Recently, I did a review of Lacan and Contemporary Film edited by McGowan and Kunkle for Metapsychology Online. This resulted in my watching Stanley Kubrick's film Eyes Wide Shut again. The film garnered some negative reviews and even Roger Ebert who gave it a positive review did not like the ending.
The film is Stanley Kubrick's last work and was not released till after his death. It is based on Dream Story (Traumnovelle) by Arthur Schnitzler, a Viennese contemporary of Freud. In it, I think, Kubrick plays with the distinction between reality and fantasy especially as it relates self-destructiveness and threat.
The film has beautiful cinematography, shot in warm honey tones or in cool blues. The lighting is not related to daylight or dark scenes as even night scenes sometimes have the honey tones. Rather it seems related to a complex of factors I call life-oriented and death-oriented. In his chapter of the film book, Mark Pizzato had looked at aspects of the death instinct in the film. He sees the death instinct manifest in Bill's self-destructive quest for sexual gratification. Kubrick's use of lighting overall but in one scene in particular is, I think, illustrative of this. While they talk, Bill and Alice exist in the deathlike blue of their bedroom as in the background through the door to the hall we see the honey toned, warm light associated with their daughter's room. Throughout the film, the blue suggest death and the honey suggests life.
Perhaps being so near death himself, Kubrick was instinctively and acutely aware of this nuance. The principle characters Bill and Alice (played by the then married couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman) have an argument as Alice tells Bill about a fantasy she has had about a sailor. Bill cannot at first believe that his wife might be unfaithful. She is to him wife and mother, an extension of what he wants her to be, almost a nonentity in her own right. The conversation provides fuel for him to crash a very secretive party, an orgy, partly in anger and revenge against his wife's assertion of individuality. He finds out about it from a friend who unlike Bill had dropped out of medical school. The friend now a musician plays the gig at the party blindfolded. Bill secures a mask and costume armed with the password and watches as the orgy unfolds. But he is found out and forced to unmask himself. When the threat from these menacing and secretive people is at its most intense, a woman offers to take his place, to accept his punishment. Bill is afraid.
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