Til Death Do Us Part I

art by Jean-Sebastien Rossbach 

What is Eyes Wide Shut? Ask a hundred different people, and you’ll get a hundred different answers. It’s a sex comedy; it’s an erotic thriller; it’s an expose of the rich and powerful. It’s a masterpiece; it’s a disaster. The only consensus about Stanley Kubrick’s swan song is that everyone else is looking at it all wrong.

The film’s most devoted fans are the Kubrickult: my nickname for the extremely online hivemind dedicated to unearthing paranoiac patterns and puzzles in the director’s work (particularly The Shining, as lampooned in Room 237). These are the folks arguing that Eyes Wide Shut is about the Illuminati, and that Kubrick’s death during the post-production process was actually an assassination by IRL Red Cloaks. It is difficult to reconcile this solemn perspective with the experience of watching the film, which (from the title on down!) is mocking such totalizing attempts to make sense of things. It reminds me of the Beatles’ “Glass Onion,” in which John Lennon satirizes the overzealous fans reading too much into his lyrics.

Of course, Eyes Wide Shut’s harshest critics seem equally divorced from the film itself. Lee Siegel published a prescient jeremiad against the naysayers in Harper’s Magazine, pointing out that many of the negative reviews were responding entirely to the (misleading) publicity campaign, and refusing to even attempt to analyze and appreciate what was happening on screen.

Our official arbiters of culture have lost the gift of being able to comprehend a work of art that does not reflect their immediate experience; they have become afraid of genuine art. Art-phobia is now the dominant sensibility of the official culture, and art-phobia annihilated Stanley Kubrick’s autumnal work ... Genuine art makes you stake your credulity on the patently counterfeit. It takes you by surprise. And for art to take you by surprise, you have to put yourself in the power of another world—the work of art—and in the power of another person—the artist. Yet everything in our society, so saturated with economic imperatives, tells us not to surrender our interests even for a moment, tells us that the only forms of cultural expression we can trust are those that give us instant gratification, useful information, or a reflected image of ourselves. So we are flooded with the kind of art that deprecates attentiveness, tells us about the issues of the day, and corresponds to our own personalities. And if a genuine work of art appears that has none of these qualities, critics impose them anyway, for they fear that if they surrender themselves to the work’s strangeness, they will seem vulnerable and naive and intellectually unreliable.

So the question remains: what is Eyes Wide Shut? Siegel goes on to argue that Eyes Wide Shut explores the classic conflict between our public and private faces: a duel of masks. Our fears and desires feed on each other, producing contradictions that cannot be resolved. It’s a society-wide paradox which Kubrick grounds in the dynamic of a single marriage. Siegel contextualizes the film’s countless allusions within this framework: Kubrick was aiming for the sweet spot where Christian theology, Greek mythology, and modern psychology all meet in their attempts to explain how an individual navigates their environment in search of intimacy and happiness. Siegel praises the tenderness and playfulness with which Kubrick approached this timeless topic.

There are many more virtues that one could add to his succinct analysis. I am always struck, as if anew, by the subtle elegance of the filmmaking. Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining constantly call attention to their formal mastery, lest you doubt for a second that you’re watching The Best Sci-fi/Horror Movie Ever Made. (Which is fair, because in both cases, you are!) Eyes Wide Shut, by contrast, is pure confidence. The precise editing and smooth camerawork rarely stand out as such. They absorb--and are absorbed by--the unfolding action, an alchemy that can be difficult to conceptually untangle into its component parts. Everything in Eyes Wide Shut supports everything else. It embodies harmony.

But what I love most about Eyes Wide Shut flies in the face of that studious perfection: its total commitment to ambiguity. Every scene insists that life is unsolvable, a message all the more vital in the face of the endless attempts to solve the film itself. There’s always something you aren’t shown. There’s always something that happened before and after you showed up. There’s always something you will never, ever understand, and you have to keep going anyway. “Life goes on. Until it doesn’t. But you know that, don’t you?” Eyes Wide Shut will unravel whatever you bring to it, every bit as much as it unravels its characters and scenarios from within. It demands engagement on its own terms. In return, it cracks you open like a nut.

