Eyes Wide Shut

Why is this movie almost ubiquitously perceived entirely differently than I perceive it?

Eyes Wide Shut seems lucid, tender, clear, a pointe, and if I have any complaint, it's that it's not as complex as it might perhaps be. But I'm not sure I wish it were. I liked it.

It's about men's perception of women. Tom Cruise plays a decent, monogamous man who loves his wife and child, makes a damn good living as a doctor, cares about his patients . . . his beautiful, intelligent wife loves him, but is as the movie begins responding to an aggregate of her husband's distancing of her, distancing by means of seeing her as other, as the charmingly mysterious femme, as the beautiful woman with the characteristics he ascribes to 'women'; Tom doesn't want to, he cannot, it would never occur to him to see her as similar to himself, particularly in terms of sexual desires or relationships or emotions. Thus, he doesn’t see her at all.

The movie is so well directed that at first as is so often true the couple appears to have a marriage of equals, of partners. Their problems seem to be about boredom, jealousy, or possible infidelities . . . but it is made clear quickly and clearly that this is not the case. Nicole wants, perhaps without having fully articulated it to herself, to make it clear, make it undeniable, that she is not other, that the comfortable description of her which Tom so reveres, as nurturing, faithful, etc., by virtue of being a woman, is utterly prejudiced and destructive. The movie is so well directed that the normal behavior of Nicole shows us that she is in fact quite content, not gigglingly so, but in an ordinary way-her frustrations are ordinary . . . she is simply struggling to be honest, in what would be quite an ordinary way for two male friends, and her tone has an edge because she knows she is bucking not just a personal but a cultural prejudice and a misapprehension of dinausoric proportions. The entrenched nature of the problems also suggests their long history, since the time of the dinosaurs. Almost…

The sex scenes in Tom's Walpurgisnacht are like something out of Hieronymous Bosch; their value is in highlighting the infantile quality of Tom's drama with women, as well as the vapidity and animalistic emptiness of fantasies or real excesses indulged in in the context of such a drama. A common drama, characterizing most people. I could also read those scenes as representations of the subterranean nature of sexuality in our society, fraught with darkness, fear and secrecy, and not integrated into consciousness.

I would like to have been able to say that the theme of emancipating women from the dark ages, from being on a pedestal, from being identified as deserving of being treated well because they're women, or of being perceived as sexually tending toward monogamy and the nest more than men, or of being better nurturers in general, was passe. But, apparently, the theme deserves attention.

It is an extremely important theme. I did not think Kubrick painted the world with his tears as ink. I think yearning is conveyed and the possibility of change for the better.