[COLUMN] In Eyes Wide Shut, Even Naked, People Are Unknowable | by Darren Mooney

Hey there! 1999 was arguably one of the greatest years in the history of the cinema. We’re running a series of retro articles looking at the movies of the year with 25 years of distance, coinciding with the anniversaries of their original release dates. This one is a couple of weeks out, but hopefully worth a read.

Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was sold to audiences as “a boundary-pushing erotic thriller.” Indeed, it’s not uncommon for it to be classified as an “erotic thriller”, even today. This feels like an inaccurate description of what would become Kubrick’s last film. A portrait of a marriage threatening to unravel against the backdrop of turn-of-the-millennium New York, Eyes Wide Shut was far more neurotic than erotic. Doctor Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) neither fucks around nor finds out.

Eyes Wide Shut is loosely based on Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle. Although the book was published in 1926, it was set against the backdrop of 1900s Vienna. Eyes Wide Shut transposes the story to some uncanny version of New York City, but retains the source material’s fin de siècle decadence. Eyes Wide Shut is about many things, but it feels like a portrait of a society and a marriage in decline, a world slipping into shadows, lost between the real and the fantastical.

“Schnitzler's point was, among other things, that dream and reality resemble each other, and influence our lives equally,” critic John Simon argued of the movie’s source material. Eyes Wide Shut is preoccupied with the fungible lines between dreaming and waking. There are several key scenes in which Alice Harding (Nicole Kidman) narrates her dreams to her husband Bill, and the revelation has a profound effect on Bill. Bill wanders off into the night, and has his own uncanny adventure.

The film’s closing scene expresses this idea, as Bill and Alice take their daughter Helena (Madison Eginton) shopping. “Maybe I think we should be grateful,” Alice concedes. “Grateful that we've managed to survive through all of our adventures whether they were real or only a dream.” Of course, Bill acknowledges, “And no dream is ever just a dream.” There is some truth buried inside this imagined world, something that might otherwise be impossible to articulate.

While the film has a timeless quality, Eyes Wide Shut is in conversation with several of the prevailing themes of the American cinema of the era. It can be understood as a more abstract expression of the same hallucinatory anxieties that informed movies like Dark City, The Truman Show, The Matrix, eXistenZ and countless others, a fear that the world as human beings experience it is an illusion. It is also, in its own way, a conspiracy movie like JFK, Enemy of the State or The Game.

This unreality bleeds through into the film’s production. In his later years, Kubrick had retired to the United Kingdom and refused to fly, so films like Full Metal Jacket had to be produced entirely in Britain. Allowing for some second unit material, the entirety of the New York City featured in Eyes Wide Shut is a construction. There’s an uncanny quality to the film. The skyscrapers outside the windows of Bill and Alice’s apartment appear fake. The studio sets are a little too perfect.

“Meanwhile, Kubrick’s craftsmen set about erecting New York City on Pinewood’s backlots, re-creating Greenwich Village to painstakingly precise specifications,” explains Benjamin Svetkey. “Kubrick went so far as to send workmen to Manhattan to measure street widths and note newspaper vending machine locations. He also dispatched cameramen to shoot real New York footage for rear-screen projection scenes of Cruise strolling around town.” It doesn’t feel real.

Much of the pre-release discussion of Eyes Wide Shut focused on its sexual content. After all, Kubrick had cast the most famous married couple in the world. There was speculation about the film’s “unusually explicit sex scenes”, sexual escapades on set and how nude its stars would get. There was salacious gossip about how Kubrick had used digital effects to help obscure certain sexual acts to ensure that the film received an R rating from the MPAA.

However, Eyes Wide Shut is anything but titillating. There is plenty of nudity, but it is more unsettling than exciting. Early scenes between Bill and Alice demonstrate the lack of spark in their marriage, as Alice strips naked and later uses the toilet as the couple prepare to go out, while Bill searches for his wallet. The movie’s infamous orgy scene feels like something lifted from a horror movie, complete with ominous religious chanting. The characters are obsessed with sex, but Eyes Wide Shut is anything but sexy. Bill remains curiously impotent, despite all the sex happening around him.

Befitting the origins of Eyes Wide Shut in turn-of-the-century Vienna, there is something quite Freudian here. Its focus on sex doesn’t exist in isolation, but in conversation with a broader anxiety about mortality. It is a movie tied up in Freud’s concepts of eros and thanatos, sex and death. Early in the film, Bill is summoned to a bathroom to tend to a naked woman, Mandy (Julienne Davis), who has overdosed in the middle of tryst with Bill’s friend, Victor (Sydney Pollack).

Bill is a doctor. He works with death. During an argument with Alice, she wonders whether any of the women that he examines in his practice have sexual fantasies about him. “Come on, I can assure you sex is the last thing on this fucking hypothetical woman patient's mind,” Bill responds. “If for no better reason because she's afraid of what I might find.” In Bill’s mind, sex and death are two irreconcilable concepts. The film itself would seem to disagree.

This link between sex and death plays through the movie. After the argument with Alice, Bill is called away to deal with an elderly patient. When he arrives, the man is dead. The patient’s daughter, Marion (Marie Richardson), tries to seduce Bill. Bill then has a brief flirtation with a sex worker, Domino (Vinessa Shaw). When he returns to her apartment the next day, she is absent. Her roommate, Sally (Fay Masterson) informs Bill that Domino has been diagnosed with HIV. Bill picks up a copy of The New York Post with the headline, “Lucky to be alive.”

Drifting through New York at night, Bill hears whispers about a mysterious party upstate. He infiltrates it, witnessing all manner of debauchery. While there, a mysterious woman (Abigail Good) tries to convince him to leave. When Bill is apprehended, that stranger volunteers to sacrifice herself for him. Bill is allowed to leave. The following day, he discovers that Mandy died of an overdose. He is convinced that Mandy was the girl at the party, and that she sacrificed her life for him.

