This is, er, the 326th Epinion on Eyes Wide Shut, unless someone hits "Publish" on their new one before I finish. Reviews can serve two purposes, and for a few paragraphs (after the first row of asterisks) I'll serve any audience who has heard very little about Eyes Wide Shut, has clicked on _my_ review, and wants to know just enough to decide whether to watch it or not. Hi, audience! I will try to make this part of my review as perfectly-good as anyone's, because it's an important task and, indeed, the one Epinions nominally exists to serve.
In practice, of course, we're mostly geeks who discuss things to death. So after the second asterisks, I'll spoil Eyes Wide Shut's surprises. That's because, if I have anything original to say -- and my brain can handle issues pretty weirdly, so I might -- it is to the people who saw the movie and disliked it. I liked the movie, in a visceral, "Hey, this is a neat movie!" sort of way; but I also found lots to doubt. Here will be the defenses I thought of, in a curmudgeonly, realism-seeking, non-Stanley-Kubrick-worshipping way.
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Eyes Wide Shut stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a monogamous couple who've been married for nine years. At least we'll see them tell each other they're monogamous, after the opening scene, and we can perhaps accept its truth. True, the movie opened with Cruise and Kidman apart at a luxurious party. We've just seen Kidman spending a happy, drunk hour dancing very closely to a self-consciously suave Hungarian seductor. But she does -- giggly, yet insistently -- reject his advances on the grounds of being married. And true, we've just seen Cruise being hit on by two models, and seeming pretty happy to let them; but he is a doctor, Dr. Bill, and he is called away from the models by the party's host to bring a naked woman back from near death after she'd ingested cocaine with heroin. So neither of them cheated on each other.
Kidman's problem, in her hungover but alert state, is that she doesn't see why Bill should deny being jealous of the Hungarian man. Further, she doesn't see why Bill should sound so confident that she'd reject all non-Bill advances. Bill acknowledges -- when faced with Kidman's overstatement of his views, after a tricky discussion -- that basically, yes, he thinks men are lust-driven dogs, while women's lusts are tied to security and long-term commitment. And Kidman tells him, in disturbingly alive detail, about the night at a vacation cabin where, if she'd had the chance, she would have tossed away their marriage and their daughter for one night with a guy who glanced at her. She admits she still thinks of him, and buddy, you can tell she does.
This is a good truth to mention if you're out to win an argument. This is a good truth to mention if you're annoyed with your husband (who was, after all, getting pretty googly-eyed last night) and want to shock him. Not all truths are best spoken in the name of preserving faithful marriages, however. Bill begins to dwell heavily on his wife's felt unfaithfulness, and on scarier revelations she heaps on him later. It turns out that Bill's thoughts no longer weigh in favor of the Monogamy = Good equation he'd imagined before.
But he's a guy who couldn't even, in that same conversation, admit that "so the only reason you didn't want to fuuck those girls was out of consideration for me, right?". The movie unfolds as a psychological thriller, about how a couple deals with unwanted desires, uncertain trusts, and a little too much knowledge of each other's subconscious. When I call it a "psychological thriller", I don't mean there's no body count; but the body count won't keep you watching, either. The main action is in watching Bill deal with having his whole simple worldview toppled, and all his willing compromises in its name exposed to light; or, rather, to darkness.
A quick word, before I leave the newcomers to the movie behind, about Tom Cruise as Bill: he is miscast. (Kidman is excellent, though.) Could a young man these days really think women are free of random lusts, that women only treat sex as the price of security? Yes, I'd argue in a general sense: _a_ man could. It's a common belief for male teenagers; I pretty much believed it, as did my friends. It's easy to believe, for most teen boys, because
1. There's some, partial, limited truth to it.
2. There's still a strong social cost for a precollege girl to have sex in any situation other than a secure relationship. The ideology of Good Girls Don't is still alive in high schools, and restricts what girls talk about in male presence. And most crucially,
3. For most teen boys, it's absolutely true that girls won't have random, let's-just-get-busy lusts for them. Most teen girls want the same 10% of the guys they know, and my friends and I weren't in that 10%. For us, sex _was_ something we hoped some gal would relent to someday. For us, other people's girlfriends were loyal beyond question.
