Next year marks the twentieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut (as a play on words it could even be rendered in Italian as "occhi spalanchiusi") which, besides being the American director's final film, is also one of his most deliberated and tormented works: Kubrick closes his career and his life with a film he reflects on for almost thirty years. The film was presented as "taken" or "inspired" from Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (Doppio sogno). At its release some American critics wondered what could ever have possessed their most earnest director to take up a marital story, from an almost unknown tale set in fin de siècle Vienna, and to carry it, through an impossible journey in time, into contemporary America. One can imagine that, from the paradise of directors, Kubrick still smiles at the pathetic clumsiness of many of his fellow countrymen, including Frederich Raphael, his screenwriter: to measure oneself in images against the Traumnovelle is like making a film about Amleto or the Baccanti. Schnitzler's novella is one of the most pregnant and unsettling tales of the last century, so much so that it left Thomas Mann speechless and led Sigmund Freud, perhaps in bad faith, to find in Schnitzler a literary double of himself. And Kubrick was clearly perfectly aware of all this, so aware as to ponder and ponder again over the undertaking. More than "taken" or "inspired" from the novella, the film is a genuine "hand-to-hand combat" between a great director and a literary masterpiece. A confrontation that one is rarely, in very few cases, fortunate enough to witness.
To recall both film and novella, Studi Umbri publishes in this issue an article by Luigi Cimmino on the subject, and will then return to the theme, when the true twentieth anniversary falls due, in the next issue, with an article by Giorgio Pangaro. For the magazine's editorial staff the occasion expresses the intention and the commitment to devote, in the future, more articles to the relationship between cinema and literature. As is well known, apart from a few exceptions (Visconti, for instance), great Italian cinema rarely measures itself against literary masterpieces. It will be the occasion, for us and for our readers, to turn our gaze from Italy and from Umbria to the international scene.
Our thanks to the publisher Rubbettino, who has made the online publication of the two articles possible.

"A man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond life. If he should ever for an instant cease to doubt, if he wholly accepted the truth of what his senses convey to him, all objective sense lost, totally immersed in existence, he would be driven from the solid ground he clings to and swept away by the current"

Bowles, The Spider's House

"No living organism can keep its sanity under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and grasshoppers dream"

Jackson, L'incubo di Hill House

Excusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta?
The whole planet's film criticism, save for a sizeable but still minority number of voices, found itself exceptionally in agreement on at least one aspect of Kubrick's last film: Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle would be the "occasional cause", no more than the starting point of Eyes Wide Shut. The disconcerting parallelism between the two stories must not therefore mislead us. It is certainly not only the film's autonomous episodes that confirm that the story of Fridolin and Albertine stands to that of Bill and Alice as the apple that fell on Newton's head stands to the hypothesis of falling bodies. Even if Kubrick seems to take his leave of cinema with the rendering of the novella in images, appearances deceive: precisely in what exceeds, surpasses, transcends the banal similarities dwells its deepest and most hidden meaning. To the viewer (but above all to the critic) falls the task of making it explicit. The upshot of this unity in difference (of opinions on the work's value: beautiful, ugly, mediocre, incomplete), more or less explicit, more or less manifest, is the autonomy of cinema, the expressive self-sufficiency of an art that at times dreads the unconfessable suspicion of discovering itself to be a copy of a copy.
At the dawn of the new millennium, when some arts really seem on the point of taking their leave of the stage, one thinks of painting, the seventh, the youngest of the muses, betrays ever more often (and the reaction to Kubrick's film is one example of it) embarrassing forms of unease. Even limiting oneself to the many words spent on the autonomy of Eyes Wide Shut and on the removal of the novella that inspires it, one seems to sense imperceptible fits of dizziness that bode nothing good.
Why on earth should a director of Kubrick's stature not have tried simply to render the Traumnovelle in images? Why does the thematic key to his film not lie in this? Why is the suggestion that it does met with the reproach of trivialising the discourse to the point of cancelling every reading of Eyes Wide Shut and burning up the air that sustains the free flight of the doves of interpretation? Should the autonomy of cinema not consist in its expressive autonomy, and therefore also in the capacity to render alio modo one and the same theme?
In the pages that follow I would like to try to row in the opposite direction. To give indications, no more than indications, of the possibility of reading the director's last film as the cinematic outcome of a genuine spell or fascination; the one exerted by a story little known to English-speaking readers upon a director who spent at least twenty years racking his brain and imagination over how to represent it. Even if the suggestion were unexpectedly overblown, its scaling back, I believe, would still leave a good slice of truth to be pondered.
The outward signs that recommend the soundness of this route are the simple ones that so much criticism has passed over in silence or cerebrally transfigured (in some cases with conceptual pirouettes that would be the envy of Hyde Park's Sunday philosophers). Ever since he reads Doppio sogno, Kubrick ponders and ponders again his cinematic version, going so far as to buy the rights to the story. The film marks out to the letter, in detail, the episodes of the novella:
"Follow Arthur, follow Schnitzler. He knows how to tell a story" [Raphael 1999, 91][1], the director tirelessly repeats to his screenwriter. In some passages it seems that the Traumnovelle is even being recited, leaving the viewer with the surreal impression that the actors step out of the guise of fiction to declaim, as readers, a text: in the closing lines Alice's face forms the grimace of someone straining to repeat a quotation learned by heart, plainly too convoluted and literary to convey stirrings of the soul, however reflective (in the scrap of time stolen from her daughter in a toy shop on Christmas Eve!)[2]. Most of the sequences that depart from Schnitzler's text do so for evident reasons of cinematic language (the rendering of interior dialogue, of descriptions, reasons of expository economy), while those that cannot be framed in this way are genuine exceptions, and as such should be explained and commented on. Let us therefore start from the assumption, theoretical and heuristic, that Eyes Wide Shut is a film bent on the cinematic exposition of the content of the Traumnovelle. The first and fundamental question to answer is obviously "why?". Why would Kubrick, always very free, free in content, from the literary outline of his films, have let himself be intimately drawn in by a half-unknown Austrian tale? What, in short, is the theme of the Traumnovelle that so strikes, troubles and attracts him?

