Til Death Do Us Part VIII

Series so far here 

Bill and Alice Harford are fighting. At first, it was about the temptations they faced at last night's Christmas party. But, as is often the case when lovers fight, the inciting incident is a pretext. It cracks open an inner door that leads the Harfords into deeper waters. There wait problems they have kept submerged, now rising to the surface. Bill is drowning in words: "I don't even know what we're arguing about here!" Ironically, that's exactly why they're fighting. He hasn't been paying attention. 

What the Harfords are really fighting about is perspective. How do we see the world, each other, and ourselves? "I'm just trying to find out where you're coming from." Alice was goading Bill into revealing his desires, but he shut her down, dishonestly denying their existence. Bill always falls back on his public face. I'm an exception to the rule that men can't be trusted. I'm a responsible professional who loves you and would never hurt you. So now Alice has to take aim at that mask, cracking it open as with the Ludovico conditioning sessions in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. In that movie, the government demonstrated its success in remaking Alex by showing us the rapist becoming repulsed by a pair of exposed breasts. Alice's own interrogation proceeds along the same lines:

"Let's say, for example, that you have some gorgeous woman standing in your office, naked, and you're feeling her fucking tits. Now, I want to know what you're thinking about when you're squeezing them." 

Now that Kidman is up and moving, the volume growing, she resembles Gena Rowlands in her famously raw collaborations with John Cassavetes. (Alice is, quite literally, a woman under the influence.) The scene is also beginning to echo the scorched-earth arguments in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It's not hard to imagine Alice telling Bill that "if you existed I'd divorce you, you're a blank, you're a cipher." How does he respond?

"Alice, I happen to be a doctor. It's all very impersonal, and you know there's always a nurse present."

I happen to be a doctor, Bill says, just like he said he happens to be in love with her. These are things that happened to him, rather than the other way around. Career and marriage: stable external beacons of identity. He has taken them for granted. They have allowed him to sleepwalk through life, until tonight. 

"It's all very impersonal." That's how Bill likes it! He's a blank-faced banality, saying and doing whatever convention dictates. There's always a nurse present: an observing eye like the audience, making him self-conscious. But she only has to be there because of the possibility that Doctor Bill would act on his impulses. We all know it; we just don't talk about it. Bill especially doesn't talk about it. He's uncomfortable with his own free will. So he volleys back into Alice's court. You know there's always a nurse present, as when he said "we both know what men are like." You know these things, these certainties. Why are you challenging them? But he's not reassuring her, because he still isn't answering her question. He knows it, too. Bill has suddenly tightened, his eyes and nostrils flaring. She's touched a nerve. 

Why does this bother Bill so much? I doubt it's actually professional ethics, given what he did for Victor. Alice immediately mocks this pretense:

"So when you're feeling tits, it's nothing more than your professionalism?"

What's actually bothering Bill is the direction the conversation takes next:

"Now, when she is having her little titties squeezed, do you think she ever has fantasies about what handsome Doctor Bill's dickie might be like?"

Bill cannot handle this. He works so hard to repress his own fantasies that he never even thought the object of his desire might be watching him back. So once again, he falls back on his public persona, the "doctor" in front of his name. 

"I can assure you that sex is the last thing on this fucking hypothetical woman patient's mind!"

"And what makes you so sure?"

"If for no better reason, because she's afraid of what I might find."

This is the most honest thing Bill says in the entire scene. It explains a great deal about his attitude here. Alice is poking at the part of his brain where the sex drive and the death drive overlap, and Bill doesn't enjoy that one bit. Most people don't! We tend to work through that connection unconsciously. Art exposes that process to the beholding eye. Kubrick's drawing from Freud and the Greeks here, but for all its lofty allusions, Eyes Wide Shut is still a 1990s romantic thriller. As such, the best reference point might be Meryl Streep's monologue in Death Becomes Her, in which she links her husband's mortician job to their dissatisfying sex life: 

"...some drunken, broken-down flaccid undertaker who is just as dead below the waist as his clients are. Hey, I might have more fun with one of your clients! At least I'd know I'd be getting something stiff..."

