July 22–29, 1999

movie shorts

Eyes Wide Shut

by Cindy Fuchs

There’s too much to see in Stanley Kubrick’s final film. You see the requisite relentless Steadicamming, the faux luxurious Manhattan interiors and Soho funky streets (infamously built on London soundstages), Nicole Kidman’s perfectly slinky backside, the suffused golden light that makes contemporary NYC seem as decadent and creepy-crawly as any image out of Barry Lyndon. You might also expect to see the reasons why the damn thing took so long to make, what intellectual and philosophical acrobatics the director means to put you through, what revelations you might glean, whether Tom Cruise’s ulcer-making performance translates to something extraordinary on screen. Now, you think, you might see what all the hubbub is about.

Think again. This is Stanley Kubrick, legendarily meticulous and fascinated by sex, death and the language people use to make them coherent, but hardly known for his easy accessibility. And we’re talking about a movie titled Eyes Wide Shut, which hardly promises that seeing it will be a typical exercise in visual apprehension. As you might imagine, the film thematizes precisely this problem: the fear that what you see is never quite what’s out there, that you can’t help but process and twist images, reshape even the most recent memories, and edit what you see to reassure yourself that your notion of the world is prudent and correct.

As complicated as all that sounds, Eyes Wide Shut is more so. As visual composition and ideological rumination, it’s cryptic, maddening and often brilliant. Plotwise, it’s less stunning. It’s a character study of sorts, focused on a few days in some circa ’90s Christmas season, during which the apparently solid nine-year marriage of upscaley Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise) and currently unemployed Soho gallery manager Alice (Kidman) undergoes what you might call a series of traumas, real and imagined. They think they know what they see in each other and themselves, but once they come up against a moment of uncertainty — namely, they go to a fancy-schmancy party at the home of too-wealthy Victor (Sydney Pollack) and flirt with obviously unworthy others — both begin to fret and flail about, in very different ways.

While Alice displays much skin, in and out of Bill’s fantasies, it is the husband’s emotional journey the film shows, to the extent that it reveals anything concrete. Kubrick’s work has never been prone to insight concerning his women characters, but he has in the past offered notoriously astute dissections of masculinity (for example, Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket, which remains the most intelligently devastating war movie ever made).

Eyes Wide Shut extends the director’s investigation of white straight male sexuality, anxiety and violence. Based on a 1926 novella by Austrian Arthur Schnitzler, the script was co-written by the director and Frederic Raphael, reportedly rewritten daily on the set during two years of shooting, after reportedly percolating in Kubrick’s head for some 25 years. Maybe that’s why the film betrays some datedness. Or maybe it’s not precisely datedness, but more acknowledgment that the same ridiculous dreams and nightmares have been vexing men of the Caucasian-middle-class-Western-civilization persuasion since way back.

This familiarity seems to be the film’s weakest and most unnerving aspect: Bill’s desires and dreads lead him to the most regular places, where he’s the titillated and terrified (and feminized?) object of desire. Being a man in a Kubrick film, he’s simultaneously infuriated and fearful at the prospect of his wife’s unfaithfulness (it’s called "projection" in some circles). The night after the Xmas gala and after some reefer, Alice (it’s telling that she’s the one undone by drugs, whereas Bill maintains a semblance of sobriety) reveals one deeply emotional, existential and unrealized fantasy.

And here’s the great impassible gulf between them: She’s asking questions about what her marriage is worth and what her future looks like, telling the story because she’s mad at Bill for being so cool when she’s feeling jealous. But he sees only the possibility that she’d fuck another man.

Kidman has to cry a lot in this movie, and she does it in a way that’s raw and convincing. Cruise has what might be a harder job, in some ways, playing his standard super-confident hero-guy, but fragile, always liable to break into terrible pieces of self-doubt. Suddenly, Bill’s a wreck (maybe that smoke has a delayed effect after all?): Riding in a cab, walking the streets, slapping his hands together, he’s possessed by his fantasy of her in bed with this "Naval officer." Kubrick knew this much, that a buzz-cut, well-muscled military specimen is somehow the most threatening possible rival for men under sexual-anxiety siege. Alice’s fantasy later comes back as a nightmare that she confesses with great sobs, in which she is terrified that she might have even considered humiliating her husband, so that she exacts her own punishment on herself.

But the movie’s not about her.

It’s about Bill.

So, while she stays home with their 7-year-old daughter, wrapping presents, looking at herself in the mirror and donning her bra and deodorant (whose fantasy is this again?), Bill goes out, prowling for payback and answers to his own unaskable questions (does his awkward flirting with beautiful women make him feel more like a man? does his possessiveness make him less of one?). The film descends with him into club scenes and pick-ups, or more accurately, the film descends into him, representative man. Like magic, following Alice’s initial confession, Bill finds himself hit on by the next three women he meets. He even gets play from a gay hotel clerk (Alan Cumming), but Bill (not to mention many reviewers) seems incapable of recognizing this as part of his own fantasy pattern, perhaps the scariest part.

The heterosexual interactions are ludicrous in their coincidence, suggesting that they are less about literal propositions to fuck than they are more of Kubrick’s mindfucks, realism always seeming too limiting or dull for him. Bill must deal with a patient’s daughter who desperately professes her lust for him next to her father’s deathbed (a little too Freudian-wish-fulfilling, but maybe that’s because Schnitzler hung round the same Victorian social circles as Himself); a very nice and pretty prostitute who approaches him a block from her apartment (this is New York, right?); and a masked woman he meets at an orgy he stumbles onto, a woman who appears literally to risk her life to save his when the orgy-meisters turn mean and territorial.

This orgy business is getting much play (almost as much as Cruise and Kidman "making love" for Kubrick): It’s the focus of the TV campaign, as Bill enters a huge room and faces a crowd of frightening figures in robes and masks. The masks are a quintessentially Kubrickian touch, as the sex Bill sees here becomes void of any passion or even desire: It’s about mastering and mechanics (the Steadicam is in high gear roaming through these rooms with Bill), about deciphering what you see and don’t see, about not being seen and so not being responsible. (The extra hooded figures that have been digitized into the frames of the U.S. version to conceal the naughty bits — and thus insure an R rating — unintentionally up this ante.)

While the orgy signals the usual stuff — decadence, death, carelessness and lust — it also riffs on class. The participants, Bill is warned, "aren’t ordinary people." He’s told that he’d "lose sleep" if he knew their names. You might wonder, since you never see who they are, what might be so shocking about knowing, about seeing beneath the masks and robes. But then you might also see what Eyes Wide Shut is getting at, that seeing and knowing aren’t the same thing, that seeing is alarming, erratic, unreliable, even that imagining reality might be the best you can do.