From Schizo Cinema: The Occult Text in Popular Movies

by Jake Horsley

Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is a movie I have wanted to write about ever since I first saw it, a movie that for all its awfulness (and, in fact, inseparable from it) is a quite fascinating, even beguiling, cinematic artifact, most especially within the parameters of our thesis—that of the infiltration of the American family by the Id. The title Eyes Wide Shut might be said to refer to the id itself, in fact, but also to the ego in denial, depending on how you look at it. “Eyes Wide Shut” might mean eyes that are able to see everything even though they are trying desperately not to (the id that sees everything the ego does, despite all the ego’s attempts to blind it). Or else, it might refer to eyes that remain blind no matter how hard they strain to see (the ego’s relentless attempt to control and comprehend the unknown, and its being forever frustrated by blindness in the face of the terrible, unknowable Id). Kubrick had a germ of an inspiration, and even vision, when he took on his movie, and it’s perhaps for this reason that otherwise quite intelligent critics have tried to defend the movie as a great work of art.

How could anyone who has seen Eyes Wide Shut argue for it as “Kubrick’s last masterpiece”? A 14-year-old can see the movie for what it is: a laughably tame, screamingly inept, and shockingly prudish “exposé” of sexual deviancy and jealousy. Academics and scholars have an uncanny knack for blinding themselves to all but their own “thesis,” however (or in this case, opinion), and they are determined that Kubrick’s last film be a masterpiece. Never mind that the movie itself goes about as far as any movie ever could to prove otherwise. Since such willful blindness is partly what Kubrick’s last stinker is about, this is all rather fitting, in its way.

The film begins so catastrophically that it throws one into a trance of awe. Stilted dialogue, wooden acting, completely unnatural characters, all this was presumably at least partially intentional on Kubrick’s part, but certainly not wholly so. The impression he creates is not of being in an otherworldly or dreamlike place but rather of watching excruciatingly inept actors perform unspeakable dialogue. And yet, bad Kubrick is not the same as bad anyone else, and these early scenes are strangely hypnotic in their awfulness. I stayed watching in stupefaction (having originally planned to walk out once I had confirmed how bad the movie was), as if despite myself, caught by a strange, morbid curiosity. The film does improve after these early scenes, and the sheer beauty of the photography and the set design, of Kubrick’s compositions, and even the strange, wooden quality of the acting and the looniness of the dialogue, somehow all conspire to keep us entranced. Kubrick is a master all right, only he’s become a master of kitsch, and not art.

The story is essentially no more than a vignette on sexual jealousy. Nicole Kidman tells husband Tom Cruise (Bill Harford) of her fantasy of having sex with a sailor she saw once, years before, when they were already together. She admits that, at that moment, she would have given up everything, her life with Tom and their children, for one night with this mysterious sailor. Improbably daffy as this confession may seem, it is devastating to Tom , completely capsizing his complacent world as husband and father, and throwing him into torment and self-doubt (but also temptation). All this comes down to the stirring of the unconscious, set in motion by an unmet but nonetheless acknowledged (now confessed) desire. This desire is in itself an expression of the hungry id’s desire to tear down everything for a moment of impulsive freedom. Nicole is not overwhelmed by desire for the sailor (no one could be that desirable); she is overwhelmed by the idea of throwing away everything for a moment of heady satisfaction. She is terrified by the discovery of just how precarious her conscious, rational, ego-based life is; and at the same time, she is fascinated and enticed by the power of the unconscious to undo all of this in a heartbeat. Hence, although she doesn’t act upon it, the moment (of non-action) stays with her always; not as a regret, exactly, but as a reminder of her own uncertainty, and of the force and perversity of her passion. (As in American Beauty, pot is the catalyst. The confession comes when the happy, daffy couple get stoned, and non-experienced viewers, seeing Kidman’s performance, might be forgiven for assuming that marijuana is indeed a drug of deranging potential. Effectively, one spliff throws the whole family structure into peril.)

