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Dec 30, 2024 By Austin Saalman

The seemingly innate human longing for accumulation and self-gratification permeating modern society has suffered a notable erosion into an illusory state of delusional decadence, in which the sensation of desire is refashioned into an alienated voyeurism. The longing for shared intimacy has set many lonesome travelers forth on fruitless journeys down dimly lit streets, crisscrossing phantom continents of the soul upon which no spiritual refuge may be found.

Such is the fateful late-night journey of Dr. Bill Harford, aimless protagonist of director Stanley Kubrick’s controversial final—and so often misunderstood—film Eyes Wide Shut, which, despite its many detractors’ claims to the contrary, aptly embodies the vast, complex, and often melancholic scope of Kubrick’s artistic vision, specifically his vivid, career-long psychosexual fascinations. A loose adaptation of Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926-published novella Traumnovelle, the film maintains Kubrick’s signature intellectual literary edge, though, as with many artistic works possessing controversial reputations, Eyes Wide Shut’s intended aesthetic purity is often overshadowed by reports of its notoriously tumultuous production and gratuitous sexual content. The film’s message, however, remains clear and true to those willing to gaze past its surface.

On the topic of exteriors—from the splendid holiday balls and Manhattan apartments of the film’s super-wealthy to the elegant country mansion of its climax—Eyes Wide Shut enchants its audience, as Bill and Alice Harford—portrayed by a perpetually perplexed Tom Cruise and a coy, often mercurial Nicole Kidman—navigate these spaces of exquisite wealth, longing, and lust, somnolently drifting down warmly lit halls lined with elegant paintings and other affluent decor. This reality, still a dreamland to many, boasts the tranquil comforts and familiarities by which the couple—youthful, attractive, affluent, cultured, and seemingly satisfied—remain complacent. However, this mirror of reality is at last shattered one night when Bill and Alice attend an extravagant Christmas party, hosted by Victor Ziegler (portrayed by director Sydney Pollack), one of Bill’s patients. The evening’s pinnacle emerges when Bill is whisked away to an upstairs bathroom where Ziegler is anxiously awaiting his arrival, alongside a nude, unconscious woman, Mandy, who has overdosed on a speedball. Bill assists, encouraging Mandy’s return to consciousness and recommending she enter rehab.

While smoking pot in bed and reflecting on the party—during which Alice glimpsed Bill flirting with two young models, while she herself danced with a suave Hungarian aristocrat—the Harford’s begin intensely debating the respective natures of fidelity, gender, and lust within marriage, resulting in an argument during which Alice confesses to having fantasized about cheating on Bill with and, perhaps leaving him for, a handsome Navy man whom she had encountered while the couple, along with their young daughter Helena, were on vacation the previous summer. Instantly, Bill’s confidence, not only in his wife—whose desires and impulses he has smugly trivialized, even dismissed, throughout their conversation—but also his very world is swiftly deconstructed before him. With that, the phone rings, interrupting the stunned silence between them, and Bill is called to visit the home of a patient who has died, thus beginning his trek from his seemingly pristine surface to the heart of the night.

Guided by the ghostlike pull of the mysteries awaiting him, Bill wanders about New York City after dark, experiencing his own psychosexual revelations as he encounters a number of eccentric characters. Streetwalking Domino (Vinessa Shaw) approaches Bill at a crosswalk, inviting him back to her small apartment where, though Bill is initially prepared to sleep with her, the two share a kiss before parting. Domino’s world—cluttered, dingy, and rife with a sense of struggle—represents an antithesis of Bill’s own, with the slick Manhattanite doctor appearing achingly out of place as he lingers about her cramped kitchen. Elsewhere, Bill catches up with Nick Nightingale, his amiable former medical school classmate-turned-lounge pianist, at a sleepy jazz café in Greenwich Village. Nightingale, portrayed by director Todd Field, seems a somewhat tragic case: a once-promising medical student who, since dropping out, has been scraping by as a working musician at various clubs and events, merely hired by the elites whom Bill knows as friends, neighbors, and patients. Bill had encountered his old friend earlier that night, leading a band at Victor Ziegler’s party, and it is Nightingale who ultimately sends Bill on his descent into the underworld whispering just behind the familiar exterior of his own existence.

