Eyes Wide Shut: Masterpiece Or Meh?

I’m rarely confounded by a film, yet Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut confounds me. In the twenty years since its release, I’ve watched it a thousand times; not because I like it, but because I still don’t know if I like it. Is it a work of genius, the culmination of a lifetime of obsessive research by history’s greatest film-maker? Is it a rumination on the masks we wear, itself masquerading its meaning behind layers and layers of inscrutable detail? Or is it the last ditch effort of a pervey old man to stare at some boobs? 

We've heard it all before: Eyes Wide Shut set the Guinness World Record for the longest film shoot of all time. Stanley Kubrick required his actors to perform take after take of inconsequential actions, so much so that Harvey Keitel quit and Tom Cruise developed a stomach ulcer.* Kubrick literally worked himself to death, suffering a major heart attack only days after completing his final cut of the film. Considering the time, money and energy that went into the making of Eyes Wide Shut, it's impossible to watch the film without regularly pondering the following question: What the hell is going on?

Other questions might include:
- How come no-one in this film seems to know how to act? 

- Why does New York City look so fake?
- Is the orgy supposed to be erotic, suspenseful or lame?

Let’s discuss.

*Fun fact: Stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria in the lining of the stomach, not stress.

What's Going On?

On its surface, Eyes Wide Shut is a fairly straightforward story about your typical married couple. Dr Bill Harford is dedicated to his profession and faithful to his wife Alice. He doesn’t particularly like her but is committed to delivering her empty platitudes whenever she demands them. Alice feels trapped in the drudgery of domesticity and is resentful of her husband's success. She fantasises about leaving him and their daughter for a single night of passion and the false promise of romance. When she informs Bill of this in an attempt to emasculate him, he sets off in search of sex and his manhood – both of which he is unsuccessful in finding. This premise of a 'sexual odyssey' is touted by many theorists. Yet, it is contradicted by the events of the first fifteen minutes of the film. 

At Ziegler's Christmas party, and prior to discovering his wife's sexual fantasies, Bill is totally compliant when being led away to a potential threesome before being cockblocked by an overdosing hooker. Add to this the fact that, in the space of 24 hours, Bill is propositioned by the bereaved daughter of his dead patient, an aids infected prostitute and her morally conflicted housemate, an underage girl and a gay hotel concierge, and the only intentional part of this 'odyssey' is Bill gatecrashing an orgy. The rest of his experiences can be chalked up to opportunism and happenstance. 

Essentially, Bill is a man-child, blissfully unaware that his wife is unhappy and harbouring secret desires that don't involve him (at least not in a positive way). He bullies his friend into giving up the password to his employer’s secret orgy like some horny teenager, then when he is unmasked for interloping, he hangs his head in shame like a toddler that has been caught scribbling on the walls. Bill is the embodiment of ignorance and naivety. Keep your eyes shut to the world of adults, Ziegler insists when admonishing him for his search for answers. And Bill complies without question.

The Acting Is Terrible

It's a well known fact that Kubrick was not interested in realistic performances, or even the pretence of realism. He wanted his actors to be interesting, and deliver performances that could only be achieved by countless takes, during which seasoned actors would lose themselves in the characters and express dialogue and actions in ways they had never planned or expected. 

Let's look at Tom Cruise’s performance; his blank, lacklustre portrayal of Dr Bill, sculpted in Kubrick’s editing suite, is in stark contrast to Cruise’s default setting of charismatic leading man. Some theorise that this was premeditated destruction of one of the leading spokesmen for a pseudo religious entity that had ‘brainwashed’ Kubrick's daughter and precipitated her self-imposed exile from her family. Others believe that Cruise's blank slate allows us to transpose ourselves into the Cruise avatar and experience an immersive VR film environment. But consider this: Tom Cruise’s acting is not wooden, nor two-dimensional. It is, in fact, his most realistic portrayal of a human being. The Cruise we see in every other movie does not exist outside of movies. He is aspirational. Bill Harford, is not. He wears the mask of social convention. He is awkward and confused, and incapable of finding answers or resolution - just like a real boy. 

