Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Tuesday, April 25, 2000  | 

Dir. by Stanley Kubrick

Images: The following was written for a graduate seminar on James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. Please forgive my incessant psycho-babble. I think it actually serves a very legitimate reading of this confounding film.

See Also: Paths of Glory | Full Metal Jacket

• • •

Sally: You're Bill . . . the Bill? You're the doctor who was here last night?

Bill: Well, I suppose I am.

As Garry Leonard has recently noted, a Lacanian reading of James Joyce's "The Dead" would describe Gabriel Conroy's interactions with Lily, Molly Ivors, and Gretta as three attempts by the protagonist to "confirm the fictional unity of his masculine subjectivity." His after-dinner speech, then, serves as an attempted "seduction of the Other" (Lacan's phrase), a linguistic ploy by which Gabriel confirms his own identity by "seducing the audience into authenticating it for him." While he is able to carefully avoid significant fragmentation during his early encounters with Lily and Miss Ivors, Gabriel is finally forced — through Gretta's admission of her love for Michael Furey — to confront the outwardly-constructed fiction of his unified subjectivity (Leonard, 289-90). For Lacan, Gabriel's epiphany is, in Joyce's words, that inevitable dissolution of his "own identity . . . into a grey impalpable world" (224-25).

In Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's novella, Traumnovelle (1926), Dr. Bill Harford experiences a similar dissolution, though the film essentially reverses the basic plot structure of Joyce's story, thereby turning its focus on the terrifying consequences of that epiphany rather than its preludes (and giving us, in effect, a glimpse of the proverbial "morning after" that has intrigued readers of "The Dead" for decades). Bill's wife, Alice, confesses in the opening act that, while on vacation, she had fantasized about abandoning her family in exchange for even one night with a naval officer who was staying in their hotel. "I was ready to give up everything," Alice tells her disbelieving husband. "You, Helena [their daughter], my whole fucking future. Everything" (49). The admission explodes Bill's imagined subjectivity, sending him on a dizzying odyssey through the streets of New York, where he encounters a string of Others, both women and men, with whom he attempts to recapture the unity that has suddenly become lost to him.

His search is necessarily in vain, however, as is evidenced by the film's conclusion. Bill's decision to "tell [Alice] everything" and Alice's desire to "fuck . . . as soon as possible" are desperate, and ultimately unsatisfying, attempts to mask Bill's permanently split subjectivity behind established ideological structures and jouissance. His inevitable lack of satisfaction, I will argue, is likewise experienced by the film viewer, who is presented with a story that steadfastly refuses to tie together its many loose ends. In fact, in his attempts to force "progression [and] effective closure" on the source material, Kubrick's co-writer, Frederick Raphael, instead further exposes the futility of such an endeavor (Raphael, 119). Sean Murphy's conclusion concerning Gabriel Conroy and "The Dead" can, I think, be likewise applied to Bill Harford and Eyes Wide Shut: "[He] will never achieve the unity that the linear narrative supposedly achieves at the end; he can never illuminate the entire beginning and middle of his consciousness via some epiphany because his subjectivity is forever split" (471).

Kubrick and Schnitzler

In 1970, Joseph Gelmis asked Stanley Kubrick why he wished to make a film about Napoleon. Fresh from his recent success with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the filmmaker claimed to have found in the French leader a subject that spoke to his own fascination with history and strategy, while remaining "oddly contemporary — the responsibilities and abuses of power, the dynamics of social revolution, the relation of the individual to the state, war, milatirism, etc." Kubrick's Napoleon project never came to fruition. However, his answer to Gelmis's question reveals that more than thirty years ago, the seed for Kubrick's final film had already taken root. Napoleon's life, he continued, "has been described as an epic poem of action. His sex life was of Arthur Schnitzler" (29). Kubrick's obsession with Schnitzler's short novel, Traumnovelle, was fairly well-known by those who had closely followed his career. In his recent memoir, Eyes Wide Open, Frederick Raphael recounts how his editor, Stanley Baron, and the director, Stanley Donen, both correctly guessed the source material after learning that Raphael had been hired to write for Kubrick. Donen, according to Raphael, "knew that Kubrick had been trying to 'lick' the Schnitzler" since at least 1972.

Set in fin-de-siecle Vienna, Traumnovelle tells the story of a young doctor, Fridolin, and his wife, Albertine, who, while attending a masked ball, are separately propositioned by strangers. The couple returns home to enjoy an unusually amorous evening, but both wake feeling troubled by the events of the previous night. "Those trivial encounters," Schnitzler writes, "became magically and painfully interfused the treacherous illusion of missed opportunities. . . . both felt the need for mild revenge" (177). After putting their daughter to bed, Fridolin and Albertine discuss the ball and other past indiscretions: Albertine admits her lust for an officer she had noticed while vacationing on the Danish coast; Fridolin describes his brief encounter with a "young girl of no more than fifteen, her loose, flaxen hair falling over her shoulders and on one side across her tender breast" (180). Though guilty only in mind and not in body, both are disturbed by the other's admissions. They agree, with measured assurance, to tell each other of their true feelings in the future.

Fridolin is then called away to the home of a dying patient, thus beginning the odyssey that serves as the central narrative device of both Traumnovelle and Eyes Wide Shut. His voyage leads him through a dream-like world of sexual fantasy in which he plays an increasingly active role. At each stop along the journey — his patient's home, a young prostitute's apartment, a costume shop, and a large country manor — Fridolin escapes without physically betraying his wife, this despite the unusually forward advances from the young women he meets along the way. The temptation, however, intensifies as he travels through increasingly unfamiliar territory. His final destination is a masked orgy, where he is exposed as an interloper and threatened with physical harm. But Fridolin is saved — or "redeemed" — by a mysterious woman who had earlier warned him of the danger. She is ushered from the room, while he is placed in a carriage and sent away.

