An essay by Jamie Stuart

BACKGROUND:

When Eyes Wide Shut opened on July 16, 1999, it was greeted with much the same reaction that all of Stanley Kubrick’s films had received: polar opinions followed by discussion. Like those other films, now that the controversy has faded, and it can finally be dissected via video and DVD, it’s reputation has been slowly building.

Part of the initial problem for many of the film’s viewers was that Kubrick had made so few films in the last two decades of his life. During this time the world of film had been significantly augmented by three developments: home video, CGI digital effects and the rise of the blockbuster above all else.

For myself and an entire generation, we grew up watching Kubrick’s films on a TV screen. Although I did see Full Metal Jacket during its original run in theaters at the age of twelve, what we were experiencing, for the most part, were waves created some time ago during the initial impacts of his work.

When Eyes Wide Shut’s production was announced in 1996, we were thrilled, yet skeptical. One friend, upon learning it would be starring Tom Cruise, commented that it was the equivalent of Alfred Hitchcock returning from the grave to direct a Nike commercial.

As the shooting schedule wore on, our anticipation increased. Then, on the evening of March 7, 1999, only months before the film’s release, we were shocked to learn Kubrick had passed away. We were in a state of disbelief.

For the younger generation of filmmakers and enthusiasts coming of age now, it’s difficult to explain our reaction. For those who “got” Kubrick’s work -- the methodical compositions, groundbreaking narratives, revolutionary techniques, uncompromising intellectual concepts and, above all, his complete control over his productions -- it was like losing a symbol. One need only locate and read many of the obituaries published at the time to get a glimpse. There was nobody else like him, and there never would be again.

He was quite misunderstood, even by his admirers. I was aghast at reading post-mortem critical evaluations of his work, which seemed void of any comprehension. One analysis actually proclaimed the most brilliant aspect of Barry Lyndon was that Kubrick presented the title character as a “dullard.” 

1999 was the peak of the ‘90s media avalanche, as this was the year of the “dot.com.” The media, which K. had all but avoided for nearly a quarter century, quickly began spinning stories based on mistruths perpetuated by people who’d never even met him. And certainly didn’t understand his films.

Eyes Wide Shut’s entire production was controversial. The lack of public knowledge, mixed with the length of the shoot, stirred much public interest -- not the least of which was centered around the film’s married couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. All we were told was that the narrative centered itself around sexual obsession. Later, it was suggested to be based on Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovel, however, no copies were in print because Kubrick had bought them all years earlier.

As with any ambiguous rumor, given enough time it will take on a life of its own and lose any semblance of realistic proportion. The press made the film sound as if it would be like Basic Instinct. Everything was hyped beyond belief, as our piranha media configuration called for. AOL kept asking on its homepage whether it would be the sexiest movie ever, and advertised: “Tom & Nicole: Will they or won’t they?” (AOL subsequently purchased Warner Bros., who released it.)

For those who were actually interested in the reality of Eyes Wide Shut, there was a real controversy. It was well known that Kubrick had been a perfectionist, with final cut over all of his work. In fact, he’d even recut 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining after their premieres. Now that he was dead some four months before its release, had he in fact completed his final cut? History indicated that he most likely hadn’t.

Then, as the reviews began coming out, not withstanding Alexander Walker’s self-aggrandizing jump of the gun, yet another issue came to light. Apparently, in order to secure an R-rating, which Kubrick was contractually obligated to deliver to Warner Bros., CGI effects were exercised to alter a specific scene. Critics were shown both versions.

INITIAL IMPRESSION:

I saw Eyes Wide Shut several days before its release at a preview screening. The audience was anxious and on edge. The film began and after a few moments we all realized the picture quality was grainy, looking like a rough cut. There was whispering.

The story unfolded, and my initial reaction swayed from nervous numbness to curiosity, to thinking it was the worst thing he’d ever done and an embarrassment, to thinking it might be the best. Afterward, I left without much of an opinion. I needed to mull it over.

I thought, perhaps Kubrick wasn’t dead after all. Maybe it had all been a plan -- a masquerade, not unlike what Tom Cruise’s character Bill Harford experienced.

It was certainly ironic that someone known for portraying stories in which plans go astray -- while finishing his first film in a dozen years, living an anonymous lifestyle that he knew had furthered his reputation, and amidst the media maelstrom for which he had finally prepared to break his silence -- died of natural causes. His body simply stopped on him. It couldn’t have been more Kubrickian.

Most people were unable to determine how they felt about it after only one viewing. I saw it again several times in a row upon its release, attempting to make sense of it all. Certain aspects had caught my attention, and it was readily apparent that many things which seemed so on the surface all but evaporated upon closer inspection. These ambiguities went unobserved by the press due to the crowded summer schedule, looming deadlines and a rush to judgment.

