Universität zu Köln
Englisches Seminar
Seminar: Film Makers at Work

COMMUNICATION IN STANLEY KUBRICK’S
 “EYES WIDE SHUT”

von

Benjamin Althaus

SS 2004

CONTENTS

1 INTRODUCTION  1

2 HOW DOES FILM COMMUNICATE WITH THE AUDIENCE?  2
2.1 The problem of defining a sender  2
2.2 Means of communication  3
2.2.1 Metalanguage in film  4
2.2.2 Symbolic meaning in film  4
2.3 Characterization  5
2.4 How is characterisation realised in “Eyes Wide Shut”?  5

3 HOW DO CHARACTERS COMMUNICATE WITH EACH OTHER?  6
3.1 Verbal communication  6
3.2 Communicational disorders  7
3.3 Sexuality as a form of communication  7
3.4 Body Language  8

4 HOW DOES THE UNCONSCIOUS MAKE ITSELF UNDERSTOOD?  8
4.1 Alice’s realistic dream  9
4.2 Bill’s dreamlike reality  10
4.3 Confronting the unconscious  11

5 CONCLUSION  115

WORKS CITED  117

1 INTRODUCTION

Film has for a long time been neglected as an art: Sophisticated analysis has mainly been dealing with written literature as ‘the real thing’. In recent years the making of films has become more and more accepted as an art. Films are analysed and dealt with at universities and have become an essential part of school curricula. Nowadays cinematic theory is treated equally to written literature and “as a fully matured art, film is no longer a separate enterprise but an integrated pattern in the warp and woof of our culture”¹. In order to develop an ability to understand this art one has to learn to read its codes and interpret their meaning.

The following paper will deal with the role of communication in film and examine different levels on which filmic articulation takes place. Communication is an indispensable element for films, not only do characters communicate on the level of the plot but also the process of creating, showing and perceiving a film can be regarded as communication. It is this communication that allows the course of an action to be told and understood in the first place. A film is information, it is a message that is transmitted to a recipient, i.e. the audience. There are, however, problems to define who the sender of this message is. In Chapter 2 of this essay I will try to find a solution to this problem. Chapter 3 will put a focus on communication between the characters in this movie including some ways of non-verbal communication. Chapter 4 deals with a special way of communication which is a central point in Kubrick’s film: I will show how the unconscious can send messages to the conscious and how these messages can be interpreted.

A lot of parallels can be drawn between film and written literature. There are, however, some vital differences between the two genres. I will therefore make general comparisons between the language of books and that of cinema where it appears important and promotes understanding. I will apply examples from the movie “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999) by Stanley Kubrick to illustrate the theoretical approaches of my work. The main points of this paper are summarised in a conclusion in Chapter 5.

2 HOW DOES FILM COMMUNICATE WITH THE AUDIENCE?

Literary communication is generally regarded as transmitting a message from a sender to a recipient through a certain medium (in the case of books this medium is the written word). In the following I will define in how far this communication model can be applied to narration in film and I am going to point out difficulties in synchronizing models of literary and filmic communication. I will investigate the problem of defining a sender in this model and then identify filmic means of communication. Film is a complex system of successive, encoded signs². Viewers of a film perceive this code and decode its meaning. I will explore how meaning is transmitted to the viewer and how cinematic codes are interpreted. Finally I am going to illustrate my theoretical statements by analysing a bedroom-scene from “Eyes Wide Shut”.

2.1 The problem of defining a sender

Narrative communication is originally understood as the “process of transmission from the author as addresser to the reader as addressee”³. This definition, however, relates mainly to literature as written texts such as books. For narration as it appears in movies one has to apply a quite different definition. The viewer as the addressee of a film can be compared to the reader of a book but instead of reading words and interpreting them through rules of syntax and semantics, the viewer perceives sequenced single shots and connects them to comprehensible images and from these he constructs a story. 

To find out who the sender (the addresser of a narration) is, it is a good start to apply a differentiation of the term ‘sender’ into author and narrator⁴: The author is the inventor of a story and its discourse. This role is taken by the script writer. In addition one could also name the director as author of a film as he has overall responsibility and functions creatively when shooting a movie.

Finding the narrator of a story, however, is a lot more complex. Unlike in written literature we do not have a first- or third-person narrator who communicates purely verbally (in film there are pictures, sounds and music etc.). According to Metz the narrative instance is what guides the viewer’s perception when “leafing through an album of predetermined pictures”⁵. Lothe points out that the film narrator is “a heterogeneous mechanical and technical instrument, constituted by a large number of components”⁶.

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1 Monaco, p. 424

2 see Metz 1974

3 Lothe, p. 11

4 see Chatman, p. 133

5 Metz 1974, pp. 20-21

6 Lothe, p. 30