Is life merely a dream? Can our dreams and imaginations be
transformed to shape the reality of our existences, and to define what we are
or what we can be? Can the impersonal power of desire lead us to
self-knowledge, and have a constructive contribution to our happiness? Above
all, are dream and reality, or their metamorphic cousins, Eros and Thanatos, so
entangled that there is no point to distinguish between them? All these
questions have been explored in Stanley Kubrick’s final achievement – ‘Eyes
Wide Shut’ (1999)!
‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (henceforth EWS) proved to be the final
words from the visionary director, when Kubrick died a few days after he has
submitted the final version of the film to the distributors. Just like almost
any other of his films, EWS was initially received poorly among the public,
only to be re-evaluated and risen in status throughout the past 15 years or so.
Personally, I first regarded EWS as a lesser work of Kubrick, when we compared
it to films like ‘2001’, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Barry Lyndon’. Yet, I soon
realized I was wrong. Just like most of Kubrick’s later efforts, EWS is so
visual that you will discover more and more when you repeatedly watch the film,
and you start to generate more and more insights throughout the process. After
all these, I would say EWS is no less in terms of achievement to his greatest
films, and it can be compared to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ – rather it is a
sexual odyssey for EWS. Thus, ‘2001’, ‘Barry Lyndon’, and ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ can
be considered an ‘Odyssey’ trilogy, encompassing the past, present and future,
from psychological to cosmological.
Why was EWS so poorly received when it was first released in
1999? I guess it can be summarized by 3 reasons: wrong expectations from the
audience, ambiguous genre categorizations, and its deliberate pacing. Many
members of audience were expecting to watch a film with the then-married Tom
Cruise and Nicole Kidman to engage in some naughty, hard-core sex, and other
forms of sexual perversions. If that was the case, then these viewers were
doomed to be disappointed. ‘Obscene’ is the last word I would use to describe
EWS – while there are full-frontal nudities and the film is primarily concerned
with sexual issues, the film is very un-erotic and un-sensational when it comes
to the treatment of sex. We can say the film is more psychological – or
psychosexual in a Freudian sense. EWS is not merely a film about sex. The
reason why many people have started to appreciate the film is because it
encapsulates the consistent philosophical vision Kubrick has been delivered in
his films since ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. EWS, like the other Kubrickian films,
is multi-layered and it should be understood in many different perspectives, be
it psychologically, culturally and sociologically.
EWS is one of Kubrick’s most ambitious film, because he
always felt that the most difficult challenge in cinema is to make a film that
represented his own era. Of course, it sounds like a weird idea at first sight
because who is not often making films about their own times, except one is
making a sci-fi, fantasy or period film? What Kubrick meant was that if you
were making a film about your own times, then it was too easy for one to be
subjective and sentimental, and all you would get was a view-point which was
narrow in scope. Kubrick, ambitious as he was, wanted to inspire his audience
and viewed his era in a more clinical and anthropological viewpoint when he was
making his films, because that would certainly benefit the audience in long term.
He loved the project – when he has secured the right to the novel ‘Dream Story’
by Schnitzler in the late 1960s, he originally planned to make the film in the
1970s, after ‘2001’ and ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Has Kubrick made EWS during the
1970s, I am sure his approach would be far more daring and the result would
certainly be a modern masterpiece.
What sort of genre can EWS be categorized into? One of the
issues many audience and critics were confused initially was that they found it
challenging to categorize EWS into any conventional genres. Kubrick’s films
often defied genre expectations, and revealed the malleability of a traditional
genre. While EWS can be rightfully considered as an erotic thriller or
psychological thriller, the very formalized and ritualized style can make it a
chamber play; the fact that the male protagonist, Bill Harford (Tom Cruise),
was exploring around the darkest labyrinth of New York City can make it an
adventure film; and, I would even say it is a war film – as it is about the
struggle and ‘rebellion’ between Bill Harford and the world around him. On the
other hand, many critics were not only unhappy with the lack of sex scenes, but
also the slow pace of the film. Upon repeated viewing, I feel that the film is
justified to have a running time of 2.5 hours, as Kubrick would likely want the
intricately connected episodes to unfold slowly, and the result was a nice
internal rhythm, almost like ‘Barry Lyndon’.
An aspect that is worth mentioning regarding Eyes Wide Shut
is that the female characters seem to take a more significant narrative
importance as compared to his previous films. Kubrick has often been criticized
as a sexist filmmaker, because many of his films seemed to be concerned with
men or viewed from a male perspective, and the female characters tended to be
undermined and not narrative important. In Eyes Wide Shut, though many of the
female characters were exploited and subject to mechanical dehumanization, a
few of them were highly imaginative and courageous, and were far more
charismatic and likeable than the other male characters in the film. Though we
are still valid to say that EWS is a male-oriented film, because we are looking
from Bill’s point of view and inaccessible to the female characters’
perspectives, the female characters are not like Lady Lyndon or Wendy Torrance –
they are seen with more significance to the story.
