Dr. Strange Love

Arthur Schnitzler's paranoid, erotic 1926 novella inspired Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut."

By Curt Holman

Jul 15, 1999 | Dr. Arthur Schnitzler, an Austrian novelist and playwright renowned for his psychological acuity and frankness about sex, died in 1931, but he's just been initiated into an exclusive fraternity. It's a men's club comprising such diverse members as Vladimir Nabokov, Stephen King, Lionel White, Anthony Burgess and William Makepeace Thackeray -- all writers whose work has been made into films by the late Stanley Kubrick. Except for "2001: A Space Odyssey," based on a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, every Kubrick film -- beginning with "The Killing" in 1956 -- has been adapted from a novel.

Kubrick was a Schnitzler fan for decades, telling Robert Emmett Ginna in a 1960 interview, "It's difficult to find any writer who understood the human soul more truly and who had a more profound insight into the way people think, act and really are, and who also had a somewhat all-seeing point of view -- sympathetic, if somewhat cynical."

Kubrick would reveal an affinity with that perspective as he developed his signature filmmaking style, an icily formal, deliberately paced approach that conveys a clinical, third-person-omniscient point of view. That cool, scrutinizing tone proved the most consistent quality in his body of work, linking movies as diverse as "Lolita," "The Shining," "A Clockwork Orange" and "Barry Lyndon."

Of all of Schnitzler's work, Kubrick was most drawn to "Traumnovelle," a slim, 1926 novella published in the United States as "Rhapsody: A Dream Novel." The book is an erotic reverie frequently interrupted by bouts of paranoia. Kubrick contemplated filming the book for decades, and even considered a big-budget, hardcore pornographic treatment in the early 1970s. Diane Johnson, who collaborated with Kubrick on the script for "The Shining," says he showed it to her in 1979, and that "Kubrick had apparently shown 'Dream Novel' to all the writers he had worked with, to friends, perhaps people at Warner Bros. He had shown it to others since, over the years, apparently searching for the suggestion that would unlock for him something that drew but puzzled him."

At some point after the release of "Full Metal Jacket" in 1987, Kubrick found the key to "Traumnovelle" and, working with screenwriter Frederic Raphael, adapted the book, retitling it "Eyes Wide Shut." The most conspicuous change involves updating the setting from Vienna circa 1900 to modern New York, just a few years shy of 2001. But the sexual odyssey undertaken by the main character remains essentially the same as in Schnitzler's novella.

At the beginning of "Traumnovelle," a well-heeled Viennese couple, Fridolin and Albertina (in "Eyes Wide Shut" they become New Yorkers Bill and Alice Harford, played by Tom Cruise and his wife, Nicole Kidman) put their daughter to bed. They casually swap stories of being propositioned at a recent masquerade ball, then confess to more serious but unconsummated temptations from earlier in their marriage.

That night, Fridolin, a medical doctor, has professional duties that call him away, and as he strolls turn-of-the-century Vienna's cobbled streets, one sexual opportunity after another is laid before him: the willing daughter of a recently deceased colleague, a saucy prostitute, a simple girl whose father is pimping for her. He manfully resists them all until he reaches a mysterious villa where a secret society gathers for a masked orgy: The men dress up first as monks, then as musketeers, while the women wear nun's habits, then nothing but veils. At first an observer, he's exposed as a stranger before he can join in the debauchery and only escapes unscathed thanks to the intervention of an alluring, aristocratic woman.

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