1290 Eyes Wide Shut

[The Curious Sofa]

Undoubtedly, we all bring our own experiences to the way we interpret films. As a gay man who has never felt bound by what I see as heteronormative expectations around desire and fidelity, I have always had limited patience for this kind of dynamic onscreen. To me, someone who insists that their partner should find only them attractive seems controlling and certainly not the kind of person I’d want to be in a relationship with.

As the film asks us to empathise with Tom Cruise’s character, and I also find the casting misguided, I struggle to engage with the premise on a fundamental level. That said, if the film resonates with others, that’s perfectly valid.

[MichaelB]

Undoubtedly, we all bring our own experiences to the way we interpret films. As a gay man who has never felt bound by what I see as heteronormative expectations around desire and fidelity, I have always had limited patience for this kind of dynamic onscreen.

But wouldn't you agree that the vast majority of people—including, presumably, Kubrick himself—do feel bound by what you dismiss as "heteronormative expectations around desire and fidelity", and are therefore far more likely to identify with what's happening here? Either from direct personal experience, or being able to empathise with it because it's not a huge stretch from direct personal experience?

I keep trotting out this example, but it's a good one: I've seen three of Marek Koterski's scabrous satires in Polish film festivals with packed audiences with thunderous belly laughs going off around me on a regular basis pretty much throughout, whereas I'm sitting there going "Well, that was very, very mildly amusing, but..." But I 100% acknowledge that his films aren't aimed at me, or indeed anyone who doesn't share his native language and culture, and it seems to me from what you say that Eyes Wide Shut wasn't aimed at you.

To me, someone who insists that their partner should find only them attractive seems controlling and certainly not the kind of person I’d want to be in a relationship with.

But this very, very rarely manifests itself at the start, and certainly didn't in the two cases that I experienced directly. In other words, you're already embedded in the relationship when it happens (several months in in my case), and Eyes Wide Shut is in part about precisely that scenario: how you handle the situation when it arises, and what it says about you psychologically.

It's easy to casually say "that's not the kind of person I'd want to be in a relationship with", but if you don't discover that aspect until several months in—or several years in, or post-marriage or, far worse, post-children—it's much harder to neatly extricate yourself from it. Especially because 95% of everything else in that relationship was fabulous—we're still good friends to this day because of that 95%—and so you initially try to sideline or minimise the single major downside before gradually realising that it's ultimately impossible.

As I said, the second time it happened I really did dump my girlfriend within days (and was actively looking for a cast-iron excuse to do so), but first time round it's a lot more complicated. As I suspect anyone who's actually experienced a similar situation will readily confirm.

[The Curious Sofa]

I think this is going to turn circular. I will need a rewatch to see whether I find the film more compelling now but I can only repeat that it's the combination of motivation and casting that doesn't work for me. I won't dive further into my thoughts about the strange sex life of the heterosexual (joke!), but I doubt that Eyes Wide Shut will ever come near Kubrick's masterpieces for me.

[Roger Ryan]

Bill Harford's motivation in Eyes Wide Shut is far more about his uneasiness with losing power and control than simply blind jealousy. Alice is the one who, in fact, accuses Bill of infidelity if he so much as finds another woman attractive. This admittedly unreasonable accusation comes out because Alice is stoned and is feeling powerless herself after losing her position at the art gallery when it closes. She is growing resentful that her identity is only as Mrs. Bill Harford and that she appears to be raising their daughter on her own while her husband does the "important" work that keeps him away from home at all hours (making those "house calls" that supposedly grant him some level of prestige in his profession). It's not so much that Alice admits desire for the naval officer that rattles Bill as much as the fact that she tells him she was willing to leave him (and their daughter) if allowed one night of pleasure. This is a fairly damning statement that undermines Bill's sense of control. Bill's subsequent nighttime odyssey is really more about his desire to regain control than to simply engage in sex as a tit-for-tat.

Bill approaches each new encounter as if he's the one in power but every time he finds that power being undermined. Initially, with his patient's daughter and with the prostitute, it's mostly his own sense of decorum which holds him back from cheating on Alice (having the opportunity to cheat but not doing so is enough for him to retain his control). Soon, however, he finds himself way out of his depth and becomes completely powerless to effect a solution to the situations surrounding him or to even understand the dynamics at play. In the end, Alice is beginning to regain her own identity again as Bill acknowledges he is less in control than he imagined himself to be.

[MichaelB]

Yes, I'd completely agree with that reading.

It's a shame that my wife loathes Tom Cruise on an almost visceral level (and is none too fond of Nicole Kidman either), as I think she'd get a huge amount out of everything else. But the Cruise/Kidman factor is an unbridgeable deal-breaker for her, and that's fair enough.