Fridolin returns home to discover his wife lying still in bed, "her half-open lips distressingly contorted by the play of shadows: it was a face unknown to Fridolin" (237). When he bends down to touch her, Albertine explodes in a fit of dream-induced laughter. She wakes to describe the details of the dream, a dream in which she makes love to the Danish officer while Fridolin is crucified, accompanied by the sound of his wife's mocking laughter. He determines then to discover the identity of the mysterious woman from the orgy, so as to "get even" with Albertine, "who had revealed herself through her dream for what she really was, faithless, cruel and treacherous, and whom at that point he thought he hated more profoundly than he had ever loved her" (247). His search, however, is fruitless. The next day he retraces his route from the night before, but discovers only greater ambiguities, the result of which is his gradual dissolution. "He felt helpless and inept and everything seemed to be slipping from his grasp," Schnitzler writes; "everything was becoming increasingly unreal, even his home, his wife, his child, his profession, his very identity as he trudged on mechanically through the evening streets, turning things over in his mind" (263).

When Fridolin does finally return home, he finds on his pillow the mask that had, on the previous evening, concealed his identity at the orgy. The terrifying sight provokes "loud, heart-rending sobs" from the doctor and forces him to confess "everything" to his wife (280). After listening quietly to his story, Albertine suggests that they be grateful for having "safely emerged from these adventures — both from the real ones and from those we dreamed about." They then doze off together, sleeping dreamlessly until the morning, when they are woken by "a triumphant sunbeam coming in between the curtains, and a child's gay laughter from the adjacent room" (281).

The "happy" ending of Traumnovelle, however, is problematized by the sentiments expressed in Fridolin's and Albertine's final lines. "Neither the reality of a single night, nor even of a person's entire life can be equated with the full truth about his innermost being," she says. To which, he replies, "And no dream is altogether a dream." Their reconciliation is tempered by their barely-suppressed awareness of the tenuous nature of their relationship: "Never enquire into the future," Albertine whispers (281). They have each witnessed a frightening glimpse of the other, but have chosen — for the sake of their marriage and as a means of coping with the struggles of daily life — to ignore it. As Martin Swales says of the scene, "There is no solution — only a gratefully accepted working arrangement which is of necessity tentative and reticent in the certainties it offers" (147).

It is precisely that unsatisfying ambiguity, I would conjecture, that so fascinated Stanley Kubrick for nearly three decades. Each of his films — from his first feature, Fear and Desire (1953), an ambitious but almost laughably failed attempt to examine the two greatest motivating forces in human nature, to Full Metal Jacket (1987) — dissects socially constructed dichotomies, blurring the boundaries between good and evil, hero and villain, love and hate, fantasy and reality, us and them. Traumnovelle offered Kubrick the opportunity to observe the human animal in its most intimately guarded environment: the marriage bed. He had broached the subject in several earlier films, including Lolita (1962), Barry Lyndon (1975), and The Shining (1980), but none provided a suitably engaging subject for an extended study. Traumnovelle, however, would allow Kubrick to investigate the complex dynamics of "married sex," as Raphael describes it, sex that is equal parts passion and domesticity — "the naked woman at the refrigerator door as she remembers to put the chicken away before she goes to bed" (43). Schnitzler's novel negotiates that border zone where selflessness, responsibility, and commitment meet narcissism, fantasy, and desire, the product of which is a mutually reaffirming masquerade: Fridolin and Albertine ultimately return to the comfortable roles of husband/father and wife/mother, denying all that would jeopardize their performances. Or, as Leonard has noted, "one performs masques because the alternative is to have no sense of destiny at all; one wears masks to keep intact the illusion that behind them one has a real face that must be protected" (5). Traumnovelle and Eyes Wide Shut rip away those masks, and force both the characters and the readers/viewers to confront the unsettling consequences of doing so.

Lacan's Split Consciousness

Of course, Kubrick may also have been so taken by Traumnovelle because its plot turns on "one hell of a scene."1 Like Gretta's in "The Dead," Albertine's confession provokes the story's epiphanic moment.2 Fridolin is horrified by his wife's secret nature, but only as it affects the fictional unity of his own subjectivity. Disoriented by his own sudden fragmentation, Fridolin is forced to begin his journey of attempted recovery. It is a moment best explained in Lacanian terms. Jacques Lacan's brand of post-Freudian psychoanalysis problematizes consciousness by claiming that the subject is decentered and self-alienated. Instead of being whole, as Freud posits, Lacan's ego is torn in two, inciting a life-long dance of deception. Leonard explains:

The subject is split between a narcissistic, objectlike total being (moi) and a speaking subject (je) who tries to validate this (fictional) unity of being by seducing the objective world (the Other) into declaring it authentic. Thus the moi is inherently paranoid because its existence is dependent upon, and solicitous of, outside validation. The je is controlled more than it can afford to realize because the moi exerts constant pressure upon the je to complete the moi's story of self-sufficient autonomy. Beyond this split subject is the Real subject of the unconscious that cannot be represented in imagery or signified in language. It is the remainder (as well as the reminder) of the lack-in-being that the moi is intended to paper over with fantasies of autonomy that constitute what it perceives as reality. (6)

Thus, only when the je fails in its task of linguistic seduction is the subject able to glimpse "the terrifying fact that the moi, the subject's truth, which it desires to serve, is fiction" (7).

