 Critics and admirers alike seem to regard Eyes Wide Shut as being “pro-monogamy," but I could never quite buy into this. For one, the whole thing seems a little too ironic and smug to be taken directly as a morality tale, particularly when we consider the all too pat last line of the film. Two, the role that Nicole Kidman’s Alice plays in the film has not been properly or thoroughly enough discussed, and if we study the part long enough, we‘ll see that she isn’t exactly the victim here. But we‘ll get to that in a minute. Three, and this might be a weakness on my part, such a reading does not seem to gel well enough with the rest of Kubrick’s oeuvre. The film is said to contain references to all of Kubrick’s other films (Lolita and The Shining seem to be the easiest to spot), and as such I think that it’s particularly necessary to see how it fits into the puzzle. I see 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as the Rosetta Stone in figuring out Kubrick. He depicts savage apes evolving into the comfortable sleepiness of modern civilized man and then evolving again into Star Children, angels, What I am basically saying here is that our hero Dr. Bill (Tom Cruise) is supposed to cheat on his wife. Cheating on his wife represents a rejection of the conventional slave morality of marital fidelity and a progression toward a new self-made morality that values independence, individuality, and the pursuit of one’s own human-emotional sex drive over the collective. Bill’s unwillingness (not as much inability) to pursue this greater morality is indicative of failure on his part. Granted of course that we view the film through this distinctly Nietzschean prism, the ending where he reunites with his wife and she suggests that they need to fuck as soon as possible registers as happy only in a deeply, darkly ironic way much like the nuclear holocaust at the end of Dr. Strangelove, Alex’s deprogrammed sex fantasy at the end of A Clockwork Orange or smiling Jack Torrance living it up in the past at the end of The Shining. Eyes Wide Shut is distinguished from these other films in that it depicts a failure that is ideologically attuned to our conventional slave morality, rather than of a success that happens to violate our conventional slave morality, but the end result of both is similarly disorienting and perversely unsatisfying. By “civilization,” we are essentially talking about the matriarchy. The male sexual drive is defined by destruction. It’s all about gaining power by taking it from others. The male sexual drive is founded on values of individuality and self-interest and lends itself easily to evolution of man to Star Child. The female sexual drive, on the other hand, is assimilative. The female isn’t interested in destroying her opponent as much as simply turning him into another one of her. The motivation for the castration and emasculation of her men is then to render them female. The male asserts his self-interest and dominance through his phallus and by removing it, the female creates a situation in which power is held mutually. The female subjugates individuality for collectiveness and in doing so can never evolve beyond her mortal state. She never regresses to the simian but accordingly she never progresses to the Star Child. All her resources are devoted to maintaining the monotony and stasis of the civilized world. If we look back on 2001, we see that in the time of chimpanzees the collective and the individual, the male and the female, lived in perfect harmony. Boy ape had to kill the tapirs and protect the waterhole from the other tribes, and girl ape had to stay home and raise the baby apes. In the space age, world hunger and war have been eliminated. We don’t have to kill tapirs as we have ham sandwiches, and the Cold War is over with Russia and the United States working toward the same end. Our physiological needs have been conclusively satisfied and we have entered a purely domestic age: the Age of the Woman. Mankind has to be careful about losing himself in domestic comfort. The domestic age is progress, but it is a mere stepping stone to the end point. In order to achieve true spiritual actualization, Man must destroy this female element, which has long since exhausted its utility but still fights to perpetuate its useless existence, in the same way the locust builds an immunity to pesticides. Again, in looking at 2001, it’s not insignificant that the space age segment is introduced by a female flight attendant tracking down and replacing the floating pen of a sleeping passenger. She’s defined in a domestic role and, rather notably, she’s the only one awake. Some critics have remarked that the film foresees the demise of the traditional family structure and as evidence point to the scene where Dr. Floyd calls his daughter via video phone to wish her a happy birthday. I would argue just the opposite, however. To me the scene indicates that the available technology has been integrated entirely with traditional family values, and modern man still feels obligated to observe birthdays and be part of his daughter’s life even when he is several thousand miles away from the Earth’s surface. While the scene may suggest that the family going the way of the dinosaur, as it is right now, this is still a predominantly domestic society. The star of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the one character that everybody remembers, is the HAL 9000. The character was actually originally conceived as female. His final form is a fey male homosexual--but this is ultimately only a slight change. The kind of homosexual that HAL 9000 represents is deeply socialized. He has a code of speaking that obscures the weight and meaning of what he is actually saying (i.e. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” “I’m afraid that I can’t do that, Dave”). A supercomputer, HAL is not a creature of individual will, but a product of a collectivist societal ethic. He believes that he is justified in killing the ship’s crew because they were jeopardizing the mission in putting him down. HAL is unable to even think in terms of self-interest. HAL is feminine not only ethically but biologically. His relationship with the crew members is like one between a pregnant mother and her fetus. HAL not only controls the ship, for all intents and purposes, he is the ship. He encompasses all the humans and they live inside them. When they leave the ship and go into space, they are attached back to him with what look like umbilical cords. When cut off, they scream and wail and die, their relationship to the ship being largely dependent and parasitical. For man to succeed in moving to the next stage of evolution, he must slay this mother figure. The Alice character in Eyes Wide Shut is a HAL figure. Only this time, every film by ultra-auteur Kubrick being some variation of the same basic theme, she succeeds and is not vanquished by her male. We suspect that after the film ends things are going to pick up just as they started, with the two going about preparing for another soiree followed by sex and a day of doctoring and parenting. Like all of Kubrick's films there is a scene in the bathroom. Now is it defecation (simian, vulnerably mortal), bathing (modern human, bourgeois indulgence), or urination (star child, asserting sexual dominance)? It’s urination, by Alice in front of her husband as they get ready for the party at the beginning of the film. This display of public urination shows Alice as dominant relative to her husband. However, relative to somebody like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, a true ubermensch -- the Star Child grown to a Star Adolescent -- her squatting position renders her as submissive. After all, it almost looks as if she is shitting! The female must squat to urinate lest she piss all over her feet, and this need to squat will always prevent the female from evolving to the next stage. She’s innately, biologically, unable of achieving the assertive standing pose. Amusingly, while at the party, she excuses herself to go to the bathroom. Bill is too dim to observe that she just went before they got there. Why the apparent lie? What is she up to? She dances with a Hungarian count that aggressively hits on her, telling her that marriage was traditionally the only way that a woman could lose her virginity and be free to do what she wants with other men. When she leaves, the count asks her if he could see her again. She says that that would be impossible as, duh, she’s married. Meanwhile, Bill passively flirts with two models before being called to tend to his wealthy friend Victor’s OD’d hooker. They get home to make love during which Alice looks contemplatively and mysteriously at her own reflection as her husband kisses her neck. This image is iconic; it’s featured prominently in the film’s poster art. But what does it mean? I think that it’s meant to mirror the shot in 2001 of HAL observing astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole talk about putting him down. Here she is plotting just exactly how she is going to clip her husband’s wings. The following day they go through their daily routines and at by the end of the night smoke some marijuana from their bathroom stash and get in the mood. Alice expresses jealousy about Bill’s near-fling with the two models. He tells her that while he is a man and all men have a biologically urge to have sex with beautiful women, he’s an exception to the rule because he loves her and would do nothing to hurt her. She protests that the only reason he won’t fuck the models is out of consideration for her, not because he really wouldn’t want to. To get a rise out of him she offers a hypothetical beautiful naked woman in his office who is getting a breast exam. She wants to know what he is thinking about when he is feeling her up. He tells her that it’s sheer professionalism and sex is the last thing on his mind. Then she asks if this woman patient is possibly having fantasies about Dr. Bill. Bill says that women don’t think like that. Alice then relates a story about how she saw a naval officer while they were vacationing and she was so attracted to him that she would gladly have given up her husband and