Eyes Wide Shut de Stanley Kubrick: relatos soñados y deseos encadenados

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story (1926). Schnitzler was one of the big explorers of the subjective breach opened by the romanticism and enlarged into an abyss by the psychoanalysis. In Schnitzler’s life's work, the frontiers become blurred between mind and body, the conscious and the unconscious, dream and reality, desire and death. Dream Story is a condensation of all that, a brief novelle about the currents of dream and desire which furiously flow under social relations. Schnitzler placed his characters in a fin de siècle Vienna traversed by the forces of the unconscious, but Kubrick places them in a New York on the brink of the new millennium. Despite these temporal and geographical changes, Kubrick makes a faithful translation of Schnitzler’s novelle but he goes, as per usual, far beyond from the canon adaptation. In this paper I would try to show how his insatiable image desire made him avoid the expected voice over in order to translate his characters’ stream of consciousness. Thanks to a masterful use of the film grammar —specially dissolves— Kubrick manages to translate into images his character’s inner turmoil and «those hidden, scarcely suspected wishes», as Schnitzler puts it, «which can produce dangerous whirlpools even in the serenest and purest soul».