Til Death Do Us Part V

Series so far here 

Our protagonist has just barely avoided infidelity. This is the pattern of Eyes Wide Shut: both Bill and Alice come close to "where the rainbow ends" before turning back. It's a journey with both classical and Christian roots, filtered through more modern ideas about psychology and sociology. But it's also a game Kubrick is playing with his audience. As Andre Bazin said, "the cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires." Kubrick leads us on with desire, not only for sex but for narrative closure. Then he denies us both of those climaxes. Alice spells it out at the end: we can never know the whole truth. "To be continued?" Bill says to Gayle and Nuala as he walks away. The camera follows him up the stairs. He's walking on a wave of light, Christmas behind, Cupid ahead, the picture of a new year's harmonious desire...

...and then Kubrick cuts to a naked woman. She is passed out on a chair, still as a statue. Our host Victor Ziegler is getting dressed. We hear him zip up his pants, prominently on the soundtrack. There's no ignoring it. He just got finished raping her. To be continued, indeed.

It's like being plunged into ice water. The warm feeling of the party downstairs is gone in an instant. Instead, we're looking at cold tile and exposed flesh. A fireplace without fire; a body stripped of its soul and on the brink of death. Kubrick's first feature was called Fear and Desire. Desire has led us here, to the domain of fear. Eyes Wide Shut is predicated on this tonal shift. Bill flirts with Sally, only for her to reveal Domino's diagnosis. Bill follows his lust to the ritualistic orgy at Somerton, only to barely escape with his life (potentially getting Nick and Mandy killed in the process). Alice laughs as she dreams of cuckolding Bill, only to wake up shaking and in tears. Fear and desire, Eros and Thanatos, the public mask and the private one. We cannot pry these things apart, even as we've built customs and institutions and entire lives on the idea, the dream, that we can. Sooner or later, we have to wake up.

In Kubrick's movies, more often than not, this transformation takes place in the bathroom. It's where our masks fall away and our more primal selves emerge. The bathroom is where General Ripper shoots himself (Dr. Strangelove), where Alex DeLarge gives himself away to his victims (A Clockwork Orange), where Jack Torrance confronts the ghosts of future past (The Shining), and where Private Pyle shoots both his tormentor and himself (Full Metal Jacket). "What are you animals doing in my head?" his tormentor shouts. These bathrooms are inner spaces, animals crawling around inside our heads. This is where you realize, as Pyle says, that we are in a world of shit.

Victor Ziegler's lair is the ultimate Kubrick bathroom, fitting for the master's final canvas. It's not only huge, it's preposterously overstuffed: an ornate fireplace, chairs and a table, a recessed window with curtains hanging heavy. It feels like a bedroom as much as a bathroom, and that's precisely the point. For Victor, there's no difference between the two. This isn't like the Harford bedroom: the realm of intimacy where the movie began, where husband and wife must struggle as equals. Victor's bed/bathroom is the realm of anonymous exploitation. No one is equal here. Bill had to climb the stairs to get here because this room represents the abuses of power: what the folks on the hill get away with, away from prying eyes. For Victor, this woman is a possession, no different from the lamp, the chair, the toilet. He used her. Now he wants to flush her out of his life. 

And he needs Bill to help him do it. Bill does so without hesitation, not so much as batting an eye at the woman's presence in Victor's bathroom. His professional self takes over. Bill asks how long she's been unconscious; he doesn't ask what Victor did with those "five, six minutes." Bill asks what she took; he doesn't judge Victor for providing the drugs. Bill asks her name. Victor struggles to remember it, like Bill instantly forgot the babysitter's name. Finally, he comes up with it. Mandy. "Mandy," Bill repeats, tenderly. "Mandy? Can you hear me, Mandy?"  It's a mask sliding down: Doctor Bill Harford, at your service. As he told Alice, this is what you get for making house calls.

What is hiding behind that mask? Is Bill still thinking about the women downstairs, the models who nearly tempted him into infidelity? He came close to bearing witness to their naked bodies, like the opening shot of the movie. Now, suddenly, he is bearing witness to a naked female body...but in a medical context, a professional context, in which erotic excitement is drained away by duty and death. Kubrick represents this collision in the framing of Victor: standing in front of a nude painting, his head positioned over the crotch. We're literally seeing where his head is at.

