The Books of My Life: Eyes Wide Shut

As I have mentioned previously in these blogs the films of Stanley Kubrick often leave me cold. That--leaving me cold--sometimes seems to me the very essence and meaning of Kubrick's chilly, mechanical, and ultimately misanthropic and perhaps misogynistic films. They show, it seems to me, in a mechanical way, the absurdity of the human condition.

I have long admired Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1972), a film in which Kubrick's decision not to end the film with the last chapter of the book and which, as a result, tells us much about Kubrick's themes, and Full Metal Jacket (1987), but his other films have generally left me both impressed and unimpressed at the same time. Additionally, his films often seem to me to be very much of their time to their detriment. 2001 (1968), for instance, seems, to be aimed at the psychedelic wow that is far out generation.

Eyes Wide Shut, the subject of film critic Michel Chion's monograph Eyes Wide Shut (London: BFI, Modern Classics series, 2002) is not one of my favourite Kubrick films. It is, however, one of the favourite Kubrick films of critic Chion as he makes clear in the opening segments of the book. Chion explores the differences between the film and the Arthur Schnitzler novella on which it was based (Traumnovelle, 1925/26), narrative form, camera shooting strategies, colour scheme, sound picture, something Chion specialises in in his film criticism and analysis, music, and editing of Eyes Wide Shut. Chion argues that words, words parroted and words first said, are at the heart of the meaning of the film. It is only, Chion argues, when the characters awake from their repetitious parroting slumbers that their eyes are opened if only in a non-Hollywood happy happy ending way.

Recommended for students of Kubrick.