Because I was extraordinarily sheltered as a child, the first genuinely erotic movie that I ever managed to see all the way through was The Hunger. It’s a terrible thing when the first taste of cinematic erotica that a boy gets is brilliantly done.
The Hunger set the bar almost impossibly high. I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of love scenes since, scenes in Hollywood blockbusters, scenes in avant-garde erotica, and scenes in unabashed pornographic romps. But such scenes almost invariably make me laugh. Maybe it’s the fact that the performers can’t quite forget the fact that they’re surrounded by lights and technicians, but I laughed at the theater during the ridiculous sex scene in Ghost; I laughed in my living room during the unendurably pompous sex scenes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being; and I laughed and struggled vainly to be aroused by the sex scenes that constitute Pussyman 4.
I don’t think sex is funny. I think it’s hot. Really, I’m an unequivocal supporter of sex. I still think the sex scenes in The Hunger are incredibly hot. But movies very rarely succeed in giving us sex scenes; more often than not, they give us playing-at-sex scenes instead.
I consider Eyes Wide Shut to be something of a triumph for director Stanley Kubrick because he manages, in the film, to present sex without making us laugh. I don’t mean to suggest that he makes us hot either, for he doesn’t. But he does an excellent job of presenting sex in a ritualized manner that doesn’t make me laugh precisely because it never attempts to be hot. I don’t think it is going too far to say that in Eyes Wide Shut Kubrick does for sex the very thing that he did for violence in A Clockwork Orange: He stylizes it.
I lack the vocabulary to articulate how profoundly I hated 9 1/2 Weeks. Neither can I adequately explain how it is that Peter Greenaway’s casual attitude toward nudity turns 8 1/2 Women into a completely anti-sexual exercise. And for similar reasons, I suppose I would be wasting electrical impulses in trying to explain how Kubrick’s ritualization of sex in Eyes Wide Shut manages to retain the intensity of sexuality without becoming awkward. I think perhaps it has something to do with the way that I don’t have to question the sincerity of anyone’s desire to please when that desire is expected to be masked.
If we set aside the sex scenes, however, we are left with a bit of a mess, the most wrongheaded ingredient of which is Tom Cruise. Cruise plays a doctor named Bill Harford who, like Othello, is destined to make it all the way through his drama without ever quite managing to get laid. It’s absolutely incredible how many opportunities he has to act on his sexual impulse. But we are never allowed to forget that it is Tom Cruise up there on the screen, which means that his character can’t possibly have a sexual impulse. I’m not even sure that we can say Cruise has an impulse to photosynthesize without doing an injustice to plants.
The one and only Cruisean impulse, of course, is toward inertia. And he delivers convincingly. I don’t pay enough attention to Hollywood big shots to know much about the relationship between Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, but I’m pretty sure that if Kidman had a single shred of affection for her husband, she wouldn’t have bothered about acting up to the level of her marginal talents. In the scenes in which she appears with Cruise, his unfathomable incompetence manages to make her look like a latter-day Katherine Hepburn.
As for the plot, I suppose the audience is expected to play along with the likelihood that the whole thing is a dream. If so, I don’t think it’s an altogether uninteresting dream. Dr. Harford stumbles into what appears to be some sort of secret sexual society and is eventually noticed by those in charge as an intruder. He is allowed to leave only after one of the sexual slave-priestess figures volunteers to redeem him.
The next day, the pianist who told him about the secret society disappears and the slave-priestess turns up dead in a morgue. Suddenly the film feels very like a Thomas Pynchon novel. Hidden connections appear to be everywhere. Motivations are inscrutable. Nothing is as it seems, and yet everything appears to fit into a pattern.
Dr. Harford becomes a rather hilarious detective who shoves his AMA license into the face of anyone that he thinks might be able to help him solve the mystery of how far the secret society has gone in order to preserve its secrecy. I’ll admit that I cackled every single time Tom Cruise whipped out his wallet to prove that he was a doctor. That recurring gag alone is good for more laughs than the average Hollywood comedy.
Dr. Harford’s problem, however, is that he is ultimately uncertain about whether it is more important to solve the mystery concerning the secret society or to find someone who will have sex with him. There are lots of women who want to have sex with him--a pair of models at a party, a prostitute who thinks he’s ’nice, ’ an infatuated patient, and even the daughter of a man who runs a costume shop--but something always comes up to keep anything of Dr. Harford’s from coming up. It’s uncanny. It’s almost as if we’re being subjected to the would-be wet dreams of an impotent man.
Eventually, a friend of Harford’s named Ziegler (Sidney Pollock) feels compelled to explain that it is extremely important for Harford to stop investigating the secret society. He also provides explanations (uncorroborated, of course) about the disappearance of the pianist and the death of the slave-priestess.
Harford gives up his search not necessarily because he is intimidated by Ziegler, nor because he finally gets some nookie, but because his daughter wants to go Christmas shopping. While the little girl runs around the toy store trying to secure her parents’ interest in the toys that have caught her eye, Bill and Alice Harford attempt to resolve the marital difficulties that they have gotten themselves into by having a series of unnecessarily spiteful and unnaturally suspended conversations about their sexual desires. When Alice uses a single expletive to propose what it is that they need to do in order to reconcile, most people will be relieved to learn that the movie is over.
But I wasn’t. I have become peculiarly adept at ignoring Tom Cruise. It’s an essential survival technique for the twenty-first century man; and I’m nothing if not a survivor. It’s true that Cruise is in virtually every scene and that he sucks the life out of every word before releasing it from the prison of his mouth. But the scenes themselves are really quite beautiful. The pacing of the movie was, in my opinion, almost perfect. I’ll even be so bold as to admit that I quite liked the sharp, minimalist piano work that suffuses the film. After nearly three hours, I wanted more. So I can’t say it was all bad.