Eyes Wide Shut Lifted the Veil from Marriage, Merging Public and Private

It makes perfect sense that Eyes Wide Shut would be the last film Stanley Kubrick made prior to his death. The picture, in its dreamy, erotic haze, depicts a sobering realization that most arrive at prior to their own demise: the refined presentations of the upper crusts of society only obfuscate that they are beholden to the same latent forces that linger beneath the surface of our shared reality. Posh displays of genteel decorum—associated with paying the utmost respect for conservative institutions like marriage and family, which uphold power public structures through private restraint—is just that, a display. This front only obscures their primal urges, which many with old money are able to satisfy in transgressive, often violent ways.

There’s no going back from knowing this, but how do you make peace with it? Eyes Wide Shut, in its resigned, quasi-sanguine ending, argues that maybe you don’t. Perversity is banal rather than special. It may be rendered obscure in the public sphere, but it trickles out, from costume shop owners and bellhops to doctors and wealthy elites—disconcerting blips in the lull of quotidian life. There’s nothing to do when naïveté is dispelled, except to try to forget what you’ve learned. Or maybe for the observer to attempt to mediate between these base instincts and our society’s normative structures, to find something real in between.

Kubrick’s final feature, released 25 years ago in 1999, centers on physician Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise). Bill and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) live comfortably in New York City, ostensibly moving within elite circles, but Bill is always expressing an anxiety about the precarity of their position there (a notable motif throughout the picture: Bill comically pulling out his doctors’ license as an appeal to authority at every function).

Eyes Wide Shut’s scenes are crafted as a series of parallels, lending the film a surreal, acutely semiotic quality, even beyond the attention it pays to dreams. It begins with a Christmas party setpiece at the house of Bill’s patient, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack). Alice dances with an older Hungarian guest, the two twirling close to an affair, while two young models attempt to seduce Bill. The vignette is cut into by news of an overdose by Mandy, a sex worker Victor had been with. This early sequence sets the stage for the rest of the picture’s events, in which Kubrick lifts the veil off of the apparatus of marriage. In atypically anti-Kubrickian fashion, Eyes Wide Shut immediately focalizes the emotional arcs of Bill and Alice instead of opting for a birds-eye, detached lens.

For instance, unaddressed resentments, unconsummated desires and inexorable deceit color a charged conversation that takes place early in the film between Bill and Alice while high. Kubrick’s subjectivity etches this scene as theatrical and immense in scope. As Bill, operating on the basis that women are evolutionarily hardwired to be faithful, emphasizes to Alice that he trusts her, Alice calls bullshit. “On that basis, I should conclude that you wanted to fuck those two models,” she drawls, caustic and penetrating. She’s emblazoned against the neon blue backdrop of their bathroom in her white underwear; Bill is stark against the red backdrop of the bedroom. Even the colors are clear: Though they appear to be talking to each other, they’re really talking past each other.

The hair-raising scene hits a crescendo when Alice confesses her attraction to a naval officer she met in a hotel lobby a year prior. He didn’t fuck her, but she so badly wanted him to, which is perhaps worse. This recurrent vision is indicative of all the latent sensibilities that marriage, in all its neat machinery, doesn’t account for.

A misreading of Eyes Wide Shut foregoes Kubrick’s sharp focus on Bill and Alice in favor of characterizing it as commentary gesturing toward the grime and muck and banality of perversity in New York City. In this sense, the latter half of Eyes Wide Shut has sometimes been likened to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, but this isn’t a take I’m partial to. Kubrick doesn’t etch a New York that is informed by an absurdist lens of liberal scare tactics (read: crime in cities). It instead renders each of the city’s characters, working class or elite, a depravity; this wickedness doesn’t indicate the grime of the city but universal sensibilities that are forced dormant under the sheen of the nuclear family.

Think, for example, of Mr. Milich (Rade Šerbedžija), the costume store owner Bill meets prior to arriving at the private sex party in Long Island. He appears to be debased when finding his young daughter with two older men in his store, but when Bill returns to the store the following day, he’s feeling up his own daughter, propositioning her to Bill too. Sure, money corrupts, but there’s something else here too. It’s almost as if the incident served as the lifting of a moratorium, these perversions now apparent in every tic and wink Milich made the previous night.