I picked this up in a university bookstore while getting books for my own courses that year. Another class was apparently going to study Eyes Wide Shut, so I decided to grab myself a copy for my own reading purposes. Took me a while to get to it, but here we are.

This is definitely a version of the script edited to match the final cut of the film, with each and every cutaway and establishing shot written in, so it is not the best version of the script for writers looking to learn the difference from script to screen, but it still works as a nice reference.

Additionally, this volume contains the novel that inspired the film, Dream Story (Traumnovelle) by Arthur Schnitzler. I had never read this story and I always find it fascinating to read the original source material for films, which is what makes this book a great pairing. You get to read through the script, then immediately read the original story on which it was based. I always enjoy seeing what stays the same, what was changed, and seeing if I can understand why those changes were made (often dealing with pacing or story structure).

I have to say, I really enjoyed Schnitzler's novel. It is a fascinating study of the character of husband and wife and how the two are coping with their lives together. ( )

The screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut in this volume seems to exactly correspond to the film as released, which makes me suspect that the text was actually conformed to the final cut of the movie. Of course, since Kubrick was the director, he was in a position to "enforce" the screenplay, but in any case, those curious for unscreened ideas from writers Kubrick and Raphael will be disappointed.

The script is bound with Arthur Schnitzler's novel Dream Story, of which it is in fact a rather faithful adaptation, transposing the narrative from its original setting of Vienna in the 1920s to New York City in the 1990s. There is no editorial apparatus or commentary to assist the reader in any contextualization or comparison of these two documents.

Schnitzler's novel has been alternately viewed as an precocious piece of Continental modernism, or as an advanced item of Viennese decadence, and it has features to credit either classification. It is certainly informed by the ideas of Freud, with whom Schnitzler had a significant dialogue. The doctor Fridolin (Bill in Eyes Wide Shut) is furnished with ample realism in the details of his medical practice--easily written by Schnitzler who himself had had a career as a physician before dedicating himself to writing.

Schnitzler's story is more explicit about the protagonist's confused hostility toward his wife, whereas the screenplay does a better job of communicating a pervading atmosphere of menace. The endings of the two versions also strike somewhat different notes, with a greater sense of closure in Schnitzler's original--not necessarily to its credit. The dream element is certainly more significant in Schnitzler, and the Freudian tone is overt in the characters' recurrent trepidation that "no dream is altogether a dream": that the play of fantasy always provides evidence of a self which is masked by waking responsibilities.