"”Sure EWS is an adaptation of Traumnovelle, but the story and its structure remained quite similar, as well as the main theme.”
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It is fundamentally different, as the film is placing the insular and petty preoccupations of a couple in a much wider context, that of contemporary power, and of how power/ideology completely structures their everyday reality, including even their dreams and desires, including even their identities and intimacies. And just about every scene in the novel that makes it into the film is subtly different, and often reversed.
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"It clearly says that EWS is an adaptation,"
An adaptation that is radically different from the source medium, from the novel. It simply takes the bare bones of the novel to provide a skeletal framework, and then departs from the novel.
"which is not the same as a re-make."
But a 're-make' refers to a film that is an adaptation of another, previous film. This isn't the case here.
"he stayed true to the original main story and its structure."
Only at the level of a basic skeletal outline, at the most surface level.
"I don’t know why I have to repeat this."
Repeat what?
"The time-settings were different,"
And the place. He didn't just change the time-period as if it was just a decorative 'special effect'. The film is specifically situated in and is about CONTEMPORARY reality (and fantasy), about the nature of the Real (not "is this real?" but "what is the real?") about the structures of power (and related to it, political economy and sexuality, identity and intimacy) in late capitalism at the end of the 20th century in a city that is at the centre of that ideology.
"and Kubrick created some excellent enhancements and subplots,"
They are not just some trivial add-ons, though; they fundamentally alter what the film is actually about, as well as its treatment of the central themes.
"but both protagonists are doctors,"
Bill Harford is a doctor, but Alice isn't. As the film makes clear, she had been working in an art gallery but it went 'bust'. Apart from Ziegler's party and the final scene in the toy store, we only ever see her in the domestic-private realm of the home/apartment.
"have a wife confessing an adulterous adventure,"
She didn't have any 'adulterous adventure'. It was a recollection of a moment when she was suddenly overcome with the real of desire, overtaken by a FANTASY about a sailor she had seen but never met. She didn't act on it (whereas Bill is the opposite, seeking to act out his fantasies).
"visit prostitutes, meet an old friend called Nightingale or Nachtigall, who plays the piano and who provides the entrance to the secret masked sexual"
But each of these events and encounters are TOTALLY different from the novel, often completely reversed or inverted, and in the novel the masked ritual is separate and isolated from Bill's everyday official public world, something random, whereas in the film it isn't, it is inherently linked, as the introduction of the Ziegler figure demonstrates.
"ritual, which brings them into danger, even the costume-shop owner prostituting his daughter, the return to the mansion’s gate, and last but not least even the re-appearing of the mask followed by a complete confession remained unchanged."
But only at the most rudimentary, superficial level. The novel ends in the Harfords' bedroom and is escapist and upbeat, whereas the film ends in a toy-store and far from being positive or upbeat, but actually deeply disturbing.
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“According my view the heart of EWS is formed the wife's confession, which sticks into the husband's brain as a burden he can not get rid of.”
Alice's confession of her past desire is the inciting incident, the motor that gets things going. Bill can't deal with it because of Bill's smug presuppositions about women and of the role they play in his libidinal/desiring economy. For Bill, women are not permitted to have desires of their own, but to be passified, obedient (Bill is the typical conservative-neurotic subject), and so is shocked when Alice reveals that she might actually have desires of her own, even desires that might exclude Bill. This is what propels Bill on his journey, his jealous attempt to catch up with Alice's fantasy, to impotently attempt to restore women to their passive role again (hence his chasing after prostitutes, etc). But this is not all, as Bill is later excluded from somewhere else, from the desire space of the powerful Somerton elite, which tips him over into hysterical desperation.
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"So the heart of the story, or as you please, “the motor that gets things going” is indeed the wife’s confession,"
It isn't the heart of the narrative, but its trigger, inciting event, what 'gets it moving' (the motor).
