The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Stanley Kubrick · a film · 1999 · 159 minutes · written with Frederic Raphael, from Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story
Mode
Erotic thriller slowed into a dream that never declares itself; marriage drama, night journey and fable of class in one
Mythos
The night journey into an underworld and the return; Fidelio inverted, a masked woman freeing a man who came to betray his wife; one woman met in many forms
Phase
A party; a night that runs from the bedroom out across the city to a country house and home by dawn; a day that retraces the same places; a last morning in a toy store before Christmas
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 35 mm, 159 minutes; Larry Smith’s light from practical sources, the Steadicam through rooms and streets; Jocelyn Pook’s score with Ligeti and Shostakovich; a New York built on English stages
Register
From a desk clerk’s camp flirtation to a liturgy played backwards; Christmas lights in nearly every room, line readings echoed like a dream’s speech
Scale
One marriage, one man’s night, one city and the rich behind their masks
Governing Proposition
A New York doctor, told by his wife that she once would have given up her husband, her child and her future for one night with a stranger, spends a night going from door to door with his licence and his cash, and is let into the masked ritual of a class above him, where a woman redeems him at a price. By day he goes back to every place and finds each one emptied, explained or turned sordid, and the explanation he is finally given is built to cover a body. The wager of the film is that a star vehicle can be slowed into a dream that never declares itself, so that the waking life of a marriage is seen to be a dream already, and that the marriage survives because the wife can hold dream and waking together without asking which was true.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a woman undressing. Alice Harford, played by Nicole Kidman, stands with her back to the camera in a room of columns and lets her dress fall, and the image cuts to black for the title, over the second waltz from Shostakovich’s Suite for Variety Orchestra, which will return at the close. The glimpse is given to the audience and to no one in the story, and it opens the film on what its hero will spend it looking for. Then the waltz becomes domestic. Alice and her husband, Dr William Harford, played by Tom Cruise, dress for a party and leave their daughter Helena with a sitter. Their rooms are lit by lamps and by Christmas lights, as nearly every room in the film will be.
The party is Victor Ziegler’s, and Sydney Pollack plays him. A Hungarian, Sandor Szavost, played by Sky du Mont, dances with Alice and invites her upstairs. Two models lead Bill away with an offer to take him where the rainbow ends. Before either offer can be taken up, Ziegler sends for Bill. In an upstairs bathroom a naked young woman, Mandy, played by Julienne Davis, has overdosed. Bill brings her round, and Ziegler asks him for discretion. Everything the film will need is planted in these rooms: the host who owns the house, the woman who will die, the stranger who wants the wife, and the doctor who is sent for because he can be relied on to say nothing. The ending is already present, and neither the hero nor the audience can see it.
Kubrick directed and produced the film for Warner Bros., with Jan Harlan as executive producer, from a screenplay he wrote with Frederic Raphael after Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story, 1926). Schnitzler’s couple are Fridolin and Albertine, in Vienna at carnival; the film moves them to New York at Christmas, and builds that city on stages in England, so that it is never quite a city. Larry Smith photographed it and Nigel Galt cut it. The original music is Jocelyn Pook’s; beside it stand the Shostakovich waltz, the single piano notes of the second piece of György Ligeti’s Musica ricercata, and Chris Isaak’s “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing”. It runs 159 minutes, and it was Kubrick’s last film: he died on 7 March 1999, a few days after showing his cut to the two leads and to Warner Bros.
Movement II
The next day is given in a montage, cut between Bill’s examining rooms and Alice at home with Helena. In the evening comes the scene before the mirror, to Chris Isaak’s song. Then, in the bedroom, high on marijuana, they quarrel about the party. Bill says that women do not think as men do. Alice laughs at him, and then the laughter goes cold, and from the floor she tells him about a naval officer she saw the summer before, at a hotel on Cape Cod. For one night with him, she says, she would have given up Bill, Helena and her whole future. Kidman holds the speech by voice alone, and it is the first height of the film.
It ends on the telephone. A patient, Lou Nathanson, has died, and Bill goes out to the family. At the bedside the dead man’s daughter, Marion, played by Marie Richardson, kisses him and says that she loves him, and her fiancé, Carl, played by Thomas Gibson, arrives. Bill leaves into the night, and as he goes he sees, in black and white, his wife with the naval officer. The images are his own. He will spend the rest of the film watching a film of Alice that he has made himself, of a desire he does not know and cannot stop imagining.
