Eyes Wide Shut: Review By Null and Void.

Critical disappointment with "Eyes Wide Shut" was almost unanimous, and the complaint was always the same: not sexy. The reviewers sounded like a bunch of middle-school kids who'd snuck in to see it and slunk out three hours later feeling horny, frustrated, and ripped off. "Kubrick was old and out of touch with today's jaded sensibilities", they said. The film's sexual taboos, transplanted straight out of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle--jealousy over dreams and fantasies, guilt-ridden visits to prostitutes, a strained discussion of an HIV test that echoes the old social terror of syphilis--seemed quaint and naive by the standards of the sordid year 1999. One last time Stanley Kubrick had many genre expectations, and once again, as throughout his career, critics could only see what wasn't there.

The backlash against the film is now generally blamed on its cynical, miscalculated ad campaign. But why anyone who'd seen Kubrick's previous films believed the hype and actually expected it to be what Entertainment Weekly breathlessly anticipated as "the sexiest movie ever," is still not clear. The most erotic scenes he ever filmed were the bomber refueling in "Dr. Strangelove" and the spaceliner docking in "2001". He mocks any suspense in the very fist shot of this movie; without prelude, Nicole Kidman, her back to the camera, shrugs off her dress and kicks it aside, standing matter-of-factly bare-assed before us for a moment before the screen goes black like a peepshow door sliding shut. (You can almost hear the director's Bronx-accented voice: "You came to see a big-time movie star get naked? Here ya go. All right, show's over." Can we get serious now?) The main title then appears like a rebuke, telling us that we're not really seeing what we're staring at. In other words, "Eyes Wide Shut" is not going to be about sex.

The real pornography in this film is in its lingering depiction of the shameless, naked wealth of millennial Manhattan, and of its obscene effect on society and the human soul. National reviewers' headlong focus on sex, and the shallow psychologies of the film's central couple, the Harfords, at the expense of every other element of the film-the trappings of stupendous wealth, its references to fin-de-siecle Europe and other imperial periods, its Christmastime setting, even the sum Dr. Harford spends on a single night out-says more about the blindness of the elites to their own surroundings than it does about Kubrick's inadequacies as a pornographer. For those with their eyes open, there are plenty of money shots.

There is a moment in "Eyes Wide Shut", as Bill Harford is lying to his wife over a cellphone from a prostitute's apartment, when we see a textbook in the foreground titled Introducing Sociology. The book's title is a dry caption to the action onscreen (like the slogan PEACE IS OUR PROFESSION looming over the battle at the Air Force Base in "Dr. Strangelove"), telling us that prostitution is the basic, defining transaction of our society. It is also, more importantly, a key to understanding the film, suggesting that we ought to interpret it sociologically--not as most reviewers insisted on doing, psychologically.

The New York Times told us that Kubrick "never paid much attention to the psychology of characters, much less relationships between men and women," and in fact "spent his career ignoring (or avoiding) the inner lives of people, their private dreams and frustrations." Unable to imagine what other subjects there could be, they, like so many critics before them, shrugs him off as obsessed with mere technique. They are, first of all, wrong; Kubrick examines his characters' inner lives through imagery, not dialogue; as he said, "scenes of people talking about themselves are often very dull." (It could be argued that almost all of this film takes place inside Bill Harford's head.) Secondly, and more importantly, they miss the point: Kubrick's films are never only about individuals (sometimes, as in the case of "2001", they hardly contain any); they are always about Man, about civilization and history. Even "The Shining" is not just about a family, but about the massacre of the American Indians and the recurrent murderousness of Western civilization.

