Eyes Wide Shut

Interpretations

The film's puzzling narrative has inspired several interpretations, many of which see the film as a psychological allegory rather than as a straightforward drama.

Related Topics:
Psychological - Allegory

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Eyes Wide Shut and Schnitzler's Dream Story

Eyes Wide Shut is a fairly faithful adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (or Dream Story), but it leaves out one important piece of information that might have served as the key to understanding it. In Schnitzler's novella, Fridolin, the Bill Harford equivalent, is told by his wife that she first began to fantasize about infidelity while they were on holiday in Denmark. When Fridolin goes on his strange journey and arrives at the masked ball, the password is "Denmark". This could very well indicate that Fridolin's journey is a dream and is not meant to be interpreted literally, but Schnitzler leaves such a conclusion unresolved.

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In Eyes Wide Shut, the password is changed to "Fidelio", a word that hints at the theme of marital fidelty, but does not indicate clearly that Bill's journey is a dream. ("Fidelio" is also the name of Beethoven's only opera which, appropriately, has matrimonial fidelity as its subject matter. See A Clockwork Orange for more allusions to Beethoven by Kubrick.) Reading the journey as a dream helps to justify the story's more bizarre events, in particular the fact that every woman Bill meets falls in love with him; it enables us to interpret the journey as a dream of wish-fulfillment sparked by Bill's jealousy of Alice's fantasies. However, Kubrick seems to have preferred to leave this interpretation ambiguous rather than concrete; in addition, if Bill is dreaming, the script makes it unclear where and when the dream begins and ends. Furthermore, Kubrick introduced Alice's dream, in which she too appears to have gone on an even more strange and allegorical journey, one that makes Bill's journey seem relatively realistic.

Related Topics:
Fidelio - Beethoven - Opera - A Clockwork Orange

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Kubrick's downplaying of the dreamlike nature of Bill's journey made the film more open to interpretation, but also meant that more literal-minded viewers did not recognize its story as an allegory, finding it merely silly and implausible.

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Jungian interpretation

Kubrick's films often deal with the subconscious and the impulses of the Id, as well as sometimes featuring what he referred to as archetypes (a well-known example being the monolith in ). When the savage impulses of "the Shadow" (from the psychological theories of Carl Jung), are not integrated with the conscious life, madness results. Kubrick said that he was interested profoundly in the Shadow (the archetype of the savage) and how it emerges despite civilization. In Eyes Wide Shut, Alice describes her fantasy affair to Bill after the couple have been to a party where Bill had treated a prostitute for an overdose. Bill's old friend Nick (Todd Field) tells him about a sexual underworld where men of absolute power have an absolute access to women, and Bill decides to explore this world. He moves into the circle of the Shadow, and he sees the ruthless, remorseless, and violent nature of power as sex and sex as power. He views the naked masculinity of the subconscious through a mask. He returns to his wife, confessing all (although he was never adulterous). At the end of the movie, she seems to forgive him and says that the two must immediately go home and "fuck". In a sense, the couple have integrated their psyches. They have both seen and experienced their Shadows and decided to go on.

Related Topics:
Id - Archetypes - Carl Jung - Shadow - Todd Field - Fuck

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