Eyes Wide Shut

This article is about the film. For the song by JLS, see Eyes Wide Shut (song).

Eyes Wide Shut
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Stanley Kubrick
Written by	Stanley Kubrick Frederic Raphael
Produced by	Stanley Kubrick
Starring	Tom Cruise Nicole Kidman Sydney Pollack
Cinematography	Larry Smith
Edited by	Nigel Galt
Music by	Jocelyn Pook
Production companies	Hobby Films Pole Star Stanley Kubrick Productions
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release dates	July 16, 1999 (1999-07-16) (United States) September 10, 1999 (1999-09-10) (United Kingdom)
Running time	159 minutes
Language	English
Budget	$65,000,000
Box office	$162,091,208

Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 drama film based upon Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle. The film was directed, produced and co-written by Stanley Kubrick. It was was his last film. The story, set in and around New York City, follows the sexually charged adventures of Dr. Bill Harford, who is shocked when his wife, Alice, reveals that she had contemplated an affair a year earlier. He embarks on a night-long adventure, during which he infiltrates a massive masked orgy of an underground cult.

The film appeared on July 16, 1999, a few months after Kubrick's death, to generally positive critical reaction. Its strong sexual content also made it controversial. To ensure a theatrical R rating in the United States and Canada, its distributor Warner Bros. digitally altered several scenes during post-production. The uncut version has since been released on DVD. In early versions, the soundtrack featured during the masked orgy is part of a Romanian Orthodox Divine Liturgy recorded in a church in Baia Mare, played backwards. This was altered or removed in subsequent releases. The film also holds the Guinness World Record for the longest constant movie shoot, at 400 days.

Plot

Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), a young couple from New York, go to a Christmas party, given by a wealthy patient, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack). There Bill runs into an old friend, Nick Nightingale (Todd Field), who dropped out of medical school and now plays piano professionally. While a Hungarian man tries to pick up Alice, two young models try to take Bill off for a tryst. He is interrupted by a call from his host upstairs, who had been having sex with a young woman who has overdosed on a speedball.

Next evening at home, while smoking marijuana, Bill's wife asks him if he had sex with the two girls. After Bill reassures her, she asks if he is ever jealous of men who are attracted to her. As the discussion gets heated, he states that he thinks women are more faithful than men. She rebuts him, telling him of a recent fantasy she had about a naval officer they had encountered on a vacation.

Disturbed by Alice's revelation, Bill is just then called on a housecall to the deathbed of the father of a now-engaged female friend, who impulsively kisses him and tells him she loves him. Putting her off, he takes a walk down the streets of New York, and meets a prostitute named Domino (Vinessa Shaw), and goes to her apartment. Their encounter is awkward, but as they begin to kiss he is interrupted by a phone call from his wife, after which he calls off the encounter.

Bill goes to meet his friend Nick at the Sonata Cafe; there he learns that Nick has a later engagement that evening where he must play the piano while blindfolded. Nick tells him about the beautiful women he glimpsed when the blindfold slipped at the last gig, allowing him to surmise some of the goings-on. Bill presses for details. To gain admittance, one needs a costume, a mask and the password. Bill drives late at night to a shop called "Rainbow Fashions". Having been the doctor of the previous owner, he offers the new owner, Mr. Milich (Rade Serbedzija), a generous amount of money to rent to him now. Searching for a costume, the owner catches his teenage daughter (Leelee Sobieski) with two Japanese men and expresses outrage at their lack of sense of decency. He threatens to call the police.

With the costume, Bill takes a taxi out to a country mansion where a quasi-religious sexual ritual is taking place. One woman comes to Bill, takes him aside and warns him that he does not belong there. He then meets another girl in whose company he walks through a few rooms where an orgy is taking place. The first woman catches up with Bill and insists he is in terrible danger for they suspect that he is an outsider. Bill is then interrupted by a masked porter who tells him that the taxi driver who is waiting outside wants to speak with him. However, the porter takes him to the main room where the masked, red-cloaked Master of Ceremonies confronts Bill with a question about a second password which Bill is unable to answer. The Master of Ceremonies insists that he "kindly remove his mask", then asks that he remove his clothes. The masked young woman who had tried to warn Bill now intervenes and insists that she be punished instead of him. As she is taken away, Bill asks what is going to happen to her. The Master cryptically replies her fate is sealed and Bill is ushered from the mansion and warned by the red-cloaked Master not to tell anyone about what happened there.