But perhaps the greatest reason for this critical folly was that Kubrick spoke in a language of cinema, not literature. By this, I mean, most people were so unskilled at understanding film language, that they were unable to follow his intricacies and, therefore, judged it a mess. Kubrick’s consistent intent was to create visual experiences that avoided literary pigeonholes.

You see, most critics enjoy intelligent films, or so they tell themselves -- but usually dislike intellectual films. They like to watch well-made and well-thought-out work, yet disdain anything which will require them to think a great deal about what they’ve seen after the fact.

Another culprit was that many claimed to have read the Schnitzler, when all they’d read was Frederic Raphael’s brief synopsis in his published memoir Eyes Wide Open, about his screenplay collaboration with Kubrick. Many hadn’t even done that. That said, they were following an unreliable surface guide and were unable to distinguish between the differences. And so began the debate.

Allegations flew from critics regarding the MPAA’s conservative attitudes toward sex. After all, the world outside North America saw the version without the CGI alterations. These alterations, which occurred in a single scene, in the form of what became known as "Digital Fig Leaves", were figures imposed over certain sex acts to obscure their sight -- not unlike MTV’s practice of blurring various unsuitable elements in hip-hop videos. (The subsequent video release also had an alteration: the reflection of a sound man was removed in one scene -- something I believe to be intentional, not an error.)

Also, because this was apparently done just before its release, questions surfaced as to what else Warner’s might have done. Many refused to accept this as a final cut. One critic actually had the audacity to accuse Steven Spielberg, without any evidence, mind you, of reshooting the final scene. Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s brother-in-law and executive producer, subsequently made it clear that the cover-ups were Stanley’s unequivocal intention if it received an NC-17, as opposed to recutting it.  

I firmly believe that most of the confusion was the result of the writers’ inability to understand Eyes Wide Shut, and their refusal to admit so. After all, many critics are the ultimate armchair warriors, smug with feelings of superiority and incredulous that anyone, particularly Stanley Kubrick, could ever be more intelligent or better read than themselves.

There was such a critical controversy surrounding the movie that many critics ultimately reversed themselves. Janet Maslin of The New York Times left her position shortly after its release, and it has been suggested that the media’s close-minded reaction was the final straw for her.

Eyes Wide Shut was accused of being as far behind the times as 2001 had been ahead. That’s already been proven incorrect, as its ideas have been absorbed, most recently by Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, which also featured a stylized version of New York. However, where Kubrick was charged with inaccuracies, Anderson was praised for originality.

ZEITGEIST:

Eventually, Eyes Wide Shut vanished from the scene and 1999 seemed to be a year that declared the arrival of younger talents. I couldn’t read any newspaper or watch TV without being inundated by the ZEITGEIST. For some Being John Malkovich summed up the moment. Others thought it was Magnolia. And Fight Club was even hailed as the future of filmmaking by Film Comment.

It wasn’t that Kubrick’s style was so out of touch with today’s expectations. He never made films that worked like anybody else’s in any decade. His films were outside of time, designed to stand out. 

Designed to last. Yet subject to the tools and knowledge of their times.

Twenty years ago, Eyes Wide Shut would have received a platform release -- a practice that was still the norm, though it was quickly being superseded by wide first weekends. Nowadays, only movies outside the mainstream that need to build interest, such as art films, are released in stages. Most films are front packed, giving nobodies like Paul Dergarabedian of Exhibitor Relations Monday morning press an undue influence.

Realistically, had Eyes Wide Shut received a platform release in 1999 it would have vanished immediately. It dealt with issues of infidelity that made most couples squirm, and the aesthetics were organic -- a far cry from the quickening Avid-edited pace of most films. Not even the star power of Tom Cruise, who at the time had the greatest box office track record ever, with five consecutive $100-million grossing films, could have saved it. In fact, by front packing it, Cruise led the film to gross fifty-percent of its total $56-million U.S. box office take in its first weekend. Worldwide it capped at roughly $150-million -- not bad, but unspectacular compared to average blockbusters.

The film was designed to catch its audience off guard. It was full of tricks. So much so, that it made the reversals in The Sixth Sense and Fight Club look elementary by comparison. Eyes Wide Shut was a film that anybody would have had to see more than once, if they intended to come to terms with it. It was not easily digested. It was not mindless entertainment or a fun date movie. (It’s amusing to think what might have happened to a guy taking out a girl to see this, with the intention of getting laid afterward.) 

Eyes Wide Shut is a series of reversals and dashed expectations. The title itself is a contradiction. Some suggested it was a reference to the “dream logic” the narrative followed. It’s intentionally ambiguous and many correlations can be found between it and aspects of the film.

I believe the title is suggesting people have an inherent inability to actually observe and comprehend what is before them. That people create dream worlds for themselves, and all too often accept surface presentations instead of searching the depths which create such illusions -- a paradox. It was also a dry commentary on the audience’s inability to comprehend what they were viewing.