* * *

To begin with, Schnitzler's tale is not the minor operetta that many American critics, in the aftermath of the film's release, laboured to track down by rummaging through antiquarian bookshops. Doppio sogno is a small, and not even so small, masterpiece: among Stanley Kubrick's indisputable merits is that of having noticed as much. Certainly, a large part of Schnitzler's prose work, in the opinion not only of mine, has not withstood time. The Austrian writer's grim and monotonous pessimism today sounds for the most part like the expression of an era, that of fin de siècle Vienna, and even the stream of consciousness of La signorina Else appears a literary exercise that no longer greatly astonishes the mind of the contemporary reader, accustomed to quite other detonations of the self. Setting the theatre aside, a few tales nonetheless stand as exceptions, cases that go well beyond the rest of the oeuvre: probably Il tenente Gustl, certainly Il ritorno di Casanova and without doubt, precisely, that arcane, indecipherable black fairy tale that is the Traumnovelle, a perfect fusion of style and content, an exquisite example of that source of vibrations along the spine that for Nabokov accompany the reading of a work of art, "although one reads with the mind, the seat of artistic pleasure is between the shoulder blades" [Nabokov 1992, 100]. If one does not attempt the fusion with the vibrations that Stanley Kubrick must have felt on reading it and falling in love with it, I believe that of Eyes Wide Shut there remain only surface colours, original perhaps, but irredeemably devoid of deep glints and reverberations.

Clearly Schnitzler's is not an essay, nor even a thesis-driven tale. It is not a philosophical novella and I do not think at all that it has a specific message. It is the story of a fictitious betrayal, lived by him and dreamed by her, but in another sense more dreamed by him and more lived by her, which throws into crisis the marriage of a placid and ordinary bourgeois couple. The female character, as often happens in Schnitzler's tales, has greater existential and sapiential depth; the male one, by comparison, stands out for moral pettiness and a certain obtuseness (and here one is tempted to say that the daring choice of Tom Cruise in the guise of Fridolin proves sublime). The use of the dream as a narrative pivot is obviously nothing new, given Freud's looming presence, among the German-language writers of the decadent and realist period (from Mann to Musil to Broch). But Schnitzler is not Theodor Fontane either (the Fontane, for instance, of Unwiederbringlich); he does not probe the psychological motions of the clash of characters within the by now fragile conjugal refuge. Nor does the Traumnovelle intend to bring to light the schizoid magma at the bottom of the individual psyche; the novella is certainly not an avant-garde tale, stylistically and thematically, of the kind of Musil's I turbamenti del giovane Törleß. The first and fundamental error to avoid, then, is that of thinking that Kubrick's operation consisted in transposing a situation of marital conflict from turn-of-the-century Vienna to contemporary America, as, beginning with Raphael, so many of his interpreters seem implicitly or explicitly to think[3]. The first consequence of this assumption, at times declared, at times subliminal (the "simplicity" of the tale being taken for granted), is that the naive transposition of Fridolin's story to the present day would raise a smile, and that therefore the faithful repetition of the narrative scheme, in its particulars, would have a quite different meaning from that of the Schnitzlerian novella. But the error, it must be made clear, does not consist even in thinking that an unhappy story of feelings today says nothing more to disenchanted Western man. An alien who had come down to Earth in the aftermath of the film and had read the shrewd and ironic remarks on the impossible comparison between the Fridolin of the Twenties and the Bill of the Nineties would have had to infer a psychological picture of (Western) humanity very like a B-movie science-fiction episode, of the Star Trek sort, in which human beings have rid themselves, through some bionic ray, of one of their emotional anthropological constants. As if conflicts of love did not go on making up a good part of the lived, thought, read and observed life (from the trash of soap operas to the novel and to auteur cinema) of humans: the move of one who pushes this kind of representation away from himself, convincing himself that it no longer concerns him, resembles one of the many moves attempted by poor Fridolin. It is hard to think that a tragic man of the Enlightenment, such as Kubrick was, was afraid of exposing himself to the rhetorical criticisms of the champions of the "twilight of feelings". Nor does the error consist in believing that, more than the genre, it is the way in which Schnitzler's story unfolds that will not bear transcription: the use of an American bourgeois family works too.
The underlying error is another: that of failing to understand that the Traumnovelle must be read as a paradigmatic affair. It is precisely its exemplary and abstract character that is grasped by Kubrick, and that favours, almost imposes, its literal repetition. Like a number, the American director may have thought, the meaning of the Traumnovelle does not come into being, and must therefore be able to show through in different eras and contexts. It is a matter, precisely, of attempting to render its substance cinematically.
To say what that meaning is, on the other hand, is more than risky, and one immediately runs the danger of misunderstanding or of trivialisation, because Kubrick himself, in this as in all his films, thinks that: "If you say what it means, it no longer means anything" [Raphael 1999, 76][4]. The meaning must shine through, inseparable from the fabric of the story and from its images; so generic and indeterminate as to present itself, in isolation, as a truism, so concrete and immediate, if lived, as to move us and to yield a gain in knowledge. To use a word that sounds pedantic and rhetorical, but which in its etymon (statuo) denotes the fixed, stable, determinate and founding element that all of us in life would gladly rejoice to embody and possess, the opposite of death, yet perhaps, we shall see in what sense, irreconcilable with life, the Traumnovelle and Eyes Wide Shut recount an episode of the collapse, ruinous for humans of every latitude and era, of the institution.

