You Only Live Twice

On desire, duality, and the unheimlich.

— This essay was originally published by Film International on Volume 18 Issue 3 (2020) of their print edition. Thank you to Daniel Lindvall and Clara Miranda Scherffig.

Stanley Kubrick’s swansong Eyes Wide Shut (1999) opens with a warm, sensually charged glance at Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) undressing her black gown to the dangling saxophone notes of Shostakovich’s Waltz №2. In the blink of an eye, before she has the chance to turn around toward the camera or pick her dress up, the screen goes black and the film title appears. It feels like one of those half-dream liminal states, straddling the figurative and the literal until something wakes you right on the highlight moment. Of course, there’s much more going on in this elusive six seconds prelude than meets the eye (it’s hard not to look at Nicole Kidman, after all), which is one of the threads that weave the narrative of the film together: that of looking and not seeing, of being blind with wide eyes, of perceiving without acknowledging. This is the film where, quoting Michel Chion, “what does not happen is much more important than what does”, where the visionary director works on the off-screen, on the theme of the invisible, on the evocative power of words. This tableau is Kubrick’s early suggestion to withstand the erotic spellbound and focus on what’s beyond it. “You’re not even looking at it” Alice replies to her husband Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) in the next scene, who has no shadow of a doubt about his wife’s splendor in view of the ritzy holiday party thrown by Bill’s wealthier patient, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack).

Accordingly to Kubrick’s previous work (The Shining and Full Metal Jacket above all), Eyes Wide Shut is a hotbed of contradiction, duality, and ambivalence. Its source material is Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (Dream Novel — 1926), a mittel-european little gem based in fin-de-siècle Vienna that caught Kubrick’s attention in the late 60s and simmered ever since, putting the movie in a thirty-years perspective. Schnitzler was a contemporary and devoted reader of Sigmund Freud, with whom he shared interest in hysteria, the uncanny and the mechanism of dreamwork. Freudian writings largely influenced Schnitzler’s prose style and their mutual appreciation led to a correspondence in which Freud interestingly wrote: “I think I avoided you out of a kind of fear of meeting my double”. Doubling and repetition seem to be at the core of what Freud, Schnitzler and Kubrick care about in their work. And by any measures, every element of this movie refers to its equivalent counterpart, in a looping juxtaposition of symmetrical facets, starting with the antithetical title, an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. But what sparked the director’s interest from Schnitzler’s read is desire, and the thorny territory of its cultural backdrop — human nature, as primitive as it can be: jealous, unfaithful and utterly terrified. At the Ziegler’s, after briefly dancing together in the ballroom — which resembles a warmer, glowy version of The Shining ’s Gold Room (everything is a version of something else, isn’t it?) — the couple split, and during their party wanderings, each indulges on potentially perilous dalliances. Tipsy and bored, Alice is being hit on by a slick middle-aged, eye-roll-inducing Hungarian gent, while Bill is being walked “where the rainbow ends” by two foreign models. Although someway pandering his avances, Alice ultimately refuses her seducer — “because I am married”. Doctor Harford plays along too, but when the models’ interest becomes unequivocally forward he shows the first signs of trepidation by detangling from them, growing stern, and parroting what they propose him — a pattern of behavior that recurs whenever he’s nervous and indecisive (that is, pretty much the whole time when in sweet company, to the point one could start to wonder if he is even into women after all). All things considered, his calling away to help Ziegler upstairs with an ODd prostitute feels more like a rescue rather than a hindrance. While Alice’s unambiguous rejection doesn’t need an external cause — in other words, her no means no — Bill doesn’t know what to say only because he doesn’t know what he wants, and is therefore incapable of providing “a straight fucking answer”.

