Eyes Wide Shut
A Critical Reevaluation

ritical disappointment with Eyes Wide Shut was almost unanimous, and the complaint was always the same: not sexy. The reviewers of the national press sounded like a bunch of schoolkids who'd snuck in to see it and slouched out three hours later feeling frustrated, horny, and ripped off.

Once again Stanley Kubrick flouted genre expectations, and once again, as throughout his career, critics and audiences could only see what wasn't there. Why exactly anyone who had seen his previous films believed the hype and expected his last one to be what Entertainment Weekly breathlessly anticipated as "The Sexiest Movie Ever" is still not clear; the most erotic sex scenes Kubrick ever filmed were the bomber refueling in Dr. Strangelove and the space docking in 2001. He mocks any prurient expectations in the very first shot of this movie: without prelude, Nicole Kidman steps into the frame, her back to the camera, shrugs off her dress and kicks it away, standing matter of-factly bare-assed before us for a moment before the screen goes black and the main title appears. It's as if to say, "You came to see a big-time movie star get naked? Here ya go. Show's over. Now let's get serious."

o okay, no, Eyes Wide Shut is not a sexy film. The story's sexual mores and taboos—jealousy over dreams and fantasies, guilt-ridden visits to prostitutes, a strained discussion of a positive HIV test that echoes the old social terror of syphilis—are all transplanted more or less intact straight out of Arthur Schnitzler's fin-de-siècle Vienna, seeming quaint and naive by the standards of the sordid year 1999.

But Eyes Wide Shut is not about "sex." The real pornography in this film is in its lingering, overlit depiction of the shameless, naked wealth of end-of-the-millennium Manhattan, and of the obscene effect of that wealth on the human soul, and on society. National reviewers' myopic focus on sex and the shallow psychologies of the film's central couple, the Harfords, at the expense of every other element in the film—the trappings of stupendous wealth, the references to fin-de-siècle Europe and other imperial periods, the Christmastime setting, or even the sum spent by Dr. Harford in a single illicit night out—suggests more about the blindness of the elites to their own surroundings than it does about Stanley Kubrick's inadequacies as a pornographer. For those with their eyes open, there are plenty of money shots.

There is a moment in Eyes Wide Shut, as Dr. Bill Harford is lying to his wife over the phone from the apartment of a prostitute, when we see a textbook in the foreground called Introducing Sociology. The book's title serves as a sly, mirthless caption to the scene (like the slogan PEACE IS OUR PROFESSION in Dr. Strangelove), showing us prostitution as the basic and defining transaction of our society. It is also, more importantly, a key to reading the film, suggesting that we ought to interpret it sociologically—not, as most reviewers insisted on doing, psychologically.

"If Kubrick was going to make a movie about sexual obsession," wrote Stuart Klawans of The Nation, "he should have chosen characters with interesting individual psychologies." Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times pointed out that Kubrick "never paid much attention to the psychology of his characters, much less relationships between men and women," and has, in fact, "spent his career ignoring (or avoiding)...the inner lives of people, their private dreams and frustrations." Unable to imagine what other subjects there could be, she, like so many reviewers over the years, shrugged Kubrick off as obsessed with pure sophistication of technique.

These reactions recall the befuddlement of critics who complained that the astronauts in 2001 acted less human than the computer HAL, but could only attribute this (just four years after the performances of Dr. Strangelove) to bad direction. But Kubrick's films are never only about individuals. (Sometimes, as in the case of 2001, they hardly even contain any.) They are always about civilization, about human history. Even The Shining is not just about a family, as Bill Blakemore has shown in his eye-opening article "The Family of Man," but about the massacre of the Native Americans and the recurrent murderousness of Western civilization.

ill and Alice Harford's psyches do seem as naïve and sexually sheltered as those of the Victorians in, say, Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, but to wish that the characters had been more complex or self-aware misses the point. To understand a film by this most thoughtful and painstaking of filmmakers, we should assume that this characterization is deliberate; the Harfords' shallowness and repression is the point. Think of Bill in the back of the cab, his face a sullen mask as he runs the same dirty black-and-white movie of Alice's imagined infidelity over and over in his head—a married man of nine years profoundly shaken by the revelation that his wife was once attracted to another man. (Anyone who doubts that it is the character, rather than the actor, who lacks depth and expressiveness should watch Cruise in Magnolia.) The intensely staged vacuity of the Harfords' inner lives tells us to look elsewhere for the film's real interests.

