No Dream is ever just a Dream.
~~ Bill Harford

In Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) the statements of the central characters about their erotic desires obscure the comprehension they would elicit in a more traditionally structured film. In Eyes Wide Shut it is possible to trace themes of erotic sensibility, libido or lust to see if we can obtain a better understanding of the connections between sexual pleasure and the destructive impulse, and more challenging and difficult, to see if these two terms might be extricated so that their relations of influence – their particular specificity's and details – and thus their possibilities of transformation and change may be explored.

Interest in sexuality takes different forms at different times, but there always seems to be some aspect of desire that is of concern. It's the one thing that never goes away, or leaves people's minds. Perhaps desire never stops feeling like madness.

One may distinguish between bodily needs and satisfactions, and lust or erotic desire. Corporal gratification, functioning in the register of need, takes what it can get – lives in a world of means and ends – obtaining satisfaction where possible. The operations of need/gratification can be related to the functioning of the body-image/corporal schema which maps inner physiological and psychological functions onto exterior or "objective" comportment and movements, thereby establishing the body's positioning in the world through a mediating representational schema. The body image provides the subject with an experience, not only of his/her own body, but also of the ways in which its body is perceived by others. The subjects experience of the body is irreducibly bound up with the body's social status.

In contrast libido/erotic desire involves a certain "dis-quieting" or disturbance of the body-image, even while functioning in conformity with it. Rather than resolving itself, gratifying its urges as quickly and simply as possible, erotic craving seeks to prolong and extend itself beyond physiological need, to intensify and protract itself, to revel in pleasurable torment. It no longer functions according to an intentional arc, according to the structures of signification/meaning/pattern/purpose, voluptuous desire fragments and dissolves the unity and utility of the organic body and the stabilized body-image. Sensuous desire and voluptuous experience do not involve the affirmation of a bodily totality, nor the passage from formless nonsense to a body offering sense and meaning. On the contrary the voluptuous sense of disquiet engendered by and as lust, disarrays and fragments the resolve of a certain purposiveness, unhinging any determination of means/ends/goals.

Kubrick is interested in the power of impersonal sexuality, in passion without relationship, in the way people can be narcissistically fascinated by one another's bodies and their own sexual pleasure, while maintaining a distance from strong feeling and emotional complexity. His themes concern what sex enables people to do together, and what it can stop them doing. Impersonality frees the imagination, of course, but imagination isn't sufficient when it comes to other people. What is usually required is more of them and less of us. We have to let a certain amount of them in. But that can seem like the hardest, most frightening thing.

Eyes Wide Shut (an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 short novel Traumnovella/Dream Story) concerns the exposition of the anatomy of sexual desire and the psychology of mind. The principle investigation involves the psychological state of a prosperous young Doctor, Bill Harford. One night Harford's wife Alice, admits she has dreamt of sleeping with another man. Later wandering the streets of the City after attending a patient, the distracted Harford stumbles into a series of increasingly risky encounters, culminating in his infiltrating a surreal orgy held by a shadowy sect.

Experience comes to appear unreal to Harford, his home, his wife, his child, his profession and even himself as he mechanically walks through nocturnal streets with his thoughts roaming through space. The film suggests that something really unreal – a dream, a suspicion – can make reality itself seem unreal.

Kubrick directs with great force and precision the enigmas of the mind. His film is strong on the fleeting moments that lodge in the memory – a look/a word/an encounter – and on the irrationality of our emotional negotiations. At the end the macabre mysteries remain unsolved, so, too, do the psychological riddles of Harford's actions. Is his morbid intensity the hallucinatory effect of sleep deprivation, or the deliberate result of callous narcissism? Who can say?

Eyes Wide Shut has some affinity with Kubrick's 1975 picaresque film Barry Lyndon. It follows a similar episodic structure, although set in modern-day New York, not 18th century Europe. And the quest is for sexual satisfaction rather than social satisfaction. But the cool depiction of a blank hero passing through scenes of decadence follows the same path. Barry Lyndon ended unflinchingly and fittingly with the expulsion of an unrepentant rogue. Eyes Wide Shut ends awkwardly with the reacceptance of a repentant husband. Except he has nothing to repent and his wife has got nothing to forgive him for.

The film presents a series of scenes in which the sole motive for action for men and women alike, is sex drive. Kubrick is declaring the primacy of the erotic. What follows adopts many of the narrative devices of the fairy tale to explore the balance between id and ego, the desires of instinctual life and the repressions necessary for the maintenance of social existence. Each section of the film is positioned with precision by Kubrick's beautifully framed shots and tightly controlled tone. There is a struggle between reason and madness, with reason ultimately residing in Kubrick's camera.