Eyes Wide Open on the Female Subject

in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut

Diplomarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades

einer Magistra der Philosophie

an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von

Magª Christine WILHELM

am Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik

Begutachter: Ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil Klaus Rieser

Graz, 2014 Contents

1. Introduction ...... 3 2. Feminism and Film ...... 5 2.1. Key Figures and Concepts in Feminist Film Theory ...... 5 2.1.1. Beginnings ...... 6 2.1.2. American Influence: Images of Women...... 6 2.1.3. European Influence: Screen Theory ...... 8 2.1.3.1. Marxism ...... 8 2.1.3.2. Semiotics and Structuralism ...... 9 2.2 Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan ...... 10 3. The ‘Gaze’: Ways of Looking ...... 15 3.1. Men Looking at Women ...... 16 3.1.1. The Male Spectator ...... 17 3.1.2. The Female Figure ...... 18 3.2. Forms of Visual Pleasure ...... 19 3.2.1. Scopophilia ...... 19 3.2.2. Narcissism ...... 20 3.3. Scopophilic Aspects in Eyes Wide Shut ...... 21 3.3.1. Voyeurism ...... 21 3.3.2. Fetishism ...... 24 3.3.3. Pornography ...... 30 3.4. The Female Gaze and its Implications in Eyes Wide Shut ...... 32 4. Film Narrative ...... 39 4.1. The textuality of film ...... 39 4.2. Narrative, story and plot ...... 41 4.3. The Narrative Construction of Eyes Wide Shut...... 42 4.3.1. Kubrick’s last film ...... 42 4.3.2. Plot summary ...... 46 4.3.3. Subversion of the ‘Male Gaze’ ...... 51 4.4. Visual and Narrative Focalization ...... 53 4.4.1. Tom Cruise as William ‘Bill’ Harford ...... 54 4.4.2. Nicole Kidman as Alice Harford ...... 56 5. Conclusion ...... 62 6. Bibliography ...... 63

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1. Introduction

This thesis deals with the representation of nude women on screen, and how cinema today constructs femininity, and gender relations. It is born out of interest in the contradictory construction of gender in films: confident expressions of female power alongside with sexualization of women and their bodies in public spaces. It seems as if feminist ideas have become part of societies’ common sense, however, at the same time feminism is neglected by the way women are often depicted in the media.

Whereas some (like Germaine Greer 1999:14) argue, that today’s culture is a lot less feminist than thirty years ago, others (like David Gauntlett 2006:247) believe that the media is increasingly influenced by feminism. From my point of view, both sides are equally true. On the one hand a diversity of feminist ideas circulates a wide range of media and genres, but on the other hand sexism still exists in its most boring and predictable patterns. Due to these contradictory representations of women in the media, the topic is hard to grasp. Additionally, every feminist perspective and idea is – like gender relations – always changing and in constant transformation.

This is why the present paper will approach the topic „Eyes Wide Open on the Female Subject” from different points of view. It has three aims. First, its particular focus is on the visual representation of naked women. Secondly, it seeks to provide an analysis of eroticized images of the female body across the media landscape, this is, the concept of female ‘objectification’ which presents women as passive objects from a male perspective compared with the narrative depiction of women as active subjects. Thirdly, this paper is interested in contrasting both conceptions on a visual and a narrative level by means of representative scenes from the film Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick.

The thesis opens with an overview of different representations of women throughout recent cinematic history. The first chapter also discusses key terms and concepts related to this matter, and contrasts them with each other. In chapter three, visual theories formulated in this paper, such as the Mulveian concept of the ‘male gaze’, as well as visual forms of pleasurable looking, like the Freudian term scopophilia, are examined. In a further analysis of specific filmic scenes, scopophilic aspects such as voyeurism and fetishism are the main focal point of interest. This chapter additionally considers the ‘female gaze’, that is, the ways of looking at women from a female point of view. 3

The second thematic part of the paper deals with film narrative. Next to a theoretical approach dealing with textuality of film, the narrative construction of Eyes Wide Shut serves in order to subvert the ‘male gaze’ as discussed in chapter three of the paper. The concluding chapter additionally proves the paper’s assumption that the main female protagonist functions as the film’s leading character who is in charge of the story rather than being subjected by the male protagonist and the patriarchal power suggested on a visual level.

What I want to show with respect to my analysis of Eyes Wide Shut is that the visual impact given on the surface level is undermined by the underlying meaning on a deeper story level. This revelation is not only crucial for the understanding of the film but also for the understanding that all is not what it seems, or in other words, that nothing is what it appears in Eyes Wide Shut.

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2. Feminism and Film

Feminism as a movement tries to “analyze and change the power structures of patriarchal societies” (Chaudhuri 2006:3f.). This doesn’t entail that feminism is ‘against’ men, but rather that it is first and foremost concerned with women’s positions. A major reason why media became influential in shaping feminist ideas and critique during the ‘Second Wave’ of feminism was that in the late 1960s and 1970s the media daily confronted feminists with representations of womanhood and gender relations in all possible ways, for instance, on billboards, TV, and radio, in news, magazines and films. While feminist research in the early-to-mid-1970s laid the focus on ‘images of women’, from the mid-1970s onwards, the attention was drawn to ‘images for women’ (cf. Gill 2007:9f.).

Based on the assumption that female representations are important since images and cultural constructions shape our way of thinking, and thus might be connected to inequality, domination and oppression of women, this chapter looks at feminist studies’ approaches dealing with the representation of women and the significance of the meaning of images. In doing so, the chapter turns to feminist film theory, important figures and concepts across Europe and the United States as well as its transformation over time, while the proximate chapter deals with the depiction of women by different ways of looking at them from male and female viewpoints.

2.1. Key Figures and Concepts in Feminist Film Theory

Feminism’s ‘First Wave’, also known as the suffragette movement, took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when film industry was still in its beginnings but expanded rapidly, especially in America, where vast audiences were attracted to the new medium. Feminist film theory, especially in the early period, dealt with representation and sexuality, and the dominant male power structure within a patriarchal society. It leads to a ‘Second Wave’ of feminism in the 1960s, when the established order, that is, women’s conditions at work, at home, in the family, and in other areas of life were questioned. A number of women who often had an academic background contributed to the development of a film theory which was encouraged by the political debate behind feminist filmmaking and the ideological sense of purpose (cf. Nelmes 2007:226ff.).

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2.1.1. Beginnings

Although feminist thoughts date back to much earlier, the starting point for ‘Second Wave’ feminist thought can be acknowledged with the publication of The Second Sex by the French novelist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in 1949. The main idea in the book was that gender is not innate but determined by culture and through social conditions. Drawing on ideas from Existentialist philosophy, Beauvoir refers to Sartre’s argument concerning the existence of humans in and for themselves insofar as in her opinion women are denied an existence for themselves by men, and are thus reduced to an objectified position, appearing only as ‘sexual beings’ and men’s ‘Other’ who is always defined in relation to man. De Beauvoir sees the origins of sexual inequality and women’s oppression in patriarchal culture (cf. Chaudhuri 2006:16).

Another marking contribution to the beginnings of ‘Second Wave’ feminism was Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique (1963) which ties in with de Beauvoir’s insights on the exclusive definition of women in sexual relation to men, that is, as sex objects, mothers, wives or housewives. The term ‘feminine mystique’ derives from de Beauvoir’s expression ‘eternal feminine’ and refers to assumed innate and fixed qualities attributed to women such as emotionality or inferiority. Friedan argues that due to this image, which constantly surrounds us through mass media, certain roles are assigned to women so that they are again trapped in patriarchal representations, either being housewives or career women. Friedan’s work partly included the connections between the power of images and women’s real existence but this aspect was mostly analyzed by other feminist film critics (ibid. 17).

2.1.2. American Influence: Images of Women

Feminist theorists like Haskell, Rosen and Mellen belonged to a strand of feminist criticism known as ‘Images of Women’ which emerged in the early 1970s in the US and was marked by a strong political commitment. Their sociological approach to film was ‘reflectionist’ insofar as they assumed that cinema functions as a mirror to reality and thus reflects role definitions and female stereotypes accepted in society. Women’s representation in the media may thus encourage very limiting expectations of women, and produce myths such as women being based in the home, inferior to men, or in favor of violent men (cf. Nelmes 2007:227). As Haskell points out: 6

From a woman’s point of view, the ten years from, say, 1962 or 1963 to 1973 have been the most disheartening in screen history. In the roles and prominence accorded women, the decade began unpromisingly, grew steadily worse, and at present shows no signs of improving. Directors who in 1962 were guilty only of covert misogyny (Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita) […] became overt in 1972 with the violent abuse and brutalization of A Clockwork Orange […] (Haskell 1973:323).

The idea that film mirrors social reality and that depictions of women are distortions of how women are, together with the demand for showing ‘positive’ and ‘real’ images of women has often been criticized, especially by British theorists who were dissatisfied with the missing understanding of film as a signifying practice (cf. Chaudhuri 2006:22). According to White (2000:116), the problem that results from the consideration of the social function of categories is that “[t]he identification of types and generic conventions is an important step, but simply replacing stereotypes with positive images does not transform the system that produced them”. However, the critic’s emphasis on the relationship between film texts and historical contexts in which they were produced was an important contribution when it comes to an understanding of both film and femininity. By 1971, the link between the two had been based on firm grounds due to several accomplishments, like the organization of feminist film festivals1, the launch of Women and Film2 and the production of avant-garde and feminist documentaries3. It needs to be said, though, that this film practice has been criticized in a similar way as ‘Images of Women’ since “it assumes that the meanings of feminist films were transparent and had a ‘truth’ which could be unproblematically communicated to the audience”, as Hollows (2000:43) writes in her book Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture.

While most American feminist film criticism up to the mid-1970s was affected by the sociological approach, a different form of criticism, interested in theorizing the structure of representation, appeared in the UK. These theories claimed that the operations of the film text produced ‘women as image’, and had a significant impact on the future of feminist film criticism. The result was the opposition of two strands, namely the ‘American’ sociological approaches and the ‘British’ theory of ‘cinefeminism’ (cf. White 2000:116).

1 The first women’s film festival took place in 1972 in Edinburgh and was co-organized by Claire Johnston (cf. Chaudhuri 2006:22). 2 Early articles published by the ‘Images of Women’ film criticism were published in this first feminist film journal in the US (cf. Hollows 2000:43). 3 The two forms are included in independent cinema which is amongst others used to describe filmmaking outside the mainstream sector, like feminist film. 7

2.1.3. European Influence: Screen Theory

The British impact on the future of feminist film criticism was not only based on the influences from ‘Second Wave’ feminism but also on the type of film criticism, known as ‘Screen theory’4 drawing on ideas from structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis (cf. Hollows 2000:44). One key representative whose work introduced a new way of thinking about women and film was Claire Johnston, a pioneer of British feminist film theory. Contrary to the ‘Images of Women’ approach in her opinion “cinema is an artificial construction, which mediates ‘reality’ with its own signifying practices” (cit. in Chaudhuri 2006:22). In other words, meaning is generated in and by the films rather than by reality. Instead of only dealing with the surface level of a story and its characters, British feminist film theorists, such as Johnston, Cook, and Mulvey considered the influence of other filmic specificities such as lighting, editing and camera movement on the creation of hidden structures or underlying meanings. Johnston criticized the narrow role women is given in mainstream cinema and stressed the importance of a film practice which questions and challenges mainstream cinema. Consequently, in one of the first articles on feminist film theory and practice “Woman’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema” (1973), she called for a counter-cinema movement. She was also the first who combined theories coming from France, such as Marxism, semiotics and structuralism with Freudian psychoanalysis, which informed the work of Screen theorists. These concepts provided a way of understanding how films generate their meanings and how they address their spectators (cf. Hollows 2000:44). In the following the key assumptions of the Screen theory will be discussed briefly.

2.1.3.1. Marxism

An argument which derived from Marxist theory was that the dominant classes are interested in perpetuating the dominant ideology in order to control the means of production. Exponents of Althusserian Marxism have called for a revolutionary cinema in order to challenge the capitalist system and its dominant ideology which is reinforced by mainstream cinema (cf. Nelmes 2007:230). A key idea which originated from the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser was to include the spectators in the production of a film’s meaning since they were also constructed in the process by the film. This is why the

4 The film criticism was named after the journal Screen which presented a more theoretical complexity and was the touchstone for developments in feminist film theory (cf. Hollows 2000:44). 8

Screen theorists’ ideas were influenced by the notion that “the very form and language of film works not only to reproduce patriarchal ideology, but also to reproduce its spectators as subjects of patriarchal ideology”, as Hollows (2000:44) puts it. Their theoretical discourse presented Hollywood cinema as a patriarchal fantasy in which the image of a woman functions as a sign (cf. Chaudhuri 2006:21ff.).

2.1.3.2. Semiotics and Structuralism

Next to drawing on Althusserian Marxism, the Screen theorists included the study of signs in their analyses since semiotics was a useful tool in order to explain the concept of ‘woman as a sign’ and to point out the similarities with the language of cinema. The concept that language is not a neutral system, which refers to ‘real’ objects in the ‘real’ world, but rather is a sign system, in which the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary, originates from structuralism. This movement is based on the work of the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who called the science ‘semiology’, also known as semiotics. In structuralism, meaning in language is generated through difference, namely, words (or signs) gain their meaning as being different to other words (or signs). Transferred to a filmic context, semiotics is a means to analyze how the meaning of a film is constructed on a deeper level, for example through camera angles, dialogue, and narrative. Following de Saussure, words have a denotative or literal meaning and a connotative or implied meaning. This concept was transferred by feminist film theorists to the sign ‘woman’ taking away its denotative meaning of a human being with the potential to bear children and replacing it with connotative meanings of ‘other’, or ‘object of male desire’ and therefore becoming an ‘empty sign’. For this reason, both structuralism and semiotics led feminist film critics to argue that in patriarchy ‘man’ is regarded the ‘norm’ and ‘woman’ gains meaning as different to that ‘norm’ (cf. Hollows 2000:44). Annette Kuhn (1985:19) supports this view in her book The Power of the Image: “It is true […] to say that in a patriarchal culture most representations of women are readable as connoting ‘otherness’ or difference – difference from the norm of patriarchy, that is”.

A similar claim was that dominant cinema constructs our notions of the signification of ‘woman’ and thus reproduces patriarchal ideology. As Hollows (2000:45) points out: “If ‘man’ and ‘masculinity’ signify activity, then ‘woman’ and ‘femininity’ can only signify its absence, ‘passivity’”. In order to deconstruct assumptions about men and women and show the ideological constructions of these images, Johnston suggested in the course of 9 an influential statement in her essay “Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema” to make the codes of mainstream cinema visible by intervening within the mainstream and thus decoding the function of women in Hollywood films. This argument combined the concept of myth by Roland Barthes with auteur theory advocated by film director and critic François Truffaut and led to feminist studies of Hollywood genres, like film noir, the musical, and the western. In Johnston’s understanding, women as signifier fulfilled iconographic and ideological functions, either by constituting the structural dimensions of a genre (woman as home in the western) or by showing its ideological contradictions (femme fatal in film noir) (cf. White 2000:116).

All in all, the understanding that women are equivalents to signs spoken by men had a great impact on feminist theory (cf. Chaudhuri 2006:24ff.). Contrary to this concept (as will be pointed out in Chapter 4 of the paper), the main female protagonist in Eyes Wide Shut functions as an object of male desire on the visual level but on a deeper narrative level she is an independent agent who is in charge of the relationship. In other words, she speaks, rather than is being spoken.

