EYES WIDE SHUT: An Appreciation

In some circles, Stanley Kubrick is called one of the few truly great film
directors of the 20th century. Not since 2001: A Space Odyssey has he created
cinema as rich, fervent, and polished as Eyes Wide Shut. Perhaps that sounds like
a wild boast. After all, more than his other films combined (lacking 2001, of
course), Kubrick's reputation centers on A Clockwork Orange. In addition, his
last film earned some of the worst notices of his career. Must a generous
evaluation, then, be more subjective regret at his untimely death than objective
appreciation of the film itself or worse, simple blind worship?

To answer those questions as well as others, this essay looks at the movie from
various angles, including its acting performances and a closing section on the
film's many internal references, both to itself and to Kubrick's other works.
Story, structure, and visual design, despite close interconnections, for purposes
of clarity are treated in separate portions of the essay.

STORY

A prevalent criticism holds that the film's story is too flimsy to sustain its
long running time and slow pace. At a glance, that might seem true. A quick
synopsis offers little in the way of plot. After a Christmas party, a successful
New York doctor and his wife argue the question of sexual fidelity. The wife
reveals an unconsummated but intense sexual attraction she once felt for another
man. Stung by her admission, the husband spends a wild night looking for sex, a
quest that leads even to crashing an orgiastic party given by and for a group of
incalculably powerful people. Next day, the husband admits his adventures to, and
is thus reconciled with his wife. This doesn't seem like much, but a detailed
examination shows that Kubrick and his collaborator Frederick Raphael have fleshed
out this slim idea with remarkable complexity. Its plot devices, though few, are
in fact struts upon which are strung a rich series of ideas.

From the movie's first dialogue, it's clear this won't be a "simple" story.
Preparing to leave for the party, Bill Harford cannot find his wallet, or remember
the baby sitter's name. Alice, his wife, gives him both these things, but he
hardly registers her presence. Indeed, he forgets the baby sitter's name the
moment Alice reminds him. Yet he has no difficulty remembering the cab that will
take the sitter home. Later, he'll hardly acknowledge his host's wife, or know
anything about an old friend except that the guy dropped out of Harford's chosen
profession of medicine. Even when he flirts, Harford spouts platitudes, feigning
ignorance of his coy game, forcing the girls to do all the work.

This is not a bad man, precisely. He's attractive, energetic, charming,

moderately intelligent, and good at his job. But he's cut off from himself and
others, unaware of all that he takes for granted. His narrow, result-driven focus
is on manners and status, not heart. This is a character headed for catastrophe,
and Harford's arc through the story will be as peculiar as it is extreme.

By contrast and at first glance, his wife Alice seems less complex. She dutifully
handles his effects and schedule, manages their child with cool skill, and is one
hell of a homemaker. At the party, her defense against a charming Hungarian flirt
is the oldest in the book; she's married. Yet like her husband, complexity runs
just beneath the surface from the moment we first see her. For instance, she's
unaccountably displeased to attend this party. Still, she grimly faces it. Once
there, she can't wait to escape her husband and begin drinking heavily. She might
not take up the flirting Hungarian's offer, but she's still fascinated by it and
him. As tightly wound as her husband, Alice Harford is an open nerve of want,
frustration, and blocked libido.
This volatile couple goes over the edge thanks to Victor Ziegler, the third in
what under its varied surface is basically a three-character piece. For one
thing, it is his party that crystallizes the Harfords' discontents. His summons
pulls Bill away from the girls with whom his wife saw him disappear, thus giving
the impression he's gone to get for himself just what her Hungarian wants from her
(and which she ultimately won't give).

In actual fact, Harford intervenes in a medical emergency. Ziegler didn't exactly

cause it. But he certainly did sit by as his casual date filled her veins with
bad drugs. Harford works to revive her, while Ziegler calmly straightens his
clothes. And, once the crisis is over, Ziegler merely scolds the girl. He wants
nothing except to be rid of this "minor inconvenience." His only real worry is
that Harford shouldn't give him away to his wife who, just beyond the locked door,
fulfills the hosting duties he's shirked for a quick fuck. Once he knows this
disposable nonentity won't die, all he can think of is hustling her off in a cab.
Responding to Ziegler's callousness Bill Harford gives the first and, so far, only
indication he may be worth respect; he insists the girl must be treated properly.

Harford and Ziegler are two faces of the same kind of man. At this point in the
story, there's a mere hair's breadth difference between them. It turns on the
idea of responsibility, the film's central theme. So far Harford has shown
himself hardly less callous than his cool host, to his wife and the people in his
life, to marital infidelity, to the party's temptations. To this girl's plight,
though, he shows a flicker of genuine human empathy. Perhaps he does honor his
profession. Perhaps he is true to that, at least.

And so it is there Alice strikes next evening. They've smoked pot before having
sex. The set-up is ironic; last night's sober doctor berated a girl for drug use.
Not 24 hours later, he himself is using. Goaded by his smugness and her own
internal demons, Alice lashes out. She dwells on the sexual energy she knows must
exist between Bill and his female patients, unwittingly conjuring Ziegler's junkie
date.

Harford suffers his wife's anger, paradoxically, thanks to a second "lapse" into
responsibly. He's honored his promise to Ziegler and kept quiet about the
overdose. But in this case his honor is bogus, self-seeking, elitist. He lies on
Ziegler's behalf as much to confirm his own membership in a "superior" clique
jealously guarding its autonomy. Harford's world turns on notions like these.
Systematically, Alice attacks them all, especially the idea that duty for marital
fidelity rests solely with the woman, who doesn't "want" sex like a man does. The
very idea sends her into a maddening fit of laughter. It literally prostrates
her. To shatter the lie of male sexual dominance, she then admits her own
"infidelity."

Her remarkable speech, that might have easily continued the argument's shrill
tone, ends instead in revelation and the promise of reconciliation. It also
exposes the strange mixture of tenderness and cruelty that is Alice Harford. She
means to hurt her spouse, yes, but also to awaken him and herself with him. Along
with revenge, she wants to at last break through the wall that has separated them
for some time now. As Alice speaks, her anger turns to introspection and, at
last, poignancy, feelings that are worlds apart from her husband's stiff chilly
defenses. Everything she tells him is alien to the man, for she has suddenly
realized she lives in a passionate world. Yet she is cut off from it. Her dreams
have always been stifled. Wild with fantasies, she's unable to act on any of her
desires. Her gradual shift in tone betrays that she herself is almost as
surprised as her husband by what her "dream infidelity" reveals about them both.
They lead "double" lives outside their emotions, outside of each other.
For the first time in the story, a character takes unequivocal responsibility for
their actions, thoughts, and faults. Alice rips aside the veil. She exposes
herself, which is to say as much of herself as she is capable of grasping and
revealing. As she says of her wistful fantasy affaire, she ends by feeling
"relieved." From his flat stare, it is obvious Harford grasps little or none of
this beyond the galling thought his wife has "had" him. The telephone gives
neither of them a chance to explore further. He is, literally, saved by the bell.

It's an odd sort of rescue, since Harford leaves his wife's company literally to
commune with death. Harford's acquaintance with the deceased and the dead man's
grieving daughter is more complex than the story's narrow focus has time to
explore. Like Ziegler, these friends of Harford's are wealthy. His respect for
the corpse (he places his hand on the forehead in a moment of grieving silence)
and polite distance from the woman again suggest that elite male-bonded, woman-
excluded fraternity he earlier shared with Ziegler. Finally, he's again faced by
a female delivering a monologue, one that moves him only slightly less than his
wife's did.

This woman, however, suddenly makes flesh the idea his wife's soliloquy has only
just plunged into his disbelieving mind. Ostensibly she is, if not his patient,
then certainly a woman he now visits in a more or less professional capacity. Yet
she grabs and kisses him, insisting she's in love with him. In one stroke she
embodies all that Alice suggested in her previous monologue; a woman who lusts and
actively reaches for what she wants. Harford of course reacts without passion,
ruthlessly polite, even banal. She's upset, he clucks, peeling himself away.
Besides, they hardly know each other (even as Alice and the naval officer hardly
knew each other)! He quashes the overheated episode so totally, the woman's
fianc� walks into the room moments later and notices nothing.

The night's revelations have had an impact, though. When he leaves the deathbed,
Harford wanders the city. The image of his wife's fantasy taunts him. On the
street, he notices an anonymous couple kiss deeply, doing easily and in public
what he can't seem to do anywhere. We've seen him kiss Alice, yes, but pecks with
no more than desultory passion. His absorption thrusts him in the path of some
feisty kids raving among themselves about an unknown but graphic sexual encounter.
When he dodges them, they hurl anti-gay curses after him. Nothing could be
further from the truth, but for a man so driven by stereotype, their challenge
puts him in a mental state hungry for sex.

How does a person as blocked and stiff as Harford make sexual contact? Like
Ziegler, with the help of a hooker and, as with that earlier woman, Harford's
streetwalker is a social "throwaway." Outside his wife, though, she's got more
charm and natural ease than any woman in Harford's world so far. She's also
another "predatory" female, but this time one he's ready for. As expected he
throws the work back on her, even refusing to say even so much as what he wants
her to do. She has to laugh in disbelief, and can only answer "I'd rather not put
it in words." He offers the final insult: the question of money. Of course, he
doesn't bat an eye at what is probably a fee inflated to match his apparent
wealth. Not even this woman's price can impress him. He is man, the arbiter of
power, and she'd better know it.

Or is he? His cell phone rings; Alice wondering why the evening's taken so long.
Harford must now lie to two women almost in the same breath. With the scent of a
hooker fresh on his lips, does his wife's voice shame him into chastity? Or does
it remind him what he's really here for is to disprove her contention the sexually
aggressive woman really does exist? Will he get all he wants from this prostitute
simply by humiliating her? Apparently so. She wants to forget the money, but he
won't hear of it.

But now his heat is up. There'll be no return to his wife for the moment, in
itself a further insult to the now-discarded hooker, not to mention the most
outrageous slap yet at Alice. With a kind of feral genius, his steps lead him to
the club where the med school dropout from Ziegler's party mentioned he'd be
playing. Harford senses this lowly shadow self may hold secrets he wants, and
he's right. This man is as disconnected in his way as Harford in his. When
challenged about dropping out of medical school, he says "I do that lot. Feels
good!" This Nick Nightingale (sic) has left his wife and large family on the
other side of the country to play in a seedy bar with musicians he doesn't even
respect. He's both proof of Harford's superiority and confirmation that emotional
irresponsibility is a kind of guilty pleasure. Before he came to the nightclub,
Harford couldn't have guessed Nightingale (who certainly does "sing") has a secret
worth knowing. Still, it's just what he might have hoped to get from a person
like this.