Bill, too, is probably still thinking about sex. Paintings, like movies, reflect our fantasies back at us. Bill's director (represented by Ziegler himself) got him all hot and bothered, then shoved his face in the potential negative consequences of gratifying his urges. Bill's sex drive is now caught up in his death drive. This is Kubrick's modern man, the archetype he drew from Freud and Jung, sent forth on his odyssey to reconcile himself in time for Christmas shopping. "Look at me," he repeats to Mandy, over and over. My eyes summon you to life, flesh from stone. Look at me. Look at me. It's all he wants, but he refuses to recognize his his own gaze. As Alice told him: "you're not even looking at it."

The following night, she will directly confront Bill on this point. How can you pretend to divorce your sexuality from the bodies you handle professionally? This connection unravels Bill, because he's only ever confronted it unconsciously. We see that here: one persona demands the instant negation of the other. In order to clean up Victor's mess, Bill must pretend that he is nothing like Victor. He must become anonymous like Mandy herself, a servant to those whose status allows them to unleash their urges on the less powerful. Mandy slowly wakes up, her sorrowful eyes in shadow, as if still caught behind a mask. This shattering of self is reflected in the editing. Gone are the sinuous long takes drawing the Harfords effortlessly toward sin. In their place is a rigid shot-reverse shot pacing, isolating Bill and Victor in their respective frames. It's as though the movie is suffering a panic attack. It perfectly represents the animals in Bill's head, all his instincts and identities collapsing into each other. 

That stylistic switch-up only enhances the impact of the transition back downstairs, to Alice and Sandor on the dancefloor. We're lost in a fantasy again, the dreamy camera movements and hazy halos of lights expressing Alice's inebriation. But everything has changed, if only for us. We've seen behind the mask. Sandor glances up, as if somehow seeing what's happening upstairs. He invites Alice to join him upstairs in the Zieglers' sculpture gallery. Victor's abuse of Mandy is inextricable from his wealth. He gets away with treating women like objects because of how many objects he owns, many of which are shaped like women. As with Sandor's references to antiquity, we're seeing the rapacious desires lurking behind refined surfaces. After so many volleys of dialogue back and forth between the two, Alice's sudden silence speaks volumes. Sandor has to keep talking. "Would you like to see it?...I can show it to you...we won't be gone long." He's nervous about what her silence indicates. Just like Bill and his serpentine tempters, Alice is realizing that the role she is playing is about to get real. She can't keep floating in a circle; she has to choose. 

Alice leans in close, as if to kiss him. "Maybe...not...just...now." Her head ticks in time with the music. It's an exquisite moment, an erotic tease stretched out to torturous length before being denied. Maybe Alice, like Sandor, subconsciously sense what's going on upstairs: a grimmer version of their assignation playing itself out. If Alice followed Sandor upstairs, would she suffer Mandy's fate? They're both tall redheads, they're both conveniently wasted, and Alice doesn't mean any more to Sandor as a person than Mandy does to Victor. Mandy is literally asleep and dreaming, Alice metaphorically so. Which of them is dreaming the other? When Bill coaxed Mandy back to life, was he on some level waking Alice back up as well?

The association of Alice with Mandy continues when we cut back upstairs. As Bill looks on, Victor tells Mandy "you really gave us one hell of a scare, kiddo." Alice has just pulled herself back, and Mandy has just barely woken up. In public, Sandor feigns romance; in private, Victor is brutally callous. He dismisses Mandy's broken-voiced apology with a snort and turns to the mirror to finish getting dressed. All that matters to him now is restoring his sense of self. The man in the mirror: the host of the party, jovial and back-slapping. He'd never be caught dead in a situation like this. His wife told us he compliments all the ladies. Now we see what his performance of chivalry is worth.

Bill takes over from Victor, speaking more kindly and consolingly, using Mandy's name. It's interesting that we don't see Doctor Bill making use of any medical supplies to bring Mandy round. He did it purely with words, with compassion. "That's the kind of hero I can be...sometimes." If Mandy is Alice, maybe we're seeing a recreation of how the Harfords met. This is the life from which a loving bond saved them. But Bill doesn't save Mandy. Not in the long run; not "forever," his favorite word. He coaxes her back to life, only to abandon her to Victor's tender mercies. "You can't keep doing this," he tells her, with Victor looming in the background. And then he walks away. Victor wants to kick Mandy out then and there; Bill has to talk him into letting her stay another hour and then calling her a cab. Our hero's tone stays mild, even conciliatory, in the face of Victor's heartlessness. Doctor Bill has technically kept his oath. He has done no harm. Yet he is clearly allowing the harm to continue. Along the same lines, Bill technically never commits infidelity, but by the end of the movie, he has severely tested his marriage. Sticking to the letter of your vows is less important than honoring the spirit. 

Victor knows that Bill works not for that spirit, but for him. "I probably don't have to mention this...ah hell, I know I don't have to mention this...but this is just between us." Just like when he greeted the Harfords downstairs, Victor only sounds friendly. His actual words reveal his breezy contempt for Bill. I know I don't even have to tell you to stay quiet, because you're such a good little boy that you'll do it without being told. Victor says the same thing to Bill when they meet again near the end of the movie. Only his tone changes. It's the same eerie parallel between his party and the orgy at Somerton. The same face of power, wearing different masks. 

All of this will come around. The woman who recognizes Bill at the orgy is almost certainly Mandy, and she almost certainly sacrifices himself for him there because he saved her life here. Of all the many threads connecting the Christmas party to the orgy, this is the most dramatically potent: two acts of mercy mirroring each other, good deeds in a weary world. But I say "almost certainly" because we're never given concrete evidence for any of it. All we have at the end are words, masks, and a corpse. All we take away is our desire for more. 

Bill's dance is complete: alienation, nostalgia, seduction, desire, disillusionment, duty, death, silence. Downstairs, Alice's dance is ending as well. As the music stops, she realizes all at once where she is, what she's doing, and who she's doing it with. Nicole Kidman marvelously conveys this tipsy awareness, as Alice tries to pull away even as the seductive effect lingers. "I think I've had too much champagne," she says, which is true, but she's also drunk on Sandor. She needs Bill to sober up. "He'll be all right on his own a little longer," Victor says. "Yes...but will I?" Alice murmurs. Their eyes meet. "Of course you will." She almost surrenders with a smile, but then pulls back again. She misses Bill, and knows now that she doesn't know this man and can't trust him. She steps away, he pulls her back, as if the dance continues without the music. "I must see you again." Sandor senses Alice getting away and so tries to get her to commit. But that just spoils the mood, as with him trying to consummate their flirtation up among the statues. For Alice, Sandor was a dream, something to ease her inchoate irritation with her husband. She never intended to actually have sex with him. When he broaches the possibility, making the subtext text, it makes her question not only him, but herself. She can't see him again, and neither can we. Sandor doesn't even get a moment to himself like Gayle and Nuala. He was barely real at all. What's real is the face he uncovered behind her mask. "I'm marr-ied," she practically snarls, mocking herself, her husband, her whole life. She kisses her finger, and presses it to Sandor's lips, as if to keep him quiet. He cannot be part of her reality. He must be part of her fantasies instead.

This gesture is so potent that we have to cut away. We are back in the Harford bedroom, summoned as if out of a dream. No taxi ride back home; no polite conversation with Ros. No glance in at Helena as she sleeps--which Bill will do the following night, when he returns home from the orgy. In that case, we also cut directly from interior to interior, without showing the journey between. The effect is to blur these spaces together, suggesting that at some level, the bedroom is the party is the orgy is the bedroom again. At home, we can only think of leaving; when we leave, we can only think of going back. 

When Bill comes home from the orgy, however, he's consumed with fear and shame. When he comes home from the Christmas party, he's consumed with desire. This is the most obviously erotic moment in the movie, practically the only shot that lines up with the marketing. The drift of the camera, the endlessly gilded edges of the mirror, the bubbling bass and Chris Isaak's purring vocals on the soundtrack: it all draws you into the spectacle of Hollywood royalty getting down and dirty. 

Yet even here, our desire is the true subject. Bill has eyes only for Alice: sleepwalking over to her, sleeptouching her, sleepkissing her. She responds enthusiastically at first. But as the camera slowly zooms in, the frame around the mirror disappears from sight. Alice went to Wonderland, and now she steps through the looking glass. What awaits? Herself, only herself. She's looking at herself as if for the first time. It's a moment of doubt. It's the realization that she's thinking about Sandor, and that Bill is thinking about Gayle and Nuala. (Only we know he might also be thinking about Mandy.) It's the discovery of self-consciousness, of shame. The next night, Alice will dream of herself and Bill as Eve and Adam, suddenly recognizing their nudity in the garden of paradise. But there is no god in the universe of Eyes Wide Shut. The only watching eyes are ours, and now Alice is watching us watch.