2.2 Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan

Even though Freud's concept of femininity is controversial both inside and outside of the psychoanalytical discourse up to today since it is based on the patriarchal assumption that woman is inferior to man, it was fundamental for many works dealing with feminism. Feminist theorists use sexual difference, which is a central category of psychoanalysis, in order to understand women’s exclusion from linguistic, juristic and other aspects of life. At the same time, psychoanalysis has influenced the cinema profoundly through its emphasis on the meaning of desire in the life of an individual (cf. Creed 2000:75). Kaplan values psychoanalytic theory for the chance it offers to women to change themselves and thus might also bring change to social structures (cf. Ibid. 35).

I will thus briefly look at some of the premises which are relevant for this discussion, and are referred to again and again in the feminist film theory context, even if some appear arguable to me since it seems one-dimensional to base theories of representation and spectatorship mainly on sexual fixations. To begin with a historical overview, the Surrealist movement was the first to draw on psychoanalysis in the 1920s and 1930s in respect to Freud’s theory of dreams and his concept of the unconscious. It is based on the idea that 10 the ego and superego represses or keeps from consciousness a majority of undesirable human thoughts which can turn up in dreams but are generally hard to be made aware of consciously. Connected to this concept, approaches up to the 1970s focused on the ‘unconscious’ of the film text, that is, in relation to its hidden or repressed meanings. Post- 1970s theory explored the meaning of the cinema as an apparatus, the screen-spectator relationship as well as the viewer’s ‘construction’ during the spectatorial process. One representative of the psychoanalytical film theory was Laura Mulvey who introduced neo- Freudian theory to feminist film studies, since Freud’s description of scopophilia5 was Mulvey’s starting point (cf. White 2000:117). Another key figure in the critical discussion of women’s representation in the media was Juliet Mitchell, who played an important role in the British Women’s Movement and had an essential feminist influence with her writings engaging in Freud’s psychoanalysis. Contrary to many other feminists in the 1960s who have criticized Freud for his concept of ‘penis envy’, Mitchell regards him as central in and thus indispensable for the feminist discourse due to his notion of the unconscious. In her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) she argues that “psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society but an analysis of one” (Mitchell 1974:xiii). Another psychoanalyst who was introduced to the English-speaking readers by Mitchell was Lacan. His writings on feminine sexuality had a great impact on Mitchell’s re-reading of Freud (cf. Chaudhuri 2006:17f.).

According to Freud, femininity is an interest second to no other. By referring to four lines of Heine’s poem The North Sea in his lecture on Femininity6, Freud supports his claim: “Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity” (2001:113). In addressing the audience, he makes clear that this will not apply to women since they are themselves the problem. Rather than finding satisfying answers to the constitution of masculinity and femininity in anatomy or in psychology7, he bears on psycho-analysis in order to solve the ‘riddle’ (cf. Freud 2001:113ff.). When comparing both sexes to each other, bodily differences as well as different instinctual dispositions can be detected, but for Freud these differences are not of great consequence since the early phases of libidinal development happen in the same way. However, when entering into the masculine or ‘phallic’ period, as Freud termed it, “the differences between the sexes are

5 For further explanations about the term, see the chapter on Forms of Visual Pleasure. 6 The lecture is mainly based on two earlier papers: ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’ and ‘Female Sexuality’, written in 1925 and 1931 (cf. Freud 2001:113). 7 In his eyes, the distinction made in psychology between ‘masculine’ meaning ‘active’ and ‘feminine’ connoting ‘passive’ is unable to answer the question of femininity (cf. Ibid.). 11 completely eclipsed by their agreements” (ibid. 118). For Freud, femininity emerges out of this phase, which is the same for both boys and girls. He argues that “[w]e are now obliged to recognize that the little girl is a little man [since] the truly feminine vagina is still undiscovered by both sexes”. According to him, this parallel development between the sexes causes disturbances to femininity, since girls repress the phase when they develop their femininity. He is further convinced that the sexual development of a little girl into a ‘normal’ woman is more difficult and complicated since with the change to femininity two extra tasks are included which have no equivalent in the development of a man. The first task is to change the leading erotogenic zone from the clitoris to the vagina; the second, and more difficult one, is to change the object of her love from the mother to the father, or in other words, to pass from the masculine to the feminine phase. Freud even goes as far as to claim that women cannot be understood unless this phase of their pre-Oedipus attachment to the mother is appreciated (cf. Ibid. 118). The frequent regressions to the pre- Oedipus, or ‘phallic phase’ are complicated in the course of some women’s lives, since feminine and masculine periods alternate repeatedly and their behavior alternates between “passive femininity and regressive masculinity” (Mulvey 2004:35). As Mulvey argues, this complication is also reflected in Freud’s choice of terminology. The terms he uses are equal for femininity and masculinity, which causes language problems as shown by the generalized male third person singular. Drawing on Mulvey (ibid. 30), these boundaries to expression already indicate the actual position of women in patriarchal society. Following Freud’s concept, the feminine can thus be only understood as opposition or similarity to masculinity. This definition produces a shifting between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ so that femininity leads to the repression of the ‘active’ during the ‘phallic phase’ (cf. Mulvey 1989:30f.). Although Mulvey’s concept of active/male and passive/female refers to Freud, his writings imply a far less categorical position on female/male sexuality (cf. Tseëlon 1992:122). An opposing theory was suggested by Melanie Klein who argued for a primary phase in which both sexes identified with the feminine rather than the masculine. This assumption would consequently lead to a ‘womb- envy’ in boys as a counterpart to Freud’s ‘penis-envy’ in girls (cf. Creed 2000:83).

Connected to the ‘phallic phase’ is the Oedipal stage when the child first discovers its sexual difference and – what Freud insists on – its absence and lack8 (cf. Chaudhuri 2006:46). In his understanding, girls see the penis for the first time, and notice at once the

8 His displacement of lack on the part of the woman’s body can also be witnessed in film; the filmic implication to this argument is associated to Voyeurism (3.3.1.). 12 difference and its significance. “They feel seriously wronged, often declare that they want to ‘have something like it too’, and fall a victim to ‘envy for the penis’, which will leave ineradicable traces on their development and the formation of their character […]” (Freud 2001:125). In his opinion, the sight of the other sex’s genitals causes the castration complex in both girls and boys; however, the physical consequences are different. For girls there is no temporal gap between seeing and knowing and their understanding of sexual difference marks the end of the attachment to their mother since they blame her for lacking a penis whereas for boys the visible and the knowable occurs in a two-stage process since they first see the woman’s genitals without interest and then feel the threat of castration which is necessary to reread the image in relation to their own subjectivity. In the distance between the look and the threat lies the boy’s relation to knowledge of sexual difference (cf. Doane 1990:46f.). Under this assumption and as a consequence, Freud explains that

[i]n a boy the Oedipus complex, in which he desires his mother and would like to get rid of his father as being a rival, develops naturally from the phase of his phallic sexuality. The threat of castration compels him, however, to give up that attitude. Under the impression of the danger of losing his penis, the Oedipus complex is abandoned, repressed and, in the most normal cases, entirely destroyed […]. What happens with a girl is almost the opposite. The castration complex prepares for the Oedipus complex instead of destroying it; (Freud 2001:125)

The complex thus makes room for the attachment to the girls’ father but ends in hate to their mother. Freud’s insistence that absence and lack happens at the moment of the child’s discovery of sexual difference during the Oedipal stage and his assumption of ‘penis envy’ in girls which informed much film theory is questioned by feminists like Kaja Silverman (1988:16) who contends that the child of either sex “is structured by lack long before the ‘discovery’ of sexual difference”. This argument goes back to Lacan’s metaphorical reading of the Oedipus complex when it comes to the significance of castration anxiety. According to him, the incest question is connected to language since the child not only acquires language at that time, but language-wise is denied its incestuous desire for the mother by the father. During this process the infant, who identifies the father with the law, becomes a subject in the realm of language and social codes, and is separated from the unity with the mother. In the so called ‘Symbolic Order’, all people are thus confronted with lack or ‘symbolic castration’, according to Lacan. Silverman’s critique on Freud’s concept of linking sexual difference to castration can be seen in two ways: Firstly, it ignores the child’s earlier experiences of lack in the Mirror Stage, and secondly, the male subject is distanced from the idea of lack (cf. Chaudhuri

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2006:46f.). She concretizes this argument in her book The Acoustic Mirror:

Freud’s insistence that the little girl experiences a direct and immediate apprehension of what the little boy is obliged to confront only indirectly and at a later date is extremely telling. So is his stress upon the defensive mechanisms – disavowal and fetishism – whereby the male subject can further protect himself from the knowledge of loss (Silverman 1988:16).

Silverman argues that the act of externalizing displacement onto the female subject deposits what the male subject cannot tolerate in himself, namely castration and lack at the site of the woman’s body9. Prior to the Oedipus Complex, the Mirror Stage is actually the period during which the infant first experiences lack since it learns that several objects like faces, the mother’s voice, and breasts are separate. This perception happens in the early stage of childhood at an age between six and eighteen months when the child is still speechless. The period when the infant first recognizes its own image through the reflection in a mirror was thus called the Mirror Stage by Lacan who drew on Freud’s concept of the divided self (cf. Chaudhuri 2006:46). Lacan suggested that during this phase of the Imaginary10 the human identity or the ego is formed since the child experiences itself as a separate entity and by ‘splitting’ itself from these ‘part objects’, as Lacan called them, the infant starts to apprehend itself and the external world of objects. The initial moment of a joyful identification with the mirror image due to the sensation that it is more complete and perfect is based on misrecognition because at this stage the infant’s motor capacity is overwhelmed by its actual experience of its body. Thus, the self is split because of its construction in a moment of recognition and misrecognition (cf. Mulvey 2004:17f.).

In conclusion, relating the aspect of misrecognition with ‘penis envy’ it could be argued that women are more likely to misrecognize the ‘phallus’ which symbolically equals male power, advantage, language, etc. since they might misunderstand that whenever they behave in a ‘male’ way they are guaranteed the same rights as men. In terms of the female desire to be granted an equal access to the world it is quite understandable that women might be jealous when it comes to ‘possessing a penis’. At the same time, this wish can easily lead to confusion because it’s not the ‘penis envy’ that makes a difference

9 A similar displacement happens in films (see Voyeurism) (cf. Chaudhuri 2006:48). 10 Different to Freud’s model of the ego, superego, and id, which function as agencies of the mind, Lacan applied the terms of the Symbolic (Order), the Imaginary and the Real to ‘registers’ which structure our relationship with reality and function as multiple universes in which we simultaneously exist. The Imaginary is the time when the image creates the illusion of similarity and wholeness and where Self and Other intermingle with each other (Chaudhuri 2006:47). 14 but rather the understanding that Freud’s ideas were only one possible way of explaining sexual difference. In the following discussion on looking at women, Lacan’s concept that the image constitutes the first articulation of subjectivity is linked to the relationship between screen (seen as a mirror) and cinema audience. Therefore, the following chapter will focus on the connection between images of women on screen and the ways of looking at them, both within the filmic frame and from the perspective of the audience.

3. The ‘Gaze’: Ways of Looking

The ‘gaze’ has become an important term in various visual disciplines over the last twenty years; especially the contribution of feminist and queer theory has transformed our understanding of looking. This re-evaluation of the term also considers that looking is a form of power and raises the question of how that power can be gendered and “on whether the gaze is in itself male, objectifying and subordinating women” (Mirzoeff 1999:391). This section will explore images of naked women on screen and link the ways of looking at them to different forms of the gaze. The idea that women are on display and depicted as objects on a visual level will then be analyzed relating to the film Eyes Wide Shut.

As mentioned beforehand, a major influence on the debate of ‘looking’ derived from psychoanalysis, particularly from the work of Jacques Lacan, in which the male position equals the privileged place from which to look and the female corresponds to the place to be looked at. Lacan’s theories heavily shaped Laura Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” which was published for the first time in 1975 in the British journal Screen, and is probably one of the most frequently cited pieces of feminist film debate. In her article, Mulvey (2004:15) explains the obvious interest and beauty of psychoanalysis for feminists by “its exact rendering of the frustration experienced under the phallocentric order”. Besides, in her mind, this analysis leads feminists to the roots of oppression, and faces them with the challenge of fighting the unconscious which, according to Lacan, is structured like a language while being caught in patriarchal language. For Mulvey, semiotics helped to understand how images function as signs, whereas psychoanalysis provides a useful tool for finding an answer to the challenge:

There is no way in which we can produce an alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis is not the only but an important one. […] at this point, psychoanalytic 15

theory as it now stands can at least advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught (Mulvey 2004:15).

Although she criticizes the lack of important issues for a debate about the female unconscious in phallocentric theory such as the ‘sexually mature woman as non-mother’ or ‘maternity outside the signification of the phallus’, she turns to psychoanalysis in order to demonstrate “the way the unconscious patriarchal society has structured film form” (ibid.14).

As Chaudhuri comments on in her book Feminist Film Theorists, psychoanalytic theory served Mulvey as a political means to challenge the cinema of the past and turn the focus away from woman as spectacle to men whose psychic needs are satisfied by the spectacle. She further discusses that many of Mulvey’s pioneering insights of her essay can still contribute to the film production today, even though it was written over thirty years ago since “[t]he representation of ‘Woman’ as a spectacle to be looked at pervades visual culture. In such representations, ‘Woman’ is defined solely in terms of sexuality, as an object of desire, in relation to, or as a foil for, ‘Man’” (Chaudhuri 2006:2). This tendency is especially connected to mainstream narrative cinema which Mulvey argued to be constructed for a ‘male gaze’ in order to serve male fantasies and pleasures. Her aims at the time of writing this influential essay were iconoclastic, that is, to break the codes as well as to destroy the erotic and narrative pleasure in film by analyzing it11. In her eyes, this practice also helps to attack the satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego. It’s no wonder that her view of narrative cinema only catering for male fantasies and pleasures caused polemics and critical responses in feminist film theory at the time. The main criticism was that the female spectator was completely ignored in her first debate on visual pleasures12.

3.1. Men Looking at Women

According to Mulvey, there are three explicitly male sets of looks or gazes involved in cinema: the camera looking at the pro-filmic event (this look is usually ‘male’ insofar as generally a man is behind the camera), the film characters looking at each other, and the

11 By destroying the pleasure, the illusion of reality is disrupted, the story is disturbed and the identification with the characters is displaced (cf. Tseëlon 1992:126). 12 Cf. The Female Gaze and its Implications in Eyes Wide Shut. 16 audience looking at the final product13. Narrative cinema conventionally tries to make the audience forget the camera and the fact that they are watching a film. By denying both the looks of the camera and those of the audience in favor of the characters’ looks, a convincing world is created in which men gaze at women who become objects of the gaze. The male protagonist functions as the spectator’s surrogate and drives the story forward while the female has a passive role which is linked to her status as spectacle. By identifying with the look of the male hero, the heroine becomes a passive object in the eyes of the spectators. According to Mulvey, the distinction between an active/male and a passive/female pleasure in looking results from the sexual imbalance in the world and leads to “an active/passive heterosexual division of labour” controlling narrative structure (Mulvey 2004:20). For Tseëlon, this division assigns power to the (male) subject of the gaze over the (female) object of the gaze (cf. Tseëlon 1992:119).

3.1.1. The Male Spectator

The male is conceptualized as active spectator who looks (cf. Tseëlon 1992:119). As agent or bearer of the look, the male figure is reluctant to the gaze and cannot bear to be a sexual object. Instead, the man’s role on screen is rather active since he advances the story and emerges as the representative of power insofar as he bears the look of the spectator. By structuring the film around a main male character, the spectator can identify with and project his look onto him, “so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence” (Mulvey 1989:384f.). In other words, through identification with the male protagonist, the narrative structure is at the same time driven by the male spectator who projects his fantasy onto the woman as image by means of the male gaze. Mainstream film neatly combines spectacle and narrative, that is, “the gaze of the spectator and that of the male character […] without breaking narrative verisimilitude” (ibid.).

