Til Death Do Us Part II

Series so far here 

The second shot of Eyes Wide Shut glances up at the Harfords' apartment building, but it's more interested in the lamps and streetlights outside. A spangled spiderweb of light. A byzantine corridor of light. This is the structure of Eyes Wide Shut: an odyssey through the looking glass to the end of the rainbow. 

The corridor of light is the binding signature of late Kubrick. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, it embodies consciousness. Thought is born, it propels itself outward, encounters the unknown, and returns transformed. It's the circular journey of humanity given form: enlightenment as literal light.

In The Shining, the hallways of the Overlook Hotel seem increasingly abstract. It's a maze like the one outside, both representing the inner labyrinth of our protagonist Jack Torrance. He says he can sense what's around every corner, like the stalking Steadicam, but there's nothing in the middle of the maze, and ultimately, nothing inside Jack.

What does the corridor of light signify in Eyes Wide Shut? The first shot of the film introduced us to Mrs. Harford. The third shot will introduce us to Mr. Harford. The second shot therefore embodies the distance between them. They will have to navigate this corridor of light in order to find each other. This is the gap; this is the mask; this is the tension that must be resolved in order for the movie to end. 

So much for image. How about cinema's other half: sound? Underneath the music, an ambulance siren suddenly swells. It persists through the cut; we still hear the siren at the beginning of the third shot, as Bill Harford glances out the window.

Is he looking out because of the siren? Bill is a doctor, after all. This siren is the first evocation of the underworld of Eyes Wide Shut: the domain of death. Someone out there is suffering. We don’t know who, where, how, why, but we know it’s happening, because we interpret that sound like a signal. That’s what Bill is doing! He’s like an audience member, looking through the window pane like we look at the movie screen. He will spend the movie chasing sirens of a different sort: women seducing him off the path to "where the rainbow ends." It wouldn't be the Odyssey without sirens. So we meet our protagonist glancing at the outside world, briefly entranced by the possibility of something more. The Other. Something equally enticing and terrifying, Eros and Thanatos fused into a single reflected face. Bill looks...

...and then he turns back to what he knows. Or thinks he knows, anyway. The comedy of Eyes Wide Shut comes first and foremost from Bill walking away, forever failing to get what he wants, whatever that actually is. We see that movement unfold here in miniature. This is the structure Kubrick gleaned from Jung and Freud, the Greeks and the Christians, fairytale and film noir. You can’t go home again, but there’s nowhere else to go.

We first see this famous handsome actor from behind, just like his famous beautiful actress wife in the opening shot. (In the final shot of Eyes Wide Shut, we will once more see Bill from behind.) Only when he rejects the siren song do we see his face. He has become himself. 

As Bill turns, we see he’s Tom Cruise. He’s standing in the same antechamber where Nicole Kidman was standing in the first shot. But things have changed. The tennis racket and standing lamp have been replaced by a set of golf clubs. Has time passed? Or was the first shot not “real” in the same way as the third shot, existing more as a fantasy or archetypal representation? These questions aren’t answered, and the answers don’t really matter. What matters is the subtle sense of disjunction. It’s the same, but different. That's marriage, the film argues: two worlds in one. Two doorways of perception on the same space. Hers, meet his. Game for two (tennis), meet game for one (golf); there's a masturbation joke buried in there. But Bill is still doubled by the mirror. There's no escaping your double in Eyes Wide Shut. 

The third shot of Eyes Wide Shut defines the world familiar to our protagonist, which will be steadily de-familiarized throughout the rest of the movie. The first two shots were static; now the camera moves for the first time. It does so with giddiness tempered by grace, a tight series of K-turns dictated by the layout of the Harford bedroom. This is the film’s central setting, the site of multiple dramatic confrontations between husband and wife over the course of the next several nights. Those later scenes are shot in static close-ups, the camera occasionally tracking shakily to highlight an intense emotional reaction. None are shot in the prowling manner of this introductory scene, with its swift pans and steady retreats. The third shot of Eyes Wide Shut physically maps out the Harford boudoir for us so those later scenes can be afford to be less literal. Alice’s monologues and the discovery of the mask feel like they’re taking place in an abstract plane, a re-presentation of the “real” set being shown to us here.