The secret orgy's complicated requirements (an arcane password, a costume, a trip
out of town) permit Harford at last to "take action." Yes, everything he's done
since leaving home has been active, but only as a retreat from responsibility in
one way or another. Now he can show his true dominance by aggressively navigating
the difficulties that stand between himself and this promise of total sexual
indulgence. What's more, he's got to. He must redress the social "truth" Alice's
shocking revelation threw so far out of balance. It's man who is the aggressor,
woman who is passive, and Harford won't rest until he's proven it.

To do that, he must descend into a kind of madhouse. At first there's an odd

backward hint he's on the right track. The costume store he seeks out is called
"The Rainbow." The shop below it, naturally enough, is "Under the Rainbow." The
models Harford romanced at Ziegler's party offered to take him "where the rainbow
ends," with all that phrase's peculiar Oz-like promise of wonder and fantasy. Yet
here everything is subtly twisted (this is not where the rainbow ends, but is
"under" it and "within" it). That impression only grows stronger as the action
proceeds. The proprietor he expected to find (supposedly one of his patients) is
no longer there. He sold the business and disappeared. Harford flashes his
doctor's credentials in utter disregard for what they really mean but Milich, the
grumpy European now in possession of the joint, volubly wants to be left alone.
Once he smells cash, though, he's all ears.

The two men negotiate, apparently to Harford's delight. For the first time this
evening, he's really enjoying himself. And why wouldn't he be, the hound in
pursuit, an alpha male strutting his dominance. The price Milich demands for his
"trouble" (above and beyond the costume rental) is just slightly more than what
the hooker wanted. The male must be honored above the female, a requisite Harford
is gleefully willing to honor. Safe in the shop's "hidden" back room, (full to
the brim with mannequins that aren't what they seem) Milich shifts roles again, to
a pathetic in need of medical care. Harford can't give it; the proprietor's
thinning hair is outside his field. So the doctor finds he's no doctor at all,
just as Nick Nightingale said of himself earlier at Ziegler's party. In this
place, everything is distorted and nothing is what it seems.

In the next turnabout, Harford goes from being customer to witness, while Milich
flip-flops from ailing merchant to aggrieved moralist when he stumbles on his
nymphet daughter cavorting with two embarrassed Japanese businessmen. Even the
disturbed suitors wear grotesque wigs to mask their identities (albeit with woeful
comic ineptitude). The girl takes Harford through his last few transformations,
i.e. first to knight in shining armor when she hides from her father behind him,
then to potential sex partner as she whispers in his ear and throws him a
suggestive grin. With that, the good "un-doctor" is spun into the night, costume
in hand.

The lust of the chase, the thought of what he's done and what he yet may do, all
this has Harford at last in a state of focused hysteria. The shadowy image of his
wife and her phantom lover is no longer repulsive to him. Like a man gone mad
with lust, it makes him grin hungrily. He boldly thrusts his taxi in the face of
the attendants whose party he means to crash. He manipulates the cabbie with a
skill to surpass his ease with the hooker. He confronts the guards without
blinking. Harford, who began the evening with his entire world shattered, has
completely regained his alpha male equilibrium.

It will do him no good. He enters the party easily enough, pulling on his mask
and hood, giving the password, moving where instructed by masked attendants. Once
lost in the ceremonial heart of this place, a world with only a glancing
resemblance to reality, Harford's only grasp on sanity is the elusive figure of
Nick Nightingale, himself helplessly blindfolded before his keyboard just as
Harford is masked in this sea of masks. The circle ceremony he witnesses could
mean nothing or everything. At the very least, it's a wheel that throws unknown
women off to couple with unknown men, masks making love to masks.

Harford, it seems, is the only one in the room whose mask is not effective. On
the balcony above, an eerie lord and his "weeping bride" gaze down. The lord
nods. Somehow, Harford's cover is blown. A lady, thrown to him from the circle,
leads the way with hot melodramatic warnings. His danger, she insists, may be
life-threatening. Another (male) mask waylays her; Harford isn't to be ejected
just yet, it seems. Free to wander, he gets an eye-full of the party's
"attractions," until the mysterious lord from the balcony sends him a woman whose
invitation to sex can't be mistaken. Is it a trick or will it mean the release to
which all his efforts have been leading? Whatever it means, sex isn't going to
happen. The girl from the circle returns to prevent it, leads him off, and renews
her warnings while still refusing to say who she is. Before Harford can force it
out of her, a masked attendant summons him as "the man with the taxi waiting."

Harford as "conquering male" has been a woeful self-deception. From the moment he
entered this world, he's been nothing but spun about, tricked, baffled. Like a
vagrant before his judges he must face a silent wall of masks, his charade
exposed, his own mask stripped away. The threat even of rape (the ultimate
abasement of the alpha male) hangs over him like incense from the acolyte's
censor. Verbal threats are made against him, against his family. It is some
nightmare kangaroo court, an awkward but inexorable ritual of abasement. This
painful artificiality reaches its peak when his unknown champion abruptly steps in
for the last time to offer herself in his place and be led away.

Pleading for her, he is dismissed. "When a promise has been made here," he is
told, "there is no turning back." The words bring home all the promises Harford
has made, all the responsibilities he had dodged tonight and every day of his
life. This, apparently, is one he won't be able to avoid.

The phrase still echoes as Harford returns home, silent and shaken. He looks in
on his sleeping daughter, innocent focus of the threats he's just received,
perhaps the most crucial responsibility of his life. Leaving her, Bill hides the
evidence of his baffling night, the bag holding costume and mask, in the guts of a
locked office cabinet. Exhausted, he creeps to bed only to be met again by his
wife's laughter. This time it's unintentional, or at least subconscious; she's
dreaming. Even so, the sound echoes the squabble that launched Harford's cryptic,
frustrating and in the end, terrifying evening.
He pulls her back to consciousness. She's all affection and concern, accepting at
face value his vague description of the night: "It took longer than I thought."
She pulls him down on the bed still in his clothes, but he's not feeling the same
tenderness for her. He must know the source of that awful laughter. She doesn't
want to tell her dream, but once he pushes her she explains in vivid detail; their
nakedness together "in a city," her fear and shame, then paradoxical relief, even
joy once he departed. So far it is a straight parallel for their evening, perhaps
a schematic of their life together so far. The night's earlier argument was
certainly a "stripping down" that left them both emotionally naked. Now her words
suggest Alice may have been glad to see Harford leave after their fight. Her
choice of words is particularly unusual and revealing: "You went to find MY
clothes for US." Again she acknowledges, if unconsciously, the reverse sexual
ethic: her clothes shield them both, but the task of providing them is his alone.

Finishing as much as is comfortable for her to tell, Alice reveals that in her
dream once Harford left, the man from her earlier fantasy entered and laughed at
her. It is as if she means Harford to take that as the laughter from which he
awoke her. There's an element of truth. Harford's inability to confront his
feelings, not to mention her own repressed life, have saddled her with deep shame.
He sees through her strategy, though, knowing in his bones this can't have been
the end of her dream. He presses for the rest. Again she resists him: "No, it's
too horrible." He won't be put off; she must tell.

When she describes the group sex that really ended it, the immediate shocking
parallel to Harford's real-life experiences of that night fills him with
unquenchable horror, the very sort she warned him her dream contains. He might
almost imagine Alice had been there at the house, masked like her husband, as
unknown to him as he was to her. The repeated, almost assaulting use of the word
"fuck" is another echo from their earlier fight, when it was often on both their
lips. In the end she confirms what he most fears; her dream laughter was directed
against him, a gleeful lust to hurt him with her scorn.

All told, this pivotal dream narration reinforces everything that has occurred so
far. The Harfords' lack of communication has indeed left them naked, with Bill
all but an outcast searching impotently and never finding. Alice is more
comfortable without him, but once he is gone, equally unable to connect with
anyone else. This throws her into a nightmare of intense sexual and emotional
energy without any outlet except contemptuous rage. As in her previous narration,
the one that launched Harford on his night's odyssey, Alice has revealed
everything of herself that she can. Meanwhile, her husband remains as
inarticulate as ever. Worse, he has entirely misinterpreted the importance of her
confusion. He sees it as a blow against him, against his prowess, against his
masculinity. He thinks it is about sex. It isn't; it is a cry to both of them to
face responsibility.

With daylight, Harford must seek answers for what has thrust him into this
condition of blind, helpless vulnerability. Predictably (and impotently), he
looks not inward but outward. He travels to the club where Nick Nightingale
worked. It is closed to him. In the little caf� next door, he pumps the waitress
for knowledge about the elusive musician. She treats him with polite disinterest,
even subdued hostility. He flashes his doctor's credentials as he did with Milich
the costume shop proprietor, and with about as much success. As his adventures
unfold, Harford's qualifications as a doctor seem ever more useless. Unless he
lies, of course, which he now does with his claim for cryptic results of
"important tests" that Nightingale is sure to want.

That apparently gets him what he needs, for he finds himself at Nightingale's
hotel. Again he confronts a "menial," and again sexual interest is pivotal. But
here the tables are turned, for this is a gay desk clerk. Where the waitress was
reluctant, this man is more than helpful. Yet Harford is as blind to the clerk's
warm interest as he was to the waitress's chill hostility. Only this time, with
his alpha male persona subtly torn from him, Harford actually gets some
information. It's riveting, in fact. The way in which Nightingale was hustled
out of town, possibly after a beating, confirms the threats from last night's orgy
may have teeth. The meeting sends Bill on his quest again, leaving the clerk to
deal with his own ignored tenderness as best he can.