This is all rather abstract, and deliberately so. Despite the fact that Bill is convinced that Mandy was the mysterious woman at the party, the two roles are played by two different women. Later, Victor acknowledges that Mandy was “the girl at the party”, but he might be lying or referring to his own party earlier that night. Eyes Wide Shut is a movie full of doubles and mirrors. Bill attends two parties. At the first party, he chats with two women (Louise Taylor-Smith and Stewart Thorndike).

Buying a costume for the orgy, Bill interrupts two men (Togo Igawa and Eiji Kusuhara) engaged in a tryst with a young woman (Leelee Sobieski). Convincing a taxi driver (Sam Douglas) to wait for him, Bill tears a hundred-dollar-bill in half, promising to reunite the halves on his return. Sequences neatly mirror one another. Even the film’s structure doubles back on itself, with Bill spending the last hour revisiting locations from the film’s first half. As an aside, this carries across to the film’s twin Viennese influences; Freud had avoided “avoided [Schnitzler] out of a kind of fear of finding [his] own double.”

Eyes Wide Shut repeatedly invokes The Wizard of Oz. “Don’t you want to go where the rainbow ends?” ask the two women flirting with Bill at the earlier party. He buys his costume at Rainbow Fashion. The studio recreation of New York City exists half-way between the production design of Oz and the real world. The film’s structure, introducing ostensibly realistic characters and settings that will later become unreal and fantastical, mirrors that of The Wizard of Oz.

This is reflected in the film’s visual language. Kubrick keeps coming back to a shot of Bill moving through expansive and labyrinthine New York apartments, including his own. These spaces should be familiar to Bill, but the shots are always disorienting. This isn’t the Steadicam footage of The Shining. These spaces seem mysterious and untrustworthy. There is a clear implication that Bill does not know the world as well as he might like to believe that he does.

This is perhaps the best illustration of the millennial anxiety that permeates the film. Bill lives a comfortable, secure and privileged life. He has a stable career, a loving wife and a good reputation. Bill is able to navigate New York with ease; there is very little that cannot be bought with money or charm. Indeed, one of the film’s most endearing recurring jokes finds Bill flashing his medical license like it’s an FBI badge. At the start of the movie, Bill’s world makes sense. Then it comes apart.

Appropriately enough, Bill’s journey through the looking glass begins with a confession from Alice. The two get stoned, and Bill insists that Alice would never cheat on him. “Women don't… they basically just don't think like that,” he states, expressing a clear assumption about how he sees the world. “You are very, very sure of yourself, aren't you?” Alice responds. Bill replies, “No. I'm sure of you.” Alice then reveals that she did once think about cheating on Bill. This shakes Bill to his core.

Much has been made in recent years about how Eyes Wide Shut reads in the era of #metoo, particularly in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein case. This dominated coverage of the film’s 20th anniversary. This is certainly a valid reading of the movie, a portrait of degradation and impropriety nestled beneath a seemingly proper and prosperous exterior. The logic of Eyes Wide Shut is the logic of conspiracy theory: the world is not what it appears to be, and to understand it is to court insanity.

This became the metatext of the movie, particularly when Kubrick died a week after he finished his cut. To this day, observers wonder if it is really Kubrick’s film. “I really love Eyes Wide Shut,” David Lynch admitted. “I just wonder if Stanley Kubrick really did finish it the way he wanted to before he died.” This is without getting into the more overtly conspiratorial territory of fabricated interviews and assassination theories. Eyes Wide Shut is itself a murky object about a murky world. That just makes it all the more fascinating to contemplate.

All of this is part of Eyes Wide Shut, but it’s also about something much more personal and profound. Like most of Kubrick’s films, it is about humanity’s attempts to impose order on fundamentally arbitrary universe, to build structures atop chaos, whether literally in The Shining or more abstractly in the systems constructed around the savagery of war in Full Metal Jacket or Dr. Strangelove or the civilizing mechanisms built around human nature in Barry Lyndon or A Clockwork Orange.

“The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning,” Kubrick argued. Nicole Kidman recalls Kubrick’s cynicism about human nature. “Stanley always said animals are far more honest than humans,” Kidman recalls. “I remember we were watching a wildlife show on lions and the lion went in and ferociously attacked. He was upset by that, but also said, ‘Well, at least animals are more readable. You know what their motives are.’”

At its core, Eyes Wide Shut is about Bill realizing that human beings are fundamentally mysterious to one another, even to their spouses and partners. Bill is confronted with the reality that he doesn’t really know Alice. Indeed, Bill’s entire adventure can be seen as an attempt to externalize her fantasies, to make them real and tangible. He goes straight from Alice talking about her fantasy of running away with a stranger to Marion asking him to run away with her. He comes home from the orgy to wake her from a nightmare where “everyone was fucking.” The only way Bill can accept Alice’s inner life is to render it literal.

This is the horror of the orgy sequence. Bill walks through a house where human beings are as intimate with one another as it is possible to be, but their faces are obscured by masks frozen in unreadable expressions. Even naked, human beings are unknowable. Incidentally, the password to the orgy is “fidelio”, meaning “faithful.” It’s an expression of Bill’s anxieties about the woman he has married, but doesn’t know at all. Indeed, some of Bill’s questions don’t have answers. Bill is exposed at the orgy when he’s asked to produce a second password. Later, Victor admits, “There was no second password.”

In the closing scene, Alice wonders whether “the reality of one night – let alone that of a whole lifetime – can ever be the whole truth.” Facing that uncertainty, there’s only one reasonable course of action: “Fuck.”