So much of Eyes Wide Shut is about the intertwining of sex and death, Eros and Thanatos. Bill was aroused by Gayle and Nuala only to confront the comatose Mandy. (Not such a "hypothetical" female patient after all.) Alice's erotic fantasy in this scene is interrupted by the death of one of Bill's patients. Bill almost sleeps with Domino, only to learn the next day while flirting with her roommate Sally that Domino has tested positive for HIV. The orgy gives way to sacrifice, a morgue slab as ritual altar. The French call orgasm le petit mort--the little death--for a reason. The bodies we clutch will wither, as will our own. We can hide from each other. We can't hide from that. The final mask is the death mask. The true anonymity: the blank-eyed rush of orgasm made permanent. 

Humans are burdened with the knowledge of our mortality. As Victor Ziegler says near the end of the movie: "Life goes on. Until it doesn't." In this scene, however, Bill is using the specter of death as a cover. My female patients couldn't possibly desire me, because they're too worried I might find a lump. So...what if you don't, Alice asks? Bill narrowly avoids being sacrificed at the altar of ego. Instead, he comes home at the end, his circular odyssey complete. That's a happy ending, but it also means he has to do what terrifies him the most: take responsibility for his life. That's what Alice is asking him to do here. When the professional duties are complete, when the woman isn't in danger of dying (yet), what "better reason" prevents her from wanting you then? What would've prevented Mandy last night?

 "What then, Alice...I dunno, what then?" 

He has no idea what to say! It's immensely satisfying because of how smug he was earlier. Bill thought himself superior because her anger seems irrational to him, but it's precisely his superior attitude that got her angry in the first place. Bill's belief in absolutes, his central dramatic flaw, is beginning to break down. He is confronting the unknown. He is being asked to look through a woman's eyes, through her eyes. He refuses. 

"Women just...they basically just don't think like that." 

In a terrific bit of acting, Kidman stands and points, eyes flashing. She's both victorious and furious. Victorious because she got something real out of him. This is what he was holding back behind his performed niceties. But furious, because now he has confirmed his bullshit beliefs. She lays them out for him:

"Millions of years of evolution, right? Right?! Men have to stick it every place they can, but for women, it's just about security and commitment and whatever the fuck else."

This is an intimate scene between two characters focused on each other. It's first and foremost about their inner lives. But just as Sandor's allusive dialogue put his seduction of Alice in historical and cultural context, Alice's line here suddenly opens up the film's scope. Now they're talking about the nature of humanity: what millions of years of evolution have made of us. Are our desires truly our own? Or are we responding to programming in our genes, insistent on their own continuation? Sandor argued erotic pleasure is our reason for being. Bill insists that he has been redeemed from that state by his love for Alice. What if both of them are just reading a script, a Ludovico treatment coming from within? Eyes Wide Shut suggests that we've built refined structures (from marriages to markets) on an irrational foundation. Society is a house of cards on shifting sands. Plausible deniability is the order of the day. The only unforgivable sin is breaking character, which is what Alice is doing now. 

"A little oversimplified, Alice, but yes, something like that."

"If you men only knew..."

This is a gauntlet for Bill, and for anyone in the audience inclined to agree with him. This worldview doesn't survive honest contact with a woman. Of course women have sexual fantasies! We saw it happen last night with Alice and Sandor: he was her idle daydream brought to life. We'll see it again in the very next scene, when Bill goes to the Nathansons: he is a source of fantasy for Marian. If you men only knew. There are no certainties. Only mysteries, waiting behind the mask.

"I'll tell you what I do know. You got a little stoned tonight, you've been trying to pick a fight with me, and now you're trying to make me jealous."

Bill's voice is rising now to match Alice's. He's wounded by her mockery, especially because he knows at some level that she's right. That's why he has to keep hedging his bets with phrases like "I don't think it's quite that black and white, but..." and "A little oversimplified, Alice, but..." He doesn't know as much as he thought he did. Again he tries to take refuge in certainty, pulling himself out of the conversation. Again it doesn't work, and he is sucked right back in.

