Announced in the previous issue of Studi Umbri, at the head of Luigi Cimmino’s essay, this short piece is dedicated to the memory of Stanley Kubrick, on the twentieth anniversary of his death, which coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the release in cinemas of his last film, Eyes Wide Shut. A few modest reflections on a misunderstood masterpiece – hardly a rarity, misunderstanding, on the part of the critics even before the public, when it comes to the work of a genius of twentieth-century cinema (of twentieth-century culture?). The text, from which I have removed the notes (unnecessary in this context), is presented here just as it appeared in the collective volume Il doppio sogno di Stanley Kubrick, first published by Il Castoro in 2007 and reissued by Rubbettino in 2017, whom we naturally thank for the permission granted to us. In the next issue of Studi Umbri, which as usual will be online in the autumn, we will publish the essay by Daniele Dottorini that appeared alongside the others in the same collection, closing this 2019 in memory of Stanley Kubrick. gp

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Thus, with immaculate abstraction from its nefarious profanations and its meritorious fidelities – both the one and the other of no importance –, the present film is highly vigorous.
(J.L. Borges, Discusión)

In the epigraph above, a piece entitled Film, the Argentine master took such pleasure in his ignorance of the text from which the film he was reviewing had been drawn (The Murderer Karamazov, 1931, directed by F. Otsep). I will not presume to imitate his irony. What I will try to do, instead, is simply to treat the works we are concerned with as if they were, as in fact they are, autonomous and independent. For although on this occasion Kubrick’s work may appear, more than on other occasions, almost a photocopy of the source work, a closer analysis reveals it in all its autonomy and complexity.

Among the great masters of twentieth-century directing, Stanley Kubrick – given the small number of his films – is perhaps the one who most effectively measured himself against important narrative works, disproving, in more than one case, the commonplace that “a masterpiece does not beget a masterpiece”. Without drawing up the list yet again, it is enough to cite Lolita, on whose screenplay Vladimir Nabokov collaborated, and who willingly accepted the changes Kubrick proposed and later spoke words of appreciation for the final result. And Nabokov was certainly not a man of easy tastes, ready to settle for whatever came.

It is perhaps worth asking, then, why Kubrick wanted to film Dream Story, after an incubation lasting some thirty years, given that for Schnitzler himself the work on this text had an almost equally long gestation (roughly twenty years). What is so fundamental (and lasting) in the story of a bourgeois couple going through a crisis is, I believe, the point from which to set out for a treatment that does not confine itself to considering the formal success of the film. Reflecting on the temporal shift (the years, and the time of year) carried out in the film version, on the added scenes, on the quality of the images, on the continual metafilmic references, on the choice of the leads (leaving aside the tabloid gossip), may perhaps lead to a better understanding of the specific mechanisms internal to cinema’s narrative mode, of cinema as industry and as art (an art, it is worth stressing, that is collegial, in which the author – the director – always has only partial control of the work, even when he is a kind of extraordinary factotum of cinema such as Kubrick was). This sort of analytical reflection, of inquiry, can certainly yield interesting indications about Kubrick’s cinema, a cinema that thinks itself and its own limits at the close of its first century of life and on the ridge of the new millennium. But I believe this order of considerations cannot take us very far in a deep understanding of this particular story, of the sense that Kubrick grasped in it. I will therefore try to approach the question from a different angle, inevitably neglecting some of the more strictly technical aspects of making cinema – as of making literature – in order to discuss a few points I consider fundamental for giving an answer, a sensible one I hope, to the question with which I began: why this story? Why this story today?

***

Schnitzler works on Dream Story between 1921 and 1925, but a first draft dates back to 1907 [Schnitzler 1977, 117]; the gestation of the work coincides precisely with the twilight of a world: the old order shatters, and with it shatters the structure of the Self as it had gradually taken shape in the West. It is the work of Freud, Einstein, Schönberg (to cite only the tips of an iceberg, an iceberg that, perhaps not by chance, is largely made up of thinkers of Jewish origin) that marks what would be, in many respects simultaneously, and paradoxically one might say, both the apogee and the funeral of Modernity. And if one does not yet see, or at least does not see so glaringly, the absolute dominion of the Economic over the Political, which is surely one, if not the most important, of the distinguishing features of the passage to so-called postmodernity, the more receptive antennae already pick up the signals heralding the further enormous upheavals that will follow within a few years.