her daughter for just one night with him. Bill is shocked and then called out on a house call before the problem can be fully resolved. Two things that I want to address right off the bat. This “hypothetical” naked female patient actually exists. We saw her in the previous montage establishing their daily routine. How did Alice know about this? It’s quite simple: she is all-seeing and all-knowing, just like the HAL computer. We will see further evidence of Alice’s omniscience later in the film. Right before Bill is about to sleep with a prostitute she calls him on his cellular phone and tells him that she is going to call it a day. Later, when he comes home after being exposed at the orgy (where he was forced to remove his mask and nearly strip) Alice wakes up to relate a “dream” where they were both stranded in a strange place without any clothes and she made love to the naval officer that she told him about. After she finished with him she fucked other men and was cycled around like the village bicycle. Wanting to humiliate Bill, she then summoned him in order to laugh at him. This monologue seems to indicate that she knew all about the orgy. She seems to have been there, in a dream, as one of the whores the men were fucking--one of the whores that Bill could never quite bring himself to dominate. And then there is the case of Nicole Kidman’s performance. When the film first came out, I recall a superficial but pointed complaint by one viewer that Kidman’s performance as stoned was entirely unconvincing and evidence that she had never used the marijuana and was relying on her exaggerated preconceptions of the drug. Quite; her level of inebriation seems inconsistent throughout the scene. Sometimes she’s silly, sometimes she’s accusatory, sometimes she’s sentient. This problem is exaggerated particularly since Kubrick was openly and blatantly disinterested in naturalistic acting. He disliked “realistic” performances. This unconvincing self-conscious performance, however, is integral in reinforcing both our perception of Alice’s deceitfulness and the character’s parallels with 2001’s HAL. Like HAL, she seems to be feigning insanity in order to force her male to leave the nest, allowing her to proceed to castrate/neutralize him. Now, about the sex. Note that while Alice’s fantasy is biologically motivated it still puts her in a submissive role. She is surrendering everything she has for sexual bliss and is taking nothing in return. This is her fantasy and even in fantasy she is unable to assume the superior male sexual role of oppressor. She still needs to be the one to be oppressed. The hierarchy in the film seems to be Star Child (the naval officer, and by extension the men who orchestrate the orgy), modern woman (Alice) who because of her innate inferiority to the Star Child can only aspire as high as assuming the relatively submissive role of his whore, and then modern man (Bill) who is unwilling or unable to assume the Star Child role and as thus must then acquiesce to his wife’s conventional moral code. Secondly, notice that Alice directly states that it is not enough for Bill to restrict his sexual urges. He needs to cease having them. For the castration to be truly complete, Bill must be domesticated in mind as well as body. Eyes Wide Shut is not exactly a remake of The Wizard of Oz, but it shares some close parallels with that film connected by a few easy-to-spot references. The two models want to take Bill “over the rainbow,” and when he goes to procure a costume in order to crash a secret orgy he goes to Rainbow Fashions located just over a rainbow sign. Going “over the rainbow” clearly means entering a world of sexual adventure and going through the Star Gate to become a Star Child. And like The Wizard of Oz, this wonderland is deconstructed at the end by a kind and gentle old man who reveals that it was all a hoax. Most importantly, Eyes Wide Shut retains the problematic message of The Wizard of Oz. We tend to succinctly describe this message as “There is no place like home,” but there is a bit more to it than that. Wizard of Oz protagonist Dorothy Gale puts it as: “Well, I - I think that it - it wasn't enough to just want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie Em - and it's that - if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with!” In other words, loving Uncle Henry and Auntie Em and not wishing to hurt them is not enough. She needs to stop dreaming of anything beyond her backyard. The Wizard of Oz parallels are integral in establishing this morality as a distinctly feminine one. I sense that this lesson was traditionally meant only for the girls, lest they leave town and try and pursue a college education or join the army or whatever. By placing Bill in a role that was originally and rather definitively held by a sixteen-year-old girl (playing twelve or thirteen, no less), his feminization by following through and obeying this moral code is made explicit. And it’s not only that; there are few cultural icons as thoroughly identified with the gay community as Judy Garland and The Wizard of Oz. Associating Bill