In the film Eyes Wide Shut, the spectator is both offered the pleasurable identification with the main male protagonist Dr. Bill Harford, and through him the power to possess the female character displayed as sexual object for his pleasure. Grond-Riegler points out that both Schnitzler and Kubrick celebrate the male gaze on women in their works and ads

13 Tseëlon points out that although Mulvey distinguished different gazes, the categories were often used interchangeably in her work and subsequent works (cf. Tseëlon 1992:120). 17

[w]enn Frauen instrumentalisiert und klischeehaft dargestellt werden, so ist dies ganz klar der Sichtweise einer bestimmten Figur – also den Wünschen und Vorstellungen des männlichen Erzählers – zuzuschreiben (Grond-Riegler 2010:303).

The film involves the viewers in an intimate and personal experience which, according to Giovannelli (2010:360f.), is largely due to its ‘perspective taking’, that is, perceptually and cognitively taking on Bill's perspective. In particular, perceiving things as Bill does often happens due to some long point-of-view shots, which mostly occur during the orgy sequence, when we, as audience, also hear his and other people's voices as they would be heard through the mask he is wearing. Thus, our perceptual imaginings are aligned with those of the protagonist. As such, “[...] the film is very male focused. It largely calls the viewer to see the world through Bill's eyes rather than Alice's” (Saunders Calvert 2011). Exemplarily of this perception are the opening shot of the film with the female protagonist and the scenes which depict the prostitute Mandy and other women during the orgy as the object of the spectator's gaze. As Vaughan (2004) confirms, “from the very opening, Eyes Wide Shut promises to be focused on the role of the ‘gaze’ and its inherent objectification and fetishization, especially of the female body”.

3.1.2. The Female Figure

The female figure on screen is defined as a passive object or image and connotes ‘to-be- looked-at-ness’, as Mulvey (2004:19) terms it since the woman is simultaneously looked at and displayed in her traditional exhibitionistic role which she plays in narrative cinema. Chaudhuri (cf. 2006:35) points out, that in almost any classic Hollywood film the heroine serves as an object to be looked at. The woman thus functions on two levels, namely as an erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium as well as a sexual object for the characters within the story. This is why she holds the look of male desire on both sides of the screen performing within the narrative. In a similar way, fragmented body parts14, such as the close-ups of legs or a face, add a different mode of eroticism to the narrative and destroy the illusion of depth, which is demanded by the narrative. As Chaudhuri (ibid.) suggests, “narrative cinema, then, is not unlike other visual forms that display women as sexual objects, such as pin-ups or striptease”. The main difference between cinema and other forms of sexual representation of women is that in cinema there are different looks involved which place all spectators in a ‘masculinized’ position. Kuhn (1982:65) argues that

14 For further information read the section on Fetishism. 18 a model of spectatorship which refuses women to adopt neither a male nor a transvestite position is ‘monolithic’ and ‘homogenizing’ since “it ignores complex forms of identification, multiple identifications, the plurality, contradiction or resistance that exists among feminine spectators, an active female gaze and feminist erotica (female pleasure in looking outside of male structures)”. However, theories of female spectators are rare but not inexistent. Some of them will be discussed at a later point of the paper in greater detail.

3.2. Forms of Visual Pleasure

There are two contradictory processes of visual pleasure in narrative film, namely, the objectification of the image and the identification with it (cf. Mulvey 2004:26). In active scopophilia the spectator doesn’t identify with and is thus distanced from the erotic object on screen. The other form of looking contributes to the construction of the ego and arises from narcissism where the spectator identifies with his own likeness on screen (cf. Ibid. 16). In other words, there is a twofold process involved in the cinematic gaze which firstly consists in the construction of image, expressed by the power assigned to the male protagonist and secondly in the construction of cinematic pleasure where the gaze is characterized by the voyeuristic pleasure and fetishistic objectification and idealization (cf. Tseëlon 1992:120).

3.2.1. Scopophilia

The term scopophilia, or sexual pleasure in looking, was originally coined by Freud and served Mulvey as a starting point in her discussion on the ways women are looked at by a male audience. Influenced by her article, feminist film theory argued that the viewer’s desire equals the scopic instinct, and takes the forms of voyeuristic and fetishistic gratifications (cf. Tseëlon 1992:123). In his work Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud defined scopophilia as a component instinct of sexuality and associated it with “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (cit. in Mulvey 2004:16). At first, he connected this instinct to the voyeuristic activities of children who actively try to see and find out about the private and forbidden genital and bodily functions as well as the presence or absence of the penis in other people. Even though the instinct is modified amongst other factors by the constitution of the ego, it represents the basis for looking at another person as object. In this context, Mulvey mentions an extreme example of scopophilia, namely a Peeping Tom or obsessive voyeur who only feels 19 sexually satisfied when watching an objectified other in an active controlling sense. According to her, mainstream cinema positions its spectators as Peeping Toms, promoting a sense of voyeuristic separation between them and the private world they are looking on in15. Psychoanalytic critics argue that the cinema fosters a regression to the state of early childhood. Freud developed his theory further and transferred the pleasure of looking to others than children. By doing so, he related the active instinct to the narcissistic form (ibid.).

3.2.2. Narcissism

The wish for pleasurable looking is further developed in its ‘narcissistic aspect’ by triggering the spectator’s curiosity and wish to recognize the human face, the human body and its relationship to the world in order to identify it as being similar to the own. Connected to this form of looking, Mulvey refers to Lacan’s concept of the Mirror Stage insofar as the spectator resembles an infant who is impressed by the images on screen forgetting the world perceived by the ego, but at the same time identifies with the stars, who “provide a focus or center both to screen space and screen story where they act out a complex process of likeness and difference” (ibid. 18). Thus, the viewing experience resembles the moment when the child first grasps a sense of subjectivity by identifying with an ideal self and the spectator feels some sort of transcendence. However, Creed objects (2000:78) that the “spectator is not the point of origin, the center of representation”. Similar objections were formulated by Baudry who argued that the sense of a unified self does not emanate from the spectator but is related to the cinematic apparatus. For him, the aim of the cinematic institution is to make the subject misrecognize itself as transcendental. Even if the analogy between screen and mirror was supported by Baudry and Metz who published the first systematic book, which applied psychoanalytic theory to cinema, the latter argued that the link between cinema and mirror was not useful since the cinema doesn’t reflect the spectator’s own image in the way a mirror does (ibid.).

In summary, there are two contradictory aspects of pleasurable looking. Firstly, when looking at another person as an object of sexual stimulation while the subject’s identity is distanced from the object on screen (scopophilia) and secondly, when identifying with the image, that is, the on-screen likeness (through narcissism and the formation of the ego). Freud saw sexual instincts and identification processes as interacting, yet polarizing at the

15 For a more thorough background on Voyeurism, read 3.3.1. 20 same time. For Mulvey, this dichotomy, which was crucial for Freud, continually traces back to its beginning, the castration complex where the female figure connotes sexual difference and thus poses a threat of castration on the male spectator who is looking at her. This is why “the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallizes this paradox” (Mulvey 2004:19). According to Mulvey, narrative cinema has found two ways in order to neutralize this threat and master the castration anxiety, namely firstly through voyeurism by revealing the woman’s guilt and secondly through fetishism by making the woman reassuring instead of dangerous (cf. Chaudhuri 2006:36).

3.3. Scopophilic Aspects in Eyes Wide Shut

Mulvey’s concept that scopophilia is a male pleasure and ‘the look’ in cinema is controlled by the male, directed at the female is often referred to as the ‘male gaze’. With her emphasis on the patriarchal perspective in the cinema she not only took into consideration the interaction between spectator and screen from a feminist point of view, but also contributed to the uncovering of voyeuristic and fetishistic ideas behind male spectators looking at women since she argued that the visual pleasures of Hollywood cinema are based on these looks. Both forms were described in Freud’s essay on “Fetishism” as “sexual male perversions representing solutions to unconscious conflicts” (cit. in Tseëlon 1995:67). Similarly, for Williams (2000:482) both are ways of “not-seeing, of either keeping a safe distance from, or misrecognizing what there is to see of, the woman’s difference”. Mulvey acknowledges a great need for women to understand the mechanisms of both voyeurism and fetishism in order to see through the patriarchal unconscious of film.

3.3.1. Voyeurism

Voyeurism is only one form of scopophilia, another one being fetishism. In voyeurism, exhibitionistic tendencies are converted from the passive pleasure to display one’s body to the active pleasure in looking. In other words, “voyeurism represents a substitution of sexual activity with the act of looking” (Tseëlon 1992:123). Thereby, the look separates the voyeur or Peeping Tom from the object without the object looking back. “Because of the definitive absence of what is represented […], there is always an element of voyeuristic pleasure in the spectator’s looking” (Kuhn 1985:41f.). Additionally and as mentioned beforehand, the cinema supports the spectators’ illusion that they are looking in on a 21 private world and the dark auditorium, which isolates them from the bright screen, helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. The position of the spectators is thus a way to repress their exhibitionism and project the repressed desire onto the performer (cf. Mulvey 1989:381f.). According to Mulvey, the voyeuristic look is inquisitive as well as curious, and at the same time tries to demystify or destroy the woman.

Christian Metz analyzed voyeuristic desire in terms of proximity and distance in relation to the image on screen. According to him, the voyeur not only must maintain a distance, he even needs the gap between him (desire) and the image (object). As such, he sees voyeurism as a type of meta-desire.

If it is true of all desire that it depends on the infinite pursuit of its absent object, voyeuristic desire, along with certain forms of sadism, is the only desire whose principle of distance symbolically and spatially evokes this fundamental rent (Metz 1975:61).

The problem with this status is that other arts like painting, theater, or opera share the same characteristics. In order to distinguish the cinema, Metz introduced a further re- duplication of the lack that prompts desire. Despite the sensory plenitude, the objects which are there to be seen are absent. Thus, as Doane (1990:45) remarks in her essay on female spectatorship: “The viewer must not sit either too close or too far from the screen. The result of both would be the same – he would lose the image of his desire”. From this point of view, she deduces that both the control and the loss of the image cause the problematic of sexual difference in the spectatorship.

Since the pleasure of male spectators depends on the identification process of woman with lack which then leads to punishing or taming her it has associations with sadism, as Mulvey argued: “the pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjugating the guilty person through punishment and forgiveness” (Mulvey 2004:21f.). For her, sadism is a suitable component in narrative as it demands a story which occurs in a linear time line with a beginning and an end and forces a change in another person. In contrast to Mulvey, Silverman demonstrates that while the burden of a lack belongs to both male and female subjects, male spectators project their burden onto the female figure in order to compensate for their own lack, and can indulge in the fantasy of being unified and complete. In this sense, cinema as a medium offers not only a visual but also an aural illusion for the spectators (cf. Chaudhuri 2006:48).

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The voyeuristic strategy is typically used in film noir which is known for its deadly femmes fatales. In this genre, the hero who is usually a detective and thus a representative of the law investigates a murder which is caused by a woman. Consequently, the male hero investigates her, and at an unconscious level resolves the problem of her sexuality. His voyeuristic control over her, reassures his own mastery, and as a matter of fact that of the male spectator (cf. Mulvey 2004:22). Kaplan is convinced that screen images of women are always sexualized and whenever sex scenes are involved the spectator is obviously in the voyeur position16 (cf. Kaplan 1983:30).

Seen in the context of Eyes Wide Shut, the film opens with the image of a nude female. Alice Harford, the doctor’s wife, is shown in the middle of the room with her back to the camera, shedding her daytime clothes in order to dress up in her evening gown. After slipping out of an elegant black dress, which she drops to the floor, the protagonist’s naked torso is on display as she stands in high heels in the dressing room of the family’s apartment (cf. Kaplan 2006:62).

Nelson describes this image like this: “In the film’s first image, he [Kubrick] framed Alice’s nakedness and our voyeurism within a painterly composition of white pillars and red curtains, bathed in a golden light that made her resemble one of those Renaissance bronzes […]” (2000:279). Similarly, Saunders Calvert refers to the voyeuristic aspect of the opening shot where “we, the audience, are clearly positioned as voyeur” (2011) since we view the main female protagonist from behind out of another room. The spectator’s gaze is automatically aimed at her nakedness since her face is turned away from the camera during the entire scene without her looking back at the spectator. At this stage, Alice exists

16 Kuhn claims that also women can adopt a position of voyeurism, since they might derive pleasure from images of women. Whenever this is the case, it is possible that they are taking on a masculine subject position. In case the spectator, either male or female, identifies with the woman in the image, rather than objectifying her, she argues that “the pleasure of looking is not completely voyeuristic” (1985:31). 23 only to be looked at from, what Laura Mulvey termed, the ‘male gaze’. Her existence is limited to being an object of scopophilia and thus objectified (cf. Saunders Calvert 2011). This image not only opens several questions in the viewer, but also arouses a first voyeuristic sensation in the male viewer feeling empowered by it. Ruschel describes it in the following words:

Die erotische Komponente dieses Bildes, das den entpersonifizierten, nackten weiblichen Körper ins Zentrum rückt, präsentiert die Frau als Sexualobjekt, das Begehren auslöst, und definiert den Blick der Kamera und damit die Perspektive des Films als eine spezifisch männliche Sicht (Ruschel, cit. in Grond-Riegler 2002:96).

Next to the voyeuristic impact of the image, it also implies a fetishistic representation of the female protagonist, Nicole Kidman. Vaughan (2004) refers to Mulvey’s concept of fetishistic scophophilia in his comments: “Not only does this initial image scream of Mulveian scopophilia in the hands of the ‘male gaze’, it also supports Mulvey’s derivative point about the fetishization of the female star (Kidman)”. Hence, without an introduction to the character or before a single word is spoken, the audience knows that the actress is Nicole Kidman and in a way might be surprised by Kubrick’s anticipation to see the actress naked so early in the film. After placing “the viewer immediately in the role of voyeur” (Helmetag 2003:277) by directing this long shot of the main character who is isolated, on display, and sexualized, Kubrick turns off the lights and produces a two-second blackout, before the lights are back on to show Dr. William Hartford dressed up and ready to leave for the Christmas ball given by his billionaire patient, Victor Ziegler (cf. Kaplan 2006:62). The fetishization of female nudes in the film, as indicated by Vaughan, will be discussed by first dealing with fetishistic scopophilia in theory.

3.3.2. Fetishism

In Cultures of Fetishism (2006), Louise J. Kaplan defines the term and its lexical field like this: “In general, fetishism refers to the practice of worshipping. Fetishist refers to the person doing the worshipping. Fetish refers to the object worshipped. And, […] what usually comes to mind first and foremost are the bizarre sexual practices of fetishism and the sort of person who is irrationally devoted to these practices, the fetishist” (Kaplan 2006:2f.). In her book, Kaplan coins the term ‘fetishism strategy’ which refers to the worship of ‘primitive’ fetish objects since “the derivation of the word ‘fetishism’ is usually traced back to the fetish objects that are worshipped by ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ peoples”

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(ibid. 4), like natural or artificial objects17. Under reference to psychoanalysis, fetishism is a response to castration anxiety which is triggered by the sight of the penis-less woman and generates an ego split between denial and defense. The sexual object is replaced by a body part or an item of clothing which belongs to the desired person (cf. Tseëlon 1995:68).