Thus Vienna, according to Karl Kraus, is the “experimental laboratory of the end of the world” [cited in Calimani 1988, 31]. And it is Hermann Broch, albeit in an essay of 1948 [ibid., 32-33], who identifies in Vienna, “joyous Apocalypse”, the centre of the Wertvakuum, the void of values.

Schnitzler lives and works in this atmosphere, is perfectly aware of it, and describes it with great lucidity. Awareness and lucidity are the attributes best suited to define a body of work, and a method, that, revolving around a few themes – betrayal, disillusion or rather disappointment (in love above all, but not only), death – and digging relentlessly into the inner life of masterfully created characters, manages, sometimes through apparently irrelevant details, to give us back the Zeitgeist with greater fullness and complexity than far weightier socio-political analyses, both contemporary and later.

***

“It will never be the theme you have chosen, never the spirit in which you have treated it, that will hand your work down to the future: it will always and only be the characters you have conceived and the atmosphere you will have created around them” [Schnitzler 1988, 1717].

This aphorism, which is a fully formed declaration of poetics, accounts well for what has been said, and should be kept in mind because, in my view, here lies a fundamental dividing line between the poetics of the authors we are considering.

Schnitzler works on character, constructs figures and follows their psychological development, with a precise awareness (and knowledge) of the context in which these characters act. But the codes of conduct and the conditionings, the rules and the habits, which are the limits within which we all move, are almost never recounted to us in the terms of a narrative frame; we learn them, rather, we almost sense them, as guides that direct the characters’ action and thought. The fundamental tension, the one that determines all of us, that is, the dynamic and always precarious balance between nature and culture, between the immediate claims of instinct and the rational subjection to institutions, shows through in the becoming of the characters. The short span of the narratives (the form in which Schnitzler excels) leaves little room for digressions, and the frequent shifts of register (dialogue, interior monologue, whose technique Schnitzler brings to a degree of extreme refinement), which lend themselves well to giving depth to characters, are less suited to the construction of settings. And so of the world of Fridolin and Albertine, as indeed of that of Else, of Therese and of Gustl, and of so many other Schnitzlerian antiheroes, we often come to know more from what they tell us than from what the narrator tells us. Schnitzler brings us to the heart of the matter by way of empathy.

***

“…setting can represent a decisive determining factor, can constitute a frame understood as a series of physical or social causes, something, in short, that the individual cannot control on his own. […]. The great city (Paris, London, New York) is the most real of the characters in many modern novels” [Wellek/Warren 1999, 298-299].

This assertion, drawn from a capital text of twentieth-century literary criticism, may help, provisionally, to characterise Kubrick’s approach to narrative (I deliberately avoid distinctions of technique) and satisfies, at least in part, and by contrast, a hypothesis about the Kubrickian method in the staging of Dream Story.

What I mean is that Kubrick, though it is true that he follows the Schnitzlerian text almost with the utmost fidelity, sets out from the context rather than from the characters and their psychologies. The transposition to the New York of the end of the millennium, which as well as underlining analogies also underlines differences, is the clear sign of a possibility: the possibility, or rather the necessity, of preserving the sense of that specific narrative. Perhaps, in part, it is also the will to take a distance, which does not mean arming oneself with detached cynicism, but should rather be read as the need to objectify in order to understand. To reconstruct in the studio the Vienna of Kakanian dissolution would certainly have been no more complicated than reconstructing that New York, and Kubrick amply proved that he had no difficulty directing period films; it is enough, in this regard, to recall the Hogarthian eighteenth century through which Redmond Barry moves.

Kubrick’s work – in the specific case of Eyes Wide Shut markedly so, in other works perhaps less evidently – has the character of a kind of Skinnerian experimentation, and this character is in any case a constant of his approach to narrative. And if for Schnitzler I have spoken of awareness and lucidity, the same attributes, obviously, must be granted to Kubrick, and moreover, for both, one would have to add a diagnostic capacity closely bound to an absolute therapeutic agnosticism (it is all too obvious, then, to account for the use of clinical terminology: one – Schnitzler – was a physician, the other – Kubrick – was the son of a physician).

