sexual
initiative, the ones who approach Bill, further disempowering him as
protagonist in terms of this sexual and narrative agency. Throughout
the course of the night and his erotic misadventures, Bill is haunted by
the mental visual representation (his representation) of Alice’s ima-
ginary infidelity. In Kubrick’s film, Bill’s visualization of Alice having
sex with the stranger becomes the representation of ‘‘the unbearable
agony’’ of desire; the agony of the woman’s desire.
It is in his taxi ride to the patient’s house that Bill first visualizes or
imagines Alice’s infidelity. Bill sits in the back seat of the taxi with a
concerned yet lost stare in his eyes. The camera slowly and discreetly
zooms in to his face and then cuts to reveal his vision of Alice. She is
lying on a bed being avidly kissed by the young naval officer dressed in
his full white uniform. He is leaning toward her, kissing her neck and
caressing her breasts through her dress, mimicking the foreplay kis-
sing of Bill and Alice’s that we have seen before. Her hands reach
down to her waist, and she pulls off her panties in one swift motion.
The single shot lasts only eleven seconds and then cuts back to the
shot of Bill, continuing the slow zoom-in to a close-up of his face.
Stylistically, the shot of Alice and the naval officer contrasts sig-
nificantly from the general look of the picture. This shot, as are the
continuing shots of this action, each progressively moving toward the
consummation of the sexual relation, is filmed with a grainy black and
white film stock, unnaturally lit with one apparent source light from
above. In contrast, the film’s cinematography up to this moment sug-
gests natural light sources (as Kubrick’s films usually do). Cinemato-
grapher Larry Smith offers a lavish, gorgeous combination of warm
golden glows, hot reds, and cold blue tones. Light sources are often
visible whether they are lamps, light fixtures, or the ubiquitous
Christmas lights that often seem to be the direct sources of illumi-
nation. As in Barry Lyndon (photographed by John Alcott), where
Kubrick insisted on using candlelight to light night scenes to enhance
the natural feeling, the lighting pattern in Eyes Wide Shut is very
expressive without being excessively distracting. Thus, the choice of a
high-contrast black and white film stock for Bill’s vision of Alice
removes those shots from the natural look of the picture, emphasizing
their strictly filmic quality and their value as specifically cinematic
representations.
After the visit to his dead patient’s house where he faces his friend’s
love declaration (to which Bill replied, characteristically, ‘‘I don’t think
you realize what you’re saying’’), Bill wanders the streets aimlessly.
He sees a couple kissing on the street and that vision of real desire
triggers his second imaging of Alice in bed with the stranger. The
sequence of shots is significant, because a direct connection is drawn
here between the visual stimulus (the couple kissing, the man cares-
sing the woman’s buttocks) and the content of Bill’s fantasy. It con-
tinues the narrative progression of the sexual encounter as he had left

it before, but incorporating the image of the couple on the street. Alice
has already removed her panties, and the officer, still in his uniform,
kisses her eagerly while caressing her breasts, naked pubis, and the
inside of her thighs. We cut back to the shot of Bill walking; the
camera tracking back as he approaches. He reacts by strongly beating
his fist against his other hand. Paradoxically, the angry reaction shot
occurs in response to an image not existing in the film’s narrative time
or space.
Visibly irritated by his own imagination, Bill is approached on the
street by a young and beautiful prostitute named Domino (played by
Vinessa Shaw). Bill agrees, though somewhat reluctantly, to go to her
nearby room presumably to exact his revenge against Alice (Fridolin’s
motive through the novel) with a sexual escapade. Bill reacts awk-
wardly to the woman’s sexual agency, yielding the initiative to the
woman and asking her, ‘‘what do you recommend?’’ She accepts the
responsibility, honoring her name, by replying, ‘‘why don’t you just
leave it all to me.’’ In Schnitzler’s version of this scene the prostitute’s
name is Mizzi (38 43). The name change in the film to the more
suggestive ‘‘Domino’’ (reminiscent of the verb ‘‘dominate’’) implies that
the power dynamic between the two is in fact balanced in her favor.
Even in the presence of a sex worker whose job is presumably to fulfill
his sexual fantasies, the woman renders Bill powerless. The scene is
juxtaposed with a shot of Alice at home watching television with her
glasses on and smoking a cigarette. When we cut back to Bill and
Domino in the room, the two actors’ faces in extreme close-up stress
the balance of power; Domino’s face occupies some four-fifths of the
screen (which Kubrick reportedly insisted on composing for full frame
and not wide-screen format). Bill is thus cornered against the end of
the frame, a marginal figure in terms of composition and mise-en-
scène, as we have seen before in both the mirror and bed scenes with
Alice. Domino leans forward toward Bill and asks him, ‘‘Well, shall
we?’’ Then Bill’s portable telephone rings. It is Alice demanding to
know when he will be back, the wife cutting short his purchased
pleasures. Even Alice’s unwitting interruption is essential in
understanding the meaning of this adaptation. It underscores how