A brief sketch on the story. Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise)
and Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman), with a
daughter, were living in an upper-class area in New York . One evening, after attending a
party the other day, the couple got into an argument regarding their sexual
desires, and Alice admitted that, at some point during a trip the year before,
she saw a handsome naval officer and contemplated cheating on Bill, and she was
willing to sacrifice her whole future and relationship to sleep with the naval
officer for only one night. While we had no way to verify whether it was the
truth or only Alice’s imagination, the story devastated Bill, and after visiting
a dying patient, he embarked on a nocturnal Odyssey in the streets of the New
York City, meeting various people, including a number of women which his
actions would have led to (mostly negative) outcomes for themselves. His
adventure climaxed in his party-crashing a private masked ball in Somerton,
where a number of secret ritual orgies and sacrifice ceremony were taking
place. After being spotted out as an intruder, Bill’s life was being endangered
by veiled threats and more uncanny incidents taking place around him. Will he
get out alive, and can he be able to mend fences with Alice at the end?
In ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, the boundary between dream and reality
was a thin one. Certain critics and viewers even pointed out that, there was
absolutely no point to distinguish which part of the film was a dream or
fantasy or which part was really happening, like the endless debates in films
like ‘Inception’. Because, Kubrick, like in Schnitzler’s treatment, has placed
an elliptical narrative and made the story so ambiguous that it would make the
film more appropriately as ‘dream-like’ rather than asking for a ‘dream/reality
dichotomy’. Indeed, the style of the film can be considered Modernist, as
Schnitzler and Freud, who has influenced Kubrick and his ideas are explored in
the film, are also part of the Modernist movements in the early 20th
century. Indeed, one may identify EWS with James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, a Modernist
masterpiece and a similar scenario regarding some sort of an Odyssey was
illustrated in the book. The Modernist movement has also influenced early
cinema, especially the silent cinema. It is evident that Kubrick has adopted
Imagist or silent movie approaches in many of his films, as these approaches
tend to rely on a visual mean to convey the message. The visualization of thoughts
has been employed in EWS, most notably in Bill Harford’s imagination of his
wife Alice
making love with the naval officer, even shown in black-and-white. Of course,
recently Christopher Nolan has also used silent film approaches to generate
suspense and atmosphere in his latest film ‘Dunkirk ’, as he was attempting to use a
visual mean to tell the story.
What is rather ironic, however, is that Kubrick has
committed a sort of anti-realism in Eyes Wide Shut. Thus, there is a form of
artifice in the film, where the apparently ‘real’ New York
did not resemble the real New York ;
the dialogues were banal and stylized; and the story followed a formalized
structure which some people would criticize as a bad example of narrative cinema.
The philosopher Zizek has pointed out that these apparent inaccuracies might be
deliberate – to show that Bill was dreaming and therefore having these
wish-fulfilling scenarios and co-incidences taking place. Certain attentive
viewers have also discovered spatial inconsistencies or uncanny observations
throughout the film, as in the case for ‘The Shining’, suggesting that certain
parts of the films likely took place in the dream or imaginary space.
Eyes Wide Shut has a dream-like quality, and it seemed to be
playing with a number of psychological ideas, most notably from those of
Freud’s. The idea of the unconscious part of the mind has been demonstrated
through the imagination of Alice ’s
fantasy with the naval officer. When she was delivering the story, it was as if
she was doing a free association exercise from a psychoanalytic session. And, I
believe there is a reason why her narrative concerned a naval officer, because
it symbolized exploration, which was wish-fulfilling because she might want to
escape from the grip of the domestic environment and identity she situated in. I
can think of a further wordplay here with the naval officer. It would be an
‘oceanic’ feeling for her if her dream has really come true.
There are numerous wordplays in the film. Not only many of
the character’s names may have symbolic meanings, the dialogues are also
stylized. Some of the dialogues were deliberately made to be banal, and also it
was evident that characters often repeated one another’s quote or had a similar
structure when they were talking. The formalized style here was fascinating,
because it was very non-naturalistic when we looked at films that were
concerned to enhance the realism. Some critics believed that these dialogues
contributed to the dream-like quality of the film, it was like the characters
(possibly Bill) were thinking out the dialogues himself to generate a
wish-fulfilling result. The dream-like quality was enhanced by the presence of
co-incidences, which incidents seemed to parallel each other at various parts
of the films.
Certain critics have also pointed out that, Kubrick has
deliberated used some rather strange editing techniques to generate an uncanny
feeling in the audience and made them question themselves about what they have
really seen. For example, traditional films seem to use a classical continuity
editing approach, so that the spatial relations between 2 characters can become
clearly defined and enhance the narrative consistently. In EWS, while Kubrick
has painstaking ensured a rhythm of fluid style – almost like an Ophuls film –
through the use of steadicam long takes and tracking shots, the general
approach seemed to be violated in a number of times, when that involved 2 interacting
characters, an 180 degree cut that crossed the axis were used instead. This
seems awkward because the sudden ‘bumps’ in terms of style will attract
audience attention. Yet some critics feel that these are more than visual
gimmicks, because Kubrick might be providing clues that the images were only
imaginary projections from Bill’s point or view. Thus, that was Bill’s dream-space
we were situating in. After all, as the Chinese philosopher Zhuang Tzu has questioned in the Butterfly Dream scenario: can we really distinguish between dreaming and the waking life, and are subjectivity and objectivity really that clearly defined?
(1/2)
by Ed Law
26/8/2017
Film Analysis
