Ten: Paying the piper
Dirty money
In the previous post of these ‘Twelve Days of an Eyes Wide Shut Christmas’ we learnt how Kubrick used a dream storytelling mode to justify his film’s staginess; reconciled two opposing theories of dreams; and that the film was a dreamlike warning. Today we learn the first thing that this dream was warning Bill (Tom Cruise) and the audience of.
Sex outside the marital heteronorm is in Eyes Wide Shut always some stripe of bodily or spiritual corruption. Even Marion who declares her love for Bill does so in betrayal of her fiancé and comes across more mad than romantic. The way Milich the costumier squeezes his teenage daughter to his side in front of Bill is at once jealously proprietorial and boastful of the quality of the merchandise. And I’m sorry to say the film puts homosexuality in the same murky company. Alongside zombie-like same-sex couples dancing at the masked ball, its sum of LGBT representation comprises the macho frat boys whose homophobia against Bill doth protest gayness too much and the hotel receptionist who teases Bill’s own gay-panic.
Whether these so-called corruptions are paper tigers Bill’s concocted himself to scare himself straight (literally in regards to the homosexuality) or whether they’re legit threats, they render the film a conservative parable for hetero males: adulterous sex is a trapdoor to that old demimonde of faithless women, buggers, incestuous whore-mongering foreigners, venereal disease and occult orgies.
But if it’s conservative it is with a small c. For neither is Eyes Wide Shut a film otherwise on the side of high society, establishment wealth and power—the upper class. That’s because our hero and heroine Bill and Alice are something other than that, something specific, and specifically American.
A homework question Alice reads out for her daughter: “Joe has how much more money than Mike?” For advanced study: the Zieglers have how much more money than the Harfords?
The Harfords live in a roomy Manhattan apartment filled with paintings; they listen to a Shostakovich waltz before going out to a party (recalling another waltz Kubrick used in a film, except this time heralding a descent and not ascent). But their apartment is all on one floor, unlike the lofty townhouse they’re going to the party at. Their invite to it is “what you get,” Bill says, “for making house calls”, i.e. Bill is the Zieglers’ doctor; Alice meanwhile used to be an art-gallery manager—echt middle-class professions both.
The film goes to some lengths to emphasise the middling of their middle-classness. Alice tells Sandor she’s currently out of work—Ilona Ziegler would never have to specify or justify that. The Harfords do have people who work for them - a babysitter, a secretary - but don’t have staff like the Zieglers do. Or even the Nathonsons, with their live-in maid Rosa. Like Marion Nathonson, Victor Ziegler knows his staff by name whereas Bill forgets his babysitter’s, Roz. These service-class people beneath the professional Harfords have names that merge. At least they’ve kept their identities, unlike the faceless prostitutes serving the rich and powerful at the masked ball.
Indeed what exposes Bill’s identity at the ball are such middle-class tells as him taking an admittedly expensive taxi-ride there rather than arriving by his own limo, and him (not so) prudently keeping the receipt from his costume-hire to make sure he gets the deposit back. As big as he spends in the film he’s never blithe about money - one of his first lines is him asking Alice the whereabouts of his wallet.
The film goes further than firmly placing the Harfords in the middle of the pecking order. It needs to give them another class-shading alongside their relative financial value for the import of its parable to land—something to do with their values. This it accomplishes by contrasting the Harfords, character by character, with a specific social set.
Marion Nathonson is Scandinavian; Sandor the Latin-quoting lothario at the Christmas party is Hungarian; the surname of one of the models there is Windsor (natch); the papa-pimp in his costume shop with its orientalist harem architecture is Russian, his johns Japanese; meanwhile the ball’s sex pope has a plummy English accent. These voluntary libertines (cf. the paid prostitutes) are all Old World. Contrary to the legend that ‘Harford’ is a portmanteau which squishes together the name of everyman Harrison Ford, it might come from Harford county in moneyed Maryland (which, despite its name, is demographically far more Protestant than Catholic). Being defined against all this Old World sensuality, thrown into relief and a tizzy by it, are the Harfords as the comparatively abashable American WASP bourgeoisie.
