Cultures of Fetishism (15 page)

The fetishism strategy pervades every corner of the Harfords’ world. It is expressed not only through the foreground-background pattern of an apoc- alyptic narrative, but also through Kubrick’s depictions of the ways in which the material realities of money and consumerism are substituted for the less tangible, spiritual values of Christmas—charity, forgiveness, and compassion. Almost every setting in the film has a brightly lit Christmas tree. But there is no traditional Christmas music and none of the usual cheery Christmas spirit to be found anywhere in the movie. Everything remotely Christmasy is countered by the desperate consumerism surrounding it.

Moreover, Kubrick makes vividly compelling another principle of the fetishism strategy—the destructive aggression that disguises itself in a dazzle of erotic colors and surfaces. Through the procession of images that Kubrick marches before our eyes, we become witness to a descent into an inventory of perversion; from the relatively innocent-sounding fetishism at the top, to voyeurism and exhibitionism, to sadism and bondage, and finally at the bottom—the necrophilia that characterizes much of the frenzied, orgiastic sexuality exhibited in
Eyes Wide Shut
.

In addition to his unconscious sensitivity to the fetishism strategy, Kubrick seems to have grasped the core of Freud’s theory of the defensive structure of sexual fetishism. The very title of his film,
Eyes Wide Shut,
is the ideal phrase to signify the defensive disavowals that Freud described in “Fetishism.” Eyes that are wide shut allow the person to have it both ways, both seeing what has happened, what is there, but then again, not perceiving or acknowledging the import of what one has seen, or might have seen, plain as day, right before her eyes—
if
the person’s eyes were wide open. Much of the dream life of humans takes place in REM sleep, with eyes wide shut. The dreams and fan- tasies of Alice Harford are counterposed to the cynical consumer fetishism blatantly displayed in the rest of the film.

As in Monroe’s films, women’s bodies are exploited throughout this controversial film. In fact, sixty five seconds of the original film had to be digitally covered over in order to obtain an R rating. However, unlike Miller and Huston, who didn’t realize or care to acknowledge the many ways in which they were taking advantage of Monroe, Kubrick depicts these exploita- tions of women’s bodies in uncompromising detail, as a way of exposing the widespread abuses of power in the social order in which the film takes place. In
Eyes Wide Shut
, the bodies that are emblematic of this social structure belong to women who, like Monroe, have been deprived of the Word, underclass hookers and some classier call-girls, who rent themselves out as embodiments of the exotic sexual fantasies of the ultra-wealthy and the extremely powerful.

The plot unfolds over three days and nights during the pre-Christmas season, in various homes and various streets of New York City and in a suburban man- sion. The film opens with Alice shedding her daytime clothes in preparation for dressing up in her evening gown. After this tantalizing long shot of Kidman’s exquisitely sculpted naked torso, Kubrick shuts off the lights, producing a two-second blackout before clicking the lights back on to show us Dr.William Harford all dressed up in his tuxedo, and almost ready to leave for the annual holiday ball given by his billionaire patient, Victor Ziegler. Bill utters the first words of the movie, “Honey, have you seen my wallet?” Bill’s wallet will play a considerable role in his misadventures over the next three days, as he pays off all those who supply his various needs. There are frequent displays of the large denomination bills that are tucked away in that wallet. The film is as much about dirty money as it is about dirty sex—the sex that money can buy. Even the mommy-child homework scene with Alice and their seven-year-old daughter, Helena, is about money—one of those typical prob- lems of “If Tom has $2.45 and Jimmy has $1.75, how much more money

does Tom have?” When Helena seems baffled, Alice hints that it’s “a take-away problem.”

Soon after they arrive at Ziegler’s ridiculously luxurious four-story mansion on the upper East Side, Alice separates from Bill and wanders through the extravagantly chandaliered ballroom, tossing down glasses of champagne as she moves along.

