DVD of the Week: Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick’s last film, “Eyes Wide Shut” (which I discuss in this clip), impressed and moved me, at the time of its release in 1999, as an unpeeling of the veneer of marital concord to reveal a fury of unfulfilled, often unacknowledged, and nearly inexpressible desires—and as a wise acknowledgment of the reconciliations on which an enduring marriage depends. But the scenes that take place in a private sex club in a Long Island mansion struck me as a peculiarly banal set of erotic fantasies for an elderly man (Kubrick was seventy) to entertain. I got it wrong. The scene of the club doesn’t exist to gratify or project Kubrick’s fantasies about the sexual acts themselves; rather, their subject is the theatre of sex, the very idea of sex (even the varieties ordinarily considered ordinary) as a realm of experience so extraordinary, so deep and dangerous and uncontrollable, that it both demands observation in a context outside the exploitational domain of pornography, and becomes a theatre of living terror, one of unbearable power. As Kubrick shows, it’s a theatre of such devastating force that the spectators, rather than the actors, need to wear masks. And that’s the overwhelming impression that, this time, I felt while watching the movie: I’m glad it’s available on DVD, to watch alone; because, watching with others, I’d want to be in the dark.