"Also Bill had to save a prostitute’s life"
He wasn't there to save Mandy's life (the woman OD'd in the bathroom); he was doing a favour for his client, Ziegler, saving him from possible embarrassment and exposure. He wasn't a doctor attending to a patient in need (and no nurse present either, something Bill later insists on telling/lying to Alice is always the case) but blindly serving the needs and demands of an obscene master figure (Ziegler), who has just seemingly drugged and raped a woman in his own bathroom and wants to dispose of her as quickly as possible ("Can't we just get her out of here?", says Ziegler). Even Ziegler admits to this: "You saved my áss!" while also reminding Bill to keep it all secret, that it is 'just between us', even though there is a woman sitting just next to them.
"The above mentioned comparison between Ziegler’s party and the secretive “physical communion” gives reasons to believe this must be a construction of a mind drifting into fantasy or dreamlike otherworldly realms."
No, it is happening in the world of the film. The issue isn't whether it is happening or not, but whether it is a "charade", a staged event (ie a ritual, a symbolic fiction being acted out). If it were just some daydreaming fantasy, then most of what happens in the rest of the film would also be just escapist daydreaming, like the pool room scene with Ziegler. This would reduce the film to pure nonsense, a simple escapist cartoon about nothing. The film is much more complex than that.
To make the Somerton ritual simply a fantasy of Bill Harford's would be to remove the film's social and political dimensions entirely, reducing everything to the domestic and the private. How then, for instance, would the Ziegler scene at the end fit in if this were the case? That too would 'definitely' have to be a dream sequence, since it makes explicit reference to the 'orgy' scene. So, too, would Bill's return to Somerton ...
One danger of making the Somerton scenes a 'dream sequence' is that it spirits away the film's analysis of power, making Bill's insight into the power elite a private fantasy. But saying that what happens at Somerton is not Bill's dream does not mean to say that it is 'real': the question is to what extent the Somerton ritual is a theatrical 'charade' (as Ziegler later describes it) laid out for Bill's seeming benefit. Rather than clearing up all ambiguities, as some have complained, the Ziegler scene in the pool room amplifies them. Ziegler appears to be saying two contradictory things at the same time (a classic double bind): what happened at Somerton was a mere charade, of no consequence; what happened there was enormously, dreadfully important... But if the Somerton scenes are 'real', then the distinction between the public and private, between the world of power, influence and wealth and what happens inside one's own head, collapses. Not because 'everything is a dream' (one's own dream), but - on the contrary - everything is someone else's dream, someone else's desire.
Much as all films, etc, indeed, all media, all culture, are someone ELSE's fantasy, someone else's desire; fantasies, that is to say, don't 'belong' to anyone, as it is never "I" or "Me" that dreams, but "It") ... Too many questions are begged with the 'it's all Bill's dream' story: for instance, does any dream belong to a subject in the way that this kind of account suggests? Freud - and Lacan's - disturbing revelation was that it is not 'I" who dreams but "it"; that s/he who dreams is something which takes the place of the conscious self. Furthermore, psychoanalysis denies us the relief seemingly offered by the claim that 'it's all a dream.' Dreams are the realization of desire, they determine and constitute it, tell us what to desire - and desire is the truth of what we are (even though that truth in no way accords with what we think we are). As Zizek points out, we wake up not to return to reality but, on the contrary, to escape from the real of our desires - to pretend that we are sober, rational subjects (and not the crazed desiring machines of our dreams).
Hence Bill's desperate, obsessively reiterated announcement - to anyone who will listen - that he 'is a doctor' . What is this if not an attempt to convince himself of his identity, to establish that his social standing (still) means something? Far from being Bill's 'fantasy', the film is about Bill's (ultimately failed) attempt to return to the fantasy - the complacent trance - of his previous life: a life not yet wrecked by the irruption of others' desires (Alice's, the Somerton group's) into it. Bill is the man excluded from those desires; an unwelcome interloper into others' dreams.
