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00:00Are you here with anyone tonight, Alice?
00:04With my husband.
00:06Oh, how sad.
00:08Eyes Wide Shut opens on an image that captures what this film is all about.
00:13To the spying viewer, this is clearly an erotic image.
00:17Yet to the woman's husband,
00:19who's theoretically the person observing this view,
00:22the sight is mundane,
00:24and that's signaled in the quick, casual nature of the shot.
00:28Everything that follows in this story of the woman,
00:31Nicole Kidman's Alice, and her spouse, Tom Cruise's Bill,
00:35elaborates on the ideas embodied in that opening image.
00:38The focus of Eyes Wide Shut is the scary connection
00:42between the erotic and the anonymous.
00:44It explores the role that fantasies of strangers play in our sex lives,
00:50and it suggests that married people are ultimately also strangers to each other.
00:55Stanley Kubrick's final film was one of his rare box office successes,
01:00but it's among his more underrated works.
01:02And that's perhaps because on first viewing,
01:05it's a little difficult to put your finger on exactly what it's saying.
01:10If you revisit the film, though,
01:12and now is a perfect time to do that for its 20th anniversary,
01:15Eyes Wide Shut is powerfully terrifying.
01:19It takes Kubrick's trademark skill for putting human nature under a microscope,
01:23and does that very close to home,
01:26peering without bias at the lies that underlie any marriage.
01:30Don't you think one of the charms of marriage
01:33is that it makes deception a necessity for both parties?
01:37The film asks whether our safe, happy, normal lives require us to,
01:44essentially, keep our eyes wide shut.
01:47To sleepwalk and dream,
01:49wearing a mask that helps us ignore our raging,
01:52roaring ocean of feelings,
01:54lest they overwhelm us if given the chance.
01:57As soon as you were gone, it was completely different.
02:02I...
02:05I felt wonderful.
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02:30The film begins with a couple getting ready for a Christmas party.
02:39Their good looks, vast apartment,
02:41and interactions with the babysitter signal these two have it all.
02:45I'll hold our cab for you tonight to take you home.
02:47Thanks, Dr. Hartford.
02:48Yet almost the first thing of substance we're really told is that Bill is sleepwalking,
02:55with his eyes wide shut.
02:56How do I look?
02:58Perfect.
03:00Is my hair okay?
03:02It's great.
03:03You're not even looking at it.
03:05Bill and Alice attend a Christmas party,
03:07but after the obligatory first dance together,
03:10they split up and get picked up by new temporary partners.
03:14Their separation starts with a lie.
03:17Honey, I desperately need to go to the bathroom.
03:19Alice grabs her opportunity to quickly get as drunk as possible,
03:23and indulges a dizzying flirtation with an older man,
03:27while Bill enjoys the charms of two young women.
03:31You don't remember me, do you?
03:35You were very kind to me once.
03:37Only once?
03:38That sounds like a terrible oversight.
03:41Both seem genuinely tempted by their delicious strangers,
03:44but they just about manage to resist,
03:46at least for the time being.
03:48To be continued?
03:54Maybe not just now.
04:00Then they go home and get down to business,
04:02while we hear the lyrics.
04:04Baby did a bad, bad thing.
04:08What was the bad thing they did?
04:10Well, both of them imagined being unfaithful.
04:13Both of them wanted to cheat.
04:14And now their sex life is totally invigorated by the specters of the strangers
04:19they're bringing back into the bedroom with them.
04:21Alice takes off her glasses, suggesting that she's willfully
04:25no longer seeing her husband in focus,
04:27so that she can imagine him to be anybody she wants.
04:31When the daylight life resumes,
04:32vignettes of Alice's and Bill's domestic life
04:35show how sexuality has been contained and sanitized
04:38into something unthreatening.
04:39Our third conspicuous shot of a nude Alice is surrounded by scenes of Bill
04:45going about his day as a doctor,
04:47which, again, as at the party, involves a beautiful,
04:50topless woman whose breasts he ignores with professionalism.
04:54So when you're feeling tits,
04:55it's nothing more than just your professionalism,
04:58is that what you're saying?
04:59Exactly.