Bill emerges (as if being born into the movie) from the darkened antechamber into the bedroom proper. To his right is a table, which he searches; above the table is the first of the film's many paintings. Bill and Alice seem to have covered every spare inch of their apartment with colorful canvases. This ties into Alice’s backstory, as we’ll get into at the Christmas ball. But they also represent dreams and memories: the images kept locked away behind our mask, exposed in art. 

This first painting is of a trellis leading into a garden, an image that neatly encapsulates Eyes Wide Shut. It's a vaginal symbol, and also a tunnel for the eye. The film constantly links the acts of watching and fucking, united by desire, which acts through the eye first. (Oedipus put his eyes out for a reason!) This painting reminds me of The Shining, of course: an entry into a fairytale maze. But within this movie's emotional framework, it also reminds me of T.S. Eliot's poem "Burnt Norton." 

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

So much of Eyes Wide Shut is about roads not taken, doors not opened. Alice never slept with her naval officer, nor with Sandor Szavost. Bill is called away from the models at the Christmas ball, and later from Domino. He resists Marian Nathanson and Milich's daughter; Sally and the mysterious masked woman at the ritual resist him. Nick Nightingale dropped out of medical school. "It's a good feeling," he says of walking away. "I do it a lot."

All we're left with are words, echoing in the memory: implications and descriptions, none of them matching up to the thing-in-itself. The moment is past. We will forever be playing catch-up, frames imprisoning the obscure object of our desire. As Bill moves about the bedroom, we see the painting again, reflected in a mirror. Doppelgangers and ghosts; memories and dreams. The path behind you loops around to become the path in front of you. Bill begins the movie searching. Incomplete. Questioning. What's he looking for?

“Honey, have you seen my wallet?”

As with the fourth-wall-breaking opening shot, this banal opening line is typical for Kubrick. He wasn't much for grand opening statements like "I believe in America" or "The world is changed."  The opening line of 2001, after a journey through sublime images of wonder and terror: "Here you are, sir." The opening line of A Clockwork Orange, as the camera pulls back on Alex's face: "There was me. That is, Alex." These mundane, strikingly unnecessary lines deliberately drag us down from the high of the images. The deflation is palpable in Eyes Wide Shut. Bill's already a step behind. He'll never attain the harmony of the film style itself. He bumbles into situations that do not require his presence to function, and for which he is rarely adequately prepared. One of the primary pleasures of Eyes Wide Shut is watching Bill Harford's humiliation crack its way through Tom Cruise's face. It's fun to watch him lose, and that's pretty much all he does. 

Alice knows where Bill’s wallet is: on the bedside table, probably where it always is. Bill finds it there, confirming with a muttered “yep.” He is exasperated, rather than relieved. Why? He accomplished his goal for once! He could be annoyed at himself for needing help. He might resent Alice for knowing better than him. Perhaps above all, he is haunted by how predictable he is, how easily his agency is reduced to patterns like the camera choreography unfolding around him.

This line of dialogue also introduces the theme of money into Eyes Wide Shut. It's this aspect of the film, maybe more than any other, that led to its reputation's renaissance. From Timothy Kreider's popular essay "Introducing Sociology" to the infinitely-scrolling Illuminati conspiracies, there is no end to arguments that the true message of Kubrick's final film is that our world is run by masked elites who use the rest of us ruthlessly. There's plenty of evidence to support that argument, from the ritualistic orgy held by the upper crust to Bill's final showdown with the wealthy and well-connected Victor Ziegler. My counter-argument is that Eyes Wide Shut is about the Harfords--everyone else reflects them in some way--and their struggles are about personal alienation, not how the world works. Moreover, there are many secondary characters whose roles have nothing to do with the theme of money: Sally, Marian Nathanson, the diner waitress. The theories in question basically have to pretend those characters don't exist or aren't important.