Needless to say, most audience members who had mentally salivated at the prospect of wall to wall sex with Tom and Nicole were disappointed. And that was the point. Michael Herr, Kubrick’s friend and collaborator, noted that Kubrick must have been severely out of touch if he thought he could get away
with that type of marketing campaign in today’s culture. Ticket prices were high, and people just wanted to escape life for a couple of hours, maybe get a little aroused. Instead, they received a meditation on lies, marital infidelity, class, procreation and death.

PRESENTATION:

The narrative of Eyes Wide Shut is assembled in the same way as most of Kubrick’s post-2001 films, in that it’s a series of episodes placed together without any overt exposition to bridge them. This format had many accusing it of being plotless. It isn’t plotless -- the problem is that 99% of all movies follow the same structure, so people have been conditioned from Day One as to how a movie’s plot is supposed to play out. When viewers don’t receive what they expect at any given moment, they become dislocated from the material, because they’re no longer on a treadmill and have to think for themselves -- not unlike humanity's predicament in Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake.

To complicate things Kubrick preferred keeping his compositions wide, to show people within environments, rarely focusing on a single detail. This created a web of ambiguity for viewers unaccustomed to this, since it’s less obvious what the important pieces are. It also diminishes the emotional states of the characters. This was quite out of step with 1999.

One example of his ambiguous compositions in Eyes Wide Shut is his use of establishing shots, usually of certain areas in New York. Instead of focusing on the street signs, which might have been more helpful to anyone unfamiliar with the environments, the shots are left wide. They don’t always match the following action with Dr. Bill -- a tactic used to mock television’s use of establishing shots for shows shot on sound stages miles away from the actual locations. Also, Dr. Bill never appears in them. This was done to diminish this self-centered character’s plight, as were the outward zooms used in Barry Lyndon.

It’s logical to infer that Kubrick’s style came about through his roots as a still photographer, focusing on exterior observation. By focusing on characters’ actions rather than attempting to justify their motivations, he was accused by some of not being a psychological director. This is incorrect; he just factored more into his observations than the illogical nature of mere human emotions -- such as temporal and spatial time, natural sciences and laws of physics. He preferred sociology to psychology.

His characters didn’t exist in their own worlds where everything was justified to their emotional needs; they existed within a physical universe and had to maneuver through an existence often at odds with their motivations. And to make matters worse, he often chose the point of view, some would say, of that physical world, reserving any compassion or sympathy for his characters’ plights.

The Sixth Sense, released the same summer, differs from Eyes Wide Shut in its use of lies in a fundamental way. In The Sixth Sense, as with Fight Club, the main character could only have existed within the scenes
dramatized, otherwise the illusion would’ve been shattered.

AESTHETICS:

Kubrick’s use of exposition and mise en scene differs greatly from a more modern director like Martin Scorsese. Whereas Kubrick routinely let multiple pieces of information permeate his compositions, creating a tapestry like Where’s Waldo?, Scorsese has the tendency to focus on only one thing at a time. With Scorsese, the viewer is never at a loss as to what’s going on. He’s constantly freezing his narratives and fracturing time just to explain the details, as if he’s showing off how much he knows. Kubrick, on the other hand, dramatized scenes as they might actually take place, allowing the characters’ actions to justify the pacing, letting them speak for themselves.

Eyes Wide Shut’s main character, Bill Harford, is constantly entering into situations that existed before him, and will continue once he’s gone. Bill is traveling through a series of future light cones, and touring through the ripples of previous events, and the viewer, put in his place, enters into these situations as blindly as he does. We’re given no more exposition than the main character.

Therefore, what Kubrick has established is a method fundamentally at odds with Hitchcock’s subjectivity. Hitchcock built suspense by granting the audience more information than his characters through the use of cutaways, or, in the case of Rear Window, panning away from a sleeping James Stewart to show the murderous events going on across the courtyard. Kubrick, who felt 20th Century art had become too subjective and was in dire need of locating a sense of objectivity, would have none of that smugness. 

The first three shots give us our conceptual setup. The film opens with Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite, Waltz 2, playing over white on black titles. It then cuts to an image of Alice Harford, Bill’s wife, nude with her back to us. Alice slips out of her dress, letting it brazenly drop to the floor. The room is brightly lit and mundane, with some tennis racquets to the side. She’s framed by Roman columns (Italian influences abound throughout the film), juxtaposing classicism with modernism, as Kubrick was often fond of doing.

This image is intended to deceive, and it actually calls attention to where our minds are. People seeing Eyes Wide Shut in the theater for the first time had been promised a fair degree of titillation. The opening shot, featuring a beautiful woman without any clothes on, altered none of these expectations.

