‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Isn’t About Sex
Have you ever wondered why Eyes Wide Shut, a film originally released in the middle of July, is set during Christmastime? It has been 25 years since that July, but this question, like so many that surround the film, remains unanswered. Despite dying six days after screening the final cut, director and co-writer Stanley Kubrick was directly involved in the film’s marketing, leaving instructions shortly before his death that made sure as few details as possible were revealed in the run up to its release. Maybe the decision to make Eyes Wide Shut a Christmas film was entirely arbitrary? But that doesn’t add up. After all, this is a Stanley Kubrick movie.
Ostensibly, Eyes Wide Shut is about sex. It centers on a WASPish, well-to-do Manhattan couple, Doctor Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman). They head to a ball hosted by Bill’s high-powered client, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), and soon break off into separate flirtations – Alice with an aristocratic Hungarian and Bill with two English models. When Bill is called to a private room upstairs, he finds Ziegler with a naked prostitute named Mandy (Julienne Davis), who is overdosing on a combination of cocaine and heroin. After saving her life, Bill promises Ziegler that what happened will stay between them. “My lips are sealed.”
The next evening, Bill and Alice smoke a joint and discuss the party. Soon enough they’re arguing, and Alice asks Bill why he never gets jealous. He tells her that he trusts her, and she laughs at him. She then reveals that, while on a vacation, she caught sight of an attractive naval officer in a hotel lobby, and felt such desire that she would have left Bill and their young daughter in order to spend just one night with him.
It is this revelation that sets Bill off on an odyssey around New York City – visiting the home of a patient, then the home of a prostitute (before Alice interrupts with a phone call), and a Greenwich Village bar – culminating in the film’s famous set piece in which he gatecrashes a masquerade ball-style orgy. Here, a woman wearing nothing but a mask and panties tells him to leave. When Bill is exposed as an imposter, she offers herself as some kind of sacrifice instead. Later on she winds up dead, and Bill visits the morgue. It’s Mandy, the woman he saved from an overdose at Ziegler’s party. This time the drugs killed her, or so say the doctors.
Eventually Bill is invited to Ziegler’s house, and discovers that his wealthy client was at the orgy. Ziegler warns Bill to keep quiet about what has happened. The people involved are powerful and dangerous. “If I told you their names,” says Ziegler, “I don’t think you would sleep so well.” Again, Bill keeps his lips sealed. He eventually tells Alice everything, and famously, in the film’s last line, she tells him what they should do next: “Fuck.”
Most readings of Eyes Wide Shut center on its psychological implications. Bill, upon discovering his wife’s secret desire, journeys into the depths of his own sexuality. It doesn’t seem to make any difference to Bill that Alice’s unfaithfulness is merely a fantasy. The idea of it rocks the faith he had in his marriage. He realizes that fidelity has its limits and that there are parts of Alice, as well as himself, that it is necessary to hide. At the end of the film, the couple seem to draw a line, to find some kind of acceptance about these secret realities.
But a purely psychological reading fails to account for the specific strangeness of their marriage. During the cannabis-infused argument in the bedroom, Alice asks what Bill thinks about when he feels the breast of an attractive client. Bill responds by asserting his professionalism, and adds ‘women don’t think like that’ – a comment that reveals a surprising level of ignorance about female sexuality. Up to this point, a number of scenes have depicted Alice naked, or framed in mirrors. The opening shot shows her peeling off a dress and stripping nude. But her confession switches the dynamic. Suddenly, all her agency is unleashed. To us – and to Bill – she is no longer just an object of voyeuristic pleasure. Women do indeed think like that.
In the first scene, while sitting on the toilet, Alice asks her husband how she looks. “Perfect,” he says. “You’re not even looking at me,” she replies. He turns to her and tells her she looks beautiful. “You always look beautiful.” When they arrive at Ziegler’s party, the first thing their host does is compliment Alice’s appearance. Later that evening, we learn that she is out of work, having previously run an art gallery that went bust. This is a marriage with a traditional dynamic: the man is the breadwinner.
After the party, a naked Alice removes her earrings in the mirror. Bill comes over and begins caressing her. They kiss, but then, in an image similar to the film’s main poster, she turns and looks at her reflection. Bill is absorbed in his desire, but what about Alice? This, and everything else we have learned about the couple so far, suggests an imbalance of power in their relationship. It’s as if Alice’s job is, in Bill’s words, to ‘always look beautiful’.
All of this takes on a darker resonance when we consider the orgy. Bill’s complicit silence after Mandy’s overdose at Ziegler’s party is echoed in his complicity when she is killed later on. The secret society is murderous and exploitative. They kill with impunity, using human life as a prop in a gratuitous, ceremonial sacrifice. But they have been allowed to exist by a world where limitless wealth can lead to unbridled power. They represent the extreme version of the inequality we have seen throughout the film. We see it with Mandy and Ziegler at the party, but, when you think about it, so many of Bill’s encounters are with people worse off than he is: the taxi driver (in front of whom Bill rips a hundred dollar bill in half), the maître d’, the costume seller, the hotel clerk, the waitress in the diner, his friend the piano player Nick Nightingale (whose work demands he barely see his family), Domino the prostitute (who we later find out has been diagnosed with HIV). Bill’s relationships with these people are transactional. Even Ziegler is a client, not an actual friend. Throughout the film, Bill is associated with money. His name is a synonym for cash. And this brings us to the question of why the film is set during Christmas time. In a film full of transactions, where money corrupts every relationship, it is fitting to set it at a time of heightened consumerism. Of all Christmas movies, Stanley Kubrick’s might be the most cynical.
All this serves a purpose. Prostitution – the commodification of human flesh – is everywhere in this film. It is not just confined to the orgy: the inequality and exploitation we see there does not exist in a vacuum. It permeates every level of society. As we have seen, even the Harford home isn’t free from these dynamics. And when we see toys on Domino’s bed, where she sleeps with men for money, we can’t help but to think of Helena, the Harfords’s young daughter.
Every time you watch Eyes Wide Shut, you see something new. Kubrick conveys his meaning with details, drawing parallels between scenes and characters. He doesn’t spoon feed, or hand us pre-packaged, neatly wrapped ideas. The effect is subtle, but that’s the point. If we analyze the film in purely psychological terms, we fall for the sleight of hand. We fail to see what is so clearly there, watching a sex film rather than an indictment of an inherently corrupt society. We stay blind to the conditions that surround us. Our eyes are wide shut.
Written by Declan O’Reilly
You can find more of this writer’s work at Declan O’Reilly Portfolio.
Very powerful. I love digging my nails into a Kubrick movie and getting to the core of it