Til Death Do Us Part VII

Series so far here 

Eyes Wide Shut covers a lot of ground, literally and otherwise. It's a difficult movie to summarize because so much happens, or seems to happen, or is suggested to have happened. Every scene contributes to the key motifs (duality, deception, deflated expectations, confronting the unknown), but they resist a collective interpretation. Whatever your theory about Eyes Wide Shut, there's a scene that doesn't fit. This is by design. As with Rashomon, your own position as an audience member is under interrogation. You are being watched back.

This ambiguity should not be confused for chaos. Eyes Wide Shut has a compelling structure. This is precisely what produces the desire for clarity! There is a half-hidden shape to everything: the circle of gravity's rainbow, only resembling an arc to our lying eyes. There is an odyssey taking place. It begins here, with a bedroom showdown between husband and wife. It's a duel to the (inner) death; it's a dance, like at the party last night. It's a battle of wills in which the creatures stirring in the night tear off the masks they wear by day, revealing themselves to each other, to themselves, and to us. This scene grounds Eyes Wide Shut.  The rest of the movie is spent recovering from it. No matter where Bill wanders, he is always trying to get back here, to rewind it and make it make sense. 

As with those other crucial scenes in Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick is paying tribute to multiple masters at once. The slow disintegration of a couple has its most obvious precedents in theater. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf set the gold standard for marital fights, while the nature of Alice's grievances and Bill's reaction to them recalls Ibsen's A Doll's House. Kidman's performance also echoes the character Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Days' Journey into Night. Kubrick's scene feels very theatrical indeed: a stage-like room with a couple of actors enunciating every word and blowing their emotions open to the back row. 

There are clear precedents in film as well. Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales series featured many such anguished duels between men and women; My Night at Maud's in particular has a similar structure to Eyes Wide Shut, as its self-tormenting protagonist goes on a Yuletide journey of sexual temptation. Alice Harford is Mary Tyrone, but she's also Gena Rowlands in her collaborations with John Cassavetes. More contemporary parallels include Death Becomes Her and War of the Roses, but Eyes Wide Shut is basically a '60s arthouse movie that happened to be made in the '90s, and so the clearest film influence on this scene came out in the '60s: Jean Luc-Godard's masterpiece Contempt.  

I'll be touching on each of these influences as we go, in this essay and the next. But this scene is so elemental that no footnotes are required to make sense of it. This is all there is to it:

We begin with Alice staring at herself in the mirror. Her face crumples. She looks like she can't bear to wear her mask another second. The routine of day wasn't enough to erase the uncertainty she felt last night. How can she face her husband? Behind the looking glass, another self awaits Alice, like her predecessor in Lewis Carroll's tales. Our Alice honors a time-old tradition among bored spouses: she gets high.

The Band-Aid box containing her weed and rolling papers is among the more blunt metaphors in Eyes Wide Shut. This joint is a Band-Aid for Alice. It serves to cover up the wound; it won't heal it. (The body does that on its own, as we'll see in the final moments of the movie.) This is a temporary measure, a loosening of inhibitions allowing for the problem to be acknowledged, so that later it can be addressed. 

The shot of Alice smoking the joint is beautiful: a slow zoom-out that expresses how it feels to be stoned, as the Christmas lights at the party expressed how it feels to be drunk. Kubrick himself didn't partake, saying regarding recreational drug use that "when everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful," a disillusionment with desire that resonates with Eyes Wide Shut. He also said that drugs were of more use to the audience than the artist. As such, that shot of Kidman blazing might be an instruction to us, like being told to put on your 3-D glasses. Eyes Wide Shut might not scan as a stoner movie, but it's got that same structure: our hero fails to solve a series of shaggydog mysteries. The twist is that our hero isn't himself [S]haggy. He's the opposite! He's perfect smiling handsome Tom Cruise, stuck in a story structure that prevents him from being truly heroic. As he told Gayle, that's the kind of hero I can be...sometimes. Speaking of Gayle and Nuala:

"Tell me something. Those two girls...at the party the other night? Did you...by any chance...happen to...fuck them?"

