SOURCE: “Eyes Wide Shut: What the Critics Failed to See in Kubrick's Last Film,” in Harper's Magazine, Vol. 299, October, 1999, pp. 76-82.

In the following positive assessment of Eyes Wide Shut, Siegel denounces the overwhelming negative reaction to Kubrick's final film, maintaining that “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.”

Eyes Wide Shut is one of the most moving, playful, and complex movies I have ever seen. I love the way Stanley Kubrick expresses the film's theme of social and psychological doubleness through a double entendre in the film's very title—“I's Wide Shut”—and through his choice, for the title song, of a waltz by Dmitry Shostakovich, a guileful composer famous for writing music whose subtle motifs seemed to celebrate Stalin but actually...