On the street young men shove him and shout homophobic abuse at him. A prostitute, Domino, played by Vinessa Shaw, takes him up to her apartment, and before anything has happened Alice calls his mobile phone, and he leaves without sex and pays Domino anyway. Each encounter of the night is an offer made and then withheld, and each is paid for. Bill’s instruments for the whole journey are already in his hands: the doctor’s licence that opens doors and the cash that keeps them open. What he is looking for he could not name, and the film does not name it for him.
Movement III
At the Sonata Café Bill finds Nick Nightingale, played by Todd Field, a classmate from medical school who dropped out to play the piano. Nick tells him of parties where he plays blindfold, and, pressed, gives him the address and the password: “Fidelio”. It is the name Beethoven’s Leonore takes when she disguises herself to free her husband from prison. The film turns the opera inside out. The man who goes in disguise to the house is not going to free his spouse; he has gone out to betray her, and it is a woman who will free him.
He needs a costume. At Rainbow Fashions he wakes the owner, Milich, played by Rade Šerbedžija, to rent a cloak and a mask, and in the back of the shop Milich finds his young daughter, played by Leelee Sobieski, with two Japanese men, and locks them in. The rainbow the models offered at the party has become a sign over a shop. Bill takes a cab out of the city to a country house, Somerton, and at the gate he tears a hundred-dollar bill in half to keep the cab waiting. Then he gives the word and is let in.
Inside is the summit of the film. Masked women kneel in a circle in a great hall around a figure in a red cloak with a censer, while Pook’s music plays a liturgy backwards, and the masks turn together toward the stranger. A masked woman warns him to leave. He passes through rooms of masked sex watched by masked spectators. Then he is brought before the assembly, and the figure in red, played by Leon Vitali, orders him to unmask, and the single piano notes of the Ligeti are struck. From the gallery the masked woman intervenes and offers herself to redeem him. He is let go, with a warning to say nothing, and she stays. She is the last of the night’s women, and the film has made them all versions of one figure, the wife he cannot reach.
Movement IV
Bill comes home at dawn and finds Alice laughing in her sleep. When she wakes she tells him the dream, in tears: a deserted city, the two of them naked, Bill gone to find clothes, a garden, the naval officer, sex with him and then with many men, and herself laughing at Bill. It is the second of Kidman’s two speeches, and it answers the night he has just spent. What he went out to do and did not do, she has done in a dream, and laughed at him for it.
The next day he goes back, in daylight, to each place of the night, and each is emptied, explained or turned sordid. At the hotel the desk clerk, played by Alan Cumming, tells him that Nick checked out at dawn with two large men. Milich, taking back the costume, offers him his daughter. At Somerton’s gate a written second warning is handed to him. He calls Marion, and hangs up when Carl answers. He goes to Domino’s with a gift, and her roommate, Sally, played by Fay Masterson, tells him that Domino has learned she is HIV positive. A bald man follows him through the streets, to the Ligeti notes, and in a café a newspaper reports that a former beauty queen is in hospital after an overdose. At the morgue Bill identifies the body of Mandy and bends over her face.
Ziegler sends for him again, and in a billiard room, across a red table, gives him an account: that he was at Somerton himself; that the warnings were meant to frighten Bill and nothing more; that the woman who redeemed him was Mandy; that the sacrifice was staged; and that Mandy died of the overdose that was always coming. Pollack plays it genial and menacing at once. It is offered as comfort and works as a threat, and the dead woman is the fact it is built to cover. “Life goes on. It always does, until it doesn’t.” The film does not confirm a word of it, and it does not deny one.
Movement V
Bill comes home. On his pillow, beside the sleeping Alice, lies the mask he rented. The film does not say who put it there, and the image closes a circuit: the underworld has come to the bed, and the bed was where the journey began. He breaks down and says that he will tell her everything. The telling itself the film leaves out.
The next morning they go Christmas shopping with Helena in a toy store, and Alice’s eyes are red. Helena moves among the goods choosing what she wants, and her parents talk. Alice says that they should be grateful to have come through, whether it was all real or only a dream, and that they are awake now. Bill says “Forever”, and she asks him not to use the word. There is something, she says, that they must do as soon as possible, and the last word of the film is hers: “Fuck.” A night of offers made and withheld ends on an offer made plainly, in daylight, by the wife.
