Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick's Swan Song

What exactly is wrong with Eyes Wide Shut? Let’s find out!

Music is from Epidemic Sound

SOURCES:

Seth Abramovich. “Searching for Shelley Duvall: The Reclusive Icon on Fleeing Hollywood and the Scars of Making ‘The Shining’” The Hollywood Reporter (2021).

Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, City Lights Publishers (1986).

Roger Ebert. “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999).

Kevin Filipski. “Jan Harlan Keeps His Eyes Wide Open On New Ideas” Times Square (2007).

Michael Herr, “Kubrick” Vanity Fair, (2000). 

James Israel. “Kubrick Apparently Thought “Eyes Wide Shut” Was A ‘Piece of Shit’?” Indie Wire (2006).

Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams, “The Elusive Jewishness of “Eyes Wide Shut” — Stanley Kubrick’s Final Film” Forward (2019). 

Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic” Sister Outsider, Crossing Press (1984).

Stefan Mattessich, “Grotesque Caricature: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut as the Allegory of Its Own Reception” Postmodern Culture, Volume 10, Number 2, (2000).

Amy Nicholson, Eyes Wide Shut at 15: Inside the Epic, Secretive Film Shoot that Pushed Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman to Their Limits, Vanity Fair (2014).

Paul O’Callaghan, “Eyes Wide Shut, 20 years on: how does Stanley Kubrick’s last testament stand up?” BFI (2021).

Stephen Pizzello, “A Sword in the Bed: Eyes Wide Shut” American Cinematographer (2020). 

Ed Power, “Eyes Wide Shut: 20 years on, Stanley Kubrick’s most notorious film is still shrouded in mystery” Independent (2019). 

Jonathan Rosenbaum & Peter Loewenberg in Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film, and the Uses of History, University of Wisconsin Press (2006).

Schnitzler to Theodor Reik, December 31, 1913, Schnitzler Briefe, 1913-31, 35-36. 

Lee Siegel, “EYES WIDE SHUT: WHAT THE CRITICS FAILED TO SEE IN KUBRICK’S LAST FILM” Harper’s October 1999: 76-83.

Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, Indiana University Press, (2005).

[BroeyDeschanel]

Guys I don't actually think org*es are bad lmao. I was trying to be hilarious.

[AcolytesOfHorror]

The way Kubrick's actors speak so highly of a man who often made them miserable reminds of when I was a freshman in college, performing in this play being directed by someone I now realize was having a mental breakdown. (We spent 6 hours of tech rehearsal on the first page alone.) Many of my castmates remember her as an abusive tyrant, and she probably was, but in a fucked up way it's one of my favorite acting experiences. Most of my actor/director relationships have been pretty formal and professional. Clock in/clock out kinda thing. With her, there was something intimate about the way she expected us to pour out our deepest vulnerabilities and mix it in with hers. Her obsessiveness made that play The Most Important Thing In Our Lives for a few months, and I'll always feel connected to everyone who worked on it in ways I don't with most other artistic collaborators.

I don't mean to defend tyrannical behavior. She was fired shortly after and totally deserved it. Just thinking aloud about some confusing feelings those kind of stories always dig up for me.

Great work, as always!

[laartwork]

The movie suffered from celebrity backlash. But they were both great in it.
Tom Cruise's quiet and still inner rage as he hears her fantasy is amazing acting.

[jennynorberg]

I watched this film many years ago and completely forgot about the plot (besides the BIG BAD), but I still vividly remember the uncomfortable, weird feeling I had afterwards, like I had accessed a secret part of my brain..

[SukieOOO]

Eyes wide Shut gives me the exact same feeling i get when watching The Shining, no other two films have that feeling

[teona]

I read the book in school in German prior to watching the movie and all the things the critics said about the movie was exactly what the book felt like. The movie perfectly brought the feeling to film, it was a pretty good adaptation. It managed to make me uncomfortable but yet keep me hooked.