In Doane’s opinion (1990:47), “the male spectator is destined to be a fetishist, balancing knowledge and belief”. The analogy is based on the simultaneous knowledge that the image is just an image and the belief that the image creates an illusion of reality. This idea refers to the boy’s knowledge of sexual difference and his retrospective understanding, or revision of earlier events. For her, the gap between the knowable and the visible thus prepares the ground for fetishism. Due to the girl’s lack of distance between seeing and understanding, the position of fetishist is impossible or extremely difficult to be assumed by females. Instead, by abolishing the distance, the woman over-identifies with the image, and is unable to fetishize18 (cf. Doane 1990:47). Usually the fetishist worships his fetish, which might be stiletto shoes or boots worn by the fetishist or his sexual partner. However, as Kaplan explains, any excessive activity or devotion can be referred to as fetish as well as the enigmatic body of a woman which has traditionally been employed in various disciplines like medicine, art, politics, or religion as a fetishistic emblem (cf. Kaplan 2006:52).

Fetishistic scopophilia, according to Mulvey, focuses on the object’s beauty. As an erotic spectacle, the woman is the perfect fetish. The camera isolates fragments of her body, like breasts, legs or the face in close-ups. The use of close-ups not only forms the content of the film due to the direct reception of the spectator’s look, it also stresses that the heroine is most of all valued for her appearance, her beauty and sexual desirability. At the same time, close-ups of female body parts invite the viewers to erotic contemplation which causes a halt in the flow of the narrative and a destruction of the illusion of depth. Exemplarily for the fetishization of women in cinema, Mulvey mentions the most typical Dietrich films where moments of supreme erotic impact happen in absence of the man she loves, and are displayed as a spectacle for the audience. The overvaluation of a female star like Dietrich suggests that the recognition of sexual difference is refused and thus the

17 Kaplan mentions a tiger tooth, or crow feather believed to be inhabited by a god or spirit (cf. Kaplan 2006:5). 18 In Stacey’s opinion, this argument challenges the hegemony of the cinema apparatus since it offers an account of visual pleasure which is neither based on a phallic model nor on a determinant text, and allows women to resist to the dominant masculine spectator position (cf. Stacey 2000:453). 25 female form can be looked at without fear by the male spectator. This is because the image of a woman or a fragment of her body is used exemplarily for disavowing the threat of sexual difference (White 2000:118). Contrary to voyeurism, fetishism can exist outside linear time because the erotic instinct focuses only on the look. A special instance in narrative cinema is Sternberg’s films, which are discussed by Mulvey as they dispense with the controlling male gaze within the screen scene and thus facilitate a direct link between image and spectator (cf. Mulvey 2004:22).

According to Kaplan, Eyes Wide Shut exemplarily demonstrates the fetishism strategy, since “it pervades every corner of the Harford’s world” (Kaplan 2006:61). She argues that not only the foreground-background pattern of the narrative but also the substitution of money and consumerism for forgiveness, and compassion representing Christian values serve a fetishistic purpose in the film. In fact, the Christmas tree as a (phallic) symbol pervades almost all settings from beginning to end. In account with this, her fifth principle of the fetishism strategy19 is linked with the aggression disguised in in erotic colors and surfaces. In the course of the film, Kubrick invites the spectators to witness the descent into perversion “from the relatively innocent-sounding fetishism at the top, to voyeurism and exhibitionism, to sadism and bondage, and finally at the bottom – the necrophilia that characterizes much of the frenzied, orgiastic sexuality exhibited in Eyes Wide Shut” (ibid. 62). Kaplan points out that Kubrick incorporated Freud’s defensive structure of sexual fetishism exemplarily by the choice of the film title since it represents the disavowals described by Freud in “Fetishism”:

Eyes that are wide shut allow the person to have it both ways, both seeing what has happened, what is there, but then again, not perceiving or acknowledging the import of what one has seen, or might have seen, plain as day, right before her eyes – if the person’s eyes are wide open (Kaplan 2006:62).

An eye-opening example for both fetishism and voyeurism in the film is the depiction of women’s bodies and their exploitation in uncompromising detail. The exploited bodies which stand for power abuses in the social order belong to underclass hookers and some better situated call-girls who sell themselves as embodiments of sexual fantasies for the powerful and rich in male society. One prominent female character is Mandy who lies stretched out on an armchair in Ziegler’s private rooms on one of the floors above the ballroom in the four-story mansion on the Upper East Side where Ziegler hosts a

19 The death drive tints itself in erotic color. The impression of erogenous color draws a mask right on the skin (Kaplan 2006:8). 26

Christmas party. At the mentioned moment, he is pulling up his trousers next to her. Saunders Calvert (2011) sums up the scene quite accurately: “Ziegler […] happily sleeps with a prostitute upstairs at his own party while his wife entertains downstairs; who displays a complete disregard for this woman's well-being when she suffers from a drug overdose;” his lack of respect for the woman is additionally demonstrated by the way she is presented to the audience.

As can be noticed at first glance, the stunningly beautiful, bare-breasted woman is positioned in the center of the screen20. A plausible explanation for this position is given by Louise Kaplan (2006:53) who argues that “[…] fetishistic transactions in film are those that occupy the center or foreground of the visual field and thereby preoccupy the conscious attention of the audience to the detriment of some other less conscious or unconscious theme”. As such, the body of the actress also serves an opposing function, namely, to conceal some unconscious background text. In the course of the film, the woman’s naked body will be displayed in two other occasions, namely during the orgy and in the morgue. However, the tragic end of her character is far from being revealed at this point of the story. Thus, those elements are cast into the margins, or background of the story.

In the first picture, the woman whose breasts and shame are openly on display is entirely naked except for a pair of stiletto sandals. Her body arrangement solicits the spectator’s gaze: “The woman’s body is angled towards the camera to offer a maximum display […] breasts are accentuated by the placement of arms and elbows in certain ways, and so on” (Kuhn 1985:38). The fact that these parts are defined and reduced to the feminine suggests a feature of fetishism, namely, that usually the female body is constructed as a spectacle because parts of it are pleasurable to look at (cf. Kuhn 1985:38). At first sight, she seems either dead or in coma. Bill suspects a drug overdose since the prostitute is almost unconscious. After Ziegler refers to her as ‘Mandy’, Bill crouches down next to the

20 Notice the same focus point as in the first shot of Alice. 27 woman addressing her on the same level by her name with his right hand placed on her belly until she wakes up with half-opened (wide-shut?) eyes (ibid. 63). During the entire scene the woman’s body remains uncovered which invites the audience to look at her naked voluminous breasts. Additionally, the camera angle is directed slightly downwards as if it was intended to show Ziegler’s perspective from an upright position. A remarkable and curious detail is that, while explaining the incidence to Bill, Ziegler stands in front of a huge rectangular painting of a nude female stretched out on a sofa. This painted image constitutes the background and frames the screen scene. As Nelson describes it: “During that important scene, we see two nude women in almost identical poses: the drug- overdosed Mandy, sprawled out in a semi-conscious state on a red chair, and a nude portrait of a woman in a state of uninhibited sexual invitation on the wall” (Nelson 2000:271). While Bill in the end swears secrecy to Ziegler about the incidence, his wife Alice is still alone downstairs wandering about the whereabouts of her husband.

The voyeuristic aspect in the discussed scene is that the voyeur’s pleasure consists partly in the fact that the object of his look is unable to see him. Drawing on Annette Kuhn (1985:28), “it is a pleasure of power, and the look a controlling one”. In her article “Lawless seeing”, she describes an image similar to the scene, pointing out the spectator’s voyeuristic attitude towards a woman depicted in this way.

Her eyes are closed, she faces away from camera, but her body is wide open. […] The spectator can indulge in the ‘lawless seeing’ permitted by the […] reassurance that the woman is unaware of his look. He can gaze as long as he likes at her body, with its sign of difference on display (Kuhn 1985:29f.).

While this scene proposes that the woman is unaware of the spectator’s look, her body is at the same time arranged as if on display for him. Kuhn (ibid. 41) suggests, that “this implies an unspoken exhibitionism on the part of the object of the look, thus permitting the spectator a twofold pleasure”. Taken one step further, the ‘come-on’ look is conventionally employed in soft-core pornography where the woman acknowledges the spectator by her direct look at the camera suggesting that she is displaying her body for him on purpose, and offering quite openly to take a good look, that is, a direct sexual invitation. In this particular kind of look the head is tilted in order to angle her glance slightly rather than to see her face-on. While in this case the spectator is assured that he is the one wanted by the woman, the voyeuristic look puts woman’s sexual pleasure on display for the spectator. Since the ‘come-on’ look promises authenticity, Kuhn argues that exhibitionism wins over 28 voyeurism (cf. Kuhn 1985:41f.).

It is arguable if some of the women depicted in the sexual orgy put on the ‘come-on’ look because their eyes are hidden behind masks. What’s certain is that the spectator is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and sees precisely what the male protagonist Bill sees: masked naked women who are in part looking at him while he is slowly strolling from one room to the next, hectically copulating couples in every corner of the room, male guests who are not actively participating, but standing around peering through the eye-slits in their masks, women pleasing other women and same-gender couples dancing with each other to the song Strangers in the Night. Bill’s gaze through the mask is central to the plot and is mainly a voyeuristic form of representation, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination. For Kaplan (2006:66), this scenario is clearly governed by the fetishism strategy: “[t]he secret passwords, the rigidly controlled script, the heavily ritualized sex, the orchestrated body movements of the naked women, were all part of a scenario designed to drain sexual experience of all its potential vitality.

According to Kuhn, images like these address the spectator in two different ways. On the one hand, they evoke voyeuristic pleasure insofar as the look is not returned and the spectator can safely enjoy the fantasy about what is actually going on without being caught. On the other hand, the spectator obtains a good look at the really important things by virtue of pornography (cf. Kuhn 1985:33).

The image, soliciting his gaze, draws him into what is happening, a position confirmed by revelations of ‘the action’ which set themselves up as authentic while at the same time operating as a display directed precisely at him. The women are doing it all for him, after all (Kuhn 1985:33).

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Therefore, these images don’t celebrate women’s mutual pleasure, but are rather put on display for a masculine spectator who investigates woman’s pleasure as an object of curiosity, since it is other. The spectator’s gaze is masculine, and the image which addresses him as part of the action constructs his sexuality as masculine. He may then imagine a leading role in a scenario à trois. The feminine is the principal object of enquiry since the masculine is the place from where the spectator looks (cf. Kuhn 1985:32f.). Seen in this light, the sexual orgy exemplifies that “[t]he power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned onto the woman” (Mulvey 1999:386).

3.3.3. Pornography

Since pornography promises the spectator’s pleasure in looking and engages his scopophilia, it is closely connected to voyeurism and fetishism. Kuhn explains the correlation between the three like this: “The conventionalized display of bodies to the spectator, the fetishizing of certain bodily attributes […], all give pornography an exhibitionistic quality, offering the spectator relief from guilt about his voyeurism” (1985:43). She further suggests that if all pornography evokes voyeurism, and voyeurism gives way to identification, pornography may invite the spectator to identify with the male protagonist. On the one hand, pornography lures the spectator promising him visual pleasure; on the other hand it excludes him from the action. While this might be frustrating on one level, it opens up room for the spectator’s fantasy on the other level. The primary purpose of pornography is thus to elicit a sexual response in the viewer. In other words, representing sex and sexual bodies for the purpose of arousal can be labelled ‘pornography’. Thus, “[i]n mainstream pornography, verbal, facial, and bodily expressions of pleasure and contentment are important elements, and […] the body is always willing to be aroused” (Grodal 2004:32). In addition, most representations of women who are produced as ‘other’ or different from the patriarchal cultural norm imply that pornography speaks to and from a masculine subject position. This means that a masculine subject constructs a woman as object and femininity as otherness. Even if mainstream pornography or promiscuous relations may be established by mutual consent, they may also be defined by power.

In the film, Bill’s subjective imaginings of Alice’s sexual encounter with the naval officer depict the female protagonist in the aesthetic of a mainstream pornographic film. His subjective feeling of paranoid disgust and jealousy are presented in form of a half-naked and lustful Alice in a shot that is poorly lit and awkwardly angled. 30

The repeating montage-like image reminds of an amateur video in black and white which, at first, seems like a shot that slipped by Kubrick’s attention. However, the director was famous for his perfectionism which is precisely revealed in this scene where he transfers the dreamy nature of Alice’s female desire into the graphic male landscape of Bill’s sexual imagination. “In fact it is reminiscent of the aesthetic and production values of mainstream pornographic films”, as Grodal (2004:31) addresses in his essay on “Love and Desire in the Cinema”. Furthermore, he explains that the image of the navy officer in uniform is a common trope in pornography.

Some pornographic films seek to increase arousal either by employing stereotypical social roles […] as models for anonymous relations or as a way to enhance anonymous biological desire by emphasizing the separation between cultural identities and roles and anonymous sex (ibid.).

In other words, Dr. Harford subjectively envisions his wife’s infidelities (in word and dream, but not in deed) as cheap pornography, whereas his own sexual experimentation remains on an ‘artistic level’ (cf. Frey 2006:42). At the same time, Bill’s ‘blue movie’ foreshadows his voyeuristic participation in the grotesque pornography of Somerton (cf. Nelson 2000:287). It could be said that Alice’s dreams and fantasies are in a counter position to the consumer fetishism represented by the male upper class displayed in the rest of the film.

Hitherto, the discussion of male spectatorship and the male gaze have left the question of female spectatorship without reply. This is why the last section of the chapter will be devoted to this much debated issue following feminist film theorists.

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3.4. The Female Gaze and its Implications in Eyes Wide Shut

Especially during the 1980s, and as a reaction to Mulvey’s first essay, a number of questions were raised by feminist film theorists like de Lauretis, Doane, Kaplan, Kuhn, Stacey et al. who influenced feminist film theory to a large extent. Is the gaze male? Could women also own the gaze? And if so, would they want to own the gaze? What does it mean to be a female spectator? What about her pleasure? As Rodowick points out:

[…] the place of the masculine is discussed as both the subject and object of the gaze: and the feminine is discussed only as an object which structures the masculine look according to its active (voyeuristic) and passive (fetishistic) forms. So where is the place of the feminine subject in this scenario? (cit. in Stacey 2000:451).

For Kaplan, asking questions is the first step to establishing a female discourse, or is the only means for women to resist to patriarchal domination since a movement is taking place when questions are followed by more questions. At the same time, feminist film critics hoped to “find the gaps and fissures through which we can insert woman in a historical discourse that has hitherto been male-dominated and has excluded women” (1983:25).

In her article “Desperately Seeking Difference”, Jackie Stacey argues that the theoretical gap can be filled in several ways. By analyzing different possibilities, she addresses the two lacunae in Mulvey’s argument concerning the objectification of the image and the identification with it as contradictory processes in visual pleasure. The first raises the question of the male figure as erotic object and the second of the female figure as subject in the narrative as well as the female audience with active desires and sexual aims. In order to show that “the film text can be read and enjoyed from different gendered positions” Stacey (2000:452) suggests a thorough textual analysis. Instead of a unified masculine spectatorship, commonly assumed in the monolithic model of Hollywood cinema, she is convinced that a film text provides space for a feminine subject both in the text and in the audience and thus offers an explanation of women’s pleasure in narrative cinema21 (cf. Ibid.).

