Nine: Alice dreaming
Kubrick inceptions his audience
Welcome to the fourth movement, the fifth act, the crown and king’s road of our epic December series on your new fave Christmas movie. In the closing posts we’ll be tackling filthy lucre among other filths, those bosom bodies Eros and Thanatos, and the annual festival of heteronormativity. But today we plunge into the Land of Nod. Before you take your sleeping pills, and if you’re new here, you might wanna start with the first post.
The film’s episodes in their night-day pattern of arousal and petite-mort are not the whole story of Eyes Wide Shut. Neither is the fact that the episodes in the first half of the film all get curtailed. Had that been the story, the film would’ve been more like a sex comedy, in which a hapless horny man is forever cockblocked by the universe.1
Instead the film’s presiding spirit reveals itself when Bill gets back home from his misadventures to find Alice laughing in her sleep over a dream, which on waking she tells him in tears.
Over the film’s opening titles and montage we heard a waltz till it was silenced by Bill turning off his stereo: as well as on the motion-picture score it’d been playing in his apartment, i.e. it was ‘diegetic sound’. So too Alice’s dream happens in the world of the story, but its central, anguished place in the film sends out ripples that the film is itself all a dream. Not in the cheesy sense that the events in it didn’t happen. Rather that dreams for the film are also non-diagetic: as with a score or soundtrack, they’re part of the artistic form of Eyes Wide Shut.
Take how critics have always derided its stagey performances and sound-stagey locations. There’s mad Marion, flaming Alan Cumming, Milich with his Russki the Grouch act. Then there’s the cityscape of New York as recreated in Pinewood Studios: for all the painstaking production design it looks uncanny, in no small part because of the lack of pigeons, as well as the way it’s lit whether at night or day (we never see any sky—Eyes Wide Shut is another film that could’ve been called Dark City). Outside of studio footage, Kubrick used stock or second-unit footage of New York for establishing shots; back-projection for the view from the rear window of Bill’s taxi; while in one shot he dollied the camera backwards as Tom Cruise walked towards it while the street around was digitally painted in.2
If Kubrick had meant to tell his film in a dream-mode then all of the above isn’t evidence he failed to pull off a convincing replica of New York City and its people. The ersatz setting, the broad performances reinforce the off-kilter, cobbled-together quality of a dream. Or in the words of Ziegler explaining away the masked ball (and the film for that matter): it’s all staged, fake.
The dream-mode extends to Eyes Wide Shut’s narrative drive, such as it is. On first watch it might seem less a story than a “barren, shadowy succession of dreary, lurid and scurrilous libidinous adventures, none of which are pursued to the end”3—not least when each ends and leads to the next in such contrived ways. Just as Bill’s about to have sex with Domino and dishonour his marriage, his wife phones. He then happens to pass Café Sonata where pianist Nick - the college friend he’d had the mis/fortune to meet at the Zieglers’ Christmas party - is playing for one more night. Nick had told Bill he’d be there, but after Bill left Domino’s he seems only to stumble on the café (and the script makes clear this is what he does). At the ball Nick let him onto, a masked Bill happens to look up at a balcony just as two masked figures look down and nod at him. And when he returns uninvited to the site of the ball, within seconds a car has met him at the gate with his written warning.
These in/convenient coincidences give way to unexplained mysteries. Back home from the ball with his tail between his legs, Bill secretes his costume in his office, the camera tracking him all the while—nothing falls out of the Rainbow Fashions bag. By the time he takes the costume back to Milich the mask has gone walkies. It returns later that night, found on his pillow next to Alice’s sleeping head (Plink! goes the piano. Plink!). How did it get there? Is its jewel-like placement on the pillow a query from Alice? Or a final warning from the elites at the ball? Or did the mask, as in a dream, put itself there?
The hardest moment, though, for which to find a rational, in-world explanation is Alice’s dream. Laughing as she slept, crying when she wakes, she tells Bill that in the dream they were both naked and afraid; she then had sex with the naval officer she’d told him about, then orgiastic group-sex as she laughed at her naked husband. She dreamed this while or just after he’d been at a masked orgy where he was almost stripped naked and sexually humiliated, and where he’d ended up to avenge her fantasy of sex with the naval officer.
His experience and her dream overlap in time and content near enough you might think she’s psychic (maybe she can shine like Danny Torrance). But we don’t need to invoke the supernatural at the plot level to justify this coincidence. All the justification it needs is the form of the film: it’s a ‘Traumnovelle’, a dream story. So it has to have spooky coincidences and convenient rescues. Not to mention a sleepwalking passivity in its protagonist.
