Hey, did you hear about this Jeffrey Epstein thing? Kinda weird that this pedophile finance guy with well-documented connections to a Who's Who of powerful figures including billionaire tycoons, the British Royal Family, and former and current American Presidents just turned up dead in his prison cell while awaiting trial for new sex trafficking charges? I mean the media said he killed himself, open and shut case really, he was depressed and facing life in jail and wouldn't anyone in that state start to look for an exit? But an independent coroner said that the autopsy evidence pointed more to homicidal strangulation than suicidal hanging? I mean is it normal to break a bunch of bones in your neck if you just tie a sheet around it and lean forward? He allegedly tried to commit suicide in the same way not even three weeks earlier, but they took him off suicide watch and left him unsupervised? They removed his cellmate, (hmm, seems that the cellmate was the one who sounded the alarm after the first "suicide" attempt), and didn't replace him with a different cellmate? The guards who were supposed to be watching him just fell asleep and didn't check on him for several hours, then falsified the logbooks to make it look like they were doing their jobs? The two cameras in front of his cell both malfunctioned right at the moment that something went awry, or the footage was uh, unusable or something? Oh and people nearby heard shrieking coming from his cell the morning that he was found dead? That doesn't seem right?! But I'm sure if we follow the dictates of Occam's Razor here, we can determine a simple and plausible explanation, which most certainly would not point to someone rich and powerful having Epstein killed in order to prevent him from testifying against them?

THREATENING NOTE: "Give up your inquiries which are completely useless."

Part of the reason EYES WIDE SHUT is still so effective is that it feels like it confirms our deepest suspicions about the world and how it works. While we, the schmucks and shmoes of the society, go about our daily business—showing up at the office, Christmas shopping, smoking joints in our underwear, quietly resenting our spouses—there exists a whole other rarefied plane of influence, where shadowy figures in back room parlors exercise absolute control over anything that matters. The thumbs really are on the scales, and there are simply some things that cannot be chalked up to paranoid conspiracy theory or working class resentment of the rich. Our fascination with these suspicions is not really about the masked balls where high-end prostitutes perform for their clientele like trained animals, it's about power: who has it, and who doesn't.

On first blush, most would categorize Bill (Tom Cruise) and Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) as members of the rich and powerful class. They live in a large apartment (I would say at least 2000 sq. feet) in Manhattan's desirable Central Park West neighborhood. He's an MD, she used to run an art gallery and is now a stay-at-home mom. He drives a Range Rover, and they both dress in expensive designer clothes. Throughout the film Bill doles out hundreds of dollars to various service-providers on seemingly capricious whims, apparently unconcerned (as I would be) that his wife might scrutinize the family budget. His clientele includes at least some members of elite society, as the film opens with the Harfords attending a Christmas party at a spacious mansion, thrown by Bill's rich patient Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack). Indeed, the Harfords are not hurting for status and privilege, occupying the highest rung on the social ladder. But they are still in fact on the ladder, and as the film progresses it gradually reveals the existence of a hidden penthouse loft at the top of the ladder, a dominant perch that men like Victor Ziegler occupy without any need to climb. The Harfords may be important enough to earn a spot on the guest list at Ziegler's party, but Ziegler is the one hosting the party. This all feels right, and again, is perhaps the main factor ensuring that EYES WIDE SHUT remains relevant. Bill Harford lives a lifestyle in this film that is beyond the vast majority of us, and yet to the obscenely rich and powerful, he is the hired help. He's just there to be on-hand in case some hooker ODs in the bathroom.

This dichotomy, between the rich and the ultra-rich, between comfortable privilege and real influence, between impotence and power, is just one of several thematic juxtapositions in EYES WIDE SHUT. The other obvious dichotomies include: what men think women desire vs. what women actually desire, how we behave in a marriage to preserve relationship harmony vs. how we would actually behave if left to our own devices, the soft seduction of pre-coital arousal and the hard come-down of post-coital release, and dreams vs. reality (“eyes wide shut”). The film generates a considerable head of steam by placing Bill Harford on a center track between these thematic confinements and then letting him try to navigate the course, ping-ponging against opposing values as he undergoes an existential crisis.

ALICE: "If you men only knew..."