Other feminist critics point out that films which specifically address the female audience by centering on a female protagonist, her concerns and experiences, have always existed, in particular in the 1930s and 1940s. The melodrama which is a sub-genre of the ‘woman’s

21 For a more detailed analysis on narrative theory and the film text read the following chapter. 32 film’22 is an excellent example for the focus on the female subject. However, the female desires expressed in the films collided with the patriarchal ideology at work. In order to tackle these contradictions, films like Stella Dallas (1937) laid them bare by dealing with women’s conflicts between their desire to be more than a mother and their maternal duty (cf. Chaudhuri 2006:40). Williams argues that melodramatic ‘woman’s films’ offer a place where women communicate with each other in a language different to their specific social roles. Thus, additionally to addressing issues of primary concern for female audiences, they demand a female reading competence which is significant for the social construction of female identity. In her eyes, the discovery of a more ‘authentic’23 female subjectivity leads to a far better understanding of what pleasure women spectators can identify with in classical narrative cinema than an entire rejection of dominant modes of representation (cf. Williams 2000:483f.).

In an attempt to refer to critical voices, Mulvey reconsidered the role of the female spectator in “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’”. While in 1975 she was convinced that narrative cinema provided no place for female spectators, in her 1981 revision of the article she realized that the conceptualization of spectators as solely masculine had disregarded the female gaze. She then suggested that the identification with the male hero might invoke “the freedom of action and control over the diegetic world” (1989:29) and at the same time make the female spectators cross the gender border since it is itself divided. Here again she alludes to Freud’s concept of the pre-Oedipal, or ‘phallic phase’ discussed earlier, and argues that the identification of a female spectator with the active, male part is possible but uneasy for her, that is, identifying with the active gaze can only be achieved within ‘transvestite clothes’ (cf. Ibid. 37). She concludes that “[i]n this sense Hollywood genre films structured around masculine pleasure, offering an identification with the active point of view, allow a woman spectator to rediscover that lost aspect of her sexual identity […]” (ibid. 31). Although Mulvey’s revision takes into consideration a ‘mobile’ spectator position produced by the text and focuses on the gaps within patriarchal signification, she maintains that the female spectator must assume a masculine position (cf. Stacey 2000:455). In other words, although the gaze is not necessarily male, to own and activate the gaze is to be in the ‘masculine’ position (cf. Kaplan 1983:30).

22 In these films the mother often sacrifices her mother-daughter relationship insofar as she attempts to compensate for her own inferiority due to patriarchal devaluation of women in general (cf. Williams 2000:479). 23 At this point, she acknowledges that the term ‘authentic’ is quite problematic (cf. Ibid.). 33

Instead of Mulvey’s oppositional use of male/active and female/passive, and the female spectator’s oscillation between the two forms of identification, the American feminist film theorist Mary Ann Doane defined the gaze in connection with the proximity and distance towards the image. In her article “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator” she explains that one problem of aligning sexual difference with a subject/object dichotomy in the dominant system is that male subjectivity is linked to the agency of the look. This is why Doane proposes not only to break the opposition between passivity and activity but also that of proximity and distance in relation to the image since this logic behind the structure of the gaze is responsible for a sexual division: “It is precisely this opposition between proximity and distance, control of the image and its loss, which locates the possibilities of spectatorship within the problematic of sexual difference” (1990:45). She draws on Freud’s asymmetrical development of masculinity and femininity in order to show that woman’s pleasures are not based on fetishistic and voyeuristic drives. Due to the close relationship between the female spectator and the image, which she is, the image becomes so over-present that the female look demands becoming the image. Therefore, the desire to look is converted into the desire to be looked at which can only be described in terms of narcissism24 (cf. Stacey 2000:453).

However, Doane points out that, due to the closeness to the body, the woman can’t assume a man’s position when it comes to signifying systems since “she is haunted by the loss of a loss, the lack of that lack so essential for the realization of the ideals of semiotic systems” (1990:46). This means that contrary to man’s spatial distance in relation to his body, the female is specified by a spatial proximity. In order to receive pleasure, Doane proposes that the woman needs a masquerade to distance herself from the female image. This idea is based on the Lacanian notion that through masquerade the woman rejects an essential part of her femininity (cit. in Tseëlon and Kaiser 1992:120). At the same time, Doane agrees that “given the history of a cinema which relies so heavily on voyeurism, fetishism, and identification with an ego ideal conceivable only in masculine terms” (1990:55) it’s tempting to foreclose the female spectatorship altogether. The tendency to theorize the feminine gaze as repressed and thus irretrievable leads to a femininity which is placed within a network of power relations (cf. Ibid.).

24 In feminist film theory, the female spectator is offered three (unsatisfactory) ways of pleasure, namely narcissism by becoming her own object of desire rather than voyeurism since the latter requires a distance or gap, masochism by over-identifying with the exclusive role as object of desire since she cannot displace her mother as first object of desire in a way the male does, and masculinization by identifying with the male gaze and thus denying her own identity (cf. Tseëlon and Kaiser 1992:121). 34

One could argue that by turning the tables, that is, by reversing the look, an answer to the questions discussed so far might be found. However, the problem of reversing the relation and adjusting the gaze for the woman’s pleasure is that “the reversal itself remains locked within the same logic” (Doane 1990:44). This is why, from a feminist point of view, the solution doesn’t lie in the reversal of roles, as Kaplan discusses. This would imply to put females in the (powerful) position of spectator and males in the (powerless) position of spectacle (cf. Kaplan 1983:30). Doane sums up the problem of defining a feminine specificity in feminist theory like this:

The feminist theorist is thus confronted with something of a double bind: she can continue to analyse and interpret various instances of the repression of woman, of her radical absence in the discourses of men – a pose which necessitates remaining within that very problematic herself, repeating its terms; or she can attempt to delineate a feminine specificity, always risking a recapitulation of patriarchal constructions and a naturalization of ‘woman’ (Doane, cit. in Stacey 2000:453f.).

According to Stacey, this problem turns up in all cultural systems which have defined women as ‘other’ within patriarchal discourses. She raises the question what other ways remain in order to show women’s oppression “without denying femininity any room to manoeuvre (Mulvey 1975), defining women as complete victims of patriarchy (Bellour 1979), or as totally other to it (Doane 1982)?” (Stacey 2000:454)

Before trying to come up with an answer to this problem, the following table summarizes the male and female spectators’ positions when it comes to the construction of the image of women and the modes of pleasure. It suggests that the aim of incorporating a female perspective is partly to problematize the spectator-spectacle relationship.

Table 1: Gendered Spectatorial Positioning (Tseëlon and Kaiser 1992:122)

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For a more complex model of spectatorship and in order to avoid binary oppositions altogether, Stacey acknowledges the “need to separate gender identification from sexuality, too often conflated in the name of sexual difference” (2000:455). This is why she examines two films which offer possibilities of pleasure to a female spectatorship without claiming the films to be directed at a lesbian audience. One of their central themes is the activity of looking as an important part in the construction and reproduction of feminine identities. Similarly, Williams (2000:483) argues that “a theoretical and practical recognition of the ways in which women actually do speak to one another within patriarchy” is needed in order to develop new strategies that speak to women audiences instead of destroying cinematic codes which have treated women as objects of spectacle.

In search for an alternative to psychoanalytic polarities of “dualism and sexual difference” Tseëlon and Kaiser demonstrate the limitations of binaries in general:

The point is that the separation between sexed and gendered gaze still does not escape binary closure. The problem echoes the feminist paradox that arguing for specificity reproduces the very terms of sexual difference it sets out to challenge. […] Rather, the structural boundaries of the (dominant-submissive) relationship must be questioned (Tseëlon and Kaiser 1992:121).

In their article “A Dialogue with Feminist Film Theory: Multiple Readings of the Gaze”, they offer an alternative approach avoiding both gendered sexuality and sexual fixations. Since patriarchal ways of looking can only be changed in line with a long process of struggle over meaning, patriarchal ideology can be challenged through negotiation at the level of spectatorship or alienation at the level of representation. While negotiation refers to meaning insofar as it tries to make feminist meanings part of our pleasures, alienation refers to Mulvey’s idea to “free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment” because “this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the ‘invisible guest’” (2004:26). In other words, by destroying the forms of narrative pleasure which are so concerned with looking at women as objects, cinema might be able to “represent not woman as difference but differences of women” (Williams 2000:483). Tseëlon and Kaiser argue that both postmodernist and symbolic-interactionist frameworks contain the concept of alienation and negotiation, and free the signified from the tyranny of the signifier. Both approaches are an alternative for dealing with binary positions. While symbolic interactionism views oppositions as negotiated, postmodernism abandons them. Next to this, they argue that

36 the categories of the gaze collapse when it is not linked to gender but when both male and female characters can assume the passive and active forms of the gaze either from a masculine or a feminine viewpoint. In other words, their subject positions are interchangeable. This is when the male character shifts from voyeur to sexual object, or the female character alternates between active protagonist and object of a voyeur’s gaze (cf. Tseëlon and Kaiser 1992:126ff.).

This idea can be witnessed in one of the most genuinely erotic scenes in the film which shows an apparently nude Alice and Bill engage in a foreplay in front of their bedroom mirror while Chris Isaak’s song ‘Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing’ is playing on the soundtrack. Nelson compares this scene to those discussed under voyeurism and fetishism, but pointing out Alice’s state of sexual readiness: “As he did in the film’s opening shot and in Victor’s upstairs bathroom, Kubrick one again cuts to an unexpected image of a naked female body, only in this case it asserts a dynamic erotic presence that moves to its own sexual rhythms” (Nelson 2000:279).

Although the male gaze is prominent at the beginning (first picture), the scene invites the female spectator to look at Alice while she admires herself in the mirror and is transfixed on their reflection (second picture). This notion is also supported by Nelson who regards Alice to be “the onscreen voyeur who looks at herself making love with Bill inside the mirror’s frame” (ibid.).

According to Helmetag (2003:278), Alice’s gaze in the mirror confronts our own voyeurism, as we are not only watching the fictional Alice and Bill but also the real-life married couple, Kidman and Cruise who were then the focus of erotic fantasies the world over. Another way of interpreting Alice’s gaze, suggested by Saunders Calvert, is that she is aware of the

37 male gaze and her power to entice and challenge it. This would mean that “her awareness allow[s] her to control or manipulate the supposed power it holds” (2011).

Along the lines of what has been discussed so far, the use of the mirror reflects well the Lacanian idea behind the ‘Mirror Stage’ as a phase of the Imaginary when the child is still speechless and the identity or rather the ego is formed. Alice’s joyful gaze at herself in the mirror reminds of a child’s first recognition of itself as a separate entity. Even if this finding might entail a shock in the case of a child, Alice seems to gain pleasure from the perception. Additionally, the speechless moment is captured accurately by the couple’s silent foreplay which is audibly supported by the song. This allusion seems like a foretaste to the following Oedipus Complex where the female subject represents castration and lack for the male subject. In the scene, the song title sounds to be directed at the woman who is blamed for doing a bad thing by seducing her husband while standing naked in front of the mirror.

Another curious and eye-catching detail in the scene is that Alice wears glasses when Bill approaches her from the left side (first picture) which she takes off in the course of action (second picture). This can be considered an act of giving up looking and being looked at which is based on Doane’s argument that “the woman who wears glasses constitutes one of the most intense visual clichés of the cinema” (1990:50) since it represents a crucial aspect of seeing and being seen with sexual difference. In other words, rather than demonstrating a deficient sight, woman with glasses represent active looking, or the fact of seeing opposed to being seen. In her mind, women with glasses simultaneously represent intellectuality and undesirability. While the intellectual woman usurps the gaze by looking and analyzing, and at the same time poses a threat to the entire system of representation, the undesirable woman wears glasses as signifiers of unattractiveness. Once the glasses have disappeared, the woman transforms into a beautiful lady. Doane describes the cliché of the woman with glasses like this:

The image is a heavily marked condensation of motifs concerned with repressed sexuality, knowledge visibility and vision, intellectuality, and desire. […] but the moment she removes her glasses (a moment which, it seems, must almost always be shown and which is itself linked with a certain sensual quality), she is transformed into spectacle, the very picture of desire (ibid.).

The woman with glasses stands for a more generalized logic, namely, the woman who insists upon looking and appropriates the gaze is ultimately punished. Williams shows that 38 this is true in the genre of horror film where the reflection of the woman is a mirror of herself, the monster. However, the sub-heading “Men Seldom Make Passes at Girls Who Wear Glasses” under which Doane explains this cliché of women with glasses is not valid in the case of the described scene. In my opinion, it disrupts the film’s predominantly male gaze since Alice seems engrossed in her own image in the mirror which enables the female spectator to enjoy the pleasure from a female point of view.

Based on this female perspective, I will now look at the narrative structure of the film by first exploring theoretical grounds in order to afterwards demonstrate that in the film Eyes Wide Shut the main female protagonist is in charge of the story rather than subjected to the male power suggested on the visual level.

4. Film Narrative

When talking about films the subject matter seems clear since film and cinema have become an essential part of everyday life. However simple and influential the impact of film on people’s lives might appear this simplicity is exactly what makes it difficult to find a definition. Indeed, a film includes the notion of a story with characters and emotions which is ready to be watched in a cinema, on television or on DVD. This relates to different but closely connected aspects, namely film texts. A text can be defined as “a coherent, delimited, comprehensible structure of meaning” (Kolker 2000:9). In fact, any meaningful event can be called a text as long as its outside boundaries, its internal structure as well as the viewer’s response25 to it can be isolated and defined.

4.1. The textuality of film

One aspect of textuality is the physicality of film, that is, the film material projected onto a screen in the darkened cinema, or watched on television, computer or DVD at home. The difference consists not only in the images but also the ways in which the images are perceived. In other words, the textual construction for theatrical and televisual viewing is effected by different size, resolution and response. Size is also a determinant factor for the look of the film. Thus, the film text depends on various external conditions, like theatre management, broadcast exigencies and digital video conventions which make the

25 A text is completed when it is seen, read, and heard by someone (cf. Kolker 2000:9). 39 unchanging nature of film impossible. However, the physicality plays a less important role compared to the effect a film has on its viewers.

The second and major part of the text is the thinking, feeling person with his/her experiences which bear on the film’s images, sounds and narrative, and are informed by the surrounding culture. Additionally, beliefs, understandings, and values are activated when viewing a film. Similarly, the filmmaker is influenced by beliefs and the understanding what a film should or should not be; factors which again become textualized (cf. Ibid. 10). A film differs from other forms of art such as a novel or painting insofar as it is less personal and more accessible; it seems to have no origin and is ready for enjoyment. According to Walter Benjamin, film is unique among the arts because it is not unique. In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” he writes:

Film addresses the world, pierces through the realities of daily life like a surgeon’s knife and, by opening perceptions of the ordinary to the many, holds the possibility of engaging an audience in a social and cultural discourse, a mass engagement of the imagination unlike any other art form (cit. in Kolker 2000:11).

Since films are intended for a large number of people in order to make the highest profit, filmmakers have to address what they consider to be the most common and acceptable beliefs of a possible audience. However, filmmaker’s expectations are not always in accordance with viewer’s responses which form part of the film’s textuality and form. As Kolker suggests, “a film is made for an audience and will survive only as far as an audience finds it acceptable” (ibid. 12). The finished work is then negotiated by the audience. Among other things, this process includes film reviews, resonance with the narrative content, and the willingness to accept the exploitation of sexuality and violence. As such, the textuality of a film is imbedded between creation and response, and the film text is “a plural, complex, simultaneously static and changing event, produced by the filmmakers who put it together and the audience members who view it” (ibid. 13).

Contrary to many other American filmmakers26 Kubrick asks the audience to be active instead of being passively entertained. Supposedly, this is why Robert Kolker refers to his films as ‘open text’ which means that “[it] provokes, indeed demands participation, questioning, working with the film’s visual and aural structures” (1988:116). In order to gain meaning from the films, the audience has to actively engage in them, and thus the open

26 Kolker points out that Kubrick works in the most non-American fashion compared to other American filmmakers, and has eschewed American production methods (cf. Kolker 1988:78). 40 narrative places a task on the viewer. In other words, “the process of revealing the implicit latent content in a Kubrick film, as in a dream, is a difficult one that requires insight, reflection and patience but which ultimately offers us value worthy of this effort and helps us to understand ourselves better” (Saunders Calvert, 2011).