(It’s integral to note that one’s reaction to what follows would be fundamentally different seeing it on video than in a theater. The difference between film and video, or DVD to be more precise, is the picture quality. The actual film it was shot on, Eastman 500 EXR, had been underexposed by two stops, then pushed another two during development, creating a haze of grain that lent it a documentary feel. The effect was rather like Suerat’s pointillism meeting the warm interior lights of Latrec. It’s intimacy was almost embarrassing. The DVD was cleaned up, slickening the presentation, thereby making it more palatable to audiences. )

After the shot of Alice another title card appears cleverly announcing the film’s title, followed by a wobbly establishing shot of an apartment building on Manhattan’s Central Park West. What we didn’t notice in the theatrical release, during the first shot, was the picture’s grain -- we were too fixed on the naked woman. Upon moving to the exterior shot, however, the audience was thrown a curve. Not only was there a content contrast between the two shots, but the picture was literally filled with contrast. It  looked cheap and amateurish.

Another thing we were distracted from, due to the image of nudity, was the attitude by which Alice undressed. Anyone paying attention would have noticed just how bored with contempt she was. She wasn’t even wearing anything below the dress. It can be inferred, when placed within the context of the following scenes, that Alice was unenthusiastically deciding what to wear for the party she and Bill were to attend.

Upon cutting from the CPW establishing shot we find Bill in a tuxedo, standing where Alice was only a moment before. There are major aesthetic differences to be noted. First, the exterior was lit with street lights, which lent an amber hue to the winter night. Inside, however, the light coming through the window is blue. (The color blue will become an integral part of the film’s mechanics as it progresses.)

In one Stedicam shot, with Shostakovich still playing on the soundtrack, Bill wanders through the apartment searching for something. He calls to Alice who’s off-screen, asking if she knows where his wallet is. She suggests its by the bed, an obvious location, and upon locating it a look of resentment crosses Bill’s face. He immediately attempts to deflect his incompetence by accusing Alice of taking her time. (His wallet, as it contains cash and his ID, will become another key motif, consistently offering others his identity and a means of exchange.)

Bill enters the bathroom, and we discover Alice on the toilet -- a far cry from our first image of her. Bill is oblivious and looks at himself in the mirror. Alice wipes herself, then asks Bill how she looks. He automatically replies without looking, telling her she looks beautiful, which she scolds him for. He patronizingly tells her she always looks beautiful, then kisses her on the neck. Bill walks back into the bedroom and turns off the stereo, which it turns out was playing the Shostakovich, tricking the audience who assumed it was just the background score.

(Jazz Suite, Waltz 2, will appear again during the film as a theme for the routine of their lives. By using music by both Shostakovich and Ligeti as its main themes, an interesting layer has been added. Both were composers whose work was done under the rule of Stalinist Soviet Union; both composers’ work was therefore restricted accordingly. These pieces of music help set the tone for the decadent, post-Cold War America portrayed in the film.)

What we have learned via these first three shots is that Bill and Alice have been married for quite some time, and they’re wealthy, living on Central Park West. Bill is absentminded and a bit of a boob with things; he’s also extremely self-centered. Also, we should prepare ourselves for a certain amount of nudity, and this narrative is going to play mind fucks with us. 

One other piece of information granted us during this setup shot is a window air conditioner seen repeatedly as Bill passes it. It’s an extremely subtle element of the mise en scene, but rather humorous, when considering the setting is Christmas time, and the AC should have been removed a while ago -- it isn’t a central air installation, but merely an appliance mounted to the window. Later on, the AC is missing from the window; this is the only time we’ll see it. The AC can be seen as symbolic of Bill and Alice’s relationship, but it also plays into the film’s highly complex use of mise en scene. As it’s never seen again, we can be left to ponder whether it was a continuity error or whether it was subsequently removed -- though if it was, Alice most likely did the work, because we later see Bill as a lazy oaf after work the next evening. The point is: we don’t know.

CONCEPTUALLY SPEAKING:

Bill and Alice have been married for nine years at this point. Their daily routine has become mechanized. It’s been suggested that Kubrick’s central theme throughout his career was the contrast between things which are mechanical and those which are spontaneous, contingent or unforeseen. More can be made of this. I would like to suggest that the underlying concept behind these themes are the perils resulting from blind faith. Blind faith, by its very nature, requires a submission of autonomy. Therefore, it lends itself to mechanization because it eliminates the opportunity for someone to actually think and act independently. (Think: The Ludovico Treatment, the Doomsday Machine, HAL 9000 or even Redmond Barry’s devotion to his mother and her advice.)

Of course, there are pros and cons to both consistency and spontaneity. Some said Kubrick mocked plans, but that would be an incorrect conclusion based upon his widely reported meticulousness. During the planning for a film about Napoleon, he even calculated the size of the battlefields in relation to the number of soldiers, as well as determining the speed at which a helicopter would have to fly to pass over all the troops, and how long the shot would last. Without computers.

Whereas too much planning stagnates and creates an appearance of lifelessness (which Kubrick’s work was certainly accused of), too much spontaneity can lead to an inability to accomplish a desired end. Kubrick believed that most people were incapable of determining the methods by which they intended to accomplish their goals. He was able to acquire freedom from time constraints with his work; the success of his films allowed him to take whatever time he felt was needed, to create work which he felt most proud of. That way, any malfunctions could be detected within time to be corrected. In the end, of course, his time ran out. 

