Forty Three

Back, now, to Alice and Sandor, spinning giddily around Victor’s dancefloor. But, as with all well-wrought cross-cutting narrative, the intervening events completely change the scene’s mood and theme. For one, we know that this magical, seductive party is hosted by an unabashed rapist. All those golden lights, those soaring columns, Nick’s band–all paid for by rapist-money. Kubrick was an expert at tracing individual sins as they corrupt wider institutions, and does so with uncharacteristic subtlety here.

How so? Let’s map out the evening’s structure, a tour through what Eyes Wide Shut superfan Jeffrey Scott Bernstein calls “Stations of Amorous Love.” We begin with Bill and Alice Harford, the Happy Couple™, although the latter has already let hints of her dissatisfaction slip. They meet and greet Victor and Ilona Ziegler, who seem like an older, wealthier version of the Harfords; they’re even shot as parallels. So time itself seems to relent before the Harfords–they are seeing their future, and it’s a palatial mansion full of seductive guests. What could be better? But the cracks appear, bit by bit: Bill encounters Nick, reminding him of his single, pre-doctor days (which Nick doesn’t seem to have given up), while Alice goes off on her own and meets Sandor, offering her a tantalizing future paralleled with Bill’s unearthed past. Bill then appears to bump randomly into Gayle and Nuala, who remind Bill of another bygone flirtation (Gayle, Rockefeller Plaza, something in her eye), and offer a counterpoint seduction to Sandor’s: a threesome instead of a coupling, silly and shallow instead of suave and debonair, leading him down a linear hallway instead of whirling him around a dancefloor. And yet, they are all pieces in the same game, and the true nature of that game is revealed upstairs: Victor molesting the drugged Mandy, relying on Bill to help cover it up.

Eyes Wide Shut is about more than an individual or a couple; it is about a society, one separate from but insidiously representative of our own. The movie follows two seemingly contradictory trajectories at once: like 2001, it builds from individuals outward, constructing a picture of a city built on not only abuse, but the covering up of said abuse. What matters in Eyes Wide Shut is less what happens than the fact that what happens is hidden, ignored, willfully forgotten; therein lies the other arc. That is the path inward, surgically prying apart Doctor Bill Harford’s defenses until he is left humiliated, utterly exposed for the ordinary, conflicted human being he is. That is the shock of Eyes Wide Shut: the revelation of the absurd amalgam of contradictory parts that we have somehow agreed to refer to as one coherent “person.” Eyes Wide Shut, made as its director lay dying, somehow manages to be about both Bill Harford and the society through which he moves in equal proportion, as if the master wanted to unleash one last terrible all-consuming vision on his unsuspecting audience, but also let them know he understood how it felt to be a small, helpless individual caught up in that pattern. I’m projecting, of course, but if that was his intention, he utterly nailed it. RIP, you master of the medium, as much as Shakespeare was of theater, or Carlin of stand-up, or, or…

Where was I? Oh, yes, the structure of the night, “Amorous Stations of Love,” yes yes. OK. So I’ll save my conclusions for when the Harfords finally escape this tantalizing death-trap of an evening. For now, enough to note that it’s impossible to take Sandor’s sexy moves at face value any more. Is he any different from Victor? Are his intentions toward Alice any different than his host’s toward Mandy? Remember, Alice has had far too much to drink, and doesn’t seem far removed from Mandy’s vulnerable blackout. (I’ll just point out that both are tall redheads, and again leave further discussion of their insidious commonality for later.)

So our impression of their ongoing dance and flirtation is colored by what Bill’s been up to upstairs, and indeed, Sandor glances enigmatically upward as he prepares to go for broke. “I love Victor’s art collection, don’t you?” Back we go to art! It’s an endlessly recurring motif in Eyes Wide Shut, designed to accomplish several purposes at once. It adds to the film’s layered, synaesthetic beauty, explicitly call attention to the constructed and even deceptive nature of that beauty, and tie the film’s characters into the age-old exploitation of high culture toward base ends: art as a primal display of wealth. That painting in Victor’s bathroom sews all these strands together–immediately striking in its bold colors and frank nudity, satirically reflective of Victor’s treatment of actual naked women, and representative of the wealth by which he subtly intimidates upper-middle-class types like Bill and thereby escapes justice.