The complex series of steps in this dance is best illustrated in the masculine/ feminine relationship. For Lacan, "the Phallus" is an imagined signifier that supposedly bestows unity upon the masculine subject: he is "all" because he has designated the feminine subject as "not all." But while the penis is a biological fact, the Phallus is merely an ideological construct born of psychic necessity. "The sexual relation," Leonard writes, "consists of two interrelated gender myths: the myth of psychic unity and coherence that is the masculine subject and the corresponding myth of the feminine subject as the site of the otherness and absence that guarantees the supposedly self-evident unity of man" (9). Woman, as Lacan has famously formulated, is a "symptom" for the man: "what constitutes the symptom — that something which dallies with the unconscious — is that one believes in it. . . . in the life of a man, a woman is something he believes in" (168). Lacan designates this construct — this fictional woman all men must "believe in" in order to maintain their supposed unity — as "The Woman," for the feminine subject can never be "an absolute category and guarantor of fantasy (exactly The Woman)" (Rose, 48).

Again, "The Dead" serves as a fitting example. Gabriel Conroy confidently presents himself as one who knows all that he needs to know: he is highly opinionated and imagines himself the intellectual superior of all at the party. Yet his unease is repeatedly illustrated throughout the story, as he bumbles his way through social interactions, first with Lily, then with Molly Ivors and Gretta. With Lily, for instance, Gabriel strikes the familiar pose of master/teacher to her servant/student. They engage briefly in what Leonard calls "mutually affirming dialogue" — they discuss the weather as she removes his overcoat — until he casually asks her about marriage (296). It is a mistake, a very adult question for The Woman he has constructed as a servant/child. Her world-weary answer — "The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you" — interrupts their well-rehearsed performance and threatens his imagined subjective unity. His je attempts to seduce her once more, but with little affect. "Just . . . here's a little . . ." he stammers, as he thrusts a coin into her hand. In order to stave off further fragmentation, Gabriel escapes, "almost trotting the stairs and waving his hand to her in deprecation" (178).

Upon escaping from Lily (and later, from Miss Ivors), Gabriel finds comfort from fine-tuning his after-dinner speech, the ideal platform for the je to seduce Others into authenticating his subjective unity. But the speech is of little use when he and Gretta return to their hotel room that evening. Before leaving the party, Gabriel had paused briefly to observe his wife, who appeared lost in reverie while listening to a song. "At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart" (213). That joy quickly fades, however, when Gretta reveals to her husband that it was Michael Furey, a former love, who had inspired that reverie and not Gabriel. "What is it that women want? Lacan's answer to Freud's most famous question is that they simply want; and the man's desire, what he wants, is to be what he imagines they want, hence the first question" (Leonard, 303). Gabriel's epiphany is that he is not what Gretta desires. The Woman he has constructed as "his wife" disintegrates, revealing the fiction of the role he has been performing. The story ends as he catches a horrifying glimpse of "the pitious fatuable fellow" in the mirror and is seized by a "vague terror," before "fading out into a grey impalpable world" (222, 225).

Eyes Wide Shut

Raphael claims that, when adapting Traumnovelle for the screen, he was repeatedly encouraged by Kubrick to "just follow Arthur [Schnitzler]. . . . Track Arthur. He knows how to tell a story" (105, 91). Eyes Wide Shut remains remarkably faithful to the source material; the most significant change is its movement from turn of the century Vienna to contemporary New York. Though the move was widely criticized in the popular press — many of whom claimed that the sexual moralizing of the film seemed better suited for the Victorian era — it fits Kubrick's modus operandi. Except for his work as a "hired gun" on Spartacus (1960), Kubrick spent his entire career in relative independence, having established himself early on as a filmmaker whose work sparked critical interest, while coming in under budget and turning a profit. The consummate businessman, Kubrick knew that a contemporary vehicle with marquee stars — whom he found in husband and wife, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman — guaranteed significant opening week box office returns.

Of course, Kubrick's decision to adapt Traumnovelle to a contemporary setting was made for more than purely commercial reasons. Like Gabriel Conroy and the other protagonists of Dubliners, Bill Harford is "a central everyman character" (Walzl, 18). Raphael claims, in fact, that Kubrick envisioned his hero as "Harrison Fordish" (hence the name change from Fridolin), and forbade any reference to the Jewish elements in Schnitzler's story (59). Harford, like his counterparts in Traumnovelle and "The Dead," is refused a past; his condition is (we are led to believe) timeless. He is essentially Man, Husband, Father, Doctor, a position which nicely serves the central psychological question of the film: How can the masculine subject survive when all that defines it is revealed to be fiction?

The opening frames of Eyes Wide Shut firmly establish Harford's position in the ideal masculine role. He is young, attractive, and highly successful; his status is reflected by everything with which he surrounds himself, including his beautiful wife and child, and their ridiculously opulent apartment "on Central Park West." The first image, in fact, is of his wife, Alice, slipping her flawless body out of a black evening dress. As they prepare to attend a Christmas party, both act as if performing a well-rehearsed domestic ritual. She applies the final strokes of make-up and asks him how she looks. He replies mechanically: "You always look beautiful" (6). Lacan would explain the meaninglessness of their conversation and the performativeness of their routine as a defense mechanism, a means by which each avoids confronting his or her own identity confusion. As Leonard says of the guests at the Morkans' party in "The Dead," "Much of what they say to one another in conversation is compulsively banal precisely because what they cannot know is so alarming. . . . Conversation is dangerous, as Gabriel learns, because it is always an attempted seduction of the Other, and one's sense of self may be subverted as easily as it may be confirmed" (291).