The slow pacing of Eyes Wide Shut's dialogue scenes drives a lot of people up the wall. We're increasingly accustomed to snappy banter as the default, and even at the time, many critics wondered why everyone seemed so heavily medicated. In part, it's just exhaustion from the length of the shoot! But it's also clearly a deliberate decision on the director's part, and less attention was paid to why that decision might have been made. 

Eyes Wide Shut forces us to slow down and consider each word as it's being said. What is revealed? What is hidden? Words are not an effective method of communication (actions speak louder, after all, and so do images) so much as another kind of mask. Kubrick instructed co-screenwriter Frederic Raphael to remove all self-conscious wit from the dialogue. The words that remain are spare and sparse, hanging in the air like objects. The effect is hypnotic. We know where Alice is going the whole time, but when she suddenly spits out fuck, it's a shock because of how slow and meditative her pace was until that moment. Kubrick and Kidman play the same trick on us with the movie's final word: "Fuck."

"What?" sputters Bill. He's the picture of wide-eyed innocence. In a great little comic beat, he glances at the joint in his hand, as if wondering if it's to blame for what Alice just said. "What are you talking about?" Already, Bill has his mask on. He knows exactly what Alice is talking about! He may be shocked by her bluntness, but acting like he's forgotten about Gayle and Nuala is absurd. Yet I would bet that Bill is not even consciously aware of this pretense. The repression is instinctive and immediate, as it was with Mandy, as it was in his office earlier that day. He does it all the time. 

This is Bill's flaw: he does not know himself. Again it makes me think of Rashomon, and how  its assistant directors were confused by the script. Their frustrations echo some common criticisms of Eyes Wide Shut: "We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don't understand it at all." Kurosawa's response could just as easily apply to Kubrick's swan song:

"Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings--the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people then they really are ... This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can't understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it."

Alice is zeroing in on Bill's flaw, recognizing it as the source of her unhappiness with him. She's aggravated by his mask. "I'm talking about the two girls that you were so blatantly hitting on." Again, Kidman's baked delivery is mesmerizing, grinding on "blatantly" like she's putting out a cigarette in Bill's ears. Yet Alice doesn't actually think Bill cheated on her. You can tell by how she asks "hmmm...who were they?" She's teasing him! Alice knows Bill well enough to intuit what we saw happen: he got cold feet. So what is she after? In Drama 101 terms: what does the character want out of the scene?

What Alice wants from Bill is honesty. She wants him to acknowledge his fears and desires. She wants him to admit that while he did not cheat on her, part of him definitely wanted to. Sandor rattled her, and so she wants reassurance in her marriage. Honesty will provide that reassurance because it will establish a level playing field between the two of them: we both briefly wanted out. Bill has to be honest, not only because it's disrespectful not to be, but also because honesty allows for vulnerability, which allows for intimacy, which allows for love. Alice does not fear infidelity on Bill's part. She fears that they're falling out of love. 

All of this goes over Bill's head. He realizes it all at once near the end of the movie, when he returns to this bedroom to find a mask on his pillow. What Bill wants out of the scene is purely reactive: get through Alice's interrogation with his ego intact. If Alice's monologue is the source of the scene's drama, Bill's attitude is the source of the scene's comedy. Cruise's weaselly squirms and evasions are note-perfect. He can't bear the thought of intimacy. The mask is more important to him, all-important. 

To be fair, we have been made to understand why that is. Bill prioritized his service to Victor over the expression of his inner self. Gayle and Nuala aroused him, and then he was plunged into a situation in which desire was linked to death and subordinated to duty. No wonder this topic makes him so uncomfortable! If he explained that to Alice, she might be less aggravated with him. But that would require Bill admitting the nature of his "house calls." She might be horrified, pointing out that he abandoned Mandy to Victor's tender mercies. She might also see the parallel to herself and Sandor, and realize that even when separated, she and her husband were playing the same game. This chance for connection passes. It's only taken up near the end of the movie, when Bill promises to tell Alice "everything." So when Alice asks where Bill went last night, Bill says that Victor wasn't feeling well, and Bill was called away to help him. Bill lies slowly and seductively. He pulls Alice to him as he lies to her, his hands slipping below her waist, below the frame, as if to distract both her and us from the lie. "Wait a minute...wait a minute..." he murmurs to buy himself time. Bill is always trying to buy himself time. It catches up to him anyway. He's neatly snipped Mandy out of the story, but she will return at the orgy. Kubrick won't let him forget her: after all, here he is with Alice, another tall redhead with a taste for numbing drugs. 

