The 1999 Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut is very well known, and very recognisable, within popular culture to this day - even decades after it was released. Even people who haven't personally seen it are more than likely at least generally aware that this is the one where well-to-do New York doctor Tom Cruise starts to become insecure about his martial life and finds himself enmeshed in the dreamlike world of high-society masked drugs and sex parties. The imagery of the masked mansion debauch Cruise's character infiltrates is among of the Kubrick's most iconic visual creations - which is really saying something when you consider the rest of the man's entire cinematography.
Fewer people are aware that Eyes Wide Shut is actually an attempt to adapt an Austrian novellafrom 1926 called Traumnovelle. And in all the basic ways - with regards to all the original book's narrative beats and such - Eyes Wide Shut is a fairly faithful adaptation. Although of course, the setting is made contemporary Nineties New York City and not early Twentieth Century Vienna. And a few names here and there are modernised, and so on - but it's largely a straight page-to-screen adaptation as far as the overall plot is concerned.
Narrative adaptational accuracy aside, I maintain Eyes Wide Shut fails as both an adaptation of a preexisting novella, and as a work in its own right, thematically. The close retreading of Traumnovelle's plot doesn't mask a fundamental disconnect between the contents of Kubrick's final film and the themes of the source material I think it is very reasonable to take as read that Kubrick attempted to convey here. Eyes Wide Shut may be in many respects a very well-scripted, well-acted, well-directed piece - but I believe it fundamentally fails to work as an adaptation. Perhaps simply because the time and place in which it was made - and thereby, the general audience for whom it was made - unavoidably disconnected the film from the social context of the original story.
Many of the more foundational elements of Traumnovelle just aren't something that modern audiences will receive in the same way readers in 1926 would - even if they still recognise the basic outline of the plot for what it is.
Because Traumnovelle, and by extension, Eyes Wide Shut, is at its heart - a story about this smart young doctor. Who, despite having a good job which pays much better than most jobs, and the respect of his peers, and a loving wife and daughter, - is distinctly aware of the real heights of wealth and power and opulence far above him - and his complete and utter inability to contend with, or really grasp at any of it.
A lot of the angst of main character in both the book and the movie comes from how he works himself up over comparing himself to these uber-rich people he happens to occasionally briefly rub shoulders with. He's got a top one-percent salary. But they've got multi-billion dollar generation wealth. He's got a nice upmarket townhouse. But they've got palatial mansion estates. He's got a beautiful young bride. But they're throwing nightly bacchanals with hundreds of exotic escorts.
But, very crucially, - in Traumnovelle, the subtext is that the protagonist doctor character is a stand-in for Europe's assimilated Jewry - and the wealthy powerful billionaires are wealthy powerful landed White European Gentiles.
In Eyes Wide Shut, that's no longer the case. The Tom Cruise character isn't played as Jewish - and I'd argue that even if maybe you got in a different, Jewish, actor and rewrote the script a bit to explicitly emphasize his Jewishness or Jewish-coded-ness - the Ninties Western culture that this portrayal would still be being made for isn't one in which being Jewish still carries that same sort of outsider status. Or at least, carries it in a way that gentiles particularly will understand or be able to appreciate.
Eyes Wide Shut is retelling a story about the Jew as the perpetual outsider - but totally divorced from the context of its source material. Which is why it ends up as one of the weaker of Kubrick's movies. Granted, I'd say Kubrick at his lowest is still a really good filmmaker - but this is why I think a lot of people might come away from Eyes Wide Shut confused about the message it's attempting to convey. Without that specific context for why the Tom Cruise character is meant to feel to specifically alienated from the world around him, a lot of the symbolism Kubrick carries over from the book is lost.
Take, for instance, a really prominent recurring motif of the movie that is lifted more or less directly from Traumnovelle: all the Christmas imagery. Kubrick makes the choice to intentionally set Eyes Wide Shut around Christmas, as was the original novella - so there's a bunch of Christmas trees and decorations throughout the film. In the setting of the book, this is meant to reinforce the idea that the protagonist is living in a decidedly Gentile world. Also, at the time the book was written, Christmas trees were still a relatively recent tradition in much of Christendom that also still had a few mildly pagan connotations. Either way, in the book, it's all meant to come across decidedly anti-Jewish.
But in the movie, in the context of the Tom Cruise character being a regular Ninties American, Christmas trees are just a perfectly normal thing to have around if its that time of year. The setting of the movie keeps the symbol, but it no longer has the associated symbolism.
More explicitly, at one point Cruise's character is briefly accosted in the street by some random frat bros who taunt him and call him gay. The point of that scene is just to show that much of the world of the story is ambiently hostile, whether the harassment itself is warranted or not. The movie gives those guys some realistic Ninties homophobic dialogue to say to Cruise in passing to stir him up.
That scene's in the book, and it plays out much the same, but in the original text they're university students who throw out a few anti-semetic comments as they pass the doctor on the street.
Still, even without the explicit coding of the main character as a Jewish archetype, there is still a lot in the movie to reinforce the idea that the main anxiety in his life his how much the wealth and power of others - that he can see but not take for himself - overshadows his own life. But I think it just falls somewhat flat for modern, Western, - particularly American - audiences.
There might be something to that old notion that Americans like to think of themselves all as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". To them, seeing a massive fancy mansion and its wild parties isn't entirely offputting - it's at least a little bit aspirational.
How many people might have watched Eyes Wide Shut for the first time and just come away thinking that masked sex party looked cool as hell?
It's not meant to be something you even necessarily should want - but, either way, the point is - that sort of opulence is way beyond your reach anyway, regardless. And the subtext of the novella Traumnovelle is that the uppermost heights of power aren't accessible to outsiders to the cultural-racial-religious hierarchical world the story was written and originally set in.
But it's adapted into this modern movie, where now the plot involves essentially anti-semetic discrimination, stripped of all of its overt anti-semetism, - and not even happening to a Jew. And most people who see the movie don't know anything about this hundred-year-old book its based off of so they just come away confused.
If you want to make a comparison to a more recent film, take a look at anything from Jordan Peele. They're far from subtle - but the idea is that he does horror and thrillers where the theme is clearly American White-Black racial animus. So in a film like his Get Out, the protagonist can represent the effects of systemic racial inequality and prejudice personified. Imagine then, if instead of being a Black Man, he was generically Scots-Irish American White, but the movie still played out basically exactly the same.
The moment has largely passed in many ways for 'non-WASP White' to be a meaningful cultural or racial signifier. So, in a modern racially-tinged production like anything of Peele's centering some pasty Irish guy in a film otherwise all about anti-Africian-American prejudice for instance, would just leave everyone in the audience confused, of course.
Consider then, something like Get Out or Us where the protagonist character is nominally a non-WASP White - but being played by a Protestant Anglo-American actor anyway.
That's what Eyes Wide Shut feels like for Jews.
The lead character is a Jewish doctor in modern New York? Not really an outsider any more. And furthermore, he's played by the most conventionally attractive Gentile you could find and you never even mention once in the movie that he's supposed to Jewish in the first place? It's very jarring if you're familar with the original story.
It is what it is, however. Perhaps some old stories just can't be adapted particularly well today. The cultural moment where their messages were largely recognisable and readily intuitive has just passed, for better or worse, with the passage of time.
For what it's worth, Eyes Wide Shut is still an alright film at the end of the day. It just doesn't really convey the central theme and tone of its source material effectively. I would suggest that no modern adaption of Traumnovelle - especially not one made for mass audiences - ever could.
last major update: September 2026