Til Death Do Us Part IV

Series so far here 

Alice Harford is alone in a crowd. She is drunk. She is bored. She is annoyed at her husband Bill for ignoring her. Every year, he brings her to this party where she doesn't know anyone, and now he's ditched her to hang out with his old college buddy. She can't bring herself to say these things; not yet, anyway. What she wants right now is a way to act these feelings out. The movie provides her with one.

As we dissolve into the shot, the camera is already moving. It circles around Alice, beginning on her left. The movement is both precise and casual. It's a dance partner stepping in time with the beat; it's a predator lazily spiraling in on prey with no exit. Alice herself can't seem to stand still. She's unconsciously swaying and flittering, the champagne melting the mask and revealing her desire to be elsewhere. Kubrick shows us how she feels: surrounded by light. Curtains of lights framing tempting tunnels. Rainbow stars of lights exploding behind her eyelids when she blinks. Lights gathered together to imitate a tree, like the Christmas tree waiting at home, Helena with her angel wings on top. Alice is trembling out of her clothes, out of her skin. As the camera completes its circuit, her face disappears. We're seeing her from behind, like we did in the opening shot of the movie. She could be anyone now. Anyone she wants to be. 

The camera stops moving. It has arrived at its destination: the man to Alice's right. He was the predator slowly stalking her. His gaze has come home. Alice feels it. She sets her glass down on the table between them. Her wedding ring glitters on her other hand: off to the left side of the frame, at the corner of his vision and ours, if we care to look at it.

Is Alice simply setting down her glass, or is she offering it to her new suitor? Her arm flutters close to him as it descends; she sets it down directly between them. This might be a flirtation, or it might not. It's impossible to tell, because we're seeing it happen from behind. If we were still seeing Alice head-on, we could read her facial expression and judge her intention. But the camera steadily, gracefully brought us to a position of ignorance. We're left with signs and symbols to interpret. Alice's new suitor interprets her signal with gusto.

"I think that's my glass."

"Oh, I'm absolutely certain of it."

He drains it dry. Slowly, with satisfaction. He would drink of you as deeply. As he lowers the glass, their eyes meet, and the band begins playing a different tune. "I'm in the Mood for Love." And so she is.

Sandor Szavost is the ultimate lothario. He's Casanova; he's Don Juan. He's a smooth talker who just can't seem to turn off the charm. His accent is mellifluous, his countenance is pleasingly craggy. He's old enough to be experienced, but not too old to act on it. If you had to invent a man to tempt a bored housewife, you would invent Sandor. He's explicitly an archetype on loan from Old Europe, haunting America like a ghost:

"My name is Sandor Szavost. I'm Hungarian."

"My name is Alice Harford. I'm American."

This dynamic is central to Eyes Wide Shut: the old world v. the new. It's built into the making of the movie, a 1990s American adaptation of a 1920s Austrian novella. You can read this conversation as a metaphor for Kubrick's relationship to the source text:

My name is Arthur Schnitzler. I'm Austrian.

My name is Stanley Kubrick. I'm American.

The duality is reinforced by the cut between the two lines. As with the opening shots of the film, Kubrick is showing us two perspectives at play. The camera circled around Alice until she was anonymous, signaling a change in self-image that would allow her to flirt with this man. The cut snaps her mask back into place. It's her sudden self-awareness, reflected in the film form: she looks at herself differently, and so does the camera. Alice drops her hand and looks nervous. Now she remembers her name, which is also her husband's.

"Delighted to meet you, Alice. Did you ever read the Latin poet Ovid on the art of love?"

Is Kubrick pretentious for making references like this? I think that even if the allusion is unfamiliar, you can pick up on how it contributes to the unfolding character drama. Put aside the question of why Kubrick is referencing Ovid. Why is Sandor referencing Ovid? Because it might help him get laid! That's all it means to him. He's using Ovid not as a source of intellectual heritage, but as a pickup playbook. His move with Alice's glass is right out of The Art of Love: an audacious assumption of intimacy. Art is but a premise, a means to an end. That end is fucking. 'Twas always so. Sandor's refinement is a mask. This dovetails with what Kubrick said about Alex's love for Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange: 

"[It] suggests the failure of culture to have any morally refining effect on society. Hitler loved good music and many top Nazis were cultured and sophisticated men, but it didn’t do them, or anyone else, much good.”

Sandor is like a version of Alex who learned self-control. He knows that being a member of polite society is all about playing your part, memorizing your lines and smiling for the observing eye. No one knows what's going on behind your mask, and most of them don't even care. Alex famously wears a mask with a ridiculously long nose, an obvious phallic symbol. Sandor, by contrast, has incorporated his all-consuming lust into his public persona: a mask made of flesh. 