One place to look is not at the characters but around them, at the places where they live and the things they own. Most of the film's sets, even the New York street scenes, were constructed on sound stages and backlots, just like the Overlook Hotel, which was as central to The Shining as its actors. Precision of visual detail is as integral to the meaning of Eyes Wide Shut as is the
use of famous, gorgeous faces familiar from the covers of supermarket magazines to play the conspicuously attractive high-society couple (like the casting of handsome, bland-faced Ryan O'Neal as the eighteenth-century social climber Remond Barry in Barry Lyndon). Even the street sets (criticized by the uniquely provincial New York press as inaccurate) are expressionistic in intent, with neon signs like "Pink Pussycat" and "EROS" foreshadowing and commenting on the action. In Kubrick's mature work, nothing is incidental; every detail of mise-en-scène should be assumed purposeful and significant.

Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post mentions that the Harfords' apartment "must have cost $7 million," but only to mock Kubrick's apparent disconnection from contemporary America. But the meticulously rendered settings of the film, the luxurious apartments and sumptuous mansions, are meant to raise eyebrows. The Harfords' standard of living raises questions about their wealth and where it comes from. From Bill's sparsely scheduled private practice, or from his "house calls" and the sorts of under-the-table services we see him render at Ziegler's party?

Bill Harford is on call to that class of person who can afford not to wait in emergency rooms or die in hospitals, people like Victor Ziegler. Although Bill condescendingly calls the prostitute Domino's apartment "cozy," his own place looks cramped and cluttered compared to Ziegler's, with its vast ballrooms and stairways reminiscent of the haunted Overlook Hotel, its cascades of glittering lights, its mirrors and gilt, its bedroom-sized bathrooms. And even Ziegler's house seems modest and sensible compared to the opulent Moorish palace of Somerton, where the secret orgy takes place (in Schnitzler's novella it is merely "a one-story villa in a modest Empire style").

To some extent, the fact that no reviewers recognized this as deliberate is forgivable; we've all learned to ignore the fantastic affluence of the sets and costumes in most movies and TV shows, just as black audiences have had, for decades, to filter out the whiteness of most characters in the media. But make no mistake: this is not a film about the "private dreams and frustrations" of what Ziegler calls "ordinary people"; it is, very pointedly, about really rich people, that notorious one percent of the population that owns forty percent of the wealth.

The paintings that cover the Harfords' walls from floor to ceiling (most of them painted by Kubrick's wife Christine), almost without exception depict gardens, flowers, or food, making explicit the function of art in this environment as decor, art for consumption—a commodity. Helena, the Harfords' daughter, helps Alice Christmas-wrap a massive collection of reproductions by Van Gogh (the very icon of an artist who suffered pitiably for his work during his lifetime but whose reproductions on calendars, ties, and coffee mugs now produce quick multimillions for the canny profiteers of the museum industry). The apartment of Bill's patient Lou Nathanson is decorated with even more expensive objets d'art, tastefully placed in spotlit alcoves, and his bedroom is wallpapered with imperial blue and gold fleurs-de-lis (Just like the hallway outside the Harfords' own apartment). And Victor Ziegler has a famous art collection: collections of antique china arrayed in glass cases, a soaring winged statue of Cupid and Psyche in his stairwell, and, reputedly, a collection of Renaissance bronzes upstairs. Like Clare Quilty's trashed mansion in Lolita, these houses are stocked with the plundered treasures of the world.

