“We’re Awake Now” | Eyes Wide Shut
About two hours into a screening of Eyes Wide Shut on 35mm last night, on what was probably my dozenth viewing of the film, I whipped out my notebook. It had been less than a week since I’d written about the film for Miami New Times and I wasn’t expecting to have much more to say, but some movies refuse to let go.
There’s a moment late in the film when, upon walking into his home on the film’s final night, Bill Harford turns off the Christmas tree. The lights, forming their own distorted rainbow in the distance, have existed throughout the film in a number of places. In their own, odd way, these lights (which have been a point of discussion for every single person who’s ever analyzed the film) serve as a specter of queerness; often in the background, but occasionally all encompassing, the plague of presumed faggotry seeping into the home, the work place, and almost impossible to keep out of sight and out of mind.
In practically every scene, Bill finds himself attempting to pass as a heterosexual man, or in the film’s narrative, a doctor. He uses his medical certification not simply like a man playing detective in a noir film, but as though it confirms his heterosexuality, his trustworthiness, his status as more than the man people might assume he is for associating with shady figures. He flaunts his money, comfortable paying over $300 for a costume rental and spending hundreds on cab rides across New York.
Kubrick’s film isn’t subtle about the way it explores the class differences between the characters in the movie. Queerness is inherently tied to the lower class: a world of prostitutes, pianists, immigrants, and hotel clerks. Identification and money are two ways to show his separation from that world — a reinforcement of masculinity, of stature, of heterosexuality, and of trustworthiness. But a man like Bill still exists in a middle ground, between the folks who truly struggle and the folks who truly profit from the work that the lower class puts in, still having to blend into normalcy instead of having the luxury or the necessity to identify as what you truly are.
At the private party is where we are introduced to this world of the upper elite, the ruling class of the Eyes Wide Shut world. Within these walls, anyone with the right level of money and a mask to shed any preconceived notion of identity can be whoever they want to be. Men can dance with men and women can dance with women, but they can only do so because of the overwhelming power they hold over those below them.
Bill himself is outed as not being part of this ruling class, with his decisions to leave a rental receipt in his pocket, arrive in a taxi cab, and insistence on defending himself and speaking too much, betraying him, just as they betrays anyone trying to blend in where they don’t belong. He is further reminded of his place in the world when he realizes the power that these individuals hold over those below them. Not only could they have exposed him to the world and ruined him, but they were able to make his friend and pianist Nick Nightingale disappear for leading him there and they, intentionally or not, allowed a woman who saved him from this shame to die.
And so comes the title: Eyes Wide Shut. It’s a contradiction, but so is existing as straight when you’re really queer in some capacity. Despite Bill’s eyes being opened to the world that surrounds him, to the pleasures his wife longs for, to the fear that he holds about his own pleasure, he is ultimately able to keep his eyes shut to the world that doesn’t affect him in the slightest. It’s not just about closing your eyes to your own desires, but to closing your eyes to the injustices that are present.
Bill certainly has his own struggles — the mask itself on the pillow serving as a reminder, an ever present trauma, that cannot be truly repressed, as the truth always exists even if it’s only in our dreams — but he has a certain level of privilege with his class and his ability to present as something he may not be. And maybe, ultimately, Bill is okay with that. As Sydney Pollack’s Victor Ziegler says to him, “Someone died. It happens all the time. Life goes on. It always does, until it doesn’t. But you know that, don’t you?” And it’s a lot easier to make it through life when you’re rich and comfortable, basking in the sweet ignorance of living with your Eyes Wide Shut.