Kubrick did make a movie all about class...but it's Barry Lyndon, in which the protagonist's every move is shaped by economic and political status, for love wilts as soon as it flowers. By contrast, money is merely one motif among many in Eyes Wide Shut. For our protagonist Bill, money is a fail-safe, a practically subconscious factor only brought to the surface when it will allow for a shortcut to his goals. There is a distinction to be drawn between wealth--organized entrenched economic power--and mere currency that one exchanges for goods and services. The former is certainly part of the patriarchal atmosphere surrounding Victor Ziegler, equally effective used as honey (“this is just between us”) and vinegar  (“you’ve been way out of your depth”). The latter is the petty bourgeois domain of Bill Harford, a man named after cash. He spends it lavishly, but it never really gets him anywhere.

For the moment, Bill tucks his wallet and his phone into his pockets like tools of his trade. They will work at cross-purposes throughout the film, yet another pair of matched opposites. The wallet allows Bill to get through the doors keeping him from contact with the Other, thanks not only to cash but his doctor's license, which he brandishes as an external beacon of identity. The phone, by contrast, serves Alice’s needs: she interrupts his dalliance with Domino via a phone call (inadvertently saving both of their lives, as it turns out). Victor also summons Bill to kneel before him on that phone, which serves Alice’s needs in a roundabout way. In one pocket, Bill has that which leads him astray; in the other, he has that which holds him back. A perfect circle.

Bill takes us into the bathroom, the camera sweeping in harmony with the music, dancing around him like a planet in orbit. Even the opening line of dialogue moved with the beat. Everything is scrupulously perfect: an idealized portrait of man’s place in space and time. It’s the Strauss spacewaltz of 2001 or the Schubert needledrop of Barry Lyndon, captured in the most intimate possible form. Perhaps because of this intimacy, and this Shostakovitch waltz being so much sprightlier than those previous selections, this passage moves quicker than those films. Your eyes and ears are moving to catch up, ensnared by everything you see and hear. Already, you are being forced to choose what to take in, knowing you won’t get it all--which is what the movie is all about.

As Bill pivots into the bathroom, he calls attention to this aspect of the human condition:

"Now, listen. You know we're running a little late?"

Plotwise, this lets us know that the Harfords are going out to an event. We’re seeing a prologue, with the Christmas Ball as the launching pad of the film proper. Character-wise, this tells us a little about what’s going on with Bill. He’s nervous about showing up late, and is taking the attendant insecurity and inadequacy out on his wife. Bill’s the one who couldn’t find his wallet; if not for Alice, he’d still be behind. She’s only a minute behind him because she’s doing the most universal thing there is: peeing. If there’s any good excuse to be running a little late, it would be that!

Kidman could not look more different here than at the beginning. In that previous shot, we saw her naked from behind. Now she's in profile, her dress (mostly) on, her face visible. In that previous shot, she was lit by a tasteful lamp and surrounded by frames within frames. Now she is lit by harsh bathroom fluorescents, nothing between us and her. In that previous shot, she looked like a statue brought to life. Now she looks like a person, a real person, who sleeps and sweats and showers, a person who must eat and then must shit. Sculptures don't shit.

The opening shot of Eyes Wide Shut encapsulated desire, and now we are being shown that which desire denies. You can want an image, and that's all there is to it. But a person? You have to do more than want a person. You have to live with them, and nothing says "I live with you" like walking in on them in the bathroom. There is an added tension and thrill to the scene generated purely by the casting. Kubrick is nodding to the meta-text, the audience's knowledge of Cruise and Kidman as a celebrity couple. Here they are, behind the scenes in the most private of all settings. This is the primal image longed for by every gaping gossiping eye. It's the Real...even though it's all staged for us, as Victor Ziegler spells out near the end.