Bill Harford is made painfully aware of this danger (and its consequences) when, on the following evening, he and Alice confront each other about their behavior at the Christmas party. As in Traumnovelle, both Bill and Alice had been separately propositioned by strangers before returning home to make love. In what has become the film's signature image, Kubrick shows us only Bill's and Alice's foreplay: she stands naked before their bedroom mirror, while he approaches from behind and begins to kiss her. As the camera follows in a slow zoom, Bill closes his eyes. But Alice raises hers to the mirror, looking away from her husband as if her thoughts are with someone else. When they discuss the party 24 hours later, Bill is shocked to discover what we already know: like Gabriel Conroy, Bill has been guilty of misinterpreting his wife's desires.

Their conversation begins as the age-old and cliche-ridden debate concerning male and female sexuality. As Alice bluntly puts it, "Millions of years of evolution, right? Right? Men have to stick it in every place they can, but for women . . . women it is just about security and commitment and whatever the fuck . . . else" (46). For Bill, this simple formulation is perfectly acceptable — "A little oversimplified, Alice, but yes, something like that," he says. However, the tenor of their argument changes considerably when Alice begins to deconstruct those preconceptions. When Alice asks accusingly, "And why haven't you ever been jealous about me?" his je attempts to paper over the frightening ramifications of her question by systematically describing the role of The Woman that he has written for her.

Bill: Well, I don't know, Alice. Maybe because you're my wife, maybe because you're the mother of my child and I know you would never be unfaithful to me.
Alice: You are very, very sure of yourself, aren't you?
Bill: No, I'm sure of you. (my italics, 47-48)

His attempted seduction of the Other fails miserably, though. Alice falls to the floor in a fit of laughter and begins the confession that completely dismantles his imagined subjective unity. By the time she finishes her soliloquy, Bill's je has been silenced. He sits on the bed completely motionless, staring at "[his] wife . . . the mother of [his] child" as if she were a stranger.

Bill's nocturnal odyssey through the streets of New York can be best described as a series of failed attempts by the protagonist to seduce the Other and to recapture the subjective unity that has been revealed by Alice's confession to be fiction. In each instance, he slips on a familiar role only to discover that it is inappropriate and/or ineffective. His first stop, for instance, is at the home of a recently deceased patient. He is greeted by the patient's daughter, Marion, and quickly establishes himself as the "consoling doctor" to her "grieving loved one" by first offering his condolences — "I'm sorry . . . I'm so sorry" — then, in a strangely rehearsed gesture, by placing his hand on the deceased's forehead (53). But his words and gestures are lost on Marion, whose conflicted emotions are the product of her love for Harford rather than, as he incorrectly assumes, the sudden loss of her father. When she kisses him, Harford again stares ahead, motionless. The scene paradoxically serves as both a reinforcement and a refutation of his masculine subjectivity. Marion's desire for Harford should authenticate his identity, but it fails to do so because she simultaneously exposes his failure, represented both by the presence of the body of the patient he was unable to save and by his "misdiagnosis" of Marion's concern. This becomes a recurring theme throughout the film, as Harford repeatedly wields his Medical Board card and assures people, "I'm a doctor," only to then fail in his attempts to comfort or save them.

Harford's masculine subjectivity is further assaulted when he leaves Marion's apartment. While walking through Greenwich Village, he is accosted by a group of male college students who, based on his appearance, accuse him of being a homosexual. The scene is echoed later in the film when a gay desk clerk flirts with him. As if to prove his possession of the Phallus, Harford then follows a young prostitute home, goaded on by her none-too-subtle offer to "come inside with me" (63). However, the scene — along with another that takes place soon after in the costume shop — serves only to further expose Harford's continued failure in his attempts to recapture the fictional unity of his subjectivity. The events of the evening have rendered his je powerless, leaving him able to do little more than simply repeat the language that circulates around him. For instance, when the prostitute, Domino, asks him, "What do you wanna do?" he is unable to answer, instead placing himself totally "in [her] hands" (65). After they are interrupted by a phone call from Alice, Domino asks, "Do you have to go?" to which he is able only to respond by echoing her question, "Do I have to go? I think I do" (69). In Lacanian terms, Harford's continued failure is inevitable. Leonard writes:

One is never so happy as when one is the triumphant hero of one's own story, nor so desolate as when one is the suddenly vanquished hero of the other story that this same triumphant narrative left untold . . . Lacan posits that some degree of suffering might be alleviated in the human condition, but the ego itself is necessarily incurable because it papers over a lack-in-being that can be exposed or denied-but never satiated. Any sort of cure that a character in Joyce's fiction imagines undergoing merely serves as a prelude for the next identity crisis. (7-8)

It is interesting to note that Leonard supports this claim by referring to Stephen Dedalus's temporary victories in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His first visit to a prostitute, which marks the end of section two and presages his religious conversion in section three, is remarkably similar to Harford's experience with Domino. While, in the film, they do not physically consummate a sexual relationship, Harford is able to symbolically complete the exchange by paying her the agreed upon amount. The small victory, however, is necessarily temporary, as he is soon back on the streets, obsessing over Alice's imagined affair with the Naval Officer, and confronting even greater danger.