Representation, in both, is always problematic: neither Kubrick nor, still less, Schnitzler ever simplifies things: reality is complex, and consolatory recipes do not belong to their narrative registers. It is these considerations that readily account for a critical literature so disparate and antithetical. I am referring mostly, of course, to the criticism written in the immediate aftermath, more journalistic than reasoned, since it is by now fairly obvious that the long run clearly vindicates the two authors, entirely to the disadvantage of their detractors, so much so as to render wholly negligible the charges of cynicism, when not of pure and simple nihilism, that have repeatedly been levelled at both.

For whatever the comparison is worth, the mistrust – when not the categorical rejection – of a certain part of the critics, and of the public naturally, towards both Schnitzler’s work and Kubrick’s, has many analogies with the repulsion Wittgenstein felt for Shakespeare’s work, which, according to the Austrian thinker, errs in never taking sides.

Now, both Schnitzler and Kubrick, working on the same narrative theme, manage to induce in the reader/viewer a tangle of feelings that is a mixture of attraction and repulsion, of involvement and detachment, and which, as the result of such different narrative methods, in the end bear strong resemblances to each other.

***

Dream Story opens with a few sentences of a fairy tale, which sound like a vague warning; they tell the reader, that is, that the territory he is about to venture into is not made of clearly distinguishable blacks and whites, but is rather a path that constantly fades into an infinite range of greys, since between dream and reality – and the narration of both – it is often hard to discern a sharp break, just as between the conscious and the unconscious there is always the middle consciousness (a figure of the psyche which, for Schnitzler, when he theorises it, is also one of the grounds of his disagreement with Freud) [Schnitzler 1988, 1693-1694], a sort of moment of synthesis between the deep inner drives and the highest level of consciousness in constant relation with the external world. The mutual confession that follows this first scene is an introduction to the discovery of the differences of character that mark Fridolin and Albertine. If it is true that the text is quantitatively dominated by Fridolin’s presence, and indeed the main narrative line can readily be reduced to a small odyssey sub specie Bloom, the qualitative dominant undoubtedly refers to Albertine. The text is strewn with signals that allow one to form a precise idea of Fridolin’s character (of the absence of it): beginning with the different measure by which he gauges his own right to desire (the right, too, to the satisfaction of desire) as against Albertine’s right to desire, even though hers is merely yearned for or dreamed. And continuing with the constant undertone of pettiness that permeates all his reactions: the fear of being ill judged holds him back from taking care of a beggar; and it is certainly not, or at least not in the first instance, the risk of infection that prevents him from having relations with the young prostitute, but, again, the fear of social judgement; he does not react to the students’ provocation, he strains to rationalise, he recalls past duels, but his trembling knees betray him. Equally immediate to see is his propensity to live in watertight compartments: on one side the family, the secure affections, the first institution, the one on which all deep certainties are founded and on whose stability depends one’s trust in all further institutions; on the other, the rest of the world: the profession, social relations with their obligations, rights and duties, not least, on the contrary often foremost, those of self-presentation, with the masks they entail.

It is clear that those listed are all traits denoting a “bourgeois” vision of existence, and if to these we add a need for the legal regulation of relations [Kocka 1989] (whose norms, decidedly favourable to the male, changed little over the course of the twentieth century), we can better understand the deep unease with which Fridolin receives Albertine’s confession. When Fridolin leaves the house, called to the councillor’s bedside, he absent-mindedly kisses Albertine: “…as if the conversation of the preceding hours had already been erased from his memory…” [Schnitzler 1977, 20]. At the sight of the beggar Fridolin quickens his pace: “…so as to escape as soon as possible from every kind of responsibility and temptation.” [ibid. 30]. But everything that will happen to him from now on, all the encounters, all the experiences, will be marked by an afterthought that, winding inexorably upon itself, will lead Fridolin to the crucial and ineluctable realisation that: “…all that order, that harmony, that security of his existence were nothing but appearance and lie” [ibid., 92].