Bill's problem is that he takes both his wife and life for granted. This is the character flaw that Kubrick analogizes as a dream state, hence the emphasis on being "awake" at the end. It's less about literal dreams than a waking dream: a passive experience in which Bill acts like the audience of his own existence. He's sleepwalking with his eyes open. He's so used to everything he does, snug within fortresses of custom and routine, that he has become divorced (so to speak) from his own life. And Alice knows it. She tests him, asking how her hair looks. He compliments it. "You're not even looking at it," she sighs.

She's right! Bill isn't looking at her. He's looking at himself in the mirror, smug and secure in his own ego. He doesn't feel the need to look at her, really look at her. He assumes he knows her so well that he can just describe the Alice in his head, who probably looks more like the statuesque figure in the opening shot than the flesh-and-blood woman wiping herself in this one. Bill is a doctor; he knows better than most that flesh decays. He'd rather not think about it. But that has come to mean ignoring Alice as well.

Alice's line is a gauntlet for the audience as well. You're not even looking at it. What are we looking at, and why? Eyes Wide Shut rarely compels us to watch it a certain way. It does not demand that you reach one conclusion or another. All it asks is that you look, and that's all Alice is asking of Bill. Pay attention to me. Witness me. Love me. To look is not a passive experience, Eyes Wide Shut argues. It is a choice, and a revealing one. The eye of the beholder is itself under glass. As I said last week, Eyes Wide Shut is a cinematic Rorschach blot. It cracks you open, not the other way around.

So Bill is, once again, the audience surrogate: staring blankly into a reflective frame, called out for not paying attention. He finally turns to look at Alice. Has he learned his lesson?

"It's beautiful. You always look beautiful."

No, he has not! Alice does not want to hear that she always looks beautiful. She wants to hear that she looks beautiful now. She wants her husband to be present in the moment. Instead, he's lost in the abstract of Alice, his assumption that nothing has changed, nothing will change, nothing need ever change, especially him. At the end of the movie, Bill declares that they will now be awake "forever." Alice cautions him against such absolutes; they frighten her. Rather than assume such godlike confidence, Bill needs to be brought back down to earth. He must learn to live with the unknown. 

Change is the sole constant. It only takes eyes to see it. Bill leaves the bathroom, abandoning the shot to Alice. She declares that she's ready, and before our eyes, she reverts to the woman we saw at the beginning. She adjusts her dress, takes off her glasses, and sweeps past the camera into the bedroom, where the fluorescents are replaced by the loving lamplight orange of the opening shot. This is the moment she becomes who she is in the eye of the beholder. All the world is a stage; as they say in Pulp Fiction, it's time to get into character. The private face gives way to the public one. They are linked only by our gaze, as emphasized by Alice removing her glasses. It's all in how you look. 

This breakthrough is followed swiftly by another, an audio signal to the audience rather than a visual one. Bill reaches for their stereo, and switches off the score.

This is the most deliberate fourth-wall break in Eyes Wide Shut, save perhaps the “abandon hope” letter flourished in the audience’s faces when Bill returns to Somerton. Music we assumed to be non-diegetic has been revealed as diegetic. The border between ourselves and this fictional universe has been exposed, if only as a structuring absence. A sudden silence descends, dictated not by the filmmakers (who live in our world), but the characters (who do not). It turns out that the Shostakovitch waltz was Bill’s choice, not Kubrick’s. Imagine this opening without the music. The peekaboo glimpse of Alice from behind would seem menacing, rather than playful; the lines lobbied back and forth would hover in dead air, their passive-aggressive nature now impossible to ignore. The siren outside would stick out more in memory. So where does that version of the scene exist? It exists only in our heads, and only now that Bill turned off the music. Only in retrospect; only in dreams. That’s where Eyes Wide Shut takes place. At the end of the rainbow.

