This essay was originally published on patreon in March of 2024.
In the opening frame of Eyes Wide Shut, everything seems inconsequential on the surface. Alice (Nicole Kidman) can be seen wriggling out of a backless, black cocktail dress, revealing that she is wearing nothing underneath. If you don’t know what you’re getting into, it seems like a teasing image that foreshadows the eroticism to come. The broken promise of not showing anything resembling a voyeuristic sex scene between Kidman, and co-star (and husband) Tom Cruise is perhaps one reason why critics and audiences were so harsh on Eyes Wide Shut in 1999. If you’ve seen the film, you might interpret the initially erotic image of Kidman slipping out of a dress, and into herself, as a prank, because it promises something sultry, but refutes it in favor of an interrogation of heterosexuality and divisions between husbands and wives over the topics of sex. In truth, the image is the film in a microcosm, encasing all of its potential ideas on the above subjects, through this deliberate usage of the male gaze, and how the camera chooses to look at Alice. She is aware of being seen in the way that women are typically aware of our visibility. Her choice of an alternative outfit in the following scene reflects that awareness. Her new gown has lace sleeves and a modest plunge of the neckline, and the skirt has full coverage. The opening image is also potentially separate from the rest of the film, because we are left to wonder if it is actually real, or imagined. If one were to actually observe a physical print they would find that this provocative image is bordered by two black interstitial title cards, separating it from the body of the picture. By giving her image of nudity borders, it appears like a mirage, and audiences are left with an unconscious dreamy effect for the resulting film grammar, because this hallucination of Kidman vanishes in plain sight. Eyes Wide Shut is at once a mystery, and a dream, sometimes a nightmare, but the prevailing notion of this opening image is built upon an idea whose fantasies and connotations are of endless intrigue for male artists: the unknown quality of women.
Tabloid journalists and entertainment news circuits assumed that Eyes Wide Shut would be an intimate, voyeuristic experience like none other. Since the late 60s Hollywood had seen an uptick in eroticism, nudity and sexual depiction in mainstream movies, but few had ever offered something as delectable as an A-list husband and wife having sex on camera. Rumours spread far and wide about the extent of the sexual depiction and Kubrick and the rest of the crew did their level best to keep the specific details of the film hidden, but that wasn’t necessarily new for something as special as a Kubrick film. Eyes Wide Shut had captured the public imagination, and there were wild, outrageous ideas of what the film would be, and how it would offer an intimate look at the Hollywood power couple of the moment. Watching Cruise and Kidman play out the tumultous relationship between Alice and her husband Dr. William Harford felt like a border-line private experience, but it was not their sexual intimacy which the film indulged in. It was instead the secret, intimate world of their bedroom behind closed doors, and the revelations of Alice’s not so shocking fantasies of phantom sailors, which disturbs the footing of their relationship, and their understanding of one another.
At the black-tie party they attend at the beginning of the picture Alice and Bill are given contrasting images of potential erotic fantasy, and these images are deeply gendered. For Alice, she dances with a charming Italian man many years her senior, who lavishes her with praise. Alice is charmed, but Kidman uses her cold intensity to evoke the feeling that Alice has heard everything nice a man could ever dream of saying to her. We see Bill with a young woman in each arm, and Cruise uses his billion-wattage smile in this image that acts as a parade of his triumphant heterosexuality. For Kubrick, these images are a ploy to suggest character types, and sexual identifiers to exploit and deconstruct when the two are in the privacy of their own bedroom later that evening.
After the conclusion of the black-tie party, Alice and Bill wind down by smoking a joint, quaintly hidden in their medicine cabinet in a small tin of band-aids. They’re not exactly stoners, but discretely toke up every now and then as adults from that era sometimes chose to do. It’s supposed to be the preamble for an evening of hot sex—at least, this is probably what we’re intended to assume as an audience—but Bill says the wrong thing about that charming Italian man: “of course he’d be interested in you…you’re a beautiful woman.”. Alice, taken aback, almost offended, “wait, wait, wait, you’re saying he would only show interest in me…because I’m beautiful??”. The opening stages of the argument are rooted in broad, biological identifiers between the sexes, and it’s a little bit ridiculous, played with arch comedic notes, and broad, physical gestures that make sense for two people who can’t handle their weed. It’s funny, until Alice begins to talk about a fantasy she had of a sailor, for whom she was so intoxicated by, she could hardly move. The lighting palette shifts to an icy blue, like frozen waters, and Kidman very carefully details the fantasy, note for note, with a slow-delivery. It’s the sort of thing that’s at once hot, embarrassing to witness, and appeals to the voyeuristic qualities of cinema all at once. Kubrick uses his trade-mark slow-zoom on Bill. This technique is usually saved for moments of foreshadowing or extreme violence, and it is a kind of violence for his fragile ego. Bill’s emasculated to the very core of his being, and Alice goes about her work of revelation like it is something she has pent-up for ages. Treating each word like a tool of dissection, carving up the man in front her. Much later that evening, she casually eats a bowl of cereal at her kitchen counter while watching a television program. Satisfied. Bored. Performing the doting wife role of waiting for her husband to return home from the medical call which sent him out of the house in the middle of their argument. She still loves Bill, but she knows their relationship has irrecoverably changed. With the incantation of her revelation, she has undergone a transformation that makes her feel like she is now the one in power. She is the biblical Eve mature with the secrets of her serpent, in the face of confused Adam, and she is now forever confounding to the man she loves.
