Four: Calling phones
Maiden Marion and the Cruise-Kidman twins
In today’s instalment of our festive series on Eyes Wide Shut, we join Bill Harford at the first stop of his journey to the end of the night and day before he homes in on his wife Alice. Get the whole sweaty, seamy, eye-popping odyssey here or by subscribing below.
When Sandor the Hungarian was chatting up Alice at the Zieglers’ Christmas party, he told her marriage used to be how women “could lose their virginity and be free to do what they wanted with other men... the ones they really wanted.” (“How interesting,” Alice replies to the mini-lecture.) This theory gets inverted by Marion Nathanson, daughter of the patient whose death was announced in a phone call to Bill, right at the birth of his newfound jealous rage towards Alice.
At the Nathansons’ apartment Bill offers Marion trite condolences, her dad lying on his deathbed in the background. Their talk then moves towards the light of her coming marriage, to a man called Carl. Contrary to Sandor, Marion doesn’t view the prospect of marriage as freeing but restricting. For she’s in love with Bill, so she declares, having smothered him with kisses like the Scandi stereotype in a 70s sex comedy. Even more stereotypically, they’re saved by the doorbell, announcing her fiancé. (A neat bit of acting from Tom Cruise when he subtly wipes Marion’s lipstick off his mouth after greeting Carl.)
If Marion’s nuptials are no bar on her unfaithful passion for another man, why would they’ve been for Alice? The next day, Bill works himself up again by imagining his wife fucking the naval officer1 that she fantasised about (or rather he concocts or co-opts her own fantasy of it). Needing to discharge, he phones Marion’s apartment. But it’s Carl, the potential cuckold who answers, as if psychically sensing his rival. Bill hangs up, foiled or saved again. From what?
Notice how Alice and Marion, and Bill and Carl, have a dreamily askew resemblance to one another, right down to the women’s matching fringes: a duo of doubles. If Marion and Carl’s nascent married home is meant to parallel Alice and Bill’s established one, who or what might Marion’s father - in the background of multiple shots - stand for?
Marion has just lost her father, like Bill’s young daughter Helena will one day, definitely through death—but potentially as well through a home broken by adultery. Bill’s phone call to Marion that might’ve hatched their adultery is intercepted by Carl, his double. It’s as though he were heading himself off.
This sets the pattern. Every time Bill chases a missed opportunity from the night before he encounters a block, which can be read as a warning. Warnings of dissolution, corruption, violence—or, as most starkly symbolised by Marion’s father, death.2 For his body is only the first of a pair we’ll see lying dead by the end of the film…
Expanded from the source novel’s plain military officer, as if for the sake of the greater perceived gadaboutness of a sailor.
Kubrick didn’t invent the pattern for this film. A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon have a similar structure where the gains of the first half are mirrored scene-for-scene by their downbeat inversions in the second.