No Pulp is Ever Just a Pulp: EYES WIDE SHUT, Genre, Audience, Pleasure, and Kubrick
**THERE WILL BE SPOILERS AND NSFW CONTENT FROM EYES WIDE SHUT THROUGHOUT (AND VERY BRIEF SPOILERS FOR THE SHINING)- YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED** Eyes Wide Shut is one of the most fascinating movies of the last 20 years. Based on the 1926 novella Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler, the film follows an affluent doctor named Bill Harford living in millennial Manhattan, who, one night, after his wife Alice confesses she had sexual fantasies about a naval officer, goes on a nocturnal odyssey that culminates with him traveling to a luxurious up-state mansion where a masked orgy of a secret society takes place. If that sounds strange, that’s because it is. Upon its release in the Summer of 1999, and in subsequent years, Eyes Wide Shut has been an enigma, polarizing audiences and critics alike. David Denby, reviewing the film for The New Yorker, wrote that it contained the “most pompous orgy in the history of the movies.” (Kreider). Paul Tatara of CNN called it “morbidly paced foolishness… nothing that can’t be found in a Penthouse video” (Tatara). Roger Ebert felt that the film was a “mesmerizing daydream of sexual fantasy” (Ebert), awarding it three and a half stars out of four, while director Martin Scorsese named it the fourth best movie of the 1990’s (“Eyes Wide Shut : Roger Ebert at the Movies with Martin Scorsese (2000)”). CinemaScore, an industry leading pollster which calculates a letter-grade to reflect how opening-night audiences feel about a given film, gave it a D-. And almost two decades after its release, Eyes Wide Shut continues to divide opinion, as shown by the comments section of a recent post about it that I came across on Facebook, with the majority of commenters expressing praise for the film but there also being a significant number of people who didn’t think highly of it (“"You will kindly remove your mask..." #EyesWideShut”). In sum, its mixed reception, along with a plethora of circumstantial factors surrounding it, including that its marketing campaign generated a huge amount of hype before it came out and that it starred then real-life Hollywood couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, has made Eyes Wide Shut a goldmine for cultural studies analyses. But even with all that has been written about the film, its intricate relationship between audience and genre has received startlingly little attention, with the exception of several scholarly sources (Preussner, Ransom). A more thorough, comprehensive investigation of this relationship is needed, and thinking about Eyes Wide Shut particularly as a work of pulp fiction can further our understanding of what the film is after and why it doesn’t work for some viewers.
“Pulp fiction” is a mode of popular storytelling that is made to appeal to the masses through its lurid, sensationalized elements, named after the cheap wood material that was used to publish pulp magazines in the first part of the 20th century. Precisely because of this, the word “pulp” carries a negative connotation and pulp fiction is relegated to the bottom of our cultural hierarchy of art. On the one hand, it makes sense that Eyes Wide Shut, even with its mixed reception, is not a text normally equated with the “low” art of pulp since it is a Stanley Kubrick movie. Kubrick is regarded by many in the world of film as one of the finest directors the medium has ever seen, and he is often idolized in lofty superlatives as being a visionary auteur, a great artist who pushed the boundaries of cinema as an art form (“Siskel & Ebert (1999) - Episode on 'Stanley Kubrick' 1 of 2”). As such, one might ask how Eyes Wide Shut is a work of pulp fiction when it was directed by Stanley Kubrick? Well, for starters, two of the first feature-length films Kubrick made, Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956), are both film noirs, a popular movie genre which took off in postwar Hollywood and whose roots can be traced directly back to hardboiled detective novels from the 20’s and 30’s, which in turn came directly out of the pulp tradition. Moreover, Kubrick tried his hand at various genres that were popular in their day throughout the remainder of his career, including the war film (Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket), the historical sword and sandal epic (Spartacus), social satire and dark comedy (Lolita, Dr. Strangelove), science-fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey), dystopian (A Clockwork Orange), and horror (The Shining). Even with Barry Lyndon (1975), the one film Kubrick made that we would be inclined to view as a period piece and thus not a “genre film,” is after all a costume drama tragicomedy, which is its own genre. Although he isn’t thought of as a genre filmmaker in the same way we think of a John Carpenter or a Brian De Palma, Kubrick was in fact a versatile connoisseur of genre films, and several of the established genres he worked in (i.e. noir, horror, sci-fi, dystopia) have a close, if not direct, connection to pulp, something Carol Clover alludes to in her discussion of rape-revenge movies when she hypothesizes that if A Clockwork Orange (1971) were “less well and expensively made by a less famous man,” it “would surely qualify as sensationalist exploitation.” (Clover 116) I think it is fair to say that Eyes Wide Shut, because of it being a $65 million Summer blockbuster and its sensational subject matter, most prominently seen in its masked orgy sequence and the subsequent mystery/conspiracy part of the plot that includes a woman somehow winding up dead, can be viewed as pulp fiction. The question then becomes, which genre under the umbrella of pulp does it belong to?