Traditionally it’s not good drama for a protagonist to be as passive as Bill is in the first, ‘night’ half of the film. For one, he never has to try too hard to get what he wants and cheat on Alice (which of course can be read as him not really wanting it); instead opportunities to cheat keep jumping from the water into his lap. Every significant female character propositions him,4 except for Mandy the OD’d model (who only pretends to in order to save him like he saved her). Neither does Bill ever have to decide not to cheat. Fate always intervenes first.
Resolving scene after scene with outside intervention - so not in fact resolving them - is only bad drama if we forget this drama is a dream.5 Specifically the sort of dream where you’re just about to wank or fuck till somebody or something disturbs you. (Talk about coitus interruptus.)
You might still prefer to think of these interruptions, for all they chime with our real-world experience of dreams, as nothing more than a plot device. As with digressions or delays, they’re what helped Kubrick draw out his tale longer, replenish our interest, maintain the film’s suspense.
True, Alice’s dream does function as a plot point, as well as point of symmetry. Her telling Bill her fantasy about the naval officer kicked off his jealous rage and the ‘night’ phase of the film. After that night’s nadir Bill looks ready to wind his cock in. But Alice telling Bill her dream about fucking the naval officer and many others while she laughed at him6 tops his rage back up and kicks off the ‘day’ phase of the film. In it, he’ll chase his leads from the night before, both sexual and maybe criminal and in either case ending in the same ominous place…
And it’s in the ominous that we find Kubrick’s last and most artful use of dreams. More than a plot device, more even than applying ‘dream logic’ to get from scene to scene, telling his film as a dream was what he needed to impress on us its whole point. Because if Eyes Wide Shut is a dream, who’s dreaming it? Why?
One way to define realist art is that which hides rather than shows its working. The challenge, then, for any realist artist in designing their work well is to become Flaubert’s godlike author: present everywhere and visible nowhere.
In this lies the achievement, the fruitful irony of realist art: that it has a design and meaning at one level, while at another it works on us in such a way we can make-believe everything it portrays is as contingent and undesigned as real life. Hence why if a realist artwork fails we say it was contrived, that in its contrivances we felt the heavy hand of the author, tugging us this way, poking at that, all to make sure we got their point—when real life has none.
Now compare this to dreams. Are they contingent, undesigned—or contrived?
Easiest is to think of them as messages from the supernatural: gods, astral planes, dead ancestors—like our own ancestors used to. This would make dreams as premeditated, designed, as meant as any message. Psychoanalysis dispenses with the supernatural but holds on to meaning: dreams are the return of repressed feelings, a message - albeit garbled - from our subconscious.
For materialists dreams have no meanings but what we read into them when awake (which would make the forebodings of a dream while dreamt more like a nightly simulation of the overdetermined ‘meaningfulness’ of psychosis). At most, it’s in our evolutionary interest to utilise dreams: since we have them and read meaning into them, there’s an advantage in treating dreams as safe practice scenarios. In and of themselves they’re like any other bodily process: self-caused but not designed, with import rather than meaning as such, like running a fever or having an upset stomach.
But Kubrick, a dialectic filmmaker since at least 2001, was wise enough to know that the truth about dreams lay in a synthesis of the oppositions above. Eyes Wide Shut is that synthesis.
Here’s how. While you’re dreaming a dream, you take it literally. Weird as the contents may get, they feel like they’re really happening; that is, they feel contingent, organic (and so, strictly speaking, when we say a waking experience is dream-like we mean like a remembered dream). Hence our strong emotions towards what happens in a dream - the dread, the grief, the lust and so on - stronger than we’d feel if we knew during the dream it was ‘just a dream.’
Lucid dreaming is the usual exception: knowing during a dream it is a dream so feeling and acting accordingly. But we needn’t get into the wild weeds of oneironautics to find a kind of consciousness in dreams already, to find designs on us…
Have you ever had a plot-twist in a dream? Not just a surprise or shock but an impressive rug-pull moment. If the materialists are right and dreams are useful if random mental burblings, how is that possible? For a dream to have wrong-footed you, subverted expectations, set up content ahead of time which paid off well and surprisingly (and - typically - unpleasantly) it would’ve had to have premeditated, to have planned ahead: conscious mental states which you were unconscious of. But how can you wow with a magic trick when you’re both the audience and the magician? How do you explain this without returning to the supernatural?
A formalist credo I once made up is ‘There are no coincidences in art.’7 And in dreams? Maybe not either. Maybe a neater way to explain the paradox above would be to treat dreams like realist artworks.