Eyes Wide Shut
also illustrates the difference between women like Alice, who are blessed with the Word, and the inarticulate women who get taken advantage of for their beauty. Alice, either out of boredom or shyness or both, becomes intoxicated. Moments later, an unctuous, elegantly tuxedoed gentleman, who introduces himself as Sandor Szavost of Hungary, starts up a flirtation by kissing Alice’s hand and asking her if she has ever heard of the Latin poet, Ovid, who wrote about the art of love. Alice, showing her dis- aproval of Szavost’s blunt repartee, but also keen on exhibiting her knowledge of Ovid, his poetry, and his eventual exile answers back, “I heard he ended up crying his eyes out in a place not too pleasant.” While Alice is dancing with her sleazy seducer and chatting coquettishly about this and that, she looks over her shoulder into the crowd and notices Bill arm in arm with two models, one on each side. As she turns away she loses sight of Bill. He and the two models have disappeared.

Unbeknownst to Alice, Bill had been summoned to do a favor for their host, who is in one of the rooms on one of the floors above the ballroom. Stretched out on a chaise lounge in an alcove of Ziegler’s master bedroom is a stunningly beautiful, bare-breasted woman, entirely naked except for a pair of stiletto sandals. She seems to be either dead or comatose. Bill suspects an overdose of drugs. After learning from Ziegler that the woman’s name is Mandy, Bill calls her name several times until she dimly awakens, gazing into his eyes with glazed over, half-opened (wide-shut?) eyes. Ziegler swears Bill to secrecy. All the while Alice is still downstairs wondering where her hus- band has disappeared to.

The next evening, as the Harfords are getting ready for bed, Alice, dressed in a scanty, see-through tank top with matching bikini panties, rolls herself a marijuana joint, takes a few puffs, and is suddenly transformed from the good wife who brings “happiness and calm to the conjugal hearth” into a hysteric who “recriminates with bitterness, gives herself over to scenes, tears and extravagance and makes a show of her passions.” Working herself up to a hys- terical fit worthy of Charcot’s clinic, Alice starts out calmly by cross-examin- ing Bill about the two models. At this point she could be a seer from Ovid, and not quite yet a full-blown hysteric. However, his claim of innocence is unconvincing. Alice, who has been getting increasingly stoned, decides to get revenge on Bill for his seeming fascination with the two models—an attitude in stark contrast to his seeming indifference to her.

In her jealous fury, she voices her first revelation. Slowly and methodically, she reveals the tale of her amorous fantasies about a naval officer she had noticed when they were on vacation in Cape Cod the previous summer. Though Alice had only looked at this very handsome, sexually alluring naval

officer, and never met him, she describes in vivid detail how merely the sight of his face and body had aroused her erotic passions. As Bill stares at her in shocked amazement, Alice goes on to reveal that she would have given up her entire life for one night of love with him. Her
entire
life, her
entire
love, she stresses; not just her marital life with Bill but even her maternal love for Helena. She would have given them both up for the immensity of the sexual arousal and erotic pleasures that could be provided by the naval officer.

It is this revelation of Alice’s fantasy of complete sexual surrender that pro- vokes Bill’s flight away from her into the streets of New York and finally into the eerie, unknown world of sexual orgies in secret places. Before he sets off for the sexual orgy, three women try to seduce him: a patient’s daughter; a kind- hearted prostitute; and the prepubescent daughter of the man who owns the costume shop where Bill rents the tuxedo, cloak-hooded cape, and mask that is required for attending the orgy. Bill hires a yellow-checker taxi—the magical chariot that later that night will carry him back to the Elysian fields—to drive out to the mansion where the orgy is being held. Using the password he had wheedled out of a friend who plays the piano at the orgy, he enters the mansion.

After Bill witnesses the first act of the orgy, where masked “nuns” cloaked in hooded capes disrobe to reveal their naked bodies, he moves on to an outlying room where he views the antics of copulating couples. Before he can take in very much of this apocalyptic scene, a masked servant leads him back to the room where the first act took place. Here Bill learns that his disguise has been discovered. He is interrogated for his “crime.” But, before the “judge” can pronounce his sentence, Bill is rescued by one of the naked women, who begs that she be allowed to “redeem” the intruding stranger. Her entreaty is granted. Bill gains his freedom, gets into his magical chariot, and returns home to Alice, in a mood of reconciliation.

Thus Kubrick’s apocalyptic fantasy begins with a flight away from the disappointing mother, the mother who disrupts the conjugal hearth with revelations of her sexual desires. The fantasy ends with a flight away from the scenes of corruption and back into the arms of the redeeming mother.