[TheLastOfTheRockstarsU]

I disagree entirely that Tom retreated into action films after eyes was shot. I think the work he did in that next 5 to 6 years was actually the most interesting work of his career. With films like Magnolia and vanilla sky and minority report and the last samurai and collateral. All of which his characters have no resemblance to each other. I think it’s the best streak he ever put together

[marinaserina]

I had no idea eyes wide shut was so hated by critics. I watched it when I turned 18 and I didn't like it but I couldn't stop watching. Now I rewatch once a year lol, and as I get older I feel something new

[poindextertunes]

I feel like EWS is the most realistic horror film thats ever been made. the real horrors of the world. the club none of us are in

[Melissa-twgp]

I can understand not liking the film, but I cannot imagine coming away from EWS thinking it’s “empty of ideas.” What a bizarre critique.

[John_Notmylastname]

I loved the whole cultish scene and will never forget how eery it made me feel while watching it. There was this certainty behind it. It had this feeling that you’ve stumbled upon something and you are going to have to work very hard to stay alive.

[pinkyhc]

Oh thank goodness someone is finally going to explain this movie to me.

[craigplanting]

This might be a small detail, but so often in this movie characters repeat lines of dialogue. The Russian costume store owner says something, then Cruise slowly repeats the line back to him. I've heard this is a trick sometimes used when the person repeating the line is trying to come up with a creditable lie. I'd love to know why Kubick used this throughout so much of the dialogue in Eyes Wide Shut.

[SecretTwilightGirl]

The mythos of the director is so interesting considering like you said filmmaking is an insanely collaborative experience. There is no movie, there is no culmination of the lofty artist’s ‘vision’, without the dull menial work of production who is scheduling the shoots, stapling the scripts, feeding the crew, measuring the set. Not to mention the countless unsung artists like the set designer, stylist, makeup artist, or even those who shape the film through lighting, sound, camera angles. Yet the movie is credited all to the director rather than the people on the ground doing the physical or boring tasks that make the product happen.

Even the act of putting the film together a lot of movies are truly formed by the editors yet they’re not given their credit. Learning that a lot of editors were women and that the female editor of the original Star Wars trilogy made that pop culture staple what it was was very eye-opening. As an artist I never want to discredit art or those who make it but it’s so typical of an individualistic culture likes ours to laud and reward directors that retain oppressive, singular creative control while leaving nothing for the community or people behind him. All regard is reserved for the idealized loner artist toiling away in his office with no thought to the wife or mother cleaning his laundry and wiping the asses of his children.

[tribudeuno]

I worked on what was to be Kubrick’s next movie after Eyes Wide Shut, the movie Ai. Since Kubrick died, the directing role was taken over Ai’s producer, Stephen Spielberg.

I think that - because of my immense respect for his genius - Kubrick’s last opus should be seen more in the way that musicologists see Beethoven’s last works, The Last Quartets. It is said of the quartets that they were not in Beethoven’s latest style, that they had gone far beyond what he had done previously. That they were ahead of their time. That nothing like the theory behind the last quartets would be done again until 80 years later by Bartok. Kind of like when I was told that there is in the last movement of Mozart’s last symphony - No. 41 (The Jupiter), which is one of the last 3 symphonies that Mozart wrote during a 70 day period when one of his children died of typhoid and he didn’t have a pot to piss in and he never heard performed - that there was a 12 tone row (serial music), which wouldn’t be done again until Schoenberg in the 20th Century.

[zachnew]

I think Tom Cruise's scoiciopathy is what makes him such a good actor

[chriswilson]

19:28 "A bit eerie"? I actually find that scene pretty scary with the backwards music and the creepy masks. It's the best part of the movie for me for sure.

[ExiledGypsy]

Like all his films Eyes Wide Shut is about many things but the one thing that I think people haven't recognised is that the film is a critique of the middle-class professionals who although educated are like prisoners on an Island detached from their overlords on the top or those below them living a narrow spectrum of "safe" emotions where anything a bit risque shakes the foundation of their reality.

[slugboard]

eyes wide shut is one of my favorite movies of all time. kubrick is my favorite director and have seen all of his films multiple times, but this is the one i am always eager and excited to rewatch. brb gonna go rewatch.

[Bradley_Lute]

This movie reminds me a lot of Martin Scorsese's After Hours. Man goes into the underworld and is tormented by a fever dream of dangerous and mysterious women. But it may be exactly what he needs to rouse him from the continual waking dream he is in.