I can imagine that a normal-looking man with no female just-friends, and with a long relationship or two to replace a lot of dating, might still believe that if he provides well, his wife will be free of extra lust. Tom Cruise, though? He was surely disabused of the notion by the time he was 13. I mean, really.
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So remember, here's where I should probably only be talking to folks who've watched the movie, or to those who definitely won't. The review'll still be here if you need to go rent it first.
The central and defining scene of the movie isn't the one where Dr. Bill first visits a prostitute, although actually that scene was almost sweet. Nor the scene where the owner of a costume shop threatens to call the cops on the two men he catches sexing up his teenage daughter, but eventually decides to charge the men cash and let them fulfill his daughter's desires. That scene was part rebuttal of the "women don't lust just for fun" notion, and part comic relief: a celebration of the free market at work.
The central scene, of course, is the orgy that Dr. Bill crashes. A hundred men in spooky masks say their passwords and enter a cathedral-ish hall. The pipe organ plays ominous music as they perform rituals. A hundred naked women, also masked, stand around, and later writhe with the men, or occasionally with each other. It's the least erotic orgy of well-built people in cinematic history, and obviously meant to be, given the music, heavy on thundering bass notes playing minor seconds (which is very effective during the orgy scene, I think, but gets skull-drillingly redundant over the next hour and a half).
It's a freaky scene, with the camera catching the size, the overbudgeted-church elegance, the Masonic-temple secretive significance, and the interchangeability of the people. Dr. Bill watches; he is indentified as an outsider (pretty easy, since he has a cab waiting in a parking lot crammed with limos); he is threatened with death. Perhaps one of the women, who mysteriously seems to know him, dies to save him. Perhaps she pretends to. Definitely he is followed. Definitely he is told that many of New York City's most important men are in this club, and that he'd really, really better not talk about it.
Here is where viewers, including me, tend to go "huh?". The masked orgy is an amazing set of visuals, but. Does anyone actually believe such a cult could exist? Well, no. I've seen the movie defended as "dreamlike", but to me that's a copout. This is a serious movie about desire and secrets, yet its central assumption, about the desires people have and the secrets they're actually keeping, doesn't convince anyone. Eyes Wide Shut makes me believe Dr. Bill would want this orgy, but if it can't make me believe the orgy's there for him to find, it's failing.
But. Let's examine. _Why_ shouldn't we believe NYC's leaders are staging masked orgies, and threatening to kill anyone who tells?
First, the answer is _not_ that the ritual is too strange. Religious cults of the powerful have been much weirder. Inca and Aztec cults, during degenerate phases, involved masks, sex, and mass human sacrifice. Many tribal and cult religions have authorized orgies for powerful men, often with no choice of involvement on the women's behalf (Eyes Wide Shut offers several pieces of evidence that the women in the orgy were hired, not there for fun). Equally bizarre but less spooky rituals have been a common part of human life; I'm currently reading an account of a 1938 boys' summer camp where Happy Points and Black Marks, ritual beatings and ritual abandonment of new campers in the woods at night, are all as regular as the ghost stories handed down in the same manner at the same time every year. I've never played football, but from what I hear, I've missed any number of rituals as unpleasant and pointless as the distractions from sex in Shut's cult.
Second, the answer is not that powerful men don't bond in embarrassing ways. For mundane examples, look at popular high school athletes of legend: the Spur Posse in California, or the circle jerks and shared girlfriends documented in Bernard Lefkowitz's Our Guys: the Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of a Perfect Suburb. For high-level examples, every recent U.S. president except Carter has attented a secret (but several-times-exposed) annual summer-camp retreat in the woods of California, full of everything from amateur drama and Boy Scout-y contests to cross-dressing and speeches by Henry Kissinger. I can't verify any of this myself, but if the International Jewish Conspiracy ever does manage to take over the world, I'll let you know what rituals we invent.
