Over the Rainbow: ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999)
Six days after handing in Eyes Wide Shut to Warner Bros., Stanley Kubrick died, as if he’d been holding off death just long enough to complete one more masterpiece — his first movie in twelve years. This film that had been cloaked in mystique throughout every stage of its creation is cloaked in mystique still, twenty years later. It’s obvious by now that it always will be.
The film is still terribly misunderstood by otherwise intelligent observers. That’s to be expected anytime someone makes something so singular and strange. All the best movies feel like dreams, and Kubrick took that axiom and brought it to a place where he was making a movie that intentionally felt dreamlike, even though all the action occurs within the film’s reality.
How did Kubrick manage to cast such a spell? By employing an ingenious kind of superficiality that too many benighted observers mistook for an attempt at verisimilitude. It’s impossible to imagine that Kubrick, Bronx-born and a resident of New York City until early middle age, could have really believed the Pinewood Studios soundstage he commissioned could ever be taken seriously as New York. Rather infamously, he’d managed to shoot London-for-Vietnam when he made Full Metal Jacket (1987; doing so with an eerie degree of plausibility) but that film was at least shot on natural locations. This was something altogether different.
This was Tom Cruise as Bill Harford walking (in many scenes) on a treadmill before a conspicuously contrived rear projection of Manhattan — a Manhattan whose streets are strikingly desolate, a hypnagogic alternative to the real Manhattan even in its wee smallest hours. And it’s in the wee small hours that Bill Harford — sent reeling by his wife’s confession of adulterous lusts — embarks on his nighttime walks through the strange lights and exotic symbols that comprise the movie before us.
Eyes Wide Shut was adapted from a 1926 Arthur Schnitzler novel called Traumnovelle (Dream Novel), which Kubrick had first been turned on to by his bohemian second wife, Ruth Sobotka, who turned him on to so much about sex and psychology and aesthetic taste. While Kubrick taught her about film and chess, she broadened his cultural horizons even further, opening him up not only to dance but to art and literature as well. These had already been interests of Kubrick’s, of course, but under Ruth’s tutelage his interest acquired a new depth and sophistication.
He finally acquired the rights to the novel some ten years later, in 1968 when making 2001: A Space Odyssey. After that, the film went into its lengthy incubation, but in a sense it had been incubating all along, as Kubrick had never stopped thinking about Schnitzler. In 1960, he told an interviewer, “It’s difficult to find any writer who had a more profound insight into the way people think, act, and really are, and who had a somewhat all-seeing point of view — sympathetic if somewhat cynical.” In explaining to another interviewer why he wanted to make a film about Napoleon — a film that, infamously, was never completed — he provided the following as one of his reasons: “His sex life was worthy of Arthur Schnitzler.”
Of the book itself, Kubrick said in 1972 that Traumnovelle “is a difficult book to describe — what good book isn’t? It explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage, and it tries to equate the importance of sexual dreams and might-have-beens with reality. All of Schnitzler’s work is psychologically brilliant, and he was greatly admired by Freud.”
Interest in this movie about “the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage” was amplified greatly by the very fact that its two stars were married in real life, and that they were Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. In retrospect, because of the couple’s divorce two years later, the movie has taken on greater resonance still.
Kubrick was canny enough to embrace the Cruise-Kidman dynamic. It featured primarily in all the advertising, as well as in the journalistic coverage, to an extent that perverted the nature of the actual movie. Kubrick was also canny enough to make ample use of his leading lady’s nude figure; indeed, Kidman’s naked body is the very first thing we see after the lead credits — before even the title itself. He was not at all unaware of that body’s charms. Frederic Raphael, in his memoir about their work together on the script, writes that Kubrick suggested to him that on a day when Kidman was to be filming nude “Might be a good day to happen to drop by the set, if you wanted to.”
There were a few different actors Kubrick had considered for the role of Bill Harford, but by far the most intriguing is Steve Martin. (Some of the others include Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, and Harrison Ford, who some believe influenced Dr. Harford’s name.) In the early ’80s, when Kubrick was still thinking of a more comic slant to the story, he invited Martin, in London doing publicity for The Jerk, to his estate out in the country.