[JSC]

I know it was criticized at the time, but Frederic Raphael's memoir about working with Kubrick on the
script of Eyes Wide Shut really is worth a read. Raphael doesn't shy away from talking about his
reservations about aspects of the original Schnitzler story and the process of adapting it.

[MichaelB]

I know it was criticized at the time, but Frederic Raphael's memoir about working with Kubrick on the
script of Eyes Wide Shut really is worth a read. Raphael doesn't shy away from talking about his
reservations about aspects of the original Schnitzler story and the process of adapting it.

I don't know about internationally, but the Kindle edition is a mere £2.99 on UK Amazon, so that was a very easy impulse purchase.

Thanks for the tip-off!

[Mr Sausage]

Not the biggest fan of the movie, but I always took it as a version of The Dead, where a sudden glimpse in their partner of an entire other life, indeed erotic life, that long familiarity and self involvement had led the characters to believe wasn’t there, suddenly opens up before them. It’s not just the sex, but that the person you always thought you knew becomes suddenly someone else entirely before your eyes. That kind of thing can be quite destabilizing for certain people. And the powerful and privileged can be oddly brittle when it comes to feelings of security.

[Sloper]

It's not so much that Alice admits desire for the naval officer that rattles Bill as much as the fact that she tells him she was willing to leave him (and their daughter) if allowed one night of pleasure. This is a fairly damning statement that undermines Bill's sense of control. Bill's subsequent nighttime odyssey is really more about his desire to regain control than to simply engage in sex as a tit-for-tat.

I always took it as a version of The Dead, where a sudden glimpse in their partner of an entire other life, indeed erotic life, that long familiarity and self involvement had led the characters to believe wasn’t there, suddenly opens up before them. It’s not just the sex, but that the person you always thought you knew becomes suddenly someone else entirely before your eyes. That kind of thing can be quite destabilizing for certain people. And the powerful and privileged can be oddly brittle when it comes to feelings of security.

One of the most telling details is that Alice not only wanted to leave her husband for the naval officer, but that somehow in this moment she felt the most intense love for him as well. You would almost think this is a kind of sop to him, intended to reassure him, but it’s the opposite – it means that these thoughts are not separate from the loving marriage, they are part of it. I love the moment when Alice is at the kitchen table with the daughter, and she and Bill make eye-contact: she looks at him with real love and affection, but by the same token she is saying, ‘Now you know there is something else going on in parallel with moments like this.’ He looks quietly terrified.

In Schnitzler’s Dream Story, here is how the husband (Fridolin) reflects on his increasing sense of alienation after learning about his wife’s unknown inner life:

Strange how homeless, how rejected he felt […] [E]ver since his evening conversation with Albertine he had been moving away from the habitual sphere of his existence, into some other remote and unfamiliar world. […] [Fridolin] had the sense that all this order, balance and security in his life were really an illusion and a lie.

Fridolin’s would-be illicit encounters with women, as he wanders the streets at night, are described as being not so much ‘experiences’ but ‘enchantment[s] that must not gain power over him,’ or fever dreams induced by sickness. He is having to adjust to a new way of understanding both her desires and his own. When the wife (Albertine) describes her erotic dream, she is torn between two emotions:

‘[J]ust as that […] feeling of horror and shame transcended anything conceivable in a wakeful state, it would be equally hard to conceive of anything in normal conscious life that could equal the freedom, the abandon, the sheer bliss I experienced in that dream.’

Fridolin imagines taking revenge on her by replicating this conflict in his own life:

[T]he idea of betrayal, lying, infidelity and a bit of hanky-panky here and there, all under the noses of Marianne, Albertine, the good Dr Roediger, all the world – the thought of leading a kind of double life, of being at once a hard-working reliable progressive doctor, a decent husband, family man and father, and at the same time a profligate, seducer and cynic who played with men and women as his whim dictated – this prospect seemed to him at that moment peculiarly agreeable. […] [H]e thought of driving to some station, taking a train to wherever it might be and vanishing from the lives of everyone who knew him, to resurface somewhere overseas and begin a new life as someone else. […] True, such things happened very rarely, but they had been authenticated none the less. And in a milder form they were experienced by a great many people. What about when one awoke from dreams, for example? Of course, there one could remember … But there were also surly dreams which one forgot completely, of which nothing remained but some mysterious aura, some obscure bemusement.

He is overcome by the sense that real life is no longer real, that to live in the dream-world – a reality removed from this one – would somehow be more real.