The relationship between genre and audience is one in which genre uses recognizable conventions and formula to let the audience know what type of story to expect. Genres matter, but only because of the meaning we have assigned to them; genre is about audience. Even so, plenty of overlap between individual genres exists, and the fact that there are texts that can be seen as either occupying multiple genres or bending/breaking the genre they have been placed in attests to the arbitrary nature of genre. Eyes Wide Shut is one such film that defies straightforward genre classification. Most commonly, it is labeled as an “erotic drama,” which would imply that it is trying to titillate or arouse its audience and that its tone is steady and serious. However, both of these implications can be disputed.
The centerpiece of the film, the masked orgy sequence, starts off with a black mass ritual in which a circle of perfectly shaped women unrobe themselves so that they are naked except for the Venetian masks, G-strings, and Stilettos they are wearing, before transitioning into an extended tour of the mansion where we, as viewers, through shots from Bill’s first-person point of view, see more of these masked women having sex in each room as a group of individuals gather around and watch. But despite the sight of all these naked bodies pleasuring themselves, the experience of watching this scene as a viewer is not pleasurable; the sex isn’t sexy. Part of the way Kubrick de-eroticizes this sequence has to do with sound. During the black mass, there is a repeated chant performed by a man in a red cloak, and accompanying him is a synthesizer in the room that is playing a liturgical song in Latin that has been recorded in reverse. And while Bill is walking through the mansion, there is a non-diegetic song on the soundtrack that sounds like it is from India. Neither of these music choices are appropriate with what we are seeing onscreen, creating a powerful, disconcerting effect as we recognize how both original pieces of music have been perverted by way of appropriation. The other thing that Kubrick is doing on the visual level during this sequence to de-eroticize the nudity and sex is he is taking the male gaze’s fetishistic-scopophilia of the female body to its logical end point. The male gaze is a concept created by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, which explains how female characters are looked at, either as a form of voyeurism or fetishism, in such a way that is objectifying and exploitative. For Mulvey, the male gaze is always present in narrative films, but it is hidden by the codes and conventions of these films so as not to make the gaze’s immoral intentions too obvious to the unknowing viewer. The conclusion Mulvey reaches is that uncovering how the male gaze operates destroys all pleasure that comes with it, and Eyes Wide Shut’s orgy scene serves as perfect evidence in support of her thesis. In other films where an onscreen female is positioned as a fetishistic object of the male gaze- think Megan Fox in Transformers- the way she is dressed or looks suggests her status as a sex symbol, but she isn’t 100% sexualized to the point where we literally only see a body with breasts and a vagina. The female is still recognizably human to the viewer. Not so with the orgy sequence. Kubrick’s camera lets out into the open the sexuality that is only suggested in other films for us to see, revealing just how repugnant the male gaze is at its most explicit. As the women take off their robes and fully expose their bodies, they become virtually indistinguishable from one another, the presence of the masks covering their faces completely stripping away their human identities. In the eyes of those participating in the black mass and the orgy, these masked, anonymous women are not actual people, they are pure objects to be gazed upon and fucked, and nothing more.