Martin, of course, never did make it into Eyes Wide Shut, but a red pool table, similar to the one Martin’s character of the Jerk buys in his days of profligate spending, does appear in the apartment of profligate spender Vic Ziegler (Sydney Pollack). It features prominently in the scene in which Ziegler warns Harford of how close he came to real danger the night before.
That red pool table, of course, is itself meant to symbolize danger. Kubrick has always been consistent in his use of this most ominous of colors; indeed, there was an entire exhibit devoted to its use at “Stanley Kubrick On View,” the exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For the purpose of Eyes Wide Shut, notice that when he enters the prostitute’s apartment, the door through which he does so is red, while the door to his own apartment — like the color scheme of the apartment itself — is a cool, safe blue. The orgy at which Bill finds himself in terrible danger is presided over by a man in a red robe and hood. When Bill gets the call from Vic asking that he come see him, he’s in the hospital having just been to the morgue to see the woman who’d saved him at the party; behind him is a conspicuously red elevator (redolent of the blood-bursting elevator in The Shining) and on the wall to his left is solid-red abstract artwork. Early in the movie, at the sparkling gala at Vic’s house, Cruise is seen talking to Nick Nightingale, the old med-school classmate turned piano player — who, in his propensity for singing in the night, will eventually tell Bill about the masked orgy and even give him the password for entry. When they talk, they’re standing next to a stage as mercilessly red as Vic’s pool table upstairs.
We could go on, of course, but any talk of the color red has to be subordinated to talk of rainbow colors in general — for it’s in the rainbow that Eyes Wide Shut finds its central visual motif. At that same party mentioned above, from which so many of the film’s events are set in motion, Bill is approached by two surpassingly beautiful models who make iclear to him that they’re also available. They try to lead him away to someplace presumably more private, and Bill, laughing along with things in a good-natured way but not at all sold (he’s there with his wife, who he loves), says, “Ladies, where, exactly, are we going? Exactly?” And the one called Nuela replies, “Where the rainbow ends.”
That’s when Bill is called away to tend to a problem passed out on Vic’s couch upstairs, while his wife continues to flirt with a stranger on the dancefloor.
I’m convinced that Kubrick’s primary motive for setting the film at Christmastime was so he could light the whole thing up with the primary colors of the rainbow. I guess we’ll never know, but we certainly know how important those lights were to him. Kubrick “had a fixed idea about the color of each sequence,” according to Chester Eyre, who worked as a lab consultant on the film, “and he would strive with you to obtain that color, even if it had no relation to the preceding sequence. He was always focused on the mood that could be achieved with a certain color.”
Christmas lights were supplemented with street lights, table lamps, and other source lighting, as well as large China balls to which blue gels had been applied to cast that surreal azure glow. Such minimal lighting was possible only because Kubrick insisted on force-developing the film, leaving it in its bath longer to compensate for the lowly lit negatives. “On this picture,” said Eyre, who worked closely with cinematographer Larry smith in addition to Kubrick,
…it was a deliberate strategy that was designed to get a special look….[O]nce we began seeing the results and the quality of the negative, we understood what he was trying to do. If you look at the night scenes in particular, they have terrific exposure and depth, as well as very good blacks.
In the Harfords’ apartment, in the scenes in which the blue light shares a frame with intense oranges — fire and ice occupying the same space — the effect is reminiscent of nothing so much as Russell Metty’s cinematography in All That Heaven Allows (1955). Which is funny, because when Kubrick was a young director making Spartacus (1960), he clashed terribly with Metty as each sought control over how to properly light that film. Could it be that here Kubrick is borrowing ideas from a cinematographer whose input he’d previously — and noisily — rejected?
Cruise got to know Kubrick well during the making of the film. In a 2012 talk with Interview magazine about the whole experience, he addressed the matter of Kubrick’s attitude toward doctors, having had one as a father. “People look at doctors like they know everything,” Cruise said, “and Stanley was very cynical about that — people using their titles or power to allow themselves into places and to exploit others and the situation.”
So much of what Dr. Bill Harford gets into, by his own agency and others’, occurs as a result of his status as doctor. It’s because he’s a doctor that he’s called away to tend to Victor’s emergency with the ODed hooker — an event that instigates so many things.