***

"When, instead of thinking of human beings one by one, one thinks of them all at once, one has merely added a new word to the dictionary and not a new thing to the universe" [Pound 1973, 409]. To Pound society appears, pace Hegel, neither a "concrete universal" nor an organic whole superior to its parts; and yet his historical, poetic and political trajectory unwinds in search of a community such as to justify and give sense to the mere sum of individuals. The family is today mostly conceived as a conventional pact between two wills, voluntarily revisable, but every lived relationship with a family aspect (narrow, extended, hetero and homosexual, normatively recognised or private) betrays varied and differentiated references to a kind of "form" that is meant to sustain, and therefore not to coincide with, the thoughts, the desires, the arbitrary whims that sprout from the mind of the individual: even in the most unbridled champions of the inviolable rights of the individual will, this is transformed as if by magic into an impersonal end. The one who writes addresses a reader who does not simply repeat, however enhanced, the writer. The truth to which knowledge aspires swells with glints of sense that mute "correspondence" to things does not have and cannot have. The man of letters looks to the "limits" of scientific knowledge, the scientist looks to the vanity of belles-lettres, but in more or less everyone there broods the anxiety of "truth" and of "recognition", two of the most impalpable and evanescent dimensions in which human thought floats without noticing. If, in short, by "institution" we try to allude to the background, however vague, uncertain, indeterminate, that safeguards, even if only emotionally, like a deep echo, the contingency of our actions, it is the institution, its cipher, that marks the outline of sense of Fridolin's wanderings.

These vague hints are, for that matter, likewise larvae of theory, whereas in Schnitzler and Kubrick, obviously, the elusive nature of the institution in which we strive to find our recognition is fused into a story, a story that, in this Kubrick and the writer are philosophers, mutatis mutandis, could just as well have as its setting Trobriand society, a shanty suburb or a hypothetical human colony on Jupiter. If that is so, it is easy to imagine how wide of the mark are the scruples, behind those of the screenwriter Frederic Raphael, concerning the difficulties of "historical transcription"! Medical science, social recognition, knowledge and, above all, family, the last den in which to lick our wounds (introverted Kubrick too must certainly have licked his here), are the institutions embroidered into the story of Fridolin (and Bill). The desire to be something, something that guarantees his identity, calls them into play, but that same desire for identity and recognition finds the way to burn them up and dissolve them. Some reviewers of Eyes Wide Shut mention a comparison between the film and Bernardo Bertolucci's Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972). In truth the comparison is apt if it has the sense of a litotes, the negation of its opposite: in the beautiful soul that conceives Ultimo tango a Parigi desire aspires, without success for historical, political, social reasons, to unhinge the institution; for Kubrick's grim eagle gaze the desire that would erase the "superstructure" altogether would erase (by some obscure metaphysical plot?) itself without fail.

