Eleven: Bells a-knelling
Erotica and thanatica
In the penultimate post of this series, we find out what the second warning is Bill Harford(Tom Cruise)’s been getting from the dream that is Stanley Kubrick’s last film. Then again self-abuse was only ever gonna lead to one place and I don’t mean it’ll make you go blind.
If Eyes Wide Shut’s scare-stories about the spiritual corruption of adulterous sex weren’t enough then the film repeatedly, knellingly warns Bill and the audience that such sex leads to, or is equivalent of, something else. As to what that is, let’s take the knells in turn.
The models’ adulterous proposition to married Bill at the Christmas party is interrupted by a security guard, who escorts him to see married Victor Ziegler, who’d been engaged in some adulterous sex act with another model, Mandy: when Bill attends to her she’s OD’d to the point of an NDE. “You can’t keep doing this,” he warns, alluding to what may and perhaps does happen to her later. DING!
Alice, stirred by her suspicions regarding the above, argues with her husband about women, men and sex, and floats the scenario of a hypothetical female patient whose breasts he’s examining for cancer who nonetheless might get excited by the touch of “handsome Doctor Bill.” DONG! Later we hear one of his non-hypothetical patients is called Kaminsky, which should knell another kind bell for Kubrick devotees: it’s the name of one of the astronauts who never makes it to Jupiter in 2001. DING!
After their argument has given Alice licence to confess her own brush with infidelity, and at the very moment Bill is birthing his desire to balance the infidelity books, death comes a-calling, literally. DONG! Bill attends to that death at the Nathonson’s apartment, after which, Marion, the just-bereaved daughter, steals a kiss from him with the corpse of her father still warm in the background. DING!
Leaving Marion with her fiancé to sort funeral arrangements, Bill returns to the dead wintry streets where he’s assaulted by frat boys, the sort of close call violence which, should he have retaliated or had he missed the car he slips back onto, could’ve ended terminally for him. DONG! (In the source novel Bill’s counterpart almost demands satisfaction from the insolent student carouser with a duel.)
The mortal risks of extramarital sex don’t only go one-way. Domino, the prostitute Bill almost slept with, has tested (he finds out the next day) positive for HIV, something more fatal in the 90s than it might be now. DING! Though he himself was saved by luck the film doesn’t excuse him from all responsibility in the baton-pass of transmissible disease. With the auto-suggestive power of a dream, he can be read as the cause of Domino’s medical results, his infidelity’s domino effect. His attempts to cheat on his wife are figuratively death-dealing (and perhaps literally too, as we’ll find out by the end of the film).
While Bill takes a yellow cab to the masked ball, his counterpart in the novel follows a black carriage there that Schnitzler repeatedly likens to a hearse. DONG! The punters at the ball are all clothed (for now) in black cowls. DING! The ball climaxes with Mandy’s offer to take Bill’s place for some unnamed punishment which he and the audience have to consider might be lethal. Especially since he, although let off the hook (for now) thanks to Mandy, still receives an implied death-threat, those “dire consequences” for him and his family. DONG!
To monitor their necessity, a man stalks Bill, or so he worries. Trying to lose his tail, he happens on a newspaper with a spot-on headline that, coming as it does at the end of his curtailed sexual escapades, spells out the risk he’s been taking with them all this time, and in page-filling font: ‘Lucky to be alive!’ DING! Newspaper in hand, he slips his stalker into an open-all-hours café, but death follows him there too, in the form of what’s playing on the radio inside: that classic café-ambience music, Mozart’s Requiem. DONG!
In the newspaper he reads of the death by overdose of Mandy the model; petite-mort at last literalised as the grande kind. DING! When he goes to see her body at the hospital the receptionist spells out, and so emphasises, Mandy’s surname. This is the second time in the film that someone’s spelled out a name (i.e. an emphasis being emphasised): one of the fashion models spelled hers out too: Nuala, an Irish name, like Amanda’s surname is, Curran. So maybe we should pay attention to names: Curran, for example, means hero or dagger—a hero to Bill; a dagger to herself. DONG! Or was she? Debating the true cause of her death with Ziegler, Bill links his voyeurism, her sexuality and death together via the pause Tom Cruise makes in the middle of his line “I saw her body. In the morgue.”
That’s the one lethal risk fulfilled by Bill, the one cost incurred not just symbolically, in fantasy-life, on a dream-level but in cold hard reality: the death of Mandy, whether murder or mishap. Because had he stayed at home, either she wouldn’t have needed to ritually sacrifice her life for him at worst, or at best would’ve experienced a different chain of events that night that might’ve forked her away from her accidental drug death, for now at least. Either way she paid Bill’s price. Why else does he cry so much over her body? Look what he’s done.
Remember Helena Harford’s math homework problem? Alice coaches her daughter towards its answer with words we can apply to the film’s broader ethical question: “So, is it going to be a subtraction or addition?” Which of those is sex?
If it’s extramarital and/or adulterous then the answer for the film seems to be subtraction. That is what Bill has been warned of by all the dream-logic ‘coincidences’ and convenient interruptions, all the pairings of those bosom buddies, Eros and Thanatos: sex outside of procreative marriage is corrupt, transactional, moribund, anti-life. It subtracts life, figuratively and literally. Not just masturbation is the sin of Onan: all sex outside of procreative marriage is wasted seed, abortion-before-the-fact. The fact that any of Bill’s adulterous encounters, had they been consummated, could in biological reality have led to pregnancies and babies makes zero difference, not to the meaning of the film. Taken as part of an artwork and not real life, all the heterodox sex portrayed by the film points tomb-wards instead of womb-wards.
Eyes Wide Shut’s warning to Bill isn’t that infidelity guarantees death (only Mandy died by the end, and, in theory, more from her vice of drugs than sex). Rather that death, spiritual and physical, is either what he rightly learns to fear from infidelity (contra to his morgue-voyeurism he becomes necrophobiac) or it’s his defence for why he returns to his wife; and this fear or defence then back-engineer all his failed consummations, all the un/lucky curtailments. This is a perfect mirror of the way that dreams so often fail to simulate sex richly or lastingly, and instead, as if seeking an in-dream excuse for that failure, and trying to keep the dream going nonetheless and stop you from waking up, interject some threat or disturbance as that failure’s retroactive cause.
But if extramarital, adulterous sex stands for death, then what might its inverse stand for? And why is it therefore so apt the film be set exactly when it is? Find out on the night before the night before Christmas!