Sandor Szavost, Alice's would-be seducer at Ziegler's ball, inquires at one point whether she knows Ovid's Art of Love, a satiric guide to the niceties of seduction and intrigue, set among the elite classes of Augustus's imperial Rome, that includes valuable instruction on matters from buying gifts and bribing servants to not trusting your friends and keeping your mouth shut. Szavost, like Ovid, is urbane, witty and amoral, and his drinking deliberately from Alice's glass is a move lifted straight out of Ovid's pick-up manual. The fact that Ovid was an exile from his own center of empire ("Didn't he end up alone, crying his eyes out someplace with a very bad climate?" asks Alice) links him to the expatriate Hungarian Szavost, whose extraordinary skill at the defunct Viennese waltz allows him to guide Alice effortlessly around the ballroom, drunk though she is on champagne. (The presence of so many European expatriates in the film reinforces the association of 1999 America with fin-de-siècle Europe, another corrupt and decadent high culture on the brink of disaster.)

Szavost's invitation to Alice to come upstairs and see Ziegler's collection of bronze sculptures extends the instances of imperially sponsored high art from the Latin poetry of ancient Rome to the plastic arts of the Renaissance to ballroom dance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and into contemporary New York's glittering, art-encrusted facade. America has absorbed and established continuity with all these earlier imperial periods.

Alice reluctantly resists Szavost's effort at seduction in the name of her marriage (though she later assures her husband that she knows he had only wanted to have sex with her). The theme of women being dangerously fucked at the epicenters of empire is meanwhile being established elsewhere. Behind the scenes at Victor's party, in an upstairs bathroom, Bill Harford finds the same thing that Jack Torrance finds in the Overlook's bathroom, and that Private Joker finds at the end of Full Metal Jacket: a woman's body. Banal dance music echoes hollowly from downstairs as we see Mandy sprawled naked in a narcotic stupor. Victor (an imperial name, like Alexander deLarge in A Clockwork Orange) is hurriedly pulling up his pants, his sexual use of the girl having been interrupted by her overdose. After Dr. Bill brings her around, Ziegler secures his compliance in keeping this near-scandal "just between us."

But with reference to a broad sweep of imperial styles, and with eyes open to all of their exploitative associations (the painting on the wall behind Victor is a nude), our contemporary American artist-in-exile, Stanley Kubrick, in his own bitterly parodic Art of Love, tells all. Asked about Alex's fondness for Beethoven, Kubrick answered: "I think this suggests the failure of culture to have any morally refining effect on society. Many top Nazis were cultured and sophisticated men, but it didn't do them, or anyone else, much good." The use of Fidelio, "an opera by Beethoven," as Nick Nightingale points out, as the password to the orgy is not just heavy-handed irony (fidelity) but a reiteration of this critique.

As omnipresent and unnoticed as the art in the film's backgrounds are its Christmas decorations. It's not incidental that the film is set at Christmastime; Schnitzler's book, which the script follows very closely in most other particulars, is not (it takes place "just before the end of carnival period"). Stanley Kubrick seems to have gotten seriously into the Yuletide spirit in this film; Eyes Wide Shut is the Christmas movie of 1999. Hardly an interior in the film (except for the Satanic orgy) is without a gaudily baubled Christmas tree. Almost every set is suffused with the hazy glow of colored lights and tinsel. The film's denouement, the final conversation between the Harfords, takes place in a decidedly upscale department store where their daughter indulges herself "Christmas shopping," identifying items she wants exclusively for herself.

There is, in fact, a chain of allusions to the Judeo-Christian fall-and-redemption myth throughout the film; Alice's dream about being "naked and ashamed," and fucking "in a beautiful garden"; the Harfords' Edenic apartment crammed with plants and paintings of gardens; the picture of an apple with a single vaginal slice cut from it on the wall of Domino's kitchen; the self-sacrificial ritual at the orgy. But, compared to the subtler imagery in the rest of the film, these seem very clumsy and nineteenth-century and decidedly un-Kubrickian. In fact, these Biblical allusions only serve to show us how bankrupt the Christian ethic is in America at the turn of the millenium, how completely it has been coopted and undermined by the culture of commerce. As Ziegler angrily tells Bill in their final confrontation, "That whole play-acted 'take me' phony sacrifice you've been jerking yourself off with had absolutely nothing to do with her [Mandy's] real death!" No—her real death had more to do with the cult of power and secrecy at the heart of wealth. In other words, just business.