with The Wizard of Oz doesn’t only render him female, it renders him homosexual, code to women that he is not only no longer threatening but, as he is completely incapable of raping them and assuming a dominant sexual role indicative of a Star Child morality, deserving of pity. (One of the reasons that the gay best friend archetype in romantic comedies feels so offensive is that the role is implicitly condescending and patronizing toward gays.) This sense of pity is deeply felt by Alice. When describing her initial encounter with the naval officer to Bill she says, “And yet it was weird because at the same time you were dearer to me than ever and. . . and at that moment my love for you was both tender and sad." Bill’s sexual inadequacy is so deeply ingrained that other men mistakenly assume that he is homosexual. He is nearly roughed up by a gang of frat boys passing him on the street as one talks about getting a “Mexican lap dance” right in his face. They push Bill against a parked car and call him “faggot” and “Mary” before playfully and sarcastically offering themselves up for sodomy. At the end of the incident, one of them says, “I got dumps bigger than you!” curiously suggesting that his anus has been stretched out. These boys’ misogyny is exaggerated in a way that distinguishes them from the less-talk-more-fuck misogyny of the Star Children. They’re trying to prove something, suggesting that they are compensating for latent homosexual tendencies and are using this latent “gaydar” to select Bill for attack. More explicitly, the day following Bill’s sexual misadventure, he is hit on by a flamboyant hotel clerk played by Alan Cummings. Bill is looking for his friend Nick Nightingale who had led him to the orgy. The clerk says that Nightingale was escorted out by a couple of “very large men” that looked like the sort that you don’t want to mess with. “If you know what I mean,” the clerk whispers to Bill before hiding his giggles at the double entendre. Even the casting of Tom Cruise in the role, an often-rumored closet homosexual, seems designed to doubly emasculate the character on a meta-level. I’m equating homosexuality with the feminized male, but there is a shot during the orgy sequence that depicts a masked man in a suit (a Star Child) dancing with a nude male prostitute. While his presence seems cutesy-pie and sort of perfunctory at first glance, I feel obligated to revise this aspect of the film to accommodate him. I think we need to distinguish between the pitcher and the catcher, top and the bottom, dominant and submissive, the guy and the "girl." Without taking into account the particulars of the sex act, the man in the suit is the top. He’s wearing a suit; his boy toy is buck naked. He’s rich and powerful while this boy toy is a whore hired to amuse him. Power is really the only thing that matters here. Who’s on top? Who’s calling the shots? Arguably the dominant homosexual is an improvement over the dominant heterosexual, as he has completely rejected all relations with the feminine world and completely rejected conventional morality (which says that sex between a man and a woman is the norm) instead of continuing to honor it (albeit on a low level) through male-on-female rape. When I say that Bill has been made into a homosexual figure through his emasculation, make no mistake, I mean the kind of homosexual that gets fucked in the ass, which indeed is the lowest that the human being can fall within the modern world. As any student of fellow Nietzschean Oliver Stone’s deeply homoerotic Platoon and JFK could tell you, the kind of homosexual that does the actual ass-fucking is still the epitome of masculinity and of Star Child ethics. Even more perfunctory and more difficult to explain is perhaps the lesbian couple in the same shot. Didn’t I just say that women were biologically incapable of assuming the dominant role as they had to sit down to pee? Perhaps, but the lesbian’s presence at this orgy feels unlikely on a literal level and that is perhaps the point. But still, this illustrates the male gendering of the Star Child race. Wearing a suit and a bobbed haircut, the lesbian has essentially adopted a male gender role. What’s more, in doing so, she has implicitly rejected conventional feminist thinking which, of course, is synonymous with the conventional moral thinking that emasculates men, prevents them from evolving to the next stage, and maintains monotony and stasis (i.e. “Rape is wrong”). This lesbian finds sexual pleasure in exploiting and asserting power over her social, if not in this case biological, inferiors. Just like all the other men in the room, she likes the whores. I’ve browsed a rough draft of the film’s original screenplay and was intrigued by a certain omission from Alice’s dream. In the original version she sees Bill being taken up onto a hill by a mob and crucified. Alice looks on this with all her lovers and they laugh at him. This bit seems to have been omitted from the finished film as it may come off as somewhat pretentious and heavy-handed, but Eyes Wide Shut is, of course, a film that has more than earned the right to employ Christ imagery. Bill’s crucifixion and Alice’s enjoyment of it mirrors a fantasy sequence in A Clockwork Orange of Star Child Alex joyously flogging Christ while dressed “in the height of Roman fashion,” again reinforcing the idea that Alice is on the side of the Star Children and is enjoying her role as their whore. But it also brings in that idea that Christianity is an effeminate religion that reinforces effeminate values. Christian values are values of altruism, collectivism and anonymity, values indicative of a slave morality. The Christian God is also a human God that the rest of us must worship, obey and emulate, whereas the idea behind the Star Child morality is to evolve beyond the human stage through sheer will of power. Bill’s becoming a Christ figure is part and parcel to his emasculation. I said of 2001 that part of the reasoning behind the four-act structure is to move beyond the limitations of the three-oriented Christian (as represented by the Holy trinity and three-point crucifix) world. The triangle, it’s worth noting, can only be folded on a vertical line. The square on the other hand can be folded on both a vertical and horizontal line. In that sense, it’s the superior form. Eyes Wide Shut is a bit more structurally complex than 2001. Like that film it uses a four-act structure. The first act is setting up Alice’s confession. The second act is Bill’s misadventure. The third act is the fallout of the misadventure, ending with Bill’s confession. The fourth act is the fallout of this and the film’s eventual resolution. It’s all very neat. Within the second and third act are mirroring trilogies of failed sexual encounters. In the second act, Bill attends to the daughter of a patient who had just died. She tells him that she loves him, does not want to leave town with her husband (“Dharma and Greg”’s Thomas Gibson, sort of the poor man’s Tom Cruise and in the film the poor man’s Dr. Bill), and just wants Bill to stay near her. This woman is infatuated with Bill in very much the same way that Alice was infatuated with the naval officer, which would allow Bill to assume the dominant role of the naval officer were he to sleep with her. He turns her down, however. His next encounter is with the prostitute Domino. He is about to sleep with her (pathetically asking her “What would you recommend?” when she asks what he likes, putting him again in the submissive role) before being interrupted by his wife. And then finally he attends the orgy where he is enamored by a mysterious woman who wants to save his life, but is unmasked far before he can do anything. This is as lucky as Dr. Bill gets, and during most of his time there he is put in the position of passive voyeur. In the third act, Bill drops off his costume at Rainbow Fashions. He had seen the owner’s teenage daughter in a tryst with two Asian businessmen the previous night and had seen her father harshly chastise her and chase the men out of his store. When Bill comes back, he sees that the owner has now reached a “deal” with the businessmen. He offers her to Bill (she seems to like him), but Bill is too shocked and disgusted to take him up on it. In his next encounter, Bill goes to visit Domino and in seeing that she isn’t available puts the moves on her female roommate. The roommate then breaks the mood by sitting him down and telling him that Domino had just tested positive for the HIV virus. That ought to teach him for going on these adventures! Finally, he calls the dead patient’s daughter only to have her would-be cuckolded husband answer the phone. He hangs up, now completely emasculated, his every avenue for sexual adventure now long since dried up. These mirroring trilogies of sexual encounters aren’t as neatly defined as the film’s overarching four-act structure. What constitutes a sexual encounter anyway? I disregarded Bill’s initial encounter with the costume shop owner because he neither pursued or rejected her, but still she expressed sexual interest him as indicated by her whispering in his ear before he went on with his journey. And perhaps I should include his pursuit of the hooker at the orgy in the third act and his discovery of her death. More to the point, the encounters of the third act don’t follow a reversed sequence of those from the second, even if we look at it as pairs of four; and, inconsistently, in many of this incidents, he doesn‘t even encounter the original woman that he failed to fornicate. I think that the film appears sloppy in this aspect because Kubrick has set up a “natural” world of fours that the Dr. Bill character is unable to comfortably inhabit. An emasculated Christ figure, he can never quite get past number three. Granted, we should try to tie down our readings to that which can only be seen on-screen -- with Kubrick in particular, I always find this a problem -- but even without foreknowledge of Bill’s literal transformation into Christ, the continual interruption and successful smothering of this non-hero’s journey toward enlightenment is both a challenging spin on Kubrickian themes and fruitfully subversive. |