Bill’s search for pleasure is not active (as Fridolin’s is in Dream Story)
but accidental, governed by chance, and always controlled by women.
His desire is not only denied but interrupted; he is unable to fulfill his
sexual needs (even with a prostitute and later at an orgy) while ago-
nizing over somebody else’s desire.
Back on the street after the disappointing interruption of his latest
sexual prelude, Bill arrives at the ‘‘Sonata Café,’’ where he encounters
his friend, the piano player Nick Nightingale (Todd Field). The
encounter is faithfully recreated from Schnitzler’s description, down to
the mystery of Nick’s next musical engagement (the orgy). After little
argument, Nightingale surrenders the appropriately referential
password to the prohibited house. The password is ‘‘Fidelio,’’ which,
like the name ‘‘Sonata,’’ is one of several references to Beethoven in
the film. It has been changed from ‘‘Denmark’’ in the novel. In their
specific contexts, both passwords are significant. It was during a
Danish holiday when Albertina first saw the naval officer of her fan-
tasy, and Beethoven’s opera title, of course, comes from the Latin word
for ‘‘faithful’’ (Bill’s torture). The selling point that inspires Bill to
pursue this new temptation is Nightingale’s (Nachtigall in the book)
description of the women who will attend the orgy. ‘‘The women,’’ says
the musician, ‘‘I’ve never seen such women.’’ As always in the cinema,
the women are a fantasy, unreal. Bill repeatedly fails to ‘‘see’’ Alice,
and Nightingale has never ‘‘seen such women.’’ As I will discuss
shortly, the women in the orgy are themselves stylish dramatizations
of the classic cinematic image of female sexuality and narrative posi-
tion; like Mandy before them, their function is ‘‘to be seen.’’ While Bill
goes to the orgy with the intention of ‘‘seeing such women,’’ he remains
incapable throughout the movie of ‘‘seeing’’ Alice as a desiring subject.
Bill’s last stop before arriving at the orgy is at a costume shop where
he needs to pick up the necessary cloak and mask for the anonymous
party. Temptation knocks at Bill’s door once more when he visits the
costume shop. Bill and the owner, Milich (Rade Sherbedigia), discover
the man’s young daughter (Leelee Sobieski) in some sort of strange
sexual trio with two Asian tourists. The girl, grotesquely made up,
prefiguring the orgy’s masquerade, protects herself from her father’s
rage behind Bill’s back. Even under the layers of make-up her eyes are
very expressive, seductive even. She whispers something into Bill’s ear
and walks away slowly in her brassiere and panties, still facing Bill,
her eyebrows invitingly calling him. The costume shop is probably the
most bizarre scene in the film (yet, again faithfully taken from the
novel). In the book the scene seems to indicate the time of the evening
when Fridolin is starting to confuse reality with dreams and fantasy,
itself an important topic of debate in Schnitzler’s time (Freud Inter-

pretation, 41 44). It is as if Fridolin’s nightmare is starting to tap into
his own sanity. But in Eyes Wide Shut, Bill’s outrage at the scenario he
witnesses gives him a further moral dimension, while also supplying
another instance in which he faces temptation and the direct advances
of a woman (or, in this case, a girl). However, the interesting thing is
that, whether fantasy or reality, the costume shop scene indicates a
further step down in Fridolin=Bill’s erotic trajectory. From his wife’s
bedroom to a friend’s love confession, from his encounter with a

