Freud’s Uncanny & Eyes Wide Shut

In this post I will address Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 movie, Eyes Wide Shut. I just read Freud’s Uncanny and although there is already a wonderful piece on it in relation to The Shining, I thought I would talk about in relation to Kubrick’s last film. (For Uncanny and The Shining see: http://kubrickfilms.tripod.com/id80.html ). In Eyes Wide Shut Kubrick comes perhaps nearest in all his films to achieve what Freud aimed for in his writing on the Uncanny. First I will argue in general some elements of uncanniness in EWS and then I will elaborate on it. In my conclusion I will do a suggestion as to why Kubrick was interested in using Uncanny (since he cited the essay while making The Shining).

The Uncanny (or: Das Unheimliche) is a feeling of unpleasantness or anxiety sometimes experienced by humans. He starts out his essay with saying that this feeling is not “always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread.” In short I’d say, this is Freud’s attempt to define the Uncanny somewhat more thus to get closer to a concrete description of the feeling and in what circumstances it comes into being. He writes that a feeling of Uncanniness is also closely related to the idea of “a ‘double’ in every shape and degree, with persons, therefore, who are to be considered identical by reason of looking alike.” This is especially the case in EWS, where the women all rather look-a-like and are almost interchangeable. The woman at the deathbed of her father looks almost like Alice in the way here hair is etc. Then who hasn’t had this feeling of questioning which girl is which, who died of an overdose in the newspaper etc? Furthermore there’s the “constant recurrence of similar situations, a same face, or character-trait, or twist of fortune.” Daytime or nighttime, Bill visits the same areas and same situations seem to occur. And think about the dream that Alice tells her husband, which is strangely familiar to Bill (having been at the mansion).

This brings me to where I think that EWS stands out in relation to Freud’s essay. Namely, in relation to the idea of a distinction between imagination and reality. Freud names other elements which can create a sense of uncanny, like dismembered limbs or when in daily life you notice the same numbers around you (or when you check the clock). He goes on to say that it’s very rare that it happens in real life, and it perhaps makes more sense in relation to art. Freud then distinguishes four worlds of representation that the story-teller can present to us. The first is the one with fairy-tales, where “the world of reality is left behind from the very start […] all the elements so common in fairy-stories, can exert no uncanny influence here.” Think of the Thing (the hand) in The Addams Family series, which wouldn’t arouse any feeling of anxiety since we don’t believe the world created before is when we start to enter it. We don’t take the Addams family-world as related to our ‘real-world’ (daily life).

The second world of representation is a setting which “though less imaginary than the world of fairy tales, does yet differ from the real world by admitting superior spiritual entites. We order our judgement to the imaginary reality imposed on us by the writer, and regard souls, spirits and spectres as though their existence had the same validity in their world as our own has in the external world. And then in this case too we are spared all trace of the uncanny.” Freud here mentions an example like the ghostly apparitions in Hamlet. One could also think of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, where there is one scene in which Diane Keaton leaves the bed as a ghostlike appearance.

“The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. Everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story. He can increase his effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality. He takes advantage of our supposedly surmounted superstitiousness; he deceives us into thinking that he is giving us the sober truth, and then after all oversteps the bounds of possibility (3). There is one more means to improve his chances of success. He should keep us in the dark for a long time about the precise nature of the conditions he has selected for the world he writes about, or that he should cunningly and ingeniously avoid any definite information on the point at all throughout the book (4).”

In the third world we catch the writer afterwards at fooling us or deceiving us. In the fourth world we can never be sure. This is precisely what happens in EWS, a representation of a world in which we can’t distinguish reality from the dream and don’t know where the imagination ends. Kubrick leaves all these questions open. It is also on this same level that Lynch, Bunuel and perhaps Cronenberg move. And Bergman, in Persona.

Finally as to why I think these ideas of Freud interested Kubrick. At the start of his essay Freud writes that aesthetics till then has mostly been concerned with feelings or objects that create feelings of a positive nature. They have mostly neglected “opposite feelings of unpleasantness and repulsion.” This are precisely the feelings an artist should be concerned with I think. Kubrick is not interested in presenting us a fairy-tale world in which we can safely dwell without being disturbed. Through art we should be confronted and disturbed. Or as Zizek/Lacan would say: confront us with a lack, with something unharmonious.

 

Sources:

Freud’s Uncanny (1919): http://homepage.mac.com/allanmcnyc/textpdfs/freud1.pdf