With the release of Eyes Wide Shut (July 1999), less than two months after Stanley Kubrick’s death, a project that had haunted him for more then thirty years came to fruition. Kubrick had spoken of this project—an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (“Dream Story”)—as early as the 1960’s, and he considered adapting it after completing A Clockwork Orange. In an interview with Michel Ciment conducted shortly after the release of A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick noted that Traumnovelle was a project he “intend[ed] to do” and called it “a difficult book to describe.” He went on to explain that “it explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage, and tries to equate the importance of sexual dreams and might-have-beens with reality” (Kubrick’s italics).1 By the time he finally came to make the project in the 90’s, it had all the elements of a “dream story” for him personally, as it allowed him to revisit stages of his own life and raise questions that he had struggled with for many years. Unlike the novel, which takes place in turn-of-thecentury Vienna, Kubrick’s film is set in the New York of his youth.