* * *

Doppio sogno begins with a mimetic triangle in the purest Girardian style (but mimetic desire is only a consequence). The diffuse and imperceptible serenity that accompanies the married life of Fridolin and Albertine, made of smiles exchanged as they caress the objective fruit of their marriage, is shaken by a party in which passion and sexual desire, the individual desire each has to enjoy the other directly and without restriction, make their reappearance. During a carnival masked ball (the masks make their entrance from the outset), each begins again to desire the other because each of the two is desired, courted, by others. In this case too desire is mediated, it arises for external reasons, only here it is another desire that gives rise to it: as a child drops the ball he is playing with alone and bored to run after someone else's ball, Fridolin rediscovers in Albertine a woman who, having become the object of passion for a third party, has suddenly taken on again the guise of the other half of the sky, where the rebirth of "wanting" is clearly reciprocal. "Thus husband and wife, Schnitzler writes, glad at heart to have escaped a banally disappointing masquerade [Maskenspiel], had soon found themselves at the buffet among oysters and champagne, like two lovers amid couples in love: they had conversed with amusement, as if they had met only then, throwing themselves into a comedy of gallantry, of refusal, of seduction and of compliance; and, after a swift carriage ride through the white winter night, they had surrendered at home into each other's arms, loving one another ardently as had not happened for a long time" [Schnitzler 1999, 12; 1992, 8][5].
With the morning following the night of love, with the "livid" dawn that follows, the Nordic fairy tale begins to turn into a nightmare. What gave rise to the desire to possess the object is the very same thing that threatens its loss: if each spouse desires the other because others desire him or her, the coveted thing is such solely and only because it is exposed to the constant threat of being lost; outside the institution, abandoned to a desire that wants to possess without further guarantees, the ego of the characters begins to fear losing its own object. The jealousy that animates the two spouses and that is progressively transformed into rancour and resentment is not simply the consequence of love but the other side of one and the same coin: a side that represents an (impossible) desire whose conditions of satisfaction are solely and only mine. The very passion of the spouses in fact passes at once into the memory of past but unsatisfied passions. Thus Schnitzler at once hands the reader the cipher of the whole tale, which repeats itself in Albertine's mere dreams and in Fridolin's faceless, contactless love. The marriage that wraps the two spouses bent over their daughter like the stable of a nativity scene was certainly not a marriage of convenience, it was and still is a marriage of love, but one which, faced with love lived in absolute freedom (willed, so the subject believes, for oneself alone), decays into a feeling close to "compassion" [ibid., 15] (in the words of Kubrick's Alice it becomes "sad"). Like Ivan Ilyich, the character in Tolstoy's tale, who faced with death does not resign himself to finding that he is the term of a syllogism ("all men are mortal"; "Ivan Ilyich is a man"; "Ivan Ilyich is…"), Schnitzler's characters, the male one first of all, do not resign themselves to consisting only in the tangle of institutional figures. The need for identity that produces them is the same (as a desire for individual self-affirmation, to drink deep from life) that dissolves them. Thus, starting from the mimetic situation of the masked party, Fridolin begins the seven episodes of his descent into the mälström of the faceless, a descent that will lead him to tear the flesh from himself little by little. Along with the flesh of "husband", that of "doctor" and of "male", until he is reduced, at the end, to a mask, to the empty simulacrum of himself laid out on the marriage bed.
Schnitzler prodigiously manages to set the tale in motion and to lay most of the cards on the table in four or five pages, introducing, besides masks, doubles and mimetic desire, also the inviolability of the desired object; the "very young" fifteen-year-old who excites Fridolin's passion smiles invitingly beyond a line that cannot be crossed: "In her eyes there was a greeting, an invitation, and at the same time a slight derision in the way she fleetingly grazed with her gaze the water at her feet that divided me from her". When Fridolin tries to embrace her, the beautiful fifteen-year-old, with "an expression of prayer and entreaty", full of compassion like his wife, rebuffs him and draws back [ibid., 17].
A synthesis of this kind is cinematically impossible. One of the episodes of the film that most departs from the novella, then (I shall return at the end to the other two, far more substantial ones), that of the long party sequence, depends more than evidently on the necessities of filmic rendering. Certainly, in this as in other parts of the film, Kubrick pours out a quantity of quotations, cross-references, symbols, largely absent from the tale[6]; but these too (a hallmark, moreover, of his films), together with the blatant "studio" reconstruction of New York, help to create the abstract and suspended atmosphere that runs through Schnitzler's tale. What better suggestion, for example, than that of reading the obsessive use the director makes of mirrors[7] as an allusion to the public and objective ground where the characters recognise themselves, only to remain lost precisely before what they recognise[8] (the reverse of the "mirror stage" of a certain psychoanalysis)?
To tell the truth, there is a marked difference with respect to the Traumnovelle, and not only in this episode. Compared with the tale, Kubrick's film overflows with vulgarity. Besides the cloying presence of money (Kubrick had inquired, he confesses to Raphael, into the average earnings of an American private physician, yet Bill handles money with the nonchalance of a chief executive: evidently, in this too, "realism" takes second place), the glitter of lights and the decorations of the Ziegler house call to mind the Las Vegas of Elvis Presley's films. Ziegler ushers Bill into his alcove while adjusting his underpants, and one may suppose that, had he been spared by the censors, Kubrick would have presented him to us in short socks without even those. Alice's suitor enters the scene as a Hungarian gentleman, but in the whirling turns of the waltz with Alice he leans in and "pushes" like a lecher, an old erotomaniac who lacks only the groping of the lady: Giuseppe Farese rightly observed, during the seminar, that the invitation to Alice to view the "collection of paintings" has the allusive lightness of an invitation to see his "butterfly collection". And again, Bill is Fridolin (melancholy, paternal, gentle) in the encounter with the prostitute, but on presenting himself again to his colleague, unlike his literary counterpart, a sudden gust of libido drives him to feel her up, to the point of embarrassing her, without restraint. Why this excess, these obscene sudden outbursts of vulgarity (which culminate in the final proposal to "fuck"), at odds, moreover, with the more sober arrangement of the interiors (psychic and environmental)? Setting aside the hypothesis, out of respect for the director's excellence, of a spiteful portrayal of his native country, and excluding above all, for the same reasons, the idea that Kubrick meant in this way to portray and underline the vulgarity or the reality of the modern world, in particular the American one (banal, and in full contrast with the symbolic and hyperreal character of the film), what can be the reason, thematic and cinematic, for such disproportionate excess? Could it be that through the surplus of vulgarity Kubrick intends to prepare his real lion's swipe, his personal addition to the abstract thematics of the Traumnovelle?