The film was released in the United States on 16 July 1999, four months after Kubrick’s death, and it was received largely as slow, unerotic and puzzling. For the American theatrical release Warner Bros. placed digitally added figures in front of parts of the Somerton orgy to secure an R rating; the international release carried the picture as Kubrick delivered it, and the unaltered film has since replaced the altered one. The stars’ marriage ended in 2001, and the film has outlived the marketing built on it. It has since been read as a marriage film, a Christmas film and a film about money and the masked power of the very rich, and it returns to repertory screens at Christmas. What has lasted is a shape: a night that puts a price on every door, a day that empties every room, and a wife who will not ask which was the dream.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The spine resists subtraction. The second day is required: Bill goes back in daylight to each place of the night and finds it emptied, explained or turned sordid, and without the retracing the night would stand as fact. The party is required, since Mandy, Ziegler and Szavost are planted there. But at 159 minutes the subtractive test finds give. The bald man in the street plays a dread the warning at the gate has already set; the second visit to Milich restates the first; the desk clerk is held for comedy past his information. The echoing line readings are partly the dream’s law and partly only length.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it is a meaning, not a mood. A marriage rests on what each partner withholds of desire, and a man’s jealousy is a fantasy of his wife’s desire more than knowledge of it: Bill spends the film watching an imagined film of Alice. His power is credentials and cash, and above him is a class for whom he is as disposable as the women in its rooms. And the marriage survives because Alice can hold dream and waking together. Each holds on any reading. Held at the figure because the class disclosure rests on an explanation the film will not confirm, and part of it arrives as unease.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The elevation is dread more than beauty, and it is concentrated. Somerton is the summit: the liturgy played backwards, the circle of kneeling women, the red cloak and censer, the masks turning together toward the stranger. The unmasking, with the masked woman’s voice from the gallery, is terror and grace in one image. Kidman’s two monologues rise by voice alone. The single piano notes of the Ligeti make dread a sound, and the morgue is still and cold. Against that is frequency: much of the film is a man in conversation in lit rooms, and the second day descends by design into anticlimax. The flatness is counted.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Myth built, not cited. The plot is a night journey into an underworld and a return, then a day that retraces it, with a guide, a password, an outfitter, a threshold, a judge in red and a woman who dies for the hero. The password, “Fidelio”, is the name Beethoven’s Leonore takes in disguise to free her husband, and the film inverts it: a masked woman offers herself to free a man who came to betray his wife. Marion, Domino, Mandy, Milich’s daughter and the masked woman are versions of one figure Bill cannot reach. Held at the figure because much of the construction is Schnitzler’s, and the sacrifice is left in doubt.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is Schnitzler’s novella, the erotic thriller of the 1990s and Kubrick’s own idiom of Steadicam corridor and symmetrical frame. The departures are real. A studio film sold on the most famous married couple in the world is slow, anti-erotic and finally domestic; its New York is built on English stages; a dream logic runs unmarked across a realist plot; it ends in a toy store on one blunt word. The turn was paid for in a long and costly shoot, years of its stars’ working lives and a puzzled release. Held close to the gate by precedent: Buñuel had made the bourgeois erotic dream in Belle de Jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that Bill’s waking life is already a dream. The city is built and looks built: the same corners recur, and the light comes from lamps, windows and Christmas lights. Characters echo each other’s last words, so speech becomes a dream’s speech. Night and then day over the same places is the instrument of the knowledge: what was charged at night is emptied in daylight, from the party to the toy store. Shot on location and paced as a thriller, the story would be about a conspiracy. One cost keeps it a step from the top: the black-and-white inserts, which state the jealousy too plainly.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over promise, and twenty-seven years of it. Received in 1999 largely as a slow, unerotic disappointment, the film has since been read as a marriage film, a Christmas film, a film about money, class and the masked power of the very rich, and a meditation on fidelity. The formal yield holds on return: the rainbow motif, the colour of doors and lights, the recurring corners. Two discounts. Part of the yield is invited by what the film withholds: whether the masked woman is Mandy, whether Ziegler tells the truth, who put the mask on the pillow. And much of its later currency is conspiracy reading, which is projection, not depth.