And Sandor, by alluding to it, implicates himself in the muted outrage playing out upstairs, even as Kubrick pointedly shoots the two scenes with different, indeed divergent styles (one is the bittersweet dream, the other the grim reality, an early tremor of the tragic horror David Lynch would bring to full fruition with Mulholland Drive). Alice, of course, doesn’t know what Bill and Victor are up to, and is willing to play along with Sandor for the moment. “Yes,” she replies breathily. “It’s wonderful.” Sandor offers a serpentine smile. “Have you ever seen his sculpture gallery?” Alice grins back. “No…” Amusement hangs heavy on her voice, as if she can’t quite believe he’s using art, of all things, as an excuse to go in for the kill. (How different is he from Victor, whose choice of bathroom-painting inadvertently reveals his jet-black soul?) “He has a wonderful collection of Renaissance bronzes.” Here is another of Eyes Wide Shut‘s endless allusions to ancient/classical eras, both directly tying the themes of these individual stories to age-old dilemmas and implicitly comparing the artwork to the characters, who are themselves representatives of their particular time-space corridor (but without the luxury of the eternal frozen majesty of sculpture; again, moving images exist in time, and therefore die). “Do you like the period?” I wouldn’t leap to the obvious menstrual joke there, except that Sandor delivers this line so creepily, all deep purr and leaning in, and I can’t help it. In my defense, I offer Dr. Strangelove as evidence that for all Kubrick’s hyper-intelligent philosophizing, dude loved dumb sex jokes. Who don’t?

“Mm, I do.” We will later learn that Alice loves Van Gogh, a man who knew a thing or two about art being corrupted by the monied powers that be. “I adore it,” says Sandor silkily. Does he? Doesn’t matter, he’s using the great humanist breakthrough in Western art and civilization as a prop to get laid. “The sculpture gallery is just upstairs. Would you like to see it? I can show it to you…we won’t be gone long.”

After so many classic volleys back and forth, Sandor delivers four straight lines to dead air, Alice simply watching and listening and no doubt thinking very hard. The whole rhythm is thrown off and realigned, bringing us along with the characters to the tipping point. Emptiness, the Void, is one of the many pivotal subjects of Eyes Wide Shut, albeit inevitably  difficult to define. What is it we are seeing in this moment?  Two beautiful people, whirling around a beautiful room, one of whom has just proposed to the other that they put everything that has led to this beautiful moment at risk, for the chance at something better. Of course, it’s all much sleazier than that makes it sound, but it doesn’t really matter; every moment, for Kubrick, is another chance for self- and societal evaluation, regardless of how seemingly tawdry the event at hand seems. Alice has a chance now. She doesn’t take it. “Maybe…not…just…now,” she whispers as she leans in close. It’s so damn tantalizing, not just because it’s super-sexy, but because we are witnessing a future that could have been die and wither away. Eyes Wide Shut seems barely to exist, a particular configuration of socio-economic space-time that forever stands at the precipice of Something Else, but the timidity and inertia of the characters prevents them from taking the full plunge. Kubrick, unlike more simplistic, didactic artists, isn’t saying whether that step into the unknown (micro-echoes of 2001‘s macrocosmic Journey Beyond the Infinite) is good or bad, just that it is an opportunity forsaken, and will forever haunt the timestream proceeding outward from the film’s infamous ending.

Why does Alice say no? Is she genuinely uninterested? Was she eager, not to fuck, but to linger on the possibility of fucking? (There will be plenty of evidence for this interpretation after the momentous events of the following night.) Or is she, at some deep, primeval level, aware of what is going on upstairs? Does she not want to end up like Mandy, a “Renaissance bronze” rendered in flesh and blood, but no less a slave to the acquisitive rule of rich men like Victor, like Sandor, and perhaps (perhaps) like her dear dull husband Bill? That wreath-and-lights star framing her head in the above shot hints that she’s just as trapped as Mandy, or as the woman in Victor’s painting: she is an artfully arranged prize in a man’s, man’s, man’s world.

Forty Two

“What’s her name?” Bill finally thinks to ask. “Uh…Mandy. Mandy,” Victor mutters. Names are given a totemic power in Eyes Wide Shut, as we’ve already seen: Bill forgets Roz’s name seconds after Alice mentions her (indicating his detachment, self-absorption, emptiness, etc.), he attempts to flirt with Nuala by asking how she spells her name, and alliterative monikers like “Sandor Szavost” and “Nick Nightingale” are hints that the Harfords are entering a realm of fantasy and deception. “Mandy,” by contrast, is a simple name, easy both to remember and forget, which is exactly how Bill and Victor both treat her (the former more passively, of course, but no less devastatingly).

Again, Kubrick’s shots match his script. In one the film’s least subtle visual gags, Victor is framed throughout the conversation in front of a large painting, depicting a naked woman on a red carpet. His head is positioned exactly level with her crotch. It’s a perverse joke, of course, wryly commenting on Victor’s rapacity, but it also ties into Eyes Wide Shut‘s motif of art explicating character. As, again, in Clockwork Orange, art is used to convey both refinement and crassness at once, but in EWS, this theme takes on a more melancholy cast. Those shots of Victor and his painting tell us exactly what Victor is, but our hero Bill is understandably distracted by the flesh-and-blood woman in front of him. Victor, of course, doesn’t see the difference; to him, they’re both just prizes to be displayed. Bill isn’t necessarily more humanist in his outlook, as he sees women as puzzles to be solved (be it sexually, emotionally, or medically) rather than objects to be won, and his inability to solve the puzzle that is Alice will point the way forward to some sort of revelation.

“Mandy,” Bill repeats (again with the parroting). “Mandy?” Now he’s talking to her. “Look at me. Look at me. Look at me, Mandy.”

