On the second day of Christmas I got from 'Eyes Wide Shut'...
Two deceptions and confessions
This is the second post of my festive series on Eyes Wide Shut, running through December. You can read the previous post here in which we flirted with formalism, Kubrick’s critics, and the paired temptations of Bill and Alice Harford at the Zieglers’ Christmas party. Today we head into the bathroom and bedroom for a peek at the secrets that those places are privy to, pun I suppose intended.
Ziegler, semi-nude - black braces over grey chest-hair - sneaks Dr. Harford into a bathroom to aid another beautiful young woman, sprawled nude and O.D.’d. After Bill’s confirmed the woman, Mandy, is not in mortal danger, Ziegler asks him to keep the close call a secret. Bill does so, even from his wife (for now). The next night Alice squeezes her face in a vanity mirror, sighing, then takes out from behind her reflection a drug stash;1 she then proceeds to roll the most weed-heavy joint this side of the Camberwell Carrot. With her and Bill suitably stoned she quizzes him about his absence at the Zieglers’, wondering whether he wasn’t fucking the fashion models.
Bill denies this and claims he was helping Ziegler who “wasn’t feeling too well.” Seeing as Ziegler could’ve been caught in flagrante with “an overdosed hooker” by his wife or other guests, chances are he was a little out of sorts, so Bill has told Alice a half-truth. But what’s the other half? Moments later he says, “I would never lie to you.” He’s deceived her nonetheless. The film’s first deception, narratively speaking, is Bill’s of Alice.
He deflects from it by asking about the man she’d danced with. She admits Sandor propositioned her, yet her own husband brushes off this encroachment as understandable, considering how beautiful she is. At this ‘compliment’ Alice smarts. Debating whether one-track-minds occur in both men and women, she asserts his female patients fantasise about him. He denies this on the basis that women, to oversimplify it, haven’t evolved as horny as men. This spurs Alice to tell him something she’s kept to herself until now.
What other scene in cinema goes from 0-80 as sharply as this? For its first half Nicole Kidman’s performance was like an improv class had gotten the prompt ‘Play a drunk in a panto’, while Tom Cruise acting stoned looked as though a fly kept getting in his face. But on the hinge of Alice saying “titties!” in a helium-high-voice then having a laughing fit, we pass from cringe to can’t-tear-your-eyes-away.
With a glower and the words, “If you men only knew” Alice begins her confession. Once on holiday in Cape Cod she crushed on a naval officer so hard she was prepared to lose her husband and daughter for a chance to have sex with him.2 She couldn’t sleep at the prospect of seeing him in the hotel dining room the next day. The suspense of her monologue hangs on how she’ll describe her reaction to finding him in fact not there: “I was… relieved.” Temptation felt sincerely, passionately, but it passed. It stayed a fantasy—the first dream of our ‘Dream Story’.
Though Alice’s cucking of Bill was counterfactual - infidelity in the subjunctive mood - it’s enough to make something in him snap. He might’ve bought Gayle’s compliment that doctors are “so knowledgeable” but that’s part of his delusion: he doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know. The film started with him assuring Alice she looks perfect without looking at her and instead at his own reflection; he misplaces his wallet, forgets their babysitter’s name moments after Alice told him it; and his first interaction with Mandy the OD’d model is to tell her so often to “open your eyes” that the words become pointed.
What were Bill’s eyes shut to? That men find his wife desirable? He’d acknowledged as much on the brink of their row (of course his wife would be desired by other men). Then is it that she desired other men? He’s a worldly grown-up, this ought not be a surprise (she desired him after all). Rather, the stunning blow is Alice reasserting, within the bounds and binds of their marriage, her separate inner life, her fantasies, which not only exclude him but are predicated on leaving him and their child. She uses her confession as a blow, to beat him in their domestic row or at least force a stalemate, all via the typical trump card (it’s Christmas, let me mix metaphors and drinks) of an adolescent: ‘You don’t know me!’3
Alice’s ‘deception’, then, while coming narratively after Bill’s, chronologically came before. As far as he’s concerned, she shot first. During her harangue moments earlier she’d asked, “What makes you an exception?” In (re)discovering that his wife has sexual secrets independent of, even in opposition to him, something to which he’d been blinded by his hoary take on gender roles, Bill has discovered he’s not an exception, i.e. suffered a narcissistic injury. And injury seeks revenge.
Before his glare at her seethes into anything worse the phone rings and he’s spirited away on a house call. And so we’re off on what’ll turn out to be a sex odyssey to pay back his wife; she’s called Alice but it’s sensible Bill about to fall into wonderland. When at last he crawls out of his hole he pays back his wife another way: by confessing to her in turn.
The film elides that confession, cutting to the morning-aftermath. We already know what it was about; he’d sobbed to her the night before, “I’ll tell you everything”—i.e. his attempts at infidelity, which in the end stayed fantasy, like hers. But unlike hers, his had risked so much, for himself and others. Tear-stained Alice just found this out; he, though, was reminded of it continually if not systematically. That system forms the structure and moral universe of Eyes Wide Shut. So what is it? Read the next post to find out.
Secreted in a tin of plasters or band-aids, i.e. temporary fixes.
This prefigures the notorious line from Intimacy, Hanif Kureishi’s tell-all novel: “There are some fucks for which a person would have their partner and children drown in a freezing sea.”
Compare this with Carmella confessing a romantic fantasy to Tony at the peak of their row in The Sopranos episode ‘White Caps.’