As in Traumnovelle, the final stop of Harford's odyssey is at a mysterious masked orgy. Kubrick turns the scene into an oddly gothic ritual, more grotesque than erotic. The pivotal moment of the scene occurs when Harford is singled out as an interloper and forced to remove his mask while the other participants look on. He, like Fridolin, is then threatened with physical harm before being "redeemed" by a Mysterious Woman who had earlier warned him of danger. Schnitzler writes of the scene, "It seemed to him a thousand times worse to stand there as the only one unmasked amid a host of masks, than to suddenly stand naked among those fully dressed" (228). "The pain of shame," Michael Sperber writes, "and the inability of the ego's defenses (typically, avoidance and denial) to neutralize it, explain its frequent conversion to guilt" (63). Harford's odyssey has led him to a terrifying awareness of his own fragmentation. As she is led away and he is placed in a taxi, The Mysterious Woman has, in a sense, temporarily redeemed Harford by converting his shame into the guilt that motivates his actions for the remainder of the film.

Kubrick deviates most notably from Schnitzler's blueprint in the final act of Eyes Wide Shut, in which Harford retraces the steps of his odyssey in hopes of uncovering the identity of the Mysterious Woman. Raphael claims that he and the director often argued about how (or if) they should lend more cohesion to the story. Raphael writes:

I remained convinced that there had, for instance, to be a link between the scene at the party at the beginning of the movie and the orgy and its consequences. Otherwise there would be a catenation of events, but neither progression nor effective closure. . . . Stanley jeered at my appetite for plotted neatness, but I returned to the charge. (119)

Eyes Wide Shut includes only two significant scenes that do not exist in any form in Traumnovelle: the first occurs at the pivotal Christmas party, when Bill is ushered upstairs to find the party's host, Ziegler, standing over a naked, overdosed prostitute; the second comes near the end of the film, when Ziegler calls Bill back to his home, ostensibly to "cut the bullshit" and to reveal "what happened last night," thereby tying up the story's many loose ends. The latter scene, in particular, has been the subject of considerable debate, both for its pacing (many critics have even postulated that Kubrick would have trimmed the scene had he lived) and for the unsatisfying solutions it provides. Michael Herr, Kubrick's screenwriting collaborator on Full Metal Jacket, has written, "I don't even know what [the scene's] supposed to be about, unless, as I suspect, it's really just about the red pool table" (270).

The pool table scene, for Lacan, is about the impossibility of ever truly discovering the cohesion and closure that we desire to fix on our personal narratives. In "Passing Boldly into That Other World of (W)Holes: Narrativity and Subjectivity in James Joyce's 'The Dead,'" Sean Murphy defines the "masculine narrative" as the typical, linear narrative that moves toward an end in order to transform "the reader in some way, namely by illuminating the beginning and the middle and thereby unveiling the 'truth' or 'meaning' inherent in the chains of signification constituting the story" (466). Murphy argues that readers of "The Dead" have forced a cohesion on Joyce's story where none exists. "Because critics desire to symbolize their own lack," Murphy writes:

they fall prey to Joyce's seductive yet subversive use of the linear narrative paradigm in their readings of Gabriel and of the supposed epiphanic end of "The Dead." Joyce's text is seductive because it allows the reader to indulge in the fetishistic split between knowing and believing in unity and subversive because he does not provide an end, does not adhere to the law of linearity that demands an illuminative moment that makes sense of (totalizes) the fragmented discourse that precedes it. (469)

Murphy claims that the masculine narrative paradigm became popularized in the nineteenth century realistic novel and remains "the norm," despite the invention of alternative forms by writers such as Joyce (466). Nowhere has the linear narrative maintained its grip more firmly than in the classical Hollywood cinema. In a 1987 interview, Kubrick told Jack Kroll that he wanted to "explode the narrative structure of movies," a feat he finally accomplishes, with astonishing subtlety, in Eyes Wide Shut. The final line of the film (the other significant deviation from Traumnovelle) is ultimately unsatisfying, like the pool table scene, because it subverts our conditioned behavior as film viewers. Taught to expect pat answers and firm conclusions — particularly in an"erotic thriller," as Warner Brothers marketed Eyes Wide Shut — Alice's desire to "fuck" is jarring. We are left with considerable questions concerning both the happenings and consequences of Bill's odyssey and the future of his and Alice's relationship, questions that, despite Raphael's best efforts, cannot be resolved. For Lacan, this ending is inevitable. Terrified by their brief glimpses of truth, Bill and Alice retreat to the familiar roles of husband/father and wife/mother so as to disguise their unity behind ideological masks. When they do fuck, it will simply be a return of jouissance, Lacan's term for the pleasure we find in enjoying our symptoms. But that pleasure will necessarily be short-lived and unsatisfying. Like Gabriel Conroy, Bill Harford "will never achieve the unity that the linear narrative supposedly achieves at the end; he can never illuminate the entire beginning and middle of his consciousness via some epiphany because his subjectivity is forever split" (Murphy, 471).

— Presented at Florida State Film & Literature Conference
January, 2001

Footnotes

1. Raphael recounts how Kubrick asked him if he thought a movie could be found in Caesar's Gallic Wars. Kubrick says, "We wouldn't have to change a thing. That's one hell of a scene, so all we'd have to do is kinda . . . do it up to that point and then . . . get to the end" (76). [return]

2. Comparisons between Joyce and Schnitzler (or Joyce and Kubrick, for that matter) are purely conjectural. Richard Ellman informs us that Joyce's Trieste library of 1920 included a 1906 edition of Schnitzler's Lieutenant Gustl (126), and Richard Brown speculates that Joyce would have been interested in Schnitzler's narrative experimentation, as well as the theatrical scandal that surrounded La Ronde (150). Likewise, Swales comments on the stylistic affinities shared by both men (91). It is almost certain that Kubrick would have been familiar with "The Dead." He was widely regarded as a voracious reader and researcher. He tells Gelmis, for instance, that in preparing Napoleon, he had read "several hundred books" and seen "every film that was ever made on the subject" (30). It is highly likely, then, that while preparing A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick would have read everything written by his collaborator, Anthony Burgess, including Here Comes Everybody, which includes a brief analysis of "The Dead." Kubrick's own interests in narrative experimentation would also have inevitably led him to Joyce's fiction. [return]

Works Cited

Brown, Richard. James Joyce and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Ellman, Richard. The Consciousness of Joyce. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1977.

