Besides the pointed Glen Cove reference, Kubrick's treatment of Tom
Cruise--particularly the way that, in the character's fantasy,
everyone Cruise meets appears attracted to him, reminded me of the way
Hitchcock kidded Cary Grant's persona in N x NW.  As for BLUME IN LOVE,
it's the story of a man who goes to great lengths to get back his wife
following an infidelity (and it's specifically unclear whether Cruise is
so motivated in EWS).  Moreover, Mazursky, as a young actor,  played a
featured role in FEAR AND DESIRE, Kubrick's first feature film.  This is
one of many ways in which EWS seems very poignant as an inadvertent
valedictory film.  Paul Mazursky figures prominently in both Kubrick's
first film and his last!

While I believe that the scene with Pollack/Ziegler resembles the first
meeting of Gavin Elster and Scottie Ferguson in VERTIGO more than it does
the psychiatrist's speech in PSYCHO, a much more banal film I found poking
out from behind EWS is THE FIRM.  In each of the two films Tom Cruise
discovers himself at the center of a mysterious conspiracy (or perhaps
only thinks he does, in the case of EWS), all to the accompaniment of an
insistent solo piano score.  (When I spied on Kubrick's NY/London/Elstree
street a paper box for "The National Law Review," I forgot for an instant
that Cruise is playing a doctor here, not a lawyer.) Moreover, when the
star of THE FIRM is finally confronted by the director of THE FIRM, Sidney
Pollack, we enter some sort of film buff's intertextual version of Heaven.
Undoubtedly, some of this is serendipity, courtesy of the film's winding
road to completion.  If Harvey Keitel had remained in the Ziegler role, we
might be picking out references to Scorsese and Tarantino instead.

It's not unusual for a film or two to function as a Kubrick
film's unconscious, a subtextual frame of reference behind the current
text.  I'd always thought, for example, that THE SHINING worked as a
thorough deconstruction of the then-recent CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD
KIND and I'd be happy to count the ways for anyone who's interested.
Kubrick, from BARRY LYNDON on, became a most proficient postmodernist,
using familiar films, tropes, motifs, and genres as loose referential
frameworks, to be quoted and generally to trouble a spectator's usual
reliance upon cultural signs and types.  A range of troubling types serves
that purpose here: a prostitute's Asian clients, a New York Jewish tailor
(who looks a bit like Kubrick himself), an anxious gay man.

Finally, at least one director we know was a major influence on Kubrick
was Max Ophuls.  With Ophuls, Kubrick shared a fascination with the moving
camera and, eventually, as his style developed, Kubrick discovered his own
way of playing elegant surfaces and troubling subtexts against each other,
as Ophuls had.  Vincent LoBrutto's excellent biography of Kubrick
describes the director, on the day Ophuls died in 1957, telling a cast
member that the scene he was shooting, in which conniving generals spin
their men into a sinister web while a tracking camera monitors their every
move, was "in honor of" Ophuls.  Clearly, EYES WIDE SHUT is Kubrick's
Ophuls film.  Based, as three Ophuls films were, on a novel by Arthur
Schnitzler, the film is Ophulsian in its male-female dynamics, and in its
frank artificiality.  The Ophuls whose camera circled, in the astonishing
opening sequence of LA RONDE, from a movie studio to the world of
fin-de-siecle Vienna in a single five-minute movement, is matched by the
Kubrick who is frankly making an imaginary "New York" of his memory out of
cinematic spare parts.  The oily seducer at the party is "quoted"
directly from Ophuls; he's reminiscent of Louis Jourdan in LETTER FROM AN
UNKNOWN WOMAN or Vittorio DeSica in EARRINGS OF MADAME DE..., to name just
two.  Moreover, David Hare's play, THE BLUE ROOM (equivalent to the blue
lighting with which Kidman's character is often associated in EWS?) is an
adaptation of Schnitzler's LA RONDE, filmed by Ophuls in 1950.  It was a
stage triumph for Nicole Kidman in London and New York after her work in
EWS was completed.  Clearly, all of these Ophuls connections need much
more thought and development.  (Kidman played all the female roles, which
were played in Ophuls's film by glittering line-up of French actresses
of the time, among them, Danielle Darrieaux, Simone Simon, and Simone
Signoret.)  However, the point is one of several ways of appreciating the
richness of Kubrick's achievement in EYES WIDE SHUT is to understand the
extent of its allusiveness--and I haven't even begun to list the allusions
to Kubrick's own films, the elaborateness of which add to the impression
that I had of this film as a valedictory, a career summation.

Dennis Bingham
Indiana University Indianapolis



On Fri, 23 Jul 1999, Harvey R Greenberg Md wrote:

> i made similar observations a bit back elsewhere but did not know that Glen
> Cove was the precise community of NNW   Hitchcock  I totally agree  is a big
> influence and elsewhere to in the Kubrick canon   but  question is   did
> Kubrick himself ever acknowledge this  or indeed  any other influence -- for
> instance  note in EWS that Blume in Love is playing on the couple's TV set at
> the beginning of the film  and Mazurski himself has been preoccupied greatly
> with fidelity/infidelity in marriage
>
> best hrgreenberg md endit
>
> ----
> Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
> http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite
>

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