The wishful ideas of revenge, doomed to founder, which reach their climax in the encounter with the masked woman at the orgy, one of the rare moments in which Fridolin, with the strength of desperation, or rather with the courage of one who has nothing to lose, shows a strong and unconditioned reaction, cannot but turn against him, making the sense of frustration and disorientation grow exponentially, that sense which, from Albertine’s confession onward, dominates him and from which he cannot free himself. What Fridolin faces is an experience of death in life [Caruso 1988]: the jealousy that gnaws at him, that guides all his actions and reactions, will dig into, and break apart, down to the foundations, the construction of his self and his world, to the point of leaving him wholly hollowed out and ready to abandon everything and everyone in order to: “…begin a new life, under a different guise” [Schnitzler 1977, 96]. The sense of emptiness that follows the ruin of the bases on which an existence is built, which in its peculiar bourgeois premise has the shape of an inverted pyramid, is one of the classic legacies of modernity, but the roots of such a construction lie far back in the history of Western culture; and to account for the duration and the permanence, in many respects unchanged, of this topos, a literary one too, but first and more deeply one of the psyche, I will cite two poets, Guido Cavalcanti and Yehuda Amichai, as distant in time and space as they are close in formulating a concept in many ways analogous. Of Guido see the sonnet Tu m’ai sì piena di dolor la mente [Cavalcanti 1993, 68], in particular the two final tercets:

I go about like one who is outside of life,/who seems, to whoever looks at him, a man/made of copper or of stone or of wood,/who keeps himself going by artifice alone/and bears within his heart a wound/that is the open sign that he is dead.

By Y. Amichai, a Jewish poet of the twentieth century, born, in Germany, around the time Schnitzler was completing the writing of Dream Story, and dead, in Jerusalem, just before the release of Eyes Wide Shut, a poem from the collection But a Great Happiness Lies Hidden in All This (1976), When the Beloved Woman [Amichai 2001, 63], renders with equal force and pregnancy the sense of emptiness that follows abandonment:

When the beloved woman leaves him,/a man is invaded within by an emptiness/round as a cave/in which magnificent stalactites will form./Slowly, as within History,/the empty space reserved for meaning,/for the purpose of everything, for tears.

Fridolin’s cathartic (?) tears, which well up unstoppably at the sight of the little mask on the pillow beside Albertine – a recognition, this, among the most complex and polysemous that contemporary cinema has given us –, those tears that will set the final confession in motion, will serve to fill, at least partly, this emptiness round as a cave, an emptiness that, however, can no longer be filled with meaning, with the purpose of everything.

But Fridolin, who is not a hero, nor a romantic adventurer, had already confirmed his bourgeois character to us through his capacity, his attempt, to reach an armistice – not a peace – with the turmoil of feelings that has invaded him: “The body lying behind him in the vaulted chamber, […] no longer represented for him, nor could it any longer represent, anything but the pale corpse of the past night, irrevocably destined to decay” [Schnitzler 1977, 111]. Now, in closing, in a final attempt to recover at least in part the certainties that vanished in the course of the few, frantic hours that have marked this, his personal passage from bourgeois modernity, with the traits we have listed, to a condition of uncertainty, the typical constant of a postmodern self, labile, fragmented and continually exposed to the shifting wind of chance, Fridolin entrusts himself once more to Albertine, but the verdict could not be less consoling: “One cannot mortgage the future” [ibid., 114]. The epilogue, with the usual noises of the street, the victorious ray of light and a child’s clear laughter, can be understood as a “happy ending” only if one chooses to set aside everything that prepares it. The disconcerting stubbornness of Fridolin’s attempt to return to the status quo ante would suggest, rather, a kind of authorial sarcasm. Only a few lines earlier Albertine, with an apodictic pronouncement, had declared that: “…the reality of a single night, and indeed not even that of an entire human life, is not, at the same time, also its deepest truth” [ibid., 114], a sibylline sentence, bordering on the senseless, unless one wishes to read that “and indeed not even” as a more pregnant “just as neither”, conjugating the verb in the singular, a construction not so sharply adversative; a halo of ambiguity remains, but which nonetheless better accounts for Fridolin’s reply: “And no dream is entirely a dream” [ibid., 114], and condenses the clot of experiences accumulated in so short a time. Naturally this is a small forcing, which my way of proceeding perhaps requires, but which finds support in this further Borgesian quotation, well suited to clarifying my hypothesis, from the Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz: “Any destiny, however long and complicated, in reality consists of a single moment: the moment in which a man knows once and for all who he is” [Borges 1961, 54].

