Sony G90 manual Ic in this context in cloud cuckooland, with their, Food-storage room

Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut

. . . . . . . . .

yes Wide Shut is one of those films that has the main-

stream movie reviewers (I don’t dare use the word crit-

ic in this context) in cloud cuckooland, with their

assessments reading more like Rorshachs than having much

to do with Stanley Kubrick’s last film. If you’ve seen the pic-

ture, reading the reviews can be a bucket of fun, especially if

you have an idea of what’s really going on in the film.

First of all, Eyes is a horror movie, and has more in com-

mon with The Shining than with any other Kubrick opus.

The Shining failed, finally, because Kubrick never success-

fully connected the ghost story with his hero’s descent into

madness. He is far too literal a director to hurl himself with

abandon into the conventions of a ghost story. And so you

get two-thirds of a great movie that, for all practical pur-

poses, ends when the “ghosts” let Jack Torrance out of the

food-storage room.

What The Shining is really about is the fragility of the

family and its susceptibility to attack. It fails because Kubrick

cannot correlate Jack Torrance’s inner demons with those

that exist independently of him or are functions of his own

subconscious projections. The Overlook Hotel represents the

ghosts of the past, and the ghost in Torrance’s past is the bot-

tle, which, of course, the ghosts are quick to provide (in the

form of Jack Daniel’s). The drinks, we may assume, are not

real, but the alcoholism – or its root cause – is, since it

unleashes his inner demons.

In Eyes, the family is once again under attack. And the

trigger is, once again, an external one – the wife (Kidman),

whose confession of a passing crush unleashes her

foursquare (doctor, played by Cruise) husband’s demons of

sexual jealousy and sends him on an Odyssey through New

York’s sexual underworld – a demimonde depicted in cool,

stylized, and, at its core, highly ritualized fashion. His preda-

tory curiosities, once evoked, threaten both him and his fam-

ily. Kubrick once again fails, and by a wider margin than he

did in The Shining, to correlate his mythic hero’s journey into

the underworld of the subconscious with the externals of his

life as we are shown them.

Making the connection with The Shining explicit,

Kubrick films a party sequence near the opening in much the

same fashion (and exactly the same colors) as he did the

haunted Ballroom sequences of the Overlook; he even plays

some of the same music. The party’s host is Sidney Pollack,

playing a corrupt Manhattan patient of Cruise; Pollack’s avun-

cular manner notwithstanding, he serves the function of

Charon in Cruise’s journey to the far shores of Hades. And it

is he who, toward the film’s end, will try to explain away much

of what has threatened Cruise as a “charade.”

The film’s central tableaux is a ceremonial sexual rite

(set in a mansion in Glen Cove, Long Island, which drew

huge laughs at the local theater) and it is more frightening

than anything in The Shining – with the possible exception

of the baseball bat sequence. All of the guests – Cruise

being the party crasher who is about to be exposed – are

dressed in cloaks and masks and resemble nothing less

than an army of commendatori from Amadeus. The music,

the chanting, the sepulchral spaces, and the mechanical,

stylized sexual couplings all suggest sexuality run rampant,

that is, sexuality without feeling. (One has to look no fur-

ther than the S&M community for insight on how the trap-

pings of sex become a substitute for love.) And sexuality

without love, that is, outside the family, Kubrick views with

p.c. heterosexual suspicion.

This sequence surely wasn’t meant to be pornographic or

sexy; it strips bare the intellectual threadbareness of the

MPAA and its consummate white-bread (and childish) fear of

sex. What Kubrick suggests, I would argue, is that this form of

sex is a form of death and that is why it was without anima-

tion – there was no need to cover up the soft-core behavior of

the mannequins. What the scene reveals is both the charac-

ter’s and the director’s fear of death, as represented by the

death of love. Indeed, what could be more explicit than the

offer of a young woman to stand in Cruise’s place once he is

discovered and about to be sentenced to death? She saves

him, and the next day he learns that she is really dead. Cruise,

of course, is way out of his depth here. He is surrounded by

vampires and he’s incapable, Top Gun-style, of showing the

slightest bit of fear (the horror of a big shot looking weak!).

Nor can he suggest layers of depth within the repressed doc-

tor, much less the presence of lusty subconscious urges; he

flirts more with a gay hotel clerk – a wonderful bit by Alan

Cumming of Cabaret – than with anyone else in the film, prob-

ably because he can be playful in this scene, freed from the

darker depths Kubrick may have wanted him to explore.

The ending is particularly unsatisfying. In a long, badly

played, clumsily staged scene, the Pollack character tries to

explain away the happenings of the evening before and the

threats on Cruise’s life as part of the stylized goings-on.

Instead of being ambiguously disturbing, it is just a mess, leav-

ing the audience to wonder. (Certain disturbing things are left

unaccounted for, including an explanation of how the mask

Cruise wore to the ball turns up on the pillow next to his

sleeping wife.) Whether the goings-on where real or a dream

–and they are played straight – the final word of the film,

uttered by Kidman, suggests the solution for the couple is to

go home and “fuck.”