"The important thing is we're awake now."
Alice Harford

Credits

Director/Producer: Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's "Traumnovelle"
Music: Jocelyn Pook, Gyorgy Ligeti, Dmitri Shostakovish, Chris Isaak
Running time: 159 min
Cast: Tom Cruise (Dr. William Harford), Nicole Kidman (Alice Harford), Sydney Pollack (Victor Ziegler), Todd Field (Nick Nightingale), Sky Dumont (Sandov Szavest), Marie Richardson (Marion), Vinessa Shaw (Domino), Rade Sherbedgia (Millich), Leelee Sobieski (Millich's daughter), Julienne Davis (Amanda Curran), Alan Cumming (hotel clerk), Leon Vitali (master of ceremonies), Fay Masterson (Sally)

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Plot

Dr. Bill Harford and his wife Alice embark on a dark journey of sexual tension, death, and self discovery.

Commentary

Just some food for thought, until I put together a cohesive piece:

• Typical Kubrickian shock opening: the white titles flash on a black background, with the first shot being Alice (Kidman) undressing to Shostakovish's Jazz Suite, Waltz 2.

• During the opening moments of the film we are introduced to the quality of the relationship between Bill (Cruise) and Alice:

  "How's my hair?"

  "It's perfect."

  "You're not even looking."

• The party sequence serves not only to introduce plot and characters that will figure in later, but is composed of "compare/contrast" scenes --- Bill's response to sex and Alice's:

  -Alice dances and flirts with a Hungarian smoothee (Dumont), and she genuinely responds to him (to the tune "Chanson D'Amor"; Kubrickian chortle). The acting out of fantasy flirtations is very revealing: Alice becomes slightly ditzy and drunk, but she still produces witty comments. And she strings Sandov along. Her fantasy partner is suave, sophisticated, and intelligent. At one point, Kubrick leaves us hanging, as a shot ends with the Hungarian propositioning Alice, and she tells him "Not….right now". Ultimately, she seriously considers the proposal, then rejects it.

  -Contrast this with the Bill encounter: two beautiful airheads cavort with the doctor ("Your hankerchief was sooo clean!"), and he being at his wittiest, which is surprisingly shallow. Is this the depth of Bill's fantasy flirtations? Bill's scene is in interrupted before it is resolved, this is the first instance of a repeated pattern of anticipation and frustration. This is similar to the scene construction of "The Shining," in that the structure of scenes is representative of their quality of life; this a metaphor for the type of life Alice and Bill have together.

• Victor (Pollack) is introduced zipping up his pants --- somewhat sinister considering that Mandy (Davis), the unconscious naked woman in his bathroom, has been in the throes of an overdose for the past 5 minutes. This is indicative of the moral degeneracy that he, his wife (during the party scene, Bill and Alice are greeted by Victor [tall and standing to the right] and his wife [short and to the left]; at the mansion two of the masked figures nod to Bill, a tall one [to the right] and a short one [to the left], later the tall figure goes to look at Bill [just before Bill is sent to the circle]), and others partake in. Victor is not just depraved in the midst of the masked group; the millionaire has a house full of guests for a Christmas party, he still gets a hooker and he can't seem to find a more appropriate place than the bathroom (revealing a tremendous lack of class and imagination) to copulate and do drugs in.

• When the doctor and wife return home after the party and make love in front of the mirror ("Baby Did a Bad Thing" plays in the background), Alice remains somewhat distracted. Her eyes remain open; is she thinking of the Hungarian, of how empty her marriage is?

• The pot smoking scene: they both smoke to relax. Bill believes he is in for some sex that night, as they start their conversation his is kissing her and feeling her up. Again, anticipation and frustration (metaphor for how the 9 years of the marriage have been for Alice). At first glance it would appear that Alice is too high, and going off on wild tangents as she gets angier with Bill. On first viewing one might wonder exactly what she is angry with, and we can side easily with Bill's astonishment. Yet on second viewing, with what it all means, it is possible to view the scene from Alice's perspective. Although she is seemingly taking wild shots in the dark and is skewed in her anger, you can see very easily what she really is getting at. There are several important aspects covered in this argument:

  -Bill has no idea of where his wife is coming from. This is indicative of their whole relationship to this point. He is continually making assumptions about her, based on popular (mis)conceptions (eg regarding evolutionary sexuality: men's promiscuity and women's security), and on his own experience (eg he has been living a static, rather than dynamic, existence).

  - Kubrick returns to themes covered in his other films, the theory of art, creativity, imagination, and passion arising from the same primal source as brutality and violence (Clockwork Orange), of security and static safety being death in opposition to risk and potential evolution (2001, The Shining). Bill is a "clockwork" man, he is Jack Torrance sitting in the empty Colorado Lounge, he has been the staid Heywood Floyd, but he is soon to become David Bowman.

  -Bill makes the assumption that his wife is like him, settled and accustomed to a safe but passionless existence. Not only is this completely wrong, but she wants very badly to tell him so.

  -Alice's monologue is illuminating. She reveal the hidden "natural" woman (like Alex, she responds primally) through her confession of desire for another man. Note that prior to her disclosure she laughs and the camera goes into a hand-held shot (she will laugh again, in her sleep). Kubrick has used hand-held shots in other films as devices (in Barry Lyndon the two fist fight scenes, the attack on the Writer and his wife in Clockwork Orange).

  -Once again, the scene builds in tension, and the resolution is frustrated by a phone call.

Bill goes to a patient's house in the middle of the night; a young woman's father has just died. Here again is a typically subversive Kubrickian scene, in the sense that the most absurd and grotesque things occur. It begins normally enough, with condolences and discussion of the dead. Marion (Richardson) gasps, chokes, and appears to be overwhelmed with grief, when she kisses Bill and confesses her love to him. Her boyfriend arrives.

-Here Kubrick employs a familiar doubling technique (Quilty and Humbert [Lolita], Poole and Bowman [2001], the two Jacks [one frozen, the other in the 1921 photo] from The Shining), as the couple physically resemble Bill and Alice (dark haired thin man, fair haired woman) and the situations are similar (Alice: "If he had wanted me, I would have given up you, Helena, my whole future"; Marion: "I don't want to go to Michigan, I want to stay in the city near you").

-There is a perfect visually composed static scene, with the couple and the dead man framed to the left and Bill by himself on the right (the room they're in resembles the "memory room" that Bowman ultimately ends up, even the bed looks like the one he dies and is reborn on). During the conversation (the boyfriend suspects nothing), Bill repeated wipes his lips to remove lipstick (is this why a group of youths [droogs?] accost Bill on the street calling him "faggot"? Bill does not fight back, even when shoved [supression of not only passion but violence]).

Bill cannot remove the idea from his mind that his wife ever contemplated sex with another man. He does not go home and instead goes for a walk. He meets Domino (Shaw), a working girl and they return to her apartment (going through a huge set of bright red doors framed by a dark grey-brown building!). When things begin to heat up, coitus interruptus via a call on the good doctor's cell phone, from Mrs. Doctor. Bill leaves unsatisfied. It is interesting to note that up to this point (and this is also one reason why he goes to the hidden meeting), Bill is only looking for sexual release with someone other than his wife because of his wife. His infidelity has very little to do with his own desires and instincts, it is solely in response to the imagined infidelity of his wife (this is in contrast to her encounters, where she acts in accordance to her own desires and gives no consideration of Bill save that of not doing it [at least with the Hungarian] because she is married).

Significance of the password "Fidelio"?

Normality subverted once again at the Rainbow Costume Shop (is this a reference to what is at the "end of the rainbow" that the two models promised Bill in the beginning?). First, the shopkeeper Millich (Sherbedgia) is simply an odd fellow, and then we see the confrontation between him, his daughter, and two undressed men in make up and wigs. As Millich rants and raves about statutory rape, his lolita-esque daughter (Sobieski) wraps herself around Bill. As she is leaving to go to her room, she whispers in his ear, steps off and looks enquiringly at him. Anticipation and frustration. Bill leaves for the party.

The mansion and its secrets: the most visually and aurally stunning sequence of the film. Ornate marble interior, large, open, and empty (reminiscent of the Chateau of Paths and the Overlook in The Shining). Visual composition with a compelling soundtrack ensnare the attention completely. Just what the hell is going on? Here Kubrick grabs our attention and will not let it go. What is point of this weird, pagan ceremony? Devil worshippers, cult, etc? A few elements to note:

-the temple-like architecture in 18th century neoclassical style (Kubrick has often connected neoclassicism with spiritual degeneracy: the chateau in Paths, Barry Lyndon in its entirety)

-the stark color scheme with rectangular blocks of black robed figures, the blood red square in the middle of the hall with an illuminated center circle lined with nude masked women, the figure in red (Vitali) at the center (Masque of the Red Death? Reference to that final, mad masked ball?)

-the growing urgency of the rising notes of a synthesized score, puntuated with a hymn of madness (chanting voices played backwords?)

-the circular track around the center circle

-the masks stand out in sharp contrast to the beautiful naked women and the sex they take part in, dehumanizing what is the closest contact people can share, while simultaneously piquing libidinous impulses of anonymous pleasure without consequences

We focus entirely on what this is; but it isn't what it is. As in The Shining, Kubrick has made a film that is not what it appears to be. The Shining has been described by Richard Jameson as "a horror movie that is a horror movie only in the sense that all Kubrick's mature work has been horror movies--films that constitute a Swiftian vision of inscrutable cosmic order, and of 'the most pernicious race of little vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.'...the director is so little interested in the genre for its own sake that he hasn't even systematically subverted so much as displaced it with a genre all his own...Who bothers to characterize Dr. Strangelove as 'an antiwar film,' or sees merit in rating 2001: A Space Odyssey as 'an outer-space pic,' or finds particular utility in considering Barry Lyndon as 'a costume picture'?" Eyes Wide Shut is a sexual/conspiracy thriller where there is no conspiracy. As will be revealed at the end, the ceremony at the mansion was nothing more than rich, affluent people getting together with some prostitutes, having a debacle. This is certainly in keeping with Kubrickian themes:

-On a plot level, if there was a cult conspiracy, why did the group let Bill live? If, as Cruise (and the audience) suspects, the group did indeed kill the woman, and torture/kill Nick, why was Cruise let go? It makes sense to eliminate him right away: no one knows where he went that night, the group certainly has enough money and power to cover everything up (from body disposal to evidence of the orgy), there are no witnesses from outside the group, and they have everything to lose if Bill exposes them.

-On a thematic level, Kubrick returns to the theme of intellectual, cultural, and spiritual degeneration. Like Gens. Broulard and Mireau in Paths and the characters of Barry Lyndon, the group is surrounded by art (the ornate house with artefacts) and culture (the ceremony could have originally been a genuine fertility rite), but they neither acknowledge nor understand any of it. The ceremony is nothing more than pomp and circumstance for an orgy; if it's a serious ceremony and cult, why involve outsiders (prostitutes)? The Fidelio Party lacks the imagination to fully appreciate the potential of a real ceremony, ie they are not "true believers," rather, they buy and sell their sensual experiences; they lack aesthetic vision. Compare the pure, primal artistic savagery that is Clockwork's Alex with the sleazy, bathroom antics of Victor or showy theatrics and stage whispers of the Fidelio Party (Alex's ideas of action for the sake of sheer invigorating experience are derisively termed thinking "like a little child" by his less creative droogs). Alex possesses his own share of banality (during his masturbation scene he imagines "lovely pictures," namely, B-grade movie violence), but he does not carry it through with as much elaboration as the Fidelio Party.

-The true conspiracy is one of the mind, not of fact. Thematically, the film explores perception and the deceptiveness of appearances: Bill and Kidman's relationship, the healthy looking but stricken prostitute, the concerned father who one day yells for the police and the next sells his daughter, the murder that is not murder, the conspiracy that is no conspiracy. On another level, it is the repeated pathos of anticipation and (if not frustration) unexpected resolutions.

Upon his return, Bill finds his wife laughing in her sleep. He rouses her, and she tells him about her dream, in her words a "nightmare" (is this thematically similar to the nightmare Jack has in The Shining?), wherein they are alone in a city, and naked. Men appear, have sex with Alice, while she laughs at Bill --- then she woke up.

When Bill goes looking for Nick, he gets the hotel address from a nearby coffeeshop's waitress (it's interesting to note that this young woman would know where Nick is staying; he's married with four kids!). During the coffeeshop scene, reds and blues dominate: there is a large red towel on the counter to the left, all the people sitting at the counter are wearing blue or red shirts/jackets. Bill goes to Nick's hotel, where the lobby scene recalls the Enchanted Hunter exchange in Lolita, between Quilty and hotel manager Swine --- it's humorous, there is sexual tension and innuendo (Quilty's "excess energy" and "judo practice;" the clerk's giggle about the two men with Nick, fellows "you wouldn't want to fool around with, you know what I mean"), odd characters are briefly introduced (Swine in Lolita, the swishy clerk [Cumming] in Eyes Wide Shut), and disturbing elements unfold toward its conclusion (in Lolita, the lobby scene ends with Humbert and Lolita checking in with Quilty eavesdropping; in Eyes Wide Shut there is the revelation of the suspicious departure of Nick).

Bill's return to Domino's apartment is disturbing in the extreme. Bill meets the roommate Sally (Masterson), a sexy young lady who has been told about his generosity and seems physically interested in him. Bill is aroused, and as they chat they get close to each other. The small talk seems inoccuous at first, then Sally tells Bill how she heard about him, and the subject of Domino is finally brought up with a bombshell: she is HIV positive. From a build up of sexual tension and anticipation to the complete opposite --- all in a matter of seconds. Once again, anticipation ending in (deadly) frustration. With typical Kubrickian irony and humor we see in a following scene a headline on the front page of the paper Bill is reading: "Lucky To Be Alive," while Mozart's Death Mass plays in the background.

Visual motifs:

-Natural lighting, shot with low-light techniques. Vivid, odd looking colors: white, blue, red, green

-Christmas lights and/or trees in (nearly) every apartment

-18th century architecture, furniture, art

-Paintings (does this recall the paintings in Paths and Barry Lyndon? Thomas Nelson asserts that in both cases the paintings are misidentified by characters as "pictures," revealing their cultural and intellectual bankruptcy.)

Thematics:

-Anticipation and frustation/unexpected resolution

-Deceptiveness of appearances

-Investigation of universe of perception

-Suppression of "natural impulses" (passion, imagination, violence)

-Expression of suppressed impulses in degenerate form

-Cinematic doubling and introductions and returns (like Alex in Clockwork meeting everyone twice [bums, the Writer, the Minister, doctors]; for Bill: Domino's apartment, Amanda Curran, the shopkeeper and his daughter, Victor)

-Normality that is "normal", but not in the way it is usually defined

-Dehumanization

To be continued...

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