Kubrick’s Man is steadily obsessive about his need to be in charge of his own fate, and his cinema is about the complexity behind the ways in which that attempt to control collapses. Thus, when Alice confesses to Bill the inexplicable attraction she felt exchanging a glance with a naval officer during their previous summer trip, and the far worse perspective of trading her picture-perfect family for a one-night-stand with that handsome stranger, an ill-defined desperation takes root in Bill, in what is arguably the most delightful dialogue sequence Kubrick ever directed. Female honesty cannot but trouble the man who doesn’t ignore the existence of masks — the amiable downstairs host turned into upstairs-bathroom (where else?) depraved trash Ziegler — but finds his wife to have worn one as well. Bill’s perception of his wife, and women in general, is delusive because he is stuck with a reactionary idea of genders where he dismisses jealousy because his hubris tells him his wife would never cheat on him. “I’m sure of you”, he says looking at her and nodding his head, which only makes a high-on-pot Alice fall wheezing on the floor. As film professor Dennis Bingham points out, this is the kind of line a man says expecting to hear “MY HERO!” in return. But Alice shatters his illusion, introducing him to the power of female agency and the coexistence of a situation where a woman can love her husband dearly and fiercely desire another man at the same time, with one thing propelling the other and vice versa. She doesn’t hide, not anymore at least, what comes naturally to her, although unpleasant, if not aching, while Bill is distraught by this feral side of his newly found unpredictable wife because it diverges from his blind belief that “women basically don’t think like that”. We tend to forget that human beings are walking contradictions; our actions oppose our thoughts, we think we live by morals and principles but eventually betray our own beliefs. We are inherently inconsistent and fragmented. We desire things, a certain lifestyle, we think we know what we want, and once we achieve it we need to distance ourselves from it, to escape our own reality when it becomes too intimate, familiar, real. This is why Alice’s fantasy ignited precisely when she felt closer to Bill and their child, when she felt loved, fulfilled and complete. The revelation leads Bill to experience the unheimlich , a strong, bivalent feeling of estrangement and disquiet triggered primarily by the disclosure of all that which ought to have remained concealed and secret and, that does not add up to what we acknowledge as familiar and domestic. In other words, it’s a cognitive dissonance. Who is this woman? Who is really my wife? What follows is the ruthless depiction of the frailty of man when their masculinity is called into question. Bill’s reaction shot to Alice’s soliloquy is drenched in breathless opacity and adds to the Kubrick Stare Collection of ambiguous derangement that sets him on a harrowing journey toward his own hunt for desire and sexual validation that is doomed to failure, because we know that in Kubrick there’s no sense of direction within the odyssey — only spirals.

In that New York winter night, Bill hears another unexpected confession from Marion (Marie Richardson), the daughter of a patient who declares her love for him, right next to her deceased father. She kisses him, but he rejects her and the inappropriate situation they’re in, exacerbated by the arrival of her unsuspecting fiancé. This context seems to echo the story he just heard from Alice, in the way that a woman could be overwhelmed by her attraction to a man she barely even knows. Out on the streets, the image of Alice surrendering to the touch of the naval officer plagues Bill’s imagination in black and cyan fashion, but his frustration outburst doesn’t go beyond slapping his fist into his other hand. Thereafter, a prostitute named Domino (Vinessa Shaw) picks him up, takes him home, and right when the prospect of adultery becomes tangible and no disturbance was likely his cellphone rings; it’s Alice calling — quite a knock at the good doctor’s conscience. Again, he can’t get anywhere over a kiss, and now being unfaithful would mean to willfully ignore the consideration of his wife — “the only reason you wouldn’t fuck those models is out of consideration for me. Not because you really wouldn’t want to”. So he leaves.

Bill Harford could certainly come across as a disappointing character — and the film doesn’t make much effort in encouraging engagement with him. Every single female character in this movie (and one male) wants to sleep with him, but his lack of vitality and sexual drive — along with his infertile reveries (his recurring mental image of Alice’s virtual intercourse with her Lothario is as banal as a pornographic tape framing could be, to the point where his idle mind’s eye is incapable of color perception) — provide for quite underwhelming rendez-vous where his fears keep ahead of his libido. Here dwells the main divergence between him and Alice, who despite being petrified by her attraction to the officer, was eager to follow wherever that fever led her. Although well aware of being courted by a plethora of women, a crippling inhibition for the unknown and shared intimacy has got a hold on Bill. Shouldn’t a doctor be more comfortable around human bodies and nudity, especially the one of strangers? Perhaps there’s something else at the root of his sexual disturbance. Perhaps, his quest for desire can’t work because the fantasy he is after isn’t even his own; he is obsessed with Alice’s desire towards a stranger and feels jealous about her — maybe for the first time ever since he discovers what’s behind the mask of marital fidelity. He is destroyed by the mere notion of betrayal, which he, by default, translates to a brutal denial of their love, and therefore, their marriage. But, above all, he feels envious: he wants to experience the same kind of ravishing lust for another woman because his wife experienced it in the first place, not because he autonomously craves so. According to anthropologist René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, this imitative scheme puts the concept of desire in a derivative triangular process: “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind”. After the party, the couple’s passion for each other was rekindled because other individuals pursued and desired them during the evening, leading the spouses to eventually do The Bad Bad Thing. Watching Doctor Harford mooning around aimlessly in the Village, we are under the impression that he is missing the whole point: true erotic abandon cannot be manufactured, but befalls in the blink of an eye as an irresistible undignifying passion. Plus, she never really did cheat on him. She only wallowed in the eventuality.

