Luke Ford

By Bryn V. Young-Roberts:

Although Geoffrey Cocks explored the theme of Holocaust running through the entire oeuvre of Kubrick in The Wolf at the Door (2004), and devoted a section to Eyes Wide Shut, he only touched upon the theme of Jewish identity, rather than examine it specifically.[1] This article explores Kubrick’s swansong in order to discover what it can reveal about Jewish identity in late 20th century America.

Stanley Kubrick was born in New York in 1928, the descendant of Jewish Austro-Hungarian grandparents. After a successful career as a photographer in his youth, he turned to film directing in the 1950s, the work of Jewish-German director Max Ophuls being one of his primary influences. After a distasteful experience shooting Spartacus (1960) with actor and producer Kirk Douglas, he turned his back on Hollywood and fled to England, where he lived for the rest of his life. Still funded by Hollywood studios, he continued to work in the United Kingdom, transforming locations in London into settings for vast ancient deserts and outer space (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968), Vietnam (Full Metal Jacket, 1987), and finally, in what was to be his last film, New York City, completed only four days before his death (Eyes Wide Shut).

Eyes Wide Shut is based on the novella Traumnovelle (1926) by Jewish-Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. The plot follows Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) as he seeks sexual gratification in New York as a response to his wife’s (Alice Harford, played by Nicole Kidman) fantasies of infidelity. The adventure takes him to an encounter with the daughter of a patient who admits her love for him, friendly prostitutes, a meeting with an old medical school friend, a heavily fortified costume shop featuring sex with an underage girl, and a masked orgy with quasi-religious themes that lead to threats against him and his family. However, at no point in the journey does he ever manage to consummate sex with anyone other than his wife. And there are no overt references to him, or any other character, being Jewish.

This does not hamper any investigation into Jewish identity, however. Just because characters are not highlighted as Jewish in a narrative, it does not mean they cannot be perceived as such, as there is also no reason to believe that characters must automatically be considered gentiles unless otherwise stated. However there is a particular argument for reading characters as Jewish in the work of Stanley Kubrick. Most of Kubrick’s films were adaptations of novels, and he deliberately expunged almost all overt references to Jewry in the transition from page to screen, even if Jewish aspects were major themes of the books. Jon Stratton argues in Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities that many texts offer ‘an ambivalence of representation’ to readers, so that our reading of Bill in Eyes Wide Shut, just like many other films that do not overtly mention the word ‘Jew’ gives us ‘the possibility of reading him as a Jew – looks, behaviour, name – but no certainty’ (2000: 5).

Traumnovelle is a classic example of Kubrick’s Jew-editing, as the novel, by a Jewish writer, clearly states that some of its characters are Jewish. But the omission of references to Jewish character backgrounds does not mean they are gentiles, and so readers of the novella watching the film adaptation would have no reason to assume that the characters are not Jewish. It is likely that Kubrick preferred not to overtly state that his characters were Jewish for financial reasons, perhaps believing that the word ‘Jewish’ would dissuaded gentiles from seeing his movies.

According to Ruth D. Johnston, citing the work of Jon Stratton in her article ‘Joke-Work’ (2006), post-World War II Jews in America were assimilated ‘on two levels – both ideologically and culturally. In other words, they were accepted not only as American (i.e., subscribing to the Enlightenment ideology of liberalism, individualism, and freedom) but also as White (i.e., embracing Anglo-American culture)’. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, she explains that ‘desire for assimilation waned’ and that modern American Jews found themselves ‘in a peculiar post-assimilationist situation’ that no longer subscribed to the key values of Anglo-America, and were left unsure of how to produce and present difference…

Bill’s profession of doctor suggests he is of this later Eastern European Diaspora, as these Jews ‘became professionals rather than business people’, with careers such as ‘physicians, attorneys, academicians, scientists, and engineers’ that allowed them financial security, but as a result were ‘less philanthropic (and often less wealthy) than the successful self-employed’, which further indicates Ziegler’s position as the descendent of nineteenth century immigrants, and highlights a Jewish immigrant class divide between the two men (Whitfield 1996: 185). The acceptance of a wage has therefore brought benefits of financial security, allowing a middle-class status to this later generation who took to higher education, but it has also limited them from entering the realms of elitist power by curtailing their philanthropic ventures.

NEW YORK POST: “THE late Stanley Kubrick once remarked that ‘Hitler was right about almost everything,” and insisted that any trace of Jewishness be expunged from the ‘Eyes Wide Shut” script that author Frederic Raphael was writing for him.”