4.2. Narrative, story and plot

A text contains a chain of events like images, words, and sounds in a cause-effect relationship within a context which can be a story or narrative, occurring in time and space (cf. Ibid.). Thus, “narrative is a way of organizing spatial and temporal data into a cause- effect chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end that embodies a judgment about the nature of the events as well as demonstrates how it is possible to know, and hence to narrate, the events”, as Edward Branigan (1992:3) argues.

The difference between story/narrative/narrating and story/plot is explained in the introduction to Narrative Discourse Revisited where Genette confirms the parallel which is often drawn between the distinction story/narrative and the Formalist opposition story/plot. However, he argues that the triad consisting of “story (the totality of the narrated events), narrative (the discourse, oral or written, that narrates them), and narrating (the real or fictive act that produces that discourse – in other words, the very fact of recounting) […] gives a better account of the whole of the narrative fact” (Genette 1988:13) since the two- part division story/narrative might lead to a misunderstanding and is meaningless without incorporation into the triad. As to the Formalist pair story/plot, Genette considers them no longer useful since they belong to the ‘prehistory of narratology’ (ibid. 14). If a distinction between the latter has to be made, the story is the sum of all events in a narrative, that is, those explicitly presented and those the viewer infers. This is also called diegesis. Thus, the diegetic material comprises everything existent in the story world. All that is seen onscreen but is not part of the story is called non-diegetic material and belongs to the plot which comprises characters, settings, credits and theme music, shortly, all that is visibly and audibly presented onscreen. Therefore, on the one hand, story and plot overlap and on the other, they diverge since the story goes beyond the plot (some diegetic events are never witnessed by the audience) and the plot goes beyond the story (non-diegetic images and sounds affect the audience’s understanding of the story) (cf. Bordwell and Thompson 2004:70ff.).

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When reconstructing a film’s meaning, narrative patterns and structures can be missed easily because meaning is often hidden between shots or in the relation of one shot to another. The more relations are contained in a film, the more complex is the structure. Although narration patterns have received little critical attention in Kubrick’s literature, it is an important aspect of his work (cf. Falsetto 2001:2). According to Kolker, Kubrick’s narratives are linear, foreshortened and condensed since a lot of information is presented in a short period of time (cf. Kolker 1988:88f.).

4.3. The Narrative Construction of Eyes Wide Shut

On the surface, Eyes Wide Shut presents a narrative filled with certainties and banalities, but the film’s meanings are full of ambiguity and profundity, embedded in a ‘subtext’. The complexity of meaning can be found in every aspect of the film’s construction, as Falsetto exemplifies:

[T]he subtle performances, artful décor, extraordinary lighting, unusual shot composition and framing, fluid camera movement, the subtle use of the zoom, a complex narrative structure, complex shot-to-shot editing patterns, and the emotional use of music and sound (Falsetto 2001:xiii).

Each of these aspects delivers new information which adds one layer of meaning upon the other. Since Kubrick always tries to create meaning which is not apparent in the script, he constructs his films in a way that brings out the subtext of a scene, which is more important than the surface meaning. The actors then help him to create the meaning lying below the surface. The notion of shifting meaning is especially striking in Eyes Wide Shut, one of his most elusive films27 (cf. Ibid. 82f.).

4.3.1. Kubrick’s last film

In his last film, Kubrick uses structuring devices already established in previous films, that is, the repetition and variation of narrative events adding complex thematic relationships in dialogues and other aspects of the film. One striking example is Bill’s constant repetition of dialogue which emphasizes the film’s theme of looking. The idea of repetition and paired scenes contributes to the film’s dream logic which is introduced quite early in the film. The

27 By creating an elusive narrative, Kubrick operates in non-classical ways which can be associated to modernist and postmodern artists (cf. Falsetto 2001:82f.). 42 narrative trajectory most obviously circles around the subjective shots of Bill imagining Alice and the naval officer having sex. This image originates from Alice’s first revelation which puts the marriage in such crisis that Bill sets out on a jealousy odyssey. It is repeated five times and helps to anchor the film to Bill’s visual point of view. The alternation of public and private spaces as well as the idea of paired figures (Domino and Sally; Sandor and Milich) and paired locales (Bill’s two visits to Rainbow Fashion, Somerton mansion, and Ziegler’s house) form an essential part of the narrative construction which is absolutely bound to the film’s thematic. On the thematic level, Eyes Wide Shut is definitely Kubrick’s most Freudian film since it explores the psychological background of human desire and death instinct (cf. Falsetto 2001:16ff).

Due to Kubrick’s sudden death within some days after the completion of Eyes Wide Shut, he was neither able to react to the critics who judged the film a failure nor the questions concerning the film’s meaning. What’s certain is that Kubrick was well noted for both his perfectionism28 and symbolism29 he used in the marketing of his films and obviously in this particular film content as well. The picture which decorated posters, DVD covers and the film’s soundtrack was chosen from the erotic scene in front of the mirror30. Next to this expressive image, Eyes Wide Shut contained certain other scenes, like the climatic orgy, which threatened the film to earn an X rating. Instead of altering this particular part, Kubrick inserted digitalized figures in order to hide the most explicit 65 seconds of the sexual activity, and to earn an R rating (cf. Booth 1999:74).

The film turns out to be Kubrick’s most personal work which can be explained partly to the film’s very personal subject of sex and partly to the director’s autobiographical reference to the film insofar as the film couple’s apartment looked very much like Kubrick’s and his wife’s apartment in New York City (cf. Kagan 2000:234). The fact that Eyes Wide Shut meant a great deal to Kubrick, was expressed by one of his three daughters, Anya Kubrick. She regarded it “a very personal statement from my father”. Additionally, “[h]e felt very strongly about this subject and theme, and he honed down in it exactly the ideas, principles and moral philosophies he had lived by” (Schickel 1999:69).

28 His perfectionism led some to believe that the film was far from completion when Kubrick passed away. Cronenberg for example was sure that his movie wasn’t finished since the sound mix and the looping with actors was still to be done (cf. Kagan 1999:235f.). 29 The symbolism placed by Kubrick also connects all the women in the film, making Bill’s encounters a multi- faceted exploration of the feminine principle (ibid.). 30 In Booth‘s article, she mentions that Kubrick closed the set when filming this particular nude scene in order to intensify the intimacy among the three (cf. Booth, 1999). 43

According to Seeßlen, the film is not about sex or naked bodies which Kubrick shows in the orgy sequence, along with several others in the film, but rather “die Idee des Subjekts darin. Je größer die Sehnsucht nach Einheit, desto größer der Bruch“ (Seeßlen 1999:296). Kubrick’s wife Christine confirms this statement: “It has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with fear” (Schickel 1999:68). Although this is a point, Kubrick obviously wanted to make, it might not be the point audiences want to take. “Indeed, the deepest daring of Eyes Wide Shut lies in the way it keeps edging viewers toward a place they want very much to go (famous people making out before the camera, for example), then dashing those hopes” (Schickel 1999:68). In fact, Kubrick teases the audience from the very first moment of the film by showing Nicole Kidman stripping her clothes off, but without keeping up to the expectations of the audience. Those who hoped to see more sexually enticing scenes in addition to the one promised in the trailer where Cruise and Kidman engage in a foreplay in front of the mirror certainly were disappointed in the end. Seeßlen adds that the film couple’s sexual life is depicted as good, which doesn’t allow a trip to the pornographic system because only bad sex in a relationship needs to be compensated by good sex. By showing the Harford’s relationship, Kubrick focuses on a problem which for him is not of psychological (except for the married couple’s fears and desires) but rather of philosophical nature:

Kubrick stellt nicht die Frage, warum eine Beziehung nicht oder dann doch funktioniert, er stellt die Frage: Was ist die Liebe? Und hat in Schnitzler einen idealen Komplizen. Ach was: Einen Doppelgänger. EYES WIDE SHUT ist eine Einladung und eine Falle für die Post-Psychoanalyse. Der erste Film, in dem Lacan sich heillos verirren würde. Oder, wie man so sagt, zu sich kommen könnte (Seeßlen 1999:297).

46 years after Kubrick’s first film Fear and Desire, Eyes Wide Shut rounds off the totality of thirteen films. Despite the director’s vast knowledge on the topic he seems not to feel the urge to explain his insights to the audience31. The hypnotic quality of his last film might be related to Alice’s leading input, as Thissen (1999:204) confirms: “Vielleicht liegt es daran, dass man als Zuschauer schnell merkt, das[s] Alice mehr weiß als Bill; um das klarzumachen, genügt Kubrick das kleine Spiel mit Bills Brieftasche;”32 In fact, Kubrick’s focus on Alice throughout the dreamlike episodes (and throughout the film in general) is underlined by several critics and authors, among them Nelson and Walker. On the one hand, the latter points out that Kubrick turns the traditional settings upside down insofar as

31 The answers to all the questions that are raised by the film can be found within each and every viewer, confirms Kubrick’s executive producer and close friend, Jan Harlan (cf. Thissen 1999:206). 32 Read the plot summary. 44 he leaves important scenes to Alice who seems to be the one in power of the relationship. This is especially true for Alice’s first revelation of her sexual fantasy about the naval officer. “Während diese Art Doppelmoral normalerweise als männliches Vorrecht gilt, fordert hier die Frau für sich das gleiche” (Walker 1999:354). Even if Alice doesn’t share the same screen time as her partner Bill, she is always present in his thoughts by means of the short sequences in black and white.

Damit ist deutlich, dass Kidman Alices sexuelle Sehnsüchte […] als Rückgrat und Bezugspunkt der Geschichte etabliert hat. Da haben es Bills eigene amouröse Abenteuer – als Weiberheld auf der Suche nach Gelegenheiten – schwer, sich gegen Alices Bericht über ihre erotische Traumwelt durchzusetzen (ibid. 356).

On the other hand, the film can be described as the threatening discovery by man of woman’s subjectivity and sexuality, and suggests “a reflexive depiction of the conventional (constructed and unnatural) order imposed by Western patriarchal civilization over female discourse and fantasies”, as Cornellier (2003) describes it in his analysis in Cadrage. Kolker comments on Kubrick’s attitude towards men in the film in general, and Bill’s character in particular: “Kubrick sees men […] mechanistically, as determined by their world, sometimes by their passions […], always by the rituals and structures they set up for themselves. Forgetting that they have set these structures up, and have control over them they allow the structures to control them” (Kolker 1988:87).

In conclusion, in the transitional period between the beginning and the end of the 20th century Kubrick tells the story of a man who wanders around desperately looking for a way to revenge his wife. Kubrick also tells the story of a woman who is more than a beautiful wife to look at when she is naked. But most of all Kubrick re-tells a story which lives from the acting performance of the two main characters, and especially of Nicole Kidman (cf. Walker 1999:358).

After this first insight into Kubrick’s last film, the story will be summarized because in order “to study the structure of a narrative’s plot, we must first present this plot in summary form in which each distinct action of the story has a corresponding proposition”, as Todorov stated (cit. in Falsetto 2001:2).

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4.3.2. Plot summary

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is a British-American drama based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 short story Traumnovelle (Dream Story) in which the married couple Albertine and Fridolin is confronted with each other’s sexual dreams, temptations, imaginings and actual adventures against the background of the Viennese social order of the early 1900s33. Stanley Kubrick directed, produced, and co-wrote his last film before he died shortly after submitting the final cut of the movie to Warner Bros. The agents of cause and effect are Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the “It” couple of 1999. The story time comprises three days and nights during the pre-Christmas period while the screen time covers two hours and 39 minutes. The plot unfolds in chronological order and is told in a one-for-one frequency. The film’s main screen space is New York City, its various homes and streets as well as the suburban mansion Somerton.

The narrative concerns the relationship of the upper-class couple Dr. William and Alice Harford whose marriage is challenged by temptations of adultery which shake their identities, anxieties, frustrations, and hopes to the core. Although from the beginning their marriage seems quite normal, as the film progresses the viewers can witness that beneath this surface are problems that the couple has to confront with thoughts and actions. Next to faithfulness, as a leading theme of the movie, the plot deals with external influences which define that relationship, and the back-and-forth between opposing forces like life and death, lust and pain, light and darkness, male and female principles in a confused and decadent modern world ruled by a secret elite that controls the struggle between the male and female principles in an unsettling way. As Schickel wrote in his cover story of Time, “[l]ike a lot of the novels on which good movies are based, it is an entertaining, erotically charged fiction of the second rank, in need of the vivifying physicalization of the screen and the kind of narrative focus a good director can bring to imperfect but provocative life […]” (Schickel 1999:67).

The first half of the film is dominated by William Harford’s wanderings through a surreal world of sexuality, and social corruption. The second half shows Bill’s way back home to reunite with his wife Alice. The film opens with a shot of Alice standing naked in the middle

33 Eyes Wide Shut remains remarkably faithful to the source material. The most significant change is its movement from 19th century Vienna to the 20th century New York (cf. Hughes, 2001). By transposing the story, Kubrick highlights the social corruptions and class differences that Schnitzler only hinted at (cf. Kaplan 2006:65). 46 of the dressing room34 getting ready for the annual holiday ball given by Victor Ziegler. The first words of the movie are uttered by Bill: “Honey, have you seen my wallet?”35 Alice used to work as an editor but since the publishing house went broke she is homeschooling their daughter Helena. Soon after they arrive at Ziegler’s four-story mansion on the Upper East Side, the couple separates since Bill sees Nick Nightingale, and old friend of his, playing the piano. Meanwhile, Alice wanders around the chandeliered ballroom drinking glasses of champagne until she becomes intoxicated. Moments later, she meets a gentleman at the bar who introduces himself as Sandor Szavost of Hungary, and starts flirting with her. By means of a witty comment Alice shows her disapproval of his seduction moves: “Did you ever read the Latin poet Ovid on The Art of Love?” while she notices Bill across the room flirting with two models who promise to take him “where the rainbow ends”. Alice finally agrees to dance with her sleazy seducer, but after he offers to show her Ziegler’s art collection upstairs, she refuses by waving her ring finger in front of his eyes, reminding him of the fact that she is married36. Her husband has disappeared with the two models; the three of them are interrupted by Ziegler’s personal assistant who summons Bill to follow him upstairs where the host awaits him in his bathroom standing next to a naked female lying on an armchair. When Bill re-enters the ballroom looking for the two models, Alice is right next to him and suggests returning home. Before they go to bed, Alice stands naked in front of the dressing table mirror while Bill approaches her from behind. After their supposed love making, Alice and Bill are shown in the morning of the next day pursuing their daily chores.