streetwalker to the temptation of child prostitution, the protagonist of
Story=Eyes moves further away from reality and closer to an irrational
experience of desire.
In terms of Schnitzler’s novella and its connection with surrealist
literature of the 1920s, the idea of fusing dreams or nightmares and
reality is suggestive of the fragility and arbitrary character of our
moral convictions and civility (direct targets of the surrealists). In
surrealism, dreams are greatly valued because they allow us to
express our true fears and desires, to get in touch with our deepest,
irrational, unrepressed instincts. Fridolin’s search for vengeance
against Albertina’s desire leads him in a downward trajectory from
‘‘normal’’ or socially acceptable sexual behavior (his adventures as a
bachelor, his wife’s favors) to lower levels of ‘‘depravity’’ or socially
unacceptable sexual scenarios (the prostitute, the child, the orgy).
Interestingly, the more Fridolin oscillates between what is real and
what is not, the more he seems to get in touch with primal desires. In
Eyes Wide Shut, Bill’s trajectory similarly takes him ‘‘down’’ the ladder
of what is socially acceptable, but instead of confusing those situations
with the irrational or the dreamlike they seem to be confused with
cinematic representation. The relationship between the ‘‘dreamlike’’
and the cinematic is, of course, also a predilection of the surrealists,
who compared the visual quality of dreams with cinematic repre-
sentation (Williams 10 12). On his way to the orgy Bill elaborates
further on his fantasy about Alice and her anonymous, imagined
sexual partner. Again, he directs his blank stare to the back of the seat
in front of him, the shot of Bill formally repeated as in the previous
depictions. The imagined narrative has progressed, and the stranger
caresses Alice while she positions herself, naked, on her hands and
knees. This time, to exit the fantasy, Bill opens his eyes, as if returning
from a trance or waking up from a nightmare.
He arrives at the masquerade, puts on his costume and mask, and
enters the nightmarish set of the orgy where his friend, Nightingale,
plays the organ. The setting is strangely cinematic. The elaborate
mise-en-scène in the mansion, the bizarre masks, and the ‘‘unreal’’
women all add to a self-reflexive feeling of artificiality, but unlike a