Eyes Wide Shut then becomes about Bill’s quest to understand Alice, but the further he looks, the more lost he becomes, dwelling deeper into the labyrinth of eros. Bill wanders around Kubrick’s artificial interpretation of New York City—the set also resembles Vienna at times, evoking Arthur Schintzler’s “Dream Story” which this film is based upon. The buildings seem reconstructed through dream memory, and the city much too small. The labyrinth-feel is juxtaposed by the fact that it seems these small streets are getting even smaller. This is made even more cognizant by the small-town trope of running into someone you know, which Bill does, when he sees med-school drop-out, now piano bar-fly Nick Nightingale (Todd Field). Nick tells Bill of another gig he has later that evening that requires a password for entry and he is to play blind-folded while guests tend to their Sadean fantasies. Nightingale’s story of wanton sex is a dangling carrot for our wounded man, looking to sure up his masculine pride by fornicating in a promised Wonderland. Bill can’t resist. He buys his cloak, his mask, and tarries on. Along the way he meets a sex-worker willing to throw her life away for him—mirroring Alice’s feelings for the sailor.
Kubrick’s work is quietly complex. He tells you everything about the film right on the surface, and lulls the viewer into a hypnotic, trance-like state, due to shot length, and the pull of the steadi-cam or the dolly track. But there is also hidden quality in the construction of his art that begs for further interpretation and examination, which never totally reveals itself. Kubrick will take the viewer to the center, but upon arriving there those broad elements are obfuscated by images and scenarios which do not answer the central questions at hand. Consider The Overlook hotel’s confounding architecture and its ghosts in The Shining, or the spirituality of prayer on the face of a victim obfuscated by the soldier who pulled the trigger in a pointless war in Full Metal Jacket, or the Jupiter sequence and what might lay beyond in outer space in 2001. In Eyes Wide Shut, it is an orgy, and all that it entails. Sex is ritualized at the party that Bill crashes. It is decadent in posture, but not in fluids. The images behave like an art instillation where the viewer cannot conceive of pleasure, because the camera is at a remove in a steadi-cam shot moving from room to room. There are no moans of pleasure, no orgasm. It is sex at the behest of extinction—sex as a series of poses and sculpture with no reproductive outlet. And it is around this point where the viewer begins to wonder where exactly they’ve found themselves and where the film might be taking them. Bill is just as lost as the viewer, and we wish to know more through him, but the camera doesn’t reveal any definitive information.
Eyes Wide Shut, as a concept, peaks at the orgy, and the remaining film acts like a hangover. Bill keeps digging around trying to find more information about who these cloaked people were, and how they operate. Dead bodies pile up around him, and he believes he’s responsible for a beautiful young woman ending up in the morgue. He assumes it is the same woman who acted as “tribute” when he was found out at the orgy, and all that collateral damage begins to weigh on his soul. But it’s really difficult to glean what is fact and what is a guilty conscience. Sydney Pollack plays Victor Ziegler a friend and confidant of Bill and he seems to know more than he’s letting on. He tells Bill that the girl got her brains fucked out, and Bill, whimpering, disheveled, distraught, cannot take it any more. He lets the mystery go. He tells Alice everything, but we do not see his confession. Kubrick is smart to not indulge the melodramatic scene that would have followed. We are creatures of habit and look for patterns as viewers. We desire the symmetry that would have come from Bill’s confession, because it would have closed the emotional loop of Alice’s confession about the sailor earlier. Instead, we are left to dwell in the raw aftermath of what their conversation may have been as they shop for Christmas gifts alongside their young daughter. The bedroom door was closed. In doing so, Alice’s confession remains a beguiling, disruptive, elemental moment, and Bill’s remains a mystery. The power balance is still shifted in her favor. At the department store, Bill and Alice whisper their dirty laundry, among the customers, but for us they might as well be nude with how severely they have both been shed of their image of one another. And then, a proposal from Alice, not of a lasting marriage, not of a happy ending, but something they must do when they get back home: Fuck.
It’s the perfect crescendo isn’t it? So perfect it plays as a dark punchline. It is so teasing. Maybe that’s why audiences weren’t privy to the film in 1999. All of the juicy bits are kept at arms length, communicated between frames, and experienced behind closed doors. It’s orgasm as an ideological concern, rather than a physical one, with desire, fear and paranoia all boiling to that moment of declaration, which we do not even get to see. It is sex as a mirage. Nicole Kidman slips out of a black cocktail dress, a veil drops in the following frame, and we wake up somewhere strange.
Be First to Comment