EYES WIDE SHUT

[Kathleen Fitzpatrick]

This was posted to H-FILM earlier today:
_______________

>The following is posted to H-Film with permission from Geoff Pevere. It
>was originally published in the Toronto Star July 16th, 1999. I include
>Geoff's review here because, of others I've read, it comes closest to my
>own reactions. Like myself, Geoff was inspired by the works of Stanley
>Kubrick to pursue a life-long interest in film. For that reason I feel a
>certain bond. And, I think Geoff states his affection much more
>effectively than I can. Of course, as Mike Frank has rightly pointed out,
>this "affection" obviously translates into a biasness, but I think film
>theory and criticism has always been plagued by such personal prejudices.
>It's the nature of the medium, and impossible to escape. All we can hope
>for is that the varying views will add a perspective that we may not have
>considered before... dw
>--------------------------------------------------------
>With eyes wide open Kidman, Cruise and Kubrick willingly ventured into the
>darkness of a wounded ego and created a masterful satire about sex
>
>By Geoff Pevere
>Toronto Star Movie Critic
>
>As it turns out, the last word ever uttered in a Stanley Kubrick movie
>will be the well-known four-letter term for fornication.
>
>While the director, who passed away a week after finishing Eyes Wide Shut,
>presumably did not know the word would be the final one he'd ever direct,
>it's the perfect adieu nevertheless: a profane punch line to a career-long
>joke about human folly, a joke re-told with dazzling skill and wry
>mordancy in this elaborately perverse, inimitably Kubrickian satire of sex
>and its discontents.
>
>As a last word, Eyes Wide Shut is a good one, as good as any we might have
>imagined.
>
>Based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 Freudian novella Traumnovelle, Eyes Wide
>Shut is about one man's desperate retreat up the various dark alleys and
>dead ends of his own wounded ego.
>
>Mortified by his wife's overzealously detailed admission of an
>extramarital dalliance (revealed in an electrifying bedroom monologue by a
>superb Nicole Kidman), Dr. William Harford (Tom Cruise) charges out into
>the New York night - or at least the New York night according to Kubrick,
>whose studio recreation of his hometown recalls Taxi Driver by way of On
>The Town, which is to say an insomniac's dream of the city that never
>sleeps.
>
>Plagued by overly vivid visions of wife Alice's imagined indiscretion
>(with, of all insulting things, a sailor), Harford finds himself drawn
>into a series of increasingly cryptic and creepy erotic exchanges: the
>daughter of a freshly deceased colleague suddenly professes to love him;
>he is verbally assaulted on the street by a gang of homophobic yahoos; a
>seemingly heaven-sent hooker invites him in for a cup of something warm
>and nice. Elsewhere, in a costume shop opened privately after hours, he
>stumbles upon a situation of truly mystifying sexual implications.
>
>But all these are mere prologues to the main event of Harford's plummet
>through this dark night of the soul: His visit to a secluded country
>estate for an event that gives new meaning to the phrase masked ball, and
>which, with its transfixing blend of the opulent and erotic, the divine
>and decadent, ranks as one of finest sequences in all of Kubrick.
>
>It is here, in the midst of these anonymously tangled limbs and concealed
>faces, that Harford's feelings of guilt, desire, anger and fear achieve
>fission, and here where Eyes Wide Shut officially disengages itself from
>anything resembling conventional narrative logic.
>
>By the time we (and the doctor) have arrived here, Kubrick has taken us
>well beyond the place where distinctions between real and imaginary are
>anything other than semantic abstractions, to a place the director has
>taken us before - it's that maze where we last left Jack Nicholson howling
>in The Shining, or maybe that deathly silent white room at the end of
>2001. Where you don't know if you're dreaming or not, or even if you're
>awake. Where it's possible to have your eyes wide shut.
>
>Yet, for all the metaphysical gamesmanship, Eyes Wide Shut is also firmly
>anchored in the terra firma of the material. Indeed, it is sex that lights
>the path to this inferno, or at least sex as filtered through the thickets
>of the masculine ego. Like The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut views the world
>through the bent frame of a deranging man's mind, and it is performance
>anxiety that is bending that frame.
>
>From the opening shot of a disrobing Kidman, to the uniformly stunning and
>statuesque amazons who confront the diminutive Cruise, Harford's world is
>defined by equal parts obsession and terror. For if it is sex that defines
>power, what happens when things go, as they always eventually do, limp?
>
>Needless to say, it's the stuff of farce, and Eyes Wide Shut is nothing if
>not mercilessly (if occasionally mirthlessly) comic. Structured as a
>series of erotic episodes which refuse to reach climax, the movie depicts
>the season's most luckless sexual adventurer this side of the hero of
>American Pie.
>
>The casting joke here is that Cruise, of all people, just can't get laid -
>that even Tom Cruise can't live up to being Tom Cruise.
>
>To this end, Kubrick not only frames the character as the most clued-out
>since of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix (fully half of Cruise's lines involve
>repeating what's just been said to him), he also provides relentless
>visual reminders of the actor's shortness. Apart from Harford's 7-year-old
>daughter, there isn't a single character in the movie who doesn't loom
>over the doctor, who doesn't look down on his roily insecurities.
>
>In his least heroic role by a mile, Cruise demonstrates an endearing flair
>for self-deconstruction. By the time Harford has snuck home in dawn's
>early light - defeated, deflated and devoid of conquest - you can't help
>but feel sorry for the guy, which isn't something you were left feeling
>for Nicholson at the bone-chilling close of The Shining.
>
>It might be a sign that Kubrick, the inscrutable old chess master, had
>been mellowing his board tactics in old age, but more likely it's his
>recognition of the fundamental tragedy in Schnitzler's story, a tragedy
>that has informed the late director's satirical universe, from Lolita and
>Dr. Strangelove to The Shining and Full Metal Jacket: When a man's world
>rests on his member, sooner or later it's going to crash.
>
>And when it does, when you realize wars have been fought and lives have
>been lost all for the sake of a tumble, when you think back on the randy
>glare of Malcolm McDowell, the profane cant of Full Metal Jacket, the
>cuckold's duelling in Barry Lyndon, the archive of indelible images
>inspired by man's insoluble conflict with his own baseness, all you're
>left with is the four-letter word that started the whole thing.
>
>Same to you Mr. Kubrick. Rest in peace.
>.
>

***********************
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Department of English
Media Studies Program
Pomona College
kfitzpatrick at pomona.edu
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