05:00Alice's physicality is mixed in with shots of a mother's familiar,
05:04unsexy home life.
05:05Yet, after the day of respectable adult role-playing is over,
05:09Alice breaks out the pot and decides, for once,
05:13to get honest with her husband.
05:15Why can't you ever give me a straight f***ing answer?
05:18I was under the impression that's what I was doing.
05:21And this is where the trouble begins.
05:23Alice starts to strip away the glib falsehoods
05:26upon which a successful marriage depends.
05:28What makes you an exception?
05:31What makes me an exception is that I happen to be in love with you.
05:38When both Bill and Alice turn down invitations to cheat,
05:42their reasoning is, more or less,
05:44I can't because marriage.
05:46Because I'm married.
05:52And because we're married,
05:55and because I would never lie to you.
05:59They haven't really thought deeply about what that means to them,
06:02what fidelity is,
06:03and whether it matters that they desire others.
06:06Do you realize that what you're saying is that the only reason
06:11you wouldn't f*** those two models is out of consideration for me?
06:16Not because you really wouldn't want to.
06:18Alice kicks off all these questions when she decides to make her husband jealous
06:23by divulging her fantasy about a stranger.
06:26At no time was he ever out of my mind.
06:37Later, the climactic orgy scene full of masked figures
06:41encapsulates the connection between anonymity and sex drive.
06:45Yet this uninhibited, impersonal sexual urge is dangerous,
06:50and the orgy scene is infused with peril.
06:53You are in great danger.
06:55As Lee Siegel wrote for Harper's,
06:57the risk is that if we surrender ourselves absolutely to our anonymous animal side,
07:02we slide helplessly towards death, the absolute anonymity.
07:06Whenever Alice and Bill don't act on their naked desires,
07:09they feel relieved.
07:11I realized he was gone.
07:19And I was relieved.
07:25Do I have to go?
07:33I think I do.
07:34What we're seeing in this movie is that the Hartfords,
07:37and all couples, veer between two poles.
07:40On one end is sex without intimacy, and it's kind of terrible,
07:45a sinister means of enslaving and abusing others.
07:48On the other end is total intimacy,
07:51which can breed boredom and snuff out lust altogether.
07:55The challenge of marriage is to somehow navigate these two extremes,
07:59of mysterious erotic danger,
08:01and comfortable knowing familiarity, to find that ideal of sex with love.
08:07Earlier, Alice makes the curious observation that,
08:10while fantasizing about her stranger,
08:12she felt even more tender love for her husband.
08:15You were dearer to me than ever.
08:18So Kubrick raises the possibility that maybe this duality of the erotic
08:22and the mundane actually works somehow.
08:25What if fantasies of strangers from time to time might just be beneficial for a marriage?
08:32There's even a suggestion that, on some level,
08:35the stranger we're fantasizing about is our partner.
08:38Someone you know.
08:40We just have to think of them as this mystery,
08:44in order to remember the excitement we once had for them.
08:48By the end, Alice and Bill feel as if they've dodged a bullet.
08:51I'm grateful that we've managed to survive through all of our adventures.
09:01The film indicates, in various ways,
09:03that they came very close to a ruin they've miraculously escaped.
09:07Because it could cost me my life, and possibly yours.
09:11She got the results of a blood test this morning,
09:14and it was HIV positive.
09:18But, on the deepest level,
09:19the disaster they averted was really infidelity.
09:23Despite very much wanting to, and seriously considering it,
09:26neither partner actually sleeps with someone else.
09:29The secret society's password is Fidelio,
09:32a reference to Beethoven's only opera,
09:34which is about a faithful wife.
09:36It's the name of a Beethoven opera, isn't it?
09:39When Mandy sacrifices herself for Bill during the ritual,
09:42I am ready to redeem him.
09:45and we hear that this has sealed her fate,
09:47when a promise has been made here,
09:51there is no turning back.
09:53The concept of the choice that can't be undone
09:56might make us think of an act of infidelity.
09:59Once fidelity is violated, it can never be restored.
10:03Doubles and mirrors recur throughout this film.
10:06It doesn't feel like an accident that Alice bears the name
10:09of the character who goes through the looking glass.