* * *

Before touching on this last point, and concluding the invitation to ponder the film by reflecting on Schnitzler's novella, two further brief remarks on the question of cinematic rendering, on the idea that a large part of the differences between text and film are due to problems of expressiveness, caused by the different artistic medium. The first concerning the scenes of the "orgy", the second relating to Kubrick's rendering of the contents in foro interno, of the thoughts that the writer can read directly in Fridolin's head.
The blend of images, colours and sounds that in Eyes Wide Shut accompany the orgy scenes is certainly one of the pivotal moments, in my view among the highest and most successful, of the film. The expectation, stoked by the financiers, that Kubrick would treat us to scenes of the raciest and most extreme sex, as is well known, was wholly disappointed. The throng of masked porn-lovers who savoured in advance the fine pairing of libido and auteur cinema went home empty-handed. The copulation is the hieratic one of Greek vases, the men's pelvic thrusts recall the mechanical bends of Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (1976). Not a moan, a shudder, a stifled little cry of pleasure. Bill wanders among composed standard "positions" as if admiring, detached and perplexed, the tritons and nereids of a Böcklin painting: the echoes of a myth, though here a cold and death-dealing one. The scene described by Schnitzler is incomparably more erotic and vital; even the sensual Italian music[9], Nachtigall's "wild and exciting touch" [ibid., 56], resemble the progression of an orgasm. Fridolin burns with desire.
And yet it is precisely Kubrick's painted sex that restores, in an astonishing and moving way, the deep sense of the bacchanal in the Traumnovelle: the one summed up in the contrast between Fridolin's arousal and the curt answer whispered to him by the woman who will redeem him. To the ironic question: "Are there not perhaps secret rooms into which the couples who have made friends withdraw? Or will they all in the end take their leave with a courteous kiss of the hand?", the lady with the "blood-red mouth" replies: "Vain hope. Here there are no rooms such as you dream of […]. Flee!" [ibid., 58-59]. The images, the sounds, the atmosphere of lugubrious velvet of the Kubrickian party are, as a whole, the best that could be conceived to render the check of desire while doing without words.
It is, however, almost impossible to renounce words in describing Fridolin's interior odyssey. Schnitzler's character truly lives the progressive shattering of the various aspects of his public identity. That of husband is certainly central, but alongside it, as was said, there is that of doctor and, more generally, that of a male citizen endowed with a certain degree of power and dignity. The fact is that the crumbling of the various aspects is conveyed largely by interior monologues and by that "seventh wall" from which the writer peeps into his thoughts; thoughts, moreover, at times "read" by the author, in other cases "directly" thought by the character. In Kubrick's cinema, as in the theatre, only the "sixth wall" of the screen is instead open to the viewer.

