Because it’s very real. If you’re a man and have experience in relationships, I’m sure you’ve been in such emasculating scenarios before. If not, you’re life is absolutely blissful!
KRABBBOOOOOMMMM!!!!!
I certainly have been in similar scenarios, and yes I am a man. However, there is something beyond that, something very existential that is beyond human emotion. I have to believe that this would be a Sartre-approved film.
I wouldn’t call the film cold or heartless.
cold and heartless not as in “no emotion” but as in a strange rigidness that is evident also in 2001.
http://kentroversypapers.blogspot.com/2006/03/eyes-wide-shut-occult-symbolism.html
Looking forward to reading the blog entry. Looks wild.
Just finished the BFI Classics book on EWS by Michael Chion, and though most of it was pretty hair-brained, he brought up some great points about parroting of dialogue (the amount of times people repeat something that has been immediately said prior by another character), and about the deliberateness with which every action and line of dialogue is delivered…there is a flattening of affect across the board in performance, speech, gesture, action, and camera movement and framing that trends towards equalizing and homogenizing the perceived importance of whatever is going on at any given time…whether it be a highly dramatic moment or a highly mundane one.
Anyone else notice that the women in the orgy circle are posed exactly like Barbie dolls, per the daughter’s final request in the toy store? Chion also makes the incredible observation that the naked woman presented by the masked man to Cruise immediately after the orgy circle is portrayed by a different actress from one shot to the next, as proven by a subtle change in her breast size and pubic hair styling…Kubrick of course knew he could get away with such an egregious breach of continuity because the chest and groin are precisely the spots we are culturally trained NOT to look at. More manipulation of taboo. Amazing stuff. This movie is the best. I just took out the most recent translation of TRAUMNOVELLE today from the library and can’t wait to dig into it.
@VVEKSUV ARNA:
>>I can think of no better source than the fact that I have family in the Illuminati, with my cousin’s husband controlling a corporation that is located here in the Buffalo, NY USA area, which had seen sales of $1.3 BILLION in the last fiscal year of 2006, and who are also close associates of the Bush Crime Family, and are also associated with the Rothschild family, both well-known families in the global elite structure.<<
Yes, if I were affiliated with a super-secret organization that would kill me if I revealed their secrets I’d trumpet it on the internet …
I personally feel no other artist has ended their career with a greater film except for maybe Bernard Herrmann with Taxi Driver score.
@ HARRY LONG
WOW ! and here i was fighting everyone out in my film theory class that ILLUMINATI EXIST !
thx.
This film is very under-rated. I think with Kubrick’s death – the film was altered. In the US, we saw only the version with added black shadows which adversely affected the film. I found Tom Cruise to be at the top of his game.
“What is it about Eyes Wide Shut that makes sexuality so eerie and mysterious, but also so cold and heartless? What do you see in this movie? It is one of my favorites, but I truly don’t know why beyond the usual Kubrick-ey way of explaining something. “Put this under your tongue and you’ll see why…” "
This is a strange thread. I would say that the film is very ambiguous, rather existential (as someone mentioned earlier), and surreal, but not “cold and heartless” (those are words I reserve for, say, a Von Trier film).
“However, there is something beyond that, something very existential that is beyond human emotion.”
Perhaps you should see a Bela Tarr film – that’ll really confuse you.
And 2001 rigid? What’s rigid about it?
@luis landivar – the bluray is the unrated version, without the computerised ritual scene & shadows.
Wait Deckard are you sure there actually is much feeling? I mean think back to Barry Lyndon his whole aesthetic with that film was that he forced us to not care about the characters and merely observe the craft. Although here he is both mixing the psychological-thriller with a classic Kubrick driven trademarks.
I think there is, but trying to explain why something is or isn’t “feeling” is futile in its subjectivity, so I’ll say simply that Kubrick is regarded as “Kubrick” (i.e. almost unanimously regarded as one of the, if not the greatest filmmaker of the 20th Century) because of the versatility in his approach to vastly different forms of narrative. As you mentioned, Lyndon is about style, workmanship, craft, but one can’t really criticized it for being “nothing like Paths of Glory” – all his films are very different from each other.
In the case of Eyes Wide Shut, the film is meant to be observatory (we are the audience remember), subjective (as opposed to the singular goal or plot of the protagonist), and “apart”. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t any emotion or feeling in the film, but that we are meant to be removed from it, to be witnesses rather than individuals taking part first-hand in the experience itself. I can see how this can be regarded as “cold, heartless”, but it’s not an empty or angry emotion, but a deeper one that we have to delve into and find for ourselves.
Also, a number of scenes are particularly complex because we observe characters using and manipulating their own core emotions or surface emotional affect to comply with what is socially expected of them in that setting or scenario. Differentiating between an absence of feeling and an uncanny sensation of artificial feeling comes into play and maybe accounts for some passages that viewers initially find emotionless (…“politeness” seems an appropriate term for what comes through in a lot of the interactions).
@VVEK
>>and here i was fighting everyone out in my film theory class that ILLUMINATI EXIST<<
And now that you know we’ll have to kill you.
Zach Wise
What is it about Eyes Wide Shut that makes sexuality so eerie and mysterious, but also so cold and heartless? What do you see in this movie? It is one of my favorites, but I truly don’t know why beyond the usual Kubrick-ey way of explaining something. “Put this under your tongue and you’ll see why…”