Eyes Wide...

Reviewed by D.K. Holm

uickly after the release of Kubrick's last movie comes a memoir by the script's co-author, Frederic Raphael, cleverly titled Eyes Wide Open : A Memory of Stanley Kubrick (Ballantine Books, 196 pages $12, ISBN 0.345.43776.4). It is a book that we are both eager to read, yet suspicious of; it is a book that seems to offer some insight into Kubrick's working method, but also in a sense betrays the man who put a great deal of trust into the author, both professionally and artistically.

Raphael was born in Chicago, spent some time in New York City, but was raised in England, where he went to Cambridge as a classicist, an experience he commemorated in the British TV mini-series The Glittering Prizes, an earlier text that you could say betrays confidences, though under assumed names. A novelist, short story writer, and essayist, he has also worked as a prize-winning screenwriter with Stanley Donen (Two for the Road) and John Schlesinger (Darling).

If I say that it is a valuable document, that is not to endorse what Raphael did; but since he has gone and done it, there is no point in not reading it for clues to the mysteries of Kubrick's last, mysterious film, and to the artistic personality that created it. A greatly reduced version of the book ran in the New Yorker for 14 June 1999, and created something of a stir, whetting the appetite of the horde, including people like me, that was dying to see the film. In its truncated, slicker New Yorker version are contained all the themes of the somewhat larger book: Kubrick's secretiveness, his intellectual game playing (as Raphael saw it), Kubrick's relationship with his Jewishness, and Raphael's continual besting of him in the chess game of collaboration.

hough the book is ostensibly, even in large part, actually about the collaboration of a scripter with a major director, ultimately it is really about what it's like to be a screenwriter in the movie business in the second half of the 20th century. Raphael offers Goldmanian insights into the screenwriter's dire trade: "If you are seriously reluctant to do something, your price can rise until the offer becomes, the producer hopes, irresistible. If you are eager to work on an idea you love, and want to give it all you've got, you will get less for it than for work you wish you had never accepted." He quotes another author (there is much recourse to his commonplace book in the text) that "Authorship is a rat race in which you never get to meet the other rats." He has a screenwriter's natural contempt for the more vigorous and active role of the director: "Directors often fall for natty narrative twists; their reading is rarely as sophisticated as their vision." He also notes that "Ruthlessness and rare talents are seldom far apart." Yet, as a sometimes aspiring director himself, Raphael is not totally unsympathetic to the difficulties directors face in the current structure of the industry. "A filmmaker, however grand, is always at the mercy of circumstance, unless he is the circumstance."

But because, for better or worse, movies are a director's medium, at least as Kubrick practiced the trade, Raphael also offers observations born of his two year collaboration.

Well, an outsider might deem it a collaboration. "As usual with good directors he wants only the the competences which he cannot supply himself." Raphael characterizes himself as Kubrick's "selected…outside caterer…He doesn't want to make anything with anybody." In the end, Raphael decides that "Working all those months with Stanley was like being in solitary confinement without the comfort of being alone." As presented in the book, Raphael's relationship with Kubrick, that of an ambitious, conceited, but not particularly distinguished métier en scene, consulted by, yet also spurned by, and jealous of in a Salieri-like manner, a naturally superior artist, would make a great story —by Martin Amis.

Raphael, who talked on the phone with Kubrick quite a bit, but only met him in person three or four times, and always at the director 's "Victorian pile" with its "dignified autumnal melancholy," tries to etch the auteur's personality. He characterizes him as a man of "strangely passive curiosity." He views the Kube as a gameplayer (that chess metaphor yet again!). He also relishes recounting the moments when he "scores" against Kubrick. Much of their conversation, and especially their few meetings, are recorded in that annoying screenplay format that screenwriters revert to when they are in a hurry.

Raphael wants Kubrick to be a great man, whatever that means. "He seems a little more human -- commercial -- than I might have hoped of a very great director. He likes stars because they know what they're re doing and because they fill theaters." Raphael notes that Kubrick has "an outsider's love of inside information." He quotes Kubrick occasionally on problems he's had on the set, and of his aesthetic positions, but they don't get much beyond his judgment as to why 2001 was a better than the overly explicit 2010: "You tell people what things mean, they don't mean anything anymore." To show that he is just one of the boys, Kubrick "uses the word 'cunt' a lot." (The word has a slightly different usage in England, where the word "fanny" is the shockingly dirty word for a woman's privates.)

Raphael also spends a lot of time dwelling on Kubrick's Jewishness. The director is prone to drawing Raphael to him by pretending that they are two Jews squared off against the world. Yet he also records what he takes to be Kubrick's simultaneous attraction and repulsion from the licentiousness of his former Jewish comrades in the movie business, such as Kirk Douglas, who supposedly solicited blowjobs between takes. "Like Schnitzler's hero, Kubrick was fascinated and appalled by things he witnessed but could not quite bring himself to do."

