Til Death Do Us Part VI

Series so far here 

Every night gives way to day. We mine this image for hope: no matter how long your night of the soul, it will end. Yet we all know it also works the other way around. Night is exciting. Night is erotic. Night is mysterious, offering opportunities for transformation. You can change! The world might just let you...until the sun rises. Your carriage turns back into a pumpkin. Your eyes open, and you remember who you are. Which is to say, who you are in the eyes of others. All the world's a stage.

"Come night, come Romeo, come thou day in night, for thou wilt lie upon the wings of night."

Eyes Wide Shut begins at night. It ends in the day. In between, it covers roughly sixty hours. Three midnights, three mornings; they may as well belong to different worlds. Under the sun, nothing looks the same as it did in the shadows. It's an appropriate dynamic for Kubrick's triple-X spin on the The Nutcracker. Every decision our characters made (or didn't make), every fantasy that both enticed and disturbed them, now has to be reconciled with routine. 

The montage covering the first day of Eyes Wide Shut is all about routine. This is a day in the lives of Bill and Alice Harford. It's what they're used to. It's what they do without thinking about it (or "looking at it," to quote Alice). In the fairytale world of the Christmas Ball, they were both offered temptations off this circular path, to "where the rainbow ends." Alice resisted, and Bill was called away to witness the horrorshow behind the temptations. They came back together, consummation fueled by fantasy. Now they get back into character. 

Bill emerges from his office elevator like a vampire from his coffin. The beautiful colors of the night before are literally behind him, over his shoulder, like a thought in the back of his mind. He leaves them behind for pitiless fluorescents that bleach out the Christmas lights, leaving him nowhere to hide. The elevator painting is Wassily Kandinsky's Contrapesos. As the camera escorts Doctor Bill to his office, it sweeps past August Macke's View into a Lane. 

These are German Expressionist paintings, created by members of the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) school. Inspired by fauvism and cubism, these artists rejected the dogma that paintings should be aesthetically pleasing representations of real subjects, and instead embraced techniques that showcased emotion. Eyes Wide Shut is an expressionist film, constantly blurring the lines between reality and fantasy in ways both obvious and subtle. Kubrick is drawing upon older forms to show us how to read his final film, his all-consuming tribute to art. The same goes for the soundtrack. As in the opening scene, we're hearing Shostakovich's "Waltz No. 2" from his Suite for Variety Orchestra. This time, though, Bill's not in charge of it. It's non-diegetic; it plays around him, about him. The waltz has become strongly associated with Eyes Wide Shut (for example, it pops up in Batman v Superman at a high-society function clearly meant to resemble Kubrick's film). Its keening melody and sprightly rhythm make it a perfect synecdoche for Eyes Wide Shut as a whole, forever careening between tragedy and comedy masks. Shostakovich experienced both patronage and persecution from the Soviet government; the Expressionists were responding to the horrors of WWI. These political currents are under the surface of Eyes Wide Shut, but still present, feeding into the dissatisfaction and paranoia that threaten to consume the story whole. 

The Expressionists were heavily influenced by Van Gogh, and Kubrick again nods to art history with the weighty Van Gogh biography Alice wraps alongside Helena. One of the most celebrated artists of all time died in poverty. Now we mark the birth of his fellow martyr by giving corporations money so we can then give each other official pictures of his suffering face. Beauty becomes routine. Romance yields to commerce. Alice managed an art gallery before it went broke, and now she's stuck here remembering the way things used to be.

As Bill arrives at the office, Alice and Helena are having breakfast. Bugs Bunny is on the television, reading "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. But creatures are stirring. Instinctive beasts have been activated behind the masks of "Bill Harford" and "Alice Harford." They are struggling toward the surface, just as Kubrick's dark Christmas carol peeks out from beneath the friendly face of tree lights and cartoon characters. (In The Shining, he used a Roadrunner cartoon to foreshadow that movie's endless circular chases; in both movies, the pursuit is coming from within.) There's a jar of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter on the table. I've always been weirdly fascinated by that brand name, the cheerful falsity on display. It fits the movie perfectly. This montage only looks, only tastes, like a happy family. Bill is about to discover that the truth is more complicated. I can't believe it's not real. 

Back to Bill in his office. He's inspecting a topless woman. Cold stethoscope; warm flesh. "That's fine, you can put your gown on," Bill mumbles. He's visibly uncomfortable. Maybe he's thinking about Gayle and Nuala, how he almost got to see them naked. Maybe he's thinking about Mandy, who he did see naked...and on death's door, so he had to repress his sex drive and wear the same Doctor Bill mask he's wearing now. Maybe that repression has stopped working. Bill's thinking about sex and death. After all, he's only seeing this half-naked body because the brain who runs said body is worried it might be failing. That's what he tells Alice that night, when she asks if he thinks his patients desire him: they're too afraid of what he might find. Bill's afraid, too. Not of what he'll find in them, but of what they'll find in him.

"Looking forward to Christmas?" Bill asks a young patient. The boy nods with a smile. "Does it hurt?" The boy nods with a frown. Bill is literally asking about the boy's sore throat. But taken together, those lines suggest that what's really hurting this kid is looking forward to Christmas. Anticipation; expectation; desire. Desire is the source of suffering. Nothing is ever what we want it to be. Not Christmas, not sex, and not ourselves. We are our own worst enemies. The camera slowly pans up Nicole Kidman, naked from behind like the opening shot. Then it cuts to Doctor Bill lifting a man's leg until he grunts in pain. Eyes Wide Shut turns you on and then off. 

Moments like these trigger an exquisite mechanism, in which any sense activated by lust is immediately forced to reckon with decay. Our bodies are both. Maybe this elemental confusion is why we have to wear so many masks; we can never stop trying to reconcile fear and desire.

Where can you steer between these rocks, the Scylla and Charybides of the soul? After those two shots comes one of Alice and Helena in the bathroom. Mom's applying deodorant; the kid's brushing her teeth. You have to accept that the bodies you love are in a constant state of decay, and that their upkeep does not fit the idealized image in your mind's eye. There are movie stars, and then there are real people. You fantasize about the former. You live and die with the latter. 

Bill and Alice come together after their paralleled days apart to care for Helena, snug between them in her bed. Alice mouths along with Helena as she reads, like Bugs was reading to them earlier. She's rehearsing her lines: "before me when I jump into my bed..." The same words mean something different for her. It waits only for the adult Harfords to jump into their bed, after Helena is once more asleep and dreaming. Night has fallen. So will they.