The following evening, as the Harfords are getting ready for bed, Alice rolls herself a joint, and is suddenly transformed from the good wife and caring mother into an ‘aggressive fury’. Her argument with Bill about the differing sexual attitudes of men and women is caused by his remark about her sex-appeal to other men. She is enraged because her beauty has nothing to do with her as a person and even if he might think he can own her, she is not his object to show off. The emerging threat of female subjectivity is countered by Alice’s empowering words “If you men only knew”. After cross-examining Bill about the two models, she becomes impatient with Bill’s patronizing claims of innocence, which seem

34 The depiction of her nakedness has already been discussed under 3.4.1. A different way of understanding this scene will be analyzed in the next chapter. 35 Throughout the film, Bill’s motto could be understood as “everybody has a price” because there is nothing money can’t buy. However, although Bill is a rich doctor, he is not part of the ‘elite’. 36 At the same time she makes clear that she is not one of Victor’s models or hookers, but more important, Alice openly expresses a deep resentment towards the dishonesty and arrogance of men through her mocking and her angry defense of marriage (cf. Nelson 2000:277). 47 unconvincing, and screams “Why can’t you ever give me a straight fucking answer!” In her fury, she reveals her amorous fantasies about a naval officer she had seen when they were on vacation in Cape Cod the previous summer. She adds that she would have given up everything for one night of love with him. From then on, Bill’s journey moves from certitude towards insecurity and revenge. This revelation is interrupted by a phone call from a patients’ daughter, Marion, whose father had just died. Thus, Bill leaves Alice in order to make this house call where he expresses his condolences as the doctor of her dead father. Unexpectedly, Marion declares her love for Bill who is saved from an embarrassing moment by the sudden arrival of her fiancé Carl. Bill leaves in hurry and flights away into the streets of New York where a kind-hearted prostitute, Domino, invites him into her apartment “How’d you like to have a little fun?”37 Once inside, he compliments Domino on her pathetic Christmas tree38 and her messy apartment. Due to Bill’s coyness, Domino has to do the preliminary sexual work “Shall we?” When Bill starts kissing her, they are interrupted by a phone call from Alice, which allows Bill to remain ‘faithful’ and saves him from having ‘unsafe’ sex with a woman who unknowingly is infected with the HIV-virus. Domino’s question “Was that Mrs. Dr. Bill?” makes Bill leave the apartment and continue his nocturnal journey which leads him to the Sonata Café where he meets his old friend Nick again. In their conversation, Nick reveals his later duties at Somerton where he has to play the piano blindfolded. When sharing his glimpses of beautiful naked women with Bill, he seems to be eager to know the secret password ‘Fidelio’. Before he sets off for the secret party, Bill calls on Milich at Rainbow Fashions to rent a costume consisting of a tuxedo, a cloak-hooded cape, and a mask. While Milich tends to business, his prepubescent daughter tries to seduce Bill and “the film once again directs its satire against a patriarchal order confronting the power of the female desire” (Nelson 2000:285). After this incidence, Bill hires a taxi which brings him to the mansion where the orgy is taking place and promises the driver the other half of the dollar bill if he waits for him. By using the password, he enters the mansion and becomes witness to the first act of the orgy where masked women in a circle undress to reveal their naked bodies in a ritual guided by the ‘Red Cloak Master’. From there he moves through various rooms where he views copulating couples. On his apocalyptic journey, a mysterious woman in a feathered mask approaches Bill in order to warn him and urge him to leave immediately. However,

37 Once again a woman asks Bill a direct question “What do you wanna do?” but once again he doesn’t give her a straight answer. Instead, he asks her “What do you recommend?” (cf. Nelson 2000:284). 38 Almost every time Bill enters a room, the first thing we see is a multicolored Christmas tree. Sometimes the Christmas lights are the focal point of attention and tie together many scenes of the movie, making them part of the same reality.

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Bill ignores her warnings and continues wandering around the rooms as he observes the participants in different forms of sexual acrobatics until a masked servant leads him back to the great hall where Bill learns that his disguise has been discovered. He is commanded to take off his mask, that is, to ‘show’ his face and remove his clothes. “Dr. William Harford unknowingly becomes a key player in a cruel ‘charade’ in which an older male order […] administers a comeuppance to a young doctor who threatens its rule” (Nelson 2000:289). However, at this point the mysterious woman appears again and announces that she will ‘redeem’ him. After she agrees on the terms the ‘Red Cloak Master’ orders Bill to leave at once and threatens him with serious consequences for him and his family in case he makes any further inquiries, or informs anyone of what he has seen. Before leaving the scene, he tries to save his ‘redeemer’, but the woman sends him away with the words “You cannot save me!” The fantasy ends with Bill’s flight away from this living nightmare into the arms of Alice who is asleep, but is woken up by Bill on his arrival. This is Alice’s second revelation where she tells Bill about her weird dream which sounds very much like the orgy Bill has just witnessed39.

We were in a deserted city and our clothes were gone… I was angry at you. I thought it was your fault… As soon as you were gone, I felt wonderful. I was lying out naked in the sunlight… The naval officer stared at me and just laughed. He was kissing me and there were people all around us. Everyone was fucking and then I was fucking other men, so many, hundreds and hundreds. And I knew you could see me, kissing, fucking all these men, making fun of you and I laughed in your face. That must be when you woke me up (Kaplan 2006:65).

In her second revelation, Alice mirrors her introduction into the film “How do I look?” which submits her to Bill’s and other men’s gaze, and replaces this representation by her overt fantasy of nakedness and orgasm while laughing in the face of the victimized husband. (cf. Cornellier, 2003). Similarly to her first confession about her desire for the naval officer, Alice’s dream acts as a catalyst which sends her husband on another round of nightmarish discoveries.

The next day starts with Bill trying to accomplish his office duties, but his quest for the truth soon leads him on a second apocalyptic journey to some of the settings he had visited the night before. Searching for Nick he drives to his hotel only to find out from the gay desk clerk that he had checked out at four in the morning accompanied by two men and with a

39 Although Kubrick raises the question whether Alice is aware of Bill’s nightmarish adventure, he wants to focus on the difference between reality and fantasy (cf. Kaplan 2006:66). 49 bruise on his cheek. The next stop on his inquiry tour is the costume shop where he gives back the rented clothes; however, the mask is missing. He continues his “house calls” (Nelson 2000:286) by driving to the Somerton estate where he receives a note with a second warning urging him to give up his inquires, whereupon he leaves the property hurriedly and returns to the city. There he decides to visit Domino with a present, but instead of finding the woman her friend Sally opens the door to the apartment. Bill starts flirting with her, although he soon backs down after Sally reveals that Domino was diagnosed with AIDS. Bill is again shocked and leaves the place trying to find out more details on the previous night. In the Sonata Café he hits upon a newspaper’s report on an “ex-beauty queen” who had succumbed to a drug overdose the night before. Her name was Amanda Curren, Mandy, just like the woman he had encountered drugged-out and naked in Ziegler’s bathroom two nights ago. His journey concludes with his visit to the morgue where he gazes at Mandy’s corpse and finally leans over her as if he wanted to kiss her one last time40. After his encounter with Mandy’s dead body, Bill is summoned to Ziegler’s house where Victor begins his ‘confession’ about the events at Somerton “I was there. I saw it all”. Like Alice before him, Ziegler unmasks both the young doctor’s pretended innocence “What the hell are you talking about?”, and the emotional gap behind his mask of patriarchal affability. He also tells Bill that the entire scene had been staged and that nobody punished or hurt the naked woman who redeemed him.

After this talk, Bill returns home to Alice for the second time. When entering the bedroom, he discovers the mask lying on the pillow next to his wife. At the sight of this, he awakens her, sobbing and crying repeatedly “I will tell you everything”. By the time Bill finishes to reveal his misadventures, daylight has come and Alice reminds Bill of their promised Christmas shopping to Helena. Once their daughter dashes off to look at some toys, Bill asks Alice what she thinks they should do41. Her last lines and the word “fuck” that Alice speaks in response to Bill’s question at the end demonstrate her qualities of a devoted mother, a forgiving wife, and a candidly sexual woman (cf. Kaplan 2006:61).

40 Kaplan claims that this gesture suggests that Bill is still under the spell of the necrophilic sex he had experienced at the orgy where couples were engaging in copulations while being drugged-out (cf. Kaplan 2006:66) 41 The following dialogue will be analyzed in detail under 4.4.2 since it contributes to the assumption that Alice is the subject in the film’s narrative.

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4.3.3. Subversion of the ‘Male Gaze’

In feminist film theorist’s eyes, this film is a dream-come-true. The ‘male gaze’ is a central device of the film and is exploited to perfection. While initially Mulvey’s concept, which is probably the most extended concept of feminist film criticism, seems to be perfect and even romanticized in the film, finally the formal and narrative subversion of the ‘male gaze’ suggests how malleable the first concepts of feminist film theory were. Summing up Mulvey’s concept, she described the underlying patriarchal domination of Hollywood cinema by taking the ‘male gaze’ as a visual-based metaphor for the systematic oppression of women in classical cinema. The concept of the ‘male gaze’ works on various levels, the first one being the cinematic apparatus. Based on Freud’s theory of the objectifying gaze, Mulvey applies the term ‘scopophilia’ to the representation of women in cinema. Since men were traditionally responsible for film production and behind the camera, the depiction of women derived from the male pleasure of looking at them. This coincides with the women’s desire to be looked at and thus being visually objectified. At the same time, this form of looking, that is, the ‘gaze’ is based on the fascination of sexual difference which poses a threat on patriarchy and is thus solved through voyeurism (investigation) or fetishization (objectification). These are two ways in which the male fear of female otherness can be overcome. In order to devaluate the object Mulvey suggests investigation as a necessary catalyst. The disturbing results that originate from investigation are crucial in subverting the traditional ‘male gaze’ in Eyes Wide Shut. Vaughan sums up the subversion of monolithic feminist analysis in the following words:

While Eyes Wide Shut seems at first glance to fit perfectly into Mulveian feminist criticism, it ultimately illustrates how incomplete the monolithic version of this theory is; and, how, itself being based on over-simplifications and inaccurate and inflexible generalizations, the theory of the ‘male gaze’ has finally been co-opted by more well-balanced critics and even film-makers in order to reveal both its theoretical validity and its all-encompassing shortcomings (Vaughan, 2004).

Some of the shortcomings will be discussed in the following section. Despite the certain abundance of naked female bodies on a visual level, Eyes Wide Shut takes the concept beyond the monolithic boundaries of Mulveian analysis by turning the fundamental binary upside down. First and foremost, there is the narrative motif in which female nakedness is sterilized. In the opening sequence, Bill has to rescue a naked woman overdosed on drugs (first picture). In the cross-cutting sequence of daily life, Bill inspects his female patients

51 sterilely (second picture)42 while Alice domestically gets dressed with Helena (third picture). In each of these examples the female body is de-fetishized43. “Thus, through formal, narrative, and direct comment, Kubrick reveals the subversion of the traditional ‘male gaze’ as a primary meaning of Eyes Wide Shut” (Vaughan, 2004).

Secondly, when talking about the gaze, Eyes Wide Shut actually subverts the ‘male gaze’ as suggested by Mulvey through formal and narrative methods by showing both male and female lost bodies wandering around a confusing world; a world in which eyes are far from being ‘wide shut’. Not only men are gazing at women, but also women are gazing at men, as well as women at women and men at men. In this context, Vaughan (ibid) mentions the institution of multi-sexual gazes which he calls the ‘poly-gaze’. This way of looking is equally true for the look of the camera as well as between the characters in the text. Based on the fact that the cinematic apparatus influences or even controls the viewer’s ways of looking, in Eyes Wide Shut the camera not only provides a ‘poly-gaze’ for both female and male spectators of any sexual orientation but it also shows that the glance from one character to another is thrown from all sides and at all people (cf. Ibid.). Vaughan concludes that

[…] by embracing the “gaze” (as well as other fundamental concepts of feminist criticism) and using it self-consciously, both by revealing its limits and by making it both subject and object of the film, Kubrick reveals just how profoundly capable cinema is of acknowledging, manipulating, and subverting the patriarchal traditions of Classical Hollywood (ibid.).

In other words, Eyes Wide Shut removes the conditioning sexual orientation of the gaze and succeeds at progressive film-making which goes beyond the traditional way of presenting male and female relations. The idea that “woman are body” by Hélène Cixous

42 When Alice later asks Bill to be honest if he ever thinks about screwing a “really great-looking woman [who] comes in [his] office to have her tits checked out”, he answers that he is “a doctor. It’s all very impersonal” (Kubrick & Raphael, 1999). 43 This point is explicitly remarked upon during Bill’s and Alice’s conversation when smoking a joint. 52

(1980:257) applies to both women and men in the film. This is especially true for the scene at the secret society’s party where everyone wears masks, and bodies are literally beheaded, being only body. By beheading both sexes and reducing them to bodies, Kubrick directs the gaze towards a representation of hedonistic copulation which is liberated from politics through masquerade.

Instead of sexual difference, Eyes Wide Shut seems to create a world which is based on equal distribution and neutral affirmation. Therefore, the sexual division which is offered by feminist film criticism is subverted insofar as there is no preference given to the sexual image. Even though the main female protagonist in Eyes Wide Shut is rarely present on screen after the first half hour, she gives a more powerful performance since she confronts the patriarchal order by her power of female desire and her emotional honesty about it (as will be discussed in the section on Alice), “while the permanently on-screen Cruise remains on ‘cruise-control’, enhancing the film’s dream logic with his passivity”, as Whitehouse (1999) states in his review in Sight & Sound.

4.4. Visual and Narrative Focalization

The film starts with an opening shot of Alice which is followed by a blackout and then the names Cruise and Kidman, the title Eyes Wide Shut and the director’s name Stanley Kubrick appear in large white capital letters. From what is known Kubrick had a close connection to the actors, mainly because all three had spent two years on the set together44. In her Time cover story “Three of a Kind”, Cathy Booth acknowledges the intimacy among the three of them during the entire project, especially “by the time filming began in 1997, the three had become virtually inseparable” (Booth 1999:73). Kidman even commented that it was “my obsession, our obsession, for two or three years” (ibid. 72).

In the last part of the paper, I will argue that while the film is visually anchored to the male character Bill Harford who is represented by Tom Cruise, the narrative focalization happens through his wife Alice Harford who is played by Nicole Kidman.

44 Read the section on Nicole Kidman where the assumption that Alice stands in for Kubrick in the film will be discussed briefly. 53

4.4.1. Tom Cruise as William ‘Bill’45 Harford

Eyes Wide Shut centers on Dr. Bill Harford as main male protagonist. His role as the source of narrative thrust initially supports, but ultimately subverts the opinion of feminist film theorists, like Mulvey, that the male protagonist and star functions as narrative manifestation and source of the ‘male gaze’. According to Vaughan, Eyes Wide Shut is basically a nymphomaniac film noir and he claims that “an essential generic aspect of the film noir that Mulvey appears to have overlooked is [that in] the chaotic world of the (almost always male) protagonist […], the protagonist is merely a pawn in an uncontrollable context” (2004). Indeed, Bill becomes both the ball in the game of the rich and influential, and a jealous and resentful husband while wandering through waking nightmares in which he confronts his unconscious desires and fears. After his dream-like adventures he breaks down into tearful confession before Alice, unmasking completely his character (cf. Nelson 2000:283).

On his journey Bill encounters what Saunders Calvert calls “the who’s who of stereotypical male fantasy objects and situations” (2011). This includes Gayle and Nuala, the two models at Ziegler’s party; Marian, a vulnerable woman who declares her love for him, and requires more than his sympathy; Amanda Carren, or Mandy, a beautiful and educated prostitute whom he sees again at Somerton and later at the morgue; Mr. Milich’s daughter, a sexually assertive teenage girl who propositions Bill; Domino, a prostitute he nearly sleeps with and who turns out to be infected with HIV, as well as beautiful naked women at the orgy. In the story, all these women are connected in one way or the other. This reveals that Bill’s journey is not about a specific woman, but rather about the feminine principle as a whole. It is a quest to understand and ‘be one with’ the feminine principle that is opposite to his. As discussed before, this can be best explained in Lacanian terms since his brand of post-Freudian psychoanalysis problematizes consciousness by claiming that the subject is decentered and self-alienated. Instead of being whole, as Freud posits, Lacan’s ego is torn in two, inciting a life-long deception. Bill cannot be complete if he is not at peace with the opposite feminine principle. Therefore, it can be noted that Bill’s quest follows the principle of uniting two opposite forces into one. As suggested by the last lines of the movie, Bill will ultimately ‘be one’ and get physical with his wife. Nelson refers to Bill as “a Kubrickian male character discovering his own paradoxical duality – and ultimately a more

45 The name Bill might allude to the dollar bill since Bill’s wallet will play an important role in his misadventures over the next three days. 54 fully realized humanity – in an evolution that brings [him] into contact with the intertwined psychological realms of Persona and Shadow” (2000:265). However, none of his numerous encounters with the feminine principle result in a sexual conquest. Instead Bill is symbolically emasculated. As a matter of fact,

Bill himself becomes the object of the objectifying look in the film – most notably when he is unmasked and threatened with nakedness by a mansion full of faceless eyes, ‘The film not only reveals the star (Cruise) as an object of the gaze, but it reveals his character (Bill) as a weak and incomplete ego, thus castrating him yet again […] (ibid. 11).

