Island of the damned: Kubrick's creepy vision of sex
By David Gates

Not until I'd put some time and distance between me and Stanley Kubrick's supremely silly, supremely scary "Eyes Wide Shut" did I understand I'd been watching gothic grand guignol -- something like "The Shining," say -- and not a realist film about adultery and deception. (In "Eyes Wide Shut" neither the Tom Cruise nor the Nicole Kidman character actually commits adultery; this is the movie analogue to such tempted-to-cheat country songs as "Almost Persuaded" and "On the Other Hand.")

You've got the big old mansion behind the locked gate (from every gothic romance from "Mysteries of Udolfo" to Stephen King). You've got the sinister masked revelers (Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," with a touch of "Fellini's Casanova"). You've got the mysterious, all-powerful enemy, a plot twisted by hidden conspiracy and malign coincidence, and a dark, narrow, powerful view of the world -- and the human heart -- as a place of lurking evil.

In the opening scenes, Kubrick provides Tom and Nicole -- I forget their movie names -- with patently preposterous tempters: for Nicole, a smarmy, silver-haired European out of '30s screwball comedy; for Tom, a brace of bubble-headed models. We know that if such cartoonish seducers are being given a second's consideration, this marriage must have some capital-I Issues. And sure enough. Nicole is the more passionate partner, who escapes sexual temptation because of circumstance, not willpower, while boyish, passive Tom's urges are mainly voyeuristic. He can't stop picturing (in stylish sepia) Nicole in bed with a man she didn't actually go to bed with, and his aim in sneaking into the film's already notorious orgy seems to be simply to watch. Is his subconscious aim to get caught and gang-fucked, as the revelers threaten to do? This would make sense of an otherwise gratuitous scene in which a gang of gay-bashers shoves and insults him. If they only knew, we think at first. Then we think, hmm.

Each partner has it in for the other. Tom only lets himself get picked up by a prostitute -- he backs out at the last minute -- after Nicole confesses (in a soliloquy that seems longer than all of Hamlet's put together) to having hopelessly lusted after a strange man. He doesn't want sex: He wants to even the score, or to go her one better. Nicole has resentments of her own. She once ran an art gallery or something that went belly-up; now she seems to be staying home with her daughter and living on the manifestly big bucks Tom makes as a "doctor." (It's impossible to believe he's anything but a movie actor.) This bit of back-story -- which she drunkenly tells to the Eurosmarm guy -- is apparently supposed to be the borderline-plausible motivation for her being so angry at Tom that she dreams of screwing lots of other men while laughing at him.

But Kubrick doesn't seem to take this motivation any more seriously than we do; he's more a Shakespearian than a Freudian, and what's really up with Nicole might be summed up in the well-known lines from "King Lear":

Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above:
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiend's.

From her tempted-to-cheat soliloquy to her very last word -- now that they're out of trouble they'd better get home ASAP and fuck -- she's exhibit A in Kubrick's indictment of sexuality. (He even gives her a none-too-subtle doppelganger: a hooker who OD's on coke and heroin after an epic gangbang. Nicole is able to stop at mere fantasy and flirtation, pot and champagne.) Tom, the character who gets into all the trouble and through whose eyes we see the action, may have a kink or two. But Nicole's lust drives the story; Tom's dances with temptation, his lies and his bad decisions all happen in reaction to his discovery of her as a being whose sexual passion isn't his to control.

I'll leave it up to anybody with an interest in sexual politics to decide if this is misogyny or some kind of ass-backward feminism, or both or neither. What interests me about the film is its awe and dread in the face of sexuality, and its conflation of sex and deception: the revelers kissing with papier-mache lips, the horrific moment in which Tom discovers the mask he'd lost at the orgy on his marriage pillow. Like the horse's head in "The Godfather," it's heavy-handed but effective: What married person hasn't been that mask on the pillow, from spouses with genuine adulterous secrets to people like those in Philip Larkin's quietly terrifying poem "Talking in Bed," racking their brains for something to say to each other that's "not untrue and not unkind." Nicole is the only character who doesn't go through the whole film wearing either a literal or metaphorical mask -- but, paradoxically, it was her unmasking herself as a profoundly, uncontrollably sexual creature that caused all the trouble.

In "Eyes Wide Shut," sexual desire (as distinct from sex itself, which in the orgy scene doesn't look like much fun) is a force so uncannily fissionable that even in the containment vessel of marriage it's dangerous to handle. And once it gets out, all hell -- literally -- breaks loose. Kubrick's New York is a sexual inferno, from black-tie balls to lap dances. Prostitutes bob up on every corner, a costume-store owner pimps for his daughter, a grieving woman makes a desperate pass at Dr. Tom as her father's corpse lies there on the bed.

And the bottom circle of this hell is a mansion in Glen Cove -- a tip of the Kubrickian hat to both "The Great Gatsby" and "North by Northwest"? -- in which the masked decadents hold their quasi-Satanic orgy. (They spend more time chanting than coupling, perhaps because of the cutting it took to get the American version an R rating.) Is this a Puritan, even Manichean, vision of sexuality? No kidding. Is it crazy? Well, maybe a little selective: Kubrick never gives us one of those long, lyrical sex-is-beautiful scenes with groovy music and artfully concealed genitals, as in "Titanic" or "Shakespeare in Love," to balance out the sin and creepiness. Is it convincing? Yeah, it convinced me. For as long as I was in the theater.

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