Questions posed by EWS

[Justin Ginnetti]

I think Andrew raises some good questions a few of which jive with the way I've
been thinking about EWS.

> Mask
>
> How did the mask get on the bed?  Did Kidman find it, was it placed?
>
> Navy Officer
>
> It would seem that Kidman did indeed fuck the navy officer after all. . . .

A lot of the reviews I've recently read pick up on the artifice of the dialog
which is often put down as distractingly too faithful to the Schnitzler
diction.  I think that the so-called artificiality puts the film directly into
conversation with Schnitzler and an even earlier (late Victorian) cultural
moment.

I see Harford as a flaneur (a la Manet, Degas, and co.), and the film as a study
of certain tensions upon which that social figure rests.  The "dated" language
and the fact that Alice managed an art gallery, along with Harford's nightime
perambulations, made me think of the flaneur figure and in terms of
socioeconomics he's a perfect match.  As a flaneur he'd also have equal access
to bourgeois homes, nightclubs, and brothels.

But what about the orgy then?  Perhaps either the orgy is in some way the truth
(ironically played out through a fiction) behind the polite society aka the
world in which reason appears to order reality.  It's this negotiation of
mediated/quasi-anonymous fantasy which allows for the appearance of real world
fidelio (thank's Rich).  Harford, doesn't get it, doesn't buy into the
"charade," because it represents (as others have pointed out) that which
terrorizes him:  the ability to *act out* secual fantasies.

This reading would explain Harford's start when he sees the mask on his
pillow--it links the ability to act out these fantasies with the fear of his
wife acting hers out.   I guess I'm sympathetic because it certainly places art
in privileged position and it is the closest thing to a "truth" that the movie
offers.  And then the last line sort of confirms Kubrick/Schnitzler's eschewing
of any one absolute truth (i.e. reason, love) and what is left is . . . well,
the activating power of art for one thing.