I always loved and was fascinated by Eyes Wide Shut, but my introduction to the wide-ranging arguments about the film was Timothy Kreider’s popular essay “Introducing Sociology,” in which he made the case that Eyes Wide Shut was less about marriage than the corrupt nature of wealth and patriarchal power. If you go to his website to read the essay now, it comes with the following afterword:

I wrote this essay in 1999. In retrospect, I think Eyes Wide Shut initially puzzled me, as it did so many viewers, and in my puzzlement I sought through it looking for the sort of Stanley Kubrick film I knew and expected, a film about the brutality of man, the callousness and depravity of elites, the cyclical self-destruction of human history—you know, what Pvt. Joker calls “the whole Jungian thing.” And I found it, because it is indeed in there, buried in shadowy subtext beneath the cozy Christmas glow of the surface. Kubrick’s worldview was born of the mid-twentieth century, of Darwin and Freud, the Holocaust and the Bomb, a black-comic, 50’s hipster existentialism, and he couldn’t help but infuse everything he made with his dark understanding of human beings and the society they’d made.

And yet, watching the film in middle age, I find myself (and imagine Kubrick being) less interested in condemning the Harfords than in simply observing them, and find myself admiring not the same old story he’d always told but the new one he was trying to tell for the first time in his career. He was attempting, late in life, something he’d never done before, something he didn’t know whether he’d be any good at: to make a film about intimate, domestic life, about a blindly complacent but basically happy marriage, testing its fault lines of temptation, jealousy and resentment and leaving it stronger and more truthful.

Maybe that’s what Eyes Wide Shut is actually all about: the process by which you change, and find that the movie has changed with you. Kubrick famously summarized his philosophy in an interview with Playboy in the wake of 2001: “However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” Indeed, few films capture the vastness of darkness like those he would make next. Yet there is precious little light-supplying in A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, beyond the cold light of clarity. Was the second half of Kubrick’s mantra empty? In the universe of his movies, what would a reason to believe even look like? Why would one go on? Eyes Wide Shut is an answer to those questions, albeit a deliberately opaque one. Kubrick’s last film is his attempt to make good on his promise, supplying light at last.

Eyes Wide Shut is my favorite movie. I return to it because it's a cinematic Rorschach blot. I'm excited to see what form it takes for me this time. Thank you for reading!

Much like his movies themselves, it is difficult to place Stanley Kubrick into a satisfying context. I remember going to a screening of 2001 with a friend who had never seen it, but knew of it via cultural osmosis as the one with a killer robot. She was surprised to find that HAL was merely one (latecoming!) component of 2001, rather than its central character. Like any experience, art is reduced in retrospect to a handful of standout elements. With Kubrick, those popular elements (despite being so frequently homaged and parodied) are often strikingly unrepresentative of the whole. Eyes Wide Shut is often referred to as “the orgy movie,” even though multiple subplots are unconnected to the cultish ritual at Somerton; the latter is less the overriding focus of the movie than the most distinctive expression of its ideas and images.

Along the same lines, none of the readily available categories make room for Kubrick himself. Was he a member of a distinct artistic movement? Not really; the closest you can come is to call him a “modernist,” which is so broad as to be useless. Was he part of a generational upheaval? Not at all; he was too young for the Golden Age and too old for New Hollywood, admired at a distance by denizens of both. Was he identified with a specific genre? Hardly; he worked within many different genres, applying the “Kubrick touch” to each.