Two important aspects are addressed here: firstly, Bill’s castration as an effect of his own inability to reach the goal of his investigation46. This ‘failure’ symbolizes his incompetence, thus leaving him in a sense castrated which subverts the traditional male-driven narrative. Seeßlen (1999:292) sums up his lost power by the words “weder hat er seine verlorene phallische Macht zurückgewinnen können, noch konnte er ein Geheimnis der Frauen lüften. […] Er scheitert also noch gründlicher […]“. And secondly, when it comes to the aspect of fetishization, a complete reversal of roles can be argued47 since the male star is fetishized and objectified in the film. “Bill starrt – und wird angestarrt”, as Seeßlen (ibid. 291) puts it. By showing the male star in suggestive ways, the ‘male gaze’ is contradicted on two levels: the sexual identity and orientation of the camera, and the consideration for the heterosexual female and gay male spectator. The ‘male gaze’ is thus subverted by the de-fetishization of the female body, the objectification of the male star and the generic destruction of the fictional male hero (cf. Vaughan, 2004). Similarly, Seeßlen comments on the male ‘failure’ of desire in his comparison of Eyes Wide Shut as an erotic thriller to Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Das Scheitern des männlichen Begehrens vollzieht sich auf ganz ähnliche, freilich radikalere Weise. Daß sich die Frau nicht mehr spaltet in das Objekt der Begierde und das Subjekt der Liebe, das macht den Helden […] ganz buchstäblich verrückt (Seeßlen 1999:284).

In the following, the paper will look at the female character, Alice, who is neither the object of desire nor the subject of love (ibid.).

46 Investigation is the fundamental narrative catalyst for Eyes Wide Shut, and its disturbing results are essential in subverting the traditional ‘male gaze’ (cf. Vaughan 2004). 47 The possibility of reversal was neglected by Mulvey, but acknowledged by Stacey, as discussed under 3.4. 55

4.4.2. Nicole Kidman as Alice48 Harford

While Bill Harford is the film’s main protagonist, Alice Harford plays an integral role in the plot of Eyes Wide Shut. Although she doesn’t share the same amount of film time as Bill does, she seems to know a lot more that meets the viewers’ perception in the events of the film. “Throughout the film, Kubrick keeps the focus on Alice, who seems to be looking with her ‘eyes wide open’ for something more than just sexual gratification beneath the reflected surfaces of her marriage” (Nelson 2000:280). The film turns Alice into a complex, layered character, especially in the way she is differentiated from her husband. She is more honest than Bill about her unfulfilled sexual desires. There are certain scenes in which the Mulveian concept of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ can be challenged, and thus entice to ask the following questions: Is Alice aware of the male gaze? And if so, is she challenging it? Does her awareness allow her to control or manipulate the power it holds? Although the narrative cannot answer these questions, it suggests that Alice is in charge of the relationship and makes the final decisions when it comes to their marriage at the end of the film.

In order to compare the story’s beginning to its end, the opening will be looked at once again. Earlier in the paper the film’s first shot has been discussed in the context of voyeurism. At this point it is worth noting that the film opens (first picture) and ends (second picture) with an image of Alice, which is interesting given the fact that the majority of the film the audience follows Bill around his sexual adventures and misadventures. From the beginning, the film gives Alice’s character a psychological autonomy, but also a restless sexual volatility which in a way foreshadows Bill’s later misadventures (cf. Nelson 2000:265).

In this sense, it can be argued that instead of being subjected to the look, the first image suggests that Alice is aware of the male gaze, and perhaps even uses it for her own benefit since she acts as if she was on stage and knew that she was being observed (cf. Saunders Calvert, 2011).

48 The name Alice might be a reference to the main character of Alice in Wonderland – a fairy tale about a privileged girl who is bored with her life and goes “through the looking glass” to end up in Wonderland. In Eyes Wide Shut, Alice is often depicted in front of the looking glass which might indicate her search for something more to life. 56

A closer inspection shows that the female protagonist stands in front of the window with the curtains and blinds open at night time. The ambiguity of the word ‘jalousie’, meaning ‘envy’ as well as ‘blinds’ might be a hint at the ambiguous theme that runs through the film, namely, that Alice understands the female effect on male fantasy and entices or even manipulates it – consciously or unconsciously. Brandstetter describes this ambiguity as follows:

Die Eifersucht treibt die Suche nach dem Blick hinter den Vorhang an; und sie bringt zugleich die Erwartung jenes Augenblicks der Enthüllung hervor, des Lidschlags der Wahrheit, der das (vorläufige) Ende des Voyeurismus verspricht (Brandstetter 1995:342).

To submit herself to the voyeurism of others within the film, and to know about the effect it has on viewers might also express Alice’s conscious decision to influence voyeurism on her own account or demonstrate Kubrick’s intention to show beauty in a different light as expressed by the newspaper critics Jack Kroll.

In the very first shot we see Kidman, her back to the camera, snake-hipping out of a black dress, to stand there nude in possibly the most beautiful human image ever to open a movie. Female beauty is a subject that has been treated so crudely in movies for so long that it's almost shocking to see the care with which Kubrick handles this classical and potent theme of all art (Kroll 1999:62).

One way of interpreting Alice’s change from a visual object to a real subject is the journey the film covers between the first and the final shot, which offers an incredible insight into the development of the central theme of the film. At first, it seems as if Alice only exists as the one to be looked at, controlled of the ‘male gaze’. She is limited to what the audience sees her as, an object of scopohphilia. Also her opening line “How do I look?” in front of a mirror positions her in this light. On the basis of Mulvey’s work, it might be seen as another evidence for Alice’s powerlessness “with even her own image of herself confined within the context of Lacan’s symbolic order of the male defined world” (Saunders Calvert 2011).

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When jumping to the final shot of the film, Alice’s face is shown in a close up. Her hair is up, she is wearing no make-up, but instead glasses and a thick coat. In other words, she is not any longer in the center of the voyeuristic camera. As discussed before, the narrative context of this final scene not only shows that Alice is in control of whether the relationship continues or not, but also that she decides over their sex life, namely when they have sex and whether they make love or fuck. “She has gone from being solely the object of male fantasy, under the control of the voyeuristic ‘male gaze’, unempowered and defined only by her ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, to being the sexually dominant and empowered party in the relationship” (ibid. 8).

The unconscious shift in power between the couple is essentially initiated by Alice’s confession of her sexual fantasy with regard to the naval officer whom they have met briefly on holiday a year earlier. This revelation was obviously evoked by “Bill’s adoring view of her as a prized social trophy for the public admiration of others” (Nelson 2000:277). Her honest and direct explanation “Just the sight of him stirred me deeply and I thought if he wanted me, I could not have resisted. I was willing to give up everything. You, Helena, my whole fucking future” (Kubrick & Raphael 1999:16) was a shock for Bill whose self- identity as well as sense to stereotype Alice by sentences like “I’m sure of you” (ibid. 13) and “women just don’t think like that” (ibid. 15) was shaken right then. Bill’s presumptuous comments were now undermined by Alice’s assertion as a subject in her own right (cf. Saunders Calvert 2011). In this context, Seeßlen (1999:289) poses a rather rhetorical question: “Sollte man das Begehren um der Liebe willen kontrollieren, und ist nicht die Kontrolle selbst schon der Verrat, ein Verrat, der vor allem der Frau Unrecht tut, die sich in das Subjekt der Liebe und in das Objekt der Begierde spalten soll?”

After her first revelation, Kubrick ‘breaks the fourth wall’ insofar as Nicole Kidman looks directly at the camera, that is, the audience with a smile. At the same time, she looks at Bill who is standing next to the fridge observing Alice and Helen doing the homework (first picture). This direct look (second picture) makes the audience wonder if Alice already knows about Bill’s escapades. Saunders Calvert interprets the conspiratorial look as actually belonging to Kubrick: “Alice stands in for Kubrick in the film – acting as his vessel to launch a challenge to the power of the male gaze” (2011).

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On a deeper level, this look can be interpreted as Alice’s knowledge on her emasculating effect she is having on Bill by sharing her fantasy about the naval officer and her dream of sleeping with numerous men which she shares with Bill in her second revelation right after he gets home from the orgy. What generally distinguishes Alice and Bill is that

[d]ie Bewegung der Frau, die ihren inneren Spannungen zwischen Sehnsucht, Furcht, Aggression und Lust auch körperlich Ausdruck verleiht, lähmt den Mann. Nicole Kidman macht mit jeder Geste, mit jedem Blick diese Dynamik spürbar, eine emotionale Explosion, die zugleich dazu führt, daß ihr Mann versteinert, jede Option verliert (Seeßlen 1999:286).

In both scenes, Bill ends up being dressed down in front of the audience. The question if Alice knows about Bill’s whereabouts is neither answered on a visual nor on a narrative level and can thus only be insinuated. However, Alice challenges Bill’s masculinity two times, but on both opportunities he fails to reassert his sense of manliness. What’s worse, his quest for empowerment only leads to more emasculation. As Seeßlen (ibid. 287) aptly sums it up: “Jede neue Begegnung mit der Frau spaltet ihn erneut, und je mehr er den Bildern seiner Angst begegnet […], desto mehr versucht er sich zu maskieren und wird umso unbarmherziger demaskiert“. Thus, Kubrick forces the hero to take off his mask.

Close to the end of the film, the mask, Bill was wearing at Somerton, lies on the pillow next to a dormant Alice (first picture). After staring at this image from the entrance of the room Bill finally confesses to Alice while breaking down into tears and literally losing face.

He sees that he has been running his life from his driven ego-personality, (persona is Greek for mask), from the power of his role, rather than from his soul. Now that he is finally able to really feel something, he is able to look at his wife fully in the face. She (and the other female/Anima characters) have provided him with a mirror in which he is now able to see the catastrophic journey he has been on, driven by his own fantasies, servicing his own neediness, to find an erotic adventure (Duffell, 2012).

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Although Alice also reacts in an emotional way, she keeps Bill in suspense by not uttering a single word (second picture). Apart from being speechless, her arms are folded. She is smoking a cigarette without so much as looking at Bill who sits on the sofa opposite of her searching for words to say. Alice disrupts the silence and reminds Bill that they had agreed on going Christmas shopping with their daughter.

The last scene of the film shows the couple in a toy store. Together with their daughter Helena they walk around and try to piece their marriage back together. In the hope that Alice will have the answer49, Bill asks her “What do you think we should do?” (Kubrick & Raphael 1999:66) Alice, who is looking at Bill through her glasses, evaluates the question for a moment: “What do I think? Ummm” (ibid.). She then responds that they should be grateful to have managed to survive all adventures, “whether they were real or only a dream” (ibid. 67). Bill seems in disbelief when he asks her if she was sure. Again Alice repeats his question “Am I sure?” and then answers wisely “The reality of one night, even the reality of a whole lifetime isn’t the whole truth. No dream is ever just a dream” (ibid.). She believes that they are “awake now and for a long time to come” (ibid.). While for Bill her modest hope means “forever” (ibid.), she tells him that she is frightened by the word and that they should never look into the future. Thus, Alice remains realistic and honest about the fragile nature of their marriage. She again acts as the ‘knowledgeable’ wife when she reminds him of the unfinished business of their marriage: “There is something very important we need to do as soon as possible” (ibid.). By taking on the job to keep Bill’s male desires within the existential context of the Now, she counters his “forever” with a single word that derives entirely from Kubrick’s imagination and Alice is not frightened to say “fuck” (ibid.). Her face is shown in a close up while she utters the last word of the film which is followed by a short blackout before the large white letters of the film credits on a

49 Instead of dividing the words between the couple as Schnitzler did, Kubrick lets Alice say all the ‘wise words’ while Bill is the questioner who seeks understanding and redemption. This time Alice is the redeemer (compared to Mandy as Bill’s redeemer at the orgy) (cf. Kaplan 2006:67). 60 black background roll down the screen50. “The film ends with an unexpected last line, Alice’s advice to her husband on how to start the process of reconciliation, advice that is at once practical, eloquent and obscene”, as Kroll (1999:64) describes it in his review in Newsweek.

The last conversation between the couple both shows that in reality Alice is the true decision-maker in the relationship, namely, the subject in charge of their future as a couple “Das Gleichgewicht in der Ehe hat sich zu ihren Gunsten verlagert. Fortan wird sie die Dominante sein” (Walker 1999:358), and also that Eyes Wide Shut is “a clear attempt to provide women with subjectivity and with fantasies, and to reveal the deceit of man’s claim to power and domination” (Cornellier, 2003).

50 Compare the ending to the beginning of the film when Alice is shown in the first picture which is followed by a blackout. 61

5. Conclusion

The intended outcome of the current paper was to demonstrate female subjectivity on a narrative level. Although all images of naked women throughout the film suggest a female objectivity under patriarchal influence, the narrative is in favor of the main female protagonist who has a decisive role in the film due to her influence on the relationship.

In my mind, Eyes Wide Shut generally shows power relations between human beings, and specifically deals with gender differences. The most striking shift between the couple happens with Alice’s first revelation towards her husband which destabilizes the marriage and sends Bill on a journey seeking for revenge. Throughout the film, Kubrick exploits powers that images can have on the audience by making it imagine perceptions and beliefs from the perspective of the main male character. At the same time, Eyes Wide Shut is a film which requires careful viewing since the meaning can be interpreted in different ways. Due to the ambiguity in this film, Kubrick totally leaves up the interpretation of Eyes Wide Shut to the audience. The story is rendered in a highly symbolic way, deeper layers of meaning are always hinted at and things are rarely what they seem. While the scenes which are most dramatic on a visual level (e.g. happenings at Somerton) are the least significant, the domestic ones (e.g. Harford’s bedroom) are those which are highly charged with meaning on a narrative level. Although the film contains a lot of sexuality, the deeper meaning of sex is mostly overlooked. For me, the film is about seeing and transformation in relationships since sex serves as a catalytic force (cf. Alice’s revelations) which impels and changes us. This shows that meaning in Eyes Wide Shut becomes a very personal matter which assumedly is why people still argue over what the movie is really about.

In my opinion, the key to the movie’s meaning lies in the title itself: Eyes Wide Shut. Especially, the husband’s eyes are shut in view of the marriage which is all but destroyed. He fails to look beyond the surface level, or live without his mask; instead he treats the other person as an image, and thus as an object for his desires and fantasies. Only in the very last moments, his redemption takes place, and the wife declares that they are awake. In other words, those eyes in the audience which are open in nude scenes might remain shut towards a less obvious meaning on a deeper level. This is why in the present paper, I kept my eyes wide open for hidden powers that the narrative can have without blaming the inequalities in relationships on the male or female since for either side “No dream is ever just a dream” (Kubrick 1999:97). 62

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