What's misleading about the attempts to assimilate Eyes Wide Shut - and is regularly done with such other films as Mulholland Drive, A History of Violence, etc - to the "it's all just a dream" model is that their analyses of power are similarly spirited away. Perceptions of manipulation, corruption and systematic abuse amongst 'the best people' are pathologized (in a postmodern repetition of the notorious framing scenes appended to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari). One could say, in fact, that many of the 90s and 00s films that simply attempt to reduce all reality to mere 'illusion' (numerous films from The Matrix to The Truman Show to Vanilla Sky etc) are properly paranoiac and narcissistic, in the sense that they happily collude with fictions of commonsense in attributing the perception of all conspiracies to delusion. But Eyes Wide Shut (and such 70s conspiracy thrillers as The Parallax View, Chinatown, The Conversation, etc) precisely resist this move, by treating the world of power as real, and the world of familial/ familiar domesticity as a comforting illusion.
There are many different varieties of escapism, including in cinema. For instance, there is Star Wars-type escapism which simply distracts us from earthly reality by creating a film reality of pure fantasy (but embedding in it a reactionary political unconscious); the escapist 90s and 00s films mentioned above don't do that. They have a different message: reality as such is all in your head; there is no objective reality. Images are the same as reality, everything is images, is Image; in other words, there's nothing to escape from ----- in other words, it doesn't only perform escapism, it provides a philosophy for it, one that peddles the infantile narcissism and solipsism upon which consumerist ideology runs.
It seems to me that Kubrick was in many ways the inheritor of the nineteenth century naturalist tradition which saw characters as determined by environment. Kubrick's films are intensely, and consistently, focused on psychology, but not as some theatre of interiority. In fact, there are no dream sequences in Eyes Wide Shut at all (apart from the brief monochrome inserts of Bill's jealous fantasy). Rather - as we see most explicitly in A Clockwork Orange - human mental processes are seen as shaped, influenced and manipulated by forces outside the cogito. The tragic flaw in many of Kubrick's characters - in Alex DeLarge, in Redmond Barry, in Jack Torrance, in FMJ's Joker, in Bill Harford - is their impotently omnipotent conviction that they are 'master of their own destiny', in control of their own minds. The Shining is a classic example of this fatal delusion. Rather than being a projection from within his mind, as many have contended, what happens in The Shining is an effect of Jack's mind being overwhelmed, overtaken by The Overlook, by a malevolent Outside.
It is cutting psychology loose from everything else - folding all exteriority inside a solipsistic white male fantasy space - that is what I object to in dismissing much of the film, indeed the most important parts, to "just a dream" (and not forgetting the actual importance of dreams in psychoanalytic theory, where dreams are not escapes from reality but realizations of desire, while 'waking life' is escapist, a set of ideological lies, symbolic fictions that structure perceptions of 'reality'). My objections to standard. mainstream ego-centric 'psychological' interpretations of reality are not objections to psychology per se, but to a hermetic, anti-social, ahistorical version of psychology, drearily consonant with traditional ego-centric and humanist metaphysics in its assumption that the whole cosmos is important only in relation to the conscious male subject. Which condition, incidentally, is exactly the sleepwalking egocentric complacency Bill begins Eyes Wide Shut so conspicuously cocooned in.
Consequently, what is objectionable in 'psychological' interpretations is not the focus on mental processes per se, but that such interpretations (1) dissolve all external reality into being a symbol of interior states and (2) as a consequence they downplay or utterly dismiss any social, political or economic themes and (3) are therefore, quite clearly, unable to make a connection between psychology and an exterior milieu. I believe that Kubrick's power derives in no small part from his sensitive, persistent and unflinching examination of this connection.
Yes, of course I completely agree, but aren't you actually completely wrong?
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Barbed_Wire_Strawberry
9 years ago
Awesome post Harry. But with your last three points there - that is what people do. The 'film' isn't doing those things - but the characters are - and the audience are. You don't see it in the film, you don't see it everyday.
Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride
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hyperstillharry
9 years ago
"Awesome post Harry. But with your last three points there - that is what people do. The 'film' isn't doing those things - but the characters are - and the audience are. You don't see it in the film, you don't see it everyday."
Cheers, Barbed. Yes, the film isn't doing those things, but the reverse; it is critiquing them, not exemplifying them.
"That there are "secret societies" (as you prefer to identify them) is merely incidental to the story of Bill's journey to his catharsis of self-discovery. Along the way, and secondarily, the movie necessarily makes a larger point about the nature of reality."
What would also be false is separating out the (inevitably failed) search to recover the always illusory and only ever imaginary 'unity' of the self from the issue of sexual revenge. The idea of a 'unified' self that
became broken, lost, or 'stolen', is a narcissistic and persecutory fantasy (the defence and recovery of which lead us into all manner of atrocious acts). What Alice says about her desire disrupts Bill's fantasy, which depends upon his being 'sure of her.' But the problem with making it all about Bill's 'self-discovery' (or the discovery of the vacancy of his self, a repressed void of negativity) is that this, precisely, echoes Bill's male-centric POV, and makes Alice/woman a bitpart player in his psychodrama.
Isn't it a question of accepting that what Bill imagined to be his 'inner' self is nothing but a spectre? That there is nothing at all behind the mask, only that which is in front of it? That his being always was split from the beginning... split between social-symbolic reality (the symbolic fictions we call everyday 'reality', the world of 'commonsense') and the Real of desire and unconscious fantasies?
The film is concerned with power, capital, ownership and money - and the way they connect - with the ostensibly private issues of identity, intimacy and sexuality, and any interpretation that concentrates merely on identity, the imaginary, self-discovery etc while ignoring or to the detriment of the social and economic 'themes' is not only willfully blinding itself to whole swathes
of what happens in the film, it is missing one of its most important and unique aspects. As a result, any interpretation that concentrates exclusively on Bill/Alice's marital concerns would be turning a blind eye to large expanses of the film. Indeed, Bill's relationship with Ziegler strikes me as at least as pivotal to the film as his relationship with Alice. Ziegler's main role, it seems to me, is as a power-broker and representative of wealth. Why include him if not to point up this theme?
And, of course, power wants us to believe in commonsense, that what goes on in our own heads is more real than geo-politics and political economy, that the 'content of the mind' is real and determines the 'world' (that the way we see the world is the way that it really is, so ignoring how all perception is mediated by ideas, concepts, beliefs, fictions and fantasies), which is an empiricist solipsism, and is today widespread.
An interpretation that concentrates on Bill's 'identity' and 'hurt' and his 'quest for self-discovery' surrenders the film into being an 'eternal', ahistorical disquizition on fairly well-known existential themes, voided of specific reference to contemporary culture/ society. When - for me - what is interesting is an exploration of those themes in the context of a very precisely drawn socio-economic world.
Doesn't Bill discover that the membrane separating his mind, his psychology, from the world of wealth, power and patriarchy was only ever an illusion? Hence the irony of his desperate attempt to shore up his identity by appealing to his professional status. 'I am a DOC-TOR' - meaning: I am what I am socially validated to be. 'Here's ... my card.'
What if Bill's desperate, obsessively reiterated announcement - to anyone who will listen - that he 'is a doctor' - is just an attempt to convince himself of his identity, to establish that his social standing (still) means something? Far from being Bill's 'fantasy', the film is about Bill's (ultimately failed) attempt to return to the fantasy - the complacent trance - of his previous life.
Then Bill has a vertiginous revelation of his place in the social world, and a hint of what the rich and powerful are capable of. More enigmas open up - who are the Somerton people? Is Ziegler lying, and do the Somerton group kill Mandy's redeemer?
