In Dreams

Movies: Eyes Wide Shut

Warning: sexy spoilers.

Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, holds a special place in my heart. It was a movie I was expressly forbidden to see. My parents saw it at the theatre when it came out in 1999 (I was about 13 at the time) and when I asked if I could see it when it came out on video, my mom said "No way".

Little did they know that I watched nearly the entire film on one of our secret "scrambled" TV channels...bwahaha!


But watching Eyes Wide Shut on a scrambled channel is definitely not the way it was intended to be viewed, and I finally sat down and watched it for the first time in my adult life last week. Film buffs know that Kubrick took over a year to make this movie and died very shortly after it was completed. The film was widely criticized and the late Kubrick mocked for his reclusiveness and obsessiveness. Critics said the film revealed how out of touch he was with the modern world, and that it was laughably unerotic, clinical, and boring. I can see why many people were disappointed by the film. Because of Kubrick's secretiveness, the length of the shoot, and the high profile married stars (this was long before Tom Cruise did the couch-jumping thing on Oprah), there was an intense amount of pressure on Eyes Wide Shut to live up to the fevered fantasies of movie critics and cinephiles everywhere. Before it was even released, people were salivating over it and saying it was going to be the "sexiest film ever made". Well, I can tell you that it is certainly not the sexiest film ever made. And I don't think that was Kubrick's intention at all.

The complaints lobbed at the film are legitimate: First, It is very clinical. The dialogue is stilted and the interactions between the characters are often unnatural. The scene where Bill and Alice, the married couple at the center of the film, smoke pot and get into a fight over whether or not women, like men, feel extramarital sexual desire, struck me as bizarre. Bill and Alice have been married for 10 years and have an active sex life. And yet they behave in this scene as if they've never had an honest conversation about sex. Maybe that's the point? Even though Alice is the one acting aggressive and crass in this scene, it's Bill who comes off looking like a fool: he honestly never believed his wife would fantasize about another man. When she reveals that she does, in fact, have such thoughts, Bill is shocked and dismayed. And it is this conversation that propels Bill into his little sexual odyssey around New York City and thus propels the entire film. I thought it was odd that the basis of the entire movie is a revelation that would strike most people I know as mind-bogglingly obvious. Women--married women--have sexual thoughts that exist on a spectrum outside of their marriage. Big whoop! No need to go to an orgy over it...

...but, ah! Bill does go to an orgy over it! And a prostitute as well. And this is where another so-called problem of the film arises: the fact that it promises much eroticism and delivers little. But I think that with this complaint the critics missed the point. I don't think Kubrick set out to make a film about a man's sexual adventures, but rather, a film about a man's sexual humiliation. And he succeeded. Bill, reeling from Alice's naughty revelation that she once thought about sex with another man (key word here is "thought". She didn't actually sleep with the other guy), finds himself wandering the streets of New York City at night and becoming entangled in a series of sexual misadventures. Yet, despite his apparent desire to taste strange fruit, he never actually has sex. Bill is, for the most part, a passive character. He finds himself on the receiving end of the attentions of women: a distraught woman kisses him; a prostitute approaches and propositions him; a young girl flirts with him...he initiates none of this, and merely accepts it when it happens. It is only when he hears from a friend about an elite group of wealthy New Yorkers who meet in a mansion for group sex that Bill takes action and decides to worm his way into this secretive gathering. But it's all for naught: once Bill makes it into the mansion and observes the festivities (again, he is passive and merely watches--he does not participate in the sex), he is summoned before the masked orgy participants and forced to remove his mask in front of them. They know he is an outsider and he is publicly humiliated for his trespassing.

Not only is Eyes Wide Shut not erotic in a very literal way (the orgy scene is ridiculous and, in any case, you don't see much. And I was watching the unedited version), it is anti-erotic conceptually. It is a movie where a man chooses not (or perhaps fails depending on your viewpoint) to perform sexually. It is a movie about not committing adultery. In fact, it is a film about humiliation and emasculation. And I think Kubrick was a genius in casting Cruise for this part: a classic leading man and a romantic heartthrob (again, pre-couch jumping when he was still relevant) in a role where he is humiliated by his wife and by a giant crowd of masked orgy-goers. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Nicely done, Mr. Kubrick.

So, I've taken a very circuitous route to make my point. Simply, I believe that Eyes Wide Shut is a misunderstood work of near-genius. It is a beautiful film. The saturated colors, soft lighting, and lovely musical score make it look and sound and feel like art. I don't consider the film to be Kubrick's best*, but it definitely has his name written all over it. And since I dig Kubrick's style and ideas generally, I enjoyed this one despite its flaws. I just wonder what the point of it all is. After Bill confesses his (non) adventures to his wife and asks what they should do, she says that they should be happy they survived their little adventures and be grateful that they are now "awake". Eyes Wide Shut is based on a novella titled "Dream Story", and I think that Alice's comment about being "awake" might be the moral (if there is one) to the story: everyone has dreams and fantasies, and when we try to live out these fantasies, they often do not play out as we hoped. So, while dreams and fantasies are not bad or immoral, reality is what we should focus on and be grateful for.

There's probably much more to Eyes Wide Shut than my quick and dirty interpretation, but that's the best I can do without watching it a second time. The movie is not perfect, but I was entranced by its beauty and intrigued by its ideas.

4.5 out of 5 stars

*Kubrick's best film, in my opinion, is A Clockwork Orange, which also has the special distinction of being one of two movies (the other is Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) that were so offensive to friends of mine that it was insinuated that I was a "bad person" for liking them. Little did these friends know that I secretly love it when movies I enjoy shock others. Bwahaha...

Am I messed up for having a crush on this guy?

You bet.