Bill met Mandy in Victor's bathroom, and the Harfords' own bathroom lurks behind them throughout this scene. It represents the thoughts and feelings in the back of their minds, ready to blow. To quote Full Metal Jacket, it's the animals in their heads. The lighting of the bathroom is extraordinary, a cold blue in contrast to the warm reds, oranges, and browns of the bedroom proper. I've touched briefly before on the color palette of Eyes Wide Shut; suffice to say it's an overwhelming topic. "Where the rainbow ends" is an organizing principle for the movie's style as well as its structure. Every scene reworks the colors of the rainbow in its own pattern. Generally speaking, blue in Eyes Wide Shut signifies Bill, whereas red signifies Alice. In this scene, Bill is being "cold" by repressing his emotions and putting on a front. Alice is being "warm" by sharing and processing her emotions. The bedroom becomes her territory. The bathroom becomes his.

Bill now turns the question around on Alice. Who was that guy you were dancing with? We never saw Bill see Sandor; it must have been just out of the corner of his eye. Alice snorts. "A friend of the Zieglers'," she says, emphasizing that Sandor parallels Victor. Bill asks what he wanted. Alice repeats the question idly, "what did he want..." She grins and then softly moans. Bill's fingers must be hard at work. "Sex," Alice whispers. "Upstairs, then and there." It's what Sandor couldn't bring himself to say, but they both knew it. Victor wasn't so subtle, and he needed Bill to help him escape the consequences.

"That's it?" Bill asks. "Yeah...yeah, that was it," Alice answers. She sounds disappointed. Is she let down by Sandor's base motivations, or Bill's failure to get jealous? Why not both? "He just wanted to fuck my wife," Bill growls playfully as he kisses her neck. "Mhm...that's right," Alice mutters. She's clearly poking at his ego now. She wants to shake things up, get a rise out of him, disrupt the routine. But he wants to incorporate this disturbance right back into the routine. "That's understandable," he murmurs into her. "After all, you are very beautiful."

Once again, Bill is technically saying the right things while ignoring Alice's perspective. Bill thinks this is foreplay. That's all last night was to him! He brought Gayle and Nuala into their bedroom, and probably Mandy too, substituting their faces for Alice's in the mirror. Now he's using Sandor as a specter of sexuality to arouse her in turn. As Bill kneads Alice's breasts in full view of the camera, we might remember that this is (was) an actual married couple. We're seeing something that "really" happens, but staged for us. The mannered acting is a Brechtian distancing device, another element on loan from theater. Eyes Wide Shut takes place in reality and fantasy simultaneously. 

The duality of reality, the coexistence of public and private masks, is what's haunting Alice. She will no longer permit Bill to hide it behind stock phrases and empty compliments. She gets up from their bed and walks away from him. The couple are no longer sharing a shot. As with Bill and Victor in the latter's bathroom, the movie now cuts between them: Alice in Bill's blue space, Bill in Alice's red space, forced to look through each other's eyes. 

"So because I'm a beautiful woman, the only reason any man wants to talk to me is because he wants to fuck me? Is that what you're saying?

"I don't think it's quite that black and white...but I think we both know what men are like." 

The Harfords are high as hell, and so they circle endlessly around the point. It's a meandering intensity on loan from the scene's influences. In particular, Godard's Contempt: a cynical spin on Homer's Odyssey, equally entranced and disillusioned by classical beauty as it's ground up in the gears of commerce, with its Cyclops-camera eye trained firmly on the audience. "There's nothing like the movies. Usually, when you see women, they're dressed. But put them in a movie, and you see their backsides." The protagonist Paul could've been describing the themes (and opening shot) of Eyes Wide Shut. Paul sells out both his wife and his commitment to artistic beauty, without even seeming to realize it. The movie's second act consists of them arguing in their apartment, as her titular contempt for him breaks the surface in response to his betrayal. Kubrick essentially remade this scene for Eyes Wide Shut, his own modern Odyssey: the same subject of marital decay, examined at a similarly extended length. The latter is necessary for the characters to work their way inward, transitioning from vague generalities to their specific thoughts and feelings. Alice isn't responding to Bill's literal words. She's responding to the subtext, filtered through her own fears and desires. 