Almost from the first scene, EYES WIDE SHUT begins to spool out conflicting impressions of what men think women desire vs. what women actually desire. Bill and Alice are not at Ziegler's party very long before they are separated, on the pretense that Bill needs to say hello to an old med school buddy, Nick Nightingale. (As a side note: the film does a very good job at portraying the specific discomfort of attending a Christmas party where your spouse is in their element and you're just kind of hanging around.) Alice is approached by a suave Hungarian man and entreated to a dance, while Bill concludes his catch-up with Nick and finds himself in the company of two bobbleheaded rail-thin model types who hang on his every word and puff up his ego. Here we have a fairly classic portrayal of what women want vs. what men want: Alice's fantasy is to fall into the arms of a dashing older European gentleman in a tuxedo who quotes Ovid and propositions her in the most debonair terms, while Bill wants (to quote another great film from 1999, OFFICE SPACE) "two chicks at the same time, man." Bill is interrupted by a request from Ziegler to join him upstairs, where he attends to a chesty nude woman in Ziegler's bathroom who has overdosed on a "speedball".

The next night, Bill and Alice are in bed together, sharing a joint, when the events of the night before come up. Alice asks point blank if Bill fucked the two girls he was with, and he vehemently denies it. However, he doesn't tell her the whole truth: that he was seeing to the medical needs of a naked woman upstairs. Instead he tells her that he had to see Ziegler, which is a half-truth. He turns the tables on her: wasn't she dancing with some old Hungarian guy who wanted to fuck her? She seizes on the idea that men only talk to women if they want to fuck them. Why was Bill talking to the two girls in that case? "There are... exceptions." But she pursues the point: the only reason he didn't fuck the two girls is out of marital obligation, not for any lack of desire. The half-truth about seeing Ziegler contains a kernel of something interesting about doctor-patient confidentiality, and professionalism in general: Bill's work comes with a mandatory obligation to conceal, to protect the privacy of his clients. Alice begins to interrogate him about his female patients, whether he gets turned on when he examines topless women in his office (a task he is shown performing in an interstitial scene), he protests: sex is the last thing on his mind when he is with a patient. But is this really true? Are men able to turn off their lust like that? And what about those female patients, do they desire Bill? He makes an extremely naive declaration here: "Women don't think like that."

The conversation up to this point is strangely stilted (some even read it as bad acting), perhaps from the effects of the weed, but maybe to emphasize a certain thematic point: marriage is not always an effortlessly compatible union between two kindred souls, but is often an awkward and contentious struggle for dominance and recognition. But when Bill makes his absurd claim about female desire, Alice sticks the knife in, and relates an anecdote to make a counter-point (and this monologue is maybe the best acting of Nicole Kidman's career). She recounts a story set "last summer, in Cape Cod", about a moment in a restaurant when a naval officer glanced at her. With one glance, she says she was "ready to give up her whole life", the love of Bill and their child Helena, even for just one night with this stranger. Before he can truly process this, Bill's phone rings, and the voice on the other end of the line asks him to make a house call to a patient who has just died. He leaves Alice without addressing the bombshell she has just dropped on him, brooding about her sexual fantasies in the cab ride over. At the patient's house he consoles the patient's daughter, Marion. After a brief interlude of grief, and a disclosure that she is engaged to be married, Marion grabs Bill and kisses him passionately, telling him over and over that she loves him. He's shocked, protesting that they barely know each other. But she remains undeterred. This moment consolidates the still-fresh admission of Alice's naval officer fantasy, confronting Bill with another woman who is ready to throw away an established partner for a brief romantic dalliance. It's at that moment that the fiancé actually arrives, a man who might as well be Tom Cruise's doppelganger in a physical sense, oblivious to his wife's secret desires. Perhaps men don't know their spouses after all.

Anyone in a marriage or equivalent long term relationship should be able to recognize a great deal of the dynamics at play between Bill and Alice Harford. In the opening scene, the banality of domestic partnerships is deftly established. (I'm probably reading too much into this, but the very first line of dialogue is Bill asking "Honey, have you seen my wallet?" to which Alice replies "Isn't it on the bedside table?", promptly establishing a symbolic link between money, sex, and dreams in one quick stroke.) Bill nags Alice that they are running late for Ziegler's party, and barely notices her hair—but the babysitter they've hired to look after Helena gushes over her: "you look amazing". Familiarity breeds contempt.