In Eyes Wide Shut, chance, hitches and circumstances have essential implications over the characters. Yet again, Bill is adrift in the streets and stumbles upon the Sonata Café, where his old chum Nick Nightingale (Todd Field), whom he accidentally met at Ziegler’s party (which significance can’t be stressed enough), is playing in a jazz quartet. Bill is intrigued to know that later that evening Nick will be playing another show to a secret location that requires him to perform blindfolded, at the presence of splendid women in costume. The Dottore is now more enticed than ever to have his own little adventure, despite Nick’s reticence and attempts to disillusion him — because, like a baby, the more people say no to him, the more he wants in.

The mystique of that night both bewitches and dreads Bill to the gates of this extravagant yet somewhat impersonal arabesque mansion, where anonymity requires all its guests to wear a costume and a mask. This is the apogee of his errancy, the threshold beyond which “there’s no turning back”. Bill is asked for the password to access the event: Fidelio, a word that should alert him to relinquish, call it a day and go back home to his wife. And yet he doesn’t take the hint. Shrouded in a haze of incense smoke, willowy models are partaking a sinister pagan ceremony, around which the camera goes in circles, and whose ambiguity is augmented by a beautifully disturbing musical piece played by Nick (composed by Jocelyn Pook). In the other rooms, bodies graphically shove over each other in an eerie, miserable way; submissive women are the abstraction of Men’s fantasy of transgression. Instead of intimacy and passion, Bill finds artificial, impersonal sex. People touching, at the opposite sides of the abyss that’s in between. People who wear both invisible behavioral masks in order to survive their everyday life and these carnival material ones to be relieved from the burden of exposure. Is everyone ever really themself? Maskenfreiheit is the german word that expresses the specific kind of freedom and excitement of wearing one; they both alienate and give the illusion of belonging. Moreover, the sense of anonymity feels somber, rather than liberating, and it’s even difficult to distinguish pleasure from displeasure. Clearly, Bill is out of his element, as well as of his socioeconomic register: this is the underbelly of high society, and in his attempt to lose his identity and keep a low profile, the doctor’s lack of caution — such as, true to Kubrick’s razor-sharp irony, arriving in a cab hoping to be as invisible and anonymous as possible whereas everybody else parked their limos and fancy Rolls Royces outside — makes him leave a breadcrumbs trail that soon sells him as an intruder. After ignoring the warnings of a mysterious woman — “You don’t belong here. You are in great danger” — he is lured to the center — the eye — of a seemingly choreographed theatrics where he is ordered to remove both his Venetian mask and his clothes, over insufferably strident piano strokes (from György Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata ). Until the same mysterious woman interrupts the proceedings, comes to his rescue and sacrifices for him.

Kubrick’s entire opus relies on the dialectic symmetrical relationship between first and latter parts of his cursed-by-repetition narratives, in which his Man dreary squirms around for some kind of agency. In the wake of a long night of unfulfilled sexual validation, Bill comes back home and finds Alice laughing in her sleep, swath in a cerulean-hued glow. He wakes her up, worried she was having a nightmare, but also hoping she could perhaps soothe the discomfort of his void. Yet the roles overturn: “I just had such a horrible dream”, she whispers ashamed, in need of reassurance, although it really sounded like she was having a good oneiric time. Her laughter signals the forthcoming of another revelation and a further humiliation in which Bill, again, is the laughingstock. In her dream, Alice and Bill are naked in a deserted city; Bill rushes away to find some clothes and as soon as he leaves, she finds herself in a garden, having sex with countless men (including the naval officer) while mocking at Bill with hysterical laughter. The haunting familiarity of the dream reverts him to the unheimlich state, as it is an uncanny reflection of Bill’s own night adventures, and shows what being perceived as invisible might do to the subconscious mind of a woman who’s bloodstream runs rampant (in comparison to Bill’s, if nothing else). It’s also a further expression of the feral nature of women Bill has been burned by during the night; it is true that we only see Alice in her ordinary domestic routine, never leaving their apartment as an individual — and only being brought to social events to be a wealthy doctor’s ornament. Yet her reclusiveness did nothing but strengthen her need to find a suitable repository for yearnings. And dreams come in handy when you’re locked in your unsexy daily unemployed-mother duties.

As an audience, we are intrigued by Kidman’s role and would like to learn more of — anatomy-wise she’s no mystery to us — being the only rounded, three-dimensional female character that Kubrick ever put on screen. Her strong sense of longing doesn’t really take away from her love for Bill, as he fails to understand; it rather adds to her complexity as a woman. She is self-knowledgeable, outspoken, a dominant figure if there was ever one, simply because she fiercely owns her sexuality, and it takes this little to tear a man like Bill apart.