In Eyes Wide Shut, as in the real world of the United States circa 1999, Christmas is less a religious observance than a frenzied, culminating orgy of consumerism, the climax of the retail year. MERRY CHRISTMAS banners hang in the backgrounds at places of business along with signs reading NO CHECKS ACCEPTED and THANK YOU FOR YOUR CUSTOM. Rows of Christmas cards are on display at Doctor Bill's office below a not particularly merry sign saying "Payment is expected at the time of treatment unless other arrangements have previously been made." These juxtapositions undercut the supposed significance of the holiday and reveal the real nature of the season, its ostensible warmth and sentimentality belied by the bottom line. Milich, the owner of Rainbow Costumes, even calls holiday greetings after the two men who have just come to "another arrangement" concerning the use of his daughter. The whole movie is brimming over with the spirit of the season.

The Harfords themselves (like most of the film's reviewers) don't really see their surrounding mise en-scène—their wealth, their art, the ubiquitous Christmas glitz. They're preoccupied instead with their own interior lives, the petty lusts and jealousies which they think of as distinct from their exterior world. But again and again Kubrick visually links his characters to their settings, indicting them as part of the rarefied world in which they live and move, through which his relentless Steadicam tracks them like an omniscient presence. At Ziegler's ball, the starburst pattern of lights seen on the walls in the background is echoed in the lace edging of Alice Harford's gown and in the blue stelliform ribbon on Sandor Szavost's lapel. Domino first appears in a black-and-white striped fur coat, a pattern repeated in the zebra skin stool at her dresser and in the coat of a plush tiger on her bed. Like the art in the film, everything here is decor, commodity—everything can be bought.

And everyone. Alice Harford's status is subtly but unmistakably suggested: the wife as prostitute. She is associated with the streetwalker Domino by purple, the color of her sheets and of Domino's dress, and by their dressing-table mirrors. She's also associated with Mandy; we first see them both in bathrooms, they share a taste for numbing intoxicants, and Mandy's last night "being fucked by hundreds of men" is distortedly echoed in Alice's "nightmare." Mandy and Domino are connected, as in dream-associations, by the shared consonants of their names; Alice is similarly connected with Domino's roommate, Sally. These last two women are interchangeable; when Domino disappears, she is replaced by Sally the next day.

Although Alice is giggling in her "nightmare," clearly enjoying her betrayal and humiliation of her husband (just as she burst out laughing at him earlier), once she awakens her laughter turns to tears and she says "I had such a horrible dream." The repression is instantaneous. Her resentment of her husband, the malice that prompts her to tell him the story of the naval officer, may be motivated by her unconscious recognition that she is a kept woman.

We know she is unemployed, her art gallery having gone broke. She tells Sandor Szavost she's "looking for a job," but we don't see her looking; mostly we see her being looked at. Her role as an object is defined by her first on-screen line: "How do I look?" Bill tells her she looks beautiful, as does everyone else; she's also complimented by such admirers of beauty as Victor Ziegler and Sandor Szavost. Ziegler tells her she looks "absolutely stunning and I don't say that to all the women." "Oh, yes, he does," says his wife—a joke that resonates unfunnily when we remember who "all the women" associated with Ziegler are.

During the quotidian-life-of-the-Harfords montage in which her husband examines patients at the office, we only see Alice tending to her toilette: brushing her daughter's hair, regally hooking on a brassiere, applying deodorant in front of the bathroom mirror. Hers is the daytime life of a courtesan (or a movie star), devoted to the maintenance of her beauty. When we last see Alice in the film, in the department store, she is surrounded by shelves full of stuffed tigers identical to the one on Domino's bed, linking her again to the vanished prostitute. (Tiger-and leopard-print pattems are also used in Lolita to connote Charlotte Haze's predatory sexuality.)