In reality, neither the victorious ray of light nor the child’s clear laughter will be able to make time march backwards. Perhaps the ménage of Fridolin and Albertine will last, but nothing will ever be as it was before.

***

Stanley Kubrick, with a masterly move, fine chess player that he was, takes Fridolin and Albertine (who become Bill and Alice) and places them in a context that, one presumes, ought to overturn their behaviour, their deep convictions, entirely. But, with no very great surprise, one finds oneself obliged to observe that, saving the due differences, which are of form rather than of substance, Kubrick’s New York has many analogies with Schnitzler’s Vienna. In this end of the millennium it is New York that is the metropolis identifying itself as the centre of a world without a centre. From New York radiate all the innovative tendencies, progress as the liberation of man from the slavery of need, progress as the demon that massacres nature and man. The capital of the Empire of the West is at once the most and the least American of American cities, the site of the crisis and the dissolution of Western culture. And the Krausian epithet of experimental laboratory of the end of the world fits this artificial New York just as well as it fits the Vienna of the finis Austriae.

Between the first draft of Dream Story and the cinema release of Eyes Wide Shut the twentieth century has passed; the dissolution of Kakania was followed by Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Korea and Vietnam, a century that transformed the world and – ought to have transformed – consciences. But in reality what Kubrick shows us is that certain constants remain unchanged in their most salient characteristics. The couple’s relationship, in the sense of marriage, of family, which is at the centre of this narrative, continues to be a nodal point of the stability of the Western social system, and in the couple’s relationship very little of substance has changed since Schnitzler described it. That sort of memoir set down by Frederic Raphael [Raphael 1999], co-screenwriter of Eyes Wide Shut, made up of diary entries, digressions and various considerations on the Kubrickian method, contains, besides several curiosities and a few small unkindnesses, some interesting observations on what Kubrick had seen in Schnitzler’s text and on what he wanted to draw from it.

The repeated recommendation to keep to Arthur’s text, the repeated prohibition against marking the characters’ Jewishness, the decision to keep the dialogic progression almost unchanged, are signs of a substantial interest in the deep core of the Schnitzlerian material. That all this, obviously, then had to be rethought in images lies, it is banal to say, in the nature of the medium used to carry out the transposition.

Victor Ziegler – the only real departure from the Schnitzlerian text –, as the chief producer of symmetries, in the scenes in which he is the protagonist, serves Kubrick to give a logical form to Bill’s experiences. A kind of deus ex machina, Ziegler opens and closes the circle of Bill’s obsession. It is in Ziegler’s sumptuous residence that Bill first meets Amanda “Mandy” Curran, the one who will then be the Alcestis to a Bill/Admetus wholly disoriented and helpless in the setting of the orgy. And it is again during the party at Ziegler’s house that, for both Bill and Alice, aroused by the courtship they are subjected to, he by the models, she by the romantically démodé Sandor Szavost, that “mimetic desire” of Girardian memory is triggered (on whose mechanism Luigi Cimmino dwells more fully [in the essay published in the previous issue of Studi Umbri]), which will lead them to make love “ardently, as had not happened for some time” [Schnitzler 1977, 12]. But after the intoxication of the night the prosaic greyness of morning returns without fail, and with it the accustomed labours return. Something, however, a kind of woodworm, has begun to dig its tunnels in the minds of Bill and Alice.

The passage from mimetic desire to the mutual confessions, and from these to provocation, triggers in Bill that crisis of jealousy, itself mimetic, which will lead him to the attempt to lose himself in a night of adventure.