Just before dawn, Bill arrives home guilty and confused, where his wife Alice is now awake and tells him of a troubling dream in which he and she were in a deserted city without their clothes. She felt frightened and ashamed while he went off to try to find their clothes. After he left, she felt better, finding herself, still naked, in a beautiful garden. The Naval Officer emerged, stared at her, and the two of them began making love surrounded by many other couples doing the same. She then started having sex with many of those men and laughing at the idea of Bill seeing her with them.

The next morning, Bill goes in search of Nick. After he locates his hotel from the nightclub owner, the desk clerk (Alan Cumming) there tells Bill that a bruised and frightened Nick had checked out a few hours earlier after returning with two large, dangerous-looking men. The clerk also mentions that Nick tried to pass an envelope to him when they were leaving, but that one of the men noticed this and intercepted it, then Nick was driven away by the two men in a limousine parked outside the hotel, with no mention as to where they were going.

Before going to work, Bill goes to return the costume and the shop proprietor, with his daughter by his side, states he can do other favors for Bill "and it needn't be a costume". The Japanese men leave; Milich implies to Bill that he has sold his daughter for prostitution. Bill has misplaced the mask, so is billed for it. Bill returns to the mansion in his own car and is greeted at the gate by a man with a typed note warning him to cease and desist his inquiries. At home, Bill thinks about Alice's recounting of the scene while he watches her tutor their daughter.

That evening, Bill goes to the home of the prostitute with a gift. Her roommate greets him, telling him Domino has just discovered she has HIV. Bill leaves and notices that a well-dressed man is following him. After losing his pursuer, Bill reads a newspaper story about a beauty queen, Amanda Curran, who had died of a drug overdose. She is the Mandy he had treated at Ziegler's party. He goes to the hospital, claiming to be her doctor, and examines her body in the morgue.

Afterwards, Ziegler summons Bill to his house and tells him he knows all the events of the past night and day. Ziegler was one of those involved with the ritual orgy and his own position with the secret society has been jeopardized by Bill's intrusion. Bill is now concerned with the death of Mandy, whom Ziegler has identified as the woman at the party who'd "sacrificed" herself to prevent Bill's punishment, as well as the disappearance of Nick. Ziegler insists that Nick is safely back at his home in Seattle, but does not know where to contact him. Ziegler also insists that the "punishment" had nothing to do with Mandy's death; she was a junkie and she really has died from another accidental drug overdose. Bill clearly does not know if Ziegler is telling him the truth, but he accepts it anyway.

When Bill returns home, he sees the mask he had rented on his pillow next to his sleeping wife. He breaks down in tears and as Alice awakes, he decides to tell her the whole truth of the past two days. The next morning they go Christmas shopping. His wife muses that recent events do not define their life and they should be grateful they have survived and are still together and that she loves him. She then says they need to, in her own words, "fuck" as soon as possible.

Mentmore Towers, one of the settings used by the film

Cast

• Tom Cruise as Dr. William "Bill" Harford
• Nicole Kidman as Alice Harford
• Sydney Pollack as Victor Ziegler
• Marie Richardson as Marion Nathanson
• Todd Field as Nick Nightingale
• Sky du Mont as Sandor Szavost
• Rade Šerbedžija as Mr. Milich
• Vinessa Shaw as Domino
• Leelee Sobieski as Milich's daughter
• Alan Cumming as Hotel desk clerk
• Leon Vitali as Red Cloak
• Julienne Davis as Mandy Curran
• Thomas Gibson as Carl Thomas

Genre and marketing

The film was described by some reviewers and partially marketed as an erotic thriller, a categorization disputed by others. It is classed as such in the book The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema by Linda Ruth Williams, and was described as such in two news articles about Cruise and Kidman's lawsuit over assertions they saw a sex therapist during filming. One review panning the film disparaged it as an erotic thriller implying the genre was inherently disreputable, although other positive reviews such as the one in Hidefdigest also called it such as well.

