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Stanley Kubrick

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When he returns home, Albertina awakens and relates a dream with Freudian parallels to Fridolin's recent sexploits. In her dream, as a merciless queen condemns her husband to death, Albertina takes part in a Bacchanalian romp: "Just as I saw you," she tells him, "though I was far away, you could also see me and the man who was holding me in his arms. All the other couples, too, were visible in this infinite sea of nakedness which foamed about me, and of which my companions and I were only a wave, so to speak."

Stung by this intimation that his wife has a faithless heart, Fridolin leaves and retraces his steps, prepared to seize the pleasures he previously refused and fantasizing about a double life as "a libertine, a seducer" as well as a family man. But this time all the carnal avenues are closed, and he winds up at that deadest of dead ends, a mortuary. The book ends with the daughter's laughter, but Schnitzler doesn't indicate whether the marriage's status quo has been restored or overturned.

Kubrick reportedly said he was never sure whether "Traumnovelle" was a comedy or a tragedy, and he considered casting Steve Martin in the Fridolin role. There's nothing overtly funny in the book, but you can view it as a deadpan exploration of the old saw that you won't get any if you go looking for it. Structurally, "Traumnovelle" has a symmetry reminiscent of the first and last acts of "A Clockwork Orange," where Malcolm McDowell's ultra-violent Alex abuses people in the first part, then is abused by them later.

Much of Schnitzler's writing is marked by an interest in sex. Like Anton Chekhov, Schnitzler practiced medicine before pursuing a literary life, and his specialties in syphilis and psychiatry would later inform his writing. His concern with the heart in addition to the areas below the belt is reflected in such titles as "Casanova's Homecoming" and "Liebelei," a play variously translated as "Flirtations," "Playing With Love" and "Dalliance" (the latter is the title of Tom Stoppard's English translation).

Like Kubrick, who offered scathing depictions of war and the military in "Dr. Strangelove" and "Full Metal Jacket," Schnitzler was a pacifist, sharply critical of the armed services. His stream-of-consciousness novella "Lieutenant Gustl" got him court-martialed by the Austro-Hungarian military reserve for painting a damning portrait of a brutish soldier. "Lieutenant Gustl" and the tragicomedy "Das Weite Land" (translated as "Undiscovered Country" by Stoppard) reveal a special abhorrence of the Hapsburg Empire's obsession with dueling -- a topic Kubrick himself tackled in "Barry Lyndon."

Schnitzler wrote his most famous work, "Der Reigen," aka "La Ronde," in 1902, with no expectation of seeing it publicly performed. He printed only 200 copies to distribute among friends. The play lays out a sexual daisy chain of five men and five women: A prostitute sleeps with a soldier, who sleeps with a chambermaid, who sleeps with her young employer, who sleeps with a married woman, and so on, ending up with the prostitute again. In David Hare's transatlantic hit adaptation of the play, retitled "The Blue Room," Kidman herself played all the female roles. Kidman's highly publicized nude scenes in both "The Blue Room" and "Eyes Wide Shut" are giving Schnitzler his biggest boost of the century.

"Traumnovelle" and "La Ronde" are the best examples of Schnitzler's equivocal and all-seeing eye -- the perspective that so attracted Kubrick. In prose and drama, Schnitzler approaches sexual inconstancy in a clinical, nonjudgmental way. Neither "Traumnovelle" nor "La Ronde" offers tidy explanations of the human heart. The works suggest Rorschach blots, awaiting the reader's interpretation, and it's inevitable that Schnitzler's adapters should put their own stamp on the material. In Max Ophüls' 1950 film of "La Ronde," Anton Walbrook's crooning narrator/stage manager adds some Gallic savoir-faire, while Hare's "Blue Room" employs the coarse joke of identifying the length of each erotic encounter -- from "45 seconds" to "one hour and one minute" -- at every fade to black.

Given his fascination with sex, death, consciousness and Vienna, one could easily imagine Schnitzler as a nom de plume of Sigmund Freud himself, who was in fact born six years earlier than the playwright. They admired each other, but weren't close. In a 1922 letter congratulating Schnitzler on his 60th birthday, Freud makes this remarkable profession: "I think I have avoided you from a kind of reluctance to meet my double ... Your preoccupation with the truths of the unconscious and of the instinctual drives in man, your dissection of the cultural conventions of our society, the dwelling of your thoughts on the polarity of love and death; all this moves me with an uncanny feeling of familiarity."

Many of these preoccupations apply to Kubrick himself, especially when his films pursue themes of relationships and sexuality. As a domesticated, civilized man beset by his baser instincts, Fridolin/Bill Harford can be seen as a more controlled, straight-laced sibling to Humbert Humbert of "Lolita," Alex of "A Clockwork Orange" or even Jack Torrance of "The Shining." But Schnitzler provides Kubrick a route to a more intimate treatment of human passion than he'd ever attempted before.

It's hard to read "Traumnovelle" without trying to see it as Kubrick did, and in your mind's eye you can see his Steadicam roaming starry Vienna as it did the Overlook Hotel in "The Shining." Advance buzz has it that despite the updated setting and some new characters, "Eyes Wide Shut" will be more faithful to Schnitzler than "The Shining" was to King, or "A Clockwork Orange" was to Burgess. But no matter how faithful the film is to the book, it's fittingly Schnitzlerian that Kubrick would expire just after having consummated his dream project.

Curt Holman is a freelance writer in Atlanta.

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