So it is about ‘heteronormative expectations around desire and fidelity,’ except that I would replace ‘desire and fidelity’ with ‘relationships’ in general. Mr S’s comment about the brittle egos of the powerful is apt here, because part of what is being challenged is the nuclear family, the respectable bourgeois existence, and all the conventions that normally apply to a handsome well-to-do married couple who attend fashionable parties. One of those conventions, which I think Bill and Alice have always adhered to, is that they are still attracted to other people, and even flirt with them sometimes, but that even these flirtations throw into relief the essential strength and stability of the relationship. They'll come home, smoke a joint together, have sex, and everything will be fine. But the conversation takes a strange turn, and that strength and stability that start to disintegrate – it’s like learning that you have your high-powered, highly-paid job largely because of luck rather than talent, and that although you will never lose that job you also have a kind of tenuous hold on it; you don't really know what you're doing, and neither do your colleagues. We would all like to think we are comfortable with this kind of uncertainty, but in one way or another I think we all lie to ourselves the way Bill does.

This makes me think (because almost everything does) about Anna in L’avventura. There’s a moment, soon after she disappears, when Sandro says to Claudia, ‘At times it was as if our love for Anna – yours, mine, even her father’s – meant nothing to her.’ In a sense, Anna loved Sandro and missed him terribly during their three-month separation, but when they are reunited she says, ‘I don’t feel you anymore.’ He responds, crassly, by referring to the sex they've just had (‘Even last night, you didn’t feel me?’) and somehow this is what triggers her disappearance. She does what Alice and Bill fantasised about doing: she throws away all the relations and connections in her life and disappears to who-knows-where. Sandro and Claudia, like Bill in Eyes Wide Shut, then have to go on an odyssey of realisation about the fragility of their own desires. Sometimes they meant nothing to Anna; and now she will gradually come to mean nothing to them; and they will come to mean nothing to each other. Notice how Alice rejects that word 'forever' ('It frightens me') in her final conversation with Bill.

As in The Dead, this is partly about coming to terms with the ‘last end’, with mortality, but it’s also a deeper existential angst about how things change, and how we change with them. In Eyes Wide Shut, a film I despised when it came out and have since grown to love (mainly by seeing it through the eyes of my wife, who is a big Tom Cruise fan), I think a lot of it hinges on whether you understand why Bill breaks down and cries when he comes home and finds the mask on his pillow. He’s not crying because he’s afraid of Alice cheating on him, or because he almost cheated on her, but because of what he has realised about their relationship to each other and to the society they live in and depend upon (which is run by sociopathic masked millionaires). For me, that moment now feels very moving and authentic, in spite of the awkward dialogue and weird acting choices throughout the film.

[Matt]

Becoming a doctor was a common ambition in the Asian-American community, one many carried out, and making the ethnic difference (which is explicit in the original story, albeit with a Jewish doctor in an anti-semitic Austrian world) more pronounced would also play into the idea of assimilation as one aspect of desired social climbing, especially if it pits the idea of a “model minority” against the private vices of the upper echelons of society.

I'm intrigued by this idea. If Kubrick had made this a decade earlier, he could conceivably have cast John Lone, who was riding a modest wave of acclaim after Year of the Dragon, The Last Emperor, and The Moderns. And perhaps if Alice Harford remained a white woman, that might make Bill's sense of alienation even more acute.

At the same time, I think the movie already has a lot going on. There's a strong class dynamic in the film which is really not discussed much. Though the Harfords are well-off, they are nowhere near the social class of someone like Victor Ziegler, what we might now call the Epstein class. Throughout the film, Ziegler treats Bill Harford as something like an underling or longtime servant. Ziegler is polite and genial, yet also condescending, and you can tell he'd never accept Harford as an equal. Harford tries and fails to ingratiate himself into the upper class but also tries to slum with the lower classes—a sex worker, a gigging musician, a shop proprietor—and doesn't fit in there either. I think this social immobility, more so than a visible racial or ethnic difference, already mirrors Schnitzler's Vienna of the 1920s where bourgeois Jews would have been politely tolerated—but never truly accepted—by those at either the upper or lower echelons of society. I'm sure, as the Jewish son of a doctor father and an Austrian Jewish mother, Kubrick was keenly aware of this dynamic.

A racial difference would, as you say, make the difficulty (impossibility ?) of assimilation and acceptance more pronounced but might also threaten to pull all the weight of the story onto that dynamic and not on Harford's fantasies.

[hearthesilence]

Becoming a doctor was a common ambition in the Asian-American community, one many carried out, and making the ethnic difference (which is explicit in the original story, albeit with a Jewish doctor in an anti-semitic Austrian world) more pronounced would also play into the idea of assimilation as one aspect of desired social climbing, especially if it pits the idea of a “model minority” against the private vices of the upper echelons of society.