However, reviewing the film on aboutfilm.com, Carlo Cavagna regards this as a misleading classification, as does Leo Goldsmith writing on notcoming.com (a website devoted to old movies out of current release), and also the review on Blu-ray.com. Writing in TV Guide, Maitland McDonagh writes "No one familiar with the cold precision of Kubrick's work will be surprised that this isn't the steamy erotic thriller a synopsis (or the ads) might suggest." Writing in general about the genre of 'erotic thriller' for CineAction in 2001, Douglas Keesey states that the film "whatever its actual type...[was] at least marketed as an erotic thriller". Michael Koresky writing in the 2006 issue of film journal Reverse Shot writes "this director, who defies expectations at every turn and brings genre to his feet, was ...setting out to make neither the “erotic thriller” that the press maintained nor an easily identifiable “Kubrick film”". DVD Talk similarly dissociates the film from this genre.

Production

Comparison with Dream Story

Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle is set around Vienna shortly after the turn of the century. The couple are named Fridolin and Albertina, and their home is a typical suburban middle-class home, not the film's posh urban apartment. Schnitzler himself, like the protagonist of this novel, lived in Vienna, was Jewish, and a medical doctor (though Schnitzler eventually abandoned medicine for writing.)

The couple in the novella are implied to be Jewish (and Nightingale is overtly identified as Jewish). According to historian Geoffrey Cocks, Kubrick (himself of Jewish descent) frequently removed references to the Jewishness of characters in the novels he adapted. This is reflected in the way the film handles the way Bill Harford is taunted by college students when going home in the morning. In the film, Bill is taunted with homophobic slurs. In the novella, these boys are recognized to be members of an anti-Semitic college fraternity. (Kubrick's co-screenwriter, Fredric Raphael, in an introduction to a Penguin Classics edition of Dream Story, writes "Fridolin is not declared to be a Jew, but his feelings of cowardice, for failing to challenge his aggressor, echo the uneasiness of Austrian Jews in the face of Gentile provocation." Raphael, Loewenberg, and Cocks all note the students in the novella are declared to be members of an "Alemannic" college fraternity, which was known for its anti-Semitism.)

The novella is set during Carnival, when people often wear masks to parties. The party that both husband and wife attend at the opening of the story is a masked Carnival ball, whereas the film's story begins at Christmas time.

Critic Randy Rasmussen suggests that the character of Bill is fundamentally more naïve, strait-laced, less disclosing and more unconscious of his vindictive motives than his counterpart, Fridolin. For Rasmussen and others, the film's Bill Harford is essentially sleep-walking through life with no deeper awareness of his surrounding. In the novella when his wife discloses a private sexual fantasy, he in turn admits one of his own (of a girl in her mid to late teens), while in the film he is simply shocked. The film's argument over whether he has fantasies over female patients and whether women have sexual fantasies is simply absent from the novella where both husband and wife assume the other has fantasies. In the film, Bill's estrangement from Alice revolves around her confessing a recent fantasy to him; in the novella both exchange fantasies after which she declares that in her youth she could have easily married someone else, which is what precipitates their sense of estrangement.

In the novella, the husband long suspected that his patient (Marion) was infatuated with him, while in the film it is a complete surprise and he seems shocked. He is also more overwhelmed by the orgy in the film than in the novella. Fridolin is socially bolder but less sexual with the prostitute (Mizzi in the novella, Domino in the film). Fridolin is also conscious of looking old in the novella, though he hardly does in the film.

