It has been twenty years since the release of Eyes Wide Shut, the final film of Stanley Kubrick, one of Mid Century Cinema’s favorite directors. Based on a 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler, Kubrick transposed the story from turn-of-the-century Vienna to contemporary New York City—but with the exception of adding the pivotal character Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), Eyes Wide Shut navigates a course that hews closely to the principal signposts from the original story.
As recounted in a new book by Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams (an essential resource for anyone interested in the film’s development and production), Eyes Wide Shut was a project that Kubrick had been seriously contemplating for decades. It was well worth – and very likely all the better for – the very long wait, as the film now stands as one of his greatest achievements. Years ago this would have been a minority positon, as the movie had a mixed reception on release, with detractors critical of the odd echoes prevalent in the dialogue, the dreamy cadence of Nicole Kidman’s line reads (as Alice) at the initial party in Ziegler’s mansion, the verisimilitude of Kubrick’s depiction of late-1990s Greenwich Village, and the clinical iciness of its much anticipated orgy. Some early proponents of the film blamed a misleading advertising campaign (with its tabloid promise of sex and scandal) for skewing audience expectations. But with the passage of time – and of course, after repeated viewings, as every Kubrick film gets better and more formidable with each screening – the purported weaknesses of Eyes Wide Shut recede and its grand achievements stand out in increasingly sharp relief.
In particular, Eyes Wide Shut is an exemplar of what Kubrick aspired to realize in all of his productions—expressions of ideas that could only be understood in purely cinematic terms. This is most plainly obvious in the film’s minimalist but fantastically ambitious use of color. “It overpoweringly deploys certain colors, most notably red and blue,” Janet Maslin wrote in her deeply insightful review at the time, “the advent of purple, first on the dress of a young prostitute and later on the sheets where Alice sleeps, has its own innate drama.” We have not come close to cracking this visual code, but remain fixated on the on the use of hot windows (that provide crucial sources of light)—especially the ethereal blue streams that serve as a key visual motif throughout the adventure.
Great movies are usually about one overarching theme, but Eyes Wide Shut has three: the timeless challenges of marriage, the intimate connection between sex and death, and the nebulous borderline between dreams and reality. The first theme, on marriage, and in particular regarding fidelity (and in turn trust and jealousy), is the most straightforward: the movie is pretty much set in motion when Alice, with purposeful aggression, confesses with a still-palpable passion an infidelity she once very seriously contemplated, but did not consummate. Does such an infidelity of the mind matter? Apparently it does to Bill (Tom Cruise), who is utterly shattered by the revelation, perhaps to an even greater extent than Alice was aiming for in the heat of their cannabis-infused marital dispute. This initial confrontation is not dreamlike at all—if anything it feels all too real. And as one of the many pleasures of watching a Kubrick film is that his limitless obsession with detail gives license to draw conclusions about the most subtle elements in the frame, let us share the reach that in Alice’s dangling earring we see the suddenly revealed precariousness of their marriage.
As for sex and death, they are deeply enmeshed in Eyes Wide Shut (as perhaps they are in life). This is most obvious in Bill’s near-miss with a prostitute who subsequently learns she is HIV-positive—a New York Post headline soon taunts him that he is Lucky To Be Alive. But the theme is ubiquitous. The frank nudity of the nearly-dead Mandy in Zeigler’s bathroom anticipates her naked body on a slab at the morgue; the death of Lou Nathanson leads directly to an out-of-leftfield profession of love from his daughter Marion (Marie Richardson), with her father’s body a clear presence in the room; Bill’s answer to Alice’s own jealous rage about why the beautiful women he examines are never aroused when naked in his presence (“if for no better reason, because she’s afraid of what I might find”); and, of course, the culmination of the orgy itself, when Bill is first confronted by the menacing, masked mob and then “redeemed” by another (presumably Mandy) who offers herself in exchange for his freedom.
Or maybe she didn’t. It was, after all, a very strange orgy, with an odd, dreamlike quality—as are most of Bill’s encounters, some of which promise trips to “where the rainbow ends.” Considering that the title of Schnitzler’s original work was Traumnovelle (Dream Story), and that he was enormously influenced by Sigmund Freud, it is impossible not to consider the role of dreams, and the relationship between dreams and reality, when discussing Eyes Wide Shut. Notably, the movie has no scenes that are explicitly dreams (is that because everything is a dream?) But Alice recounts one of her dreams to Bill, again a tale of marital infidelity and humiliation (again, at his expense), a subconscious journey that obviously parallels the orgy that Bill attends. (Actually Alice gets much more action in her dreams than Bill does in his “reality” which involves a series of unconsummated encounters.) Dreams – and imagination – seem more consequential in Kubrick’s film than the disorienting, dimly understood events that Bill experiences. (Note that the highly eroticized images of Alice’s encounter with the young naval officer are not her flashbacks, but entirely Bill’s fevered imagination of events that did not take place.) The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that Bill’s entire journey is “triggered by the traumatic encounter” with Alice’s fantasy, and his “desperate attempt to answer.” In this interpretation, what Bill “does on his adventurous night is to go on a kind of window-shopping trip for fantasies.”
Ultimately Bill and Alice’s experiences have overlapping moral and philosophical implications, because, as they discuss, “no dream is just a dream,” and “the reality of one night . . . [can never] be the whole truth.” Returning to their marriage with these revelations shared—what does it say about their future? The movie equivocates—perhaps it hinges on how you read Bill’s final (echoed) confession, “I’ll tell you everything.” I once had a long argument with a friend about this, who thought that was a terrible idea. There are few moments in this beautifully, meticulously, and brilliantly crafted film that could not sustain such spirited contestation—about the movie, and by extension, about life. Which is why Eyes Wide Shut is such a fitting capstone to Kubrick’s singular career.
Alice, in the Blue Light
Alice Tells Her Story
“Kindly remove your mask”
Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) explains the way of the world: “Life goes on . . . until it doesn’t”
Dreams and Reality Converge