Kubrick’s adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle—literally “dream story”—involves a married couple, Dr. Bill and Alice Harford (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman), who free-fall through a psychological landscape of libido and longing. Kubrick does away with the easy oppositions of fantasy and fact, favoring instead a more polymorphic perversity where pleasure penetrates all. At a masked ball, Dr. Bill seeks in anonymity a source for his arousal. And he is not alone behind his mask, or so Kubrick would tell us. In this carnal construction we call life, we conceal our true faces.