Alice is also grooming her daughter Helena (named after the most beautiful woman in history) to become a high-priced thing of beauty like herself. During the Alice's-day-at-home montage, we see Helena alongside her in almost every shot, holding the hairbrush while her mother gathers her hair into a ponytail, brushing her teeth at the mirror while her mom applies deodorant, learning to attend to her appearance. When we overhear Helena doing word problems with her mother, she's learning to work out who has more money than whom.

Like his wife, Bill is defined by his first line: "Honey, have you seen my wallet?" Just as his wife is a possession, he is a buyer. ("Doctor Bill," as Domino calls him, is another of Kubrick's Swiftian puns, like Jack D. Ripper.) He flashes his credentials and hands out fifty-and hundred-dollar bills to charm, bribe, or intimidate cabbies, clerks, and hookers—all members of the vast compliant service economy upon whom the enormous disparities of American wealth are built, the sorts of people who just have to smile and take it if they're being paid.

Bill is nothing if not a conspicuous consumer: including (unconsummated) prostitution, costume rental, and cab fare, his tab for a single night out totals over seven hundred dollars in cash. He does not seem fazed by the expenditure. His asking Domino "Should we talk about money?", his repeated insistence on paying her for services not rendered, his haggling with Milich over the cost of after-hours costume rental—these financial dialogues are too frequent, too conspicuous, and too drawn-out to be included only in the interest of mundane verisimilitude (they do not occur in the novel). Harford even tears a hundred dollar bill in half with a boyish, self-congratulatory grin, giving one half to his cab driver and keeping the other as insurance that the driver will wait for him.

Bill's nocturnal journey into illicit sexuality is, more significantly, a journey into invisible strata of wealth. Money is the subtext of sex from the very first temptation of Bill; the two models who flirtatiously draw him away from his wife at Ziegler's ball invite him, enigmatically, to follow them "where the rainbow ends." It's at that moment that he's called away, saying to them, "To be continued?" After he has gone, the two models exchange a cryptic, conspiratorial look. It's a moment, as Janet Maslin of the New York Times noted, that foreshadows Bill's finding himself at Rainbow Costume Rentals. "To be continued," indeed. We never find out exactly what the two models meant, but every child knows what lies at the end of the rainbow.

The colorful arc of Bill's adventure does end at the pot of gold, the innermost sanctum of the ultra-wealthy where the secret orgy is held. The orgy scenes, in particular, were singled out by reviewers for disappointment, derision, and other disguised griping about critical blueballs. (David Denby, in The New Yorker, called it "The most pompous orgy in the history of film." "More ludicrous than provocative, more voyeuristic than scary," complained Michiko Kakutani. "Whose idea of an orgy is this," groaned Stephen Hunter, "the Catholic Church's?")

But again reviewers mistake Kubrick's artistic choices, which are the opposite of the sensual. When Bill passes through the ornate portal past golden-masked doorman, we should know that we are entering the realm of myth and nightmare. This sequence is the clearest condemnation, in archetypal dream-imagery, of elite society as corrupt, exploitative, and depraved—what they used to call, in a simpler time, evil. The pre-orgy rites are overtly Satanic, a Black Mass complete with a high priest gowned in crimson, droning organ, and backward-masked lyrics. The haunted ambiance recalls that of the film's other big exclusive party, Ziegler's; the opulent surroundings (including more appropriated historical styles, from Moorish to medieval to French imperial, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, tapestries, oil portraits of stern patriarchs), the mannered, leaden dialogue, the camera afloat like the disembodied point-of-view in a dream. A ballroom full of naked, masked couples dancing to "Strangers in the Night" again recalls the Overlook Hotel, whose ghosts also danced and coupled in costume.

The scene makes the metaphor of sexual "objectification" visually literal. The ritual prostitutes, who are themselves objects purchased for sexual use, wear masks that make them identical and interchangeable. Their nude bodies are unnaturally perfect, smooth and immaculate as mannequins, photographed with the cold Kubrickian detachment that desaturates them of any eroticism. The sex we see consists of static tableaus of spectators (some of them digitally generated) posed around mechanic rutting participants. A man on all fours serves as a platform for a fornicating couple, a piece of furniture like the tables at the Korova Milk Bar in A Clockwork Orange. One might remember, with a shudder, the Lugosian-toned Szavost inviting Alice to have casual sex upstairs, among the sculptures.

