[Editorial] 12 Ghouls of Christmas: Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

A rich husband and wife attend a Christmas party pulsating with innuendo, minor indiscretions, and flirtatious boundary-pushing, but when he becomes privy to his wife’s secret sexual fantasies, his eyes are opened to the world on the other side of that boundary. Consumed by jealousy and haunted by the emasculating knowledge that his wife, you know, sometimes thinks of other men, he begins an odyssey through the damp streets of New York and finds himself in the clutches of a mysterious masked cult.

Bill, the husband played by a convincingly bewildered Tom Cruise, is the Adam to Alice’s (Nicole Kidman’s) Eve. Her admission of sexual fantasy is the apple of Eden, and Lo! They saw they were unclothed. Bill uses this newfound knowledge as permission to pursue being unfaithful to Alice. 

The first time I saw Eyes Wide Shut, I was a virginal teenager obsessed with Stanley Kubrick’s filmography. I’d also heard there was an orgy— a huge selling point for Weird Baby Mae in Conservative Land, Land of Abstinence Only Education, Land of God or Bust, without Him, might as well be bouncing on Satan’s dick. 

I did everything under the guise of educational research, which made my inclination for the erotic macabre a little more palatable to my dad, my classmates, and teachers. When I picked up Eyes Wide Shut for a 5-day video rental, it was for a presentation in my Oral Communications class on conspiracy theories in Kubrick’s films, so when I watched it, it was with a curious but uncritical lens. 

Now, I’m revisiting the film for the first time as an adult. Soon to be 30, much has changed since my first viewing, when my most risqué sexual fantasy involved Hayden Panettiere as Claire Bennett in Heroes, cheerleading uniform and all. My fantasy life has matured; it contains many facets, twisting halls, dripping dungeons one should never speak of, a bit of a thrill and the burn of shame I will only admit to in the late hours of the night when I’m laying with my partner in total darkness. Then, it all comes out and, thankfully, no one in the room is surprised.

Eyes Wide Shut revolves around fantasies; of being taken and freed from the confines of a seemingly perfect but stale marriage, from the idea of what a man or woman is, from the hollowness of privilege. It’s an awakening that actually has very little to do with the secret society at the center of the story, which only serves as a metaphor for repressed sexual exploration, for what lay beneath the shining Yuletide lights in upper class homes.

Most of the critiques and analyses of the film narrow in on the psychosexual content or the rumors surrounding Kubrick’s death shortly after completing it. Some make the argument that Eyes Wide Shut is a Christmas movie, or it isn’t a Christmas movie, back-and-forth like some kind of erotic Die Hard. But what struck me the most about Eyes Wide Shut is its commentary on gender, class, and exploitation. 

The women Bill meets on his sexual pilgrimage are, to him, objects for pleasure. He spends the night seeking someone, anyone, to fill that void for him, to reinstate his masculinity. Things don’t go as planned for Bill. Every beautiful woman he meets is revealed to be more than the sum of her parts; one, a nymph-like 15-year-old sold for sex by her father, another a sex-worker who recently tested positive for HIV, another with a drug habit that ultimately sees Bill identifying her body in the morgue. All of these girls and women, young and pretty but living in an impoverished New York, one where sex isn’t the red apple in the Garden of Eden, but a means to survive. It’s this disconnect between two worlds that is most striking to see onscreen, from Bill and Alice’s lavish Christmas party to the polished ritualistic flesh sacrifice of the exploited by the elite, to the cold city streets these women are plucked from.

As sad as it all is, I couldn’t help but feel this movie was a comedy, the premise of a man so easily sent into a spiral hilarious, his stumbling through the underworld a Divine Comedy. The more I think about it, the more I realize that many of the men I’ve known really are that fragile, and I guess it’s not all that funny anymore.

Merry fucking Christmas.

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