Read Listening to Stanley Kubrick Online
Authors: Christine Lee Gengaro
After being hired for a series of magazine ads for London fashion designer Leon Vitali, rumors began circulating of an affair between the two. Soon after her hiring, Vitali empire insiders were reporting that their boss adored Curran—not for how she wore his stunning clothes in public, but for how she wowed him by taking them off in private, seductive, performances.
Leon Vitali also acts in the film; he plays the authoritative masked man in the red cloak at the masked ball.
Eyes Wide Shut
also recalls
Killer’s Kiss
, the only other Kubrick film that takes place in New York City, Kubrick’s hometown. Both take place over three days, and both films are love stories of a sort featuring couples whose destiny hangs in the balance until the very last moment. There are other little details as well. At the beginning, people in an apartment are getting dressed to go out. Also, Nick Nightingale supposedly goes back to his family in Seattle, just as Davey was preparing to do in
Killer’s Kiss
.
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Ciment interprets the relationship between the two films a little differently, calling
Eyes Wide Shut
a “pentimento” for
Killer’s Kiss
. A pentimento, from the Italian word for “repent,” is a change in a painting that shows the artist has re-thought a particular part of the image. We know a change has been made because there is evidence of the original, like a sketch underneath the paint or something that has been painted over. In 1953, just after finishing
Fear and Desire,
Kubrick spoke about shooting “A ‘Love Story of New York’” that would use locations from all over the city. Whether that idea turned into
Killer’s Kiss
, we cannot be sure, nor can we know if Kubrick felt like
Eyes Wide Shut
was a “do-over” for the earlier film, but it is an interesting theory.
Production on
Eyes Wide Shut
took an unusually long time, even for Kubrick. Some reports say that the film was in production for four hundred days—a record for a live-action film.
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Although because Kubrick preferred—as Harlan explains—“to put his money into time, having as few people as possible on set,” Kubrick often worked with a skeleton crew, which greatly lowered production costs on a day-to-day basis.
An interesting side note: in searching Kubrick’s motives for making a story with such an important focus on sex, Raphael recalls Kubrick telling him about a conversation the director had with Terry Southern (screenwriter for
Dr. Strangelove
) about making a “blue movie with name actors and great photography.” In 1970, Terry Southern penned a novel called
Blue Movie
, in which a famous genius auteur, Boris Adrian (who goes by “B”), directs an expensive pornographic film with established movie stars. Many have assumed that the character of “B” is based on Kubrick, and indeed Southern describes “B” thusly: “Although he was thought of as a ‘director’ he was really a
film-maker
—in the tradition of Chaplin, Bergman, Fellini—an artist whose responsibility for his work was total, and his control of it complete.”
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The book’s dedication reads: “To the great Stanley K.”
Censorship
Kubrick was no stranger to controversy during his career. Kubrick was the first major filmmaker to attempt an adaptation of
Lolita
; he pulled
A Clockwork Orange
from theaters in England after reports of copycat crimes; he subjected global politics to brutal satire in
Dr. Strangelove
.
Eyes Wide Shut
, likewise, was not without controversy. In the original U.S. version, in order to garner an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, Warner Bros. had to digitally add figures into the masked ball sequence to obscure some sexual acts. Jan Harlan explains that Kubrick would likely have changed the scenes himself rather than having Warner Bros. do it for him. Had he lived, Kubrick would have likely shifted the focus from the participants to Bill and the other voyeurs.
If the alterations had not been made, the film would probably have gotten an NC-17 rating, which would have limited possibilities for distribution. The version available on DVD in the United States does not have the digital figures, and no such alterations were needed in international theatrical versions. There was also a complaint from the American Hindus Against Defamation citing the use of a sacred chant in the masked ball scene (see below). When the film was released on DVD, there were a few other minor alterations, including Nicole Kidman’s redubbing of a line from “we made love,” to “you and I made love,” to make it clear she was talking about her husband and not someone else.
Choosing Music
Music, as one might expect, is a very important part of the film. In
Eyes Wide Shut
, Kubrick, as he had in earlier films like
2001
, gave music the important job of conveying information, making it as important as dialogue or the voice in carrying the story.
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The dialogue is, at times, banal, perhaps purposefully so. And the parroting of lines slows down the rhythm of the words said by the characters. Bill in particular repeats the things that people say to him, as when Ziegler says, “I had you followed,” and Bill replies, “You had me followed?” Music also signifies Kubrick’s presence in a way because the audience has come to expect more from his musical choices than those of other directors.
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In
Eyes Wide Shut
, music shows us Bill and Alice’s idealized marriage, rather than one that has trouble brewing under the surface; music points to those times when Bill is feeling fearful; and music underpins Alice’s dreams and fantasies. Kubrick again chose a piece by Ligeti for the score, the second movement of
Musica Ricercata
, marking the composer’s third appearance in a Kubrick film. There is also a brief excerpt from the “Rex tremendae” from Mozart’s Requiem,
Nuages gris
, a piano piece by Liszt, and a waltz by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. There are also jazz standards and Chris Isaak’s bluesy “Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing.” Kubrick also worked with contemporary composer and violist Jocelyn Pook.
