![]() Their good looks, vast apartment, and interactions with the babysitter signal these two have it all. The film begins with a couple getting ready for a Christmas party. The film asks whether our safe, happy, normal lives require us to, essentially, keep our eyes wide shut: to sleepwalk and dream, wearing a mask that helps us ignore our raging, roaring ocean of feelings, lest they overwhelm us if given the chance. “Don’t you think one of the charms of marriage is that it makes deception a necessity for both parties?”-Sandor Szavost, Eyes Wide Shut It takes Kubrick’s trademark skill for putting human nature under a microscope, and does that very close to home, peering without bias at the lies that underlie any marriage. If you revisit the film, though (and now is a perfect time to do that, for its 20th anniversary) Eyes Wide Shut is powerfully terrifying. Stanley Kubrick’s final film was one of his rare box office successes, but it’s among his more underrated works, and that’s perhaps because on first viewing, it’s a little difficult to put your finger on exactly what it’s saying. It explores the role that fantasies of strangers play in our sex lives, and it suggests that married people are, ultimately, also strangers to each other. The focus of Eyes Wide Shut is the scary connection between the erotic and the anonymous. Yet, to the woman’s husband who’s theoretically the person observing this view, the sight is mundane, and that’s signaled in the quick, casual nature of the shot.Įverything that follows in the story of the woman, Nicole Kidman’s Alice, and her spouse, Tom Cruise’s Bill, elaborates in the ideas embodied in that opening image. ![]() To the spying viewer, this is clearly an erotic image. Subscribe to The Take on YouTube | Support The Take on PatreonĮyes Wide Shut: Ending, Themes and Symbols ExplainedĮyes Wide Shut opens on an image that captures what this film is all about. ![]() Eyes Wide Shut poses an interesting question: do we have to wear a mask, to sleepwalk and dream, to keep our “eyes wide shut” in order to live a happy, “normal” life? Here’s our take on how the Stanley Kubrick classic is still hauntingly relevant, 20 years later.
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