nightmare, this setting seems technically rather complex. The spec-
tators hide behind their masks and cloaks, removed from the action
like the audience in a theater. The women stand naked (except for
their masked faces) in an eerily composed circle in the middle of which
stands a sort of ‘‘director’’ (significantly played by Kubrick’s personal
assistant of many years, Leon Vitali). He commands the performers
with the thuds of a staff against the carpeted floor. The camera circles
the spectacle in a slow tracking shot that shows each one of the naked,
‘‘unreal’’ women. They obey without hesitation, without faces, in a
sequence of carefully choreographed mechanical motions in which
they mock-kiss through their masks. The sequence underscores the
detached artificiality of the situation, turning them into pieces of an
elaborately designed mise-en-scène. The scene is reminiscent of Barry
Lyndon, where the design of each shot (based on eighteenth century
portrait, court, and landscape paintings) emphasized artificiality, one
of the topics of the film. The introduction to the orgy in Eyes Wide Shut
is equally too coldly artificial, too technically proficient, to be anything
but a cinematic fantasy. Everything is either theatrical or cinematic:
the costumes, the setting, the lighting, the rhythmic editing, the zoom
shots and camera movements, and the cast of characters. The ‘‘vision’’
of these women and their fantastic, decorative function is comparable
to the sexual fantasies of the cinema itself. Especially suggestive is the
presence of a specifically theatrical mise-en-scène that dramatizes the
performative aspects as well as the presence of a ‘‘director.’’
Bill’s problem in this scene, as with his fear of Alice’s desire, is his
confusion between reality and fantasy. Like Fridolin, who loses the
notion of where his waking life ends and his dreams begin, Bill ima-
gines, cinematically, Alice’s infidelity. At the orgy he is unable to dis-
tinguish between reality and the ultimate spectatorial fantasy. The
orgy sequence goes on to show Bill (always protected behind his mask)
walking about the rooms, watching couples having sex with the help of
props, elaborate settings and lots of spectators. The sequence itself is
arguably a reflection of what sex has become in its cinematic design;
something cold, mechanical, impersonal, and certainly not erotic.
Furthermore, trouble ensues in part because of Bill’s violation of the
spectatorial covenant, because of his desire to participate in a fantasy
designed only ‘‘to be looked at.’’ When Bill becomes interested in one of
the women at the orgy, he wants to see her face, to go away with her, to
establish a personal relationship. Instead of remaining within the
relative safety of his mask (which presumably ‘‘frames’’ the action from
his point of view), Bill wants to participate in the imaginary world of
desire and beauty in which the cinematic representation envelops us.
Unlike his kissing scene with Alice, where she commands the image
into a rendition of her own subjectivity, Bill’s position actually removes
him from the fantasy, because of his inability to see it as such. Here
Kubrick seems to address, in a specifically cinematic metaphor, the
same topics treated by Schnitzler from his psychoanalytical and sur-
realist perspective. The result is similar in that both are formal
representations of ‘‘the agony of desire.’’ For Fridolin it shows his
incapacity to fulfill his desire and discern between it and his real life;
for Bill, it exposes his reluctance to maintain his distance from the
objects of desire. After ignoring the woman’s requests to leave, Bill is
indeed put on a sort of mock trial, presumably for his attempt to tres-
pass beyond the limits and into the world of the fantasy. Interestingly,
as part of his punishment he is asked to remove his clothes, which in
this context means to assume a female position. The unknown woman
saves him by offering herself (actually, her body) in exchange.
Coincidentally, upon returning home, Bill finds Alice having a
traumatic nightmare that is strangely reminiscent of the orgy scenario
he has just witnessed but which includes herself as one of the parti-
cipants. In the dream, significantly, Bill appears again only as a
spectator: ‘‘I was fucking other men,’’ Alice says, ‘‘I don’t know how
many. And you could see me.’’ To comfort her, Bill paradoxically
explains to Alice that hers was only a dream, for the first time
acknowledging their distinction from real life. In spite of the apparent
realization, Bill ‘‘stages’’ his last fantasy the next day at the office:
Alice and her lover are now, in Bill’s mind’s eye, furiously making love,
the signs of pleasure clearly visible on her face. Later at home, Bill
watches Alice at the table feigning exemplary domestic harmony. Alice
is helping their daughter, Helena (Madison Eginton), with her home-
work. Bill grabs a beer from the refrigerator and the camera slowly
zooms in to a close-up of his face, suddenly distraught. He looks
slightly off the frame. The reverse shot of Alice at the table, however,
shows her in middle close-up looking directly into the camera (the only
such shot in the film). She looks over her eyeglasses, violating her
expectedly passive position by returning Bill’s (and the camera’s) gaze.
Her lips offer a demure yet challenging little smile. Over the point of
view shot of Alice we hear again in Bill’s mind the narration of her
dream: ‘‘I was fucking other men. I don’t know how many. And you
could see me.’’ His reaction shot shows his distress, his agony over the
complete yet elusive picture of desire that he has himself composed.
He is in a way adding the soundtrack to his mental picture of Alice’s
desire. In this one scene, Kubrick’s self-reflexive position in Eyes Wide
Shut is apparent. We have seen the misrepresentation of female desire
throughout the film (and the self-reflexive over-representation of
women as sexual objects in the orgy). But in this shot Alice’s pene-
trating look and ironic smile can be interpreted as the ultimate pro-
vocation in the film. While Bill tortures himself over what is in her
mind, she seems to say again, ‘‘if you men only knew.’’ To that remark
Kubrick seems to be adding, ‘‘if the cinema only could.’’
In the third act of the film, Bill goes around town trying to retrace
the steps of the previous night, back to the dead patient’s house (her
fiancé answers the telephone), the costume shop (the girl is now openly
for sale), and Domino’s apartment (he learns she is HIV positive). This
time, unlike the night before where women and chance always took
the lead, Bill pretends to take the sexual initiative. He fails, of course,
because there is no real desire in him. Because desire only brings him
agony, Bill cannot reenter the scenario of the previous night, which
was organized like a dream, based on chance encounters and unclear
distinctions between its latent and manifest content. As we are unable
to return to a dream or remember it properly after waking (because it
has already served its purpose), Bill’s attempt to retake his ‘‘dream
story’’ proves to be impossible. Instead, he faces the reality of his
position as spectator. As in the orgy, Bill’s search the next day for a
position within the fantasy forces him to come to terms with reality.
Looking for the woman he met at the orgy, he discovers that she
mysteriously died of a drug overdose the following day.
Bill goes to the morgue where his physician’s identification card gets
him the privilege to look at the body. Until now Bill has been unable to
‘‘see.’’ But at the morgue, as he inspects the cold inert, dead body which
only the night before he had so strongly desired (or so he thought), Bill
seems genuinely remorseful over the quest that led to this point. He
looks at the dead woman, convinced that she has died for him. Schnit-
zler’s version of this scene is strikingly similar and rather cinematic in
its reliance on ‘‘seeing’’ as the basis of desire. In the novel, Fridolin
admits in his internal monologue that, never having seen the woman’s
face, he had ‘‘pictured [her] as having the features of Albertina. In fact,
he now shuddered to realize that his wife had always been in his mind’s
eye as the woman he was seeking’’ (Schnitzler 151 52). The significance
of these lines cannot be underestimated. For Schnitzler, this is Fridolin’s
moment of realization, his confrontation and final understanding of his
own desires. The emphasis on seeing as a measure of desire in this
passage makes it strangely and yet appropriately cinematic, especially
in the context of Schnitzler’s closeness to the surrealists at the time. As
the scene continues in the novel, Fridolin concentrates his attention on
the dead woman’s eyes, looking for a sign of life, of desire. Schnitzler
describes Fridolin’s experience rather paradoxically: ‘‘a white face with
half-closed eyelids stared at him.’’ ‘‘If it were her eyes,’’ he continues,
‘‘the eyes that had shone at him the day before with so much passion [ . . .]
he did not want to know’’ (157 58). Desire is no longer the cause of
agony, but it is agonizing, it is dying itself. At the morgue visit in Dream
Story, Fridolin (like Bill in Eyes Wide Shut) resolves his ‘‘agonizing’’
conflict. On one hand, he is confronted with a reality that denies the
nature of his fantasies: He finally ‘‘sees’’ this woman, although it has
been at the expense of her life that he has come to this moment. On the
other hand, Fridolin=Bill seems to make peace with his own desire,
acknowledging that it was ‘‘his wife [ . . .] the woman he was seeking.’’