There are several other scenes in Eyes Wide Shut that show explicit sex/nudity or have sexual overtones, including Bill’s imagining of the sexual fantasy Alice described that he replays over and over in his head and a brief scene of foreplay near the beginning of the film where Bill starts kissing Alice in front of a mirror, but the only two images that are erotically charged are a close-up of the prostitute Domino slowly and sensually leaning in to kiss Bill in profile and the opening shot where we see Alice taking off her dress with her back to the voyeuristic camera right before the main title pops up. Both of these shots are a tease though. Bill is interrupted by a call from Alice before he can consummate his relationship with Domino, and in the case of the first shot, Kubrick gives us a glimpse of what he knows we all desire to see- Nicole Kidman naked- only to then have “the camera’s eye shut for good on such undeflected visions of beauty” for the remainder of the film (Whitinger and Ingram 57). Because its marketing campaign promoted it as an “erotic drama,” it’s not surprising that the main critique of the film’s detractors was its lack of sexiness. But as Tim Kreider points out, “why anyone who'd seen Kubrick's previous films believed the hype and actually expected it to be what Entertainment Weekly breathlessly anticipated as ‘the sexiest movie ever,’ is still not clear.” (Kreider) Eyes Wide Shut’s misleading marketing has undoubtedly played a role in its reception, but that can’t be the end of the story. There has to be something else that the film is specifically doing (as opposed to simply what it isn’t doing) that frustrates certain viewers, and the answer falls squarely within the realm of genre.
Eyes Wide Shut is decidedly not erotic, but whether it is a drama or not is more complicated. It would appear to be so for its first half, during which Bill and Alice attend Victor Ziegler’s (one of Bill’s wealthy patients) Christmas party, Alice details her sexual fantasy, and Bill starts his after-hours odyssey. But from the moment Bill enters the secret masked orgy, it becomes something else entirely, and a strong sense of psychological paranoia runs throughout its second half, giving it “the structure of a thriller.” (Ebert) The film seems to be walking a fine line between drama and thriller, but perhaps instead of thinking about Eyes Wide Shut’s relationship to genre in terms of what is happening on a narrative level, it would be more helpful thinking about it in terms of the emotions it stirs up in the viewer. Speaking for myself, Eyes Wide Shut, more than anything, is deeply unsettling; I think that it is as frightening as The Shining (1980). In this regard, Eyes Wide Shut can be read as horror, a genre devoted to playing on our worst real-life fears in a sadomasochistic fashion. Some other scholars have also picked up on Eyes Wide Shut’s connection to The Shining (Ransom 37), but there is one glaring difference between the two films: their receptions. Today, The Shining is almost unanimously loved by everyone (getting reappraised over time after being met with ambivalence upon its release), while Eyes Wide Shut is much more polarizing and isn’t even classified as horror most of the time. The reason why this is the case may have to do with the function of identification and gender in horror films.
In her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover convincingly argues that modern horror is obsessed with gender, and that viewers spend the majority of time identifying directly with the “Final Girl” or the main female victim in such films, taking pleasure in experiencing the same fear and terror this character is feeling. Sadism plays a role too, but “the masochistic aesthetic is and always has been the dominant one in horror cinema.” (Clover 222) The Shining does not have a “Final Girl” per se, but it does have Wendy and Danny, who suffer great emotional and physical abuse at the hands of their husband/father Jack Torrance. Jack is the protagonist of The Shining, but by the second half of the film when he becomes completely unhinged and attempts to murder his wife and son with an axe, the feminine-masochistic horror that we, as viewers, feel is the same feminine-masochistic horror that Wendy and Danny are experiencing, as we identify with them and root for them not to be killed by Jack.
By contrast, something odd that I’ve observed about Eyes Wide Shut is that I feel scared, for instance, during the orgy sequence when Bill is discovered as an intruder and brought in the middle of the circle to be interrogated with all the masked participants surrounding him, or when he is followed by a man in a trench coat walking through the streets at night, but I don’t feel scared for Bill, the character, in these circumstances. It’s a very weird feeling, and I think it has to do with a lack of identification. As Alessandro Giovanneli writes, “Eyes Wide Shut relies very little on engaging the spectator with the protagonists, with Bill in particular. With the exception of some notable moments, in which we quite naturally empathize or sympathize with Alice or Bill, the film does not much promote those forms of character engagement.” (Giovanneli 360) Bill and Alice aren’t wholly unlikeable, they just come across as self-centered, shallow people who we aren't given much of a reason to care about outside of them being the two major characters. Giovanneli goes on to say that the film still manages to “involve us in a fairly intimate, personal filmic experience” through what he calls “experiential identification,” where I, the viewer, inhabit Bill’s perspective but he isn’t the target of my empathetic or sympathetic identification; there simply is no human target assigned, and so instead of identifying with the main character like I would normally do, my subjective experience of the film itself becomes the target of my identification (Giovanelli 360-361). In other words, “the film powerfully makes us the protagonists of the attempt of finding one's way through the oneiric reality it represents.” (Giovanelli 362) Not only, then, does Eyes Wide Shut not have a female character or innocent victim figure for us to identify with like most horror films do, it short-circuits the whole process of identification to its main character that we have been trained to expect from other films, and so there is no masochistic pleasure to be gained from watching Bill’s life being put in danger after he is found out as an intruder at the orgy.