Let’s talk about Tom Cruise now, because yes, Cruise is the only actor that could’ve played Dr. Bill Harford. His seemingly scarce emotional range and deadpan countenance well suites his lack of character. He is painfully clueless, vulnerably out of touch, therefore charming as hell, as there is often something intriguing about a pathetic character, in all his grey nothingness. Hollowness entails a de-characterization that feels one-dimensional, but eventually discloses as captivating and unfathomable, and his performance proves to be remarkably cohesive, given the uninterrupted 15 months of film shooting — everyone in this movie looks exhausted because they really were exhausted. If Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal) — another Kubrick character who’s interpretation has been largely criticized for lack of expressiveness variety — was a nobody who wanted to become somebody, Bill Harford was a nobody who eventually became somebody, specifically the doctor of New York City’s upper-class elite, which, after all, is just another way to say that he is a nobody. At his core he is, ultimately, as critic Thomas Allen Nelson writes, pathologically middle-class and ordinary.

All of Bill’s moonlight encounters became, as Schnitzler beautifully put it, “magically and painfully interfused with the treacherous illusion of missed opportunities”. With her dream story, Alice keeps — although unknowingly — Bill in detrimental pursuit and fuels his wish for eye-for-an-eye retaliation, therefore he gives another shot at his previous flirts, albeit the intentionality of his sex-oriented pursuit tells us that he will once again fall short. He calls Marion, but his fiancée answers the phone, which is enough for him to opt-out — couldn’t he wait a couple of hours just to see if she would pick up this time? No, no more waiting. If in the former night Bill was pursuing a desire — he had a desire to experience erotic desire — now he just wants consummation. The second, more hazardous yet somehow comforting choice would be Domino, as she resumes the function of passive funneling of male desire. But she’s not home. Her roommate would do as well, at this point, but Bill is given the biggest turn off there could be: Domino has just tested HIV positive. Bewildered, he returns to his erratic float around the city, where a man with a trench coat inaugurates a brief film noir segment in which Bill is being followed at a distance by this mysterious figure. This is not a stealthy kind of chase down; they walk slowly, heavily rattling on the wet asphalt floor, and most importantly, the man unnervingly makes sure the doctor is well aware of being followed. Mark Fisher would have said that Bill is an embodiment of the very essence of the Freudian unheimlich, in the way in which he is “haunted by an outside which he circles around but can never fully acknowledge or affirm”.

In Ian Fleming’s novel You Only Live Twice, James Bond attempts to write a haiku for a friend that goes:

You only live twice;

Once when you’re born,

And once when you look death in the face.

The sexuality in Eyes Wide Shut is inherently related to a sense of fatality and danger, to the point of coexistence; think Marion acting out her fantasy on Bill, with the corpse of his father literally lying next to them. In this scenario, death actually stokes Marion to cross the line because, to some extent, affairs are an attempt to beat back mortality — in other words, to feel alive. Bill looks death in the face in more than one occasion, but it never gets as figurative as well as literal as when he goes to see the body of Amanda Curran, a former beauty queen who died of overdose. Bill thinks this is the girl who saved him at the orgy, meaning it could/should have been him laying on that steel drawer. His head starts pirouetting in paranoid consternation, as he hovers a few inches away from her wide lifeless eyes. Death always feels around the corner and dovetailed onto the sexual discourse.

In stylistic terms, the motif of double is punctuated by the subversion of one of the fundamental rules of spatial relationships of filmmaking, the 180-degree rule. During a dialogue sequence, when the camera crosses the line within one cut, the reverse of perspective extends the experience of the unheimlich to the audience, in the way in which it fosters a disquieting flinch in the viewer, since the characters switch their staging position without moving. Why are we on the opposite side of the conversation now? Why are we looking in this other direction? We may not be consciously aware of this, because when caught up in the narration — and when properly done — we’re not even supposed to notice the change at all, if not with our mind’s eye. In Eyes Wide Shut, reverse cuts visually amplify the notion of intrinsic duality of both the cultural and psychological sphere and represent a connection with the other half, the mirrored image, the passing through it.