In the novella, the party (which is sparsely attended) uses "Denmark" as the password for entrance; that is significant in that Albertina had her infatuation with her soldier in Denmark. The film's password is "Fidelio", from the Latin word for "faithful", and which is the title of Beethoven's only opera ("Fidelio, or Married Love"). In early drafts of the screenplay, the password was "Fidelio Rainbow". Jonathan Rosenbaum notes that both passwords echo elements of one member of the couple's behaviour, though in opposite ways. The party in the novella consists mostly of nude ballroom dancing.

In the novella the woman who "redeems" Fridolin at the party, saving him from punishment, is costumed as a nun, and most of the characters at the party are dressed as nuns or priests; Fridolin himself used a priest costume. This aspect was retained in the film's original screenplay, but was deleted in the filmed version.

In the novella, when the husband returns home, the wife's dream is an elaborate drama that concludes with him getting crucified in a village square after Fridolin refuses to separate from Albertina and become the paramour of the village princess, even though Albertina is now occupied with copulating with other men, and watches him "without pity". By being faithful, Fridolin thus fails to save himself from execution in Albertina's dream although he was apparently spared by the woman's 'sacrifice' at the masked sex party. In both the novella and film, the wife states that the laugh in her sleep just before she woke was a laugh of scornful contempt for her husband; although awake she states this matter-of-factly. The novella makes it clear that Fridolin as this point hates Albertina more than ever, thinking they are now lying together "like mortal enemies". It has been argued that the dramatic climax of the novella is actually Albertina's dream, and the film has shifted the focus to Bill's visit to the secret society's orgy whose content is more shocking in the film.

The character of Ziegler (who represents the high wealth and prestige to which Bill Harford aspires) is entirely an invention of the film, having no counterpart in Schnitzler. Critic Randy Rasmussen interprets Ziegler as representing Bill's worst self, much as in other Kubrick films; the title character in Dr. Strangelove represents the worst of the American national security establishment, Charles Grady represents the worst of Jack Torrance in The Shining, and Clare Quilty represents the worst of Humbert Humbert in Lolita.

Ziegler's presence allows Kubrick to change the mechanics of the story in a few ways. In the film, Bill first meets his piano-playing friend at Ziegler's party, and then while wandering around town, seeks him out at the Sonata cafe. In the novella, the cafe encounter with Nightingale is a happy accident. Similarly, the dead woman whom Bill suspects of being the woman at the party who saved him is a baroness that he was acquainted with earlier, not a hooker at Ziegler's party.

More significantly, in the film Ziegler gives a commentary on the whole story to Bill, including an explanation that the party incident of Bill being apprehended, threatened, with the woman's sacrifice revealed as staged. Whether this is to be believed, it is an exposition of Ziegler's view of the ways of the world as a member of the power elite.

The novella explains why the husband's mask is on the pillow next to his sleeping wife, she having discovered it when it slipped out of his suitcase, and placing it there as a statement of understanding. This is left unexplained in the film.

Casting changes

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Harvey Keitel each were cast and filmed by Kubrick. Their roles were replaced by Marie Richardson and Sydney Pollack in the final cut.

Use of Venetian masks

File:Eyes-wide-shut 2.jpg

A central conflict in the film is between Dr. Harford's adventures in the sexual underworld of New York and his family life. Here he finds that his wife has discovered the Venetian mask he wore at the masked ball with bizarre sex rituals the previous evening.

Numerous authors of works on Kubrick have noted that the masks worn at the sex ritual in Somerton mansion are virtually all Venetian and that the film has a closing credit for "Venetian mask research". In an interview, costume designer Marit Allen stated that Kubrick had the masks sent from Venice but noted that Kubrick also retouched them, slightly altering their appearance. These masks have been at some periods in history (including today) associated with Venetian carnival and performances of Commedia dell'arte, and Schnitzler's novel is set in Carnival season. (Indeed, the party attended by the husband and wife in the novella's opening is also a carnival-season "masked ball", in addition to the mansion gathering being described as such.)