What does this tell us about Bill? How pretentious he is, to blast this classical music loudly and force his wife to talk over it! But of course, this is a fiction within a fiction. The Shostakovitch was Kubrick’s choice, not Bill’s, because Kubrick is (was) real and Bill is not. In the opening scene of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick is showing us the puppet strings. This is how movie magic works: the material world passes through a filter of illusory light, and then miraculously arrives whole in our minds. Tom Cruise never had control over the music, but Bill Harford did, because it was real for him. As the silence echoes, Bill turns off the light and closes the door on you. Your applause is implied.

The fourth shot of Eyes Wide Shut retreats before the Harfords as smoothly as they advance. More paintings flash by, like shots being edited together into a film. The one that sticks out to me is a portrait of a cat. The Harfords don't have a cat; they have a painting of a cat. Bill isn't engaging with his life; he's just drifting through his impressions of it. The audience isn't left with objective truth at the end; we're left with Victor's version of it. Nothing's more intimate, more real, than marriage. But how easily they can become to you no more than a painting on the walls of your mind, if you take them for granted. If you fail to wake up.

Bill helps Alice with her coat. Neither even stop moving. It's a deft bit of choreography that exemplifies the harmonious flow of action in Eyes Wide Shut, but it's also another example of marital routine. Unlike many "trouble in paradise" films (I'm thinking particularly of American Beauty, which also came out in 1999), Eyes Wide Shut does not posit a binary "routine bad, spontaneity good" explanation of domestic disillusionment. Thoughtless behavior can strengthen a marriage as well as weaken it. It's sweet that husband and wife are so used to helping each other get ready that they do so without a word, without slowing down. This is what it means for two hearts to beat as one. You share not only a consciousness, but a subconsciousness. You are in each other's dreams.

The challenge is preserving that harmony without letting it curdle into complacency, as Bill clearly has. When he says Alice "always" looks beautiful, he's letting himself off the hook for not looking at her hair before responding. Why should I bother looking, when I know what I'm going to see? Why should I bother listening, when I know what I'm going to hear? In the bathroom, Alice asked if Bill had left his number for Ros the babysitter. Yet moments later in the hallway, he asks her for the babysitter's name. Bill's failing the test on multiple levels now: he never bothered to learn Ros' name, and then he didn't bother to listen to Alice when she told it to him. Of course, he doesn’t realize it, because Alice doesn’t bother pointing it out. She just repeats Ros' name for him, without even a flicker of annoyance on her face. She is used to him not listening to her. The mask is so complete that they don't even realize they're wearing it. 

As the Harfords exit the hallway, the camera turns to the left and tracks back to take in their living room and the dining room beyond. Ros gets her one line: "Wow, you look amazing, Mrs. Harford!" Unlike Bill (who wasn't even looking at Alice) or Victor Ziegler at the ball (who compliments all the ladies), Ros' compliment seems sincere. Of course, it could be another performance: buttering up the people paying you for your services. The uncanny banalities in Eyes Wide Shut call attention to the performed, rehearsed nature of so many of the things we say, contrasted with the inexpressible thoughts and feelings roiling just beneath the surface. Bill must ask himself: how do I know what is true? The things I take for granted, the words I speak and hear automatically...what if I cannot trust them? 

What is worth seeing with open eyes?

Helena Harford gets the fifth shot of Eyes Wide Shut all to herself. It's the first close-up of the movie, dedicated to neither of the film's central characters, but their only child (so far). Helena appears again in the montage of the Harfords' next day, is glimpsed briefly when Bill returns from the ritual at Somerton, and then features prominently in the film's final scene at the toy store. These are structurally significant moments, lending her character an importance outstripping her screen time. After all, what's more concretely at stake in Eyes Wide Shut than Helena's well-being? Bill might be able to accept the mystery regarding Mandy and Nick Nightingale, but he cannot look away from his daughter. So she gets the close-up; she matters to him, and so to the camera as well. The rainbow lights on the tree behind her (the first of the film's many Christmas trees) reflect that affection, as do her angel wings. Helena is framed as a gift from heaven. She is Christmas glow given form, the happiness waiting for Bill at home.

