A Dream of Forbidden Desire
1926. The Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler publishes Traumnovelle, or Dream Story. Schnitzler is a physician, and his novella draws on the new psychology of his time: the unconscious, dreams, and repression. Sigmund Freud admires his work and sees his own ideas reflected in it.
1996. Seventy years later, Stanley Kubrick, one of the great filmmakers of the twentieth century, begins filming the story. Kubrick has spent much of his career examining violence: war, crime, and the systems that produce them. Dream Storyallows him to depict a century of violence in which the greatest violence is directed at the self.
Kubrick is an American who has lived in England for more than thirty years. He moves the story from Vienna to present-day Manhattan and sets it among the American wealthy. The psychology is Viennese; the setting, the money, and the social order are American.
March 1999. Kubrick dies, days after delivering his final cut.
July 1999. Eyes Wide Shut opens and remains fixed in that year, a record of a repressed century made just before that century ended. It is a marker of the twentieth century and a warning for the twenty-first.
Eyes Wide Shut
Bill and Alice Harford are a wealthy Manhattan couple. He is a doctor, and she is at home with their young daughter. They have the apartment, the income, and the social position that define the American good life.
The story begins at a Christmas party given by Bill's wealthy patient, Victor Ziegler. Once Bill and Alice are separated at the party, both are pursued sexually: Alice by an older Hungarian guest, Bill by two models. Both pursuits fail. Meanwhile, upstairs, a young woman named Mandy lies unconscious from an overdose, and Bill is called to treat her quietly.
The next night, Alice tells Bill that she once would have given up him and their daughter for a single night with a naval officer she saw only briefly. Bill cannot absorb this. He leaves the apartment and spends the night moving through New York.
Every encounter stops short. A patient's grieving daughter kisses him, and he turns away. A sex worker named Domino invites him in, and a call from Alice interrupts them. An old friend, the pianist Nick Nightingale, gives him the password to a masked gathering at a country mansion. Bill goes, but only watches, and the night ends with him exposed and sent away with a warning.
When he returns home, Alice wakes from a dream. In it, she is with many men, including the naval officer, while she laughs at Bill. Her dream closely resembles the gathering he has just left. What he met in the world, she met in her unconscious.
In the days that follow, Bill is followed and threatened. Mandy is found dead. Ziegler admits he was at the mansion and warns Bill to let the matter go. He tells Bill that Mandy's death is an ordinary overdose, unrelated to the gathering. Bill accepts this without challenge.
That night, Bill finds the mask he wore at the mansion lying on his pillow beside the sleeping Alice. He breaks down and tells her everything. It is the only moment in the film when the repression breaks.
The film ends in a toy store, where Bill and Alice recognize that they are lucky to have survived their misadventures. They agree to continue as before, without any promise for the future.
Each character's secure life unravels the moment they meet their desire. And while none of them acts on that desire, the damage is done anyway. That damage is inward.
Repression Turns Outward
Repression does not stay inward. Desire that cannot be acknowledged is often turned against the people who represent it. A society that polices its own desires also polices, punishes, and excludes the people it associates with those desires.
The mansion gathering shows what this looks like at the top. Wealthy men, hidden behind masks and locked gates, use other people, especially women, and face no consequences. When a woman dies, one of them explains it away, and the man who might ask questions chooses not to.
1926 Becomes 2026
What Schnitzler wrote about in 1926 as a harbinger of worse consequences has become a reality in 2026. The myth of American exceptionalism has been exposed as a story of oppression, repression, and suppression.
No part of American culture is exempt from its puritanical roots or from the violence that grew from them. That violence includes slavery, genocide, Jim Crow, the war against women, and the violence against LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities. It includes the corruption of a top-heavy billionaire class that has lost all decency, the same class Kubrick places behind the gates of the mansion.
Eyes Wide Shut shows these forces working in secret, behind masks and locked gates. Today they work in the open. Kubrick's final film is the Cassandra of the exploding American myth. The warnings of Eyes Wide Shut have become our reality.
We are all unmasked.
— Behan
Sources: Arthur Schnitzler, Traumnovelle (1926); Stanley Kubrick, dir., Eyes Wide Shut (1999).