Eyes Wide Shut: Unmasking the Dark Side of Society Through Kubrick’s Lens
“Eyes Wide Shut”
1999, Directed by Stanley Kubrick
My father was always a Kubrick fan, and my mother was a very kind spouse who enjoyed watching my dad go gaga over the movies he loved. She was very kind as a parent as well, and allowed us to bond over movies with my dad, even if his choices were somewhat unconventional. But for the sake of pursuit of the meaning of art, mother made many a concession from her usual movie limitations, flexing her hard line to allow us a rare foray into more boundary pushing cinema. This, however, was not one of them! My father, Kubrick aficionado that he was, had convinced her to join him at the movies for the director’s final film; they returned several hours later, my dad quite satisfied with his choice, albeit not as excited as when he’d left, but my mother was scowling, quite aggravated, and demanding a reciprocal rash of movies of “Moms Choice!” Since my dad said it was good but strange, my curiosity was piqued! I asked if I could see it and it was met with a resounding absolutely not. And, like any other teenager, it spurned an even bigger desire to acquire and observe this “verboten media”.
I don’t recall when exactly I watched it, or even with whom I saw it, only just that some friends and I had successfully acquired it at Blockbuster under the much less watchful eye and account of someone else’s negligent parent, haha! We were all extremely pumped to watch this “ultra dark, sexy” and “boundary pushing erotic thriller”. We were all of us young women, fallen so easily under the dark spell of 90s and early 2000s sex obsessed culture, and utterly powerless against its predatory claws, even despite the very best efforts of our liberal and socially conscious feminist parents. We pressed play with baited breath, ready for the tantalizing forbidden lust we’d been promised. What we got was a boring 90 minutes of a dysfunctional marriage that meant nothing to any of us in our naïveté, followed by incredibly unsex some butts and boobs, uncomfortable dream sequences of Nicole Kidman definitely not actually having any form of sexy sex, and disconcerting piano music. The cloaks and masks were cool, and the heady sexual tension had us on the edge of our seats, but it ultimately underdelivered because most of it was over our heads, ultimately leaving us incredibly underwhelmed; none of us wanted to admit that we didn’t get it so we all just said it was super sexy to anyone who asked us the next day at school, and then never mentioned it again, hahaha!
Fast forward to now. I decided on a whim that I’d cue up something different for my Sunday evening wind down. I had been considering for some time to shake up my usual D-movie benders and Campy horror fare, and dip instead into some of the classic movies on the AFA Top 100, and other critically acclaimed libraries of cinema. Since this was Kubrick’s final film, and one of the more off kilter offerings on the lists, I thought I would start there with something familiar, a little dark, and a twinge thrilling. What I got was absolutely nothing like I remembered, and certainly more than I bargained for.
Watching Eyes Wide Shut as an adult is absolutely chilling, vividly eye opening, and hits entirely different these days (especially given the last few years of politics, pandemics, and pop culture revelations). Somehow this decidedly 90s looking movie has become a frightening window into the underbelly of the elite, and has now effectively become timeless and more relevant than ever, and that’s perhaps some of the most frightening of concepts. It’s not remotely an erotic, sex cult thriller as billed (and frankly it’s clear that all of the sex is decidedly unsexy and uncomfortable on purpose) but it is an unnerving look into the upper echelons of patriarchal society and the predators that lurk in the shadows of some of the most powerful organizations in the world. It exposes the predators that tip toe under our noses. It also rips the mask off of those who parade and flaunt it so boldly, that we turn a willfully ignorant eye from their actions, because surely no one would be so foolish, no one so naïve, to be so public in their derelict lifestyle. And yet the Jeffrey Epsteins, Ghislaine Maxwells, Harvey Weinsteins, and Donald Trumps of this world do exactly that.
The film also exposes the fallacies beneath the idealized and quite frankly fetishized image of the western world, with its masculine bread winners and sexy feminine homemakers, charming family homes with white picket fence vibes, and patriarchal nuclear families. It puts white cisgender heteronormativity front and center, and shines a spotlight on the dregs of misogyny and antiquated patriarchal culture. It’s a scathing reminder of the abysmal choices we’ve made as a society, and how we glamorize exploitation and fetishized the worst qualities of human greed. We’ve collectively sat back and allowed evil to flourish, and eagerly participated in the demise of human decency, as we succumbed to the worst fantasies of capitalism, cultivated ruling class worship, created immense disparities of wealth through schemes like “hustle culture” and left a trail of destruction along the way. It forces us to look at what we’ve all willfully diverted our eyes from, as we instead choose to gaze upon our golden calves and worship false celebrity god idols. There’s no avoiding the truth of our ugliness as exposed front and center through Kubrick’s lens.
When it comes to darker sides of storytelling, and specifically with unnerving masterpieces like Eyes Wide Shut, a film which is at once so beautiful, so haunting, and so devastating, it becomes most challenging to discern which is the real truth: whether art imitates life or life imitates art, or “a secret third thing” by way of reciprocal or mutual relationship? I think one of the most frightening things if all, though, is the way the fables and parables of cinema like Eyes Wide Shut have become more than unnerving futures of “what might have been” as seen through a crystal ball, and instead solidified goalposts for society and a terrifying reality filled with modern day predators.
It’s unmistakable the indelible mark that Kubrick has left on media of all kinds, and I can spot more than a few parallels and his influence in the way modern day auteurs and creators tackle similar topics or themes. It’s also fascinating to consider how dark his narratives were, exploring the most frightening elements of humanity and our suffering, and then learning how toxic and troubling his behavior was as part of his “creative process”. So much of an artist really leaks into the work that it becomes an immortal extension of their being. Long after a creator is gone from this world, their influence still has such a chokehold on the viewer. How beautiful, uncomfortable, and strange a quality that is about art.
I don’t know about you, but I will never be able to unsee the hideous, dark concepts of society that Kubrick’s creation has so violently unmasked. Most disturbing of all though, I’m not sure I’m all that shocked or upset by any of it, because I suppose, in a way, we are all complicit, living so uncomfortably “comfortable” with willfully moving through the world with our eyes wide shut for far too long.
