Poor Man’s Seven. Eyes Wide Shut sets up a series of captivating mysteries but refuses to follow through on them.
?????
This week I was assigned Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s final film. On the back of my ode to Tom Cruise, David decided to challenge me with a Tom Cruise film featuring a director who has always frustrated me. The only Stanley Kubrick movie I genuinely love is Dr. Strangelove. Every other movie I’ve seen of his, I end up only loving parts. Eyes Wide Shut is no exception to this rule, it is far from a perfect movie but one that leaves me feeling unsure of how much I enjoyed it.
Eyes Wide Shut is the story of Dr. Bill Hartford, played by Cruise, who goes on a Wizard of Oz like journey into the sexual fantasies of New York City. After his wife tells him about a naval officer whom she had met on vacation. She tells him how when she looked at him she couldn’t control her lust. She wanted to run away from her husband and her child and just be with the naval officer. This story destroys Bill’s sense of masculinity and leaves him metaphorically (and potentially physically — though we never find out) impotent. He is quickly called away to visit a patient who has tied and he crosses into a new world. He learns as the Wu Tang Clan so eloquently put it C.R.E.A.M. — coitus rules everything around me. [Editor’s Note: This is not what C.R.E.A.M. stands for]
As the night goes on, Hartford is constantly surrounded by sex. He is hit on over the body of his dead friend. He is confronted by a group of bro’s who immediately start slinging homosexual slurs at him. He befriends a prostitute, and a man who turns out to be a pimp, and eventually finds himself in the middle of an orgy. And yet being constantly propositioned and once even paying for sex, he never actually performs the act. His wife’s words have so affected him that he is unable to ever actually engage with any of these people. At least I think that’s what’s happening, and that leads me to my qualm with this movie, and really with Kubrick himself.
I can point to plenty of examples of individual symbolism in this movie, but I am completely incapable of putting it all together. This is almost a signature of Kubrick. There are entire movies dedicated to analyzing all of his hidden symbols. In this movie, sex is a very dangerous game. Is Kubrick using this as a metaphor for STIs or AIDS? Is he advocating for monogamy? I don’t know. In the orgy, Hartford is unmasked leaving him, ironically, the most naked of all the guests. I get this, but I don’t know what that vulnerability is meant to represent. And the last line of the movie is so loaded with context, not even Freud would go there. Is my inability to untangle this web of symbols supposed to leave me empathizing with Hartford’s impotence? At some point, I have to stop looking for connections that aren’t there and move on.
Kubrick constantly leaves me with this empty feeling. I am unsure of why he makes any of his most famous movies. It doesn’t matter that 2001 has one of the greatest sci-fi thrillers of all time tucked inside of it. It doesn’t matter that the first half of Full Metal Jacket is one of the best war movies ever made. When I look at the films as a whole, I can never figure out what Kubrick is trying to tell me. I don’t know what Eyes Wide Shut was trying to say, but this review has something very important it needs to do as soon as possible — end.
Next week, David is reviewing Kingsman, one of my favorite surprises from the last few years. David loves a good bond movie and I’m hoping he can appreciate Kingsman even more than I did.
cinemateur 