This is one my favorite essays on Kubrick and art in general, and it was written eleven years ago, but I think the sentiments expressed still stand. Below are some of the first reactions to Eyes Wide Shut.

“I can state unequivocally that the late Stanley Kubrick, in his final

film, ‘Eyes Wide Shut,’ has staged the most pompous orgy in the history

of the movies.” -David Denby in The New Yorker

“Ridiculously though intellectually overhyped for the very marginal

entertainment, edification and titillation it provides over its somewhat

turgid 159-minute running time.” -Andrew Sarris in The New York Observer

“This two hour and 39 minute gloss on Arthur Schnitzler’s fantasmagoric

novella feels like a rough draft at best.” -J. Hoberman in The Village

Voice

“In Eyes Wide Shut nothing works.” -Louis Menand in The New York Review

of Books

“An unfortunate misstep.” -Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times

I soon began to discover something even more startling. Not a single

critic, not even those few who claimed to like Eyes Wide Shut, made any

attempt to understand the film on its own artistic terms. Instead, the

critics denounced the film for not living up to the claims its

publicists had made for it, reduced it to a question of its director’s

personality, measured it by how much information it conveyed about the

familiar world around us. And I realized that something that had been

stirring around in the depths of the culture had risen to the surface.

After years of vindictive, leveling memoirs of artistic figures; after

countless novels, plays, films, paintings, and installations constructed

to address one social issue or another; after dozens of books have been

published proclaiming the importance of the “great books” and “humanist

ideas” to such a point of inflation that the effect was to bun’ the

specificity of great books and of original ideas-after the storm of all

this self-indulgence had passed, a new cultural reality had taken shape.

Our official arbiters of culture have lost the gift of being able to

comprehend a work of art that does not reflect their immediate

experience; they have become afraid of genuine art. Art-phobia is now

the dominant sensibility of the official culture, and art-phobia

annihilated Stanley Kubrick’s autumnal work. Much talk–some of it real,

a lot of it fake–has been in the air over the last decade about empathy

for the “other,” for people different from us. But no one has dwelled on

the essential otherness of a work of art. There is, after all, that

hackneyed but profound notion of a willing suspension of disbelief.

Genuine art makes you stake your credulity on the patently counterfeit.

It takes you by surprise. And for art to take you by surprise, you have

to put yourself in the power of another world–the work of art–and in

the power of another person–the artist. Yet everything in our society,

so saturated with economic imperatives, tells us not to surrender our

interests even for a moment, tells us that the only forms of cultural

expression we can trust are those that give us instant gratification,

useful information, or a reflected image of ourselves. (Italics mine)

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