Eyes Wide Shut refuses to give us the main pleasures associated with the genre we thought it was going to be (erotic drama) and the genre that it arguably bears the strongest resemblance to (horror). This is not to say that it is void of any pleasure, it just doesn’t offer us the pleasures we are accustomed to receiving as viewers. A survey of some of the reviews written by critics who really liked the film shows that there is a common theme of relishing in its hypnotic, dreamlike quality (Ebert, Howe, Johnson-Ott, Turan, Putman). For these critics, the things that frustrated other people- the detached characters, the flat, unnatural performances, the absurd bits of humor, the languid pacing, the episodic-like narrative structure, the dream logic, the fake-looking soundstage Manhattan that most of the film was shot on, etc.- enhanced their experience of the film, allowing them to get lost in its uncanny atmosphere. Indeed, much of Eyes Wide Shut plays like Stanley Kubrick were trying to make a David Lynch movie, but surrealism, evidently, is not everyone’s cup of tea.
Looking at Eyes Wide Shut through the lens of pulp fiction and its subversion of genre and pleasure can explain why the film is so polarizing for viewers, but what it cannot account for is why Kubrick was said to consider it to be “his greatest contribution to the art of cinema” before he died (Filipski). That is, it cannot account for Kubrick’s statement if we believe the status quo position that pulp fiction is “low” art and part of “trash culture.” I believe this position is worth questioning though, and Eyes Wide Shut, a film I find to be quite profound, presents an excellent case study. Due to its Freudian source material, Eyes Wide Shut is often read in purely psychological terms, but as Tim Kreider illustrates in his brilliant essay, there is an alternate sociological reading in which it is about the intersection of sex, money, and power. During his one-night odyssey, Bill spends over $700 total, often insisting on paying people over the usual charge or even paying them without having any service rendered at all, the latter of which occurs during his interaction with Domino (Kreider). Bill, as Kreider notes, “is defined by his first line: ‘Honey, have you seen my wallet?’” Likewise, Alice is defined by her first on-screen line too: “How do I look?” She is an object who, even though she’s a wife and a mother, “is just another, higher-class whore” (Kreider), as she is visually linked (either by similar appearance or surrounding mise-en-scène) to the other women Bill encounters, and the only thing we see her doing during the Harford’s daily routine montage near the beginning of the film is attending to domestic tasks and her looks, and grooming her daughter to do the same. “In a sense, there is only one woman in the film” (Kreider), just as the masked women during the ritual scene at the orgy are, for all intents and purposes, the same. The last two major scenes, which are the most important scenes in the film, really drive this point home.