Perhaps to give himself breathing space, Harford breaks his search long enough to
return his costume. Again, the shop is a maze of inverted reality and role
reversals. In the daylight, Milich is all smiles, full of effusive jollity. Yet
ultimately, he's sinister as ever. He's also as conscientious about money and
social perceptions as Harford (or more to the point, Bill's "mentor" Ziegler).
And like them, Milich is every bit as blind to responsibility. The loss of the
mask (Harford doesn't think he left it at the party) doesn't phase the shop keeper
so long as it's paid for. Nor is he phased when his daughter leads the two
Japanese men out of the back room, who depart with smiles. Last night's madhouse
has undergone its own personality reversal, becoming the picture of social
propriety and polite good will. Harford balks, unaccountably cast as the shocked
moralist. Milich doesn't bat an eye. Instead, he offers his girl to the doctor.
His grin recalls Ziegler's private bathroom, last night's hooker, the orgy house.
Everything is possible, it seems.

Or perhaps nothing is possible. With all avenues to Nightingale blocked, and the
oppressive amoral routine that Milich represents seemingly triumphant, there's
nothing for Harford to do but return to the normalcy of his job. But he finds no
satisfaction there. Demons haunt him even in that sterile, safe cocoon. He has
one option left; he cancels his afternoon appointments (again, the doctor who is
not a doctor) and does the very thing he's feared to do until now, the single act
his entire day has been a battle to resist. He returns to the site of last
night's most contradictory, maddening sexual defeat.

This is the last choice open to Harford if he means to re-establish his illusion
of male dominance. He takes it boldly enough, displaying his face to the security
camera that broods over the house's locked gate. His audacity yields instant
results, as a limousine snakes out and disgorges a silent messenger who hands him
an envelope through the bars. In a stroke, his courage has only plunged him
deeper into the nightmare. They know his name, renew their threats, and bring him
no closer to solving the mystery they've posed him. Harford stands infinitely
worse off after this "boldness" than before it.

Why does Bill Harford pound his head so desperately against this impervious wall?
What can he hope to learn, or solve, or satisfy? The answer lies at home, where
Alice patiently tutors their daughter surrounded by paintings of gentle gardens.
Standing in a kitchen heaped with bland foods, its refrigerator cluttered by
childish drawings and brightly colored letter magnets, he stares at his wife.
Alice's raw brutal dream from the night before rises from her reassuring smile
like poison smoke, the residue of a quiet bomb that has ripped apart his
comfortable, once-certain world and every belief his image of himself relies upon.
Her words evoke a vision of all he's pursued so fruitlessly that day, making his
quest the more urgent. Though he cannot hope for anything positive at the end of
the search, he can't stop the obsession.

He escapes his wife to the one place where everything should be as it's always
been: the vain comforts of his deserted office. No luck there, for he only
pursues the search that, thanks to his day's frustrations, is now subtly altered.
He's abandoned trying to unravel the mystery. Maybe he can take it at its word
instead, embrace it, plunge headfirst into its contradictions. He phones the
woman whose father passed away, who first suggested to him that a woman really
could be a sexual predator. But her fianc� answers. Dead end there, literally
and figuratively.

So he takes to the streets again. Confidence gone, he must now come like a shy
suitor, gift in hand. And where does he take this offering? To Domino, the
hooker he earlier "rejected." But she is gone, disappeared perhaps forever. In
her place he finds the roommate she mentioned, a girl so like Domino both in body
and manner that Harford immediately confuses them. He has reason. "Sally"
recognizes him immediately, almost intimately, from her roommate's description of
his "kindness" the other night. Though they've only exchanged a few words, she
allows him to begin the slow, delicious ritual of undressing. Perhaps Harford's
new tack, this illusion of submission and understanding, is exactly the right one.
Has his quest finally reached its goal here in this dingy mockery of his own
elegant home?

No, the mystery's revenge on Harford at this moment snaps closed with exquisite
irony. Sally won't let him complete his sexual advance. Instead, she feels she
must tell him why Domino "disappeared;" thanks to the results of a test, she
learned she is HIV positive...in short, dying. The echoes of responsibility
shirked and ignored crash silently around Harford. It's a subtle reminder of
those times he flashed his own medical credentials so cavalierly, bandying
imaginary "test results" to get cooperation from Milich and information from the
waitress. More deeply, it suggests his worst fears about the woman at the orgy
who took his own guilt upon herself. More chilling than the rest, this last image
conjures the full possibility suggested by his wife's terrible dream. He escaped
this time. But the next? So long as his quandary remains unsolved, he's
vulnerable.

From this point forward, the noose only tightens. Back in the streets walking
aimlessly, he realizes someone is following him. The tail makes no effort to
disguise himself. Harford's panic rises. He can't even hail a cab to save
himself. "Off duty!" the cabbie growls. When he seeks the protection of a
newsstand, buying whatever tabloid first comes to hand, the man stands and glares
at him boldly. He wants to be seen, a clear message from the unknown rulers of
last night's orgy.

Shaken, Harford seeks refuge in a coffee bar. Amid the holiday music and chatting
strangers, he absently thumbs the magazine he's bought. Even pure chance, utter
happenstance seems to pursue him, as if his living breathing life had been
subsumed into this waking nightmare. Responsibility is in dogged pursuit. He
recognizes the "socialite" mentioned in its pages, now hospitalized for a drug
overdose.

At the hospital, he lies a final time, hiding once more behind his credentials and
calling the stranger from the tabloid his patient. It brings him more knowledge
than he ever wanted to have; the helpful receptionist announces the woman has
died. In silence, he follows an attendant to the morgue and finds the girl from
the orgy on the slab. He bends over her. Is it a hideous moment of necrophilia,
or a terrible sense of joining, of shared fate, mutually shirked responsibility?
Her warnings echo around him. Here is the key to what he searched for. Indeed,
as he stumbles from the hospital in a fugue of confused grief, his cell phone
summons him to Ziegler's home. His shadow self, the man through whom he first met
this woman, the man whose wealth, power, and casual selfishness launched his
nightmare, this same "pillar of the community" now calls him back.

Their long, intense, somnambulistic discussion is a slow whirling dance of words,

a waltz of threat and suggestion, disappointment and realization. Even critics
who approve of the film as a whole object to what seems this scene's "needless"
return to ideas the previous action has already made clear. They do not realize
that what is said on the surface (that Ziegler was at the orgy, knows all about
the dead woman, what Harford's been up to, and now wants Harford to give up his
quest) means infinitely less than what is implied. The dichotomy between Ziegler
and Harford established in their scene during the party is now explored, expanded,
and resolved, especially in terms of what Harford believes of himself.

He comes to the meeting as the hounded, wounded, unjustly battered victim, a man
who thinks he's guessed everything and is owed a quittance. His ballet with
Ziegler shows how this is the last of many illusions, indeed the only real fable
that has duped Harford all his life. It begins with Ziegler offering Harford a
case of his fine whiskey. Harford refuses, but the implication is clear. Despite
his righteous pose, he and Ziegler are of one mind about everything that has
happened. Or more accurately, they both seek to avoid their shared responsibility
for the causes whose effects they argue. The only real difference between them
(and it is major) is this. Ziegler is a steely, immovable rock of certainty,
while Harford bears his guilt with agony. Ziegler is unmoved. Harford is pure
emotion. Gradually, Ziegler suggests the only escape open to Harford from his
torment. It's the same one Harford has relied on all his life, or at least until
the events of the last 48 hours began to chip away at his Ziegler-like certainty.
It is a simple fix. Forget any of it ever happened. Go on as before.

Back home, Harford is suddenly and remarkably calm. He strolls easily through his
home, performing the unremarkable tasks of everyday life, ambling to the fridge
for a beer nightcap, sitting and drinking in peaceful self-assurance. Ziegler has
won. The past can be erased, after all. Or so it seems under the spell of
Ziegler's life-denying selfishness. But, slipping into his bedroom where Alice
sleeps peacefully, Harford finds his mask from the orgy staring up at him from his
own pillow.

The obvious question is how did the mask get there. Several explanations are
possible, the most likely being Alice found it lying where Bill carelessly dropped
it. Thinking it curious, she took it to the bedroom then fell asleep, forgetting
she'd left it on the pillow next to her. More ominous rationales are possible.
Did that sinister tail who confronted Harford in the street later break into their
house while Alice slept and leave the mask as a warning to her husband? What if
Alice herself was at the same orgy her husband attended, and the mask is both her
accusation and admission? Finally, and most surreal, everything that's taken
place since Alice told Harford her awful dream might be a dream of his own, with
this its grisly self-accusing d�nouement.

Whichever accounts for the mask on the pillow, its ultimate meaning is the same.
It is the mark of Harford's responsibility. It conquers Ziegler's disingenuous
arguments utterly precisely because it represents Ziegler's own shadow self in
body just as Harford does in spirit. It is the physical proof of all Harford has
done, thought, hoped, and feared for these last 48 hours. Faced by it, he breaks
down. Alice awakes to the sound of his tears. Her surprise and concern proves
the first and simplest explanation for the mask's presence must be the true one.
But that alters nothing. What really matters is that Harford has at last come to
his crisis. He will not act as if nothing has happened and go on as before. He
utters the film's single most revealing line: "I'll tell you everything."

This idea launched the action and kept it moving. It is the story's core. To one
degree or another, each of its characters has told only part of the truth. Some,
like Ziegler and Harford, tell none of it, to others or themselves. They
rationalize, equivocate, force those around them to do the real work of living
with and facing up to real emotion. In one way or another, they've ducked
responsibility by admitting to only that part of it that pleases them, or is
convenient, lucrative, or comfortable. Alone among them, Alice has told as much
as she knows, as much as she can tear out of herself, no matter how painful, no
matter how terrifying. It was her husband's turn to do the same the moment she
explained her painful but revealing "flirtation." It has remained his duty ever
since, which he's done everything in his power to avoid. Now, at last, he will do
it.

Is this the key for which Harford has sought so long and painfully, the answer to
his quest's mysteries? No, because there is no key. Ziegler and his hermetically
sealed world of pat answers and irresponsible manipulation should be proof. As
Alice says, "Let's not use that word (i.e. 'forever'). It frightens me." What
Harford tells her brings no joy to either of them, no instant solutions. Yes,
they return to the safe, comfortable world of routine for their daughter's sake.
But as their child sweetly romps through the toy store, it's clear her parents
remain uncertain, searching. Such reliable clich�s as maternity aren't the
panacea, either. "It's old-fashioned," Alice says of the baby carriage the child
admires.

