{"id":1823,"date":"2007-02-18T00:09:00","date_gmt":"2007-02-18T00:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2007\/02\/1823\/"},"modified":"2007-02-18T00:09:00","modified_gmt":"2007-02-18T00:09:00","slug":"1823","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2007\/02\/1823.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

WAKING UP IS HARD TO DO<\/strong>: In which I revise and extend my remarks on Eyes Wide Shut<\/em>.<\/p>\n

First of all, I should reiterate that the whole \u201cEWS<\/em> as horror movie\u201d thing is 100% Sean Collins\u2019s insight, and 0% mine. A couple people have given me props for it, so again, it isn\u2019t my idea, and I doubt I would ever have gotten it on my own. Viewing EWS<\/em> as a horror movie totally added not only to my understanding of the movie, but also to my enjoyment of it, so I\u2019m really grateful to Sean for getting it.<\/p>\n

Anyway. Josiah Neeley <\/strong>writes:<\/p>\n

\n

\u2026A friend of mine, who is a bit of a womanizer, says that it\u2019s the scariest movie he\u2019s ever seen. I\u2019m not so sure I agree that the movie is about committing adultery in your heart, though. What drives Cruise throughout the film is not really lust so much as a semi-conscious desire to \u201ceven the score\u201d and thereby get rid of the feeling that he\u2019s been cuckolded. (The scene where those random street toughs bump into Cruise and shout anti-gay slurs at him is illustrative of this). What set Kidman off, and led her to tell Cruise about the soldier in the first place, was the fact that Cruise wasn\u2019t jealous when told that another man was hitting on his wife but was instead turned on by the thought. So I think the film is more of a psychological thriller than a moral one. Cruise is presented a with a series of temptations that normally wouldn\u2019t be much of a temptation (just as the girls at the party at the beginning of the film weren\u2019t a real temptation for him), but because of what\u2019s happened with Kidman he feels almost compelled to give in. Each temptation is more depraved than the last (first plain adultery, then prostitution, then basically child prostitution,and finally a sadistic orgy) representing a kind of descent into hell, until the woman dying after the party snaps him out of it enough that he can actually *talk* to his wife about it all. <\/p>\n

The good girl\/bad girl thing was interesting. What would you make of the fact that the woman who saves Cruise at the end is the one who he saves at the beginning of the film? <\/p>\n

My only real complaint with the film aesthetically was that stupid music that played throughout the second half of the film whenever there wasn\u2019t any dialogue (made more annoying by my sense that the only reason it was there was to fill up the silence). That doesn\u2019t have anything to do with what you wrote. But it\u2019s something I\u2019ve been wanting to get off my chest for a while now.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Quickly: I think the sequence of events reinforces my belief that the movie is centrally concerned with \u201cadultery in one\u2019s heart.\u201d Kidman\u2019s character commits it, then needs reassurance that her sin was important<\/em>, and her insistence precipitates the rest of the film\u2019s events, all of which are mental\/spiritual rather than carnal.<\/p>\n

As for the \u201cbad girls\u201d question\u2026 I think, if anything, the point Josiah raises makes the movie creepier<\/em>. The well-being of the women Ziegler et al. exploit is explicitly raised as a major issue\u2026 and then just dropped.<\/p>\n

Sean Collins<\/strong> responds to my review here<\/a>. Some thoughts:<\/p>\n

To return to the horror framework, we can consider Bill and Alice Harford (but mostly Bill) to be this film\u2019s \u201cfinal girl.\u201d Sure, he survived, but I challenge you to listen to the way he sobs \u201cI\u2019ll tell you everything,\u201d or see the red eyes of his wife after he does so, or listen to that sadder and wiser conversation they have at the toy store in the film\u2019s final scene, and say nothing has changed for them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He\u2019s totally right about Dr Harford as the \u201cfinal girl.\u201d And this is the point where I\u2019m most willing to admit that my own preferences may be skewing my response to the movie. I\u2019m really, really resistant to professions of feeling bad<\/em>\u2013especially male professions of feeling bad, see above re possibly skewed response to movie\u2013unless accompanied by changes in behavior. I think if I had entered into Cruise\u2019s performance in that scene, many of my problems with the movie would have dissipated; I can think of actors who could probably have sold me on his misery. But you have to be really, really, really<\/em> good to sell me on repentance without change<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I understand that Cruise\u2019s character feels really bad. People feel really bad about what they do all the time. And then they \u201cwalk back in the revolving door, and do it all again.\u201d Some of that is just life. But some of it is a genuine question (which yeah, I put to myself all the time) of how much you\u2019re really sorry, if you don\u2019t actually change your life.<\/p>\n

