Eyes Wide Shut: Kubrick’s Last Laugh

 

I like to think of Eyes Wide Shut as a very dark comedy, based on fairly dense literature. Stanley Kubrick’s final film. His comedy was so black that he decided to cast a pair of superstars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, when in the late ’70s he had considered comedian Steve Martin for the role that eventually went to Cruise, and had contemplated the film in a Woody Allen style. God only knows what the movie would have turned out like with Martin in the lead.

Many people immediately latch onto the ritual cult scene as something forbidden and of profound meaning. Some even fantasize that Kubrick died under mysterious circumstances for revealing “secrets of the elites.” “The Kubrick film that exposed the dark secrets of the Illuminati.” But come on, Cruise arrives at that supposedly exclusive place for a secret elite in a taxi, after buying a cape and a Venetian mask in a costume shop from a man who asks him for a remedy for his baldness. Can anyone really take this seriously?

At the beginning of the film, Cruise’s character, Dr. Bill Harford, is about to take two models to bed when he is called to treat a girl who has overdosed and is lying naked on a sofa. Later, when Kidman confesses to him that she has sexual fantasies about a sailor, yes, a sailor, while they smoke weed, a confused Cruise decides to wander the streets looking for something resembling a fantasy he can make real and get even with his wife. A woman confesses she is crazy about him in front of her father’s corpse. A rather promiscuous teenager who is with two Asian men in her father’s costume shop seems to make him an indecent proposal. A call from his wife prevents him from sleeping with a prostitute, whom he discovers the next day was HIV positive. A Christmas scene at the end in which Alice suggests resolving everything by just having sex, as simple as that. The best Christmas movie I’ve ever seen.

Kubrick must have had so much fun making this one of his darkest comedies. He used Cruise and Kidman in what many surely thought would be a fairly steamy thriller, and what they actually got was a very black comedy that left Kubrick laughing his head off at the end. So much so that he left them that bomb and exited this world without giving anyone time to reply. Did Kubrick die of a heart attack from laughing so hard? I think so. The fact that Arthur Schnitzler, great friend of Freud, wrote the book, a compendium of erotic fantasies and double standards on which the film is based, must have fueled many people’s fantasies from the start, some out of prurience, others out of snobbery. But Kubrick was seeking total freedom for his final film. A pair of superstars. A dreamlike, almost empty Manhattan recreated in England. A shoot that lasted more than a year, declared the longest in film history. A secret ritual ceremony carried out on one of the Rothschild properties. A very heavy, dense joke from Kubrick. And also the one that Kubrick came to confess he considered his masterpiece.

In the end, Cruise’s walk on the wild side turns out to be a very bad joke full of frustration. Christmas becomes that existential emptiness I usually feel at those times of year. I understand that many felt ripped off after watching the film. I think that was Kubrick’s intention: to create the perfect joke at the expense of an audience drawn by the star couple and by the possible high erotic content of the movie. In part, isn’t that what led many of us to the theater to see Showgirls? In the end the box office was brutal and the joke continued, turning the film into Kubrick’s biggest commercial success, something that didn’t happen with Showgirls. Kubrick’s was a master scam. A genius who had the last laugh.

Kubrick turns Cruise, an action hero, into a sucker who thinks he’s a detective, flashing his medical credentials at everyone. A guy who was looking to fulfill some mind blowing sexual fantasy and who always ends up looking ridiculous. He also takes the opportunity to give us another fearless performance from the enormous and beautiful Kidman. My favorite Kubrick film? No. Not my favorite. But one of them.