# Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

### reviewed by
rutger h cornets de groot

    Rutger H Cornets de Groot

    Kubrick's last dream

On Stanley Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut ' (1999)

America's double sexual moral was rarely brought to a sharper light than prior to the posthumous premiere of Stanley Kubrick's last movie Eyes Wide Shut. For weeks, the American tv-audience's interest was roused by an enticing clip showing a naked Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman kissing in front of a mirror. The media could not get enough of the randy pseudo-scandal atmosphere they themselves had created. But the American viewer did not get to see any of the sex: 65 seconds worth of "graphic content" - this wonderful neutral term for anything inappropriate - was hid from view by digitally added human figurines. Kubrick himself, who had died four days after completing the movie, could not be asked for his opnion anymore. Still, the alterations appear to have taken place with his consent. He knew, no doubt, that depicting so-called penetration scenes would irrevocably earn the movie the much dreaded NC-17 rating.

Unfortunately, Kubrick's compromise did not have the desired effect. Thanks to the hullabaloo - Roger Ebert, too, said he couldn't approve of the changes - and also thanks to the many interviews with "Hollywood's hottest couple", Cruise and Kidman, about the ins and outs of extramarital sex, sex in front of a camera, sex for sex's sake, etc., the general public was slowly, but surely, prejudiced into thinking that Kubrick must have been a semi- or even a full blown director of pornography. The irony is that this observation is less distant from the truth than one would think. For years, Kubrick was attracted by the thought of making a porn movie under studio conditions and Terry Southern, co-scenarist of Dr. Strangelove who also signed for the script of Blue Movie, almost persuaded Kubrick at that time into directing this porn classic. And indeed, why not? Kubrick's own Lolita and A Clockwork Orange show that sex was not an alien theme in his world. Besides, there is no conceivable reason why Kubrick, who tried so many different genres in his small oeuvre, would shrink from pornography (or what then would be his version of it).

Considering this variety of genres, one wonders what the common factor of Kubrick's works might be, that is to say, the core, that which necessarily comes out in each expression. To do justice to his movies, one cannot view them as mere contributions to the respective genres. The Shining is a 'horror movie', like Barry Lyndon is a 'costume movie' and Full Metal Jacket is a 'Vietnam movie', but before all of this, they are made by Stanley Kubrick. At best, what could be said is that this variety of his work shows that he was conscious of the fact that there are innumerable alternatives to any approach to reality. The question of what motivated Kubrick is all the more interesting since his personality seems to be almost completely untraceable in his movies. That is why biographers and psychologists find themselves disappointed when they try to assign that personality in order to locate the center of his art. This is not, of course, because he would not have a personality, but because the driving force in his movies is so strong that it seems that they are governed from a great distance. Therefore, in order to enter his realm, one needs to look for certain characteristics in style and recurring images - less obscure, surely, than a number, 114, that must have been of particular importance, but less common, too, than the cliche of the genius who never left his house.

Kubrick made his first film, Fear and Desire, with money that he had hustled as a chessplayer in Greenwich Village. His passion for chess has never left him and this is something that can be clearly told from his movies. The perspective with which Kubrick looks at reality is that of a chessplayer: strategic, distanced and with a surplus of cognitive ability and rationality. It is a view on the world that disregards the personal, the 'human-all-too-human'. This indeed romanticized him with an unapproachable and legendary aura, but his psychological structure simply had to bring along this preoccupation with what is 'great' - not because it could not degenerate into paranoia or absolutism, but because 'greatness' is the perspective with which chessplayers look at the world. Not by chance, the chessplayer shares this outlook with both generals and filmdirectors, as can be told from the panoramic battlefield of Spartacus, Paths of Glory and Full metal Jacket. Not as panoramic, but blown up, nonetheless, to the very extreme are such typical Kubrickian settings as the immense 'War Room' in Dr. Strangelove, the colossal hotel in The Shining and, finally, space itself in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of course, the more the consequences of this perspective inflate reality, the nearer the border is drawn to a moment where either nothing is possible or everything turns into its opposite. Kubrick reached this moment rather early in his career, in a film that in its long title expresses the outcome of this process: Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. A nightmare comedy with a nuclear apocolyps as its final solution: it seems as though Kubrick went straight through reality here, even when he could not preserve his seriousness. Still, the humor in this movie is not the result of a concealing or extenuating approach, but, rather, of the absolute urgency with which Kubrick posed the question of the future of man and atomic bomb. After all, one cannot expect to preserve oneself, or even one's seriousness when one attempts to pursue a movement of thought that leads to catastrophe. Kubrick used Peter Sellers as his alter ego, but immediately dispersed into three through him (the Group Captain Mandrake, President Muffley and Dr. Strangelove; originally also the cowboy who at the end personally delivers the bomb to the Ruski's). This is how he tried to outsmart reality, by surrounding it from all sides and assailing it with alternatives. More balanced and, indeed, more poetic, Kubrick repeated this process six years later in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where he 'went through reality' once more, this time by having astronaut Dave Bowman break through the barrier of space and time ("Beyond the infinite") and have him witness his own rebirth as "Star Child".