In
Eyes Wide Shut
, background and foreground
seem
to be reversed. The traumas seem to be in the background. The redemption theme seems to be in the foreground. But the scenes of corruption are so vivid and compelling that they sometimes assume the foreground. The film begins with a discor- dance between the apocalyptic background and the foreground of domestic tranquillity that characterizes the Harford residence: their minimalist furni- ture, their nineteenth-century European paintings, their delicately lit Christmas tree, Mother and Child wrapping presents (while Daddy is examining patients in his well-run office) their refrigerator door covered with a child’s drawings, their prototypically well-protected, well-fed, well-scrubbed, chubby-cheeked, darling little girl, whose only naughtiness is to stumble over her math homework, or to stay up late to watch “Nutcracker,” or to renew her request for a puppy for Christmas. Kubrick’s film is a commentary on the discordance between the Harford’s tranquil, domestic hearth and the corrupt social order that supports and maintains that illusion.

Eyes Wide Shut
is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s short story “Traumnovelle” (Dream Story), about the married couple Albertine and Fridolin, whose sexual dreams, sexual temptations, sexual imaginings, and actual sexual adven- tures are played out against the background of the Viennese social order of the late 1800s.

A historian once called the Vienna of “Dream Story” a “snake filled Eden,”
34
where “the close proximity of nonchalant wealth and throttling poverty led to the sexual exploitation of impecunious young women.”
35
Dear old Vienna, dear Golden Vienna, the so-called city of tolerance actually spawned hatred, “as a marsh does feverish diseases,” and that festering hatred went on to spawn the holocausts of World War II.
36

Schnitzler himself did not comment on the social injustices of his time. Nor did he predict, or even realize (who could?) the horrors that would emerge from that feverish swamp. He simply depicts some of the sexual temptations and sordidly frightening events that Fridoline encounters when, in a pique of jealous fury, he leaves his protected domestic environment in order to get even with Albertine, after she reveals some fantasies and dreams about her imaginary sexual adventures.

Kubrick’s script is fairly faithful to the plot of Schnitzler’s short story. However, Kubrick brings the traumas of the corrupt and mercenary social order of New York City out of the background and intrudes it into the calm, domestic foreground of his film, portraying the deadened sexual life of Alice and Bill as a mirror of the necrophilic times that surround them. Thus when Kubrick transposes “Dream Story” from nineteenth-century Vienna to the twentieth-century golden mecca of New York City, he highlights the social corruptions that Schnitzler merely hinted at. A viewer of
Eyes Wide Shut
would have to have her eyes wide shut not to perceive the nonchalance of the advantaged class and their utter obliviousness to the humiliations they inflict on those who serve their needs and desires.

A Kubrick aficionado or, for that matter, any other sensitive viewer can’t help wondering what sort of feverish diseases will be spawned by the cultural fetishisms that Kubrick exposes: What fevers of hatred? What genocides? What Strangelove holocausts? What apocalyptic nightmares?

The second half of
Eyes Wide Shut
, is like a repetition of the trauma of the night before, only this time with a resolution. It opens with Bill arriving home safely from his apocalyptic nightmare. Alice is asleep. After she wakes up, she gives her second revelation. She is giggling with her eyes half open (wide shut?). Bill demands to know what she was dreaming. “We were in a deserted city and our clothes were gone. ...I was angry at you. I thought it was your fault. . . . As soon as you were gone, I felt wonderful. I was lying out naked in the sunlight. . . . The naval officer stared at me and just laughed.”

Bill insists that the revelation continue. “He was kissing me and there were people all around us. Everyone was fucking and then I was fucking other men, so many, hundreds and hundreds. And I knew you could see me, kissing, fucking all these men, making fun of you and I laughed in your face. That must be when you woke me up.” Alice’s weird dream sounds all too much

like the orgy Bill has just witnessed. Were they both dreaming together? Or was Alice
really
there participating in his
real
nightmarish adventure? Though Kubrick suggestively raises this question, in the end he wants to stress the difference between what is real and what is fantasy.

The next morning, his sexual jealousy re-ignited by Alice’s second revela- tion, Bill plays hooky from his afternoon office duties in order to return to the apocalyptic settings he had visited the night before. This time, Bill doesn’t rely on taxis. He drives about, from one location to another, in his classy black sedan.