It is the question, not the answer, that concerns this couple. It is the lesson
Alice has been learning quietly during her husband's noisy charades. She launched
his wild odyssey by demanding answers. Now she's not so sure. Neither his roving
nor her cryptic dreams can solve the enigma of their marriage. Life isn't summed
up by easy platitudes; not her Hungarian suitor's, not Ziegler's, not even hers or
Harford's. Instead, life can only continue, develop, strive, fail, and pick
itself up to try again. Alice is sure of only one thing now, which is that the
question must always be asked. Life must push forward. Or, to put it as bluntly
as she does (thus again evoking the argument that started it all), what they have
to do as soon as possible is "fuck."

STRUCTURE

Eyes Wide Shut is a literal banquet of stylistic and structural riches. Its
title, for instance, is a cunning multiple play on words that establishes on sight
its dominant technique of internal mirroring. First, it is a surface
contradiction, for eyes cannot be both "wide" and "shut." Then it is a clever
suggestion of the original novel's name "Traumnovelle," or "Dream Story." In
dreams the eyes may be shut but are also, as it were, open wide to the events of
the dreams. These two connotations reflect back and forth on each other in the
mirroring style that dominates the films as a whole. Finally, as the film itself
is a kind of three-part structure, so its name consists of three words.

Beginning with 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick's films have always been virtuoso
displays of structural elegance. Unlike the majority of "popular" film directors,
he shapes his material around complex, balanced principals of form. More than
literature or film, Kubrick relies on techniques drawn from painting. His two
preferred structures, commonly found in the world of art, are the triptych and
diptych, with the second used more frequently than the first.

The last of Kubrick's films is fittingly his most exquisitely structured,

incorporating elements from both those formal design techniques. At first glance,
it seems to resemble its immediate predecessor, Full Metal Jacket, which is a
diptych (i.e. two panels). But its pivotal orgy sequence is a tiny central pillar
that bisects its two large sections, making it a triptych like 2001. That earlier
film consisted of two small frames (the Dawn of Man and the finale in the "hotel
room") around a large central portion (the Moon/Discovery episodes). Formally
Eyes Wide Shut is a "mirror image" of the earlier film, only in reverse.
The question of form would be no more than an aficionado's conceit if Kubrick
didn't use it for substantive narrative purposes. As in the best painting, it is
a way to expand upon and draw conclusions about ideas, characters, and events.
Simply speaking, in Eyes Wide Shut this is achieved by mirroring in each "pane"
what is presented differently in the other "panes." The mirror theme plays an
important part in all of Kubrick's work, but with Eyes Wide Shut it has become
all-pervasive. No surprise he was drawn to Schnitzler's novel. That author's
reputation rests mostly on his play La Ronde, written as a perfect circle (i.e.
ending exactly where it begins).

Eyes Wide Shut follows a similar design, with mirrored scenes on opposite sides of
the pivotal orgy. Its opening sequence (the Harfords at home preparing for a
celebration) matches its last (the Harfords at a store preparing for a
celebration). Within it, then, all scenes echo one another as they wheel about
the central pillar of the orgy. Ziegler's party, with its revolving dances (Alice
with the Hungarian, Harford with the models, then Ziegler and his overdose victim)
is a parallel for that last grim dance of words between Harford and Ziegler around
his pool table. The montage of daily activities following the party, coy in its
drab simplicity, later finds its mirror in Harford's tormented office scenes, as
well as when Alice helps their daughter with her homework. Harford's early visit
to the bereaved is echoed by his later trip to the morgue. His early night prowl
through New York's streets matches his later pursuit by the mysterious tail. The
two scenes in the hooker's apartment, one with Domino, the other with her
roommate, are obvious parallels. The Sonata Caf� visit couples with Harford's
later search for Nick Nightingale, and Milich's two costume shop appearances
perform similarly.

The only scenes not included in this all-but symmetrical formation of mirrored
events are Alice's two major speeches; i.e. her fantasy about the naval officer,
and her nightmare. Simply put, these two passages aren't reflected "bilaterally."
Instead they mirror each other. They are two of the film's three lynch pins. The
entire narrative hangs on these landmarks. It is launched by the first, the
second is its pivot, and the third (in the toy store) is its coda. This puts the
definitive seal to the diptych/triptych format, allying it to the inspiring force
of Alice in her mirrored persona: part muse, part demon.

Another tangential fact makes Eyes Wide Shut unique in all Kubrick's work; its
unusual scene by scene mirroring. As with Schnitzler's La Ronde, each subsequent
episode reflects back on and develops ideas from the one directly preceding it.
The party scene establishes this device within itself, as Alice's flirtation with
the Hungarian parallels Harford's "flirtation" with Ziegler's demonic selfishness,
his dance of death with his addict date. Alice's self-revelation during the
Harfords' argument is made a reality in the following scene when the bereaved
daughter proves a woman can be sexually aggressive towards a man who is
effectively a stranger to her. The hooker scene takes that idea one step further,
and prepares for Nick Nightingale, a man who has prostituted his entire career.
This in turn leads to Milich, whose upside-down world leaves virtually no avenue
of exploitation unexplored. The pivotal orgy scene, whose structure is so dense
it could monopolize an entire essay, mirrors and develops everything that has
taken place before and finds its own reflection in the next scene containing
Alice's nightmare. Her dream narration acts more or less as a full stop, after
which the passages in the film's second "pane" begin reflecting back on those in
its first while continuing to echo one another. Harford's search for Nightingale
takes place in two paired scenes, where he questions first the waitress then the
desk clerk. His return to Rainbow Costumes develops those scenes, and his last
encounter with Milich finds its reflection in his return to "normalcy" at his
office. That in turn is expanded by his confrontation at the orgy house gate,
itself reflected in his brief idyll back at home with wife and daughter.
Harford's following mute frustration at his darkened medical practice takes up the
home themes and transfers them to his vain final search for the hooker Domino,
which itself looks forward to his nocturnal peril, chased by the trench-coated
stranger. His discovery of the drug overdose continues its thoughts and prepares
for his visit to the morgue, which at last leads to his slow agonizing dance of
words with Ziegler. Back home, the mask on his pillow crystallizes the scene in
Ziegler's study and lays groundwork for the last "reconciliation" with Alice.

As suggested, this highly organized structure is not a conceit, a mere display of

virtuosity for its own sake. The mirroring device in Eyes Wide shut provides
vital clues to its story and characters, the ideas that surround them, and the
emotions that drive them. It achieves this by opposing similar and/or disparate
elements in a direct way so that audiences may match, compare, and examine all of
them the more closely. In this way, differences and similarities comment on one
another with a precise correspondence not possible with looser formats.

To understand this, consider the simpler design of 2001. Its first "pane," The
Dawn of Man, presents all the film's basic concepts. Weak mortals (apes) struggle
against a hostile environment, each other, and their own flaws until transcendent
inspiration (the monolith) changes everything (the advent of carnivores and war).
The next "pane" develops these basic ideas at some length, and an audience is
allowed to draw fertile parallels between primitive man and his descendents.
Grasping these parallels, on some level at least, is essential to assimilating the
movie as a whole. The last "pane" of the triptych, with Bowman alone in the alien
"hotel" environment, seems utterly surreal and without meaning unless one grasps
that it brings together and echoes the main features of the first two "panes." As
such, it represents the film's last, most fertile layer of revelation.

Eyes Wide Shut follows a similar plan. In one sense, to belabor its insights is
presumptuous. Kubrick clearly intended it to be numinous, defeating any one
reading. Schnitzler, a member of the Viennese school of Freudians, meant that his
work should be a kind of free form screen upon which audiences could project their
own psychology. This may have been one of the novel's prime attractions for
Kubrick, all of whose films more or less follow that same impulse. Any attempt by
a commentator to foil his intentions does no favor to readers. Even so, certain
parallels in the film are broad enough to be identified without defeating
Kubrick's purpose, and may even help readers unlock their own latent associations
with the film's other details.

Like the correspondence already discussed above between Alice's fantasy and the
bereaved daughter who proves it could actually happen, some of these associations
are direct, particularly early in the film. Alice's flirtation with the Hungarian
at Ziegler's party bears a slanting fertile resemblance to Ziegler and his drugged
socialite. Like the Hungarian, he represents the "old" world and she the "new."
Ziegler is as glib as Alice's suitor, and she very nearly as disarmed by drugs
(alcohol in Alice's case) as the comatose girl sprawled in Ziegler's bathroom.
Both men want the same thing from these two different women; pleasure without
responsibility. Both women get (or in Alice's case, would get) the same thing
from it; sex without fulfillment. But Alice is sufficiently coherent to escape,
while the girl in Ziegler's bathroom is ultimately destroyed.

As the film continues, its mirror concepts grow more varied. The two scenes with
Milich in Rainbow Costumes mix clear parallels with less obvious. His change of
attitude towards his daughter and the two Japanese businessmen, as well as her own
mute invitation to Harford, need no explanation. Milich's switch from garrulous,
mercurial clown to a more or less clipped object of respect is obvious on its face
but suggests complicated subtexts. Finally the shop, whose every corner once was
open to Harford, becomes a place where he must wait before a counter. Meanwhile
two men supposed dragged away by police the night before enjoy the full access he
is now denied.

Certain correspondences are wonderfully refractive, as those during the second

"panel" (i.e. post-orgy) scenes where Harford twists and turns in confusion,
dashing from office to orgy house gate, to his home, and back to his office.
Seated behind his desk, he orders his secretary to cancel an entire afternoon's
appointments for no apparent reason. Immediately after, it's Harford on the other
side of the power line when, more frightened than ever, he must abandon the house
gate without a single clear answer. He gazes across the barrier of his dining
room table at wife and child, neither he or she knowing who is in control, who the
injured party, who the guilty. Later, behind his desk again, Harford has grown
impotent even here. His phone call to the bereaved daughter, who once offered him
what he now thinks he wants, is answered by her certainly unsympathetic fianc�.

In effect, the film's first "pane" consists of mirrored instances of freedom,

license, access. Ziegler's party unleashes a host of indulgences that, for the
Harfords, culminate in Alice's shocking admission. From there, Harford himself
penetrates ever deeper into a world that permits him more and more. The orgy
scene with its mirror in Alice's nightmare, brings that cycle to a full close.
After it, the second "pane" is a procession of denials, refusals, blocked avenues,
false leads. Only with Harford's capitulation, his long-awaited promise to "tell
everything," does the structure return to possibility and affirmation, though
briefly and with an exquisite, almost mocking uncertainty. It is this
juxtaposition of the first "pane's" possibilities with the second's denials that
offers the film's richest vein, not to mention (for some) the most annoying
riddles.

