When Shelley Duvall passed away last week, it was difficult to find an obituary that didn’t mention her starring role in The Shining — or the grueling shooting conditions director Stanley Kubrick subjected her to. Twenty-five years after his own demise, Kubrick’s influence on pop culture remains so outsized that his biggest movies are still known by reputation.
The Shining is the scary, traumatizing one. 2001: A Space Odyssey is the unbearably long and tedious sci-fi. Full Metal Jacket is the bootcamp movie. Barry Lyndon is the candlelit movie. And Eyes Wide Shut is the orgy movie. Decades after their release, these movies retain their cultural shorthand, even as many of their contemporaries fade into obscurity.
But much like how Duvall’s relationship with Kubrick was far more complicated than a couple lines in an obituary can communicate, all of these movies reveal much more than their notoriety suggests if you actually sit down and watch them. Maybe it’s obvious to state that a movie is more than its reputation, but while 2001 has its army of dorky defenders and Barry Lyndon has found new life in hip-hop mashups, Eyes Wide Shut remains “the horny one” in popular assessment. A quarter-century later, however, it’s become both a ‘90s time capsule and Kubrick’s most confounding riddle.
Despite its dreamy Christmas setting, Eyes Wide Shut arrived in theaters during the peak of the summer: July 16, 1999. The movie opens on New York couple Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and Alice (Nicole Kidman, then Cruise’s real-life spouse) as they attend a party where they both flirt with other people. The next day, they have a frank talk about their relationship before Alice confesses to fantasizing about another man. Nothing came of her attraction, but the reveal still leaves Harford unsettled.
What follows is something of a surreal sexual comedy. As Harford wanders around New York City, he gets hit on by a mourning woman, harassed by drunken homophobes, and solicited by a prostitute. He’s torn between staying loyal to his wife and being so tortured by her potential infidelity that he’s tempted to commit a real infidelity of his own.
But there’s a reason Eyes Wide Shut is remembered as Kubrick’s orgy movie. Harford meets an old friend at a jazz bar where his piano-playing pal brags about a weird gig that requires him to play blindfolded. After wheedling out details of secret passwords and masked figures, Harford is so intrigued that he plots to crash the shindig. Apparently, the ennui of being married to Nicole Kidman is simply too overwhelming to manage.
Harford discovers a mansion occupied by masquerading men and women who perform an elaborate ceremony before dispersing to enjoy themselves. He then wanders around, witnessing baroque sexual acts while enjoying his peek into a society even more exclusive than his own. But before Harford can get a true taste for himself, he’s unmasked as an outsider and only escapes intact thanks to an intervention from a mysterious woman. New York’s elite may tolerate his presence at Christmas parties, but he’ll forever be shut out of real power.
Contemporary critics fixated on — and criticized — Eyes Wide Shut’s stilted eroticism, and if you go in expecting titillation based on reputation alone you’ll likely be disappointed by its stiffness. Warner Bros. edited around the orgy’s most explicit moments to avoid the commercial deathblow that was an NC-17 rating, and while the interference is distractingly obvious, it’s unlikely you’d get worked up even if it wasn’t present. The orgy isn’t supposed to be arousing; it’s supposed to be weird.
Who are these people? Are they a cult or just horndogs playing dress-up? Are their threats to Harford serious or only meant to scare him off? Why did a stranger risk her life for Bill? Was she really risking anything at all?
Eyes Wide Shut is about the sexual anxieties of marriage, but it’s also about the limits of what you can know about the world and the people you share it with. Bill’s charm, money, and medical license get him everywhere with everyday people, but precisely nowhere in his paranoid search for the truth of what he witnessed. The few answers he does get might all be lies. And as the movie ends, with Bill having resolved precious little of his marital fears, we’re forced to wonder if his relationship — and our relationships — are built on lies too.
Much of this was ignored by critics who fixated on the “banal” and “dull” orgy, but it’s no wonder Eyes Wide Shut was judged on its ability to arouse. As Vanity Fair pointed out in a marketing post-mortem, the advertising focused on Cruise and Kidman necking, and publications like Rolling Stone and Vogue suggested it would be “the summer’s sexiest movie” if not “the sexiest movie ever.” When it turned out that Kubrick had not, in fact, made Cruiseigula, the rest of the movie felt like a plodding letdown.
But a quarter-century removed from the weight of misguided promotions, Eyes Wide Shut is both one of Kubrick’s most intriguing films and one that feels like a major Hollywood turning point. Kubrick passed away before it hit theaters, and as we marched into the 2000s, studios became increasingly loathe to give auteur directors the budgets and creative leeway he enjoyed. The movie was one of the last thrillers Tom Cruise made before he turned his attention to over-the-top action, and it was also one of the last gasps of the erotic thriller before changing tastes — and the ready availability of saucy internet thrills — put the genre on life support.
Single-minded directors can still get their bag, Cruise can still act, and movies like Challengers (another movie about a lot more than the marketing, which practically presented it as softcore pornography, suggested) can still make viewers squirm, but such moments now feel like exceptions to the bland rule. In that sense, Eyes Wide Shut is, above all, a throwback. If you watch it, just know that you’re not sitting down to watch Stanley Kubrick’s orgy movie. You’re settling in for something far stranger.
