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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Mary Gaitskill, Greil Marcus, David Gates, Lisa Zeidner and A.M. Homes weigh in on "Eyes Wide Shut."
Jul 23, 1999 | Kubrick: A little kid lost in the sexual darkness
By Mary Gaitskill
Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" is built on the idea that sex is a dark, chaotic, destructive force. This is a poor foundation, though not because the idea is wrong exactly; sex can be all of the above. But sex is too primary, too deep and too big for the idea; what makes it most destructive and violent is part of what makes it creative and intensely loving. How these opposed qualities interact in each of us is complicated and tender and strange -- it goes all the way down to the bottom of us, the part we can't see into. It's easy to be scared of what you can't see, but it's a little kid who thinks that because he's afraid of the dark, the dark is therefore evil.
"Eyes Wide Shut" has one strong early scene: A wife tells her husband of a moment some years past when a handsome young man simply glanced at her, and she was so inflamed that she would've thrown away her marriage for one night with him had the opportunity been there. That a complete stranger could arouse such a forceful primary response in her is scary for the characters and poignant for the viewer, poignant because it depicts how the underlayer of her unconscious -- what we can't see -- is at odds with the rational top layer of her life, creating an incongruity that might be funny or awful or both. At that point the movie is involving; we recognize the dilemma and want to see how it will play out.
But it doesn't. The husband, a doctor, gets an emergency call, leaves their apartment and is suddenly plunged into a (yawn) dark sexual underworld. It's a yawn because, unlike the first scene, it is not specific to a person in a particular moment; it seems a concept-driven overlay which makes the characters into stick figures. ("Concept" may be too cerebral a word. The sensibility of the film feels more obsessive than intellectual -- though it seems an old obsession gone stiff and dry.)
The events that follow -- a married patient throws herself at the doctor; a young girl prances with transvestites, after which her perverted dad tries to sell her to the doctor who has just witnessed a staid, funereal orgy -- don't have anything to do with what his wife has said to him, but they're presented as if they're all part of the same big ball o' hairy horror. It's the vision of a kid in the dark, sex as bogeyman: The emotional landscape is undifferentiated, populated more by leaden archetypes than individual personalities.
And it's no fun at all -- there is no sense of sex the ridiculous, the slippery curve-ball that turns heads of states into prevaricating buffoons. Kubrick's thematically similar "Clockwork Orange" was in its own way both sexy and goofy -- you could feel its clown-nosed hero's vicious pleasure in rape and battery, his mechanical appetite for cruelty. That film acknowledged cruelty's seductive force, but it also sensationalized it, drawing a superficial equation between vitality and violence. Maybe Kubrick was attempting to go deeper here -- and maybe he foolishly mistook an evocation of conventional morality for depth.
"Eyes Wide Shut" looks especially bad in contrast with "Summer of Sam," the new Spike Lee film, which is also about the fragility of monogamy and the destructive force of sexual desire. Lee's film is juicy, violent and sexy but also sensitive in the way he treats his characters' confusion and vulnerability. His male lead, the chronically unfaithful Vinnie, is a boy on fire, so hot he doesn't know what to with himself. He can't help fucking every girl in sight, not because he's driven by a dark, hellish force, but because his sexuality, while powerful, is undeveloped and muddled. We sense that sex is his only way of contacting the most dignified and truthful potential in himself -- his mojo, as Austin Powers would have it -- but that the contact never happens because his sexuality is also tied up with contempt and crude expressions of power, and he cannot put the higher and lower qualities together.
In longing for his own dignity and morality, he has displaced them onto his idealized wife, who must then become asexual in his eyes. In this film, sex is a complicated fireball of beauty and ugliness, life and death, and Lee isn't scared of the dark. "Summer of Sam" was not aggressively marketed as a sexy movie, but a male friend of mine told me he got an erection twice which watching it. He didn't even come close during "Eyes Wide Shut."
