Eyes Wide Shut.......What Does It All Mean???

[acoustix]

I enjoy Kubrick's films, but I'm not a rabid fan. I understand the imagery in most of his movies, as well as the underlying themes. However, Eyes Wide Shut remains an enigma to me. I just can't grasp what the film is saying. Is it suggesting that even the most upscale, white bread, pompous citizens can be sexual deviants? Is it saying something about sex in our society in general? Am I missing the mark, and it actually is just a story of a man who realises that his relationship with his wife is worth saving?


Also, what is the significance of the ritualistic party?

What's even stranger than this is the fact that I like the movie as much as I do. Nicole Kidman naked does have a hand in that, but mainly I like the atmosphere and the chilling score. I repeat, the score on this film is one of the best I have ever heard. But other than those two factors, I honestly don't know why I like it so much. Maybe that is the mark of a great movie?

[Dominic]

i love certain movies that are enigmatic in their meaning - Sex & Lucia, Being John Malkovich, the Three Colors trilogy...so ther's nothing odd about loving a movie you don't understand. I think one of the motivations for these kind of filmmakers is to get the audience to ponder its meanings.

As far as EWS...I think of it as treatise on marriage and how you never fully know the person your with...thoughts on the road not taken...sexual intensity and base desire vs. security, love and companionship...that kind of stuff.

[Utah]

[ QUOTE ]
As far as EWS...I think of it as treatise on marriage and how you never fully know the person your with...thoughts on the road not taken...sexual intensity and base desire vs. security, love and companionship...that kind of stuff.

[/ QUOTE ]I interpeted EWS as saying the world of relationships we create for ourselves in completely contrived and that we are still driven by core desires that all the love and marriage cannot supplant. For example, all the love, security, family, child, etc. would not have stopped the Nicole Kidman from the one night stand with the soldier even if it cost her everything.

I thought he was saying that it is not deviancy but normalcy.

[CharlieDontSurf]

Good post Utah

The score is brilliant. The fact that it was Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as the stars....I think it led people to kind of bash the film even if they didn't know why they were bashing it.

I still think its one of the best films of that decade.

[John Cole]

Have you read The Odyssey?

[Nick_Schulman]

Watch the movie again and pay attention to RED/BLUE.

[prohornblower]

I love the movie, like most of SK's work. I rented it and watched it like 5 days in a row a few years back. I really haven't seen it in a while so I cannot talk about the deep meaning of the film. But it seemed more sensible to me than say the Shining or 2001.

The orgy scene is awesome. Those chicks all have phenomenal bodies. And leelee sobieski looks good in underwear.

[Dominic]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
As far as EWS...I think of it as treatise on marriage and how you never fully know the person your with...thoughts on the road not taken...sexual intensity and base desire vs. security, love and companionship...that kind of stuff.

[/ QUOTE ]I interpeted EWS as saying the world of relationships we create for ourselves in completely contrived and that we are still driven by core desires that all the love and marriage cannot supplant. For example, all the love, security, family, child, etc. would not have stopped the Nicole Kidman from the one night stand with the soldier even if it cost her everything.

I thought he was saying that it is not deviancy but normalcy.

[/ QUOTE ]

nice

[GMontag]

[ QUOTE ]
And leelee sobieski looks good in underwear.

[/ QUOTE ]

You realize she was twelve when that was filmed, right?

[Mickey Brausch]

Quoting Kubrick, pre-shooting the film:
"There is also a novel by Arthur Schnitzler, Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, which I intend to do but on which I have not yet started to work. It's a difficult book to describe -- what good book isn't? It explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage, and tries to equate the importance of sexual dreams and might-have-beens with reality. All of Schnitzler's work is psychologically brilliant, and he was greatly admired by Freud, who once wrote to him, apologizing for having always avoided a personal meeting. Making a joke (a joke?), Freud said this was because he was afraid of the popular superstition that if you meet your Doppelgänger (double) you would die."
link

Note that Kubrick was also "happily married" to actress Susanne Christian since 1957.

The title of the book is, I think, the key. This is a dream film. Not in the sense that we are asked to stop trying to understand but in the sense that the film follows the strict laws of dreaming. In our dreams almost all the persons and the happenings are about us, the person dreaming. The protagonist of Eyes Wide Shut, a happily married, successful doctor, walks the landscape of his fears and fantasies; stumbles on a elaborate network of orgiasts and chases after them, wants to be part of it (only he is lost as to what he must do, once he's there); befriends a "golden-hearted" whore, the "sexually available woman"; meets by happenstance an old female acquaintance who unbeknownst to him was deeply in love with him; is followed by mysterious, guilt-inducing strangers in the dark streets; is given mysterious, non-helping directions in writing; a two-some frolic proposed by sexy young things; etc. Female fantasies are not differentiated from the male ones: A woman lying naked (and helpless) under the male gaze; a marriedd woman's violent and intense one-night stand with a total stranger; etc.

And Kubrick tells his tale with devilish, saving humor! The costume vendor, who also pimps his underage daughter on the side (Leelee Sobieski was actually 16 when the film was shot), is a bumbling, comic, exuberant character. The orgy itself comes on as a gothic affair but could be straight out of a Roger Corman quickie. The suave, white-haired womanizer at the ball is played tiwh perfect seriousness, yet is also a walking cliché. Reality intrudes only sporadically, as for example in the flirting of Cruise by the gay receptionist.

It's not an enigmatic film, but an elliptic film, a film of suggestiveness: it narrates truths, even when what we see is not real, but it doesn't try to tell us any kinfd of "whole truth", because it is impossible -- and when do we ever get to know everything? Only in feel-good Hollywoodiana. (Final dialogue in script: "The reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, is not the whole truth. And no dream is entirely a dream.")

Mickey Brausch

The above is only a high-falutin' elaboration of what was already put forth, in this thread, by Utah. It would be nice to have Mrs Utah's perspective as well.