Historians, travel guide authors, novelists and merchants of Venetian masks have noted that these have a long history of being worn during promiscuous activities. Authors Tim Kreider and Thomas Nelson have linked the film's usage of these to Venice's reputation as a center of both eroticism and mercantilism. Nelson notes that the sex ritual combines elements of Venetian Carnival and Catholic rites. (In particular, the character of "Red Cloak" simultaneously serves as Grand Inquisitor and King of Carnival). As such, Nelson argues the sex ritual is a symbolic mirror of the darker truth behind the façade of Victor Ziegler's earlier Christmas party. Carolin Ruwe writing in her 2007 book Symbols in Stanley Kubrick's Movie 'Eyes Wide Shut' argues that the mask is the prime symbol of the film, the masks at Somerton mansion reflecting the masks that all wear in society, a point reinforced by Tim Krieder who notes the many masks in the prostitute's apartment and her having been renamed in the film "Domino" which is a style of Venetian mask.

Since the release of the film, some vendors of Venetian masks have used Eyes Wide Shut as publicity on their websites (such as the UK based "Masks of Venice") and some published travel guides to Venice have pointed readers to shops from which Stanley Kubrick is said to have purchased masks used in the film. Website Conde Nast Traveller mentions mask shop Mondo Novo which Fodor's notes has also supplied masks to films of Franco Zeffirelli and Kenneth Branagh.

Reception

Eyes Wide Shut met with generally positive reviews. The film currently holds a 77% "Certified Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and received an average score of 68/100 at Metacritic. Critics objected to two features. The first complaint was that the movie's pacing was too slow; while this may have been intended to convey a dream state, critics objected that it made actions and decisions seem labored. Second, reviewers commented that Kubrick had shot his NYC scenes in a studio and that New York "didn't look like New York". Writing about erotic mystery thrillers, writer Leigh Lundin comments that watching the dissolving marriage was painful and the backdrop of Christmas against the dark topic was disturbing, but "the oblique, well-told plot rewards an attentive viewer".

Lee Siegel, in Harper's, felt that most critics responded mainly to the marketing campaign and did not address the film on its own terms. Others feel that American censorship took an esoteric film and made it even harder to understand. Reviewer James Berardinelli stated that it was arguably one of Kubrick’s best films. Writing for The New York Times, reviewer Elvis Mitchell commented "This is a dead-serious film about sexual yearnings, one that flirts with ridicule yet sustains its fundamental eeriness and gravity throughout. The dreamlike intensity of previous Kubrick visions is in full force here."

In the television show Roger Ebert & the Movies, director Martin Scorsese named Eyes Wide Shut his fourth favorite film of the 1990s. For the introduction to Michel Ciment's Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, Scorsese wrote: "When Eyes Wide Shut came out a few months after Stanley Kubrick's death in 1999, it was severely misunderstood, which came as no surprise. If you go back and look at the contemporary reactions to any Kubrick picture (except the earliest ones), you'll see that all his films were initially misunderstood. Then, after five or ten years came the realisation that 2001 or Barry Lyndon or The Shining was like nothing else before or since." Mystery writer and commentator Jon Breen agrees.

Awards and honours

• Golden Globes [12]
  • Golden Globes Award for Best Original Score - Motion Picture - Jocelyn Pook (nominated)
• Venice Film Festival
  • Filmcritica "Bastone Bianco" Award - Stanley Kubrick (Won)

• French Syndicate of Cinema Critics
  • Best Foreign Film - Stanley Kubrick (Won)

• Chicago Film Critics Association
  • Best Director - Stanley Kubrick (nominated)
  • Best Cinamatography - Stanley Kubrick and Larry Smith (nominated)
  • Best Original score - Jocelyn Pook (nominated)

• Costume Designers Guild
  • Excellence in Costume Design for Film - Contemporary - Martin Allen (nominated)

• Satellite Award
  • Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama - Nicole Kidman (nominated)
  • Best Cinamatography - Larry Smith (nominated)
  • Best Sound - Paul Conway and Edward Tise (nominated)

• César Award
  • Best Foreign Film (Meilleur film étranger)- Stanley Kubrick (nominated)

• Online Film Critics Society
  • Best Director - Stanley Kubrick (nominated)
  • Best Cinamatography - Larry Smith (nominated)
  • Best Original score - Jocelyn Pook (nominated)

