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EYES WIDE SHUT Learning to see in the dark. A movie comment by Rico. 
First image: Alice is revealed,
like Botticelli's beautiful Venus, blown ashore from the great unconscious
sea.Born of the foam from the
severed genitals of Father Time or Saturn. Shocking Beauty!Our eyes are opened to a fixed gaze.Alice's clothing falls to the floor, and Venus is revealed
as the curtains part.Unveiled and
revealed, She stands naked about to be re-veiled.Next image: the city at night, or as Freud might put it, "Civilization and its Discontents." ("Dis," another word for Hades, the underworld, hence the contents below the garments).Speed, Time, Money, the busy city, at night, after work, when the images blur and psychopathology prevails. Then comes Dr. Bill . . . well groomed, searching for his wallet, we are presented with the bill, the price for civilization's fame and wealth, he is Alice's counterpart and also the white rabbit.They are late for a very important date, the Grand Christmas Ball.Goodbye to the daughter who asks to watch the Nutcracker.Alice and Bill are moving into the fairytale world as very attractive Princess and Prince.Christmas night, of Christ's pure light, as they enter the sparkling artificial starlight ballroom and meet their hosts Mr. and Mrs. Victor, the big winners, and owners of the castle . . . the King and his Queen. Enter the Joker:We meet Bill's friend from medical school, a failed doctor and piano player, Nick Nightengale.With his bird song he guides us in the night towards the underworld, like Hermes, carrying Psyche into dark realms.Alice having drank several glasses of the transformative spirits, enters Wonderland where she meets Don Juan over a shared glass.They do the foreplay of seductive talk and dance and he offers to take her upstairs to view the art work, but Alice wards off his charm with the magic diamond . . . She is married. Bill is likewise set upon by two lovely nymphs, who also fail to seduce him.Duty saves the doctor.He is whisked away by a call from Victor in distress.The beautiful woman Victor is having sexual relations with has overdosed on drugs (a speed ball).Dr. Bill is able to talk this naked woman named Mandy back into consciousness, from eyes shut to open. In the day world, Alice goes on with her household duties and Dr. Bill continues to examine patients, including beautiful naked women.That evening, however, under the influence of marijuana, (taken from its hiding place in a Band Aid box), Alice is once again pulled into the underworld as fears, feelings, emotions and fantasies begin to emerge..The drug induced "honesty bash" leads down dark corridors, past rooms filled with jealousy, anger and fear into the final confessional where fantasies of passionate love making with a handsome Naval officer are revealed.(A riff streams through of millions of uniform seamen or semen).Dr. Bill goes from the innocence of "I would never lie to you" to his troubled green waters of jealousy and betrayal (but these are just fantasies?).Called away on another house call and into Hades' realm, he visits a woman who's father has just died.She has a huge crush on the good doctor and throws herself at him.Rescued by the arrival of the woman's fiancé, Bill journeys on into the night, driven deeper into quiet frenzy by the fantasies of his wife making love with the other man, and eventually into the nightclub where Nick is playing jazz piano. A mysterious phone call, and the musician gives Dr. Bill clues to a weird party where Nick plays the organ music . . . yes, blindfolded.Bill learns he must have a tuxedo, dark cape and mask to enter. The password is Fidelio (fidelity)!Acquiring the needed costume with some difficulty, he gets past the keepers of the gate into the scene of the Dark Mass where dispassionate masked spectators watch the ritual unfold into a strange quiet spectacle of various forms of intercourse.The accent is on passively watching and the masks suggest ancient ritual and the slow motion of a dream world.Bill is warned that he is in danger by one of the 12 naked sacred prostitutes, but too late as he is discovered and called before the assembly.Asked for another password (alas there is no other password than fidelio) he is ordered to disrobe.In Christian fashion, the naked woman offers herself in this dark Mass at the darkest season of the year near Christmas as sacrifice for Dr. Bill, who returns home to hide his costume.(So much for "I would never lie to you.") Next morning, the woman, who was a former Beauty Queen turns up dead.