If anything, Kubrick had his eyes wide open. He'd been mesmerized by Schnitzler's erotic novella since the late sixties, trying several times to arouse interest in the adaptation. This traumnovelle, literally “dreamstory,” involves a married couple, played by real-life duo Tom Cruise as Dr. Bill Harford and Nicole Kidman as Alice H., who free fall through a psychological landscape of libido and longing. The first steps toward their eventual plunge are delicate and untended as they tease each other with fantastical seductions and saucy dreams, all leading to that accelerating drop into appetite. For Bill, the pull is vicious; for Alice, more often she is pulled upon. Like in The Shining, Kubrick does away with the easy oppositions of fantasy and fact, favoring instead a more polymorphic perversity where pleasure penetrates all. At the much-fabled masked ball, Bill is an uninvited guest, seeking in anonymity a source for his arousal. Around him transpires a murky rite with sex as its sacrament. Or does it? And Bill is not alone behind his mask-all the globe is so disguised. And behind each mask another, or so Kubrick would tell us. In this carnal construction we call life, we conceal our true faces and the fantasies that play about them. Bill followed his sensual appetites from dreamy indulgence to novel trauma. And Alice: “The important thing is we're awake now.” A truly erotic outing, Eyes Wide Shut is like a caution sign on the road of excess.