I'm intrigued by this idea. If Kubrick had made this a decade earlier, he could conceivably have cast John Lone, who was riding a modest wave of acclaim after Year of the Dragon, The Last Emperor, and The Moderns. And perhaps if Alice Harford remained a white woman, that might make Bill's sense of alienation even more acute.

At the same time, I think the movie already has a lot going on. There's a strong class dynamic in the film which is really not discussed much. Though the Harfords are well-off, they are nowhere near the social class of someone like Victor Ziegler, what we might now call the Epstein class. Throughout the film, Ziegler treats Bill Harford as something like an underling or longtime servant. Ziegler is polite and genial, yet also condescending, and you can tell he'd never accept Harford as an equal. Harford tries and fails to ingratiate himself into the upper class but also tries to slum with the lower classes—a sex worker, a gigging musician, a shop proprietor—and doesn't fit in there either. I think this social immobility, more so than a visible racial or ethnic difference, already mirrors Schnitzler's Vienna of the 1920s where bourgeois Jews would have been politely tolerated—but never truly accepted—by those at either the upper or lower echelons of society. I'm sure, as the Jewish son of a doctor father and an Austrian Jewish mother, Kubrick was keenly aware of this dynamic.

A racial difference would, as you say, make the difficulty (impossibility ?) of assimilation and acceptance more pronounced but might also threaten to pull all the weight of the story onto that dynamic and not on Harford's fantasies.

Absolutely, I don't disagree with any of this, and it's why I don't believe "settling" for Tom Cruise feels compromised even if the idea of an Asian-American lead feels promising. While the idea opens up a lot of possibilities, it does mean packing more into the film, and that does become a tricky balance, not unless Kubrick wanted to expand it into something like an epic. That creates other challenges, at which point, it may demand a completely different film.

The film is already rich and complex as-is. I can't remember if I posted this before, but one reason the film grew on me was age and life experience. I was still a student when I first saw the movie. I discussed it quite a bit with other students, and I don't recall any of them ever analyzing the elements I see in the film now about class status and social mobility. It's interesting because at the time, I had a lot of friends who were in pre-med, and it was kind of an open joke in school where if you're pre-med, you're not doing it because you want to heal the world or some other form of altruism - it was the ideal profession in terms of money, respect, i.e. class and social status, even if you weren't thinking explicitly of staking a claim in high society. And the pressures to pursue that were definitely there - I also remember friends in the arts and the talks some had from less supportive parents who were suggesting they study something else, talks ranging from genuine concern to material-driven cruelty. It was not unusual to be raised and even pressured (to varying degrees) to pursue life decisions based on money and prestige. All this was known, but I don't recall people digging that deeply into these issues either, possibly because one was either contemptuous or cynical enough that it dissuaded one from looking further or if one was onboard with these things (even with reluctance), digging into it with naked honesty (no pun intended) might've been an uncomfortable act of self-interrogation.

What helps with age is actually seeing people play out these ambitions in adulthood. Revisiting the film now, it's easy to see things that reflect that reality. You can see what Bill's profession brings to him and how it commands respect - when someone with power is in trouble, they come to him and it puts him on a pedestal in some ways. This is especially true when he sees these people do something he would never do (hard drugs, escorts, etc.) You do get a sense that this is a guy who led his life in a very specific way to get to this exalted place, and that extends to sexual repression. (Weed is probably his one allowance.) Plot-wise, there's an interesting tension that builds up after his wife confesses her carnal desires, and appropriately it makes the rest of the film move like a dream, as if he's walking through a manifestation of his fantasies and frustrations. But there are a moments where it all comes crashing down in reality. I got the impression this way a guy who was becoming more resentful that everyone else in this privileged world was somehow allowed to indulge in their vices and let their id run free when it was something he couldn't do to earn his place in upper class society. So you have these constant build ups where an opportunity presents itself, and it's so tantalizing he toys with it...but he's never "allowed" to go that far. It's not from lack of will, it's as if life won't allow it. When he finally decides to go all the way and commit adultery, who would've guessed

Spoiler

an HIV diagnosis

would stop it in its tracks? The implications are also tremendous when you consider he could have gone further earlier. Again, the logic of all this plays like a dream - it's not meant to be plausible as plot, it's like a push-pull inside his mind between what he wants to do and how he can't.

[beamish14]

I know it was criticized at the time, but Frederic Raphael's memoir about working with Kubrick on the
script of Eyes Wide Shut really is worth a read. Raphael doesn't shy away from talking about his
reservations about aspects of the original Schnitzler story and the process of adapting it.