Gelmis, Joseph. "Interview with Stanley Kubrick." The Film Director as Superstar. Garden City: Doubleday, 1970. Rpt. in Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick. Ed. Mario Falsetto. New York: Hall, 1996. 26-47.

Herr, Michael. "Completely Miss Kubrick." Vanity Fair Apr. 2000. 260-72.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Kroll, Jack. "Interview with Stanley Kubrick." Newsweek 29 June 1987.

Kubrick, Stanley, and Frederick Raphael. Eyes Wide Shut: A Screenplay. New York: Warner, 1999.

Lacan, Jacques. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York: Norton, 1982.

Leonard, Garry. Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1993.

Murphy, Sean P. "Passing Boldly into That Other World of (W)Holes: Narrativity and Subjectivity in James Joyce's 'The Dead.'" Studies in Short Fiction 32.3 (1995): 463-74.

Raphael, Frederick. Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick. New York: Ballantine, 1999.

Rose, Jacqueline. "Introduction." Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Jacques Lacan. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York: Norton, 1982.

Sperber, Michael, M.D. "Shame and James Joyce's 'The Dead.'" Literature and Psychology 37.1 (1991): 62-71.

Swales, Martin. Arthur Schnitzler: A Critical Study. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971.

Walzl, Florence L. "Gabriel and Michael: The Conclusion of 'The Dead.'" James Joyce Quarterly 4.1 (1966): 17-31

Labels: American, Kubrick

Paths of Glory (1957)

Tuesday, February 01, 2000  | 

Dir. by Stanley Kubrick

Note: The following was written as an exercise in formal analysis for a graduate film seminar.

See Also: Full Metal jacket | Eyes Wide Shut

• • •

On December 18, 1957, David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai was released to overwhelming and unanimous praise. Presented in CinemaScope with Stereo sound, the World War II film paints a widescreen portrait of disciplined military leaders waging psychological war amidst the lush backdrop of an Asian jungle. The film would eventually win seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. One week after Kwai's premiere, Stanley Kubrick's fourth feature-length film, Paths of Glory, found its way into American movie houses. The two films make for an interesting juxtaposition — the first a Columbia Pictures blockbuster of epic proportions, the second an independent production shot in black and white for less than one million dollars. But perhaps what most distinguishes the films from one another is their ultimate depiction of man in war. While the finale of Kwai is certainly not typical of the 1950's war genre, its "madness" exists despite noble, human behavior. It's difficult, for instance, to identify the film's antagonist — Shears, Col. Nicholson, and Col. Saito all do the "right" thing. In The Bridge on the River Kwai, it is war itself that creates madness, not the men who fight or command it. Paths of Glory, on the other hand, shows much less faith in man's ability to retain his humanity amidst the chaos of war. Kubrick's film depicts a military bureaucracy that casually fires on its own men — both with artillery and with executioners' rifles — all in hopes of capturing a few more yards of meaningless ground. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther compared Paths of Glory's depiction of injustice to an exhibit in a medical museum, calling it "grotesque, appalling, nauseating," but also faulted Kubrick for so isolating the viewer from the action that it becomes inconsequential. It is that isolation, however, that removal of simple sentimentality, that makes Paths of Glory such an effective criticism of man's nature during times of war.

Paths of Glory opens like a World War II-era newsreel. As the titles roll, a snare drum introduces a military-style brass band's performance of the "Marseillaise." The credits dissolve into a high-angle extreme long shot of a large courtyard, the title, "France 1916," superimposed upon it. The camera pans slowly to the left to reveal a small unit of armed soldiers that marches in formation past marble sculptures toward a building of baroque opulence. Over these images of violence and extravagance, a non-diegetic narrator describes briefly the history of World War I, concluding, "Successful attacks were measured in hundreds of yards, and paid for in lives by the hundreds of thousands." Kubrick, only 28-years-old during production of the film, had trained first as a still photographer, then as a maker of documentary-style newsreels. The experience taught him great economy. In the opening shot of the film, one that lasts just over 40 seconds, we are not only firmly set within the time and place of the story, but we are also introduced to the two worlds in which that story will take place: the luxurious comfort of High Command where "success" is defined and the terrifying brutality of the trenches where lives are lost.

In a match-on-action cut, we are then placed within the opulent mansion, again looking down on the scene from a high angle long shot. The perspective allows us to see much of a great room that is furnished with ornately carved chairs, elegant tapestries, and Renaissance paintings. The perspective also introduces us to two of the film's main characters, General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) and General Mireau (Ralph Macready). Here, the men are characterized by the mise-en-scene. Their uniforms are perfectly pressed, the gold buttons and medals shining like the gilded picture frames hanging over their shoulders. They sit in Louis XIV chairs, cross their legs, and begin, like old friends, to discuss High Command's decision to send Mireau's division up against the Ant Hill, a heavily fortified German position. Mireau makes some effort to convince Broulard of the futility of such an assault, but already, only minutes into the film, his words lack conviction. "The life of one of those soldiers," he says grandly, "means more to me than all the stars and decorations and honors in France." Broulard, as unimpressed as we, looks away, fondles his gloves, and responds glibly, "That goes without saying." It comes as little surprise when Mireau, his ego bolstered by potential glory, commits his troops to action.

