Eyes Wide Shut, and pub

[ciphergoth]

First off, come to the pub tonight!

Second, I watched Eyes Wide Shut on C5 last night. What was that all about then?

Lots of impressive but meaningless imagery, very very slow plot development, rather irritating incidental music and an inconclusive conclusion. I saw lots of sex-related imagery, but if there was a sexual morality fable in there, a warning against "empty, meaningless sex" or otherwise, then it passed me by. To me, it was a warning that if you gatecrash a party and someone warns you to get away before they kill you, do as they say. Also a warning against telling people you don't know very well about things you've been paid to keep secret; or against working for organisations that have people killed in the first place.

At one point, taxis refuse to pick him up because he's crossed the Bad Guys. What did they do, send a fax to every taxi driver in New York saying "don't pick this guy up, photo attached, signed the Bad Guys"? Or did they write "don't pick me up" on Tom Cruise's forehead while he slept, in a special ink that only taxi drivers can see?

I think EWS doesn't work for me because it depends on the audience imagining that sex parties are the most forbidden and secret thing there could ever be. I'd like to wave a little flag at this point and say that, in common with many of you reading this of course, I go to sex parties quite often, they're generally jolly good fun, and people hardly ever get murdered! After watching EWS, I wanted to write that on banners and hang them out the window.

Though it did make me wonder if an opening ceremony at a sex party might be a cool thing. Unfortunately that would require people turning up on time...

Comments

[ex-meta.livejournal.com]

I don't really have the energy to go through the whole thing right now... However, I will say that almost nothing in the movie is irrelevant. The musical choices are specific and part of the story. The decor on the walls of the sets is significant. Names (of characters and places) are significant. Like Terry Gilliam, Kubrick packs each scene with detail. If it seems slow, you're missing something.

The dreamy visual style is deliberate and significant. It's not clear how much of the movie is dream, how much is fantasy, and how much is real. (The only real visual effect is used to show not dream sequences, but Harford's obsessive thoughts.) The meaning and significance of fantasy is one of the major themes of the movie. Like the other themes, it's explored within the context of a married relationship, and I find myself wondering if maybe the movie is meaningful only to someone who's married.

Is there a conspiracy? We know that one taxi driver refuses to pick up Harford, saying he's had a long day and is going off-duty. Is that conspiracy or coincidence? What about the headline of the newspaper?

It takes a great deal of effort to make an orgy seem so unerotic, passionless and cold. Clearly it's deliberately so. A statement is being made about the people in power. Yet the movie isn't anti-sex, and the portrayal of the prostitutes is sympathetic.

A passable web review of EWS is at LiP Magazine (http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/revicontent_102.htm)'s web site.

Kubrick always has a secondary story under the surface. "2001" is about humans in a technological society starting to interact like machines; "The Shining" is about the massacre of Native Americans; "A Clockwork Orange" is about the Christian conception of free will; and so on. It takes repeated viewings to extract the non-verbal meanings, which is why I don't have much to say right now. If you want to discuss "2001", on the other hand...

[gnomatron.livejournal.com]

I don't think you can credit Kubrick with any perceived secondary story in Clockwork Orange; There wasn't much in the film that wasn't also in the book. Although, gimme some examples and I'll maybe reconsider?

[reddragdiva]

In fact, I would say there was less in the film than in the book.

The book is one of my very favourites. I thought the film was ludicrously shallow by comparison.

[gnomatron.livejournal.com]

yes, it was rather shallow by comparison, but it's a gorgeously graphic film in some ways; there are so many images that just stay with you. Bits haven't aged well, but it's still a really good piece of cinema.

[please-sir.livejournal.com]

yeah, I loved the book.

[illscientist.livejournal.com]

I agree with you. I thought that, to simplify, the movie wasn't about the sex party so much as it was, simply, a meditation on the way that, in a monogamous relationship, the suggestion or implication of unfaithfulness can get into your brain, niggle itself into your mind like a wedge, and color everything you see and do for a while; not necessarily that verything that happened in the movie needed to be taken literally.

But I liked the movie.