EWS

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

"_Eyes Wide Shut_ suggests that the more you look at
something, the less you actually see. Looking is a type of
flirtation, but there is a price to be paid for it. For
Bill, the
price is humiliation; for us, it is losing touch with our
own
sensuality by living our dreams through others'. The more
we look at that which is private, intimate, the less able we

are to deal with our own intimacy. But more than the role
of the image is dealt with here. Kubrick suggests that the
arts, especially the narrative arts such as film, have an
important role to play in the self-conscious awareness of a
culture. We tell stories to learn about ourselves. But we
should never take the stories *themselves* for real.

<snip>

"_Eyes Wide Shut_ is the work of a gifted director near
(as it turns out, *at*) the end of his career, reflecting on

the role of film art in popular culture and the lure of the
image. As much as it is a film about the vagaries of adult
sexual relationships, it is a film about scopophilia and our

obsession with the postmodern god, the Hollywood icon.
This perhaps accounts for Tom Cruise's and Nicole
Kidman's interest in the project, apart from the rare
opportunity to work with one of the world's great directors:

_Eyes Wide Shut_ is about people seduced by images,
people who are so taken with the image that they forget
the substance of the object of their gaze. Film
directors/story-tellers -- not limited to, but perhaps
especially Kubrick -- manipulate our emotions and play
fast and loose with personal identity through temporarily
blurring the distinction between dream and reality, art and
real life. But as Alice and Bill discover, stories are
essentially 'fake'. Our lives are real, ours to live, ours
to be
in. Take what is useful from this 'dream for waking eyes',
but don't stay too long, because in the end it's about
reality, not dreams."