Til Death Do Us Part IX

Series so far here 

Eyes Wide Shut has either two acts or five, depending on how you look at it. You can see Aristotle's complication-unraveling model at work. The orgy is the turning point, after which every subplot concludes, as if we've passed through a mirror. But you can also see Freytag's five-act pyramid in it. The exposition act is now complete, with Alice's monologue as the inciting incident that demands resolution. Now we're into the rising action, as obstacles to that resolution mount up for our protagonist. The climax is the orgy, and Alice describing her dream afterward; the falling action is Bill revisiting all the subplots from the rising action; the denouement is his confrontation with Victor, his confession to Alice, and the final scene in the toy store.

Yet even as Kubrick recreates this familiar structure, he shoots the specifics full of holes. Every scene calls attention to how little is being accomplished, how little Bill knows about what's happening and why. It's not a story about a man struggling to achieve his desires in a hostile environment. It's a story about a man who has no idea what he desires, wandering through an environment as mysterious as he is. It's a modernist approach to classical structures: skeptical of our place in the universe, but fascinated by the structures themselves, using them as vessels for uncanny details and open-ended explorations of human psychology. Eyes Wide Shut is heir to the definitive modernist approach to the classics, James Joyce's novel Ulysses. The protagonist Leopold Bloom wanders Dublin over the course of a day, as Bill wanders New York over the course of two nights and the day in between. Ulysses was Joyce's riff on Homer's Odyssey, in which Odysseus is endlessly delayed in returning from Troy to reunite with his wife Penelope, who is besieged by many suitors in his absence. But the true journey of Joyce's novel is interior: an avalanche of thoughts and feelings and fantasies belonging not only to Leopold, but the people around him. It ends with his wife Molly's erotic ecstatic thoughts of marriage, not far off from Alice's final solution in Eyes Wide Shut: "fuck."

Kubrick was fascinated by this structure, hence the title of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bill Harford is Kubrick's modern man sent forth on a circular odyssey, there and back again. His daughter's name is Helena, after all, and both Bill and Alice are surrounded by references to antiquity. But Bill never went off to fight at Troy, any more than Leopold Bloom did. In Bill's time and place, the impulses unleashed in war are restrained by the requirements of polite society. Bill has become so accustomed to this status quo that all it took to shock him was the revelation that his wife isn't as comfortable with it. How will he respond?

We'll never find out. Before he can open his mouth, the phone rings. Bill's mask answers. "This is Dr. Harford." We can tell from his face that it's bad news. The worst news, he tells Alice: death. Lou Nathanson has just died.

Who is Lou Nathanson? (Or rather, who was he?) We haven't heard of him before. Once Bill leaves his apartment, we'll never hear of him again. He was one of Bill's patients, and that's all we're ever going to know. He serves the same story purpose as the guy who pulled Bill away from Gayle and Nuala at the Christmas party: to interrupt our hero just before he has to make a concrete decision. As with that previous interruption, the timing is uncanny, even dreamlike. Bill feels so bewildered and betrayed that his subconscious killed a guy so he wouldn't have to deal with it. The phone call shatters the hazy stoned atmosphere of the bedroom scene. It is, almost literally, a wake-up call.

Or is it? Maybe it's the other way around. Alice just woke Bill up to the reality of her private face. "If you men only knew," and now he does. The phone call returns Bill to the dream that is the public face. Society, as we saw it at the Christmas party, is a collective hallucination. A bunch of beasts stand around smiling, calling each other names like "Dr. Harford." 2001 features a famous cut between a bone club hurled into the air by our evolutionary ancestor and a nuclear satellite orbiting the Earth thousands of years later. That cut is usually talked about in terms of technological change. But it's also about human behavior. The first act of 2001 shows us early hominids screeching around a water hole. The second act shows us a modern space-bound humans chatting over drinks. By cutting so quickly between them, Kubrick suggests that nothing has actually changed. Beneath the polite mask of the second act lingers the snarling animal of the first. Eyes Wide Shut expands on that dynamic. So as with Joyce's Ulysses, we have here an Odysseus setting out to war against not an external enemy, but an internal one: the life of the mind, behind our masks.

After all, why is Bill going over to the Nathanson apartment? "To show my face." He can't do anything for poor dead Lou. Bill's not a coroner, so there's no official conclusion for him to reach. He's not a mortician, so he can't do anything with the corpse itself. He's there to be in character as the family doctor. He is there to show his face. The same face that has now been shattered.

