![]() ![]() Alice starts to strip away the glib falsehoods upon which a successful marriage depends. Yet after the day of respectable adult role-playing is over, Alice breaks out the pot and decides, for once, to get honest with her husband.Īnd this is where the trouble begins. ![]() “So when you’re feeling t-ts, it’s nothing more than just your professionalism, is that what you’re saying?”-AliceĪlice’s physicality is mixed in with shots of a mother’s familiar, unsexy home life. Our third conspicuous shot of Alice is surrounded by scenes of Bill going about his day as a doctor, which again, as at the party, involves a beautiful woman whose body he ignores with professionalism. When the daylight life resumes, vignettes of Alice’s and Bill’s domestic life show how allure has been contained and sanitized into something unthreatening. Alice takes off her glasses, suggesting that she’s willfully no longer seeing her husband in focus, so that she can imagine him to be anybody she wants. And now, their personal life is totally invigorated by the specters of the strangers they’re bringing back into the bedroom with them. ![]() Then they go home and get down to business while we hear the lyrics: “They did a bad, bad thing.” What was the bad thing they did? Well, both of them imagined being unfaithful. Their separation starts with a lie.Īlice grabs her opportunity to quickly get as tipsy as possible and indulges a dizzying flirtation with an older man, while Bill enjoys the charms of two young women.īoth seem genuinely tempted by their delicious strangers, but they just about manage to resist, at least for the time being. Yet almost the first thing of substance we’re really told is that Bill is sleepwalking, with his eyes wide shut.īill and Alice attend a Christmas party, but after the obligatory first dance together, they split up and get picked up by new, temporary partners. Their good looks, vast apartment, and interactions with the babysitter signal these two have it all. The film begins with a couple getting ready for a Christmas party. The film asks whether our safe, happy, normal lives require us to, essentially, keep our eyes wide shut: to sleepwalk and dream, wearing a mask that helps us ignore our raging, roaring ocean of feelings, lest they overwhelm us if given the chance. “Don’t you think one of the charms of marriage is that it makes deception a necessity for both parties?”-Sandor Szavost, Eyes Wide Shut It takes Kubrick’s trademark skill for putting human nature under a microscope, and does that very close to home, peering without bias at the lies that underlie any marriage. If you revisit the film, though (and now is a perfect time to do that, for its 20th anniversary) Eyes Wide Shut is powerfully terrifying. Stanley Kubrick’s final film was one of his rare box office successes, but it’s among his more underrated works, and that’s perhaps because on first viewing, it’s a little difficult to put your finger on exactly what it’s saying. It explores the role that fantasies of strangers play in our personal lives, and it suggests that married people are, ultimately, also strangers to each other. The focus of Eyes Wide Shut is the scary connection between the steamy and the anonymous. Yet, to the woman’s husband who’s theoretically the person observing this view, the sight is mundane, and that’s signaled in the quick, casual nature of the shot.Įverything that follows in the story of the woman, Nicole Kidman’s Alice, and her spouse, Tom Cruise’s Bill, elaborates in the ideas embodied in that opening image. To the spying viewer, this is clearly a steamy image. Subscribe to The Take on YouTube | Support The Take on PatreonĮyes Wide Shut: Ending, Themes and Symbols ExplainedĮyes Wide Shut opens on an image that captures what this film is all about. ![]() Eyes Wide Shut poses an interesting question: do we have to wear a mask, to sleepwalk and dream, to keep our “eyes wide shut” in order to live a happy, “normal” life? Here’s our take on how the Stanley Kubrick classic is still hauntingly relevant, 20 years later. ![]()
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