On the twelfth day of Christmas 'Eyes Wide Shut' gave to me
Sex as the prize/price of fidelity
This is the final post in what has been an Artless Christmas Special on Eyes Wide Shut. Start the series here, and read the rest here or by subscribing below. Now that I’m done I’m off to roam Manhattan in a jealous funk.
The foreground pattern of Eyes Wide Shut consists of Bill’s night-time botched opportunities for sex outside of marriage, his pursuit the next day of the same, and the risks he believes or wants to believe he’s taking by doing so. In the background but just as pervasive, and hence presumably up to something as well, is another, if homelier motif.
In the first scene of the film, the Harfords’ daughter Helena asks whether she can stay up to watch The Nutcracker on TV, a ballet set on a certain eve below a certain tree. Later she watches on TV Bugs Bunny reading ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’. Then in the final scene of the film she roves a toyshop where we can hear a muzak version of Jingle Bells.
On the off-chance we miss these pop-culture mediated signs of the holiday season there’s a more familiar and much more eye-catching kind:
All but a single, and significant, interior location in the film has a Christmas tree. To ensure we pay them mind, Kubrick made a point of having Bill compliment the prositute Domino’s. But the source novel is set at Mardi Gras, that is in February/March. So it was a conscious decision for Kubrick and screenwriter Frederic Raphael to shift the film’s time-frame from the end of winter to mid-. But for what reason?
Was it to ironically contrast the wholesome trappings of Christmas with the erotic goings-on of the plot, an irreverent tarnishing, like dressing up as a sexy Santa?
If so you’d have expected a more substantive portrayal of traditional Christmas values before they were undercut: the goodwill to all men, comfort eating against the cold dark, Baby Jesus and so on. Like how Dickens set Scrooge’s miserliness and scorn for his fellow man against the do-gooder chuggers at his office and his nephew’s dogged festive cheer. But despite its Christmas trappings, Eyes Wide Shut portrays so little actual festive cheer, even ironically, that there’s no surprise that few regarded it as a Christmas movie till recently.
Perhaps, since Christmas comes in bleak midwinter, when everything is lifeless and cold, the point of setting the story then is to amplify the film’s greater death theme as we read about in the last post. This theory isn’t right either but is useful.
We get a better idea of what Kubrick might’ve been up to when we consider the technique of throwing into sharp relief. Having learnt what’s signified by the extramarital sex in the film’s foreground, we can work out from this ying the shape of the yang: what’s signified by the Christmas in the film’s background.
Because, in modern times, when are the two occasions we display wreaths? Funerals and Christmas. If, as far as the film’s concerned, extramarital sex is deathly then marital sex must be on the side of life. Which would motivate the film’s setting during a festival that comes after the winter solstice, at the turn of the tide, the rallying of light and life—celebrated with trees that are evergreen.
So it makes all the more sense that the break in the film’s pattern of every interior having a tree is at the masked ball (that the ball, in the words of Jez from Peep Show, wasn’t very Christmassy). Not only is it a perversion of a wedding but of a Christmas party, an eviler twin to the glitzy one at the Zieglers’ towards the film’s start.
What does it mean, though, to say the film puts marital sex on the side of ‘life’—isn’t that a bit generic? Specifically, then, (if subtly) the film works into its pattern the theme of the sexual reproduction of human life as husbanded by the institutions of marriage and family.
It all begins at the Zieglers’ Christmas party, when Sandor the Hungarian talks to Alice, perhaps more appropriately than it first seems, about virginity—what he argues marriage was once useful for, for getting out the way. It crops up again when the frat boys yell at her husband, “Merry Christmas, Mary!”—beyond their homophobia, a reference to that other Mary, the Virgin Mother.1
In the normal run of things the loss of female virginity is preceded by another change. A little after his Thoughts on Marriage, Sandor asks Alice, “Do you like the period?” It’s as though he’s asking how she likes being menstrual, being a pregnable woman.
Around the same time, Bill is looking after the overdosed Mandy in Ziegler’s bathroom, her reclining pose mirrored in a painting above (linking us back to Alice, who used to manage an art gallery) both her and the figure in the painting nude but the one in the artwork (i.e. the representative one) hugely pregnant. In Sandor’s question about periods he literally meant the artistic one of the sculptures the Zieglers own and he was trying to get Alice to come see (as a pretext for an adulterous encounter). But that period happens to be the Renaissance. From virginity, menstruation, pregnancy to (re)birth.
Even in the Other Man whom Alice fantasised about committing adultery with there’s a hint of birth. Kubrick deliberately changed his job-title from the source novel’s military officer to a naval, read navel officer. (You might call an umbilical-cutting midwife a ‘navel officer’...)
To really slam on the chords of this theme, the film closes at a toyshop with not just the Harfords’ child but children everywhere. Still unsure? Helena asks her parents whether she can get a pram for her baby doll; after all, the trees that forest the film signify a baby too, Christmas being among other things somebody’s birthday.2 Its central image is a baby in a makeshift crib next to his postnatal mother (step-dad somewhere farther behind). The Nativity is what makes Christmas a heteronormativity festival.