I think the most illuminating context for Kubrick is the audience for his most beloved films. Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange came out in the arthouse era of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the creative and commercial imperatives of American filmmaking briefly overlapped. Kubrick took full advantage of this window, despite not being a member of the Easy Rider generation himself. I would argue that his defining trait as an artist was an uncanny awareness of how to sell complicated, uncomfortable, unapologetically modern art to a mass audience. There's something Warholian about this mixture, even though Kubrick's films were slower and more solemn than anything coming out of the Pop Art scene. The director's penchant for provocative combinations of philosophy and pop culture persisted to the end of his career (and life). Eyes Wide Shut is a difficult movie about one of the most universal of subjects, a magazine-cover couple besieged on all sides by smarty-pants references. 

One could say that Kubrick was among those rare talents who become their own genre. People want to make Kubrick movies, the way they want to make war movies or horror movies. Eyes Wide Shut is the ultimate Kubrick-as-auteur experience, precisely because it lacks an easily definable genre framework. It is above all Kubrickian.

Yet in following that logic, it is easy to forget that an artist’s iconography can change, and that artists resist their own biography as much as they cleave to it. Kubrick reconstructed New York for Eyes Wide Shut, rather than return to it. Despite his Jewish roots and longstanding desire to make a movie about the Holocaust, he deliberately erased the Jewish elements of the original novella in favor of making the protagonist a “Harrison Ford goy” (hence the surname of Harford, perhaps). If Eyes Wide Shut is the most Kubrickian of his movies in that it subscribes to no logic but its own, it is also the least Kubrickian of his movies in that it found him determined to change his signature.

It's also easy to forget the even the most distinctive, demanding director is but one of many collaborators on a given film. Eyes Wide Shut is a magnificent work of art thanks to cinematographer Larry Smith,* composer Jocelyn Pook, and costume designer Marit Allen. It wouldn't have existed at all without the second-unit team shooting on location in New York. Credit is due to screenwriter Frederic Raphael for the film's insidious structure, even though he famously felt slighted by the end of the process, and to Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman for their detailed and memorable performances, even if the former doesn't quite seem to understand the movie unfolding around him and the latter may have understood all too well. When I refer to "Kubrick" henceforth, it's less slavish auteurism than convenient shorthand for the sum efforts that wound up released under his name after he died. Eyes Wide Shut belongs to everyone who helped make it.

*Smith is credited as "Lighting Cameraman" rather than DP or cinematographer; by all accounts, he and Kubrick collaborated extensively on the framing and lighting schemes for the film.

Eyes Wide Shut is an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Dream Story. Kubrick and screenwriter Frederic Raphael transposed the action from fin-de-siècle Vienna to contemporary New York City. The movie stars Tom Cruise as Bill Harford, a successful young doctor, and Nicole Kidman as his wife Alice Harford, a former art gallery manager who now devotes much of her time to raising their daughter Helena.

The Harfords set out for a Christmas ball hosted by Victor Ziegler, a wealthy and well-connected patient of Bill’s. As the Harfords dance, Bill spots an old friend playing the piano: Nick Nightingale, who dropped out of medical school. As Bill chats with Nick, Alice encounters a Hungarian charmer named Sandor Szavost. They dance as he attempts to seduce her; meanwhile, Bill flirts with a couple of models before being called away to attend Victor in his bathroom. There, Victor instructs Bill to revive a naked woman named Mandy, who has overdosed. When they return home, the Harfords have sex.

The next day, Bill goes through his usual routines at the office, while Alice does the same at home. That night, they smoke a joint and begin to argue about the events at the ball. Alice accuses Bill of taking her for granted; Bill claims that women think about sex differently than men, and that he knows she’d never betray him. In response, Alice reveals that she once had an intense fantasy about a naval officer they met by chance, to the point she considered leaving Bill and Helena behind, but was ultimately relieved that she didn’t.

