Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
"Eyes Wide Shut" provokes literary couple Colin and Kathryn Harrison to spar over marriage, passion, jealousy and the lure of dangerous sex in a vanilla world.
Jul 23, 1999 | Colin: OK, so I saw it, I was hooked, I think it's beautiful to look at -- all those reds and blues -- but I don't understand the hype. Tom Cruise looks like a Boy Scout who burned his mouth on a roasted marshmallow.
Kathryn: The hype is that this is Kubrick's last film. We've been waiting for it for 10 years.
Colin: I know it's Kubrick, but the media has totally oversold the movie, promising that this film cracks something open. I was waiting for that, in part because, after you saw it, you said that you felt like you were in another country. I didn't feel that -- not even close.
Kathryn: This film succeeds where few do; it creates the texture of a dream, a dream that doesn't feel like a movie dream, but a real dreamed dream. The only other movies that come to mind are Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad" and Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast." I think all three are films that when they're over, you feel as if you've woken up. You're disoriented, provoked.
Colin: Didn't happen for me.
Kathryn: But why were you disappointed? What did you want?
Colin: I wanted to be freaked out, like I was after I saw "Blue Velvet" or "Apocalypse Now" or "Last Tango in Paris" or "The Butcher Boy." I wanted to be broken and remade, and although I admired the film, I thought that the terms of its psychological investigation were rather shallow.
Kathryn: But the Tom Cruise character, Dr. William Harford, is broken and remade.
Colin: Yeah, he has his Boy Scout cap knocked off.
Kathryn: Yeah, he does, he's a sexual naif initiated into a destructive and violent sexuality he hasn't perceived before.
Colin: But he never has sex! The closest he gets is a few leers at the two models at the party in the beginning of the movie. What he does find out is -- surprise, surprise -- that his wife has the occasional hots for some other guy. I don't think that's big-time news. Smart men assume that about women, just as all women assume that about men.
Kathryn: So, he's not smart -- he's not sophisticated, he's not even a genuinely sexual being yet. From the start his wife is a more complex, grown-up character than he is -- surprise, surprise.
Colin: Yeah, yeah.
Kathryn: It's her revelation of sexual fantasies that begins his inquiry into adult sexuality. By the end of the movie he's learned that sexual intimacy is filled with risk and danger -- the threat of death. I loved the fact that he never actually has sex, that a series of opportunities unfolds in an absurd and surreal way, and that each time, he's literally saved by a bell -- the alarm of his own consciousness goes off, just like in a dream. I didn't see it as a realistic narrative at all.
Colin: Alice, the Nicole Kidman character, is more complex. I also think Kidman acts circles around Cruise, but that's another issue. Anyway, yes, Harford is learning about adult sexuality, but I don't buy the starting point of his journey. Here he is a big-time Manhattan doctor with a busy practice, with a privileged vantage on the world, its sorrows and tragedies and inequities, its fears and appetites, and he seems wholly ignorant of the fact that his wife's sexuality does not end at the point where his dick begins. He's utterly failed to imagine her and --
Kathryn: Wait, why isn't it possible that his professional imperative to witness nakedness and decay is the very thing that necessitates the denial of that in his own life, his own psyche? He's a bland and emblematic figure -- he's far less interesting than all the characters with whom he interacts but I don't have a problem with that. It makes him more recognizably the passive dreamer, the man who is asleep and undergoing a transformation ... even Tom Cruise's looks, his predictable handsomeness, contributes to this.
Colin: Presumably you married a man who is awake and decayed -- sort of like a corpse who drank too much coffee. Anyway, I agree with what you're saying about Cruise, I just can't get excited about him. I mean, give me Nick Nolte in "Mulholland Falls" any day. You get Nick with Jennifer Connelly, the gravel voice, and the great fedora.
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