His status as doctor is what gets Bill and his wife arguing a couple nights later, not only because it’s why he was called away, thus instigating her jealousy (she suspects he went with the two models), but because it compels Alice to ask him, incredulous, if he really believes his female patients aren’t attracted to him, and if he really believes he’s not attracted to them. This helps get started the whole argument that has Alice confessing her past attraction to a young naval officer she’d seen (just seen) while they were on vacation years earlier, for whom she would have left both Bill and their daughter if she could have just spent one night with him (just one night).
Their argument is interrupted by a phone call. It’s the daughter of an elderly patient; her father has died. Bill has to leave the argument prematurely, stung by jealousy. The daughter, Marion, expresses her love for Bill and forces a kiss on him — a kiss that Bill let’s go on just a little too long, given his physical strength (we’ve just seen him with his shirt off).
Back out on the streets, he’s propositioned by a prostitute named Domino, and the proposition is not one that Bill resists. He enters her apartment (through a red door) and is soon engaged in a kiss that is not at all forced. The kiss, like the earlier argument, is interrupted, this time by Alice, who wants to know when he’ll be home. (“Is that Mrs. Dr. Bill?” Domino asks.) This spoils the mood and Bill is back out on the streets.
On his stroll he stumbles upon the Sonata Cafe, the very jazz club where his old med-school buddy Nick Nightingale had told him he’d be playing. He goes inside; hears Nick play; chats with Nick. Nick takes a call during their talk. He writes something on a napkin: “FIDELIO.” When Cruise asks what that is is when Nick tells him it’s the password to the strange orgy he’ll be playing at. Cruise beseeches him for the time and place. Nick gives it to him, along with the counsel that he’ll need a costume.
Cruise takes a taxi to a costume shop. It’s called Rainbow and underneath the name of the store are the words “Under the Rainbow.” The shop is closed — it’s way after hours — but the owner, Mr. Milch, is awake in there. Bill asks if he can please rent a costume; he knows the previous owner of the building, a patient of his. He really is a doctor, he assures Mr. Milch, and pulls out his wallet to show his ID. (Mr. Milch is impressed, sort of, but relents only when Bill offers $200 above the rental price.)
In the shop Mr. Milich notices his daughter, underage, being preyed upon by two older men. He chases them away and she clings fondly to Bill, with a look that promises yet another kiss could be in the offing for him tonight if he so chooses. He doesn’t. He gets another taxi and is on his way to the distant country estate where the orgy is being held.
Before getting out of the cab, Bill asks the driver to wait for him. He tears a hundred-dollar [B]ill in half and gives one to the driver, promising the other half upon his return. Has Bill just torn himself in two? And when he goes into the mansion, is he leaving his authentic half behind? Has he made an implicit promise to return to his old self afterwards?
“As he moves deeper into this strange world,” Schnitzler wrote, in a passage Kubrick highlighted in his own copy of Traumnovelle, “he thinks back with affection to the stable world of his everyday realities.”
What Bill encounters in the mansion is far from an everyday reality. He finds a partner to pair off with and the two kiss, mask-to-mask, as seems to be the ritual here. And as with all kisses we give with our masked selves, the intimacy is superficial.
Bill seems to be noticed at the party by someone, who gives him a nod, or maybe a reproachful tilt of the head. Soon it’s made apparent to Bill that he’s in danger, and before long we get the dramatic scene of his literal exposure: he’s forced to remove the mask and then saved from further danger by a woman who sacrifices herself in his interest.
Having fled the orgy and left the whole night behind him without engaging in a single act of real sexual intimacy, Bill returns home early in the morning. Alice is laughing in her sleep. When she awakes, she confesses to Bill a dream she’s just had, in which she was having sex with a hundred men and laughing at him all the while. So much is now exposed to Bill in the morning’s evocative blue light, and yet so little is revealed.
The next morning he retraces his steps from the night before. At a diner nextdoor to the Sonata Cafe, he’s able to find out Nick’s address from a waitress there. She obviously knows Nick intimately; and besides, as Bill assures her, presenting ID, he’s a doctor.
Bill goes to Nick’s hotel and learns from the desk clerk (Alan Cumming, playing a man obviously attracted to Bill, and not just because, as Bill assures him, he’s a doctor) that Nick checked out just several hours earlier, conspicuously roughed-up and under civilian escort.
