REVISTA N° 04 | AÑO 2008 / 2
NOTAS DE LECTURA
Danckwardt joachim f. (2007). From dream story (schnitzler) to eyes wide shut (kubrik). From identity through meaning formation to identity through excitation, int. J. Psychoanal.
Ludovica Grassi
In order to compare a literary work with its screen version produced three quarters of a century later, Joachim Dankwardt, a German psychoanalyst, chooses a point of view which fits well the focus of this review: through a comparative study of the way Schnitzler described a crisis between husband and wife in Dream Story, and the interpretation and re-edition of the story in Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut, he proposes an articulated discussion on marriage and couple relationship in two different historical periods. Danckwardt’s article aims therefore to analyze the cultural changes and inherent consequences on the internal world of individuals, which occurred during the time elapsed between the two artistic works, thus identifying what the Author names “cultural relativism”.
Both Schnitzler and Kubrick agree that the main reason of the crisis in the couple relationship lies in the “traumatic loss of certitude that one still loves”, and that “talking therapy” is the best strategy to deal with it. Even though the premises are the same, Danckwardt points to the different cultural backgrounds of the two authors: Schnitzler was deeply impressed and consequently affected by the birth of psychoanalysis, whereas Kubrick grew up in a cultural climate where other pressures came to the fore instead of the psychoanalytic vision, by then taken for granted and radically transformed through different pathways.
Dream Story is thus to be considered both as Schnitzler’s homage to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and his opposition to the psychoanalytical method: about this, he once wrote to Reik that psychoanalysts “only too often turn away too soon from a still viable road through the midst of an illuminated internal world because they think they have to explore the world of shadows and darkness” (Schnitzler to Reik, cited in Worbs, 1983, pp. 217-8). Schnitlzer, in fact, often had contacts with several psychoanalysts, met Freud a few times, and was himself a doctor and a psychotherapist of actors affected by functional aphonia.
Schnitzler’s demasking of emblematic male characters, even more incisive in his 1901 novella Leutnant Gustl, brought about a scandal and disciplinary actions by the Austro-Hungarian military establishment. The reactions produced by that work and the reasons behind them can be compared to Eyes Wide Shut’s box-office flop in U.S. In Danckward’s opinion, people did not recognize themselves in the vision Kubrick offered of the American man – confused, impotent and psychologically complicated.
The story, both in the novel and in the film, takes place in twenty-four hours: after a party, a doctor and his wife reveal to each other their hitherto hidden sexual desires and erotic fantasies. Both are hurt and humiliated by the revelations, but the husband’s reactions bring about feelings of possessive rage and ideas of breaking up the relationship. The woman works through her feelings in a long dream where she annihilates her partner and satisfies her sexual and destructive wishes, while the man, during a venturesome night, complies with his erotic and revengeful fantasies by getting repeatedly near to put them into effect in the external reality.
In conclusion, both Schnitzler and Kubrick believe that the main threat to a relationship, after the phase of infatuation, is the detachment of erotic desires from a personal bonding and from love. It is therefore particularly interesting to understand how it happens that both authors, more than seventy years apart, take us to the point when the couple optimistically decides to stay together, feeling they have got over, safe and sound, their parallel adventures.
In the final scene of the novella, we read that for the wife the positive outcome will last ”for a long time”, and not “forever”, as the husband proposes. Many things, however, have changed from the story to the film, which appears clearly in something Kubrick adds to the couple’s last dialogue:
“Alice: Let’s…let’s not use that word, it frightens me. But I do love you and you know there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible?
Bill: What’s that?
Alice: Fuck.”
Throughout the film, indeed, in all the scenes that describe the doctor’s adventures following hard on each other, Kubrick shifts the accent onto the aspect of excitement and depersonalization. So, in the scene of the orgy, the generalized compulsion of the characters to excite each other can be seen as a representation of the loss and denial of love, as well as when gorgeous women wearing depersonalizing masks exchange kisses in a circle. Likewise, the words that in the story soberly describe the feelings of jealousy aroused in the husband become in the film black and white images of a primal scene where the woman gradually loses her similarity with the protagonist, dragging the spectator into a state of overwhelming and confusing excitement. In the last scene of the film, when the wife shows her husband the mask he ”forgot” at home, she doesn’t simply catches him at fault, but rather forces him to confront himself with a symbol of depersonalization and loss of his own self.
In Kubrick’s view, to let love go beyond infatuation, psychological working through and fulfillment are not enough; love cannot last if excitement is missing. From identity through meaning formation we move to an identity created through excited self-objectification. The film is therefore expression of consciousness of identity and its development in contemporary world – from idealistic conception of Descartes’ motto “I think, therefore I am”, through “I feel, therefore I am”, up to “I am excited, therefore I am”.
These sharp conclusions seem to partially fade in the last statements in the paper, which stress how in fact Schnitzler and Kubrick use two profoundly different languages. Audiovisual media are by nature better equipped to represent an identification process based on excitement and self-objectification, whereas verbal media better express interpretation and meaning creation. While verbal language requires the receiver to transform what has listened in images and representations, in screen works the images “act like missiles”, which immediately hit the mind, meeting the spectators’ willingness to temporarily forget their identity.