Five: Nudge-wink rings

From cockblocked to cocksucker

In this, the fifth part of our festive odyssey through Eyes Wide Shut, we rejoin Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) after he’s disentangled himself from the Maiden Marion only to fall afoul of an Irishman some ‘merry’ men. You can start the odyssey proper here.

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Having left Marion with their honours intact, Bill walks the streets, where a gang of frat boys appears. They’re rampantly heterosexual, one boasting about aggressive sex he had with a woman: “I’ve got scars on the back of my neck!” They turn this aggression on Bill, verbally and physically, asking what team he plays for then shoving him into a car. They explicitly make him feel small, one yelling, “I’ve got dumps that are bigger than you.” On the heels of his curtailed embrace with Marion comes his emasculation.

This pseudo-gay-bashing scene gets paired with a scene the next day when Bill goes to a hotel to try to find his pianist friend Nick (Todd Field), who’s in trouble for sneaking Bill into a masked ball the night before. Bill quizzes the hotel receptionist—played by Alan Cumming with campness set to Kenneth Williams. The receptionist tells Bill a roughed-up Nick was escorted in and out of the hotel by “big guys” (in contrast to smaller-than-a-dump Bill), hands spread on the word ‘big’. Salaciously he tells the story of Nick’s manhandling, eyeing up and preening at his listener all the while.

These scenes are Kubrick’s invention, developed from an Austrian TV-movie adaptation of Traumnovelle in 1969, which itself developed a moment in the source novel. In the novel, an insolent student barges into Bill’s counterpart Fridolin; in the TV-movie the student then gives Fridolin a come-hither look. By the time of Eyes Wide Shut this glancing incident has grown and split into a pair of scenes to cover the physical and carnal threats to Bill of homosexuality.

The physical: the gang of (we can presume) straight men who assaulted Bill in the night-time at the trumped-up charge he was gay. The carnal: the gay man the day after who reads Bill as gay, or at least hopes he is, while titillating him about another man’s assault. Male homosexuality as a reverse sublimation of man-on-man violence: physical tension diffused into sexual tension. Such are the perils of a man leaving the shores of the family hearth and going a-sailing for sex: men will fuck you or fuck you up.

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