At first, the camera remains trained on Mandy’s face, capturing every twinge as she works her reluctant way back to consciousness. (Who can blame her? Would you want to wake to this life?) Her eyelids gradually twitch open, revealing a void beneath: dark eyes, suffused with despair and numbness, as much a mask as the literal ones to follow later in the movie. It chills me to the bone.

But as Bill keeps up his “look at me” mantra, Kubrick cuts. Now we’re looking at Bill’s face in profile, staring intently at Mandy at the far right of the screen. Victor’s lower back takes up the far left, so Bill is literally framed, center shot. “Look at me. Look at me.”

So, look at him! As I’ve said before, Eyes Wide Shut traces an almost subliminal transformation of Bill Harford, from a smug, stagnant, amoral elitist to a distraught, disturbed, morally tortured Everyman, at least until Alice unexpectedly slams that door shut in the final scene. In a more classically structured melodrama, this early scene would mark the beginning of Bill’s inner awakening. But by cutting mid-sentence, and by literally asking the audience to “look at” Bill, Kubrick calls out his protagonist for his ongoing moral slumber. Bill doesn’t care–or rather, he cares just enough to bring her around and then deliver her right back into Victor’s abusive arms. His face is a mask, all professional concern and personal void. If he’s thinking about anything, it’s likely Gayle and Nuala, failing to understand that his short-circuited lust is the foundation on which the sociological trap for women is built. (Which is not to say lust is evil, merely that it blinds us to larger, graver concerns beyond orgasm.)

Forty One

“What did she take?” Bill asks, dropping to one knee and opening Mandy’s eyelid. Cut back to Victor. “Speedball, or snowball, whatever the hell they call it…it’s heroin and coke.”

My favorite movies, generally speaking, are those that find interesting ways to match form and content. Whatever you’re doing with narrative/character/emotion/theme, it should be reflected in your style, your look and sound; the power of cinema is that it can show and tell at the same time. For example: at the exact moment when Kubrick cuts to Mandy’s naked body, thus shattering the warm, hazy narrative thrust of the opening act, the film’s aesthetic changes in turn. Gone are the languorous tracking shots and exquisite dissolves; they are replaced by a hard-edged volleying reverse shot, pinning Bill and Victor in their respective frames. Indeed, Alice-meeting-Szavost took two shots, with an exquisite cut in between; each of their dance scenes are captured in a single shot, as is Bill’s long corridor-walk with Gayle and Nuala. This first bathroom scene, by contrast, includes 15 shots.

Is it pure nerdity to take note of this? Perhaps, but even the casual reviewer registers the shift, if only at a subconscious level (and Eyes Wide Shut is all about subconscious transformations, recognized and otherwise). What effect does this stylistic switch-up have on the viewer? It makes us sit up and take notice, no longer drifting along with drunk partygoers; now, we see the ugly underbelly of this ritualistic reverie, and so the camera restricts itself to static shot-reverse-shots, fitting the brutal exposition on hand. When it cuts back to Alice and Sandor, back to light and color and dance, the aesthetic gap becomes all the starker.

Anyway, the dialogue. Victor’s line, again, in regards to what (he used to) put Mandy in a comatose state: “Speedball, or snowball, whatever the hell they call it. It’s heroin and coke.” Note the “they.” We drink champagne, you see, and if we drink a little too much and are tempted to cheat on our spouses, why, that’s just all part of the game for the idle rich. They, on the other hand, cling to the serious shit, all the better to avoid thinking about how utterly screwed they are (rimshot). The class structure of Eyes Wide Shut, heretofore hidden underneath red drapes and behind dazzling curtains of light, now comes into focus. (This gradual reveal is thematically apt, as class structures in the modern West are always at least partially hidden, making it easier for the world’s winners–like Victor, from his name on down–to pretend they aren’t there.)

“Heroin…and coke.” Bill repeats. There is not a hint of reproach or judgment in his voice, nor any of the giddy excitement he displayed when flirting with Gayle and Nuala. Doctor Bill has taken over.

But has he completely? Bill must have blue balls at this moment, given who Victor called him away from. How does he feel, looking at a naked beautiful woman? Is he aroused? Ashamed? Aroused by his own shame (he’s definitely a bottom)?

We can’t know, because neither his set expression nor neutral tone gives anything away, so we must intuit. Of course, I could easily be projecting! Occam’s razor would dictate that he expresses none of these feelings because he is not, in fact, feeling them. But a fictional character’s inner life is always an abstraction created in the audience mind, so I feel free to project. Besides, Bill’s increasingly erratic behavior later in the film makes sense only when you consider the seeds of doubt and existential alienation planted in these early scenes; Kubrick is patiently laying the groundwork for the catharses to come.