PS: With regards to their daughter, the absence of any major plot points concerning which was a big sticking point for Eve, I just didn\u2019t think she played a particularly relevant part in their erotic and sexual lives. Given what I know to be Eve\u2019s political and philosophical bedrock, I can see why this might strike her as a lacuna; given my own sexual outlook, it didn\u2019t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So\u2026 it\u2019s okay that Helena is marginal to her parents\u2019 erotic and sexual lives, because actual children are marginal to their parents\u2019 ditto? Yeah, that isn\u2019t persuasive to me.<\/p>\n

Moreover, Helena is a wasted opportunity from a narrative perspective. I said in my earlier post that the obvious sex as generativity vs. sex as destruction dichotomy wasn\u2019t the only way to use Helena; there are about a million ways she could be made important, in the way that actual children are important to their actual parents\u2019 erotic lives. She\u2019s a daughter, for example: Can Dr Harford look at her without wondering if she will grow up to be misused by men? She\u2019s a sign of hope, that no matter how much two people screw up their relationship, they can still produce a child unearned and amazing. She\u2019s a sign that his relationship with his wife is about more than just the two of them: Both of them have bonds of responsibility that extend far beyond the self, to a dependent child who loves them.<\/p>\n

I really thought the movie was setting us up for some payoff there, in part because Mrs. Dr. makes it clear that her imaginary soldier fling happened after<\/em> her child was born. I thought the movie\u2019s ending would move its protagonists (Josiah Neeley\u2019s email suggests why maybe Kidman\u2019s character should be considered as much a protagonist as her husband) into the realm of deepened responsibility that comes with deepened love. Instead, Helena runs ahead of and away from them, as their final lines reinforce their mutual self-absorption. Their child really is treated as an accessory to the central fact of their couplehood. It\u2019s hard for me to believe that Dr Harford has substantively changed his attitude toward vulnerable women when he seems so uninterested and perfunctory toward his own daughter.<\/p>\n

Again, I definitely don\u2019t think we\u2019re supposed to feel that Bill had no responsibility to the woman at the orgy (or Leelee Sobieski, for that matter) other than \u201cto avoid them,\u201d nor that he was untouched by guilt over what befell them thanks to his unwillingness to do anything about it. In an ideal\/real world he\u2019d have called the cops the next day, but in the dream logic of the film, he woke up, and by then it\u2019s too late to go back and rescue characters from your nightmare.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Okay, I think I understand the nature of Sean\u2019s criticism here\u2013it\u2019s a point about genre. It\u2019s absurd to think that Alice would be concerned about, I don\u2019t know, the Red Queen\u2019s political prisoners, after her return from Wonderland. You wake up, and while your dream can still affect you, you can no longer affect the dream.<\/p>\n

That helplessness might be experienced as tragedy. And exploring or at least showing that tragedy might have \u201credeemed\u201d EWS<\/em> for me. It\u2019s hard to say, because I don\u2019t think the movie actually presents this helplessness as tragic.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also really hard for me to see EWS<\/em> as a dream-narrative for two reasons: 1. Yeah, sexual exploitation of women is a lot more normal than cards cutting off people\u2019s heads for tart mismanagement. The movie wants the emotional frisson of real sexual cruelty, with no corresponding responsibility.
2. There\u2019s no \u201centering the dream\u201d moment. The colors are already intensified, the music already insistent, from the first moment. The Wizard of Oz<\/em> was obvious, and I understand that you can use other methods to shift into dream-narrative, but I don\u2019t think I can identify a moment when EWS<\/em> shifted from black-and-white to Technicolor. It did obviously shift back<\/em> at the end, though. And while on one level I think that\u2019s right\u2013we do slip slowly into dreams (and into sin), while often jerking sharply out of them\u2013on another level it made it really hard for me to view the orgy\/exploitation scenes as make-believe, something the characters could leave behind once they awoke.<\/p>\n

Look, I know that \u201cin dreams begin responsibilities\u201d is a cliche, but\u2026 it\u2019s kind of frustrating to me that I think all my problems with EWS<\/em> are really the same problem repeated in different places, and if that problem were solved in even one place, I would probably be able to suspend my disbelief about the other places. I really wanted to like this movie: It\u2019s amazing to look at, and, like I said, I thought the leads were good and the basic idea behind the movie was awesome. And then I felt like it failed to deliver on its promise.<\/p>\n

Um. Sorry for writing a book, here, people. I hope this was interesting to someone. Like I said, I really do think you should watch this if it sounds even remotely interesting.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WAKING UP IS HARD TO DO: In which I revise and extend my remarks on Eyes Wide Shut. First of all, I should reiterate that the whole \u201cEWS as horror movie\u201d thing is 100% Sean Collins\u2019s insight, and 0% mine. A couple people have given me props for it, so again, it isn\u2019t my idea, […]<\/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-1823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nEve Tushnet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"WAKING UP IS HARD TO DO: In which I revise and extend my remarks on Eyes Wide Shut.First of all, I should reiterate that the whole "EWS as horror movie"\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2007\/02\/1823.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" 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