Throught Kubrick's "Eyes"
A Manifesto of BetrayalIn Eyes Wide Shut, the new, and final, film by the late Stanley Kubrick, a marriage is pushed to the brink not by actual adultery but by the more abstract experience of intention and imagination. Superficially, it’s a vivid portrait of conjugal fidelity, putting pedestrian fantasy alongside exotic adventure as a way to examine the moral tension between the two. Beneath the surface lies a manifesto of inevitable betrayal – a dark reminder that our social roles and covenants are convenient (if necessary) fictions under perpetual assault.
The plot in a paragraph, vaguely: Husband and wife, after separate and unconsummated flirtations at a fancy-schmancy party, finger the delicate thread of commitment in their relationship when wife discloses a tug of unbridled (but also unconsummated) lust for a stranger on a vacation trip months earlier. Husband embarks on an odyssey of carnal temptation propelled by sexual jealousy, curiosity and possibly revenge. Wife stays home and looks after the kid. Stung by the consequences of his actions (real and imagined, largely imagined), with a dash of guilt thrown in, husband spills. Emotional and sexual bonds commingle, tangled and out of sorts. Marriage withers, or endures?
Whatever one’s take on the dramatic capacities of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the film is visually and sensually striking. Its deliberate pace may frustrate film goers accustomed to the hectic tempo of most contemporary Hollywood fare, but it rewards the meditative viewer with a rich canvas of light and color and sound and grain. In the end, crucial questions are asked, not answered, leaving us to ponder the reflection of its beacon on our own selves and relationships (which, of course, is what accomplished books and films do).
Film critics have received Eyes with a panoply of reactions that plant it firmly in the territory of mixed reviews. Although that’s perhaps not unexpected for a lengthy, ponderous (and by Hollywood standards, risky) treatment of sexual ethics, I’m intrigued by the enormous variance in critical reactions – not just thumbs in various directions, but truly polarized extremes. To cite a few examples, The New York Times’s Janet Maslin called it a "brilliantly provocative tour de force" – a film that is "languorous yet precise" with "dreamlike intensity." The Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter saw it as "misguided, cold, and idiotic." Time’s Richard Schickel labeled it "Kubrick’s haunting final masterpiece." Slate’s David Edelstein declared it "a somnolent load of wank."
After reading too many reviews (a daft enterprise made far too manageable by the insidious charms of the Internet), I did come to see much of the critical variation as rooted in starkly different assumptions as to what the film is really about. More parochial critics took it largely at face value: a straight-on story of sexual temptation and jealousy in an upscale marriage on the streets of New York. They quarreled with matters of believability and pomposity – too few people on the streets; over-the-top pretension in the Hungarian lothario who makes a play for the Nicole Kidman character in the film’s early scenes; too much staginess in the much-talked-about orgy sequence, and so forth. Salon critic Charles Taylor summed up the film as "anti-erotic – nothing more than an art-house version of an army training film."
Admirers of Eyes aren’t necessarily overlooking or dismissing these things; instead, they (we) commit technical and artistic blemishes to perceptual backdrop, against which a forceful narrative of integrity, veracity and ethical steadfastness unfolds. As a narrow tale of sex and marriage in late 20th century upscale urban America, the film is a reasonable diversion (somewhere above "wank," anyway). But the film’s moral context expands well beyond conjugality to most corners of our social and psychological selves. Its power to astonish stems from its wide ambient reach, encompassing – through a parable about marital infidelity – how we navigate truth and self-identity most waking moments – in jobs, families, friendships, competitions, and especially when we’re alone with only conduct and conscience as chaperones.
One might be tempted to take from the film a lesson in subtle, impulsive miscalculation: a cautionary tale of vigilance, admonishing us to avoid the small misstep that brings our world crashing down around us. Decent advice, perhaps, but it glosses over the film’s darker, more penetrating insight about how fragile and perishable our commitments to ourselves and those around us really are. In Eyes Wide Shut Stanley Kubrick seems to be saying that we will cheat, we will betray – our goals, our friends, our ideologies, our professional identities, our children and yes, our lovers and mates. We seduce ourselves with panaceas of virtue and ethical self-determination, trusting in their power to guide us toward the right choice. But choice is beside the point. The crucial issue is not whether to choose fidelity; it’s how to define its boundary – and then live with contentment and humanity on both sides of the line.
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