Kubrick adds a more satisfactory conclusion to the story, at least in
narrative terms, not found in the novel. Bill returns to Ziegler’s house
to learn that the dead woman was Ziegler’s mistress, Mandy. In fact,
Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), like the movie director, ‘‘knows everything’’
and admits to having designed the whole farce at the orgy only to scare
Bill and to prevent him from making inquiries. He admits to orches-
trating the fantasy. Mandy, lying naked and immobile in the begin-
ning, decoratively manipulated in the orgy, naked and dead at the end,
dramatizes that which Alice refuses to do. Mandy is all image, all body
all the time. She is repeatedly deprived of any subjectivity and is
always at the service of male directorial figures (Kubrick, Sydney
Pollack, Bill, and the ringmaster at the orgy). Mandy is never allowed
a sign of subjectivity because she cannot move, cannot speak, cannot
open her eyes, or show her face. Her presence in the film is a litera-
lization of what women customarily do in the cinema; she is the ironic
realization of what is supposed to be fantasy. Indeed, the only time
Mandy takes an initiative, when she offers to save Bill, it leads to her
death, regardless of whether it was an accidental overdose or murder.
As Ziegler explains to Bill in their last conversation, ‘‘she was a
junkie . . . Life goes on.’’ Mandy as a character poses no threat to the
male dominant position or the narrative structure. Alice, by contrast,
with her active eyes, her uninhibited questions, her expressions of
desire and her possession of the desiring gaze, challenges the classical
position of women in film and is the cause of the narrative’s organi-
zation around Bill’s ‘‘agony of desire.’’
Kubrick was reportedly always looking for ways to test the limits of
the technical and expressive possibilities of the film medium
(Walker 7). The technological, formal, and structural risks he took in
2001, Barry Lyndon, and Full Metal Jacket, for example, affirm this
claim. In Eyes Wide Shut, I believe Kubrick was reconsidering issues
of representation and spectatorship. The film is subtly, yet assuredly,
self-reflexive of formal matters. Bill’s ‘‘representation’’ of Alice’s desire,
for instance, is shown in a series of uncharacteristically grainy black
and white shots with an unnatural lighting pattern that clearly
suggest it is a misrepresentation. Their ‘‘cinematic’’ quality starkly con-

