Here’s a long-overdue link to Eve Tushnet’s latest post on Eyes Wide Shut, a film we’ve been discussing for a while now. In it she clarifies her take on the character (or lack thereof) of the Harford’s daughter Helena (it’s not that she thinks there’s some sort of crucial moral or religious component lent a marriage by the children it produces, but basically that if you show a kid in act one, it better go off by act three), as well as the difference between her sin-based approach to Bill’s misadventures and my guilt/shame-based ones (sin accounts for the possibility of redemption, so an ending where that isn’t wrestled with is disappointing; shame doesn’t, so it isn’t).
Here’s the thing, though, and this just occurred to me as I was driving back from the oil change place: Doesn’t Helena play a major, if subtle, role in the film’s denouement? As I’m fond of pointing out, there are no accidents in Stanley Kubrick films, and the final scene of this one takes place in a toy store where the Harfords are shopping for and with their daughter. The part she plays in their rapprochement doesn’t get spelled out, of course, but setting the scene in this environment Kubrick appears to be saying that their marriage has produced something that will out-last and out-love the temptations and degredations Bill has come across. Right? I remember thinking that the setting gave Alice’s final prescription for their marriage’s woes–“Fuck”–an extra, naughty, earthy frisson, and that wouldn’t have been the case if the scene took place in the self-help section at Barnes & Noble.
To shift gears to the not safe for work portion of this post, Eve also links to critic and sock-puppeteer Lee Siegel’s take on the film. Siegel argues that the sequences in which Dr. Bill pictures his wife in flagrante with her sailor fantasy-man are the most erotic in the film; Eve disagrees, and I’m with her:
…I didn’t find the Alice-fantasy scenes erotic at all. The black-and-white felt cliched; the whole thing did. That actually worked for me–I’m thinking that jealous fantasies, like most projections of the self onto the beloved, are usually cliched.
That about nails it. (The sailor was in his dress whites, for pete’s sake!)
Looking back, I find Eyes Wide Shut to be a very sexy film (beautiful, nude women are beautiful, nude women), but not a very erotic one–and that’s fine, for all the reasons I’ve enumerated before. There is one exception, though, and I’m wondering what exactly it is that makes it so. Why is it that in a film chock full of images like these…
…the most (indeed, perhaps the only) truly arousing scene looks like this?
Dr. Bill’s encounter with Sally, the roommate of the prostitute named Domino he met early in the film, is hot. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in my case it’s the only scene in the film that elicited the physical response sex scenes are supposed to elicit, with nary a nipple in sight. At least one other friend of mine reported the same basic reaction to the scene. Why? It’s probably a vain exercise to try to nail down or (over)analyze–you know hot stuff when you see it. But if we’re going to be all close-reading about it, this is probably the only sexual encounter Dr. Bill has that’s spontaneous. It’s certainly “casual,” to use the pejorative term applied to sex without emotional commitment, but there’s nothing cold or transactional (or illegal, for that matter) about it. Bill and Sally have chemistry–even without watching the scene again I can still hear her sultry breathing and speaking as they slowly-but-speedily melt into a touch-but-not-too-much clinch. And I think the chemistry comes from the fact that, however little, Bill and Sally have to work for it. She’s not a prostitute whose services he can purchase, let alone a child prostitute offered as a gift by her father, let alone a masked and dehumanized orgy participant served as a party favor. However you may feel about her seeming readiness to hit the sack with a total stranger who’s actually there to see her roommate, it’s a decision she’s making with her mind and her body, not a customer-service decision. She’s a woman, which is to say she’s a person.
The fact that so many of the other sexual encounters in the film lack that resultant heat has a moral dimension.
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Postscript: While digging up images for this post I came across a wonderful essay on the film by Reverse Shot’s Michael Koresky. Koresky puts a little too much stock in the role Bill’s profession plays in the film, I think (some of that is there, but I think ‘Doctor’ is mainly a talismanic title connoting privilege and power here–he could easily have been called ‘Sir’ or ‘Prince’). But a) he give the business in a big way to American Beauty, a film that deserves a kick in the junk whenever it is possible to dole one out (“The closest it comes to a moral insight is that it answers the ‘To fuck or not to fuck the teen virgin?’ debate with a conciliatory ‘No!'”; b) he calls out the film’s use of the uncanny, and amen to that; c) he says this:
A common criticism leveled against Kubrick