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

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2018

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Specter Vision Radio.
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martell.
0:21.8	For more episodes and to support the podcast, go to Weird Studies.com. Eyes wide shut.
0:49.8	That was the first thing that struck me when I saw the trailers in 99.
0:55.3	I was trying to figure out shortly before talking to you what I thought it meant and I didn't come up with
1:00.1	anything. So I'm curious what you thought. There's a story behind that title actually. Kubrick's
1:05.9	screenwriter on this film, which was his last film, released in 1999. That's 20 years ago now, strangely, was Frederick Raphael.
1:14.5	He's a, I think he's a British screenwriter.
1:18.9	And, no, he's American.
1:20.5	I think he's American, yeah.
1:22.5	So Kubrick hired him to write the screenplay.
1:25.1	And then Frederick Raphael wrote a kind of tell-all memoir of the experience,
1:29.4	which Kubrick's wife, because he published it after Kubrick passed away, and Kubrick's wife
1:35.9	called it a nasty bit of grave dancing, this book. And there's a scene in it, or he remembers the moment where Kubrick sent him the title by facts.
1:49.1	Fred of Raphael didn't like that title at all.
1:50.9	He thought it was crass.
1:53.7	I mean, what does it mean?
1:54.9	Eyes wide shut.
1:56.1	So your eyes are open, but you're not seeing.
1:59.4	And I think that really tells us one of the key themes of this film.
2:04.0	I watched it again last night.
2:05.1	I've seen this film probably about 12 times.
	...

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