"But you're not the jealous type, are you?"

"No, I'm not."

"You've never been jealous about me, have you?"

"No, I haven't!"

"And why haven't you ever been jealous about me?"

Alice's need for Bill to feel jealousy is more than a petty desire for attention. It's a recognition that he's become complacent. She's standing next to the stereo that was blasting the movie's score in the opening scene before Bill switched it off. He thinks he can control her the same way; he thinks of her as a possession, like one of Victor's statues. He not only assumes she wouldn't cheat--he assumes she wouldn't want to cheat. Why does he assume that? 

"Well, I don't know, Alice! Maybe because you're my wife! Maybe because you're the mother of my child, and I know you would never be unfaithful to me."

I don't know...maybe...maybe. It's all falling apart. On either side of the stereo are their windows, eyes onto the outside world. The light from outside is blue, like the bathroom: it's Bill's perspective. But the curtains framing them are red: Alice's perspective about to slide over Bill's like a filter, coloring everything he sees for the rest of the movie.

"You are very, very sure of yourself, aren't you?"

"No, Alice. I'm sure of you." 

This is Bill's last stand. He doesn't understand himself, and he doesn't want to. So instead, he projects it all into her. I'm sure of you. It sounds like a good thing, but in the context of this conversation, it's preposterous. You know nothing, Jon Snow. And so Alice laughs in her husband's face. 

She bursts into laughter; she explodes. She puts every muscle into it. She bends over, howls, points at him, cackles, falls to her knees. The camera is shocked, shaking as it tracks her movements. It's a stylistic transformation, like the shift to shot-reverse-shot editing in Victor's bathroom. The scene has just split apart. This shot shows us Bill's point of view: the moment his self-confidence shatters. Nothing is more challenging to the stereotypical male ego than a woman's mocking laughter. We'll see that again later tonight, when Bill returns from the orgy to find Alice laughing at him in her dreams. Bill tries to reframe her outburst as a pattern, part of the all-important routine: "Now we get the fucking laughing fit, right?" That's what happens every time Alice gets high, and according to Bill, that's all this is. But then Alice stops laughing. She starts talking, and everything changes.

"Well..."

Alice's monologue is a story within a story, like a Russian doll nesting within the larger structure of Eyes Wide Shut. Like the movie as a whole, it's easier to say what her story is not about than what it is about. It's not about infidelity, because Alice never cheated on Bill, nor even really came close. It's not about the specifics of sexual desire, because we never learn anything about the man to whom Alice was attracted. What did she like about him? Was it his broad shoulders, his firm ass, the way he moved? We'll never know. Kubrick chose not to film flashbacks. All we have to go on are Alice's words, and she's not talking about the man himself. She's not even talking about the act of sex itself.

What Alice is talking about is the central theme of Eyes Wide Shut: the public face v. the private face, masks all the way down. You don't know me, Alice tells her husband. You only pretend to. As she said about her hair last night, "you're not even looking at it." The Alice in Bill's mind is an image like the opening shot, a painting of a woman like the one in Victor's bathroom. Anything else gets ignored or repressed, just like when he had to snuff out his arousal to professionally inspect Mandy and the topless woman in his office. Bill subordinates his desire to duty, a splitting of self into private and public. These rigid categories prompt him to think and speak in absolutes. Now he's being confronted with something he never considered: there are no absolutes in life. Kubrick is again drawing from previous stories about marital decay, especially in theater. I'm reminded here of the climactic scene of Ibsen's A Doll's House, in which Nora Helmer tells her husband Torvald that they are strangers to each other. 

"Does it not occur to you that this is the first time we two, you and I, husband and wife, have had a serious conversation? ... I say that we have never sat down in earnest together to try and get at the bottom of anything."

So what's at the bottom? Alice reveals that she once wanted to leave Bill and Helena behind for a man who glanced at her in passing. The disproportionality is the point. This is a man Alice only saw for a few seconds on a family vacation. Bill doesn't even remember him (or so he says; more on that next time). Why would you throw everything away for a look? The very irrationality of it is what makes it attractive. Eyes Wide Shut has been showing us habits and routines, hinting at what lies beneath. What if you could break your programming? What if there's more to you than what everyone sees? As Alice will say at movie's end: the reality of one night, let alone a whole lifetime, can never be the full truth. We will never get to the bottom of anything.

Alice hunches forward, a campfire storyteller sensing the kill like a predator senses prey. Her mystery man looked at her the same way. Sandor did, too. Their gazes froze her. She saw herself through their eyes, and didn't recognize herself. She realized she'd been sleepwalking through life, subordinate to habits whether inculcated by her specific marriage or by "millions of years of evolution." Her life no longer felt like a choice, but (to borrow Bill's phrase) something that just happened to be the way it was. It could be different in a heartbeat. All she would have to do is choose. Bill also doesn't recognize her anymore. His boyish face has fallen, frozen into a perfect image of entitled petulance. The Kubrick Stare, as it's called. Just another mask.

"That afternoon, Helena went to the movies with her friend, and you and I made love. We made plans about our future, and we talked about Helena. Yet at no time was he ever out of my mind. I thought that if he wanted me, even if it was only for one night, I was ready to give up everything. You. Helena. My whole fucking future. Everything." 

This is a confession. Everything tells us so: Kidman's voice breaking, Cruise's eyes hollowing, the strings on the soundtrack rising. But a confession of what, exactly? Not infidelity. Secrecy. The existence of the unknown. It's the death of duty to each other, the private face declaring war on the public one. They were making plans about their future, but Alice was ready to abandon "her whole fucking future" for one honest night. They were talking about Helena, but Alice was ready to walk away from her, too. Alice links these conversations to sex, as if the postcoital intimacy was the actual lovemaking. That intimacy has been betrayed. It may have never existed at all. 

Bill finally realizes that he has taken Alice for granted. But he's not ready to accept responsibility for that. Instead, he blames her for wearing a mask. We'll see this play out later in the movie: Alice smiles lovingly at Bill, and he hears her confessions echo in his mind. How can he trust that face? They were bathed in intimacy, talking about the child they made, their future together, and all the while, there was another person in that room that he couldn't see. She was ready to give up everything for him. Bill didn't know how much he didn't know. He said he was sure of her. Now he knows he came close to losing everything. Or did he?

"And yet it was weird, because at the same time, you were dearer to me than ever. At that moment, my love for you was both tender and sad." 

Bill doesn't even seem to absorb these words, so devastated is he by what came before them. Yet by movie's end, this winds up being the most important part of Alice's story. It's the reason the Harfords stay together. Alice doesn't hate Bill. She loves him. And he loves her. They fit so well together that they allowed themselves to fall into complacency, finding it easier to be cheerfully dishonest than intimate. That's what Alice hates, and that's why she found her fantasy stranger so enticing. It's the same reason she flirted with Sandor. She doesn't want to leave Bill. She feels that they've somehow left each other while staying in the same place. She wants him back. It was only by fantasizing about another that she rediscovered her love for him, a love that's sadder for what she went through inside, but also more tender because of that struggle. More personal. More real. Only by testing her vows could she demonstrate their enduring strength. This is human nature: complex and contradictory. We are vast, we contain multitudes. The movie's title is a paradox, and the paradoxes of Eyes Wide Shut can't be resolved any more than ours can be.  

"I barely slept that night, and I woke up the next morning in a panic. I didn't know whether I was afraid that he had left, or that he might still be there. But by dinner, I realized he was gone, and I was relieved."

The fantasy was interrupted. Someone brought the man a message, just like how Bill was called away from Gayle and Nuala last night. "To be continued?" But it wasn't, and neither was Alice's imagined infidelity. She woke up with her husband and daughter, and she was relieved that the private mask had stayed that way. Now she has exposed it, if only to Bill. Alice has opened Pandora's box. Bill will spend the rest of the movie trying to stuff everything that flew out back inside. He fails. There is no unsaying it. There is no unseeing what you see through another's eyes. All they can do is learn to live with it together.