The Venetian masks worn by the revelers (Venice, center of another mercantile empire) serve a similar symbolic purpose, the transformation of the wearer into a soulless object. They certainly aren't expressive of ecstatic self-annihilation, as some critics have suggested; they're creepy as hell. We see a bird with a scythe-like beak, a cubist face fractured in half, contorted grimaces and leers, a frozen howl, painted tears, blindly gazing eyes. These revelers have "lost themselves" not in erotic abandon but in the same way that the recruits in Full Metal Jacket lose their selves, along with their hair and their names. The utterly still, silent shots of staring masks at Bill's "trial" are images of empty-eyed dehumanization, faces of death. Here, ironically, the guests at Ziegler's party are unmasked for what they really are.

For all his flaunting of money and professional rank, and all his efforts to penetrate the inner circle of the elite, Bill Harford is ultimately put back in his place as a member of the serving class. Recall how he is summoned away from Ziegler's party in the same polite but perfunctory manner as is his friend, the pianist Nick; like Nick, Bill, too, is only hired help, the party physician, called upon to repair (if possible) and cover up (if necessary) human messes like Mandy. When he goes to Lou Nathanson's, he is met at the door by a maid who approaches through a door from the other direction, mirroring his movement. They are both dressed in black with white collars, facing each other in a perfectly symmetrical foyer where every other object is in a matched pair. The shot doubles them, identifying them as equals. Bill is given away when he tries to infiltrate the orgy by telltale distinctions of his class status—he shows up in a taxi (not a limo) and has a costume rental slip in his coat pocket. When Ziegler calls him onto the carpet for his transgression, he chuckles at Bill's firm refusal of a case of 25-year-old Scotch, not just because this extravagance would be a trifle to Ziegler, but because Bill's pretense of integrity is an empty gesture—he is already bought and paid for. Bill may own Alice, but Ziegler owns him.

When Bill persists in making inquiries, he is rebuked and intimidated into confession by his master. "You've been way out of your depth for the last 24 hours," Ziegler tells him, shaking his head in disgust. During the same conversation he says, "Who do you think those people were? Those were not ordinary people there. If I told you their names—I'm not going to tell you their names, but if I did, you might not sleep so well." We can only assume they are politicians and moguls, the sorts of supremely wealthy and powerful men who can buy and sell "ordinary" men like Bill and Nick Nightingale, and fuck or kill women like Mandy and Domino.

Although Ziegler has a credible explanation for everything that's happened—Harford's harassment, Nick Nightingale's beating and coerced escort out of town, Mandy's death—we don't ever really know whether he's telling the truth or lying to cover up Mandy's execution and assuage Bill's unexpectedly activated conscience. Note how Ziegler introduces his explanation: "Suppose I were to tell you . . ." giving Bill an escape, a believable story to buy. Ziegler does seem to have suspiciously privileged access to details of the case: "The door was locked from the inside, the police are satisfied, case closed! [dismissive fart noise]." And his last word on the subject—"Life goes on. It always does. . . until it doesn't. But you know that, don't you, Bill?"—proffered with an avuncular, unpleasantly proprietary rub of the shoulders, is both a reassurance and a threat. In the end, Bill chooses to accept Ziegler's explanations not because there is any convincing evidence to confirm them, but because they are convenient, an excuse to back down from the dangers of further inquiry.

Of course, Bill hasn't actually killed anyone. But he is implicated in the exploitation and deaths of all the women he encounters. (As the sign over the bar at the Sonata Cafe says, "The Customer Is Always Wrong.") Bill didn't give Domino HIV, but he might as well have; she certainly contracted it servicing someone like him. Milich alternates with hilarious aplomb between berating the men he's caught with his daughter—"Will you please to be quiet! Can't you see I am trying to serve a customer?"—and unctuous apologies to Harford, conflating the two exchanges. (After all, Bill isn't paying just for a costume, but for the sexual opportunity he hopes it'll afford him.) And does it really make a difference whether Mandy was ceremonially executed by an evil cabal or only allowed, finally, to overdose after being gangbanged again?