So let’s say, then, that Bill is calling on his medical expertise–his selfhood as a doctor–to stifle inappropriate arousal. In fact, he admits to exactly this strategy the following night, when his wife accuses him of getting hot and bothered by his female patients: “Alice, I happen to be a doctor. It’s all very impersonal.” Yet if his medical ethics require him to be “impersonal,” that prevents not only sexual arousal but also the moral outrage we might expect him to feel upon seeing what Victor’s done to Mandy (not to mention his wife Ilona). So, an uber-Freudian analysis of Bill would find that his temptation combined with his profession has thoroughly mixed up his sex and death drives (and boy, will there be plenty of grist for that interpretation later in the movie), but the central thrust of Eyes Wide Shut has less to do with that psychological state than with the moral and social blindness it produces.

Kubrick takes psychosis, especially the alpha-male sex n’ death variety, as a given (see especially Strangelove and Clockwork Orange) as a given, and works toward subtler and more genuinely disturbing conclusions from there. After all, Hollywood’s done an excellent job making murderous machismo enjoyable, even admirable. What Kubrick did was work painstakingly to contextualize that impulse, reckoning with how antisocial violence is nonetheless absorbed right back into society. The director on the use of Beethoven to soundtrack rape and murder fantasies in Clockwork Orange: “I think this suggests the failure of culture to have any morally refining effect on society. Hitler loved good music and many top Nazis were cultured and sophisticated men but it didn’t do them, or anyone else, much good.” That’s Victor in a nutshell, an erudite, cultured, and charismatic rapist.

But Eyes Wide Shut isn’t a detached polemic; it’s doggedly faithful to the sights and sounds experienced by its characters, whose perception of that Big Picture and their reactions to it are forever limited. After Bill tells Alice that his examination of female patients is impersonal, he goes on to say “…and you know there’s always a nurse present.” In other words, Bill’s desire is always filtered through watching, and the shots of him attending to Mandy are dominated by Victor’s hulking frame in the foreground. When Bill repeats back “Heroin and coke” in that flat tone, he’s not only revealing his lack of moral dudgeon, he’s stripping the language of its dramatic meaning. The words become empty signifiers, reminding us that we are watching a unfolding dialectic, not a didactic screed. The specific rules and abuses of the world Bill gradually uncovers ultimately matter less than his reaction to them–his cowardice, his culpability, and finally, his total and complete repression, aided in the latter by Alice.

Forty

Forty posts! I get a free 40, right? No? Who the hell blogs sober? Fine.

Anywho, back to Bill. He follows the butler to the grand staircase we glimpsed upon the Harfords’ arrival. Kubrick’s camera holds back for a moment as they ascend, forming interchangeable figures against the brilliant backdrop of the Zieglers’ fountain o’ light. The shot lingers as we are bathed in that signature golden glow, all is well, it’s Christ-mas-tiiiiiime in the city….

Cut. An unconscious woman is sprawled on a blazing red chair. She is naked. Victor stands next to her, topless but for a pair of suspenders. He, quite audibly, zips up, before moving to the door and letting Bill in.

And so, we have arrived at the point. Eyes Wide Shut has already established itself as a film about sex and money and repression and gender and selfhood and work and color and music and light, all collapsed into the Harfords’ brains. Yet it has so far lacked in dramatic tension, revealing little details about its characters and their societal surroundings in subtle and elegant fashion, but shying away from any tension, any real problem, that might throw this suspiciously gorgeous world askew. With the introduction of Mandy, Victor’s victim, Eyes Wide Shut fully enters Kubrick-land, just as the secondhand story of Jack Torrance breaking his little son’s arm threw The Shining‘s surrealist opening chapter into sharp relief. This is what the director did so well: establish intricate systems and watch pitilessly as they fall apart, the elites saving themselves and leaving the less fortunate to rot. (See Dr. Strangelove, Paths of Glory, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, Spartacus…) Now, something is at stake, and there’s no turning back.

Victor has lured a prostitute to his hilariously huge bathroom (more on that later), allowed her to OD, and then fucked her unconscious body. This is rape. This is rape. This is rape. Why am I being so insistent on this point? Because rape survives at the ghastly rate it does because it goes ignored, which is what we’re talking about when we talk about “rape culture.” Because, by the same horrific logic, it will be some viewers’ instinct, upon witnessing Mandy’s naked and unconscious body and upon hearing Victor zipping up, to ogle, and nothing else. To watch. To feel, to immerse in the visceral, with no moral consideration. And that is Kubrick’s test–why else would he call it Eyes Wide Shut?

Movies are important because watching is important. To be part of an audience is to sit helpless while the world spins out of control, which certainly doesn’t make you responsible for that chaos, but it does (or should) remind you that most of your interactions with the world at large consist of just that–watching. Observing. Taking note, and moving on, or not. Life is a constant series of decisions as to what is important, picking and choosing among the myriad visions that cross our eyes, and that decision is inherently moral. Lesser artists make that decision for us; their work serves as a neat platter of catharsis, moral disturbance and satisfaction wrapped up in one. As A Clockwork Orange makes horribly clear, Kubrick absolutely refuses to let us off so easily. Art, for him, is a provocation meant to awaken the morality-in-watching that lies latent in so many of us, numb as we (perhaps necessarily) are to the abuse and misery that surrounds us, so easy to observe yet so difficult to solve in the digital age.