Music

• The opening title music is "Waltz 2 from Shostakovich's Suite for Variety Stage Orchestra", for years misidentified as the composer's Jazz Suite 2, recorded and released under the incorrect name by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.
• In the ritual, the incantations in the background are part of a Romanian Orthodox Divine Liturgy recorded in a church in Baia Mare, played backwards. The piece, named "Masked Ball", is an adaptation by Jocelyn Pook of her "Backwards Priests." When contacting Pook in regard to providing music for the film, Kubrick asked if she had anything else like Backwards Priests – "you know, weird."
• One recurring piece is the second movement of György Ligeti's piano cycle "Musica ricercata".
• In the morgue scene, Franz Liszt's late solo piano piece, "Nuages Gris" ("Grey Clouds") (1881) is heard.
• "Rex tremendae" from Mozart's Requiem plays as Bill walks into the cafe and reads of Mandy's death.
• The background score during the orgy (where Bill walks from room to room) is a Tamil song sung by Manickam Yogeswaran, a Carnatic singer.

Controversies

Kubrick's opinion

Jan Harlan, Kubrick's brother-in-law and executive producer, reported that Kubrick was "very happy" with the film and considered it to be his "greatest contribution to the art of cinema".

R. Lee Ermey, an actor in Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket, claimed that Kubrick phoned him two weeks before his death to express his despondency over Eyes Wide Shut. "He told me it was a piece of shit", Ermey said in Radar magazine, "and that he was disgusted with it and that the critics were going to 'have him for lunch'. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way with him — exactly the words he used."

According to Todd Field, Kubrick's friend and an actor in Eyes Wide Shut, Ermey's claims are slanderous. Field's response appeared in a 26 October 2006 interview with Slashfilm.com:

The polite thing would be to say 'No comment'. But the truth is that... let's put it this way, you've never seen two actors more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director. Stanley was absolutely thrilled with the film. He was still working on the film when he died. And he probably died because he finally relaxed. It was one of the happiest weekends of his life, right before he died, after he had shown the first cut to Terry, Tom and Nicole. He would have kept working on it, like he did on all of his films. But I know that from people around him personally, my partner who was his assistant for thirty years. And I thought about R. Lee Ermey for In the Bedroom. And I talked to Stanley a lot about that film, and all I can say is Stanley was adamant that I shouldn't work with him for all kinds of reasons that I won't get into because there is no reason to do that to anyone, even if they are saying slanderous things that I know are completely untrue.

American censorship and classification

Citing contractual obligations to deliver an R rating, Warner Bros. digitally altered the orgy for the American release, blocking out graphic sexuality by inserting additional figures to obscure the view, avoiding an adults-only NC-17 rating that limited distribution, as some large American theatres and video store operators disallow films with that rating. This alteration antagonised cinephiles, as they argued that Kubrick had never been shy about ratings (A Clockwork Orange was originally given an X-rating). The unrated version of Eyes Wide Shut was released in the United States on 23 October 2007 in DVD, HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats.

The version in South America, Europe and Australia featured the orgy scene intact (theatrical and DVD release) with ratings mostly for people of 18+. In New Zealand and in Europe, the uncensored version has been shown on television with some controversy. In Australia, it was broadcast on Network Ten with the alterations in the American version for an MA rating, blurring and cutting explicit sexuality.

Roger Ebert objected to the technique of using digital images to mask the action. He said it "should not have been done at all" and it is "symbolic of the moral hypocrisy of the rating system that it would force a great director to compromise his vision, while by the same process making his adult film more accessible to young viewers."

Although Ebert has been frequently cited as calling the standard North American R-rated version the "Austin Powers" version of Eyes Wide Shut, in fact his review mockingly referred to an early rough draft of the altered scene (never publicly released) as the "Austin Powers" version of the film. This is in reference to two scenes in the film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery in which, through camera angles and coincidences, sexual body parts are blocked from view in a comical way.

