Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Tom Cruise & Nicole Kidman

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Eyes Wide Shuts is a film of potentialities and frustration. Kubrick proposes a world dichotomies: night and day; male and female; loyalty and revenge; high and low society. It's a film about a night of sexual explosion in the city and, literally, the morning after.

It's a film where the blue night encroaches into the golden day, where social circumstances barely contain sexual frustration and desire. In Eyes Wide Shut, the social and sexual extends into the personal in the form of marriage where familiarity, adaptation and responsibility suppress the sexual urges toward one's partner.

The first night in the film concerns an on-coming city-wide orgasm. An orgasm that circumstance and coincidence denies Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise). The next day the city has been satisfied while the good doctor remains frustrated. In trying to reconstruct the previous night, he realizes that the city refuses to acknowledge anything of the previous night's debauchery.

Even in his dream-reality of his night exploring the city's orgasm, the doctor's desire are frustrated. Even his wife was satisfied in her dream (a nightmare, she claims, but only after awakening to her husband).

Eyes Wide Shut is a film about the unconscious nature of sexual desire, the encroaching of the id into the superego. It's structure follows the plot of a night and day's amorous encounter: the satisfied party content to ignore the previous night's events, the frustrated party wishing to repeat the experience successfully. Sex becomes a journey into a realm of absurd dream-logic. Rules that normally apply during the day offend during the night and most certainly vice versa. The following morning is both a literal and metaphorical awakening where both parties must obey the rules of the daytime while knowing what had happened before they slept. Eyes Wide Shut mimicks these events and illuminates the bizarre rituals and other strange goings-on of a sexually charged city and the confusion of being left unsatisfied.

February 9
apartment TV, late night

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