10:12And Bill and Alice are mirrored by other couples in the film.
10:16When they walk into the Christmas party and greet their hosts,
10:18the Zigglers, the pairs perfectly reflect each other in the shot.
10:22The Zigglers are a richer, more powerful version of our couple,
10:27representing the class and status aspect of their lives.
10:30A little later, we meet Marion and Carl.
10:32In this pair, the man wears glasses instead of the female,
10:35but they have the same hair colors and vaguely similar looks.
10:39Marion has fallen desperately in love with Bill,
10:42someone who looks just like her husband,
10:44but is vastly more exciting precisely because he's not her husband.
10:50I love you.
10:53We barely know each other.
10:56There may be an element of autobiography in this film for Kubrick.
10:59He used the furniture from his apartment with his wife
11:02to create the interior of the Hartford's home.
11:05And he added a dose of real life by casting Kidman and Cruise,
11:08who in 1999 were not only two of the world's hottest movie stars,
11:13they were a real-life couple with a private life
11:16viewers were dying to know more about.
11:18Given Kidman's and Cruise's eventual separation,
11:21there was something prophetic in this film's message
11:24that the private truth is never as it appears,
11:27and might shock us both for its depravity and for its banality.
11:32You are very, very sure of yourself, aren't you?
11:42No.
11:45I'm sure of you.
11:50Do you think that's funny?
11:52There's a lot of talk in film theory about the fact
11:54that cinema is dominated by the male gaze.
11:57And in recent years, that's prompted the question
12:00of what a female gaze looks like.
12:02Some even speculate that a pure female gaze is impossible,
12:06because in our society, women can't help internalizing the male gaze
12:10and seeing even themselves through men's eyes.
12:13At the end of his life and career,
12:15Kubrick is here very interested in the female gaze,
12:19which is expressed visually through Alice's glasses,
12:22which turn her into someone who looks with agency.
12:26Kubrick tracks how the male's stable narrative,
12:28which props up his comfortable life,
12:31is utterly threatened by the very existence of this female gaze.
12:35Women don't.
12:39They basically just don't think like that.
12:42What sets this whole drama in motion is Alice,
12:46revealing her lust for a naval officer she saw on vacation.
12:49And I thought if he wanted me, even if it was only for one night,
13:07I was ready to give up everything.
13:09She shatters Bill's assumption that, because she's a woman,
13:14she's less interested in sex and doesn't actually want to be unfaithful,
13:18whereas a man naturally has desires that he suppresses.
13:22Men have to stick it in every place they can,
13:24but for women, women it is just about security and commitment and what else.
13:30A little oversimplified, Alice, but yes, something like that.
13:34The film, like Kubrick's 2001, takes inspiration from The Odyssey,
13:38Homer's epic about Odysseus' journey back to his loyal wife Penelope,
13:43who is besieged by suitors.
13:45As Siegel writes, quote,
13:46Just as every enchantress Odysseus meets on his voyage home
13:50is an echo of his thralldom to Penelope,
13:52every woman Bill meets is a version of Alice.
13:55The question of Penelope's unbesmirched virtue,
13:59of whether she gave in to her suitors, or wanted to,
14:02haunts Odysseus and Bill, and really, it seems, men in general.
14:08The female's desire, and the male's inability to possess or contain it,
14:28is the central anxiety and crisis of the movie.
14:31If you men only knew.
14:35What's subtly revolutionary about this film is that it's telling men,
14:40your wife has the same feelings and fantasies and temptations as you.
14:44All of these perverse, dark, difficult human impulses are universal.
14:49Yet a man like Bill can't handle this.
14:52The erotic femininity she exudes as she describes her true feelings
14:57strikes him as confrontational.
14:59Relax, Alice. This pot is making you aggressive.
15:03And the desperate, long adventure he goes on in search of a sexual thrill
15:08is ultimately just an attempt to live up to Alice's fantasy.
15:12I was f***ing other men.
15:16So many, I don't know how many I was with.
15:21Ladies, where exactly are we going?
15:32Exactly.
15:36Where the rainbow ends.
15:39Where the rainbow ends.
