It's also worth pointing out that Schnitzler was a contemporary and fellow-traveler of Freud's, as images of the Freudian uncanny pop up everywhere. There's the automaton-like women in the mansion. There's the red-robed masked man with black holes for eyes. And there are doubles galore: Nuala and her friend, the two Japanese customers of Mr. Milich's (themselves doubling genders with their transvestitism), the alliterative names of the two men who lead Bill and Alice into trouble (Nick Nightingale and Sandor Szavost respectively), the masks and the faces beneath them, the two notes of the ominous Ligeti music. Even the daughter of Dr. Bill's dead patient and her husband serve as a sort of tragicomic, less attractive doubling of Dr. Bill and Alice themselves (note the placement of both the bereaved daughter and Alice in front of blue rooms, their similar hair color and style, etc.).
The final bit of doubling is another source of great vexation for the film's detractors: the repetitive dialogue. Time and time again, Bill will repeat a line just spoken to him by another character. "Maybe had Kubrick lived he might have spotted this in editing," they say--oh yeah, I'm sure he had no idea that was going on. What was he trying to achieve with this effect? Repetition is doubling, and it's also an instance of the Freudian uncanny unto itself, calling to mind non-human processes of cognition and communication (cf. the dialogue of the "twins" in The Shining). It also yields a certain narcotic, mind-altering rhythm after a time, connoting inward-facing obsessiveness and detachment from reality (cf. the "I will destroy him!" scene in Barton Fink). But there's a simpler reason, too: Bill needs things repeated to them because he simply does not understand anymore. His customary method of looking at the world has been rendered nonsensical, irrelevant, not even by deeds but by mere words. So he struggles to find a new way to frame things. He needs to repeat the new words to help make them real, to clarify them, to open his eyes to the new reality he's trying to explore. And when he does have them opened, what he sees is horrifying. That's the dream, and then that's the nightmare.
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The reason audiences bolted from Eyes Wide Shut is that it was a bad film and the director was as out of date as his source material.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.)