high infidelity
The structure of Stanley Kubrick’s swan song Eyes Wide Shut is older than cinema itself, but hardly new to it: an everyman type encounters boundary situation X, which draws him into some analogue of the unconscious, where he journeys, learns, etc, and then that man is reborn. It’s the Odysseus monomyth. Most recently featured in Lynch’s Lost Highway, which is at least as sexually charged as Eyes Wide Shut. The difference being that whereas Lynch represents the unconscious journey overtly, by marking it with the illogical, Kubrick chooses instead to dramatically incorporate it. Which gives Eyes Wide Shut more the surface texture of, say, (talking Lynch) a Blue Velvet: some naïf stumbling deeper and deeper into the mystery.
In this case, however, that naïf is Tom Cruise. Playing ‘Bill Hartford’ to Nicole Kidman’s ‘Alice Hartford,’ but still–perhaps as Kubrick intended–it’s Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman on-screen, husband and wife. That’s part of the mystique. The other part is the overhyped sexual material, which, as this is Kubrick, is significantly more subdued (see: stylized) than the trailer would suggest. This isn’t 9½ Weeks revisited. Not that kind of classic.
But it does have its moments, when there’s no dialogue, when Bill holds his index finger to his lips, trusting that that slight motion will be enough to shush the prostitute he’s with long enough for him to talk on the phone with Alice. Moments when Kubrick allows his characters to interact at such a basic, human level that words aren’t even remotely necessary, would in fact be, in the middle of all this social indecency, indecent themselves. Another such moment is the liturgical orgy, where Kubrick baldly presents the theme of the movie with the mask everyone’s wearing, which makes all this sex impersonal, purely physical, which is just the quick-fix Bill is looking for in the wake of Alice’s revelation that left him reeling: that she’s betrayed him emotionally. That he has to reinterpret their relationship in the light of that betrayal.
Which is a common enough premise, but then Kubrick, pushing the monomyth to its extremes, takes Eyes Wide Shut a little too far into fairy-tale land for credibility. Meaning Bill’s ‘sexual education’ is a little too convenient for modern audiences to stomach. A medieval audience would have had no problem, but then they were tuned into the morality play, were used to the main character being essentially a spectator in the underworld, continually warned away from real danger, etc. Perhaps this ‘convenience’ is simply a result of Kubrick dramatically incorporating the unconscious trip into the storyline, though. Give him that. However, Cronenberg was able to dramatically incorporate the unconscious trip into Crash, and it never quite got unpalatable. So.
What the modern audience can cue into, however, are the occasionally heavy-handed psychoanalytic references. Say, Bill being led into the sexual underworld by his ‘pianist’ friend. Or the foreshadowing, at the Christmas party Eyes Wide Shut opens with: while Bill repeatedly touches his ‘pianist’ friend, Alice essentially swaps bodily fluids with some stranger, via a glass of wine. All of which suggests that their marriage might not stand on as solid ground as it could be, which–trained on Annie Hall as we are–we get as soon as Nicole casually smokes pot in bed.
It’s difficult to imagine that Kubrick was thinking Woody Allen when he conceived Eyes Wide Shut, though. In Boogie Nights, porn magnate Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) dreams of making an adult film so compelling that the raincoated gentlemen evenly spaced throughout the theater will stay in their seats for the full feature, instead of ducking out early. Word is that Stanley Kubrick had a similar vision. Perhaps Eyes Wide Shut is the result. If so, then it is compelling enough to sit through once, just a little transparent for the second time around.