For his part, Cruise’s doctor is likewise haunted by the confession, and for similar reasons. He feels doubly betrayed in that, not only does he realize how tenuous his hold upon his wife is, and how easily he might have lost her (and still might), but, what’s worse, he is plagued by the awareness that such unbridled passion as she felt for the sailor is something he himself has never seen in her. Hence, jealousy over a woman who is already his, body and soul, and envy of a man he never even laid eyes on, who might not even exist, becomes the bane of his existence, the undoing of all his self-esteem and stability as a husband, lover, and, most of all, as a man. The Id disrupts.

Eyes Wide Shut is about Harford’s identity crisis, and basing this upon sexual insecurity and jealousy is a sound enough tactic. The foundation of most men’s self-esteem is indeed their sense of sexual prowess. Since the female is herself the Other, the representative of the Id, her being both unfathomable and uncontrollable is a given; her sexual desire, while intoxicating, makes her also terrifying. And a man’s complete incapacity to either fathom or control a woman’s sexuality leaves him one sole means of handling it: namely, to satisfy it. Once he begins to doubt this ability, he begins to doubt his worthiness or readiness to interact with the Other, and so loses all his footing as a conscious, ego-driven individual. From here, by a forest fire chain reaction, the whole “kingdom” (home) may collapse (as did Camelot) due to a single infidelity (even if only “imagined,” since to the id there is no difference).

So Harford goes on a quest: being shunned by the female, he must seek the anima within. He must rediscover his own private connection to the unconscious, in order to find the means to deal with the unruly Other of his life (and wife). Accordingly, he undergoes various quasi-sexual encounters: with the wife of a dead man (since he’s a doctor, Harford goes anywhere he pleases, and is always “on duty”); a street hooker with AIDS; an adolescent girl whose father pimps her out to Japanese tourists; and finally, a whole host of naked, masked, mysterious fuck-doll females at a secret occultist gathering which he stumbles blindly into, following a flukish lead from a college buddy. This is the culmination of his quest and the heartland of the Id, the underworld itself; some of the movie’s best (though also most ludicrous) scenes are here, amidst the red velvet, incense, and writhing naked bodies (though only the women are naked).

If Eyes Wide Shut is a joke of a movie, finally, it’s because its more sinister under layers are all so utterly lame and devoid of menace, or even perversity, that Harford’s quest into the id realm seems like exactly what it is: a little jaunt into kinky sexuality. Kubrick was by this time so isolated in his own cerebral, priggish world that he had lost all sense, not only of human speech patterns and emotional responses, but also of just what constitutes vice and degradation (and danger or suspense) to modern audiences; what he gives us is mere frolicking. I doubt if ever a director lived with less of a sense of the workings of the id than Kubrick, a meticulously rational and painfully conscious film artist, whose films not only lack anything resembling human compassion but are equally devoid of mystery or poetry. In Kubrick’s movies (and none more than Eyes), there’s no involvement because there’s nothing at stake. We are watching actors move about his elaborate, gorgeous sets like pieces on a chessboard, and all we can admire, at best (besides how pretty the pieces are), is the skill and precision of his moves. But since he’s only playing with himself, there’s not even the rudimentary suspense of mediocre movies as to which side (ego or id) is going to win.

In Eyes Wide Shut, the only thing that’s mildly at stake (besides Kubrick’s reputation) is Tom Cruise’s smile; we can’t for a second believe in the marriage, since we are introduced to characters so stilted and ludicrous that they barely seem human at all (the children do not exist save as adornments). Kidman gives a decent enough performance (save for that introductory clunker, and her pot-smoking scene), and she’s at least halfway human to us; but since she’s little more than the mouth piece for the writer and director’s paranoid sexual fantasies, we can’t feel much affection for her. Tom Cruise has the perfect role here for a non-actor who only has to look good, flash his card, smile, and say, “I'm a doctor.” With a better actor the film would probably seem even sillier than it does. As it is, Cruise, by not seeming to be in on the joke, helps to keep the proceedings sufficiently sincere that they almost come off as high camp. Sidney Pollack, in a thankless role, is a complete embarrassment. Pollack directed himself admirably in Tootsie, and did some solid work for Woody Allen in Husbands and Wives, but for Kubrick he has turned himself into an excruciating p resence, a golem flailing through his scenes like a fish out of water. Point by point and scene by scene, line by line and performance by performance, you could pick Eyes Wide Shut apart and in no time at all reveal it as one of the very worst major American productions in movie history. Yet it remains one of the most watchable and intriguing bad movies ever made. Beyond Kubrick’s exquisite visual sense, this can be accounted for by the movie’s subtext, which somehow holds our interest even when the text itself—the plot and the dialogue—is, for the most part, completely lifeless and dull.