Before Bill can respond, he receives a call notifying him that a patient, Lou Nathanson, has died. Bill sets out for the Nathanson apartment, obsessively replaying a fantasy of Alice’s betrayal in his mind. Marian Nathanson, the dead man’s daughter, unexpectedly kisses Bill and begs him to save her from being whisked away by her fiance Carl, who arrives to unknowingly interrupt. Bill leaves. While walking the streets, he encounters a pack of frat boys who hurl homophobic slurs at him, as well as a sex worker named Domino, who invites him inside her apartment. Just as they’re about to have sex, Alice calls to check up on Bill, which prompts him to leave Domino’s apartment.

Bill then runs back into Nick Nightingale, playing piano at the Sonata Cafe. Nick reveals to Bill that he’s scheduled to play blindfolded at a secret event later that night. Bill talks Nick into giving him the password for the event (“Fidelio”), but Bill has to acquire a cloak and mask to get inside. He visits Rainbow Fashions, where the owner Milich encounters his young daughter having sex with two older men. Bill finally arrives at the palatial Long Island estate of Somerton, donning his mask and cloak to join a ritualistic orgy. A mysterious masked woman urges Bill to leave before he’s found out as an intruder. When the ritual’s officiants prepare to disrobe Bill, the mysterious woman offers herself in his place, and Bill is dismissed with a warning to keep his mouth shut. He returns home to Alice, who tells him about a dream she had in which she betrayed him with countless men and laughed at his pain.

The next day, Bill returns to Rainbow Fashions to return the cloak, only to find that the mask is missing. Milich offers to pimp out his daughter to Bill. Our hero visits Domino’s apartment and flirts with her roommate Sally, only for his ardor to wilt when he learns that Domino has tested positive for HIV. Bill calls the Nathanson apartment, only to hang up when Carl answers. Bill tries to track down Nick, only to find he vanished overnight in the company of some tough-looking guys. Bill returns to Somerton only to be handed a tight-lipped note of dismissal through the gate. He later suspects that he is being followed. He sees in the newspaper that a former beauty queen named Amanda Curran overdosed in a hotel. Bill visits the hospital where she is being treated, only to find that she has died. He stares down her corpse in the morgue, almost kissing her before pulling back.

Victor summons Bill back to his manor to confront him about the ritual at Somerton. Victor claims he was there, and that everything Bill saw was fabricated in order to keep him quiet. According to Victor, Amanda Curran was the mysterious woman who saved Bill at the ritual, and also the woman Bill revived at Victor’s party, but there was nothing suspicious about her death. Bill goes home to find Alice asleep next to the missing mask, placed on his pillow. Bill breaks down in tears and promises to tell Alice everything. The next morning, the Harfords take Helena shopping for Christmas presents. Bill asks Alice what they should do now. She responds that they should be grateful that they came through their adventures intact, and now that they’re finally awake, there is something very important they have to do: “fuck.” Cut to credits.

Eyes Wide Shut begins by looking back at us. In the opening shot, Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) gets undressed. The pillars framing the antechamber are the first of the film's many classical allusions. They present Alice as a sculpture brought to life, a mobile element in a still portrait. The other eye-grabbing element in the shot is the red window curtain, itself reflected in the mirror. Doubles and frames and curtains; half-hidden tunnels for the eye. This shot is about the act of watching. Everything about it calls attention to our presence. It shows us the torn curtain around the proscenium arch, the ineffable border between fantasy and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, that art makes tangible. We are the ones responsible for creating meaning out of the artist's ambiguous representation. All this exists for your eyes. It does not take place in reality; it takes place in your mind. Movies are dream stories.

The question of limited perspective will persist throughout the film.  Eyes Wide Shut is Kubrick’s curtain-call tribute to the audience experience, which the film argues is the perspective of life itself. Eyes Wide Shut is an exploration of the process by which human beings create meaning together, and so is ambiguous and open-ended by design. Eyes Wide Shut is for you, about you, and ultimately, by you. 