But Alex is from the future, and Sandor is from the past. He could've walked straight out of the 18th-century canvases of Barry Lyndon; like the rest of these dancing ghosts, he would've fit right in at The Shining's Overlook Hotel. So naturally, his pickup line calls back to the classics.

Alice Harford belongs to the present, but she's familiar enough with the past to see through Sandor. "Didn't he wind up all by himself, crying his eyes out, someplace with a very bad climate?" Ovid was exiled for his "indiscretions," skewering the sex lives of the rich and powerful. Bill's arc culminates in him "crying his eyes out" to Alice, and so ensuring that he doesn't wind up all by himself. His tears complete the Oedipal removal of the offending eye, and allow Alice to see him more clearly. Ovid's fate is a cautionary tale, and Alice knows it. She has punctured her suitor's pretenses with context. How will Sandor respond?

"But he had a good time first. A very good time."  

Sandor doesn't deny that Ovid suffered for his desires. Instead, Sandor argues that desire is worth the suffering. All of us must die, but first we'll live. What's life about, if not having a good time? Problem is, Alice is married. She says so. But this doesn't stop Sandor, because Ovid's Art of Love is all about adultery: the means by which the public face surrenders. The key is preserving plausible deniability. You flirt, you suggest, you imply. You don't acknowledge what you're doing until you're doing it. Sandor knows that if he just says "screw your husband, let's screw," Alice will reject him on the spot. Instead, Sandor suggests that Bill won't mind if Alice dances with him. This redirects the tension away from Sandor and towards Bill. Surely your absent husband wouldn't mind if we danced, and if he did, he's unreasonably jealous...so you should be with me anyway! As Ovid's title suggests, seduction is an art, and that art (as Kubrick's title suggests) is keeping each other's eyes wide shut to what is actually happening.

We don't see Alice say yes; we dissolve into their dance. This is some of the most gorgeous camerawork in the movie. Alice and Sandor revolve as the camera circles them, overlapping orbits like the celestial objects in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. As with the lighting, the camerawork beautifully conveys Alice's mindset. This is what seduction feels like: practically surreal. One of the primary stylistic influences on Eyes Wide Shut is Max Ophuls, a favorite of Kubrick's who had himself adapted Arthur Schnitzler for his La Ronde. Ophuls' movies are famous for their graceful camera movements; Kubrick here is drawing from The Earrings of Madame de...

"What do you do, Alice?"

"At the moment? I'm looking for a job. I used to manage an art gallery in Soho, but it went broke." 

This subject never comes up again, but it explains a great deal about the Harfords. Their apartment isn't covered with paintings simply because they like art. Those are probably paintings Alice couldn't sell! Art is forever tainted by commerce; we're watching a gorgeous art film whose opening line is "Honey, have you seen my wallet?" Alice used to have her own source of income. She used to be directly engaged in the world outside the Harford apartment. Now her only escape is parties like this one. She says she's looking for a job, but we never see her doing so. It's a polite euphemism; it's what Alice tells herself to avoid looking at reality. This is her life now, and she resents Bill for it. 

"What a shame," Sandor purrs, but his widening Cheshire-cat grin suggests otherwise. He's sensed a weakness he can exploit. "I have some friends in the art game. Perhaps they can be of some help." First Sandor quoted the classics; now he reveals connections in the art world. Both of these high-minded appeals to beauty are rooted in his base desires. He sees art as a "game," no different than seduction, the art of love. 

Alice spots Bill in the medium distance, as Bill spotted Nick earlier. The good doctor is chatting with two women. Alice nods in his direction to cue Sandor to look; it's a subtle bit of acting that perfectly captures her inebriation. "Someone you know?" Sandor asks, unnecessarily. Alice already mentioned that she was here with her husband. Who else could it be? But by feigning ignorance, Sandor forces her to acknowledge her jealousy; he's dancing with words as well as his feet. When Alice confirms that it's her husband, Sandor gives out with a great "Oh," performing disappointment while hinting at excitement. If Alice's husband is flirting with other women, that makes Sandor's task of seducing her all the easier. Both sides are straying, as he points out:

"Don't you think one of the charms of marriage is that it makes deception a necessity for both parties?" 

This is one of the key lines of Eyes Wide Shut, as close as the movie comes to a thesis statement. Sandor is arguing that marriage amounts to a lie: a mask we force ourselves to wear, deceiving not only our partner, but ourselves. Bill and Alice Harford, aka Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, are the picture of a perfect couple. Bit by bit, that picture breaks down, and both parties are responsible. You share the lie. You share the mask.