That, admittedly, doesn’t sound like much fun. That’s where the insane unmatched monolithic craft comes in, keeping us engaged in these pitiless fables. Only 2001 transcends this struggle entirely, reaching in its dazzling and devastating climax precisely that which Kubrick denies the insects under glass populating his later works: a state of pure grace.

Thirty Nine

So far, Bill has been gliding through the movie (unlike Alice) with nary a moment’s reflection, relying on his status and his handsome mug to get him from scene to scene. But now, as Gayle and Nuala draw him forward to “where the rainbow ends,” he’s forced to choose. Who is he? Is he a loving husband and father, or a smug philanderer? The terrifying thing, really, is that he could probably get away with being both. Alice’s confession, the following night, that she fantasized about giving up her life with him in favor of one passionate night with another man shocks Bill to his core, but he need not consider any such sacrifice with Gayle and Nuala. It would be a one-night stand that he, as man and breadwinner, would not have to suffer for; it would not alter his life or psyche, not unless he wants it to. And that choice, that need to stop drifting and relying on circumstance, the moment when he must take responsibility for his life, terrifies him, and will continue to as it recurs throughout the movie.

As such, you can imagine how grateful he is when Kubrick interrupts, in the form of another of Ziegler’s servants. “Sorry, Dr. Harford, sorry to interrupt. I wonder if you could come with me for a moment. Something for Mr. Ziegler…?”

Note the obsequiousness. His co-worker had interrupted Bill and Nick without indulging in apologies or polite caveats, brusquely calling Nick away while giving Bill a decidedly unfriendly once-over. It’s a minor contrast, but it highlights the twin peaks of Eyes Wide Shut‘s internal power structure: money and sex. Servant #2 is terribly sorry to cockblock Bill, but does so on behalf of the wealthier Victor’s abusive sexual authority. Servant #1, calling his fellow underling Nick away from (snigger) platonic friendship, could not possibly care less. Why would he? Neither Nick nor Bill put up a fight. Bill, interrupted, spares a glance for Gayle and Nuala before stepping away. “To be continued?” he murmurs over his shoulder.

It won’t be, of course. Bill never sees them again, and neither do we. This potential future, what could have been, will never be, an existential absence that is no less melancholic for its sleazy-sexy content. Eyes Wide Shut, like the Lynch and Polanski classics to which it pays tribute, is haunted by what remains outside the frame, beyond its particular time-space corridor, regardless of whether that Non-Existence is itself meaningful or important. The loss is what matters, the limits of subjectivity crying out for a bigger picture that remains just beyond our sight. We will never learn for sure what is waiting where the rainbow ends, because the wanting and the hoping is what matters.

I lied, though. We get one glimpse of Gayle and Nuala that Bill does not. As he turns to follow Servant #2 upstairs, the two ladies are left alone, neatly framing the shot (Gayle to the far right, Nuala on the left). It’s an immediately uncanny moment because the protagonist has left the frame, yet the camera lingers, not cutting away just yet. They glance at each other, and Gayle drops her mask, glaring stone-faced at Nuala as the latter insolently stares back. Cut.

What just happened? What passed between these women? Is it merely frustration at the interruption, a flicker of emotion captured on film (a subtle, transitory moment that no other medium can convey, because only moving images live in time and therefore die)? Or something…more, something sinister?

But nothing suggests that, really! Gayle and Nuala don’t share code words or transmit information to some shadowy benefactor. So why do I insist that something is happening here, that Gayle and Nuala were paid to seduce Bill? Because that look, Gayle’s glare, indisputably exists. It is there, for a second, before Kubrick cuts away, and we are left to make of it…whatever we want. Eyes Wide Shut frequently functions as a Rorschach test, its dazzlingly colored inkblots offering any number of interpretations; whatever one we choose says as much about us as it does about the movie. Film is Existence recorded and then immediately lost, a rainbow that begins and ends in none-more-black. The conspiracy lurking behind Eyes Wide Shut is not necessarily a consciously organized one, but it nevertheless touches every individual involved, if only by implication. This iceberg approach to narrative, character, and mood, where the true nature of all three lurks beneath the surface, is what allows Eyes Wide Shut to age so well, and to cut deeper with each viewing. There’s something there, in a flicker of Gayle’s eyelids, and it has a cumulative effect, compounded with each following scene.

Thirty Eight

So, ladies, where are we going? “Where the rainbow ends,” Gayle murmurs.

Bill is still grinning. (It’s a reflexive move, a self-defensive technique he’s so dependent upon that the drama is immeasurably heightened whenever he fails to keep it in place.) “Where the rainbow ends?” Now he covers up his confusion by lending a seductive tone to his voice, as if he’s considering it and not just backpedaling.