Those twinned tennis rackets give away the game--which is to say, they reveal that this is all a game. Kubrick volleys across the mirrored “net” of the film canvas, and the audience mind volleys back, often instinctively. It’s a duel; a dance; a seduction. Yet Kidman’s actual movement is not self-consciously seductive. She wearily shrugs her dress off and steps out of it; she’s just getting changed. Suddenly, we might feel awkward about watching, as if we’re intruding.

This was not the first time a Kubrick movie began by kicking down the fourth wall. A Clockwork Orange opens on our protagonist Alex staring down the camera. He inherits his gaze from the Star-Child at the end of Kubrick’s previous movie 2001, as if all that cosmic wonder were nothing more than Alex’s spiked-milk-induced trip before he (and we) must settle back down to earthly business. Like Alice Harford, he seems to know we are watching, yet does not care. It will not shame him. Whatever rage we muster is ineffective, as programmed and translucent as his own Ludovico treatment. Thank you for coming, his gaze says. I am an empire, and you, all of you, merely record what I do.

Barry Lyndon, Kubrick’s next film, opens on an extreme long shot of the duel in which our protagonist’s father has died--already in the past tense as it’s happening, confirmed as fate by the voiceover, our (necessarily disembodied) embodiment of cinema. In the foreground, a wall cuts through a field, establishing our distance from the thing-in-itself. The rest of the film is about the nature of that distance. It’s fecklessness and faithlessness, feudal fatalities of war and ennui alike, but most of all, it is time. We cannot do anything about any of this, because as the epilogue tells us, everyone here is already dead. By extension, so are we, already dead at some point in the invisible but inevitable future, when our descendants will sit around watching period pieces featuring actors wearing approximations of our clothes.

These shots presume the existence of the audience, but they do not presume anything about us beyond powerlessness. The opening shot of Eyes Wide Shut is different in this regard. It engages with our expectations, delivering upon them even while subtly deriding them. If there is one expectation with which critics and audiences alike came to Eyes Wide Shut upon its release, it was seeing a glamorous Hollywood couple get nude. The opening shot so quickly satisfies this desire that it deflates the satisfaction one gains from it. This is but the first of many examples of how Eyes Wide Shut mirrors sex in its structure--specifically, the structure of unsatisfying sex. People wanted to see Nicole Kidman naked. Here she is! Without any fanfare, and gone just as quickly. The movie has prematurely ejaculated. What are we to do now? Smoke a cigarette and have an awkward conversation? What is the movie about now? What is it for now, that it delivered on our expectations within seconds?

The artistic pleasure of beauty is not denied. Far from it: Kidman is lit and framed for maximum visual appeal, the pink-orange tone of her skin seeming to proceed naturally down the rainbow from the vibrant red of the curtains. The white pillars contrast pleasingly with her black dress. The mirror opens up the tight space, adding an extra layer of sensuousness to the colors. This opening shot exemplifies the handsomeness and harmoniousness of Eyes Wide Shut: an embarrassment of stylistic riches.

Our pleasure in that beauty, however, is put into context and so productively complicated. It’s as though we have hunched forward with a leer only to realize that our hunch and leer have been incorporated into the script. This changes not only our understanding of what’s happening in the movie, but also the nature of our relationship to it. We must now reorient ourselves, a transition that will never be complete so long as the movie lasts.

The opening shot of the duel in Barry Lyndon is from our perspective, first and foremost, but it might also be from young Barry’s: a psychic trauma putting him on a path of alienation and violence, looping him ‘round to his own duels with his rivals for sex and property. The opening shot of Eyes Wide Shut is also first and foremost about the audience, but it might also be said to represent our protagonist Bill’s perspective. In that regard, the most significant aspect of this opening shot is that his wife Alice’s back is turned. It means she’s not looking at him. It means she might be looking at anyone, thinking about anyone, getting ready to play tennis (so to speak) with anyone. It means we can’t see her face, but we can see her ass. That’s a famous person’s ass! Or is it? How can we know for sure, without seeing her face?