Much of Paths of Glory's affect is the result of Kubrick's repeated juxtaposition of images from the command post with images from the front line. In its first dramatic change of scene, the film cuts from Mireau's and Broulard's meeting to an extreme long shot of the Ant Hill, the camera lens acting as a surrogate for the typical infantryman's point of view. Then, after a quick cut, we are shown life within the trenches. The refined furnishings of command have been replaced with logs, mud, and a walkway barely wide enough for two men. Over the images we occasionally hear non-diegetic percussion, approximating, at its lowest frequencies, the sounds of exploding mortars. The camera dollies back, constantly remaining just a few yards in front of Mireau as he inspects his troops. It is a shot that serves as a recurring and quite memorable motif throughout the film (and one that reappears often in Kubrick's work, most notably during Sgt. Hartman's bunkhouse speeches in Full Metal Jacket). As Mireau makes his way through the trenches, we are introduced to each of the three soldiers who will ultimately be executed for their cowardice, first Pvt. Ferol (Timothy Carey), then Corp. Paris (Ralph Meeker) and Pvt. Arnaud (Joe Turkel). The first time we see each man, it is from a low angle. Although the scene was shot using only natural light, it appears to be slightly overexposed, reducing contrast, and causing the men to bleed into the mud walls that protect them. Mireau 's enthusiasm ("Are you men ready to kill some Germans?" he repeatedly asks) and his clean uniform set him in stark contrast to those he is about to sacrifice.

The lighting of the film changes dramatically when Mireau steps into the front line headquarters buried within the ground. The room is lit by only a few low-key lights, draping the background in darkness and exposing only select figures in high-contrast illumination. The scene serves the same narrative function as the earlier one at High Command, but this time it is Mireau who carries the orders to attack and Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas) who must be convinced to cooperate. As did Mireau in the first scene, Dax protests, but eventually complies. That, however, is where comparisons between the two men end. Kubrick shoots the scene from a fairly stationary camera position, panning often to follow the actors' movements. Mireau moves constantly ("I never got the habit of sitting," he says), stepping into and out of focus, while Dax remains still, his jaw grinding in the typically stoic Kirk Douglas fashion. When Dax does comply it is with his back turned from the camera and his face hidden by shadows.

"We'll take the Ant Hill," he growls.

Today, Paths of Glory is most often remembered for its chilling recreation of World War I trench warfare. Because of budget constraints, the film was shot on location using nearly 800 German policemen as extras. In Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, Vincent LoBrutto describes how the notoriously detail-minded director spent more than one month preparing the battlefield before shooting the charge on the Ant Hill. "After we'd dug and blasted up the field," LoBrutto quotes Kubrick as saying, "we put a great many little props around — ruined guns scattered in different holes, and bits of soldiers' tunics. You couldn't see them, but you could feel them" (141). The attention to detail lends a disturbing credibility to the scene, a credibility that has rarely been matched in the forty years of war-film-making since. Steven Spielberg's recent assault on Normandy in Saving Private Ryan has deservedly received much attention for its visceral punch. But his film, with its nearly limitless budget and CGI effects, does little to surpass Kubrick's accomplishment.

Harking back to Crowther's response to Paths of Glory, it is especially in these battle scenes (and later, during the executions) that the film refuses to wash its subject in sentimentality. There is no sweeping John Williams score to strategically manipulate the audience. Instead, the only sounds we hear are diegetic — explosions, rifle fire, Dax's whistle, and the screams of the men charging out of the trenches. There is no flag-waving speech given to fire up the troops. Instead, we simply walk through the trenches in Dax's boots. The famous dolly shot returns, this time the camera dollying forward at a quick pace, the faces of the men turning to greet it with looks of fear. There are no close-ups of "Johnny, the Patriotic Hero" breathing his last breath while clutching his mother's photograph. Instead, the charge across the battlefield is filmed almost entirely in long shots, the camera tracking from right to left and following Dax's progress. Only once during the actual assault does the film create a moment of perceptual subjectivity. Dax is first seen waving on his men in a straight-on long shot. Then, as he dives to the ground, the camera zooms into a medium close-up of his face looking off to the left. The film then cuts, using an eye-line-match, to Dax's view of the Ant Hill. It's a rather terrifying view. We first see only the Ant Hill, its distance exaggerated by the wide angle lens. But then, as the camera slowly zooms out, we are forced to watch four of "our" men killed by a single mortar explosion directly in front of us. Again, instead of lingering momentarily on the casualties, the film cuts quickly away to more violence. By the end of the nearly ten-minute scene, after witnessing the disastrously failed assault, the meaninglessness of the death has become a grotesque spectacle.

The dirt, blood, and grit of the battlefield is again contrasted with the opulence of High Command when the scene shifts to the trial of Ferol, Paris, and Arnaud. The sequence begins with an extreme-long, low angle establishing shot that reveals the immense size of the room. The wide-angle lens allows us to see both the checkered marble floor and the forty-foot ceiling, along with a ridiculously oversized landscape that hangs on the back wall. Again, the only sounds we hear are diegetic, in this case, footsteps and voices that reverberate within the great hall. The prisoners enter from the back, escorted by armed guards, and walk in formation toward the camera. The camera then pans slowly to the right, following their movement, before cutting to an extreme-long, high angle shot from the back of the room. A still photograph from this perspective could easily be mistaken for a chess match — the soldiers stand motionless on alternating dark and light tiles — an apt metaphor for the strategic game that is about to be played.