"Look at me," Bill told Mandy in Victor's bathroom. Look at him now! He sits in the back of a taxi taking him away from his wife; again as always, a passenger in his own life. Tom Cruise's handsome movie-star face, a face we are forever being told to look at, is a frozen mask. What's behind it? For once, Kubrick shows us.

Bill is fantasizing about Alice having sex with another man. These fantasies are tinted blue, with an uneasy framerate suggestive of filmed peepshows or home videos. The rest of Eyes Wide Shut is colorful and luscious; Bill's fantasies are meant to stand out. Kubrick employs a stark style to achieve intimacy. This is, after all, the only time we get direct access to a character's thoughts in Eyes Wide Shut. Everywhere else, all we have to go on are words and faces.

Even here, though, the movie is committed to ambiguity. Who is that man Alice is fucking? Well, it's the naval officer she fantasized about, of course...but wait! Bill said he didn't remember that man. Was he lying? Did Alice's intense story jog his memory? Or is that man in Bill's head not the real naval officer at all? Maybe he's a composite, an image of what that man might have looked like. If so, his presence says more about Bill than Alice. He's nothing but a mask Bill conjured up to avoid facing the truth: he knows nothing about the man who just changed his life, and never will. Anyway, it doesn't matter. The damage is done.

Whose fantasy is this, anyway? That question hangs over the rest of the film. In the original novella Dream Story, the husband tells a story of past temptation to match the wife's. One of the most significant changes in Kubrick's adaptation is that Bill has no such story to share. Even his fantasy is spent imagining what Alice's fantasy might have been like--images without words, to match her words without images. Together, they make a movie that loops behind his eyes.

It has a lot of room back there, because the big joke of Eyes Wide Shut is that Bill doesn't actually want for anything. Again, look at him. He's Tom Cruise! He's a handsome young doctor in late 1990s New York City. The Cold War that haunted Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and Full Metal Jacket is over. The apocalypse never arrived, and a new millennium is calling like a shiny Christmas tree. Best of all, he's married to Nicole Kidman. Sure, we know that she left him in real life, and that he's in a cult, and that New York is headed for 9/11 and Kubrick is headed for the grave, but Bill doesn't know any of that. As far as he's concerned, his life is perfect. As such, he has no fantasies. Alice's vibrant inner life shocks him in part because he lacks an inner life. And so, he's the ultimate '90s man. To borrow from the quintessential '90s entertainment, the show about nothing: even when Bill opens up, there just isn't anything in there.

Now this man at the end of history has been reawakened to the ongoing mystery of life. Alice came close to throwing it all away. Can he? Should he? Does he even want to? If I didn't know her, how can I know myself? He's tormenting himself in his personal hell; appropriately, the taxi is driving in the fire lane.

Bill's moral descent is full of temptations: a series of opportunities to cheat on his wife. As usual with Eyes Wide Shut, this structure is classical as well as Christian. It's the story of the Odyssey. That's why Alice's suitor has to be a naval officer, as in the original novella. He was a ship not sailed, a road not taken. Now Bill is adrift. Yet because he wants for nothing, he's not sailing through his own fantasies. He's sailing through Alice's. Every step to "where the rainbow ends" (which is where it began) confronts him with the same questions she did. Duality, deception, desire. Sex and death coexisting in flesh. The unknowability of the world and ourselves. Bill's journey has begun.

It begins at the Nathanson apartment. This scene is a recreation of Alice's fantasy. It's a movie within the movie, in which masks are juggled around and everyone plays pre-existing roles. Marion Nathanson, daughter of the dead man, is playing the role of Alice. Her hair, her expressions, the color behind her...it's as though on some level, Alice came with Bill on his taxi ride to hell.

Marion's fiance Carl is playing the role of Bill. This is even more immediately obvious. Just look at them: 

So then, who is Bill playing? Alice's mysterious stranger! Marion longs for Bill as Alice longed for her naval officer, and Carl is none the wiser, just like Bill until Alice woke him up. Bill has passed through the looking glass. The dynamics have reversed. He enters this scene as the aggrieved almost-cuckold, but becomes the other man.

