Merry & Messed Up: “Eyes Wide Shut”

Posted on 15. Dec, 2009 by Jef in Film, Merry & Messed Up

Even Scientologists celebrate the holidays

We’re officially halfway through this Christmas series! Which is great, because I’m sure we’re sick of each other at this point. I won’t hold it against you. The sooner this is over and done with, the sooner you can ignore my Grinchy grumblings, and the sooner I can get back to dressing up as Santa and kissing your mom.

The 6th Day of Christmas: “Eyes Wide Shut”

Stanley Kubrick’s misunderstood swan song was at once both perverted and sanitary. A film about sex featuring barely any of it to speak of, (or at least, with lots of sex but none of it particularly sexy), starring the hottest Hollywood couple in roles where lack of chemistry was the focus, Eyes Wide Shut was very much what Rob Nelson aptly called “a largely joyless film about joylessness.” For our purposes here, though, it should be noted that Eyes Wide Shut was also very much a Christmas movie, albeit with very little Christmas in it.

Holiday decorations glow passively throughout Eyes Wide Shut, and the sexual transgressions and morbid meanderings of its unlikeable main characters are set against an otherwise typical silent night. The story begins at a holiday party, where Tom Cruise as Dr. Bill ventures upstairs with two flirty birds while his wife, Nicole Kidman as Alice, bats her eyes at an old European man downstairs. Kubrick uses this initial wedge between the married couple to set us on a trip down an increasingly frustrating dreamscape that recalls some of our most-beloved holiday flicks.

Angry and jealous because of Bill’s behaviour at the party, Alice — unwisely or maliciously — unleashes her story of a secret lust that could have changed the course of their marriage. The knowledge of Alice’s hunger for other men drives Bill insane, and when he goes out on call later that night he doesn’t return home. Instead, he wanders the winter street, and we’ve seen this lonely world-changing stroll before — it’s Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, grappling with his failures and contemplating suicide, and it’s Ebenezer Scrooge, facing his ghosts and for once regarding his own ugly reflection.

Instead of jolly angels, however, Dr. Bill is helped and haunted by a prostitute, an odd pianist, a costume store clerk and his nymphish daughter. Connecting dots across a Christmas landscape, these ghouls-of-sorts lead Bill to a gothic orgy where he dons a mask and tries to lose himself. Kubrick reaches a level of dreamy fuzziness here that is much like It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol — by the end, it doesn’t matter if anything really happened or not, because the transformation of the character is real. Dr. Bill dips into hedonistic hell and then is forced to out himself for who he truly is, and whether that’s a metaphor or a nightmare or not is missing the point — when a bell rings an angel gets its wings, it’s real enough, and when Bill meets his wife again he’s regardless a man who has seen too much and gone too far.

Kubrick uses Christmas as a mood, not a theme. The cold adds iciness to the characters and their marriage, and the cozy festive lights throb as a reminder of their domestic arrangement. Christmas is no time for this kind of debauchery or psychological torture, but yet, it’s also the perfect setting for it — at least it is for Kubrick, who always dealt in contradictions. In a movie where sex is related to death and marriage is related to aimless lust and a vague sense of dread, it’s fitting that Christmas is not about family or giving but instead about loneliness and selfish desire. And if all that just sounds like a bunch of nonsense, what better way to wrap it up than with Kidman’s infamously straightforward closing line? “Fuck,” she says. A command or a curse, like “bah humbug” but better.