Shocking as this may sound, yes. Power, it should go without saying, is a recurrent theme in Kubrick's work. And economic power is clearly a theme of EWS - _a_ theme, note, not _the_ theme. Is there a film more concerned with the price of things? (See, for instance, Tim Kreider's analysis of EWS on the Kubrick site http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0096.html.)
Nevertheless, the relationship between Bill/Alice's marriage and Ziegler/Somerton - between the psycho-sexual and the thriller elements of the film's narrative - seems to me profoundly uncertain. Bill is plunged into his journey towards 'subjective destitution' by Alice's account of her fantasy, to be sure, but the extent to which the nature of bill and Alice's elationship "is necessary" to the social status bill seeks to achieve (assumes he has achieved, even if he hasn't examined the consequences of that achievement) strikes me as very difficult to read.
Where do Somerton and Ziegler fit in to this picture? Are they on the side of desire or of 'society'? Ziegler would seem to be on the side of society, the symbolic order, patriarchy: yet he is also something of a Sadean libertine. He is both the Father who says No (guarantor of the symbolic order) and the Father who enjoys (wrecker of the symbolic). But what is definitively excluded from Ziegler/ Somerton's desiring-circuit - and from Bill's - is female desire. Women only gain entry insofar as they are passive, bought.
The assumption in many interpretations of EWS is that Bill is shaken out of his complacency into some kind of revelation. But the revelation seems to be essentially negative ---- i.e. Bill, his marriage, and the social milieu in which he moves are not what he thought or presumed they were ---- however, he seems to be no closer to understanding what they actually are.
The ending of EWS is certainly not positive, much less blatantly happy. And it's not a question of a couple turning away from those less fortunate than themselves --- in a sense, it's the reverse, they are ignoring the corruption of those more fortunate than themselves --- and let's not forget that this may involve a murder, among other things. That's the central point: for most people today, there is nothing 'secret' about corruption and the machinations of power. People already KNOW about systematic corruption 'in high places' (the most obvious recent example would be the Financial Meltdown and subsequent bailout and austerity measures; or all the revelations about comprehensive spying by various state, semi-state, and private agencies, and so on), but, like Bill and Alice, choose to act and believe and behave AS IF THEY DON'T KNOW, to disavow their knowledge, to distance themselves from it all, to pretend it's not really happening. Not because they have escaped from it all, but the reverse: in order to conform to it all, to enable them to do it, to blindly submit to it, passively collude in it. Everyone is implicated, everyone wants to keep their eyes wide shut, everyone is a part of the 'conspiracy', which turns out to be the system itself, the power structure itself ...
Yes, of course I completely agree, but aren't you actually completely wrong?
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newt_man2003
9 years ago
Well, my point (in the comment of mine that you cited) was that Kubrick wasn't out to "expose" secret societies in EWS. I believe he was operating on the premise that the audience for his movies already sort of knows they exist, and, therefore, the "secret societies" were an "incidental" part of the movie, not the purpose of the movie. As you stated, "people already know about systematic corruption in high places." So please let me re-assure you that I am not, by my remark, attempting to separate out issues of identity and self-discovery from the social and economic themes. Indeed, I've stated elsewhere that Alice's final line in the movie can only be understood in the context of all these themes.
And yes, I agree that Bill is not shaken out of his complacency. The movie, from its title to its final scene, is an indictment of the Harfords, (and the Zieglers and the Somerton crowd) and by extension "us," and makes a larger point about society. But to say that Bill is "no closer" at the end of the movie to understanding his social reality than he was at the beginning is a matter for debate. His wife certainly seems keen on where they stand, and she deliberately "chooses" complacency. And if he is to stay married to her, he would likely choose the same.
By the way, you mentioned the financial meltdown/subsequent bailout and state spying as examples of systematic corruption. I would also add the death/disappearance of Kenneth Lay shortly before he was to be sentenced for fraud and conspiracy convictions.
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hyperstillharry
9 years ago
"Kubrick wasn't out to "expose" secret societies in EWS."