More than once Fridolin thinks back to the young men of the student fraternity (which, as it happens, had reminded him of the two masks in red domino) and to the affront of the "elbow shove" he received: the violence, the danger, the fear of finding himself a coward [ibid., 32], torment him as only the gratuitous and brazen bullying of a hooligan can torment one who believes that professional dignity, money, and above all "moral correctness", the ability to manoeuvre among social rules, can protect him from physical force: "order and security are a lie" he will say to himself [ibid., 92] (as if to say that justice is "the advantage of the weaker"[10]). Death, its idea, its effects, its symbols accompany the poor man through all seven stations ("spectral" and "sinister" are the recurring adjectives). Not only in the two most striking episodes in this regard (Marianne's house and the mortuary), but in the carriage that carries him to Gibiser's shop, an example of a "hearse" [ibid., 47], in the row of masks the latter shows him, "two wings of hanged men ready to invite one another to dance" [ibid., 48], in the recurring fear of having been infected. To fear, Fridolin reacts each time by reminding himself that he is a male still desirable (even heroic [ibid., 55]), a doctor, that he still has prospects of a university career (which, moreover, are contradicted by his wife); he often consoles himself with the idea that, "in a few hours", it will be he who directs the lives of others, of his patients [ibid., 53]. The more fate beats him about the head, the more he reminds himself of his roles[11]; the more he calls them to mind, the more they protect him like papier-mâché bastions. In the interior dialogues the images pass one into another: the lady of the party into Albertine, this one into the splendid fifteen-year-old, the domino masks into the students, courage into cowardice. It is from this introspectively inaccessible psychic magma (inaccessible if not to the writer), from the turmoil of the "mid-conscious", that in the tale, as in Svevo's Zeno, identity springs forth, anything but the composed and regulated impulses of the es (as some Freudian readings of the novella and the film would have it).
The double, the mirror, the double existence, the double dream. Schnitzler's tale recounts the story of a chaotic psychic life which, pressed by an indeterminate craving for identity, tries to compose itself, and finally to subsist, in exteriority, but which from this rebounds once more and fades back into the subject, only to begin its course again: the end of the tale is in fact analogous to its beginning, as if to say that one exits the institutional figures only to re-enter them, albeit more enlightened and more debilitated. Kubrick, though repeating to the letter, as was said, the episodes of the tale, even that of the "shady character" (Strolch [Schnitzler 1992, 52]) who menacingly follows him, therefore chooses to select from this bacchanal of interiority one particular aspect, to concentrate the cinematic narration on a privileged point. And he does so by fixing attention on sex. Like it or not, the trait that accompanies, for the most part walled up behind the brow, a good part of human life. By figuratively privileging the area that links sexual desire to its institutional figures, summed up in the heterosexual family, by describing, following Schnitzler, what lies in between, Kubrick thus synthesises by selection the kernel of the Traumnovelle. Ergo: the fact that many aspects of the tale fall away, without the film for that reason renouncing the citation of all the episodes, confirms that the American director means to restate in his own way the sense of the tale that intellectually conquered him.

***

However much the hypothesis of "Kubrick as a reader of Schnitzler" helps, in my view, to look at, judge and enjoy the film, there remain in the latter at least two elements that proceed on their own account. The first is the one already mentioned about "vulgarity", hard to deny, so intentional and calculated as to overturn in its details the measure of Wilhelmine decency that runs through Doppio sogno: to give one further minimal detail, Fridolin's prostitute does not accept the money that Bill's puts in her pocket. The second, spectacular one, is given by the presence in Eyes Wide Shut of a coarse character with didactic functions, Victor Ziegler (embodied by an actor-director such as Sydney Pollack) who, like a modern chorus, tries to make our hero understand what, beyond dreams, reality is. Well then, vulgarity and Ziegler might go together, but in what sense?
Well, the senses, to insist on the double, might be two, not at all mutually exclusive.
The novella (one might observe, to clarify the first) does not pronounce directly on the "truth" at the bottom of the affair, it draws no conclusions. Fridolin, in the morgue, certainly contemplates the corpse of his dream, but no one will ever tell him whether he has before him the impersonal remains of the desired lady, a sign that how "things really stand" remains unsaid. The tale opens and closes in the same way. Not that the ending is in any sense "edifying", but the two symmetrical parentheses enclose a story made of allusions and symbols that the writer narrates, with no intention whatever of "explaining". It is quite clear that for Schnitzler institutions are typically human creatures, without any metaphysical assurance, so much so as to rest on the pragmatic and courageous feminine perception of the sense of life ("Niemals in die Zukunft fragen" [ibid., 88], Albertine makes clear, "never ask questions directed at the future"), but all this, together with the events of the tale, is kept constantly in an atmosphere of suspension, fairy-tale-like and intriguing, as if the very sense of our actions were something one cannot and must not interrogate. The truth of the double dream is all in what appears, in its incongruities, in the frustrated desires, in the efforts to reconstruct, each time, even if provisionally, the lost identity. The efforts, put another way, are not justified by anything else, but neither are they nullified by anything else.
Bill's lady reveals herself, on the contrary, incontrovertibly to be the drugged whore caught with Ziegler, and the doctor's waking dream is in reality a baroque brothel organised by wealthy notables of the city. Ziegler's function, it seems, is to explain. "Listen, Bill, the coarse rich man murmurs in their one-to-one talk before a red billiard table, with words that fall like the tolling of a death knell, no one has killed anyone. Someone went away. It always happens. Life goes on. It keeps going on, until it goes on no more. But you know these things, don't you, Bill?". Bill's authentic knowledge, Ziegler makes clear, comes from his medical profession and boils down, at bottom, to knowing that "life goes on… until it goes on no more". Behind all the oneiric suffering of the characters stands the hallucinated and opaque presence of facts and of their vanishing. But the truth comes above all from the duplicity of sweet Alice, who, however dissolute in the dream, however much she accuses her husband of "wanting to have" his patients and to touch their "little tits", right up to the end of the film still embodies the immaculate wife who refuses betrayal and declares, touching her wedding ring, that she is "married". Immaculate until the very last image when, before the darkness, for an instant without credits, envelops the viewer, she invites her foolish consort, a real coup de théâtre, to fuck. As if to say: another round, another ride. Alice, the little wife, passes into a female simply eager to have sex, and at once (has Bill become the naval officer? One of the many men of the dream with whom she "fucked" in turn?), like the two models who wanted to accompany the doctor to the other end of the rainbow: this is the treasure the rainbow conceals. It thus seems that the end of the film, rather than concluding, rewrites the beginning and the whole sense of the story. The vulgarity of settings and actions, Ziegler's cynicism, Alice's conclusion, do they not, in short, represent Kubrick's satanic gaze bent on dissolving the enigmatic bottom of the Traumnovelle, even as he narrates it?

