"Heat"? "Sparks"? There are few to come by here (perhaps only when Dr. Bill meets Sally the roommate, but that's brought to as screeching a halt as possible). Indeed, Kubrick seemed to be visually mocking the very concepts with the gauzy yellows, arctic blues, and sickly pinks that illuminate so much of the film. (The pinks in particular--try to count just the decrepit Christmas trees with those odd pink lights bleeding out of them and you'll see how prominent a role they play. Then there's the gang of toughs (from Yale!) who gaybash Dr. Harford (a pun on Harvard? maybe I need to get out more) while saying he must be playing for "the pink team." And I don't think I need to go into the other connotation of "pink.") And people looking for them missed the point entirely. So did those who complained "That's not Manhattan!" (my God, how did Kubrick not realize he was shooting on a meticulously crafted replica? Stop the press! Alert Warner Bros.!) or even more amusingly, "That's not how the rich and powerful have orgies" (I was always tempted to intone "he added knowingly" when I saw a critic kvetching about that). The point was to show a man led off the path of what he knows to be right, only to learn the lesson that what's not right is, in fact, wrong. (And for this condemnation of sexual infidelity, the film was labeled reactionary in some quarters. I found that more sad than amusing.)
It's worth noting that the source material for the film was a 1926 book called Traumnovelle--Dream Story--by writer Arthur Schnitzler. Viewers who can't get around the episodic surreality of Dr. Bill's wanderings might be well advised to view everything between the argument and the final conversation as a kind of detailed dream, one that veers slowly from would-be wet dream to full-blown nightmare. Note the dreamlike structure, with its jarring leaps from one place and time to another (this was common source of complaint against the film, but it only served to underscore the dreaminess of the narrative). Note the somnambulistic quality of Dr. Bill's wanderings. Note his dreamlike superhuman powers: the ability to get anything he wants by saying the magic words "I'm a doctor," flashing his magical 5000-megawatt smile, presenting the magical talisman known as his medical board card, and reaching into his magical bottomless wallet; the power to be irresistably attractive to anything on two legs--models, prostitutes, little girls, hotel clerks, roommates, anyone. Note that the recitation of Alice's dream is the film's central scene. Note the references to dreaming and wakefulness in the last scene. Note the title.
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Article comments
1 - Rodney Welch
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.
2 - Michael Croft
Yep. "Sex is dangerous". Best film about sex, 1958.
It was boring.
3 - Taloran
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.
4 - Sean T. Collins
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.
5 - Rodney Welch
"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.
6 - Rodney Welch
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.
7 - Michael Croft
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.
8 - Rodney Welch
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.)