r/StanleyKubrick

I just read an awesome analysis about Nick Nightingale and his connections to the Nightingale bird. How they both sing/play piano at night. I believe the analysis is called "Nightingale/Wren". Read it here:

I just noticed that when Bill arrives at Somerton, right before he speaks to the two men at the gate, you hear these nocturnal birds sing. Perhaps a warning?

I was watching Eye Wide Shut yesterday . Does any of u suspect maybe Domino was actually the women that saved bill in the mansion ? Because Ziegler told Bill that she was a hooker when he asked who was she. Domino was a hooker too. And she did disappeared the next day because of HIV. Her friend told she’s gone forever. That’s kind of weird . Stanley gives some mysterious hints. But in the end Mandy was the one who saved Bill since he found her dead body too.

I was one of the six "Rowdy College Kids" who harassed Tom Cruise's character on the streets of Manhattan. In honor of the film's 25th anniversary, I wrote a short article about my experience. Feel free to ping me with questions!

I'm new to Kubrick films, so I went into "Eyes Wide Shut" not really aware of his complex themes or symbolic imagery. To me, the movie is pretty straightforward with its exploration of the complexity of human sexuality and infidelity.

A couple is experiencing boredom in the bedroom, and both partners are lusting after new experiences. Bill becomes upset and jealous when he finds out his wife is capable of having the same desires as himself. With a blow to his manhood, he goes out into the world to fulfill his desire for lust and revenge.

During his journey, he encounters a lot of depravity: middle-aged men lusting after underage girls, wealthy bored people with unlimited access to sexual fulfillment (such as Victor sleeping with a drugged-up sex worker), and weird underground sex cults where there is an overload of sexual depravity out in the open. He has brushes with disease (HIV) and, ultimately, death.

In the end, he realizes that the grass isn't necessarily greener. He decides to work on his issues with his wife and no longer pursue those perceived pleasures. This might be a simplistic take, but I do think the movie is an allegory about the trade-off between a "boring" married life and an unrestricted sex life.

So I rewatched eyes wide shut tonight for the first time since I secretly watched it when I was 12 years old. I’m in my 30s now. As a kid watching it for the first time in the ‘90, I remember feeling very nervous that something violent would happen, and then relieved at the end of the film that nobody really meant any harm, everything was basically a near miss, and I had just felt 2 hours of tension culminate in a relatively chill ending. I didn’t really understand the marriage subtext back then, except that they were naked a lot.

Now watching it again, I think the tension between our inherent humanity, and the expectations of marriage, especially in the 90s, feel very apparent. Back then it was scandalous to admit attraction outside of your relationship, but now that’s much more normal, even in monogamous partnerships that never act on those attractions.

Mostly Tom Cruise’s character seemed like a giant baby to me this time around, acting out so spectacularly after his wife admits she is not some inert little mouse since settling down. It seems shocking he would expect that of her given how passionate their own marriage seems to be. She just admits to thinking and dreaming of a fantasy life, and he freaks! Granted, some of her fantasies and dreams pop the romantic bubble of perfect love, madly infatuated with The One forever, instead pointing to the more nuanced ebb and flow of attraction and sentiment in our relationships, which I think is the more honest take on committed love.

But confronted with the end of his Disney fantasy of the married woman’s mind, Dr bill (edited: not jeff) totally spins out, and creates a much riskier reality. Granted, his wife is pretty cruel in her delivery of the story about the naval officer, but still, dr bill goes full ACT OUT. It’s only when he sees how narrowly he missed a real bullet that her transgressions seem as minor as they really are. And yet she is the one who forgives, perhaps because both of them realize they’ve been kinda checked out and are capable of being more attuned? Or maybe it was all another game, considering the last line in the film?

I also wonder how murdery the Illuminati cult was exactly. Did they kill Mandy? I think so because of the line about her door being locked from the inside. Why say that? As for the pianist, is he dead? We never know. How much of the pool table scene was lies and how much was truth? I felt reassured when I first watched the film, because that is the goal of the elite guy trying to get Dr bill to chill, but is he telling the truth? Probs not right?

Maybe they should follow their daughters wishes and get a guard dog for Christmas.