trasts with the stylized, yet realistic, look of the rest of the film. They
even constitute a separate narrative, imagined by Bill, which pro-
gresses independently and outside of the story. The other exception is,
of course, the elaborate staging of the orgy scene, arguably a reflection
on the fantasy of cinematic representation. Its emphasis is placed on
artificiality, theatricality, and mise-en-scène. It contains the most
elaborate sets, most complicated camera movements, faceless specta-
tors, a surrogate director, and such (faceless, nameless, immobile)

women as we ‘‘have never seen.’’ The sequence practically provokes us,
as it does Bill, to confuse cinema (or dreams) with reality.
Alice, in contrast to Bill or Mandy, refuses to be situated in either a
passive or a traumatized position. That makes her an unusually
enigmatic film character. By taking a desiring position and expressing
her own subjectivity with her inquisitive, possessive gaze, Alice chal-
lenges the limits of her place in the narrative. She may be looked at, as
Kubrick clearly exploits in the aggressively provocative opening shot
of the film. But she will also look back, take an active role as a desiring
subject, possess the man with her gaze, and cause him to suffer ‘‘the
unbearable agony of desire.’’ In the process, Kubrick exposes, reflects
upon, and even mocks the conventions of representation of women and
sexual situations in contemporary film.
Both Schnitzler, in the context of 1920s Vienna and his association
with and interest in psychoanalysis and surrealism, and Kubrick, with
his ironic, fin de siècle self-reflexivity, tell a story in which desire and
spectatorship function as metaphoric renditions of our perception of
fantasy and reality. Schnitzler concentrates on the properly surrealist
attention to ‘‘seeing’’ and dreaming explored here as emblematic of the
origins and meaning of desire (as in contemporary works by Freud,
Bataille, and Buñuel). Remaining surprisingly faithful to the source,
Kubrick converts the story into an exploration of the cinema’s own
conditions of spectatorship centered on seeing, representation, and the
vicarious experience of desire. For both the author and auteur, the key
to the pleasures of the text is to understand the distinction between
reality and dreaming, between the fantasy of cinematic representation
and the reality of subjectivity and desire.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Research for this article was partially funded by the College of Arts
and Sciences Dean’s Fund for Excellence and by the Film Studies
Program, University of Colorado.
WORKS CITED
Bataille, Georges. The Story of the Eye. San Francisco: City Lights, 1987.
Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Eyes Wide Shut. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Warner Brothers, 1999.
Freud, Sigmund. On Sexuality. New York: Pelican, 1983.
——— . The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Avon, 1972.
Liptzin, Sol. Arthur Schnitzler. Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1995.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
Schnitzler, Arthur. Dream Story. Trans. Otto P. Schinnerer. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon,
1990.
——— . Traumnovelle. Trans. J. M. Q. Davies. New York: Warner Books, 1999.
Swales, Martin. Arthur Schnitzler, A Critical Study. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1971.
Walker, Alexander. Stanley Kubrick, Director. New York: Norton, 1999.
Williams, Linda. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1992.

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DON’T LOOK NOW: KUBRICK, SCHNITZLER, AND ‘‘THE

Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz is an assistant professor of Film Studies at

Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, a cinematic adaptation of

Makepeace Thackeray’s The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., 1844) to

guish themselves from their original sources. The distinctions are in

it is structured around the main character’s confusion between real

the relationship between dreams, fears, and desires (Williams 12 17).

wife’s (imagined) sexual encounter. What is most interesting is that

the potentially sexual situations that never materialize become

stimulation of visual contact. The distance that necessarily exists

experience ‘‘the unbearable agony of desire’’ from the margins. At the

Shut opens with an enigmatic glance at a woman’s naked body, which

film by the multiple images of Alice looking at her reflection in mirrors

mirror frame-within-the-frame. Bill enters the scene, now entirely

being undesirable to being glamorous, but because it does not threaten

on the same erotically charged (yet unfulfilled) encounters that

tinues the narrative progression of the sexual encounter as he had left

understanding the meaning of this adaptation. It underscores how

itself an important topic of debate in Schnitzler’s time (Freud Inter-

bedroom to a friend’s love confession, from his encounter with a

women all add to a self-reflexive feeling of artificiality, but unlike a

acknowledging that it was ‘‘his wife [ . . .] the woman he was seeking.’’

suggest it is a misrepresentation. Their ‘‘cinematic’’ quality starkly con-

tors, a surrogate director, and such (faceless, nameless, immobile)

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