The Harfords have switched places  in the debate just as they've switched colors. They're taking devil's advocate positions, mocking each other's point of view. Alice, generally comfortable with complexity and contradictions, is now the one talking in absolutes: "the only reason any man ever wants to talk to me." Thinking in absolutes is the original sin of Eyes Wide Shut's ambiguous world, and Alice is provoking Bill into recognizing how much he takes for granted. Bill now suddenly cares about nuance, cautioning her against "black and white thinking" (also a nod to the movie's color palette: this rainbow ends, and begins, with black-and-white credits). But he winds up with an overbroad statement anyway. I think we both know what men are like. 

I think we both know. What's the difference between thinking and knowing? Alice points out that when Bill talks about "what men are like," he's presumably describing himself. "So on that basis, I should conclude that you wanted to fuck those two models." This scene is no longer about whether Bill actually committed infidelity. Instead, it's about the certainties in life, the things we take for granted. It's about what happens when "I know" becomes merely "I think." Eric Rohmer explained this dynamic perfectly regarding his aforementioned Six Moral Tales, saying he wanted to "portray in film what seemed most alien to the medium, to express feelings buried deep in our consciousness." Bill realizes he's trapped himself, and needs to find safe refuge for his ego. There are exceptions, he says, to the rule that men are beasts. What makes you an exception, Alice asks? 

"What makes me an exception is that I happen to be in love with you, and because we're married, and I would never lie to you, or hurt you." 

This is bullshit. I would never lie to you? Bill's already lied to her in this conversation! He said he was called away because Victor was sick, not mentioning Mandy at all. But again: I don't think he even realizes that he's lying. The repression is that effective. Bill thinks he's the man in the mirror, yet as Alice said, he's not even looking at it. Look at the way Bill furrows his brow and grasps his chest. This is a performance. I am trustworthy, I am an exception. My public and private mask are one. His language gives him away: I "happen" to be in love with you. It sounds like chance. It sounds like something that could change without warning.

Alice knows it's bullshit, and says so. You're talking about the public face: "you wouldn't fuck them out of consideration for me." But you've failed to address the private face, which is what I'm talking about: "not because you wouldn't actually want to." Rather than acknowledging his desires and honestly discussing how to handle them, Bill is pretending those desires don't exist. It's a tortured pretense reflected in the dialogue, which is circuitous not only because the Harfords got so hazy beforehand, but also to reflect the difficulty of talking about one's own mind. Kurosawa knew it: the flashlight cannot shine upon itself. Bill is confused and irritated, being pushed into primal territory where he's not comfortable, and so he deflects.

"Relax, Alice. This pot is making you aggressive." 

This is maybe the funniest line in Eyes Wide Shut, a movie hardly lacking for funny lines. In part, the humor comes from the inversion of a stereotype. Bill...buddy...pot is known for making people less aggressive! But it's mostly Cruise's delivery, the smug self-assurance in his voice. He says it with his arm reaching out reassuringly from his lap, as if his dick is going to make everything OK. You're just stoned, sweetie; you don't know what you're saying. He's trying to cut the conversation short by denying that she's saying anything of importance, anything he has to remember in the morning. It's so condescending that Alice finally blows up at Bill.  

"It's not the pot, it's you! Why can't you ever give me a straight fucking answer?"

"I was under the impression that's what I was doing! I don't even know what we're arguing about here!"

Again, the topic is so inchoate and transient that it's difficult to nail down. As Alice says, all she's trying to understand is where Bill's coming from. She wants to see through his eyes. "Where I'm coming from?" Bill retorts, implying that Alice's hazy POV is the problem here. He will spend the rest of the scene, and arguably the rest of the movie, learning where she is coming from.