First, Ziegler reveals to Bill that he was also at the masked orgy, and he confirms that the woman who died of a drug overdose that Bill read about in a newspaper and saw at the morgue in the two preceding scenes is the same woman who had “redeemed” Bill at the masked orgy the night before, but he then tries to convince Bill that the secret society had nothing to do with her death. Ziegler says that her redeeming act was all “a charade” to frighten Bill into silence, and that the only thing that happened to this woman after Bill left the orgy was “nothing that hadn’t happened to her before… she got her brains fucked out.” This scene, which lasts 13 minutes, is interpreted by most viewers as exposition (Kreider), that is, most viewers take Ziegler's words at face value and believe he is telling the truth, even though there is evidence to the contrary (like how he starts his charade statement with the qualifier “Suppose I told you that…”). The scene concludes with Ziegler reiterating that there was no foul play (“Someone died, it happens all the time”), but nothing is resolved with any certainty. Bill subsequently returns home to tell Alice “everything,” and the final scene of the film has Bill and Alice taking their daughter Christmas shopping, in which they tell each other that they "should be grateful” and that they are “awake now.” Alice then delivers the last line of the film of what they need to do as soon as possible: “fuck.” Contrary to popular belief, this is not a happy, hopeful ending, it is a bitterly ironic and disturbing one. The deadpan delivery and vulgar word choice of this last line again aligns Alice with prostitution and indicates that she and Bill have no deeper of an understanding of real emotional intimacy at the end of the film than they did at its beginning. Even with them becoming more open with each other and admitting their imagined infidelities (Alice’s fantasy) and actual near-infidelities (Bill’s odyssey), their eyes, in keeping with the misperception that the film’s metaphorical, oxymoronic title refers to, “are still wide shut.” (Kreider)
From both his dialogue (“what kind of fucking charade ends with somebody turning up dead?”) as well as his body language (crossing his hands and putting them on his face, avoiding eye contact, flinching when Ziegler pats him on the shoulders) in the scene where he talks with Ziegler, it is clear that Bill feels guilty and doubts the validity of Ziegler’s account of events. Yet Bill ultimately goes along with it anyways, not because he buys what Ziegler is saying, but simply because looking the other way is easier (and less dangerous) to do than continuing his investigation. The sad and messed up thing is that no one in the film besides Bill gives a second thought to this woman who has died; in a few day's time (in the film’s diegesis), she will be all but forgotten. After all, she was, in Ziegler’s words, just “a hooker,” and there are plenty of other hookers just like her who can take her place at future secret masked orgies. Business as usual will continue, or, to borrow from Ziegler once more, “life (for everyone else) goes on.” As a doctor who is on call for people like Ziegler (as seen when Bill privately assists Ziegler in a bathroom at Ziegler’s Christmas party early in the film), Bill is upper middle class, but he is still not part of the elite- the secret society at the orgy. Ironically, despite their disparity in social status, Bill and this dead hooker are both expendable to the elite whom they serve, the only difference between them is that if Bill were to die or be murdered, it would be more inconvenient for the elite since it is more difficult to replace a doctor than it is to replace a hooker. The world of Eyes Wide Shut paints a capitalist society that is ruled by patriarchy and commerce, in which there are sellers (the elite who use their power to control the non-elite through money and sex), buyers (non-elite men like Bill who spend money), and objects (“the one woman in the film”). In such a society, everyone who is not part of the elite becomes a commodity, and every act becomes an impersonal transaction. Hence, as the famous last line goes, Alice will not “make love” with Bill as soon as possible, she will just “fuck” him as soon as possible, passionlessly and soullessly, for a jolt of temporary pleasure in her otherwise banal life. Kubrick’s view of contemporary American society, its gender and class politics, and its willful complicity and blindness to corruption and misogyny in Eyes Wide Shut, his self-proclaimed “greatest contribution to the art of cinema,” is exceedingly dark and horrifying, but not, as some critics at the time of its release asserted (Whitinger and Ingram 57), an invalid or outdated one. Obviously some things in our society have changed for the better since Schnitzler wrote Dream Story 91 years ago, but when there has been an ongoing wave of sexual abuse stories coming to light against prominent men in Hollywood and the current President of the United States is a man who, among other things, was elected even after a recording in which he brags about how he enjoys grabbing women “by the pussy” was released to the public, how much progress has truly been made?
Throughout the history of western civilization, hegemonic art criticism has created a rigid binary for evaluating art. The conventional way of thinking about “high” vs. “low” art is that high art has intrinsic “spiritual value” (Berger 21) emanating from a combination of its aesthetic craftsmanship and the amount of “universal truth” it conveys, while low art only possesses commercial value; it is art made primarily for the sake of money rather than for the sake of art. This framework would have us believe that pulp fiction is “low” art, interested only in surface-level entertainment, but as my analysis has detailed, Eyes Wide Shut includes dense social commentary and provides pleasure, albeit of the unorthodox variety, for its audience as a surreal horror/thriller. In the same manner that a legitimate claim can be made that Eyes Wide Shut is about sex and money, an equally legitimate claim can be made that Eyes Wide Shut is a work of pulp and “high” art. Of course, one could say that Eyes Wide Shut is an exception to the rule of pulps being “trash,” but I think that all pulps, while being entertaining in their own right, are trying to say something through the stories they tell. Being a pulp and being “high” art do not have to be mutually exclusive terms, and the taken-for-granted hierarchy of art, which precludes such a possibility, is not a viable criteria for measuring the value of a text.
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