Sandor finally comes out with it. You're a beautiful woman and you could have any man in this room. Underneath all these smiling faces, this erudite poetry, is animal lust. Why stay married? Alice asks why she wouldn't. "Is it as bad as that?" Sandor inquires. "As good as that," she shoots back. This is perfect dialogue: spare lines mirroring each other, each word hinting at many more underneath. Sandor frames marriage as an aberrant choice, against the state of nature. Alice frames it as a default, something you need a reason to not do. Sandor assumes that Alice stays married because fucking around isn't fulfilling. Alice insists that she stays married because marriage is good in itself. Sandor isn't debating in good faith, of course. As with the Ovid reference, he's saying whatever he thinks will get her to have sex with him. But Alice's argument isn't quite convincing, and as we'll see during her marital fight the following night, she knows it. 

Sandor feels like he's stepped out of a romance novel; he's a stereotypical image of a man who would inspire infidelity in a woman. So Bill, naturally, finds himself with a stereotypical male fantasy: two young models, practically writhing out of their clothes.

These cliched scenarios are off-putting to some viewers. What makes them work is how they unfold. Eyes Wide Shut is pornographic long before Bill arrives at the literal orgy--just not in the way many expected. Kubrick draws from sexual fantasies and then prevents the obvious payoffs, showing us instead what lurks behind the fantasy. The temptations are archetypal and unambiguous; the complications rise in how our central characters respond.

Which archetypes are at play here? If Sandor Szavost is a womanizer out of antiquity, who are Gayle and Nuala? They're the first sirens Bill encounters along his Odyssey, luring him off the path he should be taking: back to Alice, his Penelope. But they're also Christian symbols of corruption: snakes in Bill's garden of paradise, undulating as light glitters off them like scales. Unlike with Alice and Sandor, we don't see Bill meet Gayle and Nuala. They're just suddenly there, smiling serenely. They lead Bill past wreaths and starbursts of light, the Tree of Life sustained through the winter solstice. Bill is our modern hero, which is to say he isn't all that heroic. He bumbles his way through his Odyssey, never quite sure what he wants or needs. What concrete gestures he makes are quickly swallowed whole. Gayle remembers him, as it turns out. He helped her get something out of her eye doing a photo shoot. Clarity of vision: this is what Eyes Wide Shut is all about from the title on down. Despite helping Gayle see, Bill's own self-image is blurred. "That's the kind of hero I can be..." he begins, before sputtering out: "...sometimes." What happened to Bill's absolutism? What happened to you always look beautiful, you haven't changed a bit, once a doctor always a doctor? Suddenly, he's unsure of himself. Am I a hero, or not? Or am I really just an inchoate mass, mysterious to myself, a man of sometimes?

We cut back to Alice and Sandor. Our central couple are paralleled even as they diverge. The Christmas ball forms what the original novella called "a comedy of courting, timid resistance, seduction, and surrender," worked out via simultaneous story strands. Bill and Alice are undergoing the same process in different forms. Things change, but they stay the same. Sandor says as much to Alice:

"You know why women used to get married, don't you?"

"Why don't you tell me?"

"It was the only way they could use their virginity. Then they would be free to be with other men. The ones they really wanted."

Sandor is again rooting his seduction in an appeal to history, a sense of continuity between past and present. This is how the Romans talked about eroticism; he talks the same way. Women used to get married in order to later commit adultery; let's honor that tradition, you and me! The public mask has always been a lie. The private mask has never changed its face. 

Back to Doctor Bill and the models. They're strolling along arm in arm, Bill in between them as if being shared. "Do you know what's so nice about doctors?" Gayle murmurs. "They always seem so...knowledgeable."

Again, the bluntness of this seduction is too much for some viewers. What makes it resonate with the rest of the movie is how Bill responds. What's so nice about doctors? This is Bill's chance to brag, and he blows it. "Usually a lot less than people imagine." It's a hilariously frank response, disarming it how it deflates expectation. Like Sandor's line about deception, Bill's line captures the movie in microcosm. In each of his encounters along his Odyssey, he gets a lot less out of it than he imagined. Desire draws him on, but he never finds satisfaction...until he comes full circle to home. Moreover, Bill's "knowledge" about the body is rooted more in death than eroticism, as the movie will go on to demonstrate. His status activates fear as much as desire.

Here at the beginning, Gayle is teasing out Bill's insecurity, his fear that there's something more out there that he lacks. "But I bet they work too hard. Just think of all they miss." He's missing out on them: strings-free sex with someone you don't have to wake up next to and walk in on in the bathroom. Fantasy made flesh. 