As Eyes Wide Shut unspools, Kubrick begins filling our minds with strange inconsistencies, of which the AC is only one. An obviously missing statue in one scene is an example; a chair that comes and goes near Bill’s front door, which he likes to place his coat on, is another. A few rough edits are even scattered about. He’s calling attention to the medium itself, with its grain and sloppy reel changes. He’s begging us to wonder whether these things are intentional or not?

Bill’s life is a dream, not the movie. When Alice compares dreams and reality at the end, just before the return of Jazz Suite, Waltz 2, she’s comparing her dreams to his reality. Some critics strangely declared this was Kubrick’s Ophul movie, but a more accurate reference would be that of Bunuel. It was Bunuel who routinely satirized the bourgeois and their dreamlike removal from reality in such films as Belle De Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois. Bunuel also chose a mundane aesthetic sensibility to heighten the absurdity of the drama -- the outrageous presented realistically.

Bill is so out of the loop during the day of his odyssey that the unfamiliar events which he stumbles through appear to function with a dream logic. The events are too irregular, and his lack of experience leads him to paranoia, linking incidents together without any foundation -- just as the audience is pouring over the continuity inconsistencies. Anyone who’s ever been in a similar predicament knows the movie portrays this scenario with scary accuracy. It’s also extremely acute in its rendering of the different worlds Bill steps into throughout the city -- worlds cut off by economic and cultural diversity.

And like life, nothing ever seems to fit together perfectly. No disguise is absolute, hence the disguise. Such is Kubrick’s central theory on relationships: Trust is the glue which holds all the loose ends together, yet nothing should be blindly trusted...and the whole truth can never be known. 

SHADOWS ON THE MIRROR:

The secret to understanding the relationship between Bill and Alice can be viewed during the mirror make out scene, accompanied by Chris Isaak’s Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing (which we can assume is playing on their stereo). 

We see Alice standing in front of a mirror with her back to us. Her front side is represented by a mirror’s reflection. Throughout the film we’re shown characters from behind, then from the front, suggesting a denial of truth and reversal of perception -- and an impersonal id attraction (rear), as compared to face to face truth and conjugal intimacy (frontal). (Mirrors will be seen repeatedly in the film as a hint of duplicity.)

The reflection here offers our first glimpse of Alice’s bare front, and it can be clearly observed that her breasts are actually quite small. She was certainly wearing a push-up bra beneath her dress earlier on to create an illusion, and our previous glimpse of her nude body was from behind.

As the camera zooms in, Bill approaches from behind. He looks at her, then himself in the reflection -- then begins passionately kissing Alice. We cut closer on their reflected image. Alice’s eyes open, and a look of disappointment crosses her face. Without resolution there is a fade to black.

Obviously, there’s a problem. The first thing to understand is that they’ve been married for nine years. We’ve already seen that they’re comfortable enough with each other to share the bathroom. Also, we know that at the previous party Bill revived a naked woman who had OD’d. He also indifferently (or trustingly) left his wife to fend for herself at a party at which she didn’t know anybody, and didn’t want to be. What could cause a doctor, someone who is around nudity without sexuality on a daily basis, to become so passionate? The act of  having saved someone’s life.

Bill is a 40-ish doctor with an overblown sense of ego, and the ability to save someone’s life certainly fuels his God complex. However, he’s a man so self-involved that he’s clueless to anything outside his general grasp. He has everything he wants: a beautiful wife and daughter, a general practice on Park Avenue and a two-million dollar apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which contrary to some critical remarks, could easily be paid for with a mortgage.

There are several things worth noting about this scene. The first, is that it’s incomplete. We don’t know the outcome. Kubrick faded to black just as things seemed to be heating up. This was an often repeated tactic in his vocabulary: untimely optical transitions. (Think: the fade to black in 2001, just as Floyd’s recorded message is nearing an end, or the dissolve from Mr. Touchdown giving directions in Full Metal Jacket, to the actual scene of the crime -- or even the fade out at the end of Part 1 in Barry Lyndon, while the Narrator is still reading Sir Charles’ obituary.) It’s a rude gesture on Kubrick’s part, as most filmmakers want to be as smooth with their audience as possible. The integral piece of information has usually been established, yet instead of resolving the matter at hand, this technique leaves the ending loose, usually to have it played out in the following actions, implying that nothing can be done to alter this fate.

The question must be begged, did they or didn’t they? From everything we’ve seen about Bill prior to this -- from his indifference to Alice on the toilet and an unflinching professional demeanor when confronted with the nude woman, Mandy, at the party, to his awful attempts at wit, as the two models, Gayle and Nuala, both much more aggressive than he, propose to take him, “...Where the rainbow ends...” -- we know he’s not exactly the hot blooded type. He balks at the models’ invitation. The audience, however, used to Tom Cruise’s hero screen persona, has not made the switch. There’s even a line he speaks during the model encounter that pointedly mocks Cruise’s image, when he insinuates, “Well, that is the type of hero I can be sometimes.” The subsequent events of the story prove otherwise.

