Eight: Toffs cosplaying
The Blue Ball
In our previous post on Eyes Wide Shut, we flipped marriage to have a look at its original, transactional underside; in today’s post we finally get to the film’s dark, turgid heart—as promised. And when promises are made on this Substack, there’s no going back.
Marriage lurks even at an orgy—the masked ball that Bill (Tom Cruise) trespasses on for the film’s centrepiece. He does so using the password, ‘Fidelio’, which according to a facetious Nick is just the name of a Beethoven opera.1 Of course it also means ‘faithful’ and is twinned with infidelity.
Drawn by Nick’s backwards Sanskrit music, Bill enters a room with the tracery of an orientalist harem but the apse-like space of a church. There a man in red priestly garb officiates a ceremony2: he swirls a smoky censer around a circle of knelt nude women in masks; then, at the thump of his staff, they pair off with a lucky guest each—from ‘I do’ to ‘I do you.’
Here, at the lowest circle of sex, people have become abstract. When the knelt women passed a kiss around their circle, they did so not from face-to-face and neither from mask-to-mask but with a theatrical gap left in between. As the orgy heats up, a man and woman top-and-tail each other but with masks on, less sixty-nine than sixty-mime (or a charade in Ziegler’s later words). There is un-mimed fucking at the ball, but always masked, without faces, without identity: only bodies, for only the body.3
Since the ball is the hinge-point of the film, it merges, in fact doubles, our previous pattern of excitement and comedown. After the staff-thump ceremony a masked nude woman escorts Bill away, not for sex but to warn him of danger.4 This time, though, it’s the comedown that’s interrupted: the woman gets escorted away from Bill by a masked manservant. A little later, a second masked nude woman (at the nod of another man) engages Bill, seemingly for sex. But now they are interrupted by the first woman (as the lights in the background turn blue: always this alternation between the red of romance and passion, the blue of cold showers and balls). She takes Bill aside to warn him away again, only for them to be interrupted in turn. (It’s as though this pillar-to-post motion is meant to stand for his excitement and anxiety winding each other up to manic proportions). This time it’s Bill who’s escorted away, as he was at the Zieglers’ party, by a manservant—on false pretences.
He’s taken back to the apse-like room, where the red-robed sex pope awaits in a ring of the masked crowd. Asked again for the password, Bill repeats ‘fidelio’. The sex pope says that was the password for admittance: what’s the password for the house? Bill doesn’t know—he’s been rumbled. The sex pope orders him to remove his mask, exposing his identity. It’s a variation on the dream where you’re naked while everyone else is clothed; in fact Bill’s then ordered to remove all his clothes, which, considering the tenor of the ball, hints at some further, fucked up sexual humiliation, or worse.
Bill is saved from any such at the last moment by the masked woman who’d tried warning him away: it’s Mandy, as Bill and the audience might now infer, the “overdosed hooker” whose safety he attended to at the Zieglers’ party. She trades places with Bill, who’s sworn to secrecy on pain of “dire consequences” for him and his family.
Following this dark night of the libido, Bill returns to the site of the masked ball in the cold light of day, but the gates are sealed. A security camera turns on him at the same transfixing pace as two masked figures on a balcony did the night before. Moments later a cadaverous servant drives up and hands Bill a note.
It won’t be sufficient, not after he reads in the paper of Mandy’s supposed death-by-overdose. He tricks his way into a morgue to inquire after her body.
In the never-had, now-dead Mandy has he gotten himself a like lost-opportunity fantasy figure to pine over as he thinks Alice does with her naval officer? Was that all the balance needing redressing? Read figuratively, then, his attempts at infidelity would be just another charade; what he really wanted was a guilty sexual fantasy to confess to Alice in turn. If so, the film would’ve ended there, or even at the morgue. But Bill also needs to know what it all meant.
When it comes to this film, though, that question doesn’t have any bottom, in the same way it doesn’t when it comes to what you ‘see’ during sleep with eyes wide shut. That’s why in the next post we have to go to the land of dreams…
In the novel, the male fantasy figure for Albertine (=Alice) is Danish while ‘by coincidence’ the password for the masked ball is ‘Denmark’, making it more explicit that giving in to jealousy over his wife’s crush would be the doctor’s real fall into the sexual underworld.
Fun fact! He’s played by Leon Vitali, Ryan O’Neal’s flouncy stepson in Barry Lyndon.
“Talk about world revolution!” wrote Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. “We’re living in the historic epoch when the sexual act is being definitively transformed into ridiculous motions.”
Funner fact! She’s voiced by Cate Blanchett.