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Released in 1999, so force and reach are scored together. The force is real: a star vehicle carries a slow, ambiguous chamber study of a marriage, and a dream logic is sustained across a realistic plot without being marked. It does not reorganise what film can do; it is the last statement of a style Kubrick had built over thirty years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the masked rite in a country house has become a common shorthand for the secret ceremonies of the powerful, and the film is a reference point for later work in erotic and paranoid ambiguity. The reach is diffuse, and part of it rides on a conspiracy culture the film did not make.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across twenty-seven years, and the standing has risen across them, from mixed notices at release to a settled place among Kubrick’s major films, with repertory screenings at Christmas, restorations and new editions. Little of the surface is fixed to its moment: the pagers and mobile phones are furniture, and the built New York has no year. The one period surface lay outside the film. It was sold on its stars’ marriage; the marriage ended in 2001, and the film has outlived its marketing without loss. The digitally altered American print was a scar of its moment, and the unaltered film has replaced it. Held near the gate by the shortness of the span.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Larry Smith’s light, built almost entirely from practical sources; the Steadicam through the party, the corridors of Somerton and the night streets; the design of Somerton, its masks, its circle and its procession; Pook’s backward liturgy and the single Ligeti notes; Nicole Kidman’s two monologues; Sydney Pollack’s Ziegler, genial and menacing in one scene. The first cost lies at the centre, and it holds the figure: Tom Cruise’s Bill is held deliberately blank, and the blankness flattens scenes the film needs alive. The stalker is broad, and in a film whose making is its design the street sets sometimes look only cheap. Guernica, load-bearing in its main figures with passages left summary, stands at the same figure.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Somerton ritual and the last morning in the toy store. One law governs both. Everything is an offer of pleasure made and withheld, priced and displayed: the masked bodies in the great rooms, and the goods round Helena as she picks out what she wants while her parents talk of what they will do. Desire is deferred in every scene until the last word ends the deferral. The law strains in three places: the desk clerk’s flirtation is camp comedy in another key; the stalker plays thriller suspense, which the film otherwise refuses; and Ziegler’s explanation turns to exposition, a register the dream logic forbids.
Score: 8.7 / 10
A film of 159 minutes centred on one man holds more orders than a chamber drama, and holds them in scenes: marriage and sexuality at the centre; consciousness and dream; money, class and power, from the doctor’s licence to Ziegler’s billiard room; the body, sickness and death, from the bedside to the morgue; the family, in Helena and the Christmas shopping. Commerce runs through all of them. What holds the axis lowest is absence and routing. The state, labour beyond Bill’s practice, history and the natural order do not enter; the sacred appears only as a liturgy played backwards; and every order reaches the film through one man’s consciousness.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.1, then The Living Form at 8.9, then The Unconcealment, The Bottomless Well and The Inner Law at 8.7. A making in which practical light, the Steadicam, the design of Somerton and the music each bear weight, a form of night and day over the same places that is the instrument of what the film knows, a disclosure about desire, jealousy and the price of every door that can be stated and holds, twenty-seven years of rising return, and one law of pleasure offered and withheld from the masked hall to the toy store.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: marriage, dream, money and class, the body and death, and the family are held in scenes, but the state, labour, history and the natural order do not enter, the sacred is a liturgy played backwards, and every order passes through one man’s consciousness. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.3, where the stalker, the second visit to Milich and the desk clerk are permitted rather than required, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3, the last statement of a style rather than a new one, with a reach that is real and diffuse.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on four of five: The Unconcealment at 8.7, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6, The Swerve at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 falls two tenths short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. The work is held below the summit by one condition, Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.5 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Eyes Wide Shut as Kubrick delivered it, 159 minutes, colour, 35 mm, released by Warner Bros. in the United States on 16 July 1999, from the dress falling in the room of columns to the last word in the toy store. The American theatrical print, in which digitally added figures stand in front of parts of the Somerton orgy, is not Kubrick’s and is not the object; the picture judged is the unaltered one. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (1926) is not part of the work and is named only where the film departs from it. Dialogue is quoted only where the words are certain, and the song is named by its title alone. Figures that could not be verified, among them the scene and shot counts, the share of the dialogue, the length and cost of the shoot and the box-office returns, are not given.