This mirroring effect is uncanny. It lends a surreal atmosphere to the scene even though nothing surreal actually happens. When Bill enters the Nathanson apartment, he speaks to their maid Rosa, a parallel to the babysitter Ros at the Harford apartment. Both apartments have Christmas trees and fleur-de-lis wallpaper. The camera follows Bill as he walks down the hallway to the dead man's bedroom. Why linger on such a non-event? Why not just cut to the bedroom? Because later, when Carl enters the apartment, the camera follows him as well--but from the opposite side. The circle is complete. One shot existed to anticipate the other. Carl is Bill from a different viewpoint: his literal mirror image.

Such formal mastery is praiseworthy on its own merits. But what does this strategy suggest about our protagonist? Bill's central character flaw is his belief in absolutes, which has blinded him to ambiguous realities. Kubrick challenges that belief by transforming Bill into his opposite and confronting him with his double.  We're seeing the development of self-consciousness, on a more intimate scale than the evolution of thought in 2001. Bill is beginning to question things, look beneath them as if for the first time. In The Wizard of Oz, the people Dorothy knows in real life inhabit her dreams in different forms. In It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey sees what the world would be like if he made different choices. In Blue Velvet, Jeffrey Beaumont learns that light conceals darkness and vice versa. "It's a strange world," he says, and Eyes Wide Shut explores it in the spirit of the great American movies before it. Bill is standing outside his own life and looking in, as we are. He's almost like a ghost, a Dickensian spirit, appropriate for the Christmas setting.

Of course, Bill's not dead. Lou Nathanson is. That the news of his death came right as Alice broke Bill's heart suggests that the dead man stands in for Bill's broken heart. The death of innocence; the death of how he saw himself and her. There's no going back. Lou's deathbed  resembles Dave Bowman's in 2001:

Dave is reborn as the messianic Star-Child. If Lou is reborn, we don't get to see it. His face is as much a mask as the literal masks by his bed. In Eyes Wide Shut, we're left with the earthly remains. It reflects Bill's disillusionment with Alice. To him, the Christmas lights are not welcoming, but mocking. Sin accumulates. The savior never arrives. There is only death; things fall apart. Bill says farewell to Lou with a gentle touch to the forehead. Nothing medical about it, really. It's more of a spiritual gesture. There goes part of me. I couldn't save him. I can only hope he returns.

Bill and Marion sit by her father's deathbed. It's time for them to get into character. Bereavement is a process, a performance: inexpressible emotions somehow shaped into words and actions. What do you say in the face of death? What could Bill say in the face of Alice's revelation? As Marion says: "it's so unreal."

"Daddy had such a good day. His mind was clear, and he remembered so many things. Then he had a little dinner, and he said he felt like taking a nap. I went into the kitchen and talked to Rosa for half an hour at most, and when I went to see how he was, I just thought he was asleep. Then I realized he wasn't breathing." 

I think it's suggested that Marion killed her father. She clumsily over-establishes her alibi, her eyes suddenly flaring and darting. She later says she was more afraid of "how" her father would die than his death itself. At the end of the scene, Bill makes cutting reference to her offering "comfort" to her father in his final days. But I say suggested because it's never confirmed, nor even explicitly teased. This is characteristic of Eyes Wide Shut. It's a movie about dealing with the unknown, so no matter what a scene shows us, there's always more. We don't know what happened before we got here, and we don't know what happens after we leave. Neither does Bill, really, because this isn't his life. It's more like he stepped into another dimension. This circle briefly overlapped with his own, like 2001's spaceships dancing in orbit. After he's gone, it will keep spinning. "Life goes on. Until it doesn't. But you know that, don't you?" Lou Nathanson certainly does, if he's still out there somewhere.

Whether or not Marion literally killed her father is less important than how such an act resonates symbolically within Bill's story. Marion is a dream of Alice, like Mandy asleep and dreaming at the party last night. She killed her father, who represents Bill's previous self-image of assured patriarchy. Bill got the call right after Alice's monologue ripped his heart out, so Marion killing her father represents Alice "killing" Bill, killing the man he thought he was, the woman he thought she was, the people they were together. Marion's stepmother is in London and hasn't returned her calls, another sign of decaying love. According to Marion, Lou "remembered so many things" before he died. Alice remembered some things, too, and Bill feels dead inside as a consequence of learning them. Where did all this start?

"I think you met Carl here, a few times? ... We're going to get married in May ... Carl has a new teaching appointment at the University of Michigan. We'll be moving out there soon." 

So Marion is specifically young Alice, as she was right before she married Bill. Marion's about to set out on her journey with Carl, starting over together as the Harfords did. Yet Marion is visibly unhappy about it. Maybe she sees the complacency coming. Maybe Alice did, too. As usual, Bill isn't paying attention. When he congratulates her on her engagement, he's working overtime to repress his anguish at how his own marriage is turning out. His courtesy is a shield.

"Well, Michigan's a beautiful state. I think you'll like it a lot."

When Mitt Romney said that the trees in Michigan were "just the right height," I immediately thought of Bill's line about the state being beautiful. It's so bland that it's weird, like a robot trying to imitate small talk. In that way, it's a perfect line for Tom Cruise to deliver, but it also suits his character. Bill is struggling to keep his public mask on. Only now does he realize it's a mask. On the inside, he's a mess: angry and afraid, turned on and ashamed of it. Alice made him realize that he doesn't actually know what's going on with anyone else (or himself, for that matter). So maybe Marion, the dream-Alice, will surprise him too. As he says: "it really could be a wonderful change for you."

This sequence was initially shot with Jennifer Jason Leigh as Marion. I would've loved to see it, but the casting of the Swedish Richardson adds to the pattern of Old World-New World confrontations throughout the movie. (It's Christmastime, after all, BC flipping over into AD.) Ur-American Tom Cruise has suddenly stepped back in time to a mirror-universe where the accents have changed. It's the world of the original novella: a dream story of early 20th-century modernism, delivered as the century closed like a summary statement.

Moreover, Richardson's performance is hypnotic. Her Marion is all nervous glances and frozen smiles, expressing the sour, melancholy mood that Bill is keeping locked up inside. She's clearly breaking down. We might think that it's due to her father's death, but she says that hasn't really sunk in. There's something else waiting to come out, just as with Alice.

The peak of her performance is wordless. Fear and desire fight across her face. Her hand reaches, as if for him, and then retreats into an impotent claw clutching her face. She opens her mouth as if to speak, and then shakes her head, her eyes snapped shut. Words died with her father, with Alice's monologue, and so she crumbles into action. She breaks, becoming herself. 

Bill leans forward, the same clinical look on his face that he wore with Mandy. Throughout the scene so far, Bill and Marion have been sitting still, isolated from each other in the shot-reverse shot pattern, as though rigor mortis has spread from the deathbed to them. But now Bill has moved toward her, taking action. Now he shows up on the extreme left of "her" shot. So when Marion reacts, when she crosses the line the editing has established between them and passionately seizes what she wants, it's as revelatory as Alice's monologue. Here it is, in the flesh, the thing Bill insisted did not exist: female desire.

Bill has become the dashing suitor from Alice's story, into whose arms the desperate damsel cannot seem to help but fall. Yet the sequence plays out not like Alice’s fantasy, nor Bill’s in the taxi. Rather, it plays out as those fantasies crashing against disappointing realities. "It's so unreal," indeed. We are being shown why Alice never fulfilled her fantasy. Why didn’t she go with the naval officer? Why was she relieved when he left? Because she knew it would probably play out like this! It wouldn’t be sexy so much as desperate. Marion's lust for Bill is a version of Alice's lust for her stranger, but stripped of all retrospective romance and reduced to twitching terrified present-tense need. Why is Marion kissing Bill? She keeps saying "I love you" as though they're magic words, passwords like the one at the orgy. After what Alice said, they no longer have meaning. Marion finally gives the game away: "I don't want to go away with Carl." Marion's desire to escape is more pressing and powerful than the specifics of where she’s escaping to. It’s the end of the rainbow; that’s all that matters. It's all Alice was looking for with her naval officer. The grass is always greener on the other side. Bill has now become the vessel for that projected fear and desire.

In terms of the Odyssey structure, Marion is a 20th-century spin on Nausicaa, the Phoenician princess who longed for her future husband to resemble Odysseus after the latter washes up on her father's shores. In terms of Joyce's Ulysses, Marion is a high-society version of Gerta, the first female narrator translated into Bill's first stop along his odyssey; Gerta casts a wandering eye over Leopold Bloom and longs for a "dreamhusband" like him. No matter who tells the story, when and where they set it, it's always about wanting that which you can't have and wouldn't live up to your dreams. 

