Eyes Wide Shut: A Sword in the Bed

In this way, Kubrick seemed to be mining his own connection to the material to heighten our feeling that we are entering an intensely private space. And the film’s claustrophobic intimacy is dramatically heightened by Kubrick’s decision to cast a real-life couple in the leading roles—and not just any real-life couple but one of the most famous, and speculated on, in the world at the time: Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. It is a canny and extraordinarily effective way of exploiting audiences’ desires to peer into the private sanctum of a marriage and to uncover its hidden secrets, making all of us aware of our status as voyeurs. Because the movie is nothing if not a tale of what goes on behind the closed doors of husbands and wives.

As such, while there is a plot—and even a conspiracy—in Eyes Wide Shut, its story beats are hardly traditional. Instead, the narrative is structured more like a Russian nesting doll of dreams and fantasies, anxieties and humiliations, the fever dream of a husband whose marriage is nearly undone by a single expression of his wife’s unsanctioned lust. Indeed, it is in this exploration of the folly of male hubris that we can see the deepest connection to Kubrick’s prior films. Female desire is largely unimaginable to the men of Eyes Wide Shut, a Pandora’s box they don’t dare open. Other than Alice, the women are primarily sex workers transacting male desire, or—as with the patient’s daughter, who startles Bill with her sudden erotic confession—completely mystifying ciphers. Alice’s revelation thus cracks Bill’s life open, and all his jealousy, rage, and confusion hum through every moment of his nocturnal follies. It is as if we have entered an anxiety-fueled dream of his in which he faces a gauntlet of sexual near-encounters thwarted by circumstance or by his own fumbling guilt. And each one feels more and more unreal as Bill traverses an amber-trapped, dreamlike New York City, a labyrinth in which he keeps ending up on the same block, stuck in a circuit he cannot escape.

The performances—Cruise’s foremost—are disarmingly, purposefully heightened and theatrical, with poor Bill straining to play it cool and flailing. And the impossibly solemn orgy seems to belong to a nightmare of sexual humiliation in which Bill comes across a parade of impossibly identical and impossibly perfect women’s bodies that he never gets to touch. Instead, as in a classic anxiety dream, he is ordered to take off his mask, and then his clothes, before being rescued by the deus ex machina of an anonymous woman who exists merely to save him.

A central structure of dreams—at least in the Freudian mode that both Schnitzler and Kubrick favored—is repetition, and the movie increasingly gives itself over to a constellation of recurring images, words, and symbols: rainbows, masks, passed notes, Christmas trees, mannequin-perfect nudes, long corridors, the color red. Such echoes bleed over into Bill’s dialogue in some scenes, consisting mostly of his repeating back what the other person has already said.

The repetitions persist into the following day, when Bill revisits all the locations of the previous night, a series of reprises in degraded or perverted form. The disturbing earlier episode of the shopkeeper Milich (Rade Sherbedgia) finding his preteen daughter in flagrante with two businessmen becomes Milich’s shabby attempt at pimping the same daughter to a horrified Bill. When Bill calls the patient’s daughter whose advances he had rejected the night before, he’s cut short by her fiancé answering the phone. When he arrives at the grand mansion of the masked orgy, he can’t get past the gates, dismissed with an ominous note. Perhaps most jarringly, when Bill returns to the tiny apartment of the young woman (Vinessa Shaw) with whom he nearly had sex, he learns that she has just tested positive for HIV. Desire that was frustrated or forestalled the night before is not even possible in the cruel light of day. And anonymous sex outside of marriage suddenly feels even more dangerous than the emotional hazards of sex within it.

When Bill returns to the marital bedroom—the scene of the inciting incident of Alice’s confession—he finds that he has brought his nightmares with him. The sword in the bed in Schnitzler’s novella becomes the orgy mask that Alice has seemingly found and set on Bill’s pillow. The couple face each other unmasked for the first time, and Bill promises Alice, “I’ll tell you everything.” Kubrick fades from Bill’s words to the following morning. We don’t hear Bill’s everything. We’ve been shut out. We are roundly scolded: it’s not our business.

In Schnitzler’s novella, this is where the story ends. As the couple drift off into a reassuringly “dreamless” sleep, we are left pondering whether the key to marriage might be balancing potentially conflicting drives: faith in traditional marriage and the understanding that there will always be desire for erotic pleasures beyond it; a belief in “forever” but the awareness that it all might end; and trust in each other, along with a recognition that one can never be sure. The sword has been laid down at last.

In Eyes Wide Shut, however, Kubrick is determined to give us the sobering morning after. We open on Alice’s wrecked face as she stares at Bill from across the room. Under her penetrating gaze, he’s no longer Dr. Bill in his expensive suit, or his physician’s coat, or his rented tux. Instead, he’s a little boy in his holiday sweater, slumped on an overlarge sofa that dwarfs him, like a misbehaving child waiting to see the school principal. And the principal is Alice. Cruise is even framed to look small, emasculated, infantilized. It appears to be up to Alice to restore him.

The closing scene both promises such a restoration and calls it into doubt. The couple go Christmas shopping with their daughter at the king of toy shops, FAO Schwarz. Amid the bustling commerce of bourgeois families, Alice—wearing her glasses, suggesting she can see clearly now—appears to offer Bill some measure of forgiveness or recuperation, saying they should both be grateful that they’ve “managed to survive through all of our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream.” But when Bill asks if she’s sure, she says “only as sure as I am that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, can ever be the whole truth.” It’s a baffling turn of phrase (shouldn’t that be “can never be the whole truth”?). And Bill, refusing to cede the higher ground, adds, “And no dream is ever just a dream.” In other words: both of them have transgressed, Alice in her dreams, Bill in his night away. But Alice tries again, suggesting that the important thing is that they’re “awake now”—that they’ve shared, confessed, exposed themselves to each other and emerged on the other side.

Then comes the striking final exchange. Alice asserts there is “something very important that we need to do as soon as possible,” and Bill asks, “What’s that?” She looks at him and replies, “Fuck.” While one might be tempted to see this line as hopeful, even generative, Kidman’s expression is hardly reassuring. She looks both stern (the school principal returning?) and unsteady. Perhaps most tellingly, Kubrick never gives us a reverse shot of Bill. The screen goes black. The door has closed on the Harfords.

While Kubrick tackled subjects as weighty as war, enslavement, dystopian violence, and nuclear annihilation, Eyes Wide Shut suggests that the most dangerous place of all might be a marital bedroom. It’s a realm of shaky power, shifting authority, and a terrifying lack of control. We are left wondering: Can marital sex—a kind of reconsummation of a couple’s bond—really remove that sword in the bed, really stop them from “lying side by side like mortal enemies”? Neither Alice nor Kubrick seems so sure. Watching, we feel our own marriages exposed, our own wayward desires unmasked. The movie thus cuts deeply, making us want to avert our eyes, preferring them to remain wide shut.