Eve Tushnet, one of my favorite bloggers in the world, has just posted a review of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Among other things it links to my old essay arguing that the film is a horror movie with the violence replaced by sex, with which Eve agrees. However, she’s much less impressed with the movie overall than I was/am: “Deep on the outside; shallow within” is her final verdict. To counter her two specific objections, briefly:
1) “How are its protagonists changed by the end? What have their experiences cost them? I can’t think of anything.” Well, they’re not dead or divorced (yet, in the latter case, to bring up at least one post-credits possibility). But those aren’t the only options. To return to the horror framework, we can consider Bill and Alice Harford (but mostly Bill) to be this film’s “final girl.” Sure, he survived, but I challenge you to listen to the way he sobs “I’ll tell you everything,” or see the red eyes of his wife after he does so, or listen to that sadder and wiser conversation they have at the toy store in the film’s final scene, and say nothing has changed for them. (For an example of a character who truly doesn’t change, and is therefore to be considered evil, see Ziegler.)
PS: With regards to their daughter, the absence of any major plot points concerning which was a big sticking point for Eve, I just didn’t think she played a particularly relevant part in their erotic and sexual lives. Given what I know to be Eve’s political and philosophical bedrock, I can see why this might strike her as a lacuna; given my own sexual outlook, it didn’t.
2) Blockquote time:
the strictures of Hollywood stardom (maybe?) required that Kidman never get quite as naked as her female cohorts. So we see them from the front, but she’s only naked from the back. That difference reinforces the sense already invited by the movie’s ending: There are good girls and bad girls. Good girls shouldn’t be cheated on, even in your head, and you should have sex with them and display their nudity tastefully from the back. Bad girls may get killed and raped and even photographed in full-frontal, and your only responsibility is to avoid them. No guilt attaches to you if you leave them to be destroyed.
In all fairness, you do see Nic’s boobies, albeit nothing below the waist as far as the front is concerned. So let’s call that a draw. Do I think there’s supposed to be a distinction being drawn between Alice and the orgy girls in that regard? Yes, now that Eve brings it up, probably. But that fits the demented fairy-tale logic of plot and character witnessed throughout the rest of the film. If Bill is our focalizer here, it stands to reason that if the mere suggestion that his wife once wanted to fuck a sailor is enough to send him off on a long dark night of the soul, we’re not going to be seeing her bush anytime soon.
But the dichotomy is one of how Bill views the women in his life, not how we should view them. Again, I definitely don’t think we’re supposed to feel that Bill had no responsibility to the woman at the orgy (or Leelee Sobieski, for that matter) other than “to avoid them,” nor that he was untouched by guilt over what befell them thanks to his unwillingness to do anything about it. In an ideal/real world he’d have called the cops the next day, but in the dream logic of the film, he woke up, and by then it’s too late to go back and rescue characters from your nightmare.