The second piece of information we’ve witnessed before Alice’s mirror contradicts and bitterly fuels her position during their argument the following night, when she argues that women want more than security. I think the subtext here is that she is with Bill for reasons of security. Bill is successful, yet boring. He lives his life in a routine. All we know about Alice’s past is that she ran an art gallery, which went bust -- if she even did and wasn’t lying to Sandor Szavost, the guest at the party with whom she danced. But supposing she wasn’t lying, we can easily assume she lived a rather different life before Bill, as one involved in the arts certainly would have. Besides revealing information about her managerial skills, it’s obvious that Alice has given up on her own life outside the home, for whatever reasons, and must harbor some resentment for this choice. It’s obvious from watching her with Szavost, who’s practically drooling during their dance, this woman is quite sophisticated. She’s been around. Although Szavost initially appears to be the forward, dominant wolf in a tuxedo, we quickly learn that it’s Alice who’s really in control of the situation, subtly manipulating him through a series of flatteries and refusals. In the end, she firmly denies him and shows him her ring finger, adorned by both an engagement and wedding band. Alice, a woman of experience and liberalities, has chosen safety over freedom, and it is her situation which serves symbolically as humanity’s predicament throughout the film: security over freedom.

Marriage, as portrayed in Eyes Wide Shut, is not merely a psychological game of love or emotional manipulation or deceit, but primarily serves as an evolutionary function for the species. It’s a matter of survival; it provides structure for society, financial security for individuals, maintains population control to an extent, and subdues to the varying effects that marriages succeed, the spread of disease. The problem is not in the intellectual concept or morality of one man and one woman, but in the reality of actually applying it to real people. It’s often a case of trying to fit a circle (humans: living things capable of choice and emotional response), into a square (marriage: a rigid structure).

The make-out in front of the mirror perfectly illustrates Bill and Alice’s dilemma, in that he’s someone who’s very surface oriented and self-centered, and because of this he’s blind to what’s going on beneath Alice’s exterior. As long as everything seems to be in place, he’s content.

Ultimately, Alice’s argument built up over a period of time and was sparked by something insignificant: Bill couldn’t tell his wife the truth, because of his hypocratic oath. What happened between he and Ziegler was in strict confidence.

KUBRICK HATED THE WIZARD OF OZ:

Bill’s view of his life is, for all intents and purposes, black & white. This is visually played out in several ways: when Bill and Alice initially arrive at the Zieglers’ party, the floor beneath their feet is checkered black & white; the following room they enter is decorated with colorful Christmas lights. During Bill and Alice’s argument, he’s wearing black shorts and she white lingerie, and he even dubiously states, “Well, I don’t think it’s quite that black & white...” At the party Bill is paired against his dopelganger Nick Nightingale, and he’s wearing a black jacket, while Nick is wearing a white jacket. The newspaper in which Bill reads about Amanda Curran's overdose is black ink printed on white paper. Most tellingly, we see Bill’s jealous fantasies of Alice with the Sailor played out in his mind in black & white.

The black & white motif is used to directly counter the “rainbow” of colors awash throughout most of the film. There is a logic to the use of colors which goes as follows: blue represents an artificial or mechanical surface; red represents an internal entry, Eros, or the life instinct; orange represents normalcy and familial warmth; and yellow represents unreliability and a lack of control. (Vittorio Storaro would be proud.) A good key for these colors comes during the opening party, while Bill is assisting Ziegler and Mandy in the bathroom. A sculpture of a dragon lines the fire place. The dragon’s eyes are black & white, it’s exterior scales are blue, it’s mouth is red, and its spikes are golden. Red and blue are seen most frequently, often paired within the same shot to contrast each other. Kubrick paired these two once before during the opening titles of A Clockwork Orange, and a clockwork orange is, of course, somebody who appears to be living yet is really mechanical.

Our first introduction to blue is during the tracking shot of Bill at the beginning; there’s a cold blue light seeping through the window he’s at. As the film progresses, blue begins coming through more and more windows, brighter and brighter, illuminating what we can obviously tell is a false exterior set, literally illustrating the false exterior. As that first shot ends, the lights in the room have been turned off, leaving only two sources of light: the harsh, artificial blue coming through the window and the warm orange lamp light from the hallway. Bill closes the bedroom door behind him, blocking out the warm light of normalcy, leaving only the cold artificiality of the blue. (The cut comes just before the warm hallway light is completely shut by the door.) Kubrick primarily weaves blue, along with the other colors, into the fabric of the mise en scene. Blue is used as a tile on the wall when Bill negotiates entry into Rainbow Costumes, as a stage light at the Sonata Cafe, as the door to Domino’s apartment, and so on.