Marion is Bill's first siren, like the ambulance sirens outside, both temptation and cautionary tale. How will he respond? Even if he was attracted to Marion, there's the small matter of her father's corpse inches away from them! We've see this before: dead bodies wilt Bill's erotic desire for live ones. It’s similar to the parallel between Alice and Mandy at the ball. Sandor’s seduction is alluring; the reality upstairs with Victor, not so much. Indeed, Bill's tone with Marion is identical to the tone he used with Mandy. It's paternal, warm but firm. It's his bedside manner; it's the public face. Marion has apparently been fantasizing about Bill, but he insists that this doesn't line up with the reality that they're strangers to each other: "I don't think we've had a single conversation about anything other than your father."

Or are they? We have only Bill's word to go on. It's not like we saw previous scenes with Marion to confirm. For all we know, Bill's been leading Marion on without realizing it. He didn't realize how unhappy Alice was, after all! Bill is being forced to reckon with how little he knows about his own life. Lou's death heralded the death of everything he took for granted. That's what all Kubrick movies are about, in one way or the other: the system breaking down. For Bill to sleep with Marion would be to admit that the naval officer would have the right to sleep with Alice. By committing infidelity where Alice didn't, Bill would lose the tortured self-righteousness to which he clings. ("That's the kind of hero I can be...sometimes.") It's an invitation to chaos, socially and psychologically. Bill shuts Marion down to reassure himself that Alice's fantasy never could have come true, that it never could have meant anything. 

And anyway, they're quickly interrupted. Eyes Wide Shut is all about interruptions. Bill was called away from Gayle and Nuala at the Christmas party, and he's been called away from Alice's devastating monologue to see to the Nathansons. In the next scene, Alice will call Bill just as he's about to have sex with Domino. Here, Carl has finally arrived to reassert order over chaos. Kubrick gives him time to walk down the hallway so Marion and Bill in turn have time to get their public faces back on. Only we see it all. We see Carl next to Bill, doppelgangers on either side of the dead man. So Marion only got engaged to Carl because he looks like Bill! Or...maybe Marion is only infatuated with Bill because he looks like Carl. Who is real, and who only a reflection? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? It's an ouroboros, a Mobius strip of projection like a film strip. It's a mystery all the way down.

Carl observes the social niceties impeccably. He grieves with his fiance; he shakes the doctor's hand. His public mask is in place. Like Bill prior to Alice's monologue, Carl probably doesn't even realize that it's a mask. Bill does, though. Look at him squirm! His smug belief in absolutes and surfaces has vanished like a dream upon waking. He can no longer play his part, because he knows that Marion is only playing a part. She was attracted to him without him knowing, and she just kissed him by her father's deathbed without Carl knowing. How can Bill meet Carl's eyes after that? It's like looking at his previous self in the mirror. Carl thanks Bill for coming over because "it means a lot to us." Us. We are to be married in May; we are a unit, we are one. If you men only knew. Bill can't bear it. He gets out of there, mumbling polite words that mean nothing. More meaningful is what Marion almost says, her mouth open, an intake of breath...but then Bill shuts her down. "Good night." 

The final shot of the scene is a sorrowful ellipsis. It's a closeup of Marion, the rainbow of Christmas lights behind her capturing the swirling torrent of her emotions. Her eyes are full. Then she dissolves into the edit, a ghost trapped in light. We will never see her again. We don't know what happens to her next. But in a way, we do. She becomes Alice. 

And so Bill walks away. Like Nick Nightingale said at the Christmas party, he'll do that a lot. What did he learn from this scene? That it could just as easily be him behind the other man's mask, and that a mask is all it is. He has not explored his own desires but his wife’s, through a roleplay that has de-eroticized the fantasy while refusing Bill consummation. He is left more frustrated than ever. He can't control what happens, and he can't decide what he wants out of it.

By the end of the movie, Bill will decide that all he wants is to be back home with Alice, in spite (or because) of all that happened (or didn't). That's why the Nathanson apartment seems like the Harford apartment with the furniture and faces rearranged. That's why Marion keeps dissolving into Alice. Bill wants to wake up from this nightmare in his own bed, alive unlike Lou in his, and he wants Alice to be there next to him. No matter how far they roam afield, they come full circle to each other. Bill's odyssey will end with him by her side, crying bitter tears like Odysseus on Calypso's isle, feeling his sweet life ebbing away like Lou Nathanson's, longing mournfully for the return.