"F*ck": Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut
Published October 30, 2003
(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)
The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 5
9. Eyes Wide Shut, dir. Stanley Kubrick
When I wrote my senior essay on horror films, I was responding in part to what I saw as myopia on the part of the horror criticism and theory establishment. It seemed to me that scholars and critics focused almost exclusively on the role of violence in the genre, leaving other sources of horror largely unexplored. And even violence received a fairly one-dimensional treatment, discussed primarily in terms of displaced sexuality.
One of the films that inspired me to try something different was Eyes Wide Shut. It's ironic, then, that this movie is in a sense the traditional horror theoretician's dream film: It takes that displaced sexual anxiety and mania and puts it back where it came from. It's a horror movie with sex instead of violence.
The last film that Stanley Kubrick would ever make, EWS stars then-married Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as Dr. Bill & Alice Harford, a wealthy and attractive couple who live with their young daughter on Central Park West. Drunken flirtations with other people at the Christmas soiree of a friend of Bill's precipitate a pot-fueled fight between the two of them the following night. During the argument Alice informs Bill, whose cocksure arrogance regarding Alice's presumed-inpenetrable fidelity has infuriated her, that she once came this close to throwing away their life together to pursue sex with a handsome stranger. Though she ended up not even so much as talking to the man, the revelation of her desire so stuns and angers Bill that, after being called away from the fight by business, he begins a nighttime odyssey of sexual pursuits. His encounters get progressively more bizarre and, as he soon finds out, exponentially more dangerous.
EWS did not do as well as expected, either with audiences or critics. In part this is due to its billing as an erotic thriller--the thinking person's Basic Instinct. But folks hoping for detectives, icepicks, and hot lesbian action were no doubt disappointed by the film's glacial, peripatetic pacing. Expecting a roller-coaster, they instead found themselves in a fable, a grim fairy tale involving the frightening adventures of an attractive, naive young hero as he journeys through the dark forest of his own sexual urges. All of those urges manifest themselves as monsters, ready to devour "the good doctor": infidelity, cancer, drug abuse, prostitution, pederasty, venereal disease, cult-like ritual dominance and submission. Sex is the pale horse upon which a panoply of menacing riders ride, promising Bill pleasure but offering only ruin. I can't help but be reminded of (are you sitting down?) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, another film that dispenses with logic in order to depict a series of macabre visions each more nightmarish than the next.
- "F*ck": Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut
- Published: October 30, 2003
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- Section: Video
- Filed Under: Video: Art House, Video: Drama, Video: Horror, Video: Suspense and Mystery
- Writer: Sean T. Collins
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Comments on this articleComments
Yep. "Sex is dangerous". Best film about sex, 1958.
It was boring.
I saw it while taking a class in a little village outside of Rochester, NY. I kept waiting for something, anything, to happen, and then the credits started to roll. Ugh.
Well, diff'rent strokes, etc. Still, I can't imagine that Kubrick set out to make a movie that reflected the mental & sexual state of the common man in our world today or whatever--when had he ever done that before?--so I think to declare it a failure on that basis is missing the point. Kubrick's was a cinema of worst-case scenarios. This was one of them, and this time he was exploring the worst-case sexual scenario, as opposed to worst-case family in The Shining, worst-case technology in 2001, worst-case geopolitics in Strangelove, worst-case military justice in Paths of Glory, worst-case criminality in Clockwork Orange, etc. Moreover, there's a difference between simple sex and marital infidelity, and this was a film about the latter.
At any rate, it wasn't that Alice just thought about the guy while jerking off--she made it very clear that had the sailor said so much as "hello," she would have left the marriage. So I think we can forgive Dr. Bill for being a little upset.
"I can't imagine that Kubrick set out to make a movie that reflected the mental & sexual state of the common man in our world today or whatever--when had he ever done that before?--so I think to declare it a failure on that basis is missing the point."
Well, obviously the Cruise character isn't common -- he's a rich doctor -- but he did seem to be someone with whom we are supposed to identify or relate. To me, the story just seemed old hat, and not quite as cutting edge as Kubrick imagined.
Oh, and the movie's last word -- didn't that look like a sad act of desperation to you? As if Kubrick thought there was some kind of integrity in endorsing marital fidelity? It's just such a Doctor Phil kind of movie. One demands a view that it more interesting, a story that at the ending has a unique point of view, instead of the shallow one we got.
I've often wondered if it's generational. Growing up with a post-AIDS understanding of sex may make a statement that seems shocking or deep to Kubrick or Cruise seem underwhelming to me.
I know there are people who love it, and some of them think it's destined to be considered a classic, but if it can't speak to future generations, then it doesn't have a long life ahead of it.
I got that impression as well, Michael -- but it may also be that Kubrick was working on the wrong turf. He wasn't unfamiliar with dealing with people on an intimate level in his films, of course, but he was always better dealing with the relationship between people and institutional societies (namely the military, a world he understood well.)
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The reason audiences bolted from Eyes Wide Shut is that it was a bad film and the director was as out of date as his source material. Tom Cruise's character -- a man who freaks out over the mere fact that his wife has sexual fantasies about other men -- was far more common in Schnitizler's time than in the world you and I share.