But what Bill is actually missing out on is Alice, his wife, who he's ignoring. "You're not even looking at it," she told him. Like that line, Gayle's line is a challenge to the audience as well as Bill. Just think of all they miss. She's talking about us! So much happens in Eyes Wide Shut, yet it seems like there's even more not happening, or at least not happening where we can see it. Even as we strive to understand, we have to accept the limitations of our perception, as Bill has to come to terms with his domestic life. You're going to miss out on something. And that's OK. That's life.

Bill can't accept that. Not yet. He's thrown off by Gayle's statement; he blinks, shakes his head, and mutters "You're probably right." With Nick Nightingale, Bill acted like he had his life figured out. I stayed in medical school, I settled down and got married. Why did you do differently? Now Gayle has him thinking that he went down the wrong path. Bill's been sleepwalking through life. Suddenly, he seems to wake up, and realize what's happening.

Specifically, what's happening is that the models have been leading him away from his wife, away from the party, pursuing the camera as it retreats stealthily down a suspiciously infinite corridor. Bill hadn't really noticed. Neither do we, until he calls attention to it: "Ladies, where exactly are we going? Exactly?" Even as he smiles and they giggle, the submerged menace has emerged. Everything was fine as long as they were only flirting, walking in a movie-magic circle. They're not doing anything...yet. But now Bill has forced the issue by asking about the destination. It's uncanny, like when he switched off the score. The ambiguity has been pierced. Where is the movie taking us? Exactly? 

"Where the rainbow ends." 

That's the structure of Eyes Wide Shut in a nutshell. A journey of light, our hero stumbling through a range of colors and scenarios and possibilities, until it ends. He winds up back where he started. A rainbow only looks like an arc to us on the ground, with our limited perspectives. Its true shape is circular, and the same goes for Eyes Wide Shut. It's Christian rebirth as Homeric return. The rainbow is a promise, from beyond the infinite, that the world will never be destroyed again. "Where the rainbow ends," then, is a broken promise: infidelity, a destruction of a private world.

"Where the rainbow ends?" Bill repeats. Bill is always repeating what people say to him. The repetitions develop a hypnotic quality, as if "Bill Harford" is no more than an empty cave in which other people's words echo. A mask with nothing behind it. 

"Don't you want to go where the rainbow ends?"

"Well, that depends where that is..."

He's always trying to buy time. He's never prepared for it to get real. Bill has no idea what he wants, or even if he wants, because his unchallenged self-assurance has cut him off from the part of him that wants. He's frozen on the threshold. Even as the camera stops, the actors never actually stop moving. They're shifting, swirling, the models tugging Bill back and forth as he refuses to keep going, refuses to turn back, refuses to stop, refuses to decide. He can't stop himself. He needs to be stopped. 

And so he is, called away as he was with Nick earlier. The effect is so uncanny that the man appears to have emerged from Bill's subconscious, as if the film itself has tapped him on the shoulder. This servant is far more polite to Bill than the other man was to Nick. As a doctor, Bill is higher up in the pyramid of power than his musician friend, but he is still a servant to Victor. A summons with a smile is still a summons. 

Bill walks away from Gayle and Nuala. His last words to them are "To be continued?" It won't be, though. This is the last he (and we) will see of them.  Eyes Wide Shut is about ellipses. That which could have been is just as important as what is, if not more so. The following night, Alice will confess to Bill that she temporarily desired to leave him and their daughter behind to run off with a handsome stranger...but when she didn't, she was relieved. Bill experiences the same feeling here. He was already getting cold feet, so he's secretly glad for the interruption. But his masculine ego won't allow him to admit that, even to himself. Instead, he has to feign disappointment, suggesting that the seduction will continue and they'll get where they're going: where the rainbow ends. Bill will indeed continue that journey, but it will be other women (and men) who escort him along the way, picking up the threads dropped here.

Bill departs the shot, leaving it to Gayle and Nuala: pillars holding up a sudden void. Just before the movie cuts away, they glance at one another.

This moment is representative of the movie: it has to mean something, but there is no way of knowing what. The chill is palpable as their glittering smiles give way to iron stares. They seem to have had a plan, and it seems to have been foiled. Their come-ons were so exaggerated because they were performances, masks that they now drop. The public face has given way to...to...what, exactly? Why were they so determined to seduce Bill? Did Victor hire them? For what purpose? Did he intentionally interrupt the seduction? If so, why?

Eyes Wide Shut is ambiguous all the way down. It's a red curtain draped around an object whose shape you can almost perceive. It's a frustrated pursuit of an elusive desire around an eternal maze. It's a trick, that's all, a magic trick turning endlessly inward on itself. It clearly means something. There's just no way of knowing what.