‘Lucky to Be Alive’: Clockwork Models and the Logic of the Inanimate in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s phantasmagoric Traumnovelle (1926), chronicles a few days in the life of a perfectly wealthy, healthy and beautiful high-society couple, Alice and Bill Harford (played respectively by Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise). Transposed from Schnitzler’s early-twentieth-century Vienna to fin-desiècle New York City, Kubrick’s nocturnal ‘after hours’ experience takes place in the aftermath of a Christmas party, during which a husband’s inability to contain an excessive obsession and sexual jealousy places a seemingly ideal marriage on the verge of collapse. Eyes Wide Shut, I will argue in this chapter, is a film