Six: Johns a-laying
Eyes Wide Shut and all its unsafe sex
If you’ve not yet opened the first panel on your Kubrickian advent calendar, do that here. For those who’ve already had five mouthfuls of plastic-moulded chocolate, read below for your sixth piece in which Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) can’t even get it when he pays for it.
Following his assault by the frat boys Bill has a chance to, in his eyes, remasculate himself. He’s picked up by a beautiful young woman, who asks whether he’ll “come inside with me,” hohoho. But she picked him for his money, not manliness. In her building lobby hangs an ad for ‘body-oriented psychotherapy’, a good euphemism for the services she offers (and a good subtitle for Eyes Wide Shut).
Her name is ‘Domino’, both a game of chance - like the chance that Bill’s taking by hiring her - and a cloak you wear at a masked ball, the sort he’ll hire in a couple of scenes’ time. He and Domino agree a price then kiss, but before they get further he’s interrupted by a ring-ring, pun intended. This time it’s not somebody else’s fiancé like Carl but his own wife, Alice: phoning to check when he’s back.
Wilted Bill leaves, though insisting on paying for sex he didn’t have (what a guy). In the hope he’ll have it yet he returns the following day to Domino’s, not the pizza place and bearing cake. She’s out, as he hears from her room-mate Sally, who, having heard of his sweetness, lets him in anyway. Like the fashion models before her, Sally flirts hard with Bill, brushing against him in the poky apartment, as the lights on the Christmas tree in the back turn red. She then winds him down and explains Domino’s absence: she’s had a test result saying she’s HIV+. The lights on the Christmas tree turn blue. (Note too Sally’s wavy locks, the same as Marion’s and Alice’s.) After this cold shower reveal, what Sally offers Bill next is no longer sex but coffee—the cliché euphemism put in reverse.
Sex offered at night but foiled before it occurs; then the day after a hazard sign associated with disease or death… In Domino’s case the foiling is a ‘there but for the grace of God’ close call.
This pattern of close calls we ought now infer actually began with the security guard at the Zieglers’ Christmas party, who stole Bill away from the fashion models, Gayle and Nuala. After the men left the frame the women exchanged looks, like Roy Batty and Pris in Blade Runner do after J.F. Sebastian leaves them—as though a sinister plan has failed or is afoot…
Just before the security guard came and did what his job-title says, Gayle told Bill she and Nuala would take him to “where the rainbow ends.” Before he can get there he has to hire something else, at a shop called Rainbow Fashions. Join us inside it, at the nadir of the dolls, for our next post.