One reason the Harfords are vulnerable to this sensuality - and the spiritual corruption it brings- is because, while bourgeois, they’re tantalisingly close to upper class wealth. Hence why Gayle and Nuala offer to take Bill to where the rainbow ends: it ends at a pot of gold. When Ziegler thanked Bill for an osteopath he’d recommended, Bill agreed, “He’s the top man in New York,” to which Ziegler replied, “I could tell you that by looking at his bill.” Well-off Bill is also one of the top men in New York, a step away from the heights of wealth and power.1 Or is it only downhill from there?
Having been edged all night - practically gooning in the parlance of our times - his blood is up (and not just that): he’s going to get in to the masked ball no matter the price.
And the price sure piles up. Here’s a summary of Bill’s bills:
$150 for no-sex with Domino
$375 for costume hire and mask replacement
$180 for taxi to masked ball
This doesn’t include his other taxi fares, drinks, or the posh patisserie gift for Domino—plausibly by the end of the film he’s nearing a grand. As Christopher Eccleston says in Shallow Grave: “That’s how much you paid for it, that’s not how much it costs.” And what it costs Bill was hardly worth it; he didn’t get much bang-for-his-buck, what with a night and day of no-shows.
Incurring such costs for so little is a mark of his desperation, his indignity—and worse. The more filthy lucre he spends, the more filthy he risks getting. The mansion of the masked ball might be far grander than the Harfords’ and Nathansons’ apartments, grander even than the lofty townhouse of the Zieglers, but inverse to that height of wealth is a depth: of moral corruption.
And yet the relation between money and morals in the film is not a linear inverse one; it’s more like a Horseshoe Theory of Sexual Vice (with the bourgeoisie safely - for now - ensconced in the iron dip). Granted Bill, ever the bourgeois, thought if he earned and paid enough he could gain entry to where society’s ballers go to ball the sex-worker elite. But it’s not, or not just, money that gets him in there. He needs someone lower down the pecking order.
Bird-named Nick Nightingale and Bill went to the same med school, and both cater to the rich and powerful. But Nick’s position is more obviously servile, being as he is a mere entertainer, somewhere closer to the Zieglers’ bar or security staff. Or, for that matter, to the hired women at the ball; he too has come to the big smoke, absent family-ties, to essentially, as he tells Bill, whore out his talents to “anybody, anywhere.”
Despite Bill starting the film socially and financially closer to the rich powerful degenerate world, this doesn’t make him closer to that world’s degeneration. Nick tells Bill he’s “got another gig tonight” before pretending he didn’t mean to sing canary about the orgy, bird that he is. It’s poorer Nick who is Bill’s gateway drug and not the other way round; Nick the one who, red-underlit, gets Bill into the last circle of sex. In this, he’s Bill’s dark half, his evil twin, the other life Bill could’ve had or might have yet. (Question: when did Old Nick get that now-cliché look of red skin and a pointy box-beard?)
Arguably sex in hetero marriage is a water-carrier for the functional: it’s got a job to do: to reproduce the family. Remove that and sex (says Eyes Wide Shut) always becomes transactional. The sex we see at the masked ball is bought, and not by “just ordinary people” as Ziegler says, but by society’s elite: “If I told you their names I don’t think you’d sleep so well.” Through wearing masks, these elite punters and their high-class escorts remove from the sex they have together any personality or specificity - it’s mass-produced, one-size-fits-all sex - as well as ensure their anonymity. They are the “strangers in the night” sung about in the ballroom where same-sex couples dance like spectres at the Overlook Hotel.