When Harford returns from his jaunt into the underworld, his wife is asleep and dreaming, laughing in her sleep. She wakes and, though she appears quite contrite, rather sadistically recounts her dream to him. The dream is your basic male anxiety nightmare, an archetypal worst case scenario: she is fucking an endless series of faceless men while her husband watches helplessly on in despair, and she laughs at his misery and torment, mocking him for his weakness and inadequacy. You would think this might be enough to cement Harford’s disgust and send him packing; but somehow it has the opposite effect (or at least her dream coincides with Harford’s own realization), and he appears to put aside his foolish jealousy (suppress that id), and move on.

The idea of his straying so far afield (into the underworld to confront his sexual demons) is of course that he purge his ego of all its doubts and realize how important, how real, his marriage is to him. The movie suggests that Harford (being a doctor) is something of a prude, and that his hang-ups have forced his wife to indulge in fantasies in order to satisfy herself. Hence, the last line of the movie—Kidman’s “Let’s fuck”—suggests that they haven’t done so for ages, and that—now those sex demons of doubt and jealousy are finally overcome—they can get back down to “the good stuff.” In broader terms, Harford’s repressing of his unconscious sexual nature (though he’s pretty frisky in the early scene, this soon gives way to his treating of an overdosed naked woman in Sidney Pollack’s suite) has been a source of restriction and frustration to his wife’s libidinous desires, and as a result she has made her own (halfway) excursion into id realms, with the fantasy of the sailor. This in turn comes back to haunt Harford with his own inadequacy, impotence, and repressed nature, and so he goes off in search not merely of revenge but also of his own initiation, so that he can then meet his wife on new, common ground, as her equal. Poor Bill is suffering from borderline personality disorder: fear of loss and abandonment, low self-esteem, and above all, fear of freedom. Once he has confronted the truth of his own turbulent, transgressive nature (to the point that his awakening id is beginning the threaten the welfare of his family, indicated by his finding the mask on the pillow next to his sleeping wife), he is then able to understand and forgive his wife’s own peccadilloes. Thus, the once disruptive id becomes a creative source of inspiration and reconciliation; the previously corrupting, hate-filled sexual fantasies become the healthy desire of an uninhibited couple. “Let’s fuck.”

The masks are central to this reading, since mask = persona (in Greek), namely, the ego. Cruise is our classic schizo: he doesn’t know who he is or what he wants, and he wanders passively, yet also compulsively, from one loopy situation to the next, until he finds himself at the heartland (where he is unmasked by sinister, apelike id people). His end appears to have come, he has strayed too far from his safe, secure family hold, and fallen into the hands of depraved perverts with no regard for his standing (his “I’m a doctor” isn’t going to work here). But he is saved at the last moment (in a creakingly staged and wholly implausible scene) by a naked, masked female who offers up her own life as forfeit for his. Saved by the anima! (The same female he brought back to life in the opening scene, as it happens; like Daniel in the lion’s den, the good doctor discovers the value of good deeds.) It’s too bad Eyes Wide Shut is such a sloppy, stupid movie, because it’s full of potential; if only Kubrick had settled on the right tone, and decided whether he was making a surrealist sex comedy, an occult mystery, or a psychological thriller, or something, he might have pulled it off. As it is, it’s a genuine oddity, rather like a two-headed calf or a human seal: fascinating, strangely endearing, but rather painful to look at. Chances are it should never have been born at all.

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