Bill's erotic odyssey is seemingly prompted by Alice's naval officer revelations, but he doesn't set out in the cab to his patient's house intending to be unfaithful. Rather, there is a slippery sequence of events that leads Bill from his own bed to the mansion orgy, tugging him along with intriguing hints of sex and danger. First is his rejection of Marion's advances. Shortly after, he is walking down the street when he is accosted by a group of aggressive young men who shoulder him off the sidewalk and call him a variety of homophobic slurs. Bill is only emasculated for a few seconds before he encounters a gorgeous street walker named Domino, who invites him into her apartment. Still vulnerable from his encounter with the gang of lads, he accepts, but when she asks him what he wants to do he doesn't know. He doesn't seem like someone who would normally visit a prostitute, and Domino doesn't seem like a normal prostitute. She isn't fussed about setting a time limit, and has no rules against kissing him. Maybe she does this to pay for school—an "Introducing Sociology" text is clearly visible on a bookshelf. But Bill is again interrupted by a phone call, this time from Alice, wondering when he'll be home. He buys himself some time by lying and saying that he is still with the bereaved family of his patient, waiting for more family members to arrive. But despite the success of this lie, he tells Domino that he needs to go, and pays her anyway. Again, this is an interesting push/pull contest between how we behave in a marriage to preserve relationship harmony vs. how we would actually behave if left to our own devices. Bill teeters on the line of infidelity, vibrating in an enticing middle space and threatening to fall either way. He ultimately doesn't cross the line by having sex with Domino, but he does cross the line of intention by his very presence in her apartment. Why does he leave, when his excuse worked? Did the phone call from Alice remind him of his marital obligations? Did he abstain for her, or did he abstain for himself—trying to remain a good husband and father for his wife, or trying to remain a good husband and father to preserve his own affirmation of himself as a virtuous man?

Prowling the night streets again, Bill happens upon the jazz club where his friend Nick Nightingale is playing. Already primed by the preceding events, Bill is eagerly receptive the story Nick parcels out about a secret party with costume requirements, passwords required for entry ("Fidelio", a Beethoven opera about marital fidelity), and promises of beautiful women. There isn't much to say about the orgy sequence and the lead-up to it: it fulfills the purpose of a look behind the curtain at the halls of the rich and powerful, and confirms the previously discussed suspicions that we have about how these rich and powerful people behave when the poors aren't around. If anything, this sequence doesn't go as far as our expectations, there is nothing truly perverse or depraved at play here: it's an orgy, but the sex depicted is fairly vanilla (that said, the content here was titillating enough to raise the ire of the MPAA censors, and Kubrick did not live to fight the digital alterations that were applied to the theatrical cut of the film. Maybe he did know precisely how far he could reasonably take the sequence after all.) The soft seduction of pre-coital arousal climaxes here, right up until the moment that Bill's infiltration of the party is detected by its administrators. A beautiful masked woman (maybe the woman who overdosed at Zeigler's party? Maybe Domino?) clearly recognizes Bill and tries to get him to leave for his own safety, but he lingers a bit too long, and is exposed and forced to take off his mask. Although climactic, this is another "interruption" if you will, a motif of narrative "edging" that persists throughout. Bill remains a passive observer at the orgy, presumably too stunned by what he is seeing (who can really tell with the mask on?) to actually participate. His climax is the exposure, not a literal orgasm. The beautiful woman reappears and sacrifices herself for his freedom: "Let him go. Take me. I am ready to redeem him."

And so begins the hard come-down of post-coital release. In the light of the following day, everything is harsh and ugly and repulsive. He visits Nick Nightingale's hotel, but the gay desk clerk (obviously horny for Bill) informs him that Nick was apparently checked out at 5AM by some rough-looking gentleman, sporting a bruise on his face. Bill returns his costume to the costume shop, but finds that the proprietor, who caught his adolescent daughter fooling around with two older Asian businessmen the night before and threatened to call the police as soon as his business with Bill was concluded, is now apparently happily pimping his daughter out to the same older Asian businessmen. He tries to call Marian, but her fiancé answers. He visits Domino's apartment, where he engages in some playful foreplay with her roommate, but then she interrupts their flirtation to sit him down for some upsetting news: Domino received some bloodwork that morning, confirming that she is HIV positive. He buys a newspaper and a headline catches his eye—"Ex Beauty Queen in Hotel Drugs Overdose"—and when he visits the morgue, he discovers that the beauty queen in question is the woman who OD'd in Ziegler's bathroom at the party. This all but confirms that the beauty queen was the woman who protected him at the orgy, but there is still a nagging unresolved voice in the back of our minds that tries to square the absence of Domino in her apartment, the strange timing of the HIV diagnosis.