But only mentally backpedaling. Physically, as Jeffrey Scott Bernstein notes in his essential breakdown of Eyes Wide Shut‘s first twenty minutes, the three of them never stop moving forward. Bill spreads his arms wide to slow them down, but they still keep on toward the camera. If they stopped dead, it would’ve emphasized the tension of Bill finally calling the question; instead, they move as if in a dream, as if not entirely in control, as if (like Jack wandering down the equally shiny corridors of the Overlook Hotel) their fate is inevitable and tied to place. Don’t you want to sleep with us? Why else would you have come this far, arm in arm, affirming how “knowledgeable” doctors are about “all sorts of things?” It’s a cinematic moment that resembles a painting in motion (cinema as moving image), all color and suspense, spiked with both black humor (look at dashing Tom Cruise, utterly failing to get laid) and subtle unease. Who are Gayle and Nuala, really? What are they after?

“Don’t you want to go where the rainbow ends?” Nuala practically purrs, tugging at his arm. Bill’s response is a comic gem: “Well, that depends where that is…”

Where does the rainbow end? Well, at a pot of gold, as we all know. So they’re leading him on to the very heart of EWS, the core of the movie’s molten hierarchy: a place where money and sex can blur together and become one, acquisitiveness in defiance of all else. (Sandor would like to take Alice there as well, as he will make clear very shortly.) Moreover, the rainbow is a spectrum of color, and color is a vital component of EWS: all those vivid reds and blues and golds both define and trap the characters, hinting at their emotional states while illuminating a mysterious world beyond their reach, a timestream ruling their every step. “Where the rainbow ends,” then, is an oasis from all that confusion and forced reflection–a room without the mirrors that follow Bill wherever he goes, a chance to fuck without thinking, act without consequence, live without the fear of death. A realm free of the “necessary deception” that Sandor argues is the defining element of marriage.

But Bill doesn’t want to go. Why? Perhaps it’s out of loyalty to Alice, although he gives no indication of guilt or fear of getting caught. Is it perhaps instead that Bill is interested, not in sex, but in seduction? The process, not the consummation? (That would certainly put him in line with his director, always denying catharsis until the audience understands all the various forces that have contributed to a supposedly-singular Moment.)

In other words, unlike Alice, Bill doesn’t actually have any problems. He has the perfect life, as far as he’s concerned: lovely wife, loving daughter, swanky apartment, rich clients who invite him to parties. So he’s up for a little flirting, but why go any further and disturb what’s working so well for him?

Well, because dissatisfaction is the human condition. Because (as Alice makes explicit in her monologue the following night) what is will always look dull next to what could be, and Eyes Wide Shut trembles at the possibilities of what could be. Because his ego is on the line, and both Nick and Gayle (“just think of all they miss…”) have pricked it.

It’s an interior struggle, and a subtle one; the extent to which Bill is teetering on the precipice here is perhaps only clear in retrospect, as later scenes reveal how driven he is to escape, to find something (and someone) new. What keeps the scene intriguing on first glance is that Gayle and Nuala seem to be operating on a completely different level. “Where the rainbow ends” hints at the mythic, the poetic, and there’s something quietly sinister about it, as if they’re about to reveal the beautiful and terrible machine (a clockwork orange?) working behind the scenes of Kubrick’s final production, in which beauty becomes ever more a gilded surface concealing decay, corruption, and abuse. That’s the outside force pushing into Bill’s brain; the question now becomes, how does he push back?

Thirty Seven

Gayle reaches her thesis on the subject of doctors: “But I bet they work too hard. Just think of all they miss…”

Bill Harford, like the actor playing him, is a difficult man to read. He keeps his cards close, and is massively, obviously uncomfortable when his emotions are wrenched free involuntarily. As I’ve mentioned, he’s the definitive Passive Protagonist, which admittedly makes him difficult to like, but also transforms EWS (upon repeat viewings) into a meta-detective game. Bill Harford is undeniably a different man when the film ends, but when does that transformation take place? Can you spot it?

Obviously, the Somerton orgy is the ultimate catalyst, but Kubrick carefully lays the groundwork long before that ego-shredding tipping point. Nick Nightingale offers Bill a glimpse of another life–a disorderly and lonely one, to be sure, but more exciting and intriguing than his current routine (which Kubrick pitilessly examines the following day). What’s more, since Nick’s life has brought him to the same sprawling mansion as Bill’s, the latter wouldn’t have to sacrifice his beloved status in order to go slumming; Bill feels free to be a tourist in the realm of working-class sex. (What he finds, of course, that just as Nick is lower on the totem pole than Bill, so Bill is an insect next to the likes of Victor and Red Cloak.)

Gayle’s line here has a similar effect. Has Bill ever thought of all he’s missing? Is he satisfied with these unconsummated glimpses, or does he want something more? (Hell, would he know what to do with something more if he found it? He most certainly would not, says the rest of the movie.)