Soundtrack
The commercially available soundtrack to
Eyes Wide Shut
featured many of the pieces used in the film. The first music heard in the film, Shostakovich’s Waltz for Variety Orchestra, is actually the second track on the CD. The first track on the CD is a piece that has come to be very closely associated with the film: the second movement from Ligeti’s
Musica Ricercata
. This stark piano piece caught viewers’ attention and is, in some ways, the anthem of the film. The version of Jocelyn Pook’s “Naval Officer” on the soundtrack features a solo cello that Pook did not use in the film version, because it would have been too distracting. Track 9, “Migrations,” has been the source of some controversy because it appears at the masked ball—as Bill roams from room to room watching various couples and threesomes engage in sex acts—and it features the recitation of a verse from the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita (part of the Mahabharata). In a letter to Warner Bros. in August of 1999, the American Hindus Against Defamation protested the use of the
shloka
(recitation) in the film saying, “there appears to be no connection, or apparent justification for the use of this
shloka
.” The letter also translates the verse “paritranaya sadhunam, vinasaya ca duskritam, dharma-samstapanarthaya, sambhavami yuge yuge,” as “For the protection of the virtuous, for the destruction of the evil and for the firm establishment of Dharma [righteousness], I take birth and am incarnated on Earth, from age to age.”
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Although Warner Bros. did not make any changes in the U.S. theatrical version (they cut the chanting from the UK version, which was released after the U.S. version), they removed the chanting from all DVD releases. All recordings of the soundtrack, however, seem to have the chanted excerpt. A complete listing of the cues on the soundtrack are as follows:
Even late in his career, Kubrick’s musical collaborations retained some of the expected interactions between director and composer: Kubrick asked for a cue; the composer brought him some music; Kubrick made suggestions to help the cue fit the scene better. What sets Kubrick apart, of course, are two things: first one may assume, based on the sheer number of cues composed for
The Shining
, that Kubrick required a rather large number of musical options from which to choose, more perhaps than a composer would be expected to produce on another director’s film; second, and most important, Kubrick might ask for cues without showing the composer any film. Kubrick asked Carlos (on
The Shining
) and Pook to write music without showing them footage. Without the opportunity to “spot” the film for the music, Carlos and Pook essentially scored their cues “blind,” and once Kubrick heard something he liked, he worked with the cues the same way he worked with the music of Beethoven or Mozart.
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The composers were of course free to do whatever they wished with the unused cues.
The pieces Kubrick chose are only part of the story; Kubrick’s unused choices are interesting as well. Kubrick, at one point, thought he might use a song from Richard Wagner’s set of songs, the Wesendonck Lieder. Wagner, of course, is best known as an opera composer, and almost none of his non-operatic works are still performed today with the exceptions of the instrumental piece
Siegfried’s Idyll
and the Wesendonck Lieder. The set was published in the late 1850s under the title
Fünf Gedichte von Mathilde Wesendonck für eine Frauenstimmen und Klavier
(
Five Songs by Mathilde Wesendonck for Female Singer and Piano
). The five songs are (in English translation) “The Angel,” “Stand Still!,” “In the Greenhouse,” “Sorrows,” and “Dreams.” Both “In the Greenhouse” and “Dreams” were what Wagner called “Studies” on musical themes he would use in his opera
Tristan und Isolde
. “In the Greenhouse,” Kubrick’s choice for
Eyes Wide Shut
, was the last of the songs to be written. Jan Harlan describes Kubrick’s choice:
Something that might interest you, because really nobody knows, we had a variation of the piano accompaniment of “In the Greenhouse” (for soprano), and he loved it. Forget the singer. We had the piano accompaniment. It was transparent and we tried different variations. So for a year, he had this piece of music again and again through the film.
The choice of the Wesendonck Lieder would have been perfect for the film in terms of the music’s historical context. Although Kubrick was unaware of the history behind the song cycle—he didn’t really care to know, and besides, he didn’t think that highly of Wagner as a person
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—he intended to use it for about a year before tossing it out.
At the time Wagner composed the cycle, he was living on a small house on the property of the Wesendoncks, a wealthy husband and wife who supported Wagner’s work. Wagner, who had been living in Dresden with his wife Minna, had become part of a revolutionary group who staged an uprising in 1849. The May Uprising was quashed, and Wagner fled. He settled eventually in Zurich, but endured difficulties both health related and financial. He continued to write operas and essays, and in 1852 met Otto Wesendonck and his wife Mathilde. Wagner appears to have been enchanted both by Mathilde’s personality and her poetry. He stopped working on the Ring Cycle (his massive, four-opera epic) in order to focus on a story of forbidden love,
Tristan und Isolde
, and a set of songs using Mathilde’s poetry. (
Die Walküre
, one of the Ring Cycle operas, does owe some inspiration to Mathilde, as Wagner made notes in his manuscript to her, especially in scenes between the destined lovers, Sigmund and Sieglinde.)
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Details about an affair between Wagner and Wesendonck are scant, although whatever did transpire between them happened under the noses of both Wagner’s wife and Mathilde’s husband. To whatever extent the two were involved, the “affair” ended after Minna intercepted a package meant for Mathilde and read the eight-page letter Wagner had attached. Although the letter says nothing specifically incriminating, Minna’s interpretation of the letter was damning enough.
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Wagner’s professional relationship with both Wesendoncks continued, however, and both parties appear to have been influenced favorably in their art by the experience. Jan Harlan describes that Kubrick ultimately decided not to use it: “Maybe six weeks before he died, he tossed it out, because he thought it was too beautiful, so he used the biting Ligeti piece. Dominic [Harlan] recorded it because Stanley wanted the hammering.”
Once again, Kubrick demonstrated that his highest priority was finding music that worked for the film. Its historical context didn’t matter, and even if something pushed the boundaries of being chronologically acceptable—like the 1930s tunes at the 1920s party in
The Shining
or the Romantic Schubert piece in the Classical time period of
Barry Lyndon
—he was willing to make those concessions if the music fit the scene best. And in the case of the Wagner piece, Kubrick put aside his own feelings for the work, and Harlan seemed to admire Kubrick’s uncompromising way of doing what was best for the narrative: