I’ve been rewatching the films of the great Stanley Kubrick, and planned to write an essay on his career. I still might, but I found, surprisingly, that I had much more to say about his divisive final film – the posthumously released Eyes Wide Shut – than I’d anticipated. It was released 25 years ago, just months after Kubrick died of a heart attack at the age of 70, and followed an almost delirious promotional campaign. It was, after all, the maestro’s last film – and one starring then-married couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Titillating trailers, featuring snippets of an orgy, further lit anticipation. But when the reviews came in, the critics were largely derisive.
So, here’s my essay. And a warning: there are spoilers galore.
My first response was unkind: the dialogue was clumsy, the use of music jarringly unsubtle, and a pretentious solemnity weighed the whole thing down.
Then there were the leads: Tom and Nicole, then married in real life as they were in the film. As the story’s sexual Odysseus, Cruise commands the vast bulk of screen time. Now, I value Cruise as a freak of self-possession who radiates blinding star-wattage – but the man has no range, in part because of his incapacity to disguise his own glorious self-possession.
Of course, this isn’t a problem when he’s playing Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible franchise, and commandeering helicopters to thwart nuclear-armed mercenaries. But in Eyes Wide Shut, he plays a man who moves guilelessly through a nightmare underworld and is progressively consumed by fear, guilt, bafflement, and his own self-abasement.
That is, in Kubrick’s last film, Cruise plays a wealthy, competent and glibly assured man who comes to realise, within a crucible where his competencies are no longer valuable, the depths of his own ignorance – not only about his wife and the wider world, but about himself. Cruise is not your man for showing such transformative injuries, nor the weight of finding heavy self-knowledge.
Then there’s Nicole. I’m still of the view, once popular, that she’s a dramatically overrated actor with little more range than her ex-husband. In an early scene of Eyes Wide Shut, at an opulent Christmas party, she plays drunkenness with an absurdly diverting exaggeration. She’s little better in the pivotal scene that comes not long after: the “pot confession” in their bedroom.
But here, for now, I’ll rest my petty objections. Because something happened to me.
*
I’m sure this can be attributed more to my series of night fevers than the spooky gifts of the film, but I dreamt about it that night. And the next day, perhaps encouraged by the dream, the film clung to me. As it did the day after that. The film stuck like a scent, and if there’s a test of a film’s quality, then surely it’s that.
The other thing that happened was that I read Lee Siegel’s essay about the film (and its critical reception). It was published in Harper’s in 1999, at the time of the film’s release, and I thought it rarely brilliant and persuasive, even if I disagreed with parts. Regardless of what you might think of the film, Siegel’s piece is exemplary in its lively engagement with it – in fact, engagement is his great point.
So let me return, perhaps more generously and thoughtfully this time, to the early scenes of the film.
After the party, alone in their bedroom, the couple – Bill and Alice – smoke a spliff and debrief about the night. But when each mention the ardent attentions of strangers that the other received, things sour. It becomes obvious to Alice that her husband has blithely assumed the simplicity of her sexual desire; that he’s taken for granted her uncomplicated devotion to him, as well as her satisfaction with domesticity.
And so, after the spliff, a splintering: He’s indifferent to the fact that other men desire her, and he happily acknowledges this because it’s virtuous proof of an absence of jealousy. She sees his indifference as an arrogantly presumptuous belief that the desire of these other men might never be reciprocated.
The couple are painfully cleaved. In assuming her devotion, he believes he’s showing faith – she thinks it’s a chauvinistic failure of imagination. What might be done? And what good is that knowledge, of the other’s kaleidoscope of fantasies, least of all when the two of them are raising a young child? What good comes from lifting the veil of ignorance on the other’s desires? The husband’s assumptions may be blithe and unimaginative – but in failing to imagine the horizons of his wife’s sexuality, he has not denied them to her.
(I still think their exchange is a trite, wooden rendering of the differences between the sexes – and the differences of assumptions between them – and I felt embarrassed at times for both actors as the sophomoric dialogue fell from their mouths. It felt like watching two under-grads debating gender studies, rather than a married couple speaking intimately while under the influence – not only of dope, but the now-bubbling pressures of once disguised frustrations.)
If the scene is jarring for the ham-fisted dialogue and unconvincing acting, it’s lifted when Alice slumps to the floor and, in one long monologue, offers her erotic confession: that last summer, on family vacation, she fantasised about another man who she’d briefly seen in the hotel lobby. If Bill’s shocked, then so is she: shocked by the power of the desire and her fleeting willingness to torch her life in order to satisfy it.
I love this moment for its emotional complexity – that is, she makes the confession with both a desire to liberate herself from her husband’s complacencies, but also to hurt him: to replace his indifference with jealousy. I’m not as simple as you think I am; and you are not as safe as you think you are. There’s frustration and there’s spite.
Meanwhile, their young daughter sleeps obliviously.
*
In Kubrick’s Vietnam war film, Full Metal Jacket, a US marine is asked for the meaning of his uniform by an aggrieved colonel: Joker’s written “Born to Kill” on his helmet, and wears a peace badge on his fatigues. “Is this some kind of sick joke?” the colonel asks.
“I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir!”
“The what?”
“The duality of man – the Jungian thing, sir!”
That we might, each of us, possess the capacity for both, was Kubrick’s belief. For death and peace – or for sexual abandon and domestic stability. The duality of man, sir.
That we might conceal one in favour of the other does not extinguish the existence of one, though we often pretend that it does. In fact, the concealment merely leaves a submerged, dream-like second-life which we may, or may not be, explicitly aware of – and may, or may not, physically enact. War, Kubrick thought, was one place where the darkest desires or latencies might be both expressed and honoured – but elsewhere, it often burbles quietly. Until it doesn’t.
Kubrick read Freud. About his 1980 horror film The Shining, he told a reporter:
“About the only law that I think relates to the [horror] genre is that you should not try to explain, to find neat explanations for what happens, and that the object of the thing is to produce a sense of the uncanny. Freud in his essay on the uncanny wrote that the sense of the uncanny is the only emotion which is more powerfully expressed in art than in life, which I found very illuminating.”
Eyes Wide Shut was based upon a short novel written by a friend of Freud —Traumnovelle [Dream Story], by Arthur Schnitzler, and published in 1926. Sex and sexuality featured throughout much of his work. In a letter to Schnitzler, Freud once wrote: “I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition – although actually as a result of sensitive introspection – everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons.”
In Dr. Bill Harford, we have a man who’s made wealth, a reputation and a solid self-conception through his understanding of the human body. He has also been devotedly ignorant of much else – including the desires of his wife, or, in fact, his own.
The film is largely set in one evening – a long night in which Dr. Harford follows his thirst, and finds himself too deep in water. If we accept this film as one which accords to dream logic – or if we accept it as the Odyssey as written by Freud – then it becomes something much richer and haunting than the confused melodrama I first took it to be. For this, I have Lee Siegel to thank – but also the film’s lingering scent.
Writing this, I thought of the Arthur Koestler memoir I’m reading now – Arrow in the Blue. He describes being taken to a doctor as a boy – it’s Budapest, 1910 – and then shackled to a chair as his parents leave the room. A gag is applied, and terrifying steel instruments declared: the five-year-old boy is about to receive a tonsillectomy without anaesthesia. Much blood, vomit and horror follow. He writes:
“It was as if I had fallen through a manhole, into a dark underground world of archaic brutality. Thenceforth, I never lost my awareness of the existence of that second universe into which one might be transported, without warning, from one moment to the other. The world had become ambiguous, invested with a double-meaning; events moved on two different planes at the same time – a visible and invisible one – like a ship which carries its passengers on its sunny decks, while its keel ploughs through the dark phantom world beneath…
“It is not unlikely that my subsequent preoccupation with physical violence, terror and torture derives partly from this experience… This was my first meeting with ‘Ahor’ – the irrational, Archaic Horror – which subsequently played such an important role in the world around me that I designed this handy abbreviation for it.”
We have, in Dr. Harford, a man plumbing an eroticised version of that dark phantom world and finding that the perfect realisation of fantasies is impossible. The film’s famous masked-orgy scene in the mansion is filled with mechanistic sex and swallowed by strange and sinister rituals. There’s no fun here, and certainly no intimacy, and our sexual adventurer is first overwhelmed and then endangered when he’s exposed as an intruder.
He’s been awakened to his own desires, but thwarted in realising them – there’s no co-ordination between fantasy and fulfillment. What’s more – and what’s haunting – are the gulfs: not only between fantasy and reality, but between each other and within ourselves: about what we allow others to know about ourselves, and what we allow ourselves to know about ourselves.
On his long night into darkness, the respectable and assured Dr. Harford at least becomes better acquainted with his potential – that he’s capable of jealousy and unregulated desire, and that it might lead to catastrophe just as easily as pleasure. In the spooky underworld he enters, he finds that his money, good looks and doctor’s card mean little – his assuredness, he finds, has been glibly maintained.
All this said, I still think the film faintly preposterous and poorly cast – and wonder how it might’ve been, as Kubrick once conceived it, as an outright comedy with Steve Martin as the lead. Picture it: Martin as a smug, married doctor jolted from his complacency by jealousy, who then confers upon himself a great sexual licence before embarking upon a crazed but naïve erotic adventure in which his guileless intrusions into alien cultures leads farcically to snowballing catastrophes and a personal humbling.
Much more entertaining – if considerably less haunting.