Third, the answer is not that people won't kill to protect embarrassing secrets. Watch Law and Order for details. See how many journalists were killed by Augusto Pinochet or Jacobo Arbenz for trying to tell government secrets. Conspiracy-minded souls can read Robert Anton Wilson's evidence that Bill Clinton, for twenty years, conveniently killed people who were about to expose his slightly scandalous activities. Don't believe him? Fine, but it's a matter of public record that when Clinton's impeachment trial started, he provoked Saddam Hussein to kick out the U.N. inspectors, then bombed several Iraqi cities. A few hundred innocent people died so Clinton's embarrassment would receive less attention. Should we forgive him because he couldn't pronounce his victims' names?
No. The reason we don't believe Shut's orgy cult is that there's no need for it. Powerful men in the United States can get sex from willing women, hide it from their wives, and usually expect their wives to pretend they are, in fact, unaware. Powerful men know, as surely as Tom Cruise knows, that many women like sex; they learn to exploit it relatively openly. If they want an orgy, they may have to buy an orgy, but there's tens of thousand of millionaires in the U.S. these days, and how the heck _do_ you run through a million dollars? There's no need for passwords. The first rule of Sex Club is, who needs Sex Club?
So here, then, is my thesis: that it's not Stanley Kubrick's fault that he couldn't make the movie in the mid-19th century, when it would have made perfect sense.
Before I explain this, I allow an objection:
Q: Couldn't he have set the movie in 1849 and used 1849 costumes?
A: By Screen Actors' Guild regulations, he'd have had to make Ralph Fiennes and Emma Thompson the leads. Emma is a wonderful actress, but no one wants to see her naked backside, or her tits, or the tits of her body double. Nor does anyone want to hear her fantasizing about "f---ing hundreds of men".
Q: A lot of people think Gwyneth Paltrow is cute, though.
A: That doesn't solve the real problem, namely, that this movie needs the audience of 1849. This is supposed to be a deeply shocking movie, and it's artfully shot and richly imagined, and it deserves to shock. But we're the wrong people to try it on.
So what do I mean, then, anyway? I mean this. In the 19th century, it was absolutely accepted by men and women alike that sex was something only men wanted. Doctors didn't believe women had orgasms, and that was fine, because at least in the company of men, they usually didn't. "Separate spheres" was the principle of sex relations: men talked about sports and politics and beer and history, women talked about, oh, who cared really. Women did not get to join the men. Virginity at marital engagement was expected, and while no data confirm its frequency, we do know that a very small fraction of births (10% or less) occurred less than nine months after marriage.
Men did want sexual outlets, oh yes. In many large and/or growing cities, there was about one prostitute per ten men; unless we assume that prostitutes were strictly monogamous, we must figure that several times 1/10 of the men were hiring them now and then. At the same time, powerful men caught having affairs were far more likely than now to be ruined, and divorce was extremely rare.
It's true that women seem to have wanted sexual outlets. The correspondence of the era's wealthiest or most literary females contains lots and lots of references, friend-to-friend, of the receiving friend's lips, breasts, thighs, etc. Lesbianism was not a concept, but then, neither was a man's obligation to be a good lover, and it seems like women improvised. But they didn't admit it openly, not even to themselves; the inter-female love letters rarely contain even a hint of self-consciousness. The men, like Dr. Bill, assumed their desires were dirty, and typically either abstained from fun (as opposed to married) sex, or violated the law to get it. (For more information I recommend John D'Emilio's book Intimate Matters.)
The result? For a movie and an audience set then, Dr. Bill's naivete makes perfect sense. Kidman's fantasies, particularly the romanticism of the man at the resort, make sense. The prostitute scene is mundane realism. The cult fills a real demand (sex on the sly), gives numerical support in a real cause (feeling less dirty), gives religious ritual for a real reason (to justify sin), and has a real need to maintain secrecy (a divorce or other public exposure could ruin a man). In other words, the story, _as a consideration of human nature_, is not absurd.
Does that make Eyes Wide Shut a good movie? No, but it lets us treat its insights as possibly valid. I like its warnings about perfect honesty. I think its ultimate conservatism is cute, how all the plot's shock value turns into an argument for monogamy. I also enjoyed watching it. If I thought its insights were deeper and newer, I'd agree that it's one of the great movies of its decade. As is, I still recommend the sucker.
Stanley Kubrick s daring last film is many things. It is a compelling psychosexual journey. A haunting dreamscape. A riveting tale of suspense. A majo...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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