15:41A recurring idea in Eyes Wide Shut is the impulse to go where the rainbow ends.
15:46The film has images of rainbows, and the costume store Bill goes to is called
15:51Under the Rainbow.
15:53So the suggestion is that, in this night of chasing his desire,
15:56Bill is trying to find the end of the rainbow.
15:59Of course, the end of the rainbow is a place that's impossible to reach.
16:04Likewise, Eyes Wide Shut illuminates the immense false promise of desire,
16:08and the way that when we get what we covet, it's disappointing.
16:12Maybe because the real void or hunger we want to fill can't be satisfied.
16:16As Siegel wrote,
16:17Desire is like Christmas.
16:19It always promises more than it delivers.
16:22Eyes Wide Shut has been called a Christmas movie for grownups.
16:25In this adult's version of a Christmas movie,
16:27instead of the latest cool toy,
16:30the thing characters very badly want is anonymous sex.
16:34But what doesn't change, no matter your age,
16:37is this feeling that getting what you thought you wanted doesn't make you happy.
16:42Notably, the secret ritual gathering is lacking a Christmas tree.
16:47While the rest of the film is dominated by Christmas tree lights everywhere Bill goes,
16:51while the lovely glittering illusion exists elsewhere,
16:55there the cold hard truth is undecorated.
17:00She was a hooker.
17:11Sorry, but that's what she was.
17:15And this bare, ugly reality is perhaps the true meaning of Where the Rainbow Ends.
17:22Don't you want to go where the rainbow ends?
17:25Well, now that depends where that is.
17:34You've been way out of your depth.
17:36Bill and Alice may strike us as a pretty upper-class couple,
17:40but they are small fish,
17:42at the outer edges of a ruling class that's operating in the shadows of this society.
17:46I couldn't even begin to imagine how you'd even heard about it,
17:53let alone got yourself through the door.
17:56Many have read Eyes Wide Shut's Sinister Power Elite as a message from Kubrick
18:01implying that similar groups do operate in our real world,
18:05as the ritual incorporates imagery that might evoke the Illuminati, Freemasons, and others.
18:11But whether there's any basis to this or not,
18:14the movie appears to make a subtle connection between Bill and Alice's marriage
18:18and this power structure.
18:20The elite depends on people like the Hartfords
18:22keeping up their cliched performance of respectable married life.
18:27Ziegler is a dark mirror of the worst parts of Bill,
18:31and of powerful men in general.
18:33That's underlined visually in these two shots,
18:36which look like inversions of each other.
18:38Ziegler stands in front of a nude portrait,
18:40while Bill stands behind the naked, passed-out prostitute Ziegler has just exploited.
18:45Soon after, this shot, of Bill presenting a nice face to Mandy
18:50while Ziegler's groin is behind him,
18:52expresses the idea that Bill's pleasant manners paper over
18:56and legitimize the baser urges that drive Ziegler and his ruling class.
19:00It's okay, I'm a doctor.
19:01I'm actually a very old friend of his.
19:04I'm a doctor.
19:06I'm Dr. Hartford.
19:07We already get hints at the Christmas party that there are two layers,
19:11two worlds, operating here.
19:13The surface, Christmas-light-filled world of appearances,
19:17and the deep, dark, bottom-line underworld.
19:20The camera frequently shows the eight-pointed star on the walls of the Ziegler's house,
19:25and this resembles the star of Ishtar,
19:27a symbol of fertility and sexuality.
19:29Later, the orgy has striking visual similarities to the Christmas party.
19:34Do you know anyone here?
19:37Not a soul.
19:39Meanwhile, key details are inverted.
19:42First, faces are unmasked and bodies covered.
19:45Then, faces are masked while female bodies are naked.
19:49First, Bill saved Mandy, then she saves him.
19:52First, he turns down a proposition, then he tries to have sex but fails.
19:56All these parallels make it apparent that the reality beneath the hazy,
20:00dreamy lights of the first party was actually this one all along.
20:05The same people were there.
20:07Prostitutes were pleasuring important men and taking drugs.
20:11There's a hint that Ziegler may himself be the Red Cloak character,
20:14the way he taps objects twice on the pool table.
20:18That was just, uh...