From Nightingale, Bill learns of a private event, at which his old friend has been hired to play—blindfolded. After some badgering, Nightingale shares with Bill a password—“Fidelio,” Italian for “faithful,” and the title of Beethoven’s sole opera—and insists that the good doctor will need to arrive clad in a mask and cloak. After acquiring both at a seedy costume shop, Bill takes a taxi out of the city, to an isolated mansion, outside of which are parked numerous limousines. It is here that he witnesses the culmination of the privilege and splendor in which he and his cohort exist: a large, ritualistic orgy in which participants don Venetian masks and operate in a bizarre, ceremonial fashion. Kubrick portrays this sequence with his typical remove, the various acts therein intricately choreographed, as eerie and expressionless as the masks themselves—the demise of human desire, the grotesque fusion of late capitalist boredom and voyeuristic alienation. Accordingly, there is no sense of humanity to these scenes, the orgy itself neither authentically carnal nor pornographic, at least not in the sense that it should elicit any sensation of titillation. Participants position themselves upon couches in lavish rooms, silently observing the pseudo-sexual spectacle before them. A man and woman copulate atop the back of another man, who has positioned himself on all fours, table-like, beneath them. Swaying figures, nude except for masks, slow dance in a picturesque ballroom—a particularly melancholic vision, the ideal embodiment, perhaps, of this ritual’s innate sense of loneliness, its complete and utter lack of intimacy. Instead, the spectacle is just that—a spectacle. A simulated bacchanalia, nothing more than a pantomimed celebration of greed, indulgence, and soulless objectification, the remaining fragments of some structure of meaning, long since dissolved in the acidic solution of post-industrial ennui. The orgy, quite obviously Eyes Wide Shut’s most iconic detail, has been the subject of both sarcasm and scrutiny, while it should ultimately beg further questions regarding the nature of Bill’s eternal night, his ever-deepening mystery, which may be unsolvable.

Eventually, certain members of this costumed crowd appear to recognize Bill, who, despite his best efforts, fails to blend into the opulent menagerie. This suspicion is confirmed by the knowing glances received from two figures upon a balcony, as well as repeated warnings by a masked woman—later revealed to be Mandy, whom Bill had assisted at Ziegler’s party earlier that night, and voiced, as it turns out, by Cate Blanchett—and Bill is eventually exposed. Called before a circle of the secret society’s members, led by an imposing figure clad in a red cloak (portrayed by Leon Vitali, best known as Lord Bullingdon in Kubrick’s 1975-released historical epic Barry Lyndon), Bill is subjected to an intense act of theatrical intimidation and potential humiliation before being “rescued” by the mysterious woman, who offers herself as a “sacrifice” in exchange for Bill’s safety. Before the cult—which, it is later revealed, consists of many of Bill’s daytime acquaintances, including Ziegler, as well as various unnamed yet purportedly powerful public figures—Bill vows his silence and is escorted from the chamber, after which point, dawn arrives and his mirror shatters.

The contrast between night—in which Bill wanders a spectral dreamscape, a foreboding world of intrigue and seduction—and day—the ruins of his affluent fantasy, a realm in which nothing is as it once appeared—remains prominent throughout Eyes Wide Shut. Life resumes by daylight, Bill and Alice cohabitate, though a certain chill, lingering after Bill’s encounter, permeates each scene. A sense of unease. Ominous warnings. Visions of a strange man seemingly following Bill down city streets. Has he haplessly infiltrated the heart of the fabled global elite and become embroiled within a vast conspiracy much larger than he could’ve imagined? Kubrick, though hardly a populist himself, seems to have prophesied the rise of proletarian distrust of the wealthy here, which typically veers into some tendency toward conspiratorial fixations: shadowy secret societies, quietly manipulating our politics and economies, covert sex trafficking rings consisting of prominent celebrities and world leaders, acts of sacrilegious debauchery occurring in dimly lit rooms of distant mansions and penthouses, etc. In the Harfords’ world—the modern world, our world—nothing is as it seems. A web of conspiracies emerges, the plot thickens, the mystery deepens, then folds in on itself.

All this disillusionment is set against a glitzy Christmastime backdrop, which, should one look closely enough, is an atmosphere befitting of the film’s themes. Christmas, once a celebration of most sacred faithfulness, had since become by the 1990s an essentially commercial phenomenon. Much like the Harfords’ marriage—something once, perhaps, rooted in fidelity—the holiday has since grown corrupt in the face of rampant consumerism and materialism. Any emblems of the season featured throughout Eyes Wide Shut appear icily superficial—attractive home decor, expensive toy stores, elaborate balls—mirroring the film’s sources of drama: the result of an implosion of meaning, the disintegration of self, the inability to discern face from mask. The hollowness at the core of the film’s Christmas pageantry speaks to the greater condition afflicting the Western world: the death of essence and the transformation of intimacy at the whim of the uber-wealthy and their extravagant privileges, under the ruse of age-old tradition.

Though not as accessible as more revered Kubrick offerings, Eyes Wide Shut remains an important testament to the legendary director’s overall artistic vision and, 25 years on, seems even more relevant to the current age than its own decade. An underrated “alternative” Christmas film, this is an intriguing, albeit flawed, work to be analyzed and contemplated, its chilling sense of nocturnal mystique simultaneously haunting and intoxicating. With his final effort, released, most unfortunately, mere months after his death, Stanley Kubrick sought to penetrate the resplendent surfaces he had spent the entirety of his career cultivating, and ultimately succeeded in doing so. Eyes Wide Shut remains a captivating twilight effort by a great filmmaker and, should the inquisitive viewer choose to experience it this holiday season, may just shatter the very mirror in which the lights, trees, gifts, and overall sense of reality are reflected.

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