Eyes
Wide Shut is the posthumous project of perfectionist
but eccentric chessplaying Stanley Kubrick, who died in 1999
before the release of the film. Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 short
story Traumnovelle (Dream Story) consumed Kubrick’s imagination
for more than twenty years as the basis for this film. At
first Kubrick thought that the 1890s Vienna tale of Freudian
eros, guilt, repression, and death was a comedy, but of course
Kubrick was skeptical of everything, including psychiatry.
Kubrick moved the story to contemporary New York, but the
dialog and plot is more 1890s Vienna than 1990s Manhattan,
and the set is more 1970s than 1990s New York. A party with
waltz music is a throwback to an earlier era, and even the
specter of AIDS was placed in a 1980s frame, before the cocktail
of medicines of the 1990s transformed HIV into a more chronic
condition. Imagine New Yorkers, even in the 1890s, talking
so slowly that they qualify as announcers for Voice of America’s
English-as-a-Second Language Broadcast! The principals, Dr.
Bill Harford (played by Tom Cruise) and his spouse Alice (played
by Nicole Kidman), are among the few persons in the film who
do not jump over the line to engage in sexual infidelity;
after nine years, they are happily married in the Ozzie &
Harriet mold, with hubby, wifey, and devoted child. As the
film opens, preparations are underway for a Christmas party
hosted by Victor Ziegler (played by Stanley Pollack). Afterward,
flirtations at the Christmas party prompt Alice to confess
that in her dreams she would have risked her marriage to submit
to a handsome naval officer who stared at her once upon a
time. While called away for a medical emergency, Bill contemplates
sexual fantasies of infidelity and in due course, loaded with
cash, nearly has sex with prostitutes but cannot: he is so
accustomed to treating his female patients as clients that
he does not associate the female body with sex, the very point
that annoys Alice, and he plays a naïve hapless role, into
which Kubrick cast so many of his male leads, when confronted
with gay overtures toward him. The most memorable scene is
a pornographic orgy, which the good physician crashes by extracting
the password from the musician assigned to accompany the ceremony,
a classmate who dropped out of medical school, not realizing
that he is placing himself and his classmate at mortal risk
of life because the effete upper crust of New York cannot
tolerate anyone to discover that they are turned on by a pseudofascistic
ritual in which prostitutes serve as sex slaves for masked
magnates, most of whom are so repressed or impotent that they
only observe. After being troubled by some of the weird events
associated with the orgy, including a murder and kidnapping,
Victor provides rational explanations that Bill wants to hear,
though filmviewers know otherwise. Ultimately, he shares his
experiences with his wife, and then (after two and one half
hours of film footage) the two successfully confront their
jealousy and shame, though Alice is in the driver’s seat in
the entire colloquy. Happy ending, nice and tidy, with Kurt
Weill-type music at the beginning and end of the film and
chords made up of the lowest and highest notes on the piano
alternating during the periods of greatest suspense and tension.
In short, the film is more Faustian than Freudian, and clearly
the plot is anachronistic to most young American filmgoers,
who have lost virginity before they graduate from high school
nowadays. If Kubrick is saying that humans experience an inner
struggle between choices of good and evil (high notes versus
low notes), in which the dark side too often triumphs, he
concluded his career with a happier image of humanity than
was found in most of his films. Having their eyes opened to
the temptations of extramarital sex, Kubrick wants us to believe
that the happy couple shuts its eyes to such possibilities.
Alas, Kubrick, son of a physician, was addressing the dilemmas
of love and lust of the 1890s, not the 1990s, urging abstinence
in a liberated if hypocritical society. The film is full of
clues and unsolved mysteries, but the biggest puzzle of all
is that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) gave
the film an R rating despite full frontal female nudity while
demanding that other directors must make cuts in tamer presentations
to get even an X rating. Those who were not laughing throughout
probably did not even laugh at the campy humor of the 1996
remake of The Island of Doctor Moreau. Fortunately,
the story now invites Mad Magazine to have a field day on
the film. MH
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