As a last aspect of the film's structure, some mention should be made of its
music. Anyone who studies Kubrick's films with any care knows his individualistic
techniques in this area. From the sly wit of "Try a Little Tenderness" and "We'll
Meet Again" in Dr. Strangelove, to the multi-layered associations conjured by
"Also Sprach Zarathustra" in 2001 to Barry Lyndon's Frederick the Great/Mozart
juxtaposition to Bartok in The Shining and Nancy Sinatra in Full Metal Jacket,
Kubrick "scores" are always quirky, illuminating, dryly rich.

Kubrick's preference for "source" music over original is well-known even to casual
viewers. Eyes Wide Shut is no exception. Yet it also contains more original
music composed specifically for the movie than any of his other works. Not
accidentally, these non-source pieces underscore Alice's pivotal narratives and
the central orgy scene. As the movie's "foundation posts," these cry out for a
sound unique unto itself. Jocelyn Pook creates the ideal mood, part New Age, part
hard classical, entirely ritualistic and dream-like.

Despite Pook's contribution, the film's most dramatic (and hotly criticized)
musical touch is the Musica Ricercata II by Gy�rgy Ligeti. Once the film's
complex process of internal mirroring is understood, one cannot help think of this
piece as having been written specifically for Kubrick, even though it wasn't. For
one, Ligeti's piano music is structured exactly like the film itself, with two
long sections of almost identical size and shape flanking a much shorter middle
passage. For another, it consists almost entirely of two notes moving back and
forth between each other, a perpetual sonic question and answer, closest thing to
an audible mirror as could be imagined. As astonishing is the striking middle
"post" of the music, a single high note repeated ever more quickly, almost to the
point of ritualized madness. It is the piece's "catastrophe," its moment of
profoundest drama, its pivot of revelation, just as the orgy scene is to Eyes Wide
Shut. Kubrick uses it consistently to draw our minds back to the orgy's climax
where Harford's life charade is at last stripped away, and the film's insights
turn back on themselves with a vengeance. This places it among the most
brilliantly apt uses of music in the history of cinema.

VISUAL DESIGN

Given the film's internal mirroring structure, it is no surprise the device plays
an equally important part in its look. The one-sheet poster shows the Harfords
kissing framed by a mirror whose frame is itself a mirror. The actual prop hangs
in the Harfords' bedroom, and first suggests Alice's dissatisfaction during the
kiss memorialized by the poster. This same mirror silently gazes down on the
later argument that ends in her action-launching revelation. There are mirrored
doors and walls in Ziegler's house, and he preens himself before a mirror as
Harford steps in to rescue his overdosed date. Later, Alice will stare at herself
in their bathroom mirror just before the fateful argument.

Beyond these instances early in the film, though, actual looking glass-type
mirrors play almost no part whatever in its visual make-up. Instead, Kubrick
explores the concept of physical mirroring in a broader, more varied, richer way.
For instance, Alice's look at herself as she gets the marijuana she'll smoke with
her husband is a sly reminder of Ziegler's earlier look in his own bathroom mirror
while, behind him, a woman suffers the after effects of drugs. This subtle mirror
motif is duplicated in a wide variety of guises all the film long.

People themselves mirror each other again and again. Harford and his wife (two
people leaving the house) mirror the daughter and baby sitter (two people
staying). Immediately after, the Harfords exchange greetings with Ziegler and his
wife, then are seen in an ocean of dancing couples. Harford (in black) mirrors
Nick Nightingale (in white); one is a doctor, one is "not a doctor." Later,
Harford flirts with two similarly leggy and beautiful girls, a blonde and a
brunette. Alice and her Hungarian correspond with Ziegler and his doomed
socialite. When Harford enters the room, Ziegler is shot in frequent reverse with
a painting of a naked woman directly behind him, as if making two couples (Harford
and the drug overdose, Ziegler and the woman in his painting). Both men are
clothed, both women naked! When Harford consoles the daughter who has lost her
father, the scene ends with an eerie pair of couples; the daughter and her fianc�
facing Harford and the father's corpse. The hooker Domino has a roommate who's
not home when Domino is, but is when Domino is not. What's more, they are
physically all but the same woman, though dressed as diametric opposites (one
cheaply seductive, the other cheaply dowdy). At Rainbow Costumes, Milich is old,
swarthy and hairy, his daughter young, fair, and smooth, and found romping with an
all-but identical pair of Japanese businessmen. The orgy scene is naturally an
endless procession of couples. But its ceremonial circle, one celebrant and many
masked women revolving in perpetual self-reduplication with only the slightest
variation surrounded by identically hooded figures, brings this device into its
sharpest focus.

The general physical movement in mirroring scenes roughly follows this convention.
The party, with its circling dancers, resembles the slow revolutions of Ziegler
and Harford around the pool table. The argument and Alice's nightmare both
consist exclusively of static reverse angles on speaker and listener. Harford's
progress through Domino's apartment is almost identical both when he first meets
the hooker and later when he encounters her roommate. The one difference is that
once they reach its kitchen, where their crucial negotiations occur, the angle is
exactly reversed in either scene. Harford's encounter with Nightingale at the
Sonata Caf� consists solely of close-up reverses on the two men. Harford's
interrogation of the hotel clerk is shot in exactly that same way.
Color plays a striking role in Eyes Wide Shut, more so than in any other Kubrick
film. The trend began as far back as A Clockwork Orange with its bright, flat-
hued title boards and generally lurid tones. In his earlier films, of course,
Kubrick employs color mainly to stimulate emotion. But from 2001 on, the colors
begin to suggest narrower interpretations. In Barry Lyndon and The Shining,
they've become bona fide visual motifs, their meanings consistent with various
scholarly studies of the human mind. Across cultural and historical boundaries,
for instance, the color red has been shown to elicit dramatically similar
associations; vitality, sexual energy, violence, and so on.

Through the post-2001 films, Kubrick moves progressively towards color as a

narrative device, with Eyes Wide Shut the high point in his journey. Consistent
with the film's dreamlike quality, its juxtaposition of conscious and unconscious,
color takes on a wholly discrete function. Kubrick bases his "narrative palette"
on black, white, and the four (sic) "primary" colors: red, yellow, blue, and
green. Over the course of the film, these acquire rich, sometimes baffling
associations, but all are centered around definitions most commonly shared by
human consciousness: red, as discussed above; yellow expressing warmth, safety,
potency, aridity, etc.; blue suggesting mystery, fear, peace, wisdom, loss; and
green as growth, fertility, and decay.

The very first image in the film, with the striking, almost primitively uniform
separation of its hues, establishes this color palate. Alice, stepping out of her
red dress, stands in a yellow room draped with red. Behind, the outside window
glows a portentous blue. It is notable that green is entirely absent from this
shot, a fact that becomes important as the film progresses. Of all the primary
colors green, in fact, is seen least in the course of Eyes Wide Shut, which should
give some idea of its pivotal importance when it does appear.

As with the film's use of mirroring, an exhaustive list of its color references
would be needlessly burdensome. Rather, indicative highlights will suggest the
riches to be found in its every frame. The issue of green, for instance, begins
to clarify itself during the Harfords' brief walk through their flat before
leaving for the party. The home d�cor stresses yellows and reds, with that
omnipresent lurid blue shining in from the windows. Green is in evidence, but
only in paintings on the walls; enclosed, trapped, as if it were caged. The only
notable exception is the Christmas tree, seen throughout the sequence directly
behind the Harfords' young daughter. As a matter of fact, the film is set at this
holiday season. Despite that, Kubrick takes pains to severely limit his use of
green.

For the party, both Harford and Alice are dressed in severe black and white.
Sharp eyes will note that practically everyone else is, too. An occasional red
frock darts past, but furtively, gone almost before it appears. Swallowed up in
gaping yellow rooms festooned with blinding falls and stars of lights, the
contrast couldn't be sharper. Alone among the guests seen for any time, Ziegler's
wife is in red, while the two girls who romance Harford wear pink and white
respectively. Outside of his wife, these are the three women "important" to
Harford in this scene. Nick Nightingale is in white, too, though a cream tint
more like the walls and glaring lights than a true white. Not by accident, he'll
wear that same jacket at the orgy, whose cream walls echo those of Ziegler's home.

The scene in Ziegler's upstairs bathroom, where Harford treats the drug overdose,
offers a blinding contrast to these austere shades. For one thing, it represents
the most pungent example of green in the film to that moment. Its wood molding is
a tint of cerulean that verges almost to blue. Later, after Harford follows the
hooker Domino through her building's bright red front door, the lobby's dull blue-
green wood trim is a potent echo of Ziegler's bathroom. The woman in Ziegler's
room, however, is nude and reclined on a lush red chair. Later, she's swaddled in
a blue towel that makes the green color of wood trim all around her that much more
obvious. The painting behind Ziegler mentioned earlier, it should be noted, is a
brilliant field of red in marked contrast to the black and white of his clothing.

Taken together, these subconscious hints given by Kubrick's surgical use of color
establish a detailed visual subtext. Ziegler's party guests, almost drab in their
stiff conservatism, wheel and spin in his caverns of light, muted respectability
in the midst of a brilliant pool that might be either life-affirming or
destroying. Harford is drawn to color, called by it, seduced. Before Harford's
eyes, Ziegler and his date wallow in hot sexual vitality. But she is threatened
by blue's mystery and death, while the men remain aloof in their flat black and
white. Meanwhile, green enigmatically connects the careful order of the Harford
apartment with this apparently opposite world of license and threat.

In the pivotal argument between the Harfords, color develops these themes. As she
begins her attack on her husband, Alice rises from the crimson womb of their bed
sheets to make her first telling points from the isolation of the deep blue
bathroom doorway, the room around her all rich yellows and reds. Later, she moves
to another window to make her shocking revelation. In reverse shots between
herself and Harford, hot colors swaddle him while, from the outside window behind
her, the ghost of blue in its guise of wisdom falls across Alice. Later, during
her nightmare speech, this situation is reversed. The doorway in that later scene
leads "outside" (as opposed to the bathroom door, which leads further "inside"),
and frames both husband and wife. Blue dominates a room that, during the earlier
argument, was red and yellow. Meanwhile, those bright colors instead fill the
much smaller doorway. The subconscious message of reversal, revelation, and
danger is unmistakable.