(The Queen of the Dead, Persephone, holds the secret beauty ointment that Aphrodite sent Psyche into the underworld to obtain.It cannot be observed and it casts a spell of death-like trance over Psyche -- le petit mort -- who cannot resist using it to win back her lost lover, Eros) It is the same naked woman whom Dr. Bill awakened from her drug trance the night of the ball.Bill visits her dead body in the hospital, disguised as her doctor.The piano player is also missing and feared hurt or killed. In returning the costume to the rental store, Bill discovers that he has lost the mask, and is also offered the shopkeeper's young daughter.Thoroughly lost now, Bill wanders through the city and is taken in by a lovely prostitute, who offers the warmth of her apartment and other sensual delights.At the last moment Bill is distracted from this fateful path by a call on the cell phone. (Perhaps a call from the deep cellular memory)Alice is calling to see where he is and when he will be home.In a later visit, the prostitute's roommate reveals that the prostitute has AIDS.Close call! When Bill returns home the next night he finds Alice asleep with the mask on the pillow next to her.He breaks down crying and admits to all he has done over the last few nights.Next morning, Christmas shopping with their daughter in a large department store, they talk of their plight as the daughter points out possible gifts.(Alice and the daughter have been wrapping presents and the present or gift as represented by Christ's ultimate gift has been repeated in the many fortunate turn of events).Alice ends the movie pointing out that they have been lucky.Her parting words of forgiveness are, "I just know that I want to fuck."The final word being key (and lock). The primary themes as I perceive them are: open and shut, naked and clothed, secret and revealed, gifts wrapped and unwrapped, watching and the mirror, awake and asleep, day and night, dark and light, fact and fantasy, strangers in the night and intimacy taken for granted in the day, Christmas and Dark Mass, dream and wakefullness, male and female, fidelity and infidelity, 2+1=3 either as child or as affair, Christ or sacred prostitute as sacrifice, healthy and sick, dead or alive, eyes wide shut. Dr. Bill is the apollonic representative of Father Right, the modern shaman turned legal drug pusher.He wants to do Good, but in his onesidedness he invites the dark side.Mistaking his wife's fantasies for reality he is overwhelmed by his depths.Drawn by the dark night of his Soul, Bill is tempted by his many unexamined desires, for men, multiple partners, prostitutes, children, voyerism and into the complete opposite of Christ's Mass, the Satanic celebration.The actual ritual often takes the participants much further than Stanley Kubrick was willing to go, into murder, sacrifice, eating excretions and all the flip side of the pure white Virgin Mary and Jesus.But here, the Sacred Prostitute/Beauty Queen becomes the inverse female sacrifice who dies for Bill's sin of literalism. The movie emphasized the modern world's use and misuse of drugs.Alcohol for loosening up and seduction.Speedballs for extreme ecstasy or oblivion.Marijuana as Band Aids to patch up wounds that nevertheless seep out to reveal the deeply unconscious realms of forbidden fruit . . . desires, emotions, fantasies. Coffee and sugar to keep ahead of civilization's dis-contents.TV for dulling down.And sexuality, the primal addiction. As I understand the prime addiction of life (as represented by the twin strands of DNA), there is conservative replication and radical mutation.As species we are programmed to remain and reproduce, yet watch, evolve and awaken.Thus, the inherent duality.Men are on the lookout for the right smell and taste, the right proportion of hip to waist, the right sized breasts to make the good mother.Women also sense the smell and the genes, but also look for the success object that will buy her the safest and most comfortable brood nest.The handsome rich man and the Pretty Woman are the ideal.When we see Mr. and Miss Right we get a squirt of our internal neurochemicals that zap the pleasure centers.Intercourse and all that moves us toward successful genetic reproduction gets us the biggest doses.Is it any wonder that we are addicted to beautiful images.The ad makers know this and they know that we also want to get us those good reproductive partners.For women it is primarily physical attributes that matter although financial attributes can help.For men the physical are important but even more important are the resources and qualities that will allow the offspring to succeed and continue to reproduce.Men get drips and zaps for getting the fancy cars and houses and so the extreme of male sexual addiction is not only all the forms of intercourse, but the greed for more cattle to dazzle the women into submission. Then, there is the other side of the coin, or the other strand of DNA, the watching and evolving, hoping to understand the riddle, give the right password (is it fidelity?) and awaken from the addictive dream.But the push to reproduce is extremely strong, and perhaps Life is not certain of the value of extreme self-consciousness.