People complained that the Harfords were uncomplicated and dull; these reactions recall the bewildererment of critics who complained that the computer in "2001" was more human than the astronauts, but could only attribute it (just four years after the unforgettable performances of "Dr. Strangelove") to human error. The Harfords may seem as naive and sheltered, but to wish that the characters had been more complex or self-aware misses the point. To understand a film by this most thoughtful and painstaking of filmmakers, we should assume that this characterization is deliberate--that their shallowness and repression is the point. Think of Bill in the back of the cab, his face a sullen mask as he tortures himself by running the same black and white film of Alice's imagined infidelity over and over in his head. (Anyone who doubts that it is the character, rather than the actor, who lacks depth and expressiveness should watch Cruise in "Magnolia".) Or of Alice giggling in her sleep, clearly relishing her dream about betraying and humiliating her husband, only to wake up in tears, saying that she had "a horrible dream"; her repression is complete and instantaneous. (She's like Jack Torrance in "The Shining" waking up shouting from "the most terrible nightmare I ever had", about chopping up his family, about twelve hours before he actually tries to do it.) The itensely staged vacancy of the Harford's inner lives should tell us to look elsewhere for the film's real focus.

One place to look is not at them but around them, at the places where they live and the things they own. Most of the film's sets, even the New York street scenes, were constructed on sound stages and backlots, just like the Overlook Hotel, which was as central to "The Shining" as its actors. Precision of visual detail is as integral to the meaning of "Eyes Wide Shut" as is the use of gorgeous faces famous from the covers of glossy check-out-aisle magazines to play a consp*cuously attractive high-society couple (not unlike his choice of handsome, bland-faced Ryan O'Neill to play eighteenth-century social climber Redmond Barry.) Even the street sets (criticized by the New York press as "inaccurate") are expressionistic, with newspaper headlines (LUCKY TO BE ALIVE) and neon signs (EROS) foreshadowing and commenting on the action. In Kubrick's work, nothing is incidental.

People mention that the Harfords' apartment "must have cost $7 million," but only to make fun of Kubrick's apparent disconnection from contemporary America. But the meticulously rendered setting of the film, the luxurious apartments and sumptuous mansions, are meant to raise eyebrows. Kubrick and his collaborator, Frederic Raphael, discussed exactly how much money a New York doctor like Bill Harford must earn per year. The Harfords' standard of living raises questions about their money, and where it comes from--from Bill's sparsely scheduled private practice, or the sorts of under-the-table services we see rendered upstairs at the first party? Dr. Harford is on call to that class of person who can afford not to wait in emergency rooms or die in hospitals--people like his friend Victor Ziegler, whose name denotes him as one of the world's winners. Bill uncomfortably tries to compliment the prostitute Domino's apartment by calling it "cozy" (and her use of the joke "maid's day off" to excuse the mess only draws further awkward attention to the class rift between them), but his own place looks cramped and cluttered compared to Victor's. Ziegler's house is reminiscent of the Overlook Hotel, with its vast ballrooms and grand staircases, its mirrors and color, its bedroom-sized bathrooms. And even Ziegler's place seems modest compared to the palace of Somerton, where the secret orgy takes place. To some extent, the fact that no critics recognized this as deliberate is excusable; we've all learned to overlook the fantastic affluence of the sets and wardrobe in most movies and TV shows, just as black audiences had, for decades, to try to ignore the oppressive whiteness of everyone onscreen. But make no mistake: this is not a film about the "private dreams and frustrations" of what Victor condescendingly calls "ordinary people"; it is about really rich people, the kind that Lord Wendover in "Barry Lyndon" and Mr. Ullman in "The Shining" call "all the best people." And it shows us that these people are empty and amoral, using their social inferiors as thoughtlessly as if they were possessions, ultimately more concerned with social transgressions like infidelity than with crimes like murder--just as the film's audience is more interested in the sex it was supposed to be all about than the killing that is at its core.

There's no reason to assume we're expected to like Bill and Alice Harford. They don't, like typical Hollywood villains, literally slather or speak with foreign accents. The Harfords are what we think of, uncritically, as "nice" people--that is to say, attractive and well-educated, a couple who collect art and listen to Mozart. But evil among our elites is more often a matter of willful ignorance and lack of interest than of any deliberate cruelty. And Kubrick emphasizes that culture and brains have nothing to do with goodness or depth of character; in this film they have more to do with the exhibitionistic display of imperial wealth.