These few examples may help the discerning viewer search Eyes Wide Shut for its
host of equally revealing examples of color as a narrative tool. Rather than
combing the entire film in these pages, a few additional telling examples will
suffice to drive the point home. For instance, Harford's disguise for the orgy is
discussed several times in detail. Not surprisingly, its specifics are remarkably
color neutral; a tuxedo and black cape. During Harford's odyssey through the
sinister house, there's no mistaking the blackness of his cloak. Disguise
shattered, standing before the celebrant, Harford's cape is magically transformed
to a rich shade of blue. Given the film's obsession with color, and a director
famous for multiple takes, this is no accident of continuity. One is inevitably
reminded of another oddity with regards the orgy house; its wrought iron gate
painted an otherwise incomprehensible lurid blue.

Before quitting the subject, a last word should be said about Kubrick's use of the
color green. Again, the orgy house gives a potent clue. Alone among the film's
settings, this one is outside the otherwise all-pervasive city, lost in a sea of
green, an impenetrable forest of trees. The Christmas tree icon is indelibly
evoked, so prominent behind the Harfords' daughter during the first scene.
Green's next appearance takes place when another vulnerable female is present,
this time the drug overdose in Ziegler's bathroom. The impoverished hooker Domino
then finds herself ringed in green, with a Christmas tree the first thing
encountered insider her apartment. Much later in the film, Harford visits the
dead addict in the morgue, a set all but devoid of color, lifeless, muted, dull.
Yet directly across from where the attendant pulls out the slab holding the body
hang two smocks, one a brilliant red, the other shimmering green. The last real
key to this mystery appears when Ziegler and Harford argue around his pool table.
The table's lights are that same luminous green and, as importantly, conical in
shape, like rows of Christmas trees, or the forest surrounding the orgy house
itself. They brood like silent judges, heavy in mute condemnation over Ziegler's
head.

Of course, color is not the film's only visual flourish. As far back as Paths of
Glory with Dax and his fellow officers stalking through the trenches, the "endless
corridor" shot has been a Kubrick staple, telegraphing a inevitable hurtle towards
some unknown but looming fate. Humbert Humbert in Lolita drives headlong toward
the murder of Quilty, Danny rides his tricycle down the Overlook's halls, soldiers
of Full Metal Jacket creep toward death at the hands of unknown enemies. The list
is long. In Eyes Wide Shut, Harford is most usually the soul lost in Kubrick's
"hurtling" maze, with the orgy sequence its finest example. The idea receives a
wry twist when Harford visits the bereaved daughter. He approaches the mourning
bedroom as seen from the back. When the woman's legitimate suitor makes that same
journey, angle and viewpoint reverse. We watch him approach from the front. This
touch blends a long-standing visual Kubrick visual signature (the "corridor") with
one unique to Eyes Wide Shut (the mirror image).

Another recurrent visual symbol adds weight to the film's structural organization.
During the first half, in which "all doors are open" to Harford, Kubrick makes it
literally so. Ziegler's assistant admits him to the fateful bathroom, his office
elevator doors part before him, the bereaved daughter's maid sees him in, Domino
opens her doors willingly, even the bouncer at the Sonata Caf� is at his service,
and of course the always obliging Milich. Finally, with the help of the orgy's
password, Harford is welcomed and served by a long line of obsequious "door
openers," both masked and unmasked. In the very first shot after the orgy
sequence, though, Harford must let himself back into his flat. From there on, he
is forced to open every door for himself, from Rainbow Costumes all the way to
Ziegler's study. In fact, many are simply closed; the Sonata Caf�, the orgy house
gate, Domino's apartment (although he does manage to wiggle his way in there at
last). In one of the film's most interesting "compound" visuals, Harford enters
the hospital where he'll find the dead socialite through a transparent revolving
door, a bizarre directional stripe design in lurid red ringing it. This image
unites a number of the film's visual themes; the use of red, the mirror concept, a
memory of the orgy's circle ritual, the second half's "closed door" procedure, and
so on.

A more thorough examination of the pivotal orgy sequence has waited until this
point since, although it naturally comprises all of the film's elements, its most
remarkable aspects lie in its visual makeup. Structurally, it presents an exact
schematic for the film as a whole. Harford enters confidently, blind to its
potential, just as he set out for Ziegler's party flush with success in his chosen
field and mostly unaware of the people around him (his wife, daughter, and the
baby sitter). It is no accident two mirroring shrubs, like tiny Christmas trees,
flank the house's entry, bringing back the image of the tree behind his expectant
daughter when the film begins.

Inside, he pulls on his mask literally as he does figuratively when he greets the
Zieglers at their party. From there, he enters a great hall where figures mostly
in black and white revolve under ornate, yellow walls. As at Ziegler's party,
Nick Nightingale is on the podium clad in white coat and playing keyboards. This
hall, of course, reveals a number of things more openly than did the Zieglers'
ballroom. Its Moorish design contrasts radically with the house's traditionally
Western exterior, suggesting a more ancient, somehow alien exoticism, not to
mention a wisdom beyond that of the film's "normal" world. Its balcony shows
physically the caste division implicit in real life between Harford and Ziegler.
The masked Ziegler double (possibly Ziegler himself, it is never definitively
revealed) who nods at Harford wears a "cap" suggesting traditional Western power,
and is accompanied by a "weeping" woman, as if his actual wife grieving over his
casual infidelities to her.
The circle ritual also combines the familiar with the bizarre. Its cloaks derive
from Christian ritual, as does the censer and staff wielded by the celebrant. But
the masks, while not all of them unknown to Western culture, draw together a host
of world influences. The circle's women especially wear designs redolent of
ancient deity and power. Exceptional among them is the woman who warns Harford.
Her mask, in fact, mirrors his own, suggesting her as an Alice surrogate. Her
first warning to him therefore does double duty for the argument between the
Harfords that launched this night's odyssey, and the bereaved woman sequence.
This masked woman tells him, "I'm not sure what you think you're doing, but you
don't belong here." Neither did Alice understand Harford's attitude and certainly
felt it inappropriate to their relationship, while his trip to the deathbed ends
with much confusion and inappropriate behavior. The masked woman is then drawn
away from Harford by another "Western" mask in 3-cornered hat (though a design
notably different from the Ziegler surrogate), exactly as Harford is pulled away
from the argument with his wife by the bereaved daughter's call, a medical duty
similar to but in fact not the one set him earlier by Ziegler.

This signals Harford's headlong rush into the hallways of the orgy house, just as
his visit to the bereaved daughter launched him into his night of revelations.
During this segment, the correspondences are not so direct, since that would
impede the underlying message, namely that Harford's progress up to now has been
blind, willful, without insight or generosity of spirit, but rather almost pure
selfishness, a brute careen towards shoring up his challenged manhood. Alice's
nightmare narrative in the following scene does reflect potently on this phase of
the orgy scene, of course. That speech's most contradictory image, her fantasy
man laughing at her, refers both to Harford's contempt for her now, and the fact
his unwilling hosts are in the process of finding him out even as he prowls their
halls.

The nightmare scene's other correspondence occurs when the Ziegler surrogate
deploys a woman to invite Harford "somewhere more private." That plan is
shattered by the warning woman's return. As this is the orgy scene's turning
point, so is Alice's nightmare the film's, the moment when Harford begins to grasp
his view of the world may be truly, irretrievably flawed. The surrogate Ziegler's
plan is foiled by an aggressive woman. In the nightmare scene, Harford's self-
confidence will suffer the same fate. Here at the orgy, he tries to unmask his
"angel" and fails. He'll have the same difficulty with Alice after her dream, not
realizing the problem is that he himself is really the one who cannot allow the
mask to fall.

Reality now draws him away, as it will after Alice's nightmare; an orgy minion
requests him to follow as "the gentleman with the taxi waiting" (Harford will
manage his next day's errands from a taxi). Meanwhile Nightingale is led out past
dancing couples, men with men, women with women; the hotel clerk, smitten by
Harford, who describes Nightingale's forced check-out. Harford faces an ominous
ring of masks presided over by the celebrant and two mirroring goons. Indeed,
from the time Harford faces the orgy gate again the next day, he won't know a
moment's peace, his avenues of appeal blocked with half-truths, subterfuge, even
blatant lies. He is unmasked, threatened, and finally redeemed by the Alice
surrogate, his "angel" who has risked so much on his account, and for seemingly no
reason. This corresponds directly with his trip to the morgue and slow circling
discussion with Ziegler, although the scene arrangement is reversed here in the
orgy segment. In both cases, Harford is reduced to tears, his defenses beaten,
stripped away.

Here lies the real significance of his argument with Ziegler. It isn't a question
of its plot details, but the underlying realization they mask. Harford's way of
life and thought, his self-congratulatory insensitivity, expose him to the very
betrayal and helplessness to which he believes his social standing and behavior
make him invulnerable. He is, in effect, his own betrayer. As a result, the
woman who tries to strip away that mask must suffer in his place. Alice, not he,
is the most at risk, the one who really stands to lose everything because of his
unenlightened selfishness.

One final word before leaving the question of visual design. It was noted that
Kubrick's work relies heavily on conventions of painting, but this is not strictly
a question of composition, color, and content. Coming from a documentary
background, Kubrick's narrative films attempt a special kind of objectivity. What
is essential for audiences to see and hear is shown, but few "tricks" are used to
tell them what they should feel about it. That is left to their own good sense
and human perceptivity. Needless to say, the technique is at odds with
manipulative devices popular in most other kinds of films. Kubrick almost
entirely refrains from such effective but manipulative tricks, preferring unbroken
edits of long duration to machine gun-fire editing and eye-popping flourishes.

Such habits have a dramatic impact on his pacing style, and commonly result in
accusations he is "cold," "unemotional," his films "slow" and "plotless."
Hopefully the above discussion has gone a ways toward giving the lie to such
charges. Audiences will benefit most from Kubrick's work if they understand that
each shot contains such a quantity of information, it must be viewed as one might
examine a painting; with repose and concentration, an eye to constituent elements
rather than a mere visceral response to their pell-mell rush across the screen.
If one watches a film of this kind as they do those which rely on swift editing,
complex visual effects, and schematic emotional responses, they'll naturally come
away having missed its signals. This sort of film does not make decisions for
them on how to feel about its subject, characters, and events. If audiences don't
make those choices for themselves, a Kubrick film is bound to appear "slow" and
"plotless," "cold" and "unemotional."