Because what if dreams are contrived, consciously designed— by you: intended8 or meant and therefore meaningful? But designed in such a way that during the dream your intentional design is buried, which is why we react to the dream almost as if it were real. You are the godlike author, present everywhere and visible nowhere.9
With dreams and realist art alike being designed but with the designer palmed away for the duration of the experience, what a suitable marriage of theme and form it was for Kubrick to make a film in a dream-like mode about dreams!
Except he went one step further.
Realist artworks have to submerge their design into the background; that is, they have to ‘naturalise’ their contrivances so the audience can pretend not to notice them, so the author’s busy hand doesn’t show. But Eyes Wide Shut isn’t our dream that we’re wrapped up in. We’re meant to realise it’s a dream at the time: that dreams are the film’s mode. In other words Kubrick no longer had to submerge his designs. It’s a feature, not a bug that we detect behind his film’s supposed naturalness all its artificiality (that we find, for instance, that stabbing two-note Ligeti piano motif so over-the-top). The artificiality, the contrivances, the working ought to be detectable since the dream-medium is the message. Like a dream the film is sending a message: to Bill and to his dream-interpreters, us.
What is that message? In the last scene of Eyes Wide Shut Bill tells Alice “no dream is ever just a dream.” What for the film lies beyond that ‘just’?
Even its lighting gives us a hint. From scene to scene Kubrick alternated blue light and red light: red at the table where Nick tells Bill of the ball; blue in the bedroom during Alice’s dream and Bill’s confession. Red light, blue light, red, blue. This in a faster alternation would be the lights on a police car or an ambulance. Eyes Wide Shut is a 2hr40min-long alarm.
For it’s not only the interruptions to Bill’s encounters during the night-half of the film that we should read as dream-like. When Ziegler tells him, “You’ve been way out of your depth for the last 24 hours”, he is, on the surface, ticking him off for his foolhardy ignorance during the day-half of the film; subtextually, though, the line of dialogue implies the events of that day have been as dreamful as the night before.10 In the night and day, Bill got verbal and written warnings from people at the masked ball; these explicit ones are surrounded either side by a more cryptic kind—the muffled warnings we give ourselves in sleep.
So when woman after woman throws herself at Bill, whom he could’ve easily cheated on Alice with had he not been thwarted each time ‘by chance’ (to borrow a psychoanalyst’s scare-quotes) it gives him a second chance. Both in the sense of another shot and a reprieve. Because every time he ignores a reprieve from last night and goes for another shot the day after, he’s warned off by what he’s risking or might’ve risked.
Some risks are obvious - HIV - some can be inferred - the man who stalks Bill on the streets, the “dire consequences” for Bill and his family courtesy of the masked elite - while some have to be interpreted. Like a dream, the film won’t or can’t spell out everything in plain words. By this tack Eyes Wide Shut subscribes to the theory that dreams are your psyche warning you of risks you’ve missed or ignored or repressed because they got in the way of what you think you want, but having to do so tongue-tied; running through your cycle of waking worries with only the nearest props to hand in the junk-shop of your sleeping mind. Hence the stand-ins, the charades, the mummery, the imagery over words.11
Which would mean the ominous atmosphere during Bill’s night-time misadventures, their interruptions, the close calls he learns of the following day are all his legitimate self-preservation talking but talking in code. They’re his own subconscious or dreams stacking his odyssey with roadblocks and hazard signs. “Why would they do that?” as Bill asks Ziegler of the masked elite’s own supposed charade. Ziegler replies, “In plain words, to scare the living shit out of you!”
But there’s another - and more discomforting - theory of dreams to which Eyes Wide Shut may well subscribe.
As we saw in a previous post, Marion Nathanson has a blurry resemblance to Bill’s wife, Alice. And so when he, having brooded again on Alice’s fantasy of fucking the naval officer, tries phoning Marion to, we can infer, commit adultery as payback, we might also infer he’s unconsciously just trying to re-bed his wife. (It’s like how his counterpart Fridolin in the Traumnovelle TV-movie thinks he sees under the mask of his alluring saviour at the ball the face of his wife Albertine.12)
Going by this tack, dreams aren’t your anxious psyche broadcasting loud but unclear due to an intrinsic handicap. The indirectness of dreams might have us assume they talk in code, but that implies an encoding, if not a full-blown motive of secrecy. By who? From whom?