For the darkly humorous literalist in Kubrick ("Gentlemen, you can't fight in here; this is the War Room!", "Wendy, I'm not gonna hurt you... I'm just gonna bash your brains in!"), when Ziegler explains that Mandy wasn't murdered, she just "got her brains fucked out," the contradiction is obvious. Bill learns of her death in a cafe whose walls are covered with antique portraits of women, while Mozart's Requiem plays in the background. The setting and the music make the moment timeless, universal; the requiem is not just for this one dead hooker but for all the anonymous, expendable women who have been destroyed by men of Harford's class throughout the ages.

After Bill's confession to his wife, in the film's upbeat but dissonant denouement, the Harfords (like so many reviewers) are still wrapped up in the psychology of their own sexualities, missing the wider implications of what's onscreen. They've taken their daughter Helena Christmas shopping, but they respond to her wishes only politely, preoccupied as usual with their childish inner selves. Their dialogue, transcribed pretty much verbatim from Traumnovelle, is so allusive and disjointed that it's hard even to understand what they're supposed to be talking about. (If we believe that the mask was placed on Bill's pillow not by Alice but by Ziegler's cabal as a last warning and threat, then they're not just reconciling over Bill's indiscretions; they are agreeing to be accomplices after the fact to a homicide.)

ut, as in so much of Kubrick's work, the dialogue is misdirection; the real story is told visually. Ignored by her parents, poor Helena flits anxiously from one display to another, already an avid consumer, holding up one toy and then another. And every item she fondles associates her with the women who have been exploited by her father's circle: a baby carriage (recalling the stroller seen twice outside Domino's apartment, and placed next to a stuffed tiger just like the one on Domino's bed), an oversized teddy bear (next to a whole rack of those tigers), and a Barbie doll (recalling Milich's daughter) dressed in a diaphanous angel's costume like the one Helena wears at the beginning of the film. Another toy conspicuously displayed is called "The Magic Circle"; the name is an allusion to the ring of ritual prostitutes at the orgy, and the bright red color of the box recalls the carpet on which they genuflected to the cloaked high priest as well as the felt of the pool table over which Bill made his own bargain with the devil. The subplot with Milich and his daughter is clearly echoed here, in another place of business, as the Harfords, too, casually pimp their own little angel out to the world of commerce.

ALICE: And, you know, there is something very important we have to do as soon as possible.
BILL: What's that?
ALICE: Fuck.

As Eyes Wide Shut closes, this final exchange between Bill and Alice suggests that all the dark adventures they've confessed ("whether they were real or only dreams"), and all the crimes in which they are complicit, have occasioned nothing more than another kinky turn-on, no more enlightening than the dalliances at Ziegler's ball that inflamed their lovemaking when they got home. Bill and Alice have learned nothing; for all their incoherent talk about being "awake" now, their eyes are still wide shut. Reconciled, they plan to forget all this unpleasantness soon in the blissful oblivion of orgasm. (Try keeping your eyes open during orgasm.) Maybe, in the end, it is a film about sexual obsession after all; audiences and critics, like the Harfords, remain obsessed with sex to the end, oblivious to what's right before their eyes.

Certainly a subtler psychological interpretation of the film than has been attempted would be possible. But to focus exclusively on the Harfords unexamined inner lives is to remain blind to the profoundly visual filmic world that Kubrick devoted a career's labors to creating. The slice of that world he tried to show us in his last—and, he believed, his best—work, the capital of the American Empire at the end of the millennium, is one in which the wealthy, powerful, and privileged use the rest of us like throwaway products, covering up their crimes with shiny surfaces and murder, ultimately dooming their own children to servitude and whoredom. The feel-good ending intimates, in Kubrick's last word on the subject, that the Harford daughter is—just as they have abandoned themselves to being—fucked.

Reviewed by Tim Kreider
04.09.01

A version of this review essay first appeared in the Spring 2000 issue of Film Quarterly.