“You’re probably right,” Bill replies, glancing down. With this sudden shock to his ego, he seems to remember who he is, who they are, and what they’re almost certainly about to do. “Now, ladies…” They pass from the hallway into another large room, reaching a terminus just as their conversation does the same. (Architecture mirrors character.) “Where, exactly, are we going?” They laugh. He joins them, teeth flashing in a wide grin, his desperation all but hidden. “Exactly?” he repeats. Bill is a logical man, you see; one of those assholes who pride themselves on their rationality as a method of asserting superiority over those lost in Feelings (and there’s almost always a hint of misogyny there). The rest of the movie will (gradually, agonizingly) break that smug certainty down, for character and audience alike.

Thirty Six

Bill, the archetypal Passive Protagonist (a far more powerful role than Creative Writing 101 would suggest) resolutely refuses to keep this flirtation going, leaving all the hard work to Gayle. She’s game: “They [doctors] always seem so…knowledgeable,” she coos, all but slipping out of her super-shiny dress.

So, yeah, that’s a groaner for sure; if intended to register as sexy, it would be a failure. But to this admittedly deluded Kubrick fanboy, the line serves (like so much in Eyes Wide Shut) to expose the protagonist’s shortcomings. (Literally “short,” given how pointedly diminutive Tom Cruise looks when Kubrick frames him next to the film’s many tall women.)  Gayle’s implication, obviously, is that doctors know their way around the body and are thereby stellar at sexytimes. But Bill seems to have gone to medical school for the status (“This is what you get for making house calls) and the attendant existential boost (“Once a doctor, always a doctor.”) In other words, he takes what being a doctor gets him: a high-ranking position within the socioeconomic pyramid of EWS and psychic stability in the face of the ever-present Void. But he almost never asserts that buttressed identity, sexually or otherwise, fearing that he will be exposed (like Jack wandering through the Overlook) as small, futile, weak, and like all his patients, a corpse waiting to happen.

Bill, as a character, has more to do with these moral and existential quandaries, the failure (and sometimes outright refusal) of truth, than with being “knowledgeable” in any sense. Note the pronoun in his response to Gayle: “Oh, they are knowledgeable, about all sorts of things.” They, not we. Just as Alice earlier pretended the woman she and Sandor were discussing wasn’t her, Bill distances himself from Gayle’s image (whether it’s sincere or not) of the doctor who knows his way around a vagina. (Maybe he’s trying to keep her expectations low, like a politician before a debate?) “All sorts of things…” trails off, as if even Bill isn’t interested in his patter. Dialogue in EWS isn’t witty or baroque; words are wielded as weapons and shields, alternately deceptive and blunt, unintentionally revealing a character’s inner state, rather than functioning as a deliberate expression by the character.

Where’s Nuala in this? She’s just walking, arm in arm with Bill. As before, she’s unimpressed with his attempts at banter, but when he turns from Gayle, she boldly meets his gaze. He grins in anticipation.

This is as close to intimate connection (what we might call a human moment) as this trio gets, and it’s gone in a moment, easy to miss. Gayle continues to talk, and the three-as-one continue to waltz through the golden Ziegler manor. Rare is the scene in EWS that offers only one focal point of attention; we are offered multiple stimuli of various kinds, and so must choose among them, a decision that will grow in moral stature as the story proceeds.

Watching introduces culpability. To pay attention is to make a moral choice, to say to oneself that this person or scenario is worthy of care and investment. It’s an unconscious contract we enter into as movie-watchers, and Bill is our surrogate on this uncertain journey, no less devastating for its ambiguity.

Thirty Five

Bill looks quite content to just keep (sleep) walking, so Gayle has to keep the seduction going. “You know what’s so nice about doctors?” she asks him, emphasizing the nice and pausing before “…doctors,” at once heightening the obvious come-hither message and rendering it noticeably absurd. She’s too into it, and him, suggesting again that she’s one of many women in Eyes Wide Shut who make men happy for a living. (I don’t mean that purely as a euphemism for prostitutin’; Marion is supported in stability, but unhappily defined, by the whims of men, not to mention Alice herself.) Since Kubrick never confirms that Gayle and Nuala have been paid to satisfy (or distract?) Bill, their position becomes something less sad (and potentially exploitative) then sinister, representatives as they are of the twisting, unfaithful narrative itself.

Bill considers her question for a moment, and then responds. What’s nice about doctors, Doctor Bill? “Usually a lot less than people imagine.”

Ha! Oh, I love that line. It’s a perfectly pitched moment of dry humor in a movie much funnier (and sadder, and scarier) than its reputation would suggest. Bill’s line is disarmingly honest, as if he were being interviewed for a job and had been asked to name his weaknesses. It’s also not in the least flirtatious. (Is Bill really bad at this, or is he not even trying?)

