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Disturbing both stylistically and thematically, refusing ever to do what is expected of him though sometimes infiltrating traditional cinematic genres . . . as a visionary film-maker bringing his most personal obsessions to life on the screen of his fantasy, [Kubrick] has been able to apprehend the underlying tensions of his period and tap its collective unconscious.
Michel Ciment (43)
Receiving Stanley Kubrick- however one chooses to define him- has never been a simple task.
Jason Sperb ("Their Eyes" 125)
IN SPITE OF KUBRICK'S REPUTATION AS AN important- albeit reclusive and eccentricauteur and his death on 7 March 1999, a few months before the film's release, reviewers did not handle Eyes Wide Shut (1999) with kid gloves. Indeed, it has since become commonplace to assert that critics overwhelmingly panned the film (D. Johnson 55; Kreider 280; Sperb, "Their Eyes" 125). Clearly, Eyes Wide Shut was widely misunderstood, but it elicited a somewhat more ambivalent response than subsequent analyses have suggested. Although some labeled it puerile, pompous, unrealistic, risible, unsexy, and anachronistic, the film nonetheless caught viewers' attention with its dreamlike camera work, paranoid protagonist, and "extraordinary orgy sequence" (Ebert). More recent assessments, such as Michel Chion's monograph devoted to what he considers one of Kubrick's top three films (9), suggest the need for a révaluation of the initial critical reaction to Eyes Wide Shut and the reasons for it.
Although some scholars have peripherally discussed post-release responses to Eyes Wide Shut (EWS], none has made the argument outlined in this article: that the perceived "failure" of Kubrick's last film can be attributed not to its flaws as a work of art but rather to critics' misplaced expectations about the film's genre and its conventions. Throughout his career, the director worked with non-canonical film genres such as horror (The Shining, 1980), science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1964; A Clockwork Orange, 1971), and social satire (Dr. Strangelove, 1964). Most of his film projects developed out of existing literary works, and even the most canonical of these, such as the film version of Nabokov's Lolita (1962), explored the edges of the socially acceptable. Such is the case, as well, with his final film, an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (1926), literally a "Dream Novel." EWS explores the...