IT IS THE BEATING OF THAT HIDEOUS HORSE!: (I’m so sorry. Can you tell I’ve been waiting months to use that headline?)

Some thoughts on Eyes Wide Shut–a movie, I should say, that I’m still mulling over. It can’t be dismissed, even if my ultimate judgment remains “tries hard, finds subject difficult.” I apologize, once more, for the length of this.

First, The American Scene links to Lee Siegel’s defense of the movie. The first half of it isn’t addressed to me, since I was well-served by Sean Collins’s previous discussion of the movie (I’m pretty sure that’s why I Netflix’d it) rather than ill-served by hype and anti-hype. But I thought this was right-on and worth highlighting:

…In the novel, the password Bill uses to gain entrance to the orgy is “Denmark.” In the movie, it is “Fidelio.” Remarkably no critic I’ve quoted even brought up the password. This is a pretty bad lapse for reviews that called Kubrick’s meditation on marriage an empty aesthetic exercise, since the opera Fidelio is Beethoven’s hymn to conjugal love. Indeed, Kubrick structures his film with gorgeously subtle references to Fidelio and Christmas and Ovid and Homer though none of the critics here interpreted any of these allusions either. Nothing of the sort exists in Schnitzler’s tale.

review is here

Siegel also says this:

…Our tame middle-class critics so wanted Kubrick’s orgy to be dark and dangerous and full of sexual energy, but Kubrick wanted to show that sex without emotion is ritualistic, contrived, and in thrall to authority and fear. He was too wild for them. Everyone droned on about how unerotic Kubrick’s orgy is, but no one talked about how intensely erotic is Bill’s fantasy of Alice
making love with the naval officer. It is so erotic because Alice is the object not only of Bill’s desire but also of his love.

I think the first point is probably right (and therefore I was wrong to want the orgy scene to have the lambent eroticism of the best parts of O), but I didn’t find the Alice-fantasy scenes erotic at all. The black-and-white felt cliched; the whole thing did. That actually worked for me–I’m thinking that jealous fantasies, like most projections of the self onto the beloved, are usually cliched.

There’s lots of other close-reading-y stuff in Siegel’s review, some of it acute and some of it… well, maybe. It’s very much worth reading (despite its defensiveness) if you are interested in the movie.

I agree with Sean that we’ve probably reached the “agree to disagree” point (although I am still mulling). I do want to say two (relatively) quick things, the first a clarification of a place where I think my poor phrasing gave the wrong impression and the second an acknowledgment of a place where Sean is probably right about our divergent reactions to the movie. (Oh, and he shouldn’t feel weird about bringing up my underlying beliefs–I totally agree with him that our differences there are part of what’s going on here.)

The first: I think my second post, especially, at times implied something I don’t believe on either a religious or an aesthetic level: that children are what makes marriage real. On a religious level, this isn’t my belief. (I was reminded of something I noticed during those theology of the body seminars I went to over the summer–when Jesus points to Adam and Eve as models of married life, He’s pointing to a marriage that doesn’t, as yet, have children. They do eventually–Cain, founder of cities!–but they serve as models for men and women before that happens.) On an aesthetic level, I definitely think you could remove Helena from Eyes Wide Shut and still have an earthquake in the marriage be big enough for the impact the movie wants.

My point was more that once you introduce Helena, you have to use her either mechanistically or symbolically, and the movie chose the former. She’s a token to raise the stakes of infidelity at the outset, and she’s a reward at the end, but she isn’t affected by her parents’ discord and she doesn’t affect them; and I think that’s both untrue-to-life and a missed narrative opportunity.

In the hypothetical EWS-without-Helena, I am pretty sure the final lines would still feel like mutual self-absorption to me. Some bad alchemy of dialogue/concept and performance made it come across as wish-fulfillment (this may just be me, but I felt like Kidman’s voice even went kind of candy-colored at the very end), a return to status quo ante, an attempt to resolve the problem of sex by ignoring it. What Mrs. Dr. proposes is both necessary and radically insufficient for addressing what they’ve been through. I didn’t buy that she would suggest it so soon, and I also thought the movie didn’t recognize its insufficiency. The weird irrelevant-presence of Helena only heightened the underlying problems with the scene.

Second thing: Sean suggests that we diverged on the movie because he was reading its ending as a depiction of guilt and shame and I was reading it as a narrative about sin. That might be a big part of it, yeah. It’s possible we’re using words in different ways, here, but I think part of my problem is that in my view shame (especially) often traps people, forces a kind of miserable ingrowing of the personality, a self-swallowing that’s both terribly painful for the person undergoing it and totally useless to himself and anyone around him. The language of sin, by contrast, implies the possibility and requirement of repentance and redemption; a particular person may not fulfill that requirement, but it’s still embedded in the language.

And so while I saw Dr Harford as consumed by shame in his breakdown, that to me is not a state of mind that leads to resolution (or anything good!), and so I was disconcerted to see it (and its characteristic absence of actions of repentance, vs. expressions of misery) presented as the means to a renewed marriage….

I know I said before that my problem was Cruise’s performance–he wasn’t amazing enough to sell me on repentance-without-change–and now I think I’m saying something slightly different, that no matter how good his performance I still would have read it as shame rather than penitence. I’m not sure which is right; maybe both.