Victor Ziegler makes Bill crawl under his skin when he confesses that he was at the masked party and saw what happened, in a wearily lengthy scene whose supposed intent is to shed light on most of the film’s ambiguities, but ultimately intensify them. Ziegler seems to be claiming two incompatible things at once; that the whole “play-acted, ‘take me’ phony sacrifice ” was staged, with no real-world consequence, to scare Bill to silence and discourage further inquiries; but also that all that happened in that mansion was dreadfully bigger-than-them-important. Yet he tries to reassure Bill that he had no responsibility in Amanda Curran’s death — whom yes, was the same woman that sacrificed at the orgy and overdosed in the bathroom at the Christmas party — because “it was always gonna be just a matter of time with her”. Her death is mere junkie-statistics, there’s no mystery to torture oneself with. Does Bill believe him? Do we?

Kubrick reinforces the persistent motif of unforgiving circularity by setting the events around Christmas festivities, a yearly recurrence that recalls a ritual and cyclical temporality one cannot avoid, escape or cancel. Bill’s adventures officially come to an end when he returns home and switches off the Christmas tree lights of his apartment, a symbolic gesture that shuts down the fantasy world and foreshadows his coming clean with Alice. As he enters his bedroom, the unheimlich strucks him one last time with the sight of the mask he wore at the masquerade laying on his pillow in lieu of his own face. A vision of two things that don’t belong together, of words that cannot coexist, and a failure of absence, when something is present where there should be nothing. He burst into sobbing tears as he kneels towards the bed where Alice is sleeping. This is the strongest emotional response of the movie, the one that leads Bill to drop his figurative mask, bare his soul and confess everything that has been going on in the last 48 hours.

Along with the notion of duality, the circle is indeed the other ever-present determinant at the core of Kubrickian cinema, which owns an intrinsic dooming sense of repetition of the same patterns, of going nowhere and not being able to progress, and ultimately learn nothing. “Life goes on, until it doesn’t” as Ziegler would tell Bill, who is lucky enough get a second chance (LUCKY TO BE ALIVE) — should we make a point about the iniquity of the wealthy and powerful who get away with everything at the expense of the lower classes who always pay the higher price? — not only with his friendships and career (Ziegler will still be his friend and patient) but primarily with his marriage, as if nothing has or will change. In the closing scene, while taking their daughter to the shopping mall, Alice takes the initiative in setting the terms of their reconciliations and believes they should be grateful to have the chance to turn a crisis into an opportunity. What matters is that at this moment they’re awake, and they should remain grounded in present reality “for a long time to come”. Still, Bill — who never spoke much during the movie, and when he did he did more harm than good — pronounces a word that dreadfully reverts him to the “I’m sure of you” type of hero attitude: “forever”. It’s the wretchedly tragic human tendency to reiterate, the cue that he has not learned from his experiences and mistakes and still thinks in immature terms of happily-ever-after romantic love. Alice dismisses that word because she is aware that it is a dangerous, different way of altering, therefore escaping, the reality — whatever the hell that means — while what they should embrace is the unpredictability and singularity of their humanness. In this scenario, words aren’t even relevant, because, speaking of present reality, the impending and only realistic thing they must do to reconcile is, as a dead serious Alice candidly puts it, “fuck”. It’s Kubrick’s signature of economy of statement, where all of the elusiveness and ambiguity evaporate with a single imperative monosyllable that drags (or should drag) Bill back to the real world. There’s no need for the reverse shot of his reaction — we are well acquainted with his countenance in regards to women’s audacity towards sexuality, and there’s reason to believe that such undiluted candor is no less threatening to him than it used to be, despite the healing encouragement behind it.

Kubrick suggests that in this unfaithfulness-soaked legacy of western civilization, no one is innocent. Yet, his sharply singular storytelling has always suspended any moral judgment: ultimately, it’s hard to discern whose transgression has caused more harm in the relationship, and it’s even beside the point. Unquestionably, Alice’s all-too-real dreams and fantasies have an intrinsic emotional authenticity that Bill’s might-have-beens can only dare to dream, something that himself acknowledges when he states that “no dream is ever just a dream”. So maybe Bill has learned something, after all — the mere possibility opens a crack on a glimmer of hope.

Shostakovich’s Waltz №2 returns to fold over and seal Kubrick’s entire oeuvre, which proves to be extremely malleable yet never exhausted by the double readings of its duality, as its lifeblood flows into the elusive ambiguities in between. Alice’s desire and dreams, Bill’s fears and distress, the faces behind the carnival masks, the sacrificial death/homicide of Amanda Curran — the invisible, non-graphic elements — are the ones that make Eyes Wide Shut a confounding watch that stays with you, not just for the hauntingly exquisite piece of art it is, but also for its unfathomable, existential reach.

The waltz closes — or should we say, reopens — the pas de deux, implying a return to the boring yet reassuring routine of married life, as the screen blacks out.

You only live twice. Or so it seems.