(After all it is only a recent invention).So we fall over and over into the trance and awaken over and over from the dream.Some of the drugs seem to bring perspective in the wake of their trance.In this movie, the marijuana, although probably meant to add to the escape of sensuality or the haze of smoky forgetfulness, projected the couple into extremes of honesty and questioning that added to their awakening to new levels of intimacy, though gained at grave risk. It is particularly poignant that Nicole Kidman, the innocent blond kid or sacrificial lamb, and Tom Cruise, with his boyish grin (although his name also suggests the underbelly of peeping Tom and cruising for the chicks) were the married couple that brought us this profound drama with the password of fidelity and are to fall prey to the Hollywood disease of divorce.To the extent that they understood their lines, and yet fell to the pressures must be an exquisitely painful irony . . . a bitter relapse indeed to the primal addiction.Like Bill and Alice, but more so, being not only wealthy and beautiful, but also famous and Hollywood Stars, Tom and Nicole are subjected to amazing temptations.Like another Bill (of presidential fame) it is easy to fall from such a great stellar height. The other side of the picture, the second opening image, is the city.Civilization and its discontents bring us stress and pain.We have natural opiates to deaden the pain, but the artificial ones are so much more powerful.Unfortunately they ultimately deaden the very receptors and neural pathways that generate the pain relief, ending in even greater pain.For other tastes and lifestyles there is seeking after the ultimate velocity (for the mental types) and the super adrenaline rush for the activists.The same is true, there is coffee and sugar for the moderates, but meth and cocaine really fire those neurons.However, the fire also fries and hence the image of a fried egg and "this is your brain on drugs" image.Sad but true, it takes time to heal a broken heart and lots of time to heal a fried brain. What might be Bill and Alice's relapse plan, we might ask.They seemed to have learned from their misadventures and both have the cognitive abilities, but as we saw, left-brain approaches are not enough.There needs to be balance.They could benefit from the kind of therapy that might come from talking to others in the same situation, like a sex addiction group, but it is not likely that a DOCTOR will be able to be that humble.He might listen to a good psychiatrist.He could use some meditation and dream work to come to terms with the realm of images and how the mind works to produce them all the time, but we cannot take them all on face value.Meditation might help Bill to realize that fantasies, although not literal, still give us the drips and zaps of the real thing but learn to see the value of watching these inner dramas and not indulging.Bill and Alice could use some nutritional counseling and a better understanding of the profound effect of all the psychoactive drugs from marijuana to sugar to TV.We might assume that an M.D. would know this information, but it is often difficult to see because the drug rituals are so close and ingrained unconsciously into our daily lives.I would recommend that they take a class on addiction and substance abuse and also read The Molecules of Emotion.Couples counseling with a counselor who thoroughly understands subtle levels of addiction could be very valuable and I bet Bill could afford it. Although this is not a movie about addiction, per se, it is all the more powerful in its message as we see in it the average modern "civilized" married couple in the form of Beauty and the Handsome Beast/Doctor who are all the more touching as Nicole and Tom, the fallen Hollywood Stars (Archetypes in the Holy woods).On the Silver Screen and no doubt behind their Real Masks (Persona) they have their modern version of the medicine man's secret brews (although with probably more or less the same lack of understanding), but are adrift in a sea of taxis rushing them to the Underworld and back . . . Strangers in the Night with Eyes Wide Shut. |