Bill continues the downward descent of his trip over the rainbow by returning to the Rainbow costume shop. He returns the bag but is told the mask is missing from it. “Can you just put it on the [B]ill, please?” he asks, as if, by agreeing to purchase the mask, he’s taken ownership of this shadow side of his self — as if he has, in a very real way, put it on Bill.
Next he returns to the mansion, looking so innocuous in the bright mid-morning light, where the gatekeeper hands him an implicitly threatening note demanding that he cease his inquiries.
Later that night Alice is helping their daughter, Helena (Madison Eginton), with her math homework while Bill looks on from the kitchen. Even though we know Bill’s pain must have returned from a combination of thinking about Alice’s dream (her recounting of it is playing in his head in a none-too-subtle voiceover) and seeing her with the daughter she would have sacrificed to run off with the naval officer, it’s fun to read another meaning into this scene.
Notice that when Alice asks Helena the question (“Joe has how much more money than Mike?”), Helena knows the answer right away, but when Alice asks her how she arrived at the answer (“So is it gonna be a subtraction or an addition?”), Helena has to think about it before answering(“Um, ‘How much more?’ means that it would be a subtraction”). Similarly, Bill has apparently made the instinctual decision that home is where he belongs — that what’s out there is more dangerous and less desirable than what’s right here — but he doesn’t know exactly how he’s arrived at the answer.
So it is that later that night he returns to Domino’s apartment, as if to find the answer. Domino’s not home, but her roommate — absent the previous night — is. She comes close to giving Bill his first extramarital sexual experience of the movie before interrupting things to tell him that Domino may not be coming back, having learned that she’s HIV-positive. He then calls Marion, daughter of the man whose death sent Bill on this whole journey the other night — or he tries to. It’s her husband who answers the phone and so Bill hangs up.
Now he’s both spooked and frustrated, more so than he’d been before leaving home that night, and it’s about to get worse. On the street he notices he’s being trailed by a man on foot. He ducks behind a newsstand and purchases a New York Post. (The man who sells it to him is played by Kubrick’s longtime chauffeur/handyman Emilio D’Alessandro, so redolent in this shot of the man selling papers announcing FDR’s death in the first photograph Kubrick ever sold to Look magazine — the one that started his career. Kubrick had asked the man in the photo to look dejected, meaning that he essentially directed both shots.)
When Bill ducks into a cafe to read the paper, he sees that a model resembling the one who’d saved him at the orgy has just died of an apparent drug overdose. (The cafe Bill is in resembles that in Van Gogh’s Night Cafe. We’ve recently seen Alice at home with Helena wrapping a coffee-table compilation of Van Gogh’s work.)
He goes to the hospital, and, apparently because he’s a doctor, is allowed to view the body.
The corpse resembles not only the woman who’d saved him at the orgy but the woman he’d saved at Victor’s party. He leans in as if he’s going to kiss her. As he’s leaving the hospital, Bill receives the call on his cell from Vic saying he wants to meet with him.
They meet in Vic’s lair, the same retreat within his mansion where Bill had saved the overdose victim. Around that pool-of-blood pool table, they discuss Bill’s recent adventures. Victor knows everything — he was at the party, and is the one who’s been having Bill followed. Even fierce defenders of the film — most notably Kubrick’s great friend and sometime collaborator, the writer Michael Herr — claim this scene is too talky and needlessly expository, but I couldn’t possibly disagree more. Its revelations are real revelations, and what gets talked about over that table — and the way it gets talked about — casts a bright if ominous light over everything that’s come before. (Something also needs to be said here about Sidney Pollack as Vic Ziegler, striking just the right balance between fraternal and avuncular, while also givng the impression that beneath his friendliness lies every ounce of the power and degeneracy he suggests. His performance is easily one of the most effective things in the movie.)
When Bill gets home following his talk with Vic, the house is quiet. He turns off the luminous array of lights on the family tree, having arrived at the end of the rainbow. For his journey he is ready to encounter what awaits him in the bedroom: the mask, which Alice has found and is lying on the pillow beside her. Finally forced to own up to his shadow self, to confess his noctambulations of recent nights, Bill and Alice are at last ready for a reconciliation with meaning.
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