No, the conspiracy-thriller dimension of the film is about UNMASKING power (and, in the film, patriarchy), the fact that it isn't based on anything, that there is nothing behind it, only a void, a nothing, and that such hidden transgressions are inherent to power and institutions, are part of their very functioning, the perverse, libidinal excess always generated by power that sustains it.
"I believe he was operating on the premise that the audience for his movies already sort of knows they exist, and, therefore, the "secret societies" were an "incidental" part of the movie, not the purpose of the movie."
Why would that make the Somerton sequences 'incidental' just because people know about transgressive behaviours by the ruling class elites? The whole film is structured around the Somerton sequences. After Somerton, everything has changed, and not just for Bill; the film has moved to a different level altogether.
"But to say that Bill is "no closer" at the end of the movie to understanding his social reality than he was at the beginning is a matter for debate."
But he isn't any closer to comprehending it; instead, he is seeking to disavow it all: "Nobody's fooling but everyone's fooled", as it were.
"His wife certainly seems keen on where they stand, and she deliberately "chooses" complacency. And if he is to stay married to her, he would likely choose the same."
So they are 'choosing' escapism and self-delusion, a retreat into the false comforts of the illusory domestic, not to actually escape from their predicament or reality, but in order to blindly conform to it. A failure of comprehension, a 'knowledge' that doesn't know itself because it is being denied in broad daylight.
Cultural commentator Mark Fisher also has an interesting analysis of what is happening the Harfords in the film:
The first form of human slavery is to the Burroughs orgasm drug (the lure by means of which the organic death machine reproduces itself). It's inevitable that power should fixate on this bio-default as one of its principal means of exercising control. The really rather trivial transgressions at Somerton - masked sex! - serve also as an Initiatory Secret, less important for its own content than for dividing those in the know from outsiders. Kubrick's obsessively cultivated ambiguity leaves open the possibility that the whole episode at Somerton - TOGETHER WITH the later scene in the pool hall - are some kind of initiatory rite which draws Bill into closer proximity with the power elite. As if what Zeigler himself calls the 'staged charade' was, like the gate in Kafka's famous parable, meant only for him... So that Alice's final 'fúck' - the last word in the film, that is, the last word in Kubrick's last film - operates as the order word indicating the Harfords quietist acceptance of/ into the Core (or at least, in an inner circle closer to the Core).
In any case, Eyes Wide Shut demonstrates that, however banal it must be in order to be normalized into - and AS - everyday life, power depends upon mystagogic authoritarian ritualization. There is always a secret society, even if the secret it protects is its own vacancy, void.
The theatrical show, the mystagogic mummery, is there to conceal this Void. Hence the power's need for (simulated) hyperstition, its tendency conspiracy theories that propagate themselves via their denial, that operate only through their victims' recovered memories. Hence also the need to diagonalize between Ziegler-esque commonsense and Monarch paranoia:
Ccru: 'Like all conspiracy fictions, [this] is spun out of an all-encompassing narrative that cannot possibly be falsified (because ‘they’ want you to believe in their non-existence).'
To attempt to refute such narratives is to be drawn into a tedious double game. ‘One’ either has to embrace an arbitrary and outrageous cosmic plot (in which everything is being run by the Jews, Masons, Illuminati, CIA, Microsoft, Satan, Ccru…), or alternatively advocate submission to the most mundane construction of quotidian reality, dismissing the hyperstitional chaos that operates beyond the screens (cosmological ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ - virtual, imperceptible, unknown). This is why atheism is usually so boring.
Both conspiracy and common sense - the ‘normal reality’ script - depend on the dialectical side of the double game, on reflective twins, belief and disbelief, because disbelief is merely the negative complement of belief: cancellation of the provocation, disintensification, neutralization of stimulus - providing a metabolic yawn-break in the double-game.
Yes, of course I completely agree, but aren't you actually completely wrong?
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