Episode 30: On Stanley Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut'

No dream is ever just a dream. Or so Tom Cruises tells Nicole Kidman at the end of Eyes Wide Shut. In this episode, Phil and JF expound some of the key themes of Kubrick's film, a masterpiece of cinematic chamber music that demonstrates, with painstaking attention to detail, Zen Master Dōgen's utterance that when one side of the world is illuminated, the other side is dark. Treading a winding path between wakefulness and dream, love and sex, life and art, your paranoid hosts make boldly for that secret spot where the rainbow ends, and the masks come off. REFERENCES Arthur Schnitzler, Dream Story (Traumnovelle) -- Source of the EWS screenplay, sadly overlooked in the episode but well worth a read. Frederic Raphael, Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick Bathysphere  Frank L. Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz David Icke's "reptilian" theory of the British Royal Family  Thomas A. Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze Screenshot of newspaper article from Eyes Wide Shut Rodney Ascher, Room 237 James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare  Gustave Moreau, L'Apparition Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony William S. Burroughs, “On Coincidence,” in The Adding Machine J.F. Martel, "The Kubrick Gaze"