Hang on: God-the-Father didn’t sire a child by a human woman through the vigour of His Holy Spirit, Zeus-style. He incarnated inside the womb of an immaculately conceived and virginal Mary. (She’s not God-the-Son’s biological mother but His surrogate, and not for God-the-Zygote but God-the-Cell-Meiosis.) So how can Christmas be a heteronormativity festival when it commemorates the anomalous virgin birth of a baby engendered without sin or sex? If anything it’s anti-sex.
But for a Christian the closest you ever get to being without original sin yourself and giving virgin birth is to never have sex before marriage, then get married and never have sex outside of it, and have it primarily for the sake of reinforcing the martial bond, perpetuating the family unit and producing a baby. Sex is all right so long as it’s the least bad sex.
In this light we can see why the filmmakers chose to put Alice out of work. By depicting her as formerly instead of gainfully employed (as someone of her middle-class would likely be) or as always having been a home-maker like her counterpart is in the source novel, that is by characterising her through a transition, the filmmakers spot-lit their choice: Alice’s resumption of a homemaker or housewife role. No, they weren’t anticipating the current trad-wife ‘trend’. They were just drawing the lines more clearly of the film’s central opposition: the home and hearth versus the scary world out there of non-marital sex.
The home-hearth theme also stands in opposition to the refrain of death in the film which Bill won’t refrain from sounding with his attempts to stray. In the opening scene his daughter Helena asked for a puppy for Christmas, arguing it could be a guard dog, as if she sensed their hetero wedlocked family unit, the life it harbours and maintains, would soon need protection.
That’s why the nadir of Bill’s misadventures, the masked ball, had to be presented the way it was, with its temple architecture, incense, the priest-like officiant and the pairings-up: a church wedding turned on its head, inverted, perverted. When Bill asked the officiant what would happen to Mandy for taking his place, the next line of dialogue sealed the idea of the ball being a dysphemism for marriage: the officiant told him whatever happens will be binding: “When a promise has been made here, there is no turning back”—the same that’s expected of promises made in marriage vows.
This styling of the ball was another deliberate change on the filmmakers’ part: in the source novel, everyone there is costumed as monks or nuns, the usual cynical profaning of Christianity you get in De Sade (or a Tarts & Vicars party). Kubrick got rid of that and so better underlined the ball’s role in the moral of his film. His masked ball is a mockery of heterosexual marriage, in that it ceremonially joins not one pair but many partners, not for life but one night, to have anonymous sex for pleasure (and power and money) and not for family and kids.
And if that acme of extramarital sex was a perversion of marriage, so are all the other deviations from the heternorm we get in the film. In the dim light of their grim alternatives, they warn the audience that sex is an animal instinct and evolutionary function that’s best managed through marriage, kids— family.
For all it gets billed, then, as an erotic thriller or high-class blue movie, for all its constituency these days is art-house pervs, Eyes Wide Shut is - structurally, formally, forcefully - a pro-family-values film. It’s a parable about the monsters that lurk mere inches off-shore from the marital harbour. A Christmas ghost story wives tell their husbands (or husbands tell themselves): ‘Dishonour our marriage and the Id’ll get ya!’ A moral of the ilk you’d get from the crudest conservative scare-story but cleverly disguised, made palatable by Kubrick’s artfulness. And so when Helena in the toyshop picked a pram for a baby doll - that is, an idealised baby - and her mum Alice told her it was “old-fashioned”, the line can be read not as a censure but affirmation of how august Helena’s choice is. It has pedigree.
One note about that clever disguising of Kubrick’s. Like all the greats, he was sure to loop reversals and counterpoints into his main points. For there’s also a worldly ambivalence to the film’s pro-family theme: Helena’s choice of a pram for her baby doll is old-fashioned; and next she asks for a Barbie doll, a choice which glows darker once you learn of Kubrick’s stipulation for the body-type of the women at the masked orgy: ‘Barbie dolls.’
Is that body-type an ideal or caricature of a sexually mature woman? Is a baby doll an idealised or a caricatured baby? Well why else were these quibbles raised in a toyshop? As in Kubrick’s script for A.I. Artificial Intelligence, with its character Professor Hobby who immaturely toys with the real or artificial lives of others, the toyshop in Eyes Wide Shut might be a sly dig, at what would come to be known as heteronormativity: isn’t it all a bit childish? Co-opted? Cynically mass-produced?
A darker quibble with any pro-family-values theme has to be the costumier Milich, whose family is prostitution in disguise. But with him the film wasn’t making the old rad-fem point - “Where there’s marriage, there is always prostitution” in Angela Carter’s words - but the Freudian point, that marriage is a necessary sublimation, not least of the Milichs of the world. As well as pro-family the film is pro-civilisation. Civilisation as something you have to put on, like a costume, like the Shostakovich waltz at the film’s start: socially constructed things but with a set form. Because what set form is missing from Milich the father and his only child, such that his family can’t in fact be taken as emblematic? The traditional completion of that triad, a mother. Something only completed in their family’s light-side parallel, the Harfords: Bill, Alice and Helena—the very family Bill put at such risk.