PERFORMANCES

The majority of negative reaction to Eyes Wide Shut, both critically and at the
box office, may be laid to its frustration of expectations. For one thing, it was
marketed as a "summer blockbuster," a "thriller" with a "sexual" theme, none of
which are in the least descriptive of this powerfully internal and contemplative
piece. Kubrick's reputation may also have been as detrimental as it was positive,
stirring up resentments about his notorious secrecy, creating a backlash against
his much-hyped standing as "master film maker." The movie's radically untypical
style, breaking with everything 1999 audiences are used to, also contributed to
its tepid reception.

The presence of Tom Cruise and his real-life wife Nicole Kidman at the top of the
bill, however, may have been the single most damning factor. Again, this was a
question of frustrated expectations. Neither performer had done anything so
prestigious or demanding. One common opinion was they stepped outside their
limits of skill, causing one critic to lament how little directorial help Kubrick
gave Cruise in his admittedly difficult role. Even among loyal fans there was a
subtle feeling that, by appearing in a Kubrick film, these actors tried to
illegitimately "rise above their stations." In both cases, these accusations are
as unfair as they are groundless. "Interview With A Vampire" showed that Cruise
could leave his "pretty boy" persona far behind for a groundbreaking stretch,
while Kidman carried the fine adaptation of Henry James' "Portrait of a Woman" and
brilliantly satirized her ing�nue status in "To Die For."

Cynics claimed Kubrick was desperate to cast major stars to save what he knew
would otherwise be a film no one would care to see. But this overlooks his long-
standing film making habits. By picking Cruise for the role of Harford, Kubrick
returned to a "type casting" device used in Barry Lyndon. Harford must be a man
whose surface qualities we grasp on sight so that the film may dissect, explore,
and reconstruct them to the fullest possible extent. As a personality, and
utterly in keeping with his Eyes Wide Shut character, Cruise is strikingly
attractive but somehow perennially callow. He does not remain so as the story
develops, and Cruise is able to move through its complex demands with astonishing
power. Rather than being lacking, he performs expertly.

In his first scenes, he comes off as superficial, glib to the point of annoyance.
His behavior towards Alice, the Zieglers, Nightingale, and the models, is self-
congratulatory, all studied pauses, empty jollity, and false charm, fatuous to the
point one wants to slap him. It makes a stark contrast and comments tellingly on
his seriousness with the drug overdose. There, he seems the exact opposite of
what he was just moments before. Yet the ghost of superficiality clings to the
edges even of his sincere warning to the doomed socialite. It should be noted to
tread these extremes wants considerable skill, and Cruise has it.

His smugness is essential to motivate Alice's otherwise peculiarly sharp rage

against him during their argument. Pressed by her, Cruise falls back on his
"wounded, ever-sensible male" with such ease some viewers will feel more sympathy
for him, even though his wife's complaints are thoroughly just. In this scene,
where Kidman's virtuoso delivery potentially might steal the spotlight, Cruise
does some of his best work. Emotions duck in and out from behind the mask he
works so hard to hold up even between himself and his own wife. He ranges
effortlessly from jolly incredulity to inept denial to feigned rage to genuine but
monolithic bafflement. Yet at no point is the scene anything less than ensemble
playing.

Up until the argument, and the following scene with the bereaved daughter that
makes its implications flesh, the typecasting device requires little more from
Cruise but the sort of thing he has played in the majority of his films. Beyond
the first argument, however, lies quite unknown territory. Harford's arc in the
film's first half, through rage into determination and finally towards a kind of
grim merriment, all the while haunted by shapeless doubt, would ask a great deal
of any performer. The critic who accused Kubrick of giving his male star no help
might have found him too "flat." Still, Kubrick's film style places acting on an
even level with the ideas it carries. Especially in close up, another performer
with more ornate craft might have turned Harford into a different, perhaps more
"engaging" creature. But self-conscious display is at odds with what Eyes Wide
Shut in particular and Kubrick films in general are all about. As such, Cruise is
ideal for the job he's asked to do in this film. His "blandness" cracks open at
pivotal moments, but only enough to expose just the right amount of truth without
splattering an audience with unearned emotional responses.

Of the film's challenges, Harford's argument with Ziegler is his greatest, one
Cruise meets with control and precision, not to mention a great deal of heart and
pathos. Even here when his world is definitively ripped open, it would be a
mistake for Harford to get the kind of flat-out sympathy a more self-indulgent
performance might. He should hover between his two selves, knowing he must reject
Ziegler while desperately clinging to illusions the older man offers. The film's
tension depends on Harford coming away from even this moment of extreme bi-
location still wedded to his old self, but so delicately that the viewer knows his
balancing act cannot last. It is not an easy thing to do, but Cruise achieves it
perfectly.

For those who feel Cruise simply plays his usual "stud" role here, a closer look
at the film's second half gives that the lie. For the first time in his career,
he is required to shed the brash, likeable fa�ade that his followers know best.
Cruise exposes himself progressively until the film's last moments, when at last
he is as vulnerable as his wife. He has no defense. No charming smile or glib
quip can rescue him from the painful, totally mutual task of rebuilding the film's
last scene sets for them both.

In sum, the part of Harford is far more complex than it seems, with demands on an
actor that would defeat other more seasoned performers. Like the film itself,
Harford climbs a varied "hill" of emotions, is spun around at its top, then slides
down the other side grasping doggedly for hand holds. In the end, he fails,
indeed must fail. He plunges at last into what, during his wild ride, seemed the
abyss yawning below him. He finds Alice waiting there, having plunged into it
before him of her own will, miraculously both stronger than he and equally
uncertain. The final scene between them belongs mostly to Kidman, but Cruise
makes his few words and camera reverses speak eloquently for a man who is at the
same time deeply hurt, utterly lost, tentative, grateful, and finally relieved.
It is a fitting conclusion to a fine performance.

Although Cruise is on screen more than twice as long as Nicole Kidman, the film's
most virtuoso passages are hers. As these are speeches, their challenge might
seem both more obvious and less "cinematic." They would mean nothing, however, if
their groundwork hadn't been laid during the scene at Ziegler's party where Alice
indulges her long, contradictory flirtation with the world-weary Hungarian, one
more non-verbal than verbal. Kidman skillfully meshes her work during this scene
with that of her husband, making her coquette alternately opaque, maddeningly
childish, and startlingly wise, while giving only the most cursory replies to the
Hungarian's lengthy speeches.

Kidman reveals a woman torn almost literally in two; half matron, half vixen,
shifting between them with every revolution of the dance, seemingly giddy from
champagne and her constant turning, in reality off-balance thanks to her
oppressive life. In these crucial first minutes of the film, Kubrick's mirroring
device establishes itself. The character of Alice particularly bears the load for
this, as a microcosm for a "healthy" world made "unhealthy" by her husband's on-
going life charade, and her own capitulation to it. Her ability to seamlessly
project that she is both aware and unaware, willing and reluctant, at ease and
deeply uncertain brings off the scene.

Her later argument with Harford begins in this same style; drugged, teasing, with
a dark undercurrent of rage born from her mix of bafflement and grim knowledge.
She baits Harford, insults him, challenges him then, when the rest fails to pull
off his mask, jeers at him. It signals a breathtaking change, both in the
argument and Kidman's performance. In a real sense, it is the moment of supreme
dislocation that launches the story's internal action. She ceases to be torn, at
least in spirit. Instead, she makes herself the first "whole" spirit in the
story. Kidman handles this transformation with hypnotic proficiency, gauging her
work to Kubrick's signature "long limbed" style. She draws us into her fantasy by
stages until focus grows all but unbearably sharp with her description of how the
naval officer's departure ultimately made her feel "relieved." It is no trick of
the camera; that remains stationary throughout.

The argument scene prepares for her later nightmare revelation, since there she is
the human face of Harford's "crime," broken in half again after her moment of
wholeness during their argument, now part terrified child, part avenging angel.
What's more, she has no knowledge of either persona. Like Harford in his way,
Alice in hers has plunged to the depths of uncertainty where all doors are barred.
Her account of the dream is an accusation, but she cannot seem to know this or the
film's message is destroyed. It is a tribute to Kidman that she treads the fine
line between hysteria and tragedy with such remarkable poise, giving her words
exactly the weight to drive them home without once suggesting she does anything
more than spontaneously describe a particularly unpleasant nightmare.

The film's last scene again rests almost solely on Kidman's shoulders. Some
critics have described it as a disingenuous "happy" ending, apparently because the
couple appear to reconcile. This could be laid at Kidman's feet for not doing her
job in these last minutes. To this viewer's eyes, her tentative groping towards a
common ground between herself and a man who's forced her to live behind his mask
is exactly right. She's neither bright nor grim, neither drearily cross or
falsely warm. Kidman may give Alice a wistful softness, but in tribute to the
character's own inner grit rather than a sop to "happy endings." The effect is
exquisite, and suggests the opposite of what its critics claim. These two have
not come to the successful end of a difficult time. Rather, they're looking at
the start of a long, uncertain journey, both of them about equally unprepared for
its challenges. Beautiful and charming, they have yet to develop even basic
skills for love between two people. Kidman says this with her performance as much
as do the script's few last words. Delivering them, she is both shallow and
profound, the final mirror in a film spangled with a bewildering host of them.

Originally Harvey Keitel was signed to play Ziegler, but scheduling difficulties
prevented him. Some critics felt he would have been more effective than Sidney
Pollock. Keitel certainly has a lurking ominous quality that, at least on the
surface, seems more right for the character. But this may be one of those
accidents so familiar in movie making, apparent disasters that are really hidden
advantages. Given Kubrick's approach to the material, Pollock turns out to be
ideal casting exactly because he has none of Keitel's outward threat. It would
have been easy to play Ziegler, with his callous unconcern and his high-handed
outrage at Harford, as a leering melodrama villain. With Keitel in the role, the
film's premise would have been telegraphed the moment he came on screen, a man no
audience can watch without a hint of suspicion. Pollock's dull hang-dog, slightly
weary features and slow considered manner provide the ambiguity needed to change
Ziegler from stereotype to archetype.