Hindu prayer usage

While American censorship attempted to control the sexuality, complaints came from offended members of the Hindu religion. The American Hindus Against Defamation wrote to Warner Brothers requesting they change the voice-over chant that plays as Bill Harford wanders from room to room at the mansion. According to the AHAD, "the background music subsides and the shloka (scriptural recitation) from the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most revered Hindu scripture is played out." But, in reality, this is a modified version of an earlier piece by the film composer entitled "Backwards Priests". The main musical track at the beginning of the orgy scene is the chanting of a Romanian priest being played backwards. As noted above one musical cue is sung in Tamil although other sections (according to film composer Jocelyn Pook) are sung in Hindi taken from an earlier recording by Manickam Yogeswaran.

When Warner did not concede, the American Hindus Against Defamation threatened to protest. Eventually, Warner Brothers agreed with the Hindu community of Great Britain to replace it with a chant of similar dramatic tone. These changes were not made in the North American release. Later, Warner Brothers issued a public apology for the hurt caused to Hindus.

Christmas setting

In addition to relocating the story from Vienna in the 1900s to New York City in the 1990s, Kubrick changed the time-frame of Schnitzler's story from Mardi Gras to Christmas. One critic believes Kubrick did this because of the rejuvenating symbolism of Christmas. Others have noted that Christmas lights allow Kubrick to employ some of his distinct methods of shooting including using source location lighting, as he did in Barry Lyndon. The New York Times noted that the film "gives an otherworldly radiance and personality to Christmas lights", and similarly critic Randy Rasmussen notes that "colorful Christmas lights which illuminate almost every location in the film." Harper's film critic, Lee Siegel, believes the film's recurring motif is the Christmas tree, because it symbolizes the way that "Compared with the everyday reality of sex and emotion, our fantasies of gratification are, yes, pompous and solemn in the extreme.... For desire is like Christmas: it always promises more than it delivers." Tim Kreider's Film Quarterly essay Introducing Sociology, notes that the "Satanic" mansion-party at Somerton is the only set in the film without a Christmas tree, stating "Almost every set is suffused with the dreamlike, hazy glow of colored lights and tinsel... Eyes Wide Shut, though it was released in summer, was the Christmas movie of 1999." Noting that Kubrick has shown viewers the dark side of Christmas consumerism, Louise Kaplan notes that the film illustrates ways that the "material reality of money" is shown replacing the spiritual values of Christmas, charity and compassion. While virtually every scene has a Christmas tree, there is "no Christmas music or cheery Christmas spirit." Critic Alonso Duralde in his book Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas categorizes this film as a "Christmas movie for grownups" (as he also does with Bergman's Fanny and Alexander and The Lion in Winter), arguing that "Christmas weaves its way through the film from start to finish".

Home media

The original DVD release of Eyes Wide Shut corrects technical gaffes, including a reflected crew member, and altering a piece of Alice Harford's dialogue. Most home videos remove the verse that was claimed to be cited from the sacred Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita (although it was Pook's reworking of "Backwards Priests" as stated above.)

On 23 October 2007, Warner Home Video released Eyes Wide Shut in DVD, HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats. This is the first home video release that presents the film in anamorphic 1.78:1 (Note that the film was shown theatrically as soft matted 1.66:1 in Europe and 1.85:1 in the USA). The previous DVD release used a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. It is also the first American home video release to feature the uncut version. Although the earliest American DVD of the uncut version states on the cover that it includes both the R-rated and unrated editions, in actuality only the unrated edition is on the DVD.

References

• Rasmussen, Randy (2005). Stanley Kubrick: Seven Films Analyzed. McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-2152-5.

External links

• Official website
• Eyes Wide Shut at IMDb
• Eyes Wide Shut at the TCM Movie Database
• ‹The template AllMovie title is being considered for deletion.› Eyes Wide Shut at AllMovie
• Eyes Wide Shut at Box Office Mojo
• Eyes Wide Shut at Rotten Tomatoes
• Eyes Wide Shut at Metacritic
• Introducing Sociology: a review of Eyes Wide Shut by Tim Kreider
• Masks from the movie