Dreams Behind the Masks: The Many Layers of Eyes Wide Shut
It wasn’t just another film in 1999; it was also the last film of exceptional director Stanley Kubrick’s career. When it was first introduced, it was a filmic enigma and, for many, a psychological experience imbedded with overtones of eroticism, social critique, and psychological discomfort. The film was also a cinematic enigma, starring the most famous celebrity couple, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. The promotion for the film created a sense of intense curiosity, which nostalgic candle light, flowing satin, and ornate piano music. Kubrick’s erotic psychological thriller experience captures an extraordinary interplay of elements of order and disorder, a fascinating construction that provokes analysis and a wide range of responses even in a contemporary context. Kubrick’s film differs in many ways from the sequels; for example, it even reached places such as India, where it interconnected with the local culture’s intertwined boundaries of secrecy, loyalty, desire, and the unwritten rules of silence in social order.
The Marriage That Was More Than a Script
At the center of Eyes Wide Shut lies a marriage—not only the ones between Bill and Alice Harford, the characters, but also between the real-life Hollywood royalties who played them. In 1999, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, were cinema’s Golden couple, the picture of perfection, and the tabloids and interviews too, saying so. Yet, Kubrick, ever the provocateur, casting them to picture the flaws in that image. In a hauntingly intimate way, the movie’s premise, a husband’s night long odyssey into jealousy and temptation, after his wife, confesses a fantasy, was perhaps the most inviting scene. 99.9% of Kubrick’s decisions are calculated, this was no different.
He was trying to blur the lines of reality and fiction, forcing his actors to cross lines emotionally. In his new role, Cruise, always known for his calm and in control characters, played Bill, a man who was all messed up with his insecurities and ego. The frustration of control lost is a powerful source of motivation and it was in this role that Kidman, played Alice, a woman whose confession of desire shatters her husband’s illusions of control. The films haunting mirror scenes, especially Alice’s monlogue, about her dream and that brief, electric laughter during Bill’s jealousy questioning, were not just performances. They were psych tests.
In later interviews, Kidman remarked on the emotional toll the project took on her. Kubrick, known for perfectionism, would sometimes direct over sixty takes for one scene. He required true exhaustion and discomfort for the cut. “Stanley wanted truth,” Kidman reflected, “Even if it meant breaking you open.” For Cruise, almost two years of shooting spent the time the world saw as the end of his marriage. The dissection of the marriage in front of Kubrick’s camera gave the same haunting realism for the film.
The Film as a Mirror to Desire and Control
Control has always been a Kubrick signature — control in his shots, his lighting, his themes. Eyes Wide Shut was an exploration of control lost. Dreamlike, the film guides the audience through masked encounters, corridors of the world, and controlled, obsessive, surreal, and dissociative scenes, leaving the audience questioning their reality. Under the sexual mystique lies the deeper commentary of the film — the illusion of control, class, the power, and moral bankruptcy intertwined.
From lavish apartments to secret societies, Bill’s sojourns within New York’s underworld exemplify how some equate privilege to freedom. In India, the interpretation of these sentiments hits closer to home. Desire is confined to the underbelly of our social structures; spoken of only in whispers, and tightly controlled by one’s class and reputation. Though set in a Western metropolis, the film’s world is steeped in the same tension: the gulf between who we are and who we are permitted to be.
Alice’s confession about a fleeting sexual fantasy could be a middle-class Indian wife’s unuttered truth. One she could never speak in reality. Bill’s rage, disguised as a moral outrage, is almost primal and universal in scope; losing possession, not love, is the real fear. In cultures shrouded with secrets and shame, Kubrick offered a stark contradiction, publicly turning private shame into a cinematic ritual and forcing audiences to reconcile with the censorship of desire that permeates their cultures.
The Atmosphere of Mystery and Media Obsession
When Warner Bros. publicized that “Kubrick was making a film about sexuality with Cruise and Kidman,” media outlets “erupted with curiosity.” Tabloids reportedly made endless speculations on whether “the couple would be nude or if it was pornography disguised as art.” Speculation on whether it would ruin Cruise and Kidman’s marriage was also rife. For “almost two years, Kubrick filmed in complete secrecy, locking the set and forbidding even crew members from discussing scenes.” It was only at the film’s premiere that the public was able to speculate on the film and the couple.
That secrecy, in turn, “became part of the movie’s mystique.” “Critics speculated whether he had truly ‘finished’ the film or if Warner Bros. had altered his vision.” If completion had been altered, it was only fitting that Kubrick had “died just days after delivering his final cut.” This absence, coupled with the film’s release, only served to further complicate the public’s perception of the film and of the director.
When “Eyes Wide Shut” finally came out, reactions were mixed. Some thought it was too slow and too vague. Others called it hypnotic. Still, it achieved a cult following, like all of Kubrick’s work. The masks, the piano score by Jocelyn Pook, and the orgy sequence entered the folklore of film. Beginning in the 2000’s, fan forums on the internet overflowed with conspiracy theories about secret societies, Freemason symbols, and messages hidden in red. For Kubrick and his fans, it was a game of chess, and he had managed to create a film that had audiences endlessly attempting to decode it.
The Making of the Film
The making of “Eyes Wide Shut” was as surreal as the film itself. Kubrick’s perfectionism is legendary — the production holds the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous film shoot in history, over 400 days. He redesigned sets overnight, reshot scenes for weeks, and rehearsed even mundane gestures until they felt instinctive.
The following account portrays Kubrick’s fixation on realism. For the masked orgy scene, the actors were instructed to move with precise, ritualistic choreography. To keep the production a secret, he sent out encrypted call sheets and didn’t disclose to even the hired actors, or to the media, which actors were involved. To ensure the scene had a haunting realism, he used actual Venetian masks rather than theatrical props.
Even less known is the fact that “New York” for the movie was not actual New York, but rather a huge replica built specifically for the film at Pinewood Studios in London. Kubrick hated to fly, and so his production designers constructed an entire street from Manhattan from old photographs and measurements. Every detail, from doorways to neon signs to snow-covered curbs, was designed and built in a manner that was, to an eerie extent, artificial, but also a precise replica of the film’s illusionary world.
The Glamour of Loneliness
At its core, Eyes Wide Shut is not about sex, but rather, about loneliness. All the characters in the film, including Bill and Alice, the masked participants, and even the orgy participants, are in fact, searching for intimacy, but are trapped in a meaningless ritual. In Kubrick’s world, masks are safer than faces, and reality is more frightening than unfulfilled desire.
This is something Indian audiences get, even if it’s at a different level. The tension between the social respectability and the yearning for the private is an everyday reality. The film’s representation of the lack of truth behind perfect closure is almost the devotion with frustration, the love with control, triggers countless Indian unacknowledged undefined marriages and relationships where emotional truth is too dangerous to be acknowledged.
It is perhaps for that reason, many years later, Eyes Wide Shut feels oddly familiar. Underneath its Western facade, it communicates a universal condition with the people living their lives performing roles, hiding behind a facade, and waiting for their liberation, fearful of their exposure.
This last film of Kubrick’s is not merely a cinematic enigma but a last testament to humanity that we wear the masks not only to entice but to conceal our masks. The haunting world of illusions had been constructed such that it feels not foreign, but frighteningly close to home.
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