If it seems a minor role for so powerful a presence, that too is in keeping with
the film's premise. Ziegler is a catalyst, not a prime mover, another irony to
add to his other equivocal qualities. Pollock gears his performance towards
solidity, the sense that Ziegler can be trusted and relied upon despite so many
indications he is neither reliable nor even really likeable. He makes himself so
attractive, some might not want to dislike him even knowing they absolutely
should. Again, this is to Kubrick's purpose. Most of his films work to cast
audiences in the mental state of the protagonist. Harford does not want to
mistrust Ziegler by any means, so neither should anyone watching the film.
Pollock's work makes that eminently possible.

Pollock's main challenge, and the place where he excels, is naturally during his
confrontation with Harford near the film's end. His Ziegler goes through a series
of transformations in this scene, embodying more or less all the traditional male
authority figures our society respects, and upon whom Harford himself still
relies. Ziegler begins as the jovial benefactor, offering gifts and comforts, but
quickly becomes a stern if potentially forgiving parent. From there, he shifts to
a figure of law and order transgressed, and then to righteous outrage. In the
end, he comes full circle, playing the part of Harford's consoling buddy with glib
quips and back slaps. It is to Pollock's credit he manages these shifts without
losing the core truth behind Ziegler, which is his pure venal self-interest.
Convincing in each assumed disguise, never outwardly sinister, Pollock's Ziegler
lumbers inexorably over Harford like a juggernaut, the sum of a masked society in
a single cunning man.

INTERNAL REFERENCES

Unlike today's "tradition-conscious" directors, Kubrick never went in for hidden

jokes such as only rabid fans are likely to grasp. A few references can be traced
back and forth between his various films, but these are dramatic mainly for their
scarcity. Eyes Wide Shut is unique in his lexicon as the single most "cross-
referenced" film he ever made. Not only does it utilize the internal mirroring
process discussed at length above, but it also draws on his earlier films to a
degree not only unheard of in his own work, but unknown in that of most other film
makers. Finally, it employs a series of devices that function like "hidden"
references, but are unique to this film alone.

Kubrick's disdain for this type of filmmaking probably comes from a disinclination
to spend his or an audience's energies on anything but the story at hand. Eyes
Wide Shut, however, depends for its effect upon edifying cross references to
itself. It conjures disturbing associations in viewers by presenting familiar
things in unfamiliar ways, which may explain Kubrick's almost feverish enthusiasm
to put "hidden" references in it. Finding these out, of course, is a delightful
game for those who enjoy such things. This essay is not designed either to dwell
on or rob those pleasures. A few words, though, will help stimulate viewers not
attuned to the process, and confirm their own discoveries in those who are.

Popular tunes heard during the Ziegler party, for instance, and the orgy scene
don't really qualify, being part of Kubrick's standard musical practice from his
earliest films. Like "Try a Little Tenderness" in Dr. Strangelove played during
the phallic refueling of a nuclear bomber, raging orgiasts accompanied by
"Strangers in the Night" is not so much a cross reference as a simple joke.

The Hungarian's reference to Ovid, however, is stronger stuff. For one thing, it
suggests the "naughtiness" of an older generation while proving his character
hopes to bewilder Alice with his superior acumen (thus subtly identifying him as a
Harford/Ziegler clone with only surface differences). For another, it looks
forward to the Ovid-like ceremoniality and proto-Greek "licentiousness" of the
orgy scene.

To name a prostitute Domino in a film whose structure turns on an orgy of cloaked

figures requires no explanation. The orgy password, though, bears closer
scrutiny. Nightingale admits it is "an opera by Beethoven." Specifically, it is
one about a wife who first endangers then redeems her husband. Almost as telling,
she does so by assuming a disguise, wearing the clothes of a man to descend into a
hellish situation prepared to take his place. Finally, the word itself means
literally "the faithful one," masculine gender, of course.

Kubrick must have enjoyed naming the place where Nightingale works the Sonata
Caf�. Sonata form in music, after all, is almost an exact double for that of his
film: two long mirroring sections around a shorter central one that reflects and
develops the material in the larger portions. Additionally, sonatas often consist
of three movements, with the central as a rule the shortest of the three.

The direct irony of naming Milich's shop Rainbow Costumes, and the name of the
shop beneath it (Under the Rainbow) have already been discussed. This scene's
openly joking tone hides a wealth of material for discussion, but will be limited
here to mention of one subtly delicious touch only. Milich first appears at his
apartment door glaring suspiciously down the hall at Harford. The building's
glass door separates them. Lights from the street behind reflect on that glass,
most prominently the neon sign of a restaurant shaped like a vertical arrow
pointing down at an angle. Being a reflection, the legend is backward and more or
less illegible. But the arrow points directly to Milich's crotch! The shot is
held long enough for, at the very least, subconscious recognition. As emphasis,
Milich stays motionless during his first exchange with Harford. The cut directly
following is a reverse, turning the restaurant sign right ways, its legend easily
read. It says "Diner." And the arrow? It points directly at Harford.

This is not the last restaurant sign in Eyes Wide Shut with subliminal messages.
In the second half (true to the mirroring convention) another suggests even more
tantalizing notions. Harford has just left the hooker Domino's apartment after
learning her fatal secret, and now realizes he's being followed. For safety, he
stops beside a newsstand to glare back at his tormentor. The fellow makes no
attempt to conceal himself, but instead glowers defiantly, then slowly walks out
of sight.

Going by story content alone, Kubrick frames the shot oddly. The "tail" stops for
his long stare in its lower left corner, the rest of the frame apparently "blank."
In fact, the picture consists of storefronts across the street, as well as those
on either corner of the near side. This seeming irrelevance in fact offers a
number of clues. For one, the "tail" stops beneath the street sign, which reports
itself as "Wren Street" and is naturally but tellingly green in color. Is this a
reference to the English slang for an attractive woman, "bird?" Whether it is or
isn't, it inevitably suggests the orgy scene, where alone among the other women,
Harford's unknown rescuer wears a prominent headdress of feathers. What's more,
when she makes her "sacrifice" on Harford's account, the figure removing her wears
a huge grotesque bird's beak mask.

There is also a STOP sign, red of course, on prominent display. This in itself is
an obvious enough touch. What is mysterious is the graffiti scrawled in black
beneath the sign's letters: CMB. Is this an acronym to be puzzled out? "Conjugal
married bliss," for instance? Or does it mean nothing at all? The viewer is
invited to guess, dismiss it as mere "realistic" set dressing, or ignore it
completely.

Then comes the restaurant sign, as promised. Its huge red letters, impossible to
miss, dominate the center right quadrant of the screen. Given the shot's length
and eerie stasis, the eye can't help but wander to this bright landmark at least
once: VERONA RESTAURANT, all in capitals. There is more. Some letters are dimmer
than others, in the way of an old sign in bad repair. Accounting for dim letters
next to bright, it reads: VeroNa resTauraNT. The first dim letters, "ero," are
like in "Eros," "erotic," etc. Given they're flanked by the brighter VN (i.e.
Venus, venereal), that much is clear. They're followed by "aresT," and of course
Harford is currently pursued by an authority figure meant to stop him; the
prominent STOP sign tells us that much. The last three brightened letters, taken
together, amount to a familiar enough acronym: TNT. The pale letters between them
spell "aura," which may or may not be important. But the brighter capitals in sum
spell out VN TNT; sex is explosive, at this juncture certainly.

So far, only "internal" references have been discussed. But Eyes Wide Shut
includes more nods to other Kubrick films than anything he ever did. Certain
aspects are not references at all, of course, but only consistent aspects of
style; "endless tunnel" walks and drives, narrative application of color, long
static camera shots, slow and swift full-frame zooms, distinctive "Kubrick
backlighting." Others, arguably, are sheer coincidence. The double return to
nightmare ballrooms filled with dancers, for instance, might either suggest The
Shining or be happenstance.

Others are harder to dismiss. At the orgy, the Ziegler clone and one of his
minions both wear three-cornered hats from the period and style of Barry Lyndon,
the only other Kubrick film with anything like a true orgy in it, and the one to
mirror type casting, first in Ryan O'Neal, then in Tom Cruise. Indeed, the entire
scene is a throwback to the sense and style of that earlier film. The use of
"Fidelio" as the orgy password (and Nightingale's mention of Beethoven) clearly
evoke A Clockwork Orange, whose incidences of sex are always rape. Leelee
Sobieski's grinning, all-but mute nymphet is a clear reference to Lolita while
also echoing the woman in A Clockwork Orange who helps demonstrate Alex's
"successful" behavior alteration. At the very least, the CMB graffiti under the
STOP sign hints at similar three-letter acronyms in Dr. Strangelove; CRM, OPE,
POE, etc., as well as HAL in 2001, while Nick Nightingale is of a piece with names
in Dr. Strangelove like Bat Guano, Merkin Muffley, and Buck Turgidson.

A far more dramatic parallel with 2001, however, occurs in the second half of Eyes
Wide Shut. Harford asks his nurse what patients are waiting, and among them she
lists "Mrs. Kaminsky," a name from the earlier film, one of the astronauts in
frozen stasis. Kubrick drives his point home in the next scene, where Harford
faces by daylight the orgy house gate. Out of the threatening limousine that
comes to meet him climbs an elderly gentleman who walks to the gate. Dressed in
ankle-length trench coat, hands thrust in pockets, distinctive sharp nose, small
eyes, and wispy hair, he is a dead ringer for Dave Bowman during the last scene of
2001 as, hands thrust in the pockets of his ankle-length night coat, he walks to
the bathroom to "face" his younger self. The parallel is not casual. As in 2001,
this is a case of experience facing innocence, part of the harsh mystery of age,
wisdom, and searching for what turns out to be utterly different from what one
expects to find.

As a final wry observation, at one point a sign is visible on the second floor of
one New York building. It offers the premises for rent by "Vitali Realty." This
is clearly a gesture of thanks to Leon Vitali, who played Lord Bullingdon in Barry
Lyndon, and has been Kubrick's personal assistant on every subsequent film.

AFTERWORD

For every detail in this essay, Eyes Wide Shut offers at least that many and more
not discussed here. Readers who have already seen it should view the film again
in light of what they've read. Those who haven't cannot hope to appreciate its
generous brilliance through these pages alone. It is true that Kubrick is not for
everyone. Those lucky enough to grasp and enjoy his distinctive style will
hopefully come away from this discussion having both recognized things they
already knew and knowing things they hadn't yet recognized.
EYES WIDE SHUT: An Appreciation Page 23
G.F. Watkins