Red, constantly opposing blue (the pairing is everywhere), is seen most prominently during the orgy, where the carpet is bright crimson and the party’s chief is appropriately called Red Cloak. This is where the id has been unleashed, and Bill believes somebody might have given their life to save his. It can also be found as a traffic light outside the window of Rainbow Costumes, contrasting the blue tiles, on the neon lights that decorate the Sonata Cafe, as well as its dark interior upon Bill’s entrance. There’s even a red neon sign that says EROS in one scene. 

Orange is the color emitted from all of the normal functioning lights in the film’s settings, as it would be. In this way, orange is natural and de facto in its representation of normalcy.

Yellow, the final major recurring color, is prominent because of the taxis taken by Bill that are everywhere throughout the city. Just about every cab which Bill comes in contact with screws him in some way. This is the result of his abandoning control to let somebody else manage his means of travel.

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING:

With the exception of the noticeably artificial blue exteriors, the color scheme is blended into the film by motivated objects. The most obvious of these objects are the Christmas tree lights (Christmas trees are everywhere as a symbol of fantasies and self-delusions, namely by celebrating the birth of a man who purports to offer eternal life). This brings up another aspect of Kubrick’s filmmaking, which, with the exception of Barry Lyndon’s candlelight sequences, has gone criminally unsung: source lighting. While examples can be viewed in his work as far back as Killer’s Kiss, most of Kubrick’s interiors from 2001 on were lit by actual sources, instead of sculpting the light with multiple hidden sources and cut with flags the way most films do. This approach was logical (Where exactly do rim light’s come from, anyway?), and created a beautiful naturalism to his work. It also affected the light timing, in that because we were actually experiencing incident light from definable sources, with the light correctly fading to darkness the farther the rays fell away from the bulb, a truer, more inhabitable space was created around the characters.

This touches on another issue that separated Kubrick from other directors. While many ambitious directors strive to use and experiment with the latest technologies, Kubrick personally oversaw the creation of new technologies for his films. Kubrick personally acquired the NASA Zeiss lenses and figured out the means by which they could be attached to the Mitchell BNC cameras for the afore-mentioned Barry Lyndon. Also, if you watch the credits for 2001, he is listed as the director of the film’s special photographic effects, which won him his only Oscar. (It was all done in-camera; there was no such thing as digital back then.) And for everybody who loves Scorsese’s or Paul Thomas Anderson’s Stedicam shots, check out The Shining, done a decade before Goodfellas.

It is not without good reason that everyone from Arthur C. Clark to the myriad of rocket scientists who advised 2001, hailed him as probably the single most intelligent human being they’d ever personally known. 

This intelligence, while a gift, also made his films difficult to comprehend for most people; an avid chess player, he was always a few steps ahead of the audience. For example, in Barry Lyndon -- a film littered with tiny, often insignificant details -- one character asks Barry if he knows, “Gustavus Adolphus, the 13th Earl of Wendover?” Barry does not. In the next scene, we meet Lord Wendover, yet never hear his given name again. Barry has, in fact, been hoodwinked -- and the ignorant audience, as foreign to society as he is, misses the detail: Gustavus Adolphus was actually a 16th Century Swedish king.

METHOD:

Eyes Wide Shut is difficultly filled with obscurities. God is in the details. One sequence, in particular, displays Kubrick’s deft use of mise en scene to illuminate or mask information:

When Bill first meets Domino, he has just come from the Nathanson’s. Bristling in the cold night, he reaches a street corner and waits for the light to change. Domino approaches, dressed in a black & white faux fur coat and a short, tight purple dress (purple being the combination of red and blue). In the background we can see the red and blue neon sign for an XXX video store, subliminally planting sex in our minds. She asks him for the time, which he gives her. As the light changes, we switch to a reverse angle, leaving the image of the video store for that of a hardware store, grounding us back in the mundane world. Bill starts across the street, and Domino starts coming onto him.

Bill’s initial impression of her, as is most people’s, is that she’s a prostitute -- however, we’re getting details which subvert this initial reaction. For example, the aggressiveness in which she propositions him seems quite unprofessional. Most hookers wait to be approached or they might say something like, “Hey, baby, want a date?” But they certainly wouldn’t play so hard as follow somebody and walk in front of them, not letting them out of their grasp. Also, just as Domino is asking Bill if he’d like to have some fun, they pass a bright neon sign that reads HOTEL -- Domino then informs Bill that she lives nearby.

Now, I’m not exactly an expert on prostitution, but it seems unlikely to me that a woman would come on this strong and invite a john back to her apartment. Prostitution is a business. It’s not personal. It’s selling an image, not a reality. It’s Bill’s lack of experience that leads him to assume her identity. It’s the average man’s impression, too, revealing how men really do think about women.