Realities such as these, taken to the extreme consequence, were the result of a logic that Kubrick could only give form and shape to if and when he attained complete and full control over his films. Outside influences on his work were to be kept at the lowest possible level. This did not only apply to human interfering, but also to reality itself, which he rebuilt in his studio. To Kubrick this was the only way to design a world according to his own insights. Besides, when you create a world of your own, you're also allowed to destroy it, if you so chose. In contrast - but not in contradiction - to the fending off of other peoples' interfering with his movies, Kubrick attached high value to mankind in a world that, since the Enlightenment of Barry Lyndon's 18th century, had more and more come to reflect his own chessplayer's mind: rational, logical and, as an extension of that, technical and scientific. Nothing fascinated Kubrick so much as the fatal disparity between the ever progressing technological achievements on the one hand and the lagging spiritual developments of mankind on the other. This is the reason why Kubrick's people (mostly men; women, who emphasize feeling, play secondary roles) try to find access to a system (often their own creation) that is founded on logic and rationality. But in order to gain access they need to surrender their control over themselves. As soon as that happens the system turns itself against them and expels them, after which they are left to wander meaninglessly through a labyrinth-type surrounding, where they find that the only thing they can rely on is, after all, that same fragile humanity.

One early depiction of such a labyrinth can be found in the endless trenches of Paths of Glory. They are the mad creation of a system that cynically claims its own men, who have given up the authority over themselves. Another labyrinth is on board the spaceship of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the astronauts do their workouts in paths that have no beginning, ending or even direction, and where the HAL 9000-computer finally and fatally takes command. In The Shining we find the opposite mechanism at work: the gigantic hotel, with its endless hallways, chambers and enormous spaces does not expel Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) but gains power over him and reduces him to a mere function of its morbid jokes. Perhaps this is the reason why the labyrinth got its most literal expression in this movie: not only outside, in the snow, but inside too, in the hallways where the little boy drives his tricycle in endless rounds and blood from ages past comes flooding in. There is another figure in which Kubrick depicted his appreciation of the human: that of the machine-man. The most literal example of that creation is, of course, the HAL-9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey But there is Dr. Strangelove, too, who is not able to control his arm and Alex Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, who has his impulses programmed into him. In Full Metal Jacket, soldiers are trained to become killing machines. They expel the fat boy Gomer Pyle from their midst, an event that is mirrored in the second half of the movie by Pyle's antipode, the North-Vietnamese female sniper, who singlehandedly takes up the task of expelling the Americans from her country. Finally, in A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), the project that Kubrick had been working on since 1977 but that he left unfinished, again the subject was a machine-man: a robot in the guise of a little boy, who, against a background of ultramodern high tech, desires to become human.

Going from this machine-man to Eyes Wide Shut seems to be quite a leap, since the human factor would supposedly be visible au naturel here. But what is better suited for depicting the loss of humanity than the moment where love and eroticism transfer into mechanically experienced sex? After a party at a friend's house, where Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) is seduced by one of the guests, she confesses to her husband Bill (Tom Cruise) that several years before she had an encounter with a naval officer during which she was willing to give up "everything": him, their marriage, their 7 year old daughter, herself. Additionally, she tells him about a dream that she had in which she went to bed with "hundreds" of men. Bill becomes so upset by this that he leaves the house, not so much with the plan to commit adultery, as to find out which powers are at work here. His wandering expedition leads him through a series of women, each of whom is willing to give herself to him, although this never actually takes place. It all results in the visual highpoint of the movie: a closed gathering with a Freemasonry character in a Kubrickian country house (huge rooms, hallways, staircases) where masked men and women indulge in sex. It is here that Harford is exposed as an intruder and where both the motive of the system versus the human, as well as the subsequent expulsion become actual. And so, Bill and Alice relate inversely proportional to eachother: what Alice experiences in her dream is what Bill unsuccessfully tries to copy in reality. But considering the title and the corresponding title of Arthur Schnitzler Traumnovelle ("Dream novella") on which Kubrick based the script, one wonders whether or not what Bill experienced is real at all. Perhaps Bill's quest was nothing but a dreamt initiationrite1 with the purpose of renewing him and making him see that Alice is not only related to him through sexual ties. Their reconciliation in the end, while doing Christmas shopping with their daughter, indicates that despite Kubrick's passing away there might still be hope for mankind. It is a conclusion to which the already classic final word of the movie - Alice's four letter invitation to Bill - seems to follow up on very nicely.

Rutger H Cornets de Groot http://sites.netscape.net/cornets/film/ews.htm E-mail with comments to cornets@yahoo.com

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews