🎵Night and Day / you are the one🎵
This was Kubrick's dialectic / three-part pattern
This post continues our festive, comprehensive, frankly monumental Eyes Wide Shut Christmas special: read parts 1 and 2 here, or easier still, enter your email below and:
In the first half hour of Eyes Wide Shut, its pairings come in the form of sequences intercut with each other, like Bill and Alice’s Christmas party flirtations, and the montages of them going about their separate lives the day after the party. Following her confession that night, the paired episodes come a day or two apart in story-time, and from half-an-hour to an hour apart in screen-time. Below I’ve arranged the episodes in two columns: point and counterpoint, illicit set-up followed by sobering pay-off, both listed chronologically. I’ve then colour-coded each episode to pair it with its partner:
Most of the first column covers the night before, most of the second the day after, though not all in the daytime—enough, though, to define the pattern as a night-and-day one. In the ‘night’ column Bill is almost always passive, moved either by (in)convenient circumstance or the will of others, like in a dream: security guards, phone calls, door-bell rings, people who are concealed or who catch him concealing himself. In the ‘day’ or ‘waking’ column Bill becomes more active, gumshoeing his way from this informant to that, till the point he turns informant: confessing all to Alice.
The third part of Kubrick’s pattern which resolves night and day is that confession, is Bill’s take-home from his various misadventures. Join us for the next panel of the advent calendar where we’ll start with the first.
I saw this film in the theater, and when we left my wife pronounced it the worst film she had ever seen. I didn’t feel that way but I wasn’t sure just what to make of it. Your three posts feel sane and perceptive to me; it’s not clear yet whether I will go back and rewatch while following along with your color-coded guide. Probably depends on my work schedule. It’s easier for me to dedicate time to films and TV I know I want to write about.
I often find Kubrick’s films lopsided, with virtuosic control over technical elements bumping up against tonal choices that feel sloppy and wrongheaded to me. This has always made me reluctant to accept him as best director ever. But I certainly never get tired of watching his films, even the ones that seem flawed.
I felt that Cruise and Kidman weren’t strong enough actors to anchor the film. But they did seem to be making a game effort.
Oneironautics— that sounds intriguing.