As in the battle scene, we are again forced to observe from a distance throughout the trial. When the prosecution presents its case, Kubrick cuts between two camera positions. The first is from within the jury box. The camera remains stationary, panning when necessary to keep the prosecutor blocked within the center of the frame. We sit behind the jury, our view occasionally even impaired by other jury members' heads. Kubrick then cuts to a wide-angle, medium shot of the defendant. The image is beautifully framed with the other two prisoners always visible over his shoulder. The short focal length, however, slightly distorts the background, making the other prisoners appear to be much further away then they actually are. The effect isolates the defendant, reinforcing the hopelessness of his situation. When Dax does step forward to defend his men, he is framed in a low-angle medium shot — a "hero" shot. The walls behind him are out of focus, drawing all of our attention to the only noble officer we have met. But the inevitable outcome of the trial is implied, again by camera distance, when Dax stands to deliver his closing argument. For the first time in the long sequence, the camera is placed directly behind the three prisoners, tracking from left to right as it follows Dax's movements. The sound of his voice, now reverberating greatly, also serves to reinforce the distance between him and his men. The hero's voice is quite literally lost within the massive structure of High Command. It's significant that we are never allowed to hear the jury's final decision. Instead, in another juxtaposition of Paths of Glory's two worlds, the trial scene simply fades out, then fades directly into a shot of a sergeant delivering orders for the execution.

Fifteen minutes later, we return to the grand courtyard that we first saw in the film's opening image. Now we see it in an extreme long shot, the camera twenty feet off the ground and facing the High Command building. It is another of Kubrick's trademark shots. The camera is centered exactly, and the building and the soldiers standing in front of it are framed in near-perfect symmetry. From a great distance, we see the prisoners emerge from the building and begin their long walk toward us. Perhaps the most disconcerting element of the execution sequence is that it is nearly seven minutes long, approximating real time. The film cuts between the establishing shot and medium shots of each man as he makes his way toward the firing line. Particular attention is paid to Private Ferol. Timothy Carey's performance is unique within 1950's war films. Instead of facing death with bravery and Gary Cooper-stoicism, Carey's Ferol whimpers and moans, incoherently sobbing at times. As he walks with a priest, he clutches at his rosary and cries, "Why do I have to die, Father?" But instead of eliding time, Kubrick dollies back with Ferol, forcing us to watch this man as he walks toward another meaningless death.

The dolly motif returns again as the film cuts to the prisoners' point of view. It's from their perspective that we first see the stakes to which the men will be tied. As the camera leads us up the path, all eyes turn directly toward us. A photographer snaps a shot of the condemned. Then we walk past Broulard and Mireau, who acknowledge us with expressionless faces. Finally, we walk past Dax. The camera tracks past him while simultaneously panning to keep him in frame. He stares into the camera without blinking, his face revealing a mixture of guilt, anger, and pity. All we hear is a diegetic drum roll and Ferol's sobs. When the prisoners finally reach the firing line, they are tied and blind-folded, again without any elision of time. But just as surprising (and affecting) is Kubrick's decision to also not expand time. When we hear "Ready!" Kubrick cuts to a high angle shot of the firing squad, the camera positioned so as to keep the prisoners below the frame. Here, the drum roll stops and the diegetic sound of as a singing bird can be heard. The films then cuts in a match-on-action to a shot from within the firing squad. We see the other executioners around us and the helpless men before us. The rifles fire and the prisoners fall over dead. Again, at the emotional zenith of the film, Kubrick observes his subject from a distance, remaining on the lifeless bodies for only a second before cutting away.

The cut returns us once again to the familiar high angle shot of an interior at High Command. Sitting at the same table in which we first saw them, Broulard and Mireau discuss how "wonderfully" the executed men died. "There's always that chance that one of them will do something that will leave everyone with a bad taste," says Mireau as he bites into a forkful of chicken, apparently unaware of the irony. When Dax arrives, Mireau is brought under investigation for his incompetence, but it is far from the satisfying conclusion of the typical Hollywood variety. Broulard remains in power and Dax is deemed a fool for his concern. The scene brings the film's story full circle — ending in the same room and with the same characters with which it began — and once again reinforces the impotence of honor amidst the bureaucratic power struggles of war.

However, the short sequence at High Command is not the final image of Paths of Glory. Instead, Kubrick added another scene in which Dax is shown returning to his surviving men. Following the sounds of their whistles and cat-calls, he makes his way to a small cafe where the men have gathered. There they watch a beautiful German woman (who would later become Kubrick's wife of forty years) as she sings "La Troeyer Hussar," a German folksong. Her performance brings tears to their eyes.

The addition of the scene is significant for several reasons. First, it concludes the film by putting human faces on the infantrymen who have, until this point, been portrayed almost exclusively as nameless cannon-fodder. However, it is also worth noting that Dax does not ever join the men in their reverie. Instead, Kubrick cuts occasionally to a medium close-up of Dax outside the cafe, lending the shots from within a feeling of perceptual subjectivity. The scene also presents a final portrait of war. Before introducing the singer, the master of ceremonies asks, "What is life without a little diversion?" With Col. Dax's final line, it is obvious that this moment of happiness will indeed be only brief respite. When a sergeant informs him that he has orders to return to the front immediately, Dax responds, "Well give the men a few minutes more." Dax turns toward the camera and once again it dollies back, leading him to his quarters. The final return of the dolly motif, accompanied by the drum roll that opened the film, leaves the viewer acutely aware of how little has changed during the course of Paths of Glory.

Labels: American, Kubrick