Raphael also reveals that Kubrick's wife's uncle directed Jew Suss. He characterizes Kubrick as a sedentary wandering Jew. As the author of a book called The Necessity of anti-Semitism, he is especially attentive to Jewishness, and notes that Kubrick wanted the script denuded of all ethnicity, which he takes as a form of Jewish fear or "passing," but doesn't consider the notion that, like many people, Kubrick simply doesn't care about religion, or his ethnic identity. Raphael also makes a lot of things about Kubrick's thoughts on the subject of his Jewishness that he can't possibly know, such as that Kube was obsessed with the great shame of the holocaust (page 150-151), something that it is impossible for Raphael to know.

erhaps the most subtly awful moment is when Kubrick more or less betrays his star, Nicole Kidman (page 175). Media addicts will know that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman supposedly developed a close bond with Kubrick, who assumed the role almost of a surrogate father, very unusual not only in the moviemaking process, but coming from Kubrick. So what does Kubrick tell Raphael, shortly after the couple was cast? According to Raphael: "She's agreed to give me a couple of days when she takes off her clothes. I guess we'll close the set. Might be a good day to happen to drop by the studio, if you wanted to." Raphael claims piously that he declined the offer, but lets the incident lie there as a measure of Kubrick's hypocrisy. But Kubrick, supposedly the cold intellectual, had a healthy interest in sex, as evidenced by the abundance of nudes in his films after the collapse of the Code. Raphael, from his position of dismissive Jewish Puritanism, something of which he shared with Kubrick, charges the director with a salaciousness that may instead be an aging nerd's still randy interested in sex; at the very least he doesn't explore the topic as a means of trying to understand what Kubrick was doing in the movie Raphael was writing for him.

Thanks to anecdotes such as this you get the impression that Raphael fails to understand Kubrick on a fundamental level -- after all, authors are inherently self-disclosing, while directors are not. He characterizes the Kube as a man who cared "more for images than for drama," who hated humor, and preferred still photography over movement in his movies, all ideas refuted instantly by anyone who reflects for a second on the films themselves, with their aching passion (Barry Lyndon), wit (Lolita, Dr Strangelove) and obsessive moving camera work (Paths of Glory, The Shining). "What exactly he liked about a Spanish film called The Red Squirrel," Raphael moans, "I was never able to understand." Well, did he bother to see it? He's talking about Julio Medem, perhaps the most interesting director to come out of Spain since Almodóvar. The fact that Raphael seems to view Stanley Donen as a greater director than Kubrick (primarily because Donen bowed to the power of Raphael's scriptwriting) perhaps explains his inability to understand a highly visual type of director such as Kubrick or Medem. Raphael also calls Lolita the one truly disappointing movie Kubrick made, a baffling judgment. Well, what do you expect from a film writer who in his 60s had have explained to him by Kubrick the fundamental lesson of reading his own script dialogue out loud (page 166).

On the other hand, Raphael also seems to confirm my thesis, stated elsewhere on this website, that Kubrick's "great theme" is cowardice. Even A Clockwork Orange can be seen as a statement on cowardice; the emotion just happens to be chemically induced. In Raphael's view, Kubrick "was a timid man with little appetite for the battles which so intrigued him." The book also hints that there is the tiniest credit to my suggestion that Carl Dreyer was a major influence on this film. In Eyes Wide Shut the code word for entry into the orgy is "Fidelio," linking up with both the musical theme and the issue of fidelity. In the source story by Schnitzler, which Raphael summarizes well (the book itself is still irritatingly unavailable, even in the best bookstores in the world), it is Denmark.

The biggest charge against the film is that it is made by two old married men who are detached and unaware of what it is like out there in the sexual battlefield. This was the tact enunciated by a quartet of wind bags on Charlie Rose on Friday, 16 July. But Raphael refutes this, too. At one point while discussing modernizing the source novel, Raphael asks him, "Things have changed a lot between men and women since Schnitzler's time." Kubrick retorts, "Have they? I don't think they have." After a moment, Raphael replies, "Neither do I." As Willamette Week movie reviewer Kim Morgan said after the screening in Portland, Oregon, Wednesday morning, July 14th, to her the film is entirely contemporary, capturing the tension, fear, wariness, and still active lust of sex. This is the kind of insight that needed to be brought to this book, not the petulant (and dare I say cowardly?) blasts of an irritated writer made well after the fact.

A writer named Sara Maitland also worked with Kubrick, on the aborted AI. Her review of Raphael's book, in the New York Observer, presents a much more sympathetic portrayal of Kubrick, and the reader looks forward to the possibility that she, too, will commit her memoirs to paper, if only to give us an idea of what the intriguing AI was all about.

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