This has been something I’ve been wondering for a while. After thinking about it, for all the things they did in one night, it includes:

• Going over to a party with rich friends (the babysitter was paid for overnight, so it’s likely they came home very late)

• Bill going over to check on the old man who died (it would’ve taken a while to drive there, check on things for a while, and he decided to wander around a bit in the streets)

• Hung out with a prostitute (they didn’t have sex or did anything, but we can assume they did talk and hang out for quite a while)

• Go over to the bar to visit his old friend Nick (though to be fair, we can assume they were at the bar for maybe between 30 minutes to an hour)

• Going over to a costume store to purchase a costume (it may not have been far away, but there’s the whole purchasing, and the costume owner pulling the act of appearing like a good father)

• Driving all the way to where the elite party was occurring (with the forest surrounding, we can assume it’s pretty far away)

• The whole party’s events and orgy (we can assume that Bill was walking through all the guests and prostitutes having sex for quite a while, until they found out he did not belong)

And we can also add up the whole ordeal of driving back home, undressing, and preparing to go to bed.

With all this add up, it’s weird to imagine am such a really long night, especially with coming back from the regular party pretty late.

How long would the timeline be in the events of Eyes Wide Shut?

The reason I say this is because I believe, an ending which involves “child sacrifice” will, in my view, detract from what I believe to be the main theme of the story.

It’s frequently bought up that Eyes Wide Shut is a story about marriage and monogamy (I believe Kubrick even talked about these being the themes for the Traumnovella book, which EWS is adapted from) yet it’s strange that a big chunk of the movie revolves around Cruise 1) stumbling upon a sex cult after a “lust filled odyssey”, and then 2) finding out more about said sex cult after the fact. So what exactly was the point of the whole sex cult thing?

And one more thing I’d like to mention about the sex cult. Our view of that is something satanic and unbelievably scary, but what exactly is happening there that makes it so? prostitution is illegal in New York, yes, but if anything, the prostitutes at the cult will be more legally implicated than the people actually at the “meetings”.

Another thing is this: Ziegler in an exposition dump mentions things that ease 2 of the major worries both we and Tom Cruise’s character have throughout the story:

1. Nick Nightingale, the one who inadvertently led Cruise down this rabbit hole, was given a black eye and sent home

2. the prostitute who “saved” Cruise, who died of an OD, died independently of the cult’s actions.

Both of these seem like rather tame responses given how scary we are led to believe this cult is throughout the story.

Now this is very weird, not just in the context of the story but in the context of Kubrick’s storytelling, who has very famously liked to leave things ambiguous. Exposition dumps are something Kubrick would likely very much be against, so why this? This again makes me believe that the story isn’t really about the cult. Furthermore, if Ziegler’s words were taken to be true, then Zeigler’s words come also as almost a relief. Ziegler could just as well said they killed the prostitute (even if it’s false) and Cruise, already shit scared, wouldn’t have talked, but I believe Zeigler telling Cruise this serves as a way to tell both us the audience and Cruise that this cult is basically just a group of powerful people engaging in degenerate acts. All of this makes it seem unlikely that they’d kidnap Cruise’s daughter as a sacrifice.

The final scene at the toy store where apparently 2 guys in suits following the daughter, and how Cruise and Kidman just leave her unattended, which is where the theories about the child sacrifice comes in, but I believe this is a bit of a stretch. I don’t believe it’s unreasonable to let a girl who’s about 7 to 8 run around a bit at the toy store, and it does look like the daughter is in reasonable view of the parents, and also, given that after the cult incident, Cruise again put himself in danger to find out about a prostitute he barely knew, I doubt he’d just let the cult take away his daughter no questions asked.

So yeah, I believe the cult simply serves to represent a sort of mental rabbit hole for Cruise, showing how dark his mind went trying to take “psychological revenge” against Kidman for fantasising about another man. By the end, it is a sort of a resolution where they both decide to let bygones be bygones and just move forward however they can.

Holy shit! Dad (50M) and I (15M) finally finished EWS. Rented it a week later and both of us fell asleep at 4:30, around the halfway point. Rented it again tonight and rewatched it. I honestly think it’s second only to The Shining and followed closely after by 2001. The acting was just bloody beautiful, Kidman and Cruise do such a great job individually and together. Soundtrack was phenomenal- very tense. Set design was out of this world, it was the main reason I wanted to see it. Plot was an 8/10- felt disjointed in bits, but other than that? Man, what a film. What a fucking film.