{"id":1819,"date":"2007-02-20T00:21:00","date_gmt":"2007-02-20T00:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2007\/02\/1819\/"},"modified":"2007-02-20T00:21:00","modified_gmt":"2007-02-20T00:21:00","slug":"1819","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2007\/02\/1819.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

IT IS THE BEATING OF THAT HIDEOUS HORSE!<\/strong>: (I\u2019m so sorry. Can you tell I\u2019ve been waiting months<\/em> to use that headline?)<\/p>\n

Some thoughts on Eyes Wide Shut<\/em>\u2013a movie, I should say, that I\u2019m still mulling over. It can\u2019t be dismissed, even if my ultimate judgment remains \u201ctries hard, finds subject difficult.\u201d I apologize, once more, for the length of this.<\/p>\n

First, The American Scene <\/a>links to Lee Siegel\u2019s defense of the movie. The first half of it isn\u2019t addressed to me, since I was well-served by Sean Collins\u2019s previous discussion of the movie <\/a>(I\u2019m pretty sure that\u2019s why I Netflix\u2019d it) rather than ill-served by hype and anti-hype. But I thought this was right-on and worth highlighting:<\/p>\n

\u2026In the novel, the password Bill uses to gain entrance to the orgy is \u201cDenmark.\u201d In the movie, it is \u201cFidelio.\u201d Remarkably no critic I\u2019ve quoted even brought up the password. This is a pretty bad lapse for reviews that called Kubrick\u2019s meditation on marriage an empty aesthetic exercise, since the opera Fidelio<\/em> is Beethoven\u2019s hymn to conjugal love. Indeed, Kubrick structures his film with gorgeously subtle references to Fidelio<\/em> 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\u2019s tale.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

review is here<\/a><\/p>\n

Siegel also says this:<\/p>\n

\u2026Our tame middle-class critics so wanted Kubrick\u2019s 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\u2019s orgy is, but no one talked about how intensely erotic is Bill\u2019s fantasy of Alice
making love with the naval officer. It is so erotic because Alice is the object not only of Bill\u2019s desire but also of his love.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/em>), but I didn\u2019t find the Alice-fantasy scenes erotic at all. The black-and-white felt cliched; the whole thing did. That actually worked for me\u2013I\u2019m thinking that jealous fantasies, like most projections of the self onto the beloved, are usually cliched.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s lots of other close-reading-y stuff in Siegel\u2019s review, some of it acute and some of it\u2026 well, maybe<\/em>. It\u2019s very much worth reading (despite its defensiveness) if you are interested in the movie.<\/p>\n

I agree with Sean<\/strong> that we\u2019ve probably reached the \u201cagree to disagree\u201d point <\/a>(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\u2019t feel weird about bringing up my underlying beliefs\u2013I totally agree with him that our differences there are part of what\u2019s going on here.)<\/p>\n

The first: I think my second post, especially, at times implied something I don\u2019t believe on either a religious or an aesthetic level: that children are what makes marriage real<\/em>.<\/em> On a religious level, this isn\u2019t my belief. (I was reminded of something I noticed during those theology of the body seminars<\/a> I went to over the summer\u2013when Jesus points to Adam and Eve as models of married life, He\u2019s pointing to a marriage that doesn\u2019t, as yet, have children. They do eventually\u2013Cain, founder of cities!\u2013but they serve as models for men and women before<\/em> that happens.) On an aesthetic level, I definitely think you could remove Helena from Eyes Wide Shut<\/em> and still have an earthquake in the marriage be big enough<\/em> for the impact the movie wants.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a token to raise the stakes of infidelity at the outset, and she\u2019s a reward at the end, but she isn\u2019t affected by her parents\u2019 discord and she doesn\u2019t affect them; and I think that\u2019s both untrue-to-life and a missed narrative opportunity.<\/p>\n

In the hypothetical EWS<\/em>-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\u2019s 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\u2019ve been through. I didn\u2019t buy that she would suggest it so soon, and I also thought the movie didn\u2019t recognize its insufficiency. The weird irrelevant-presence of Helena only heightened the underlying problems with the scene.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s possible we\u2019re 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\u2019s 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\u2019s still embedded in the language.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, vs. expressions of misery) presented as the means to a renewed marriage\u2026.<\/p>\n

I know I said before that my problem was Cruise\u2019s performance\u2013he wasn\u2019t amazing enough to sell me on repentance-without-change\u2013and now I think I\u2019m saying something slightly different, that no matter how good his performance I still would have read it as shame rather than penitence. I\u2019m not sure which is right; maybe both.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

IT IS THE BEATING OF THAT HIDEOUS HORSE!: (I\u2019m so sorry. Can you tell I\u2019ve been waiting months to use that headline?) Some thoughts on Eyes Wide Shut\u2013a movie, I should say, that I\u2019m still mulling over. It can\u2019t be dismissed, even if my ultimate judgment remains \u201ctries hard, finds subject difficult.\u201d I apologize, once […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nEve Tushnet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"IT IS THE BEATING OF THAT HIDEOUS HORSE!: (I'm so sorry. 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