Bill is followed and threatened by sinister forces throughout all of this, and he persists despite repeated warnings. He is eventually summoned to Ziegler's mansion under the pretense of a house call, and finds him in a billiards room, knocking some balls around by himself (an image that conveys an impression that all of this is simply a game that the god-like Ziegler is quickly growing bored with.) Ziegler admits to having Bill followed, but offers rote explanations for all of Bill's qualms, much as the media has offered rote explanations for the questionable circumstances surrounding the death of Jeffrey Epstein. Bill doesn't really seem to buy it, but does he have a choice? Waiting at home for him is his mask from the party, sitting threateningly on his pillow beside his sleeping wife. This one shot acts as a summation for the entire affair: a mask of deception, a lie made physical, at arm’s length from an unsuspecting spouse, threatening to self-destruct the relationship by virtue of its very existence. When Alice wakes up, Bill breaks down. "I'll tell you everything", he sobs.

ALICE: "The reality of one night, let alone a whole lifetime, can ever be the whole truth."
BILL: "And no dream is just a dream."
ALICE: "The important thing is we’re awake now. And hopefully... for a long time to come."

The final thematically juxtaposed motif deepens the others: dreams vs. reality. Like David Lynch's MULLHOLLAND DR., the first half of the film has a strange aura of a lucid dream, up until the climactic orgy. After the orgy scene, it feels like we've woken up, and the logic of the preceding dream must be analyzed and accounted for. Upon returning from the orgy, Bill finds Alice in bed, laughing in her sleep. he wakes her, and her mood immediately switches: she says she was having a nightmare. She proceeds to describe the dream:

ALICE: "We were... in a deserted city and... our clothes were gone. We were naked... I was terrified and... I felt ashamed... And I was angry because I felt it was your fault... You rushed away to try to find our clothes for us... As soon as you were gone it was completely different... I felt wonderful... Then... a man walked out of the woods... he was the man from the hotel... the naval officer... He was kissing me and then... we were making love... then there were these other people around us... hundreds of them... Everyone I was fucking and then I was was fucking other men, so many... And I knew you could see me in the arms of all these men, just fucking all these men..."

The parallels between Alice's dream and Bill's experience at the orgy are too striking to discount. Additionally, the fact that her expressions of sexual fantasy bookend Bill's own erotic odyssey, acting as both the catalyst and the denouement, emphasizes the discordance between Bill's idea of female desire and the reality of female desire. Her frank descriptions of her amorous urges force Bill to relinquish his matronly, domestic picture of his wife—the fantasy or dream—and acknowledge her as a more complex and complete human being. The closing scenes of the film leave things tantalizingly half-resolved. Bill's "I'll tell you everything" confession fades into the next scene, a following morning close-up of a red-eyed Alice attempting to process a heavy emotional burden. Did he tell her everything, (can you truly tell your spouse *everything*?), or just enough to explain his erratic behavior? Does she forgive him? Was everything a dream? Was everything reality? At what points were the eyes wide, and at one points were they shut? We'll never know. We're left in that frustrating middle ground between opposing values. The final scene, Christmas shopping with Helena, offers a cheeky punctuation mark on the whole journey:

ALICE: I do love you and you know there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible.
BILL: What's that?
ALICE: Fuck.

I saw EYES WIDE SHUT for the first time in 1999, during its initial theatrical run. I was only 15 but already a huge Kubrick fan, and I happen to have a very cool dad who considered things like new Kubrick films an important part of my film education at the time. In 2020, approaching the age of 36 (give or take, the same age as Tom Cruise during production of this film), in year 7 of my relationship and year 3 of my marriage, and raising a toddler... I appreciate EYES WIDE SHUT in a new light. It's hard to understand how this film was considered a relative disappointment at the time of release, but it is the type of textured, layered work that really needs to settle in and steep for a while before you can truly appreciate it. It's truly a shame that Stanley Kubrick was murdered for exposing the secrets of an international sex cabal, but at least he died in his sleep and was not strangled in a prison cell.

"Maybe, I think, we should be grateful. Grateful we’ve been able to survive all of our adventures. Whether they were real, or only a dream."