Episode 30: On Stanley Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut'

Weird Studies

No dream is ever just a dream. Or so Tom Cruises tells Nicole Kidman at the end of Eyes Wide Shut. In this episode, Phil and JF expound some of the key themes of Kubrick's film, a masterpiece of cinematic chamber music that demonstrates, with painstaking attention to detail, Zen Master Dōgen's utterance that when one side of the world is illuminated, the other side is dark. Treading a winding path between wakefulness and dream, love and sex, life and art, your paranoid hosts make boldly for that secret spot where the rainbow ends, and the masks come off.

REFERENCES

Arthur Schnitzler, Dream Story (Traumnovelle) -- Source of the EWS screenplay, sadly overlooked in the episode but well worth a read.
Frederic Raphael, Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick
Bathysphere
Frank L. Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
David Icke's "reptilian" theory of the British Royal Family
Thomas A. Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze
Screenshot of newspaper article from Eyes Wide Shut
Rodney Ascher, Room 237
James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare
Gustave Moreau, L'Apparition
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony
William S. Burroughs, “On Coincidence,” in The Adding Machine
J.F. Martel, "The Kubrick Gaze"