It may be, then, that, driven by his tragic Enlightenment spirit, Kubrick deliberately wanted to contaminate the abstract and suspended figures of the novella. His addition would be in the sign of pessimism and lucidity. And yet another possible cipher, perhaps more cinematic and Kubrickian (why not? fused with the one just mentioned), could shuffle the cards again. If "saying what it means" (to cite once more Kubrick's sapiential motto) amounts to "making it no longer mean anything", the director's tightrope-walker game might be that of adding further elements that muddle the cards still more; if the novella is a fiction, to draw conclusions from it in a film, in a different mode of fiction, amounts to adding fiction to fiction. Kubrick's additions unsettle, disconcert, invite the question. What does it mean, what sense does it make after almost two hours of images, we ask ourselves as unwitting spectators, in the darkness of the closing credits, that Alice should want to "fuck"? Perhaps it means what the closed box inaccessible to the viewer means in Bella di giorno (Belle de jour by Luis Buñuel, 1967), or the eighteenth-century room at the end of 2001: Odissea nello spazio (2001: A Space Odissey by Stanley Kubrick, 1968). I could also try to explain myself thus: if Lily Briscoe, at the end of Virginia Woolf's Gita al faro, concludes with a swift and, at last, concrete stroke of the brush an affair narrated on the thread of the most complete abstraction, Alice, in a symmetrical and contrary way (Lily gives a sense, Alice takes it away), completes with her last line the coarse and crude varnish that Kubrick deliberately mixes into the Traumnovelle. Mere varnish: and one can imagine, if that is so, the sneer with which the American director will observe, from the paradise of directors, the complacent readings in the sign of emancipation sometimes given of Alice's final "proposal".
As happens in good philosophies, where the holes of reason reveal themselves through reasoning, the holes of sense appear in the throes of solution: the enigma narrated in the Traumnovelle[12] would return in Kubrick doubled. Diversions and embarrassing intermixtures, this could be the further double meaning of Kubrick's "addition", trace the limits of a sense that cannot be commented on outside the cinematic narration.

* * *

The attempt to explain, analyse, decipher the sense of a film through the literary original from which it is drawn (of a film that, moreover, more or less successful as it may be, is the offspring, without rhetoric, of an exceptional mother in childbirth) certainly goes in exactly the opposite direction to the one Kubrick recommended. The direction, precisely, of not explaining his films. But even had I groped in the dark, at the very least, even in that case, it would still be true that the limits of an interpretation come out only by interpreting. There remains, on the other hand, the suspicion, and here it would be Schnitzler who sneers, that the idea according to which a true film eludes interpretation belongs to the institutional identity of a true director.

Bibliography

Citati, P. 2006, La morte della farfalla , Mondadori, Milano. Colli, G. 1977, La sapienza greca. Vol I., Adelphi, Milano. Hensher, P. 1999, Eyes Wide Shut, "Time's Literary Supplement"? Nabokov, V. 1992, Lezioni di letteratura, Garzanti, Milano.