Now, what characterises Bill Harford, and perhaps distinguishes him from Fridolin, is the impression that his run through the night is not properly a search for the fulfilment of desire, but rather a desperate search for desire, and it is for this reason that Bill cannot lose himself and his attempts are destined to remain unfulfilled. The orgy, then, that macabre “masked performance”, can be read as a synthesis of the journey Fridolin has made in order to become Bill. From the first circle of female nudes – classical statuary – passing through the Gothic and the Baroque and on through all the “-isms” of the twentieth century. Masks, that is, constructions elaborated for the sole purpose of avoiding the essential, and fatal, confrontation with one’s own nakedness-absence: death! Only to find oneself at last before a bare face, which in its being unmasked is far more naked than the bodies that, a few moments earlier, all around him, were displaying themselves with mechanical asepsis in what ought to be the supreme gesture of passion and feeling, but is by now nothing other than rhythmic and senseless aestheticism. A face, Bill’s, deliberately (cynically?) so inexpressive as to be, precisely by (dis)grace of that deficiency, the paradigm of the pettiness of man floundering in this new joyous apocalypse. And this floundering, this wandering, in the ambiguity of the double sense, which is then not so double after all, of going without a goal, which one need only reinforce to indicate the pursuit of a wrong goal, an errant one precisely, destined (and an idea of destiny, of immutable fate, which comes to us from the Greek world, still marks unfailingly, now as then, each person’s reflection on his own living) ontologically to resolve into a failure, into the impossibility of satisfying desires. Perhaps precisely in this, and only in this, “minuscule” difference can we measure the time that separates us from Schnitzler: the institutions we have inherited no longer account (if ever they did) for what we are, for what we would like to be. On the contrary, it seems that a kind of inertial habituation leads us to perpetuate models of behaviour and habits we have inherited. Yet a small breath of wind is enough, and the house of cards, even that of Prince Amgiad, inside which we believed we had put our plans and our hopes in safety, falls to crumbs. Values, to use a generic and overused term, still lie to some extent in meaning, and meaning seems to be guarded only by the women. Looking closely, it is the women, beginning with Alice and continuing with Mandy, Marianne, Domino and the little whore herself, the mask-maker’s daughter, who have the only gratuitous and generous reactions, and for that very reason reactions rich in meaning.

I do not believe, finally, that the closing imperative, that “Fuck!” with which Kubrick has Alice close the film, is simply a gratuitous vulgarity, a submission to the general degradation of discourse and of feeling; I think rather that it is an extreme attempt to tell us that, hic et nunc, there are not many ways to find solid ground on which to try, and try again, in an infinite series, to build something solid, since: the future cannot be mortgaged and then, obviously, life goes on until one day it will go on no more.

The second part of the aside in the preceding sentence belongs, as a line and in spirit, to Victor Ziegler, and here there is an evident departure from what I was saying above, with respect to the prohibition Kubrick imposed on Raphael against marking the characters’ Jewishness: Ziegler is Jewish, Jewish in his name, in the crass and opulent luxury in which he lives, in the cynical vulgarity with which he deals in whisky and in human beings, in particular women. But Ziegler is no ordinary Jew: Ziegler is an assimilated Jew, and an assimilated Jew is the most bourgeois of the bourgeois, and often the most agnostic of agnostics. Victor Ziegler represents us perfectly, Jews or Gentiles that we are, as the paradigm of the male-chauvinist cynicism that for more than a century has governed this kind of endless decline of the West. In this sense I believe it right and warranted to affix to the credits of Kubrick’s film that inspired by: in the sense that Kubrick had the courage and the lucidity to carry to its extreme consequences the discourse that Schnitzler, in his splendid and accomplished tale, sometimes, whether by stylistic choice or by necessity dictated by the context in which he lives, leaves between the lines and sometimes elides.

I close with Jean-Luc Godard, to give, in epilogue, the right weight to all I have said so far: “Film criticism […] is the cinema listings: ‘Today at the Imperial, from two to four, a film with Steve McQueen’, that is film criticism; at least it says something, one knows where to go to see the film; the rest is literature, it is something else entirely” [Godard 1982, 98].

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Giorgio Pangaro, an editor of Studi Umbri, edits, together with Luigi Cimmino, the text series “Corpo a corpo” between literature and cinema for Rubbettino Editore.