In fact the shot of one couple using a masked servant as a table to fuck on is not out-of-step with the depraved shenanigans in The Shining (who knows, maybe the oldest at the orgy went to a certain other Christmas party back in 1921…) The sinister costumes, the old mansion, its lighting, the hypnotic music would fit right in with a horror film, the masked ball a Black Mass. Outside of Bill’s verbal and written warnings, he’s gotten a simpler one from the ball (or he’s fashioned a simpler defence): that extramarital, adulterous sex is a kind of hell.
Yet not a riotous free-for-all either—less a saturnalia than saturnine. The gloomy tone and solemn pace with which the ball is shot gives it and the ballers the sort of lassitude of those immortal struldbruggs in Gulliver’s Travels: from decadent to decaying.
Which decaying takes us to an obvious next place… The same led to by the threats of violence that moat the ball against trespassers and those who’d vouch for them. Because this orgy is a menacingly exclusive one—to put it in the polysemic words of the script, “These aren’t people you fuck with.” Seeing as they’re not, they eject Bill the class-trespasser from the mansion like Barry Lyndon before him (and by actor Leon Vitali to boot, the same who played Lord Bullingdon, the toff who ejected his social-climbing step-father from his ancestral manor). Still, Bill should count himself:
In a time of salubrious kink festivals run by ethically non-monogamous sex nerds, it’s harder to recall the morbid allure orgies once had. With the masked ball sequence and its aftermath the film shares in that mock-horror fascination of the peasant for the depraved sex lives of the aristocracy (it’s why De Sade’s stories with their rapacious judges, sex-criminal priests and murdered youths sell). Then again, prurience was always the other side of puritanism, tabloid titillation of public moral crusades.
But post-MeToo, post-Jeffrey Epstein and the Catholic Church abuse cover-ups surely we have stronger warrant to read Eyes Wide Shut as exposing what’s really been going on at the highest rungs and the lowest bar of the rich and powerful.
Or might there be a way to bypass any correlates with current affairs as well as historical superstitions about upper-class orgies? To work out how the film is teaching us to read its specific masked ball?
On the one hand you have the note threatening Bill and his family with dire consequences, already addressed to him when he mopes up at the gate; then his stalker on the New York streets; Mandy’s sacrificial or coincidental death; and Bill’s incriminating, missing mask which finds its way back to his pillow. Taken together these make the secretive elite’s reach and influence feel all-powerful, unbrookable, like the malice in a dream.2 On the other hand, Ziegler fobs Bill off the idea that Mandy was truly a human sacrifice and not just a victim of her self-destructive drug habit, that there’d ever been any genuine malice on the elite’s part, in the film’s longest, protest-too-much of a scene.
ZIEGLER: Everything that happened to you there, the threats, the girls… warnings, the last-minute interventions… Suppose I said all of that was staged, that it was a kind of charade, that it was fake.
But Ziegler is being infernally tricksy here. Allaying Bill’s worries, he replenishes them. While debunking his idea anything criminal took place after the ball he makes ominous insinuations about the danger he’s courting from the people there. No wonder Bill in his billiards room looks knocked dizzy from the ambiguity.
The way Kubrick treated dreams as both urgent warnings and convenient defences, as both natural and contrived can be used as a model for this other ambiguity. Was the masked ball an aristo sex-death cult or just silly one-percenter cosplay? Or was it - and more sinisterly - both?
Bill and we will never know which, never know whether it’d all been theatre or threat. Nor whether he deep-down still believes his worst-case scenario or is more than happy to accept Ziegler’s tamer, and less morally obliging, version. It doesn’t matter. Because, either way, adulterous sex’s inherent spiritual corruption, or the staged, fake, charade of the same, is the same clincher for Bill: it sends him back to Alice, crying and confessing, and needing her—only her.
After Bill has lost his mask, he asks Milich the self-reflexive, quasi-leading question, “Can you put it on the bill?”
Further enhancing this sinister omnipresent threat was a goof Kubrick left in, although you can only see it in the film reel version: a crew-man reflected in a mirror in Ziegler’s bathroom, watching everything. The video/DVD release obscured this.