Despite a mathematical bent, there was much of the gothicist about Kubrick.The fact is that Kubrick used Raphael simply to provide material. And the way he harps on about himself as a classicist (with a scholarship to Cambridge) reminds me that a classicist will always misunderstand the Gothic. I don’t get the impression – after reading Raphael’s insightful but not brilliant comments on Kubrick’s oeuvre, or his wrong- headed dismissal of films Kubrick liked, such as The Red Squirrel and Kieslowski’s Dekalog – that Raphael is actually very good on cinema, despite a talent for scintillating dialogue Perhaps Kubrick sensed this. He was not, for example, invited on set when Eyes Wide Shut was made.

Kubrick had completely dispensed with his services by that point.Kubrick had his reasons. Raphael feels that, although he respected Kubrick, this may not have been reciprocated. Raphael naturally holds up his own Jewishness as permission to say what he likes. “With pitiless self-knowledge,” he writes in this book, “Arthur Schnitzler once remarked `the eternal truth is that no Jew has any real respect for his fellow Jew, ever’.”
In truth, Eyes Wide Open is more about that elusive feeling of “respect” than anything else – in fact, it’s quite an elaborate and sophisticated meditation on the whole notion.

Kubrick would fax him pages of Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, with the author and title snipped away in case word got out that the director was pressing forward on his old project – an updating of the decadent fin- de-siecle tale by the Viennese-Jewish doctor who was a contemporary of Freud. Raphael’s characteristically waspish comments on Kubrick’s anti-Jewish Jewishness have already brought howls of protest from certain quarters in the United States. In 1994, Raphael was hired by Kubrick to work on Eyes Wide Shut, under conditions of paranoid secrecy. FREDERIC RAPHAEL has already received flack for the New Yorker article which prompted this short, but hardly sweet, monograph of his working relationship with Stanley Kubrick.