By returning him safely to his wife and daughter, the film counters as well the Sandors and Marion Nathonsons of the world. For the Hungarian lothario, marriage was a means to an end, a licence to do what you want with other partners; whereas for lovelorn fiancée Marion it was a loss of the partner she truly wanted. Bill and Alice’s marriage might have grazed the rocks during the film but it didn’t founder on libertine cynicism or on romantic tragedy. As such, it’s still exemplary. Not in the sense of an ideal but a teachable example.
Alice trying to teach Helena maths when helping with her homework, asked, “So, is it going to be a subtraction or addition?” Which of those is sex?
For the film it would seem to be addition, so long as it’s marital sex, leading traditionally as that does to a family. But in fact marital sex is addition and subtraction. Two people are added in matrimony and in doing so subtract all other possible partners out of the equation but in doing so gain family, continuity: they enter the ancient, ongoing flow of life (hereditary life that is, as opposed to just feeding the worms). The alternative - that sex of indefinite additions we’ve seen all night and day in Eyes Wide Shut - gains you nothing but spiritual corruption, physical violence, death: the anti-life.
With this in mind, the film’s ending is a defeat of Victor Ziegler too and all whom and what he stands for: that deleterious, anti-life sex for which he’s been the ambassador. Ziegler who refers to Nick Nightingale’s wife as ‘Mrs Nick’, harking back to the days when women lost names to their husband’s (‘Mr and Mrs Victor Ziegler request your presence at…’). Nick himself is not the man-about-town and gentleman of leisure he might seem but subordinate to Bill. Unlike Bill, he left Mrs Nick and the kids somewhere far behind to go where the money is for his work; in this he’s a platonic-anti-ideal of the Absent Husband and Father which Bill only experimented with being for one night. Yet with such close-call if not dire consequence. But as a result of those close calls, Ziegler, Sandor, Milich - all these older men - are none whom Bill would any longer envy, aspire to be, end up as. He’s home dry.
What’s the prize of his eventual fidelity? What has he rescued from the jaws of marital defeat?
The answer can be found in the film’s famous, horny, monosyllabic last line: Alice telling Bill what they need to do ASAP: “Fuck.” She tells him this while he’s wearing a red jumper. Yeah yeah, we know Coca Cola invented the red look of Santa; nevertheless we can discount ugly Christmas jumper fashions as the reason for his choice in clothes, not least when he and his wife in the scene are surrounded by kids. It’s the red of sexual passion which ran throughout the film restored to its proper, pro-family place. Because why play the field in a rage when you’ve got a spouse at home who’s never looked hotter, has manifestly got a wild side, and has already given you a kid? For that’s what’s really being augured by the film’s last line. To put it in terms of the subtitle to Beethoven’s opera Fidelio (which provided more than a password for the masked ball): ‘The Triumph of Marital Love.’
With that triumph, though, that prize comes a price.
Alice twice refused infidelity. First, she was saved by fate when the naval officer she fancied disappeared, a close call about which she was ultimately relieved. The second time, she chose to turn down the otherwise not-unattractive Sandor. Her refused temptation is active fidelity.
Whereas, while Bill didn’t cheat on Alice - not all the way, discounting the stolen and bought kisses - even his failed infidelity is for the film as bad as the real thing (so conservative is Eyes Wide Shut it’s positively Biblical: if you’ve thought it, you’ve done it.) Which is why he had to get the wages of jealousy, be put through the psychosexual ringer. He didn’t fuck around and found out.
Alongside that price, he and his wife have to pay a subtler, more consistent one. Alice concludes the things that happened in the story matter “whether they were real” - meaning his real-world curtailed encounters - “or a dream” - meaning her sexual fantasy and her actual dream. The counter to this is Bill’s, his warning that: “No dream is ever just a dream.”
This is a warning for the married (though everyone could do with being reminded of it): there’s a difference between your fantasies and desires. To maintain that difference, when you’re married don’t stop having sex. Don’t give in to the conception of your spouse as a stale mate, a fizzled-out spark you’re in a deadlock with, a jealous rival with whom you need to balance the psychosexual ledger. That’s why Alice’s last line, her reminder of what she and Bill have to do next, comes in the imperative mood: it’s an order as well as an offer, the paradox of a necessary privilege. Because what do you get when you’re faithfully married? You get to have to fuck.
Time has so worn this appellation we no longer see the catchy oxymoron of it, as with ‘a married bachelor’.
Kubrick here responded to the Traumnovelle TV-movie adaptation, in which, when Bill’s counterpart Fridolin tries to get back into the mansion of the masked ball, he’s appalled to see a baby pram in the grounds, i.e. appalled to see that their promiscuity is hypocritically mixed up with family values. Kubrick wisely cleaved the family/birth theme from the masked ball to make his own theme land better.