Raphael comes across as an unbelievably pompous asshole in the book, but I never understood why Michael Herr and Diane Johnson were so upset about what he said about Kubrick. He clearly wasn’t his biggest fan, and collaborating with someone who was unbelievably neurotic and indecisive for a number of years was understandably very trying, despite the great paycheck he got out of it.

Kubrick always reminded me of John Hughes in that he had a real penchant for icing out collaborators and friends over seemingly minor issues and became increasingly insulated from the Hollywood machine

[JSC]

Raphael has always come off as glib, but I didn't really mind. I never got the impression from reading it that he
'hated' Kubrick or anything like that. And unlike Johnson and Herr he was a seasoned screenwriter with (as he
has confessed in interviews) very set ideas about how scripts should be structured.

[olmo]

I know it was criticized at the time, but Frederic Raphael's memoir about working with Kubrick on the
script of Eyes Wide Shut really is worth a read. Raphael doesn't shy away from talking about his
reservations about aspects of the original Schnitzler story and the process of adapting it.

Raphael comes across as an unbelievably pompous asshole in the book, but I never understood why Michael Herr and Diane Johnson were so upset about what he said about Kubrick. He clearly wasn’t his biggest fan, and collaborating with someone who was unbelievably neurotic and indecisive for a number of years was understandably very trying, despite the great paycheck he got out of it.

Kubrick always reminded me of John Hughes in that he had a real penchant for icing out collaborators and friends over seemingly minor issues and became increasingly insulated from the Hollywood machine

I think that there exists a tacit agreement between collaborators that their interactions stay private, certainly the Kubrick family were none too pleased about the book, regardless of its disparaging content.

[The Curious Sofa]

Discretion is not exactly one of the defining features of the autobiography.

[knives]

Not the biggest fan of the movie, but I always took it as a version of The Dead, where a sudden glimpse in their partner of an entire other life, indeed erotic life, that long familiarity and self involvement had led the characters to believe wasn’t there, suddenly opens up before them. It’s not just the sex, but that the person you always thought you knew becomes suddenly someone else entirely before your eyes. That kind of thing can be quite destabilizing for certain people. And the powerful and privileged can be oddly brittle when it comes to feelings of security.

I’m with you on this though I view it as closer to Bruno Schulz wherein fidelity is a Macguffin used to spin a thread on other themes.

[MichaelB]

Discretion is not exactly one of the defining features of the autobiography.

George Cole tried to be discreet in his, and sadly the result is one of the most boring books I've ever read. He even apologises for the lack of gossip and scandal towards the end, explaining that it isn't his style.

(I picked up that and Ernest Borgnine's autobiography more or less simultaneously as 99p Kindle deals, and so read them back to back. Borgnine's was not discreet!)

[Mr Sausage]

I imagine a discrete autobiography to be like those interviews where the interviewee says something like "Oh my god, you'll never believe how badly this famous person acted! I'll tell you [the interviewer] all the details after the show." Only at book length.

I remember when Lena Dunham's memoir came out everyone was criticizing it for being self-absorbed. And that's such a puzzling thing to say. I mean, if ever there were a time to be self-absorbed! All the best ones are self-absorbed from Augustine and Cellini on down.

That said, there is one exception to this rule: Gregor von Rezzori's Snows of Yesteryear is a beautiful autobiography of the author's childhood in which he spends almost no time talking about himself. It's all deeply sensitive portraits of his family and the hired help. The author disappears into the background for long stretches. You get a sense of a man with little to say about himself but who was very interested in others. Genuine exception to the rule.

[beamish14]

Discretion is not exactly one of the defining features of the autobiography.

George Cole tried to be discreet in his, and sadly the result is one of the most boring books I've ever read. He even apologises for the lack of gossip and scandal towards the end, explaining that it isn't his style.

(I picked up that and Ernest Borgnine's autobiography more or less simultaneously as 99p Kindle deals, and so read them back to back. Borgnine's was not discreet!)

I worked at a Borders Books and we hosted a signing with Borgnine. He stayed for about a third of the agreed-upon signing length and then peeled out of the parking lot in his new Mercedes, which was a bit concerning, as he was in his 90’s by that point.

Shelley Winters had so much shit to share that she needed two volumes of autobiography. Dirk Bogarde had, what, five?

[JSC]

For my money Harpo Speaks! is still one of the most entertaining and enjoyable autobiographies.
Unlike Groucho's various books which felt as if he needed to continue to speak in character, Harpo
appears like the warm and approachable person he must've been to those who knew him. As if he went
through his entire life with that happy-go-lucky smile on his face.