Kubrick, of course, radiated scorn and Olympian contempt on many of his characters, but few earned his ire more than professional men, career men. Dr. Strangelove is the most scathing and memorable example, but see also the generals in Paths of Glory, the landed gentry in Barry Lyndon, and the smirking hotel officials in The Shining. Put simply, these roles spur these men to do terrible things (or to let them happen, which amounts to much the same thing in Kubrick’s moral universe, especially in EWS), only for the director to reveal that their hearts were shriveled and cold anyway. Gruesomely, these are the perfect terrible men for the terrible job(s) in question, and the problem of who to blame for the ensuing chaos and misery–the Individual, or the System?–is left hopelessly ambiguous, never more so than in A Clockwork Orange. There is no doubt, by film’s end, that Alex is rotten to the core, and equally no doubt that his society has arranged itself for psychopaths like him to escape justice and gain power. He is horrible, but his world allows him to be that way. Kubrick spent his career illuminating the structures and processes of control, step by step, never revealing his horrifying, exhilarating conclusions until he’d provided the sturdiest of foundations. (He was a good career man himself, you see.)

What about Eyes Wide Shut? As with so many of Kubrick’s signatures when it comes to his final movie, it’s there, but it’s buried. Doctor Bill’s profession is vital to the film’s narrative, driving him first to his patient Victor Ziegler’s Christmas Ball and then, the following night, out into the streets, using the death of another patient (Lou Nathanson) as an excuse for an existential journey around “New York.” Yet his profession shades, rather than dominates, the set pieces of glittering decay and moral confusion he encounters along the way. Bill’s status influences what he does and where he goes, but unlike previous Kubrick protagonists, it doesn’t direct him in thinking and feeling about what happens to and around him, nor in what he should do about any of it. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if it did? Bill’s life would be so much simpler if he could keep his head down and be a good doctor, as Jack’s would be if he could just be a hotel caretaker, or if Private Joker could be simply a good soldier with no pretensions about “the duality of man.” Of course, those previous Kubrick protagonists eventually, agonizingly, completely gave in, and horribly became their roles (“You are the caretaker, sir. You have always been the caretaker.”) Bill, on the other hand, does exist as an independent individual with enough distance from his profession to gently mock it, but only barely. Bill Harford the person, not just the doctor, is “a lot less than people imagine.”

Thirty Four

Bill Harford is wandering down yet another hallway. This time, he has two ladies on his arm: Gayle and Nuala, on either side. This is where any adult audience would be anticipating the close-ups on Gayle’s neckline, on Nuala’s hips, on Bill’s gleaming, handsome visage. Instead, Kubrick preserves the middle distance that characterizes Eyes Wide Shut‘s signature mix of intimacy (almost curiosity) with firm detachment. We perceive the trio as a unit, arranged as such in a single floating shot, rather than as the traditional amalgam of body parts. It’s a strangely formal titillation, shorn of any real build-up or dramatic tension. The three of them are “staged,” to use Victor’s film-defining formulation, in a manner that spurs wistful contemplation rather than sexy visceral immersion.

Look at Bill, for example. Does he look entertained? Happy? Turned on? No, he just sort of is, drifting down the Corridor of Life (a most tangible metaphor in Kubrick’s movies) wherever it may lead him. EWS is full of sexually aggressive and even predatory men (Victor, Sandor, Milich, Red Cloak) of the sort first in line for protagonist in so many other Kubrick productions. The only real predecessor in the director’s work is Barry Lyndon, in which he cast a notably blank-faced Ryan O’Neal as the titular loser, existing only to reflect, in the emptiness of his social-climbing ambitions, the utter terrifying futility of the status and pretensions of those he meets on the way. Time is the fire, Kubrick reminds with Lyndon‘s chilling epigraph: “It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.” As that movie’s classic zoom-outs demonstrated, time both moves forward and leaves eras behind it trapped, static, only paintings to be zoomed into and out of.

Time does something else in Eyes Wide Shut. It will spill, as it does at the Christmas Ball, languorously into seemingly infinite pools, only to sudden rush like a river and drag the characters with it. It will hover unblinkingly in the present, as it does for every nervous, excited moment of Bill’s brief introduction to Domino, or silently whirl the past into the moment at hand, as it does during Alice’s intense extended monologue on passion forsaken, or do both at once, as it does throughout the orgy at Somerton, merging pre-Renaissance rituals with Venetian masks with faintly Arabic architecture with modern-day conspiracy theorizing with…it goes on like that, we’ll get there.

But this, all of this, isn’t really to set up some grandiose Strangelove/Clockwork Orange theory about How the World Works. That’s in there, of course (this is Kubrick, even at the end), but whispering malevolently in the background, which is how power and conspiracies and staggering deception feel as Individual Man walking past them, glittering women and golden hallways working to distract you, as you catch the big picture out of the corner of your eye.

So Eyes Wide Shut is about Bill in the same sense that The Shining was about Jack; about these small men and the big things pressing down on their brains. But Jack, of course, fought back a little, employing his (previously restrained) gruesome charm and room-swallowing personality to let his supernatural employers know that while he might be plotting to murder his wife and son, he was going to chop them up on his terms, not the Overlook Hotel’s, damn it. (This is what was known as “irony,” before the ’90s got hold of it.)

Bill doesn’t fight back at all, but he registers the impact of it, at a deep subconscious level that eventually reaches his perfect face. That breakdown, and everything in its wake, is the story of Eyes Wide Shut. (Dramatic, eh?)