Pound, E. 1973, Selected Prose 1909-1965, New Directions, New York.

Raphael, F. 1999, Eyes Wide Open, Einaudi, Torino.

Schnitzler, A. 1992, Traumnovelle, Fischer Verlag, Francoforte s/M. Id., 1999, Doppio sogno, It. trans. ed. by G. Farese, Adelphi, Milano

Notes

[1] Frederic Raphael's text, a mixture of verbal exchanges with Kubrick and of reflections drawn from the diary kept during the writing of the screenplay, is rich in suggestions, for the most part involuntary, and I shall return to it more than once. "Involuntary" because Raphael's mistaken conviction is that the Traumnovelle is "a very dated and very European tale" [ibid., 54]. In spite of himself, Raphael nonetheless often points to the right track

[2] The line is hardly smooth even in German, and therefore in its translation: "So certain as to have a presentiment that the reality of a single night, like that not even of an entire human life, means at the same time its most intimate truth". The edition of the novella used is that of the Italian translation edited by Giuseppe Farese [Schnitzler 1999]. In some cases, as in this one, I translate directly from the German version [Schnitzler 1992, 88].

[3] Paradigmatic in this regard is the review that appeared in the "Time's Literary Supplement" [Hensher 1999, 20].

[4] Kubrick might well have said of his way of filming what Scott Fitzgerald said of his writing: "All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath" [cited in Citati 2006, 46], to reveal by concealing.

[5] Note how, from the very beginning, the object of desire hides its identity: the party at which (mimetic) desire is reborn is a "masked comedy"! [Schnitzler 1992, 8]. A source of arousal, but with a "disappointing" result.

[6] But the Traumnovelle too is no joke when it comes to symbolic symmetries, if anything they are more explicit here than in Kubrick; think of the constant recurrence of the "double": from the two domino masks of the masked party, to the two shady figures who go to fetch Nachtigall, to the "strange clinical cases of double existences" [Schnitzler 1999, 96], to the two gentlemen who call on Countess D., and so on.

[7] Once again, a symbol that is by no means absent from the novella: Nachtigall watches the "orgy" through a mirror [Schnitzler 1999, 45]; in Gibiser's mask shop, in a mirror, "Fridolin saw a thin pilgrim who was none other than himself, and marvelled that everything proceeded so naturally" [ibid., 50-51].

[8] The suggestion recalls two Orphic fragments: "For this reason they also say that Hephaestus made a mirror for Dionysus, and that the god, looking into it and contemplating his own image, threw himself into creating the whole of plurality", "Dionysus, in fact, when he had set his image in the mirror, followed after it, and thus was shattered into the whole" [Colli 1977, 251]. The place of recognition is the same as that of shattering.

[9] It is interesting to note that, in the literature of the period, the Italian, besides being an inhabitant of a museum-country, is often seen as a strange creature surrounded by an intense, contagious and unhealthy sensual atmosphere; think, among the many examples in this regard, of Mann's Morte a Venezia or of that by now Romanised Englishman who is Gilbert Osmond in Henry James's Ritratto di signora. Though not exactly flattering, compared with the way the Italian is regarded today, pizza, mafia and buffoonery, one can almost be proud of the verdict.

[10] It is the hypothesis advanced by Glaucon in Plato's Repubblica, far more bitter and disconcerting than the one proposed by the polemical Thrasymachus, for whom justice is "the advantage of the stronger". Far graver would it be if, instead of being, as Thrasymachus would have it, the instrument for cajoling and commanding others, the idea of justice were "contrived" "when one does not have the strength to overpower them" [Repubblica, II, 359b. The same argument is proposed by Callicles in the Gorgia, 482 ff.].

[11] He changes mask: "Fridolin thought it was now time to put on his disguise. He took off his fur and donned the friar's habit, just as he was accustomed to do every morning in his hospital ward when he slipped on his white coat" [ibid., 53]

[12] It is worth observing that the estranging aspect of a clarification that in reality does not clarify, precisely Ziegler's, is heightened to the point of paradox in the Italian version of the film thanks to a translation error. In the original version Ziegler reveals to Bill that the affair at the castle was only a charade, a term that in English, in a figurative sense, becomes a synonym for "pretence". In Italian, on the other hand, "sciarada", used figuratively, continues to carry over the meaning of the game, and therefore denotes an "intricate situation", an enigma (the meaning of "pretence" is not attested even by Battaglia). So in spite of itself, and in spite of Kubrick, to the Italian public alone, Ziegler confesses by a slip that the whole party was and remains a grandiose charade, a puzzle. Had he witnessed the misstep, Kubrick, so precise as sometimes to oversee in person the versions of his films, instead of being indignant, would have been exceptionally delighted.

Luigi Cimmino teaches Gnoseology and Ethical Paradigms at the University of Perugia.