20:21echoes the way Red Cloak taps his staff,
20:24and while their faces were visible,
20:27the people in the first party were wearing even more impenetrable masks,
20:32as they do all day long, even with their loved ones.
20:36The comparison reminds us, too,
20:38that as lovely and civilized as the original socializing looked,
20:42we should make no mistake,
20:44there is an evil that holds the rich and powerful in place.
20:48And this evil will do whatever it takes to maintain this hierarchy.
20:53Come on.
20:54It was always going to be just a matter of time with her.
20:57What makes the men truly powerful is that they get to be invisible,
21:01to do whatever they want, unseen, with impunity.
21:04I'm not going to tell you their names,
21:05but if I did, I don't think you'd sleep so well.
21:08Ill is not important enough to be invisible.
21:11He's shamed and put in his place by having to take off his mask,
21:15to be seen by others he can't see.
21:18Of course it didn't help a whole lot that those people arrive in limos,
21:23and you showed up in a taxi.
21:24This powerful society's dominance is everywhere.
21:27Even a toy in the very last scene alludes to the magic circle of the ritual.
21:31But it's only a dream.
21:38Eyes Wide Shut takes loose inspiration from an Austrian novella called
21:43Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler.
21:45And throughout the film, there's this question of whether
21:48some or all of this has been a dream.
21:50Oh, I just had such a horrible dream.
21:53You could even read all this action as Alice's dream.
21:56Then there were all these other people around us, hundreds of them everywhere,
22:02and everyone was f***ing.
22:06In the daytime when Bill returns to the costume store,
22:09everything is different.
22:10What we saw under the moonlight, we question under the sun.
22:13Well, uh, things change.
22:16And this is how Ziggler tries to convince Bill that everything he saw
22:19and felt wasn't real.
22:21She was a junkie.
22:22She OD'd.
22:24There was nothing suspicious.
22:25Her door was locked from the inside.
22:26The police are happy.
22:27End of story.
22:29His society concocts a rationalization to dismiss Bill's experience.
22:33I suppose I said that all of that was staged.
22:41However unbelievable it is,
22:42it gives Bill a story to hold onto,
22:44to let go of what he's learned,
22:46and go back to docile obedience.
22:48Nobody killed anybody.
22:50Someone died.
22:51It happens all the time.
22:52In the end, Alice concludes that the whole truth doesn't lie in the dream
22:57or in the waking reality.
22:59Both are real.
23:01Only as sure as I am that the reality of one night,
23:08let alone that of a whole lifetime,
23:14can ever be the whole truth.
23:16And no dream is ever just a dream.
23:21Over the course of the movie,
23:23these two confront their unconscious desires
23:26and, at least for a time, snap out of their trance.
23:29Yet is all this awareness and soul-searching honesty
23:32even good for their relationship?
23:34The movie doesn't necessarily indicate that it is.
23:37In fact, it's downright dangerous.
23:40As the movie goes along,
23:41we sometimes get the feeling that Alice needs to stop being so transparent with her spouse.
23:48Goldie's been.
23:53And I wanted to make fun of you.
23:59To laugh in your face.
24:01By the end, they've both made forthcoming confessions to each other
24:05of all that they wanted to do and almost did.
24:09I'll tell you everything.
24:12Their eyes are more open, for better or worse.
24:15They're obviously unsettled,
24:17not sure whether they like being less oblivious.
24:20We're awake now.
24:24And hopefully for a long time to come.
24:31The last dialogue in the movie is Alice saying
24:34there's something they need to do as soon as possible.
24:37What's the end?
24:41Fuck.
24:42What's going to heal this marriage isn't communication.
24:45It's sex.
24:47Sex is the very force that set them off on this hazardous journey.
24:51And a marriage counselor might find this a simplistic relationship fix,
24:55but who knows?
24:56What if the good old-fashioned practice of having sex with each other
25:01is the foundation of a marriage that lasts?
25:04All these two struggling, blind individuals can know for sure
25:08is that there is love here.
25:10I do love you.
25:13And though the future is uncertain,
25:15they choose to keep that love alive another day.
25:20Is it as bad as that?
25:23As good as that.
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