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Stanley Kubrick spent the last years of his life working on this film. And by the time Eyes Wide Shut went into general release in the United States, the director was already deceased, giving his final project the cachet of a farewell gesture-or perhaps a Last Judgment, since the Dies Irae from the Mozart Requiem can be heard at one point on the soundtrack. Yet its long awaited appearance turned out to be something of an anticlimax when most of the pre-release gossip turned out to be unjustified. No dazzling spectacle in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey nor even A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut (made available here as part of Warner Home Video's excellent set of Kubrick's films) was first of all a fable for the approaching millennium, directed with a breathtaking désinvolture that still seems astonishing several years later. One day, I hope, Eyes Wide Shut will be recognized as one of the most beautiful works in the history of the cinema.
Only in bad works of art or the artifacts of pop culture is it possible to make a facile distinction between the periphery of a work and its core. In an imaginative creation like Kubrick's last film, the limits of the core extend to its furthermost boundaries just as what could at first glance seem peripheral penetrates to its innermost recesses. Already, the opening shots of the Harfords in their stylish apartment getting ready to go out for a soiree go far beyond simply establishing a setting. The least that could be said about these powerfully iridescent, Ophulsian compositions set to music by Shostakovitch is how much more than functional they are: rather than simply establishing a particular locale, they serve to introduce us to a perversely enchanted world. The mise en scène is incantatory, but the spirits it is calling up are those of high-tech consumerism.
In these images, the décor glows with a maleficent radiance, making of the Harfords themselves little more than the props of their own property. Small wonder that such a culture finds the culmination of its most refined pleasures in the celebration of a Black Mass at a mansion on Long Island--movie trivia buffs will not fail to notice a visual allusion to Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest--attended by the crème de la crème of the rich, famous, and powerful, a ritual which blasphemously travesties the Christmas festivities taking place at the same moment and which has striking parallels to the events of de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom in both its literary version and its much later screen adaptation by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò o le 120 giornati di Sodoma (1975).
In the milieu in which the Harfords move, reified to the last degree, success is all a matter of remaining on the surface of things, and Bill Harford has thoroughly mastered that skill. But the surface begins to crack open one evening when his wife relates a fantasy about sleeping with a Naval officer they had briefly glimpsed at a resort. Bill reacts violently to this confession, insisting that he has never had similar fantasies of his own. But he cannot exorcise the images she has planted in his mind and they soon begin to take shape on the screen. Moreover, this fantasy which increasingly obsesses Harford opens up to a larger world of collective desires underlying the beautiful realm of surfaces in which Bill wishes to remain happily imprisoned. Forced to confront that underworld by series of encounters involving the daughter of a patient, a prostitute, and ultimately a Satanist coven, he can only reject it as a mystery.
The phrase "eyes wide shut" is virtually an etymological gloss on the word "mystery." In the words of Carl Kerényi (in his essay "The Mysteries of the Kabeiroi"), "The source of the term 'Mysteria'--as also of 'mystes' and 'mystikos'--consists in a verb whose ritual significance is 'to initiate' (µυeΐν), developed from the verb µύeιν, 'to close the eyes or mouth.'" He goes on to add, "the Mysteria begin for the mystes when, as sufferer of the event (µυούµeνος), he closes his eyes, falls back as it were into his own darkness, enters into the darkness." And is there anything less enigmatic about an audience sitting in a darkened theater, an audience which also could be said to fall back as it were into its own darkness, to enter its darkness--to borrow Kerenyi's formulation--watching this spectacle being enacted on screen?
It is Bill's friend, the musician Nick Nightingale who tells him of playing at an event whose specifics are unclear to him, since he has to play blindfolded. Nevertheless, the few details he has been able to spy upon after the blindfold slightly fell from his eyes the last time he performed rouse Bill's interest, and he demands to go along to the event. When Harford, the non-initiate, violates this mystery, he not only disrupts its performance, but commits a crime which can only be atoned for by a human sacrifice--that of the young woman whom Harford has previously rescued from a drug overdose at the fancy party the evening before.
Yet there is little mystery about this mystery, which continues in a perhaps more explicit vein the theme of archaic regression that recurs throughout Kubrick's work--perhaps most arrestingly in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which modern technology is presented as an outgrowth of the anthropoids' fetishization of the black obelisk which has descended to them from the heavens like the stone given by Gabriel to Abraham enshrined in the Kaaba. Civilization is constantly haunted by the specter of the barbaric past it has never been able to overcome, and the cult in Eyes Wide Shut is only a final incarnation of this key motif which Kubrick employed here for last time. After that death had the final word: Acta est fabula!
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| Additional DVD options | Edition | Discs | Price | New from | Used from |
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January 22, 2008 "Please retry" | Special Edition | 2 |
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| $20.98 | $16.98 |
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March 7, 2000 "Please retry" | R-Rated Edition | 1 | $26.00 | $3.76 |
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Unrated Two-Disc Special Edition
I think the Amazon product picture for this DVD is wrong. The Amazon product page shows exactly the same picture as the United States censored version (Eyes Wide Shut (2-disc Special Edition)). I've uploaded images of the DVD box I actually received (click "See customer images").
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