Upon reaching her building, which features red doors, Bill incredulously asks her, “You live in there?” He finally agrees to go inside with her, and we cut to the interior lobby of the building, as they enter. This is typical in that the camera never follows Bill through any doorways; he’s followed directly up to doorways, then picked up from the reverse side, as he enters into a different world. In the corner of the lobby next to Domino’s door is an abandoned blue baby carriage, mockingly juxtaposing women’s sexual role as existing solely to reproduce, and Bill’s declaration that women just want security.

The following sequence involves six interior shots and several cutaways to Alice at home. The placement of the camera is central to Domino’s true identity. We start with the camera’s back to the apartment, focused on the front door. The door opens and Domino enters, followed by Bill. The camera tracks backward with them, as they walk into the apartment. Bill comments that her small, undernourished Christmas tree is “nice,” for lack of anything better to say. Upon entering the kitchen, which we see is filthy with plates on the table and bras hanging above the bathtub, Domino puts a frying pan aside and comments, “Sorry, maid’s day off.” This is a marked contrast from the Nathanson’s apartment where Rosa, the maid, let him in and took his coat.

The next shot is a reverse-angle 2-shot of Bill and Domino. We can see more dishes and food on the table, as well as the bathtub in the kitchen, contrasting Ziegler’s luxurious bathroom from the party. A room can be seen in the background, though its details are unassuming. Bill asks Domino if she’d like to talk about money. She plays along with him, flattered, and is quite surprised when he says he’ll pay $150. She sweetly tells him that she won’t keep track of the time, a dead-on clue. Domino’s expressions and facial reactions are highly important in this scene.

We now cut away to Alice at home, staying up to wait for Bill, so they can resolve their argument. Bathed in blue light, she’s eating Snackwells and watching Blume in Love, by Paul Mazursy, who starred in Kubrick’s first feature Fear and Desire. Bill, however, in the apartment of a beautiful and willing young woman, is oblivious.

We return to Bill and find him in a tight 2-shot with Domino in her bedroom, as they kiss -- another give away. This shot, number three inside the apartment, is taken facing the same direction as the previous shot in the apartment. Bill’s cell phone rings. (His cell phone, in fact phones in general, reoccur as a motif of communication. Kubrick was always fascinated by human communication, from the military jargon used in Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket -- the total manipulation of facts through the disguise of coded language -- to the use of long distance contacts in 2001. It’s all about distortions, timing, time and space, and the way technology has made communication faster and easier, yet fabricated walls through mechanized conditioning at the same time.)

With the ring of the phone, we move to a wider shot. This is now shot four of the apartment, and it is from the same direction as the previous two shots. We learn that Bill was seated on the bed with Domino kneeling above him -- as if he’s the patient to her doctor. The camera tracks with Bill, as he steps away, maintaining the same direction. Bill turns off the stereo and answers the call.

Two books can be seen on the shelf, one more obvious than the other. The book in plain view is humorously titled Introducing Sociology. Is Domino a student? The second book, lying down and difficult to make out is Shadows on the Mirror, a novel about a successful woman attorney at a prestigious firm who keeps lonely men company at night...until she’s implicated in the discovery of a corpse -- a perfect parallel to the film’s plot, both thematically and narratively. This is what I’m talking about with regard to Kubrick’s use of detail. You’d better believe that book is intentional. This is why his films took so long to shoot -- he was making sure that everything within every scene and within each frame played out exactly the way he wanted it to.

After a series of cross-cuts between Bill and Alice, as he lies to her about his whereabouts, we cut to shot five, a medium close-up of Domino reclining on her bed. “Was that...Mrs. Dr. Bill,” she asks with a touch of subversion. This shot is from a different position, yet varies by only ninety degrees to the left.

Bill exhaustedly sits on her bed in shot six, and we’ve finally gone to a reverse angle on our final shot. And what do we see? A room behind Bill and Domino. And what room is it? The kitchen. We’ve now seen the entire layout of the apartment. There are only three rooms: a small living room which they initially entered, the kitchen and the bedroom. Therefore, Domino’s “roommate” is certainly a bit more than a roommate. This final shot of the sequence with Domino contains a subtle zoom, indicating that we’ve just received an important piece of information. (The zoom appears in the film at several integral moments, in varying degrees of size and length.) Bill offers to pay Domino anyhow, though she refuses -- yet another clue. He insists and places the money in her hand. Surprised and flattered , she thanks him.

Everything in this film is specific -- camera directions and dramatic locations alike. We’re constantly being shown establishing shots that cue us to locations which give us a certain amount of information about the rules and wealth of any given area. It also helps drive home how people in New York, like Dr. Bill, live their lives in a routine that takes them to the same locations within the city on a regular basis. Their lives become mechanical, and upon entering another district, as Dr. Bill does by wandering Greenwhich Village, he becomes lost in another world -- that could happen to anybody unfamiliar with Greenwich Village.

Kubrick’s films were visually tight. So much so, that he was praised as much as he was criticized. He never storyboarded, though. His feeling was that until he was on the set and staging the scene with the actors, there was no way to know where the camera should be. The camera’s function for him was to document, not dictate.  

 

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