That being the case, shouldn't she be named Mary? Instead, Helena was probably named for Helen of Troy: the most beautiful woman in the world whose infidelity launched a thousand ships, or so the story goes. It's an appropriate reference point given the tension lurking between her parents. So this shot marks the collision of the two primary mythological influences on Eyes Wide Shut: Homer's Odyssey and the tale of Christmas. The tension between a myth of recurrence and a myth of transformation serves as a symbolic backdrop to all the film's many doubles and dualities. Can you tell both of these stories at the same time? Well, that's what marriage (and maybe life) is all about: two as one, an eternal recurrence you must embrace as if anew. Eyes Wide Shut is the cinematic equivalent of James Joyce's Ulysses, modernism resurrecting classicism on its own terms. It is the child of two worlds, as Helena is the child of two parents. She unifies the doubles into a whole.

As I said last week, Kubrick's genius was splitting the difference between philosophical gravitas and pop-art savvy. So Eyes Wide Shut is not only a modern Christmas fable and Odyssey retelling, it's a tribute to the most popular American art: movies. When we see the Rainbow Rentals sign, or hear that a character is headed "where the rainbow ends," we're meant to think of The Wizard of Oz. When we see Nick Nightingale in his white suit at the piano, and hear his sarcastic melancholy dialogue about life in exile, we're meant to think of Casablanca. And when we see Bill's adorable daughter wearing angel wings in front of a Christmas tree, we're meant to think of It's a Wonderful Life. As with George Bailey in that cherished Christmas classic, Bill Harford suffers from disillusionment with his life and must undergo a symbolic journey, seeing how things could have been if he'd made different decisions before returning home refreshed. You can also trace this story's lineage back to Dickens. Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's own Christmas carol, is overflowing with ghosts: past, present, future, all at once.

All that's in the subtext. Helena introduces another relevant reference point directly into the text: "Mommy, can I stay up to watch The Nutcracker?"

Like Eyes Wide Shut, The Nutcracker takes place at Christmas. The aura of dreams and repressed desires, the fairytale kingdom hidden beneath the mundane world, the picaresque journey from which two move forward as one; it's not hard to see the influence of Tchaikovsky's classic ballet on Kubrick's film. The very fact that this American child wants to watch this Russian ballet speaks to the cultural cross-fertilizations that have produced Eyes Wide Shut, an American film adaptation of an Austrian novella. Eyes Wide Shut is The Nutcracker for adults, the version for parents to watch after the sugarplum fairies put the kids to bed.  Which version is Helena watching, anyway? Maybe it's the 1986 movie based on the 1983 production; if so, she's already watching one of the darker versions of the story. You can't keep your kids innocent forever.

The Nutcracker reference is also, of course, a joke about Alice busting Bill's balls. That's the singular tonal mixture of Eyes Wide Shut, which probably accounts for a great deal of the confusion upon its release, but also has helped it age well. Every weighty reference is also a silly pun, and vice versa. The comedy and tragedy masks are as one. That's only as it should be, especially coming from the director of Dr. Strangelove. 

In the sixth shot (bouncing us out of the close-up back to the wide framing of the fourth shot), the Harfords tell Helena that she can stay up to watch The Nutcracker, but she has to go to sleep before they get home. She is old enough for a child-friendly interpretation of the uncanny. She is not ready for the real thing, the fairytale garden of fear and desire glimpsed in a painting on the far wall. Maybe everything that happens at the Christmas ball is Helena's dream, her budding subconscious swirling The Nutcracker together with a child's impression of what her parents might be like when unsupervised. After all, the source novella Dream Story begins with the central couple's child falling asleep while reading a story. Her dreams take over from there. What better way to describe dreams than movies playing to eyes wide shut?