Because what if dreams aren’t warnings struggling to get through to us but are themselves the means by which we hide secrets from ourselves? They’re not even the tracks left by our attempts to hide said secrets which we happen to steal a glimpse on during a dream. The dream is the form of the hiding, is the charade through which we mask what we truly think or feel—not a return of the repressed, the repression. Dreams are spin-doctors masquerading as surrealists. (One cool trick to grasp the cunning of this sort of self-deception, the way we’re all capable of keeping our eyes wide shut, is to take the word ‘ignorance’ and shift its stress a syllable to the right.)
Which would raise the question: what’s the ominous agency behind the dream of Eyes Wide Shut really up to? What’s the truth about himself that Bill’s hiding? Are the warned-of risks just paper tigers he’s rigged up to scare himself off what he doesn’t want to do anyway, what he’d be doing for the wrong reasons?13
There is a way of reconciling these two apparently opposed theories of dreams. It’s in the film’s title. Because what does it mean anyway, instead of your eyes wide open to have them wide shut?14
Recall that when the sex pope asked Bill for the second password, it was a trick question; Bill didn’t know there wasn’t one. This, on the level of the waking world, is banal: a simple case of him not knowing what he didn’t know. But on the level of the film being, figuratively, a dream of Bill’s, in which he’s either trying to save himself or hiding secrets from himself, the non-existent password is a case in point of him not knowing what he knows, of pulling the rug on himself, of setting himself up to fail.
Having your ‘eyes wide shut’, then, is to be at once wilfully blind and ignorantly ignorant. At once deceived by yourself for your own sake and not heeding the perfectly rational warnings right in front of your face.
But warnings of what? What is Bill saving himself from or kidding himself about? That either way, with his sexcapades, he’s going to lose his soul if not his body to boot—as we’ll find out in the next post.
The sort Woody Allen might’ve made pre-scandal; I assume someone’s already deepfaked him into a comedy trailer for Eyes Wide Shut. (“I wouldn’t join any orgy that would have me as a member.”)
Michael Ciment writes “the wide angle reverse traveling shots [Kubrick] so favours are a manifestation of repulsion and also a sign of fascination.” In other words, Kubrick’s films back off from what they see while unable to tear their eyes away.
Dream Story, Arthur Schnitzler
Bill is so unmanned by Alice’s confession that he spends the first half of the film feminised—i.e. he takes on the woman’s romantic role as traditionally conceived: he’s deemed hot by a series of hotties of the opposite sex; his value is affirmed by their high estimation; he’s hit on, chased more than chaser, gets passively absorbed into sexual encounters with the licence of faux-innocence. (Kubrick should’ve scored these scenes with Madonna’s ‘Do you know what it feels like for a girl?’) Turns out Alice’s confession provoked not just Bill’s jealousy but envy: if only I were as desirable as her.
Another deliberate change from the novel and TV-movie, where Bill’s counterpart Fridolin is more active if not defiant: he resists the masked men at the ball trying to expose him and challenges them to a duel, and he physically tries to save his female saviour there. In making Bill largely passive or reactive until the day-half of the film Kubrick all the more enhanced the night-half’s dreaminess.
This to be fair is tamer than her dream in the novel, in which her husband is off buying her nice things then trying to find her while she fucks the Danish military officer; and in the TV-movie, in which she dreams of a trespassing Fridolin, disguised ridiculously as a prince, whom she gets beaten up then crucified while she fucks her first love, a stable-hand (pun I guess intended).
Obviously fortunate accidents occur in art-making. But it’s a deliberate artistic choice to remove them or to tie them in.
For a better idea of the intentionality of dreams, consider how ‘to dream’ means both to have a sleeping hallucination and to fantasise, desire.
Probably best to hide my crankiest idea in a footnote but that’s why I reckon there’s no such thing as the unconscious. There’s the non-conscious, your autonomic nervous system and so on. But otherwise we have parallel intentional conscious mental states. We’re all in two minds.
It’s as if Kubrick took a cue from the quotation that opens the TV-movie of Traumnovelle, itself taken from Arthur Schnitzler’s play Paracelsus, “Dream and waking flow into one another.”
I can read in dreams—or rather, I can see the text; but on closer look it is, or turns into, gibberish. I can’t write in dreams.
One imagines from the Albertine disparue of Proust.
In the novel, Bill’s counterpart Fridolin notes that his written warning from the masked ball crowd says it’s his ‘second’ warning, not ‘final’, as if they aren’t scaring him off so much as provoking how bold he might be.
The title is also a reference to “Eyes wide open”, a line from Max Ophüls’ film The Earrings of Madame D—a fave of Stanley Kubrick, with its own infidelity plot and ballroom-dancing Old World aristo. (The Max Opüls who adapted a Schnitzler text of his own for the film La Ronde.)