E
yes Wide Shut was released in 1999, produced, directed and co-written by Kubrick. The movie was based on the novel Dream Story, originally named Traumnovelle (1926) written by Arthur Schnitzler. This narrative was the last movie Kubrick directed before he died, and it can be considered a summary of all the questions previously raised in his movies. If in 2001, still in 1968, we saw the image of a man of the future dominated by their own inventions and institutions – watched and disciplined from their isola-tion and dependence - in Eyes Wide Shut, almost 30 years after the shot in the dark made by Kubrick, we have exactly the out-come of the future contemporary man.The characters of the movie also contain aspects dealt with in The Shin-ning. The emptiness and lack of content reach its ultimate point. In this film, we can observe not only the prison made by the system, but also the tools intended to control social life: money and luxury. The family represented is isolated in its own life in the big city, living with people they have only superficial relations with, basi-cally mediated by materiality.
cinema As a denouement for the context
presented in The Shining, the society represented in this movie is made of the repeated pages written by Jack with no content; a society based on appearance, money and status. Eyes Wide Shut shows the extreme side of the effective era of capitalism, in which people were not only prisoners but also slaves of the objectifi-cation of the human being and their rela-tionships.
Apparently, the movie is about the life of a greatly known Hollywood cou-ple, Tom Cruise and Nicolle Kidman, who played the main characters, Bill and Alice Harford. Just as in The Shining, despite being presented to a typical American family, we discover throughout the movie that they are also a problematic example of this social structure. From our point of view, regarding the prior movies, the fam-ily is a recurrent theme in Kubrick’s work, and in all of them, it is seen as a tradition-al and problematic structure.
Alice and Bill Harford is a couple moved by their image and status. The first sentences of the movie are very im-portant, as they define the superficial as-pect of both characters. Bill asks about his wallet and Alice asks him if she looks beautiful. Bill is a doctor, who always uses his profession to profit from all dif-ferent sorts of situations, offering money or asking favors from everybody around him under the pretext of being a doctor.
Alice is an astonishing woman who al-ways has her figure associated with mir-rors or comments related to her beauty.
When the couple arrives home, after going to a ball in which the local
aristocracy were gathered, Alice and the doctor discuss their attitudes during that evening. Alice stayed for a long time dancing very close to an unknown man, while Bill was flirting with two models. As the dialogue goes on, Alice admits to Bill that he could not be too pretentious and confident about himself and her fidelity to him, revealing that once she almost left everything behind, their marriage and daughter, because of a man she just looked at during a trip.
This revelation moves Bill’s thou- ghts. Their conversation is interrupted;
Bill leaves the house as he needs to see a patient who is at death’s door. As he leaves the house, his adventures during a whole night begin. At first, he meets two women, first the daughter of his patient and then Domino, a prostitute. When he meets the daughter of his patient, she unexpectedly declares her love for him, and just like his wife almost had done, she promises to leave everything behind because of him. From our perspective, the attitude of these women represent the uncertainty and instability of the marital life and the family. Despite being apparently happy, both women do not mind changing their lives for a new ad-venture.
As Bill goes through the night, walking in the streets, disturbed by the images in his mind of Alice with other men, in a kind of both real and surreal experience, he finds in the front door of a pub a flyer of a friend who would have a concert there at that same night. As he meets his friend, Bill enters the major ad-venture of the movie: he discovers that his
friend is going to play in a weird place and then does everything that is possible to go with him. In order to go to this place, Bill has to hide himself behind a mask and leaves the center of New York to reach a distant region in which the party was go-ing to take place.
The movie structure is all marked by repetitions and dualities. At the same time that we can interpret this process of repetition as a signal of Bill’s oneiric state of mind, we believe that this structure is a representation of the historical back-ground of objectification and massive production of things. Not only are objects and things repeated through the scenes (Christmas lights, streets, masks, clothes), but also dialogues between people and even the structure of the movie itself.
The most important point of the process of objectification happens when Bill arrives at the party, which is actu-ally an orgy. The orgy is a kind of ritual in which all men are wearing capes and masks as they have no individuality, and women wear just the mask, display-ing their bodies as objects. As each man chooses a woman and the sexual ritual starts, we see a society that reached its ultimate point of boredom. The scenes of sex are extremely uninteresting. Men watch women having sex with no lust; all the participants seem to be in a vegetative state. The highest point of the objectifica-tion is the masks and capes with no signal of lives. When we look at the people we see bodies without souls, all covered with similar masks: no individuality, no identi-ty and no content – a massive generation of ghosts.
As the participants identify that Bill does not belong to that ritual they put him in the center of a circle and start dis-cussing what kind of punishment could be given for his attitudes. At this time, one of the women suggests to make a sacrifice in order to them set Bill free. Bill leaves the place with no clue about was going to happen to the woman. That night he starts to go after clues about those people, the woman who offered to be sacrificed and what all that meant. The fact of the matter is that as soon as Bill starts looking for clues, he begins to be watched. As we approach the end of movie, we discover that Ziegler, the owner of the first party, was present in the orgy, and knows that Bill was also there. He prevents Bill from going after the meaning of that for his own safety and tells him that he had been watched since that day.
The structure of isolation in order to take control of people’s lives reaches the ultimate point in Eyes Wide Shut. Al-though being not prisoned in cells, people admit their individualized positions with-out hesitation. We do not really know who Bill or Alice are, as much as we do not know who those people in the orgy are. The couple that seems so clear to the audience is also a product of the objecti-fication of a society – Alice is purely full of beauty and sensuality, whereas Bill is associated to money and status - that is all we know about them. The characters they incorporate in society is also part of a structure; a structure in which one is being watched and has to be ready to figure out a way to according to the rules.
When Bill discovers that he was being
cinema watched, it is not a great surprise to him;
being watched is part of the game, and the use of different social masks can be their means for surviving in this social struc-ture.