Compare his performance to Jack Nicholson in The Shining, and imagine that both are opposite sides of the same coin. Nicholson’s Jack Torrance is a scenery-chewing, hyper-real representation of man once all pretensions have slipped. Cruise’s Harford feels these same emotions, but they are hidden behind a mask. 

New York Looks Fake

Kubrick is renowned for spending years preparing for his films, amassing a multitude of pre-digital resources and research prior to shooting a single frame. When recreating a period out of time, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey’s prehistoric past and evolutionary future, or Barry Lyndon’s 18th Century Europe, this level of preparation seems warranted. Yet the depth of detail in Eye’s Wide Shut, which Kubrick worked off and on over a thirty year period, seems totally unnecessary and, to be perfectly honest, a little bit psychotic. 

In recreating New York City on the Pinewood Studios backlot, Kubrick had his assistants document every single detail of real life NYC, right down to the dimensions and distances between mailboxes, telephone booths and newspaper stands. He had all American trash flown in to dress the gutters and alleyways, thousands of photos of Greenwich Village doorways to find the perfect door for his characters to enter, and extras dressed in the exact clothes worn by real New Yorkers as photographed by his many acolytes. And for what? Do any of these details make the film better? Most reviewers comment on the unnatural dreamlike quality of the streets, that it resembles nothing of modern day New York. Instead, it appears like a dream; the perfect location for a fin de siècle Traumnovelle. So why spend all that time trying to make it look real? Did Kubrick truly believe that the correct placement of a trash can would convince movie goers that they weren’t looking at a set? And if his intention all along was to create a dream of New York for his characters to sleepwalk through, did he really need all that useless detail? 

According to Emilio D’Alessandro, his driver and assistant of 30 years, Kubrick spent the two years of Emilio’s retirement living like some kind of obsessive-compulsive hermit, wallowing in filth, detritus and cat piss. Without Emilio there to clean up after him, Kubrick's privacy, genius and body of work allowed his mental illness to flourish unchecked under the eyes of family and friends. What we see on screen, then, may be the filmic equivalent of hoarding. Kubrick hoarded details like hoarders hoard cats. Which he also hoarded.

The Orgy Is Lame

The orgy remains Eyes Wide Shut's greatest contribution to the collective consciousness. Some claim it is a satanic ritual, while others posit that it's Kubrick's indictment of Hollywood long before the #MeToo movement. In retrospect, we can view the orgy as representative of the debauched, decadent one-percenters, living it up in pre-9/11 New York. Let's be honest, though - this has got to be the dullest orgy ever. None of the wealthy guests seem to actually be taking part in the proceedings. If they were, we'd see a lot more fat naked white guys going at it. Instead, they merely stand around, not talking or engaging with each other, watching young, nubile couples copulating. The guests can’t even eat or drink because of their masks. And this is supposed to be the wildest party ever, so wild that Bill literally spends hundreds of dollars trying to gatecrash it?

Also, the acting in this scene is notoriously bad. Understandably, this may have been intentional – as Ziegler tells Bill, it was all an act put on for his benefit. Yet, that doesn't explain why Cruise's masked performance reeks equally of cheese.

Good? Not Good?

Is it possible that Eyes Wide Shut is so masterful that it is beyond our understanding of what is and isn't good? If we were to compare it to other adult films by established directors from the same year, it clearly doesn't fare so well: Fight Club, American Beauty, and Bringing Out the Dead are all excellent films, without question. Two years later, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive also showed what could be accomplished when blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. All deal with adult concepts and present them in visually interesting ways. So why, then, does a film by one of the most revered directors of all time cause such doubt as to its actual worth? Does the Kubrick brand carry so much weight that we are willing to overlook its flaws? Or is the fact that we a still discussing this movie, twenty years after its release, testament to its magnificence? When Dave Chappelle impersonates Tom Cruise at an orgy, he doesn't need to name the movie or its creator. Eyes Wide Shut has burrowed its way into popular culture the same way most of Kubrick's films have. Whether it is a good movie or not is, consequently, irrelevant.