"Eyes Wide Shut"

[Bill] Let's go, huh?

All right.

I'm ready.

(classical music)

[Richard] I'm Richard Brody,

and this clip is from Eyes Wide Shut,

the last film by Stanley Kubrick, from 1999.

It stars Tom Cruise as Bill Harford,

a society doctor in Manhattan,

who goes with his wife, Alice, played by Nicole Kidman,

to a fancy party given by his patient, Victor Ziegler,

played by Sydney Pollack.

(orchestra music)

At the party, a couple of unseemly encounters

arouse Alice's jealousy and provoke her desire.

They also induce her to confess her erotic fantasies

to her husband, whose jealousy is raised to a fury

that propels him into a series of nocturnal adventures,

culminating in a wild, ritualistic

and secretive sex party.

The subject of the film is the erotic energy

boiling beneath the surface of genteel society.

[Woman] I'm not sure what you think you're doing.

But you don't belong here.

[Richard] Even more, Kubrick is interested

in the lengths that people will go to

to fulfill their desires, and shows that the whole point

of wealth and power is the ability to fulfill

those fantasies in the most extravagant possible ways.

Somehow, those pleasures seem joyless.

In fact, they seem more connected

with death, destruction and degradation

than they do with pleasure.

They also seem primordially connected

with aesthetic fantasy as such.

The more elaborate the artifice,

the wilder the sexual power it conceals.

Please, come forward.

[Richard] In this scene, after the doctor's night

of mysterious erotic tumult, he is summoned to the home

of his wealthy patient and friend, Victor Ziegler.

Ziegler lifts the curtain ever so slightly

on the dark doings in that mansion.

He gives the doctor a glimpse

of a parallel world of dark passions,

where the real power elite are to be found.

Okay, he had a bruise on his face.

That's a hell of a lot less than he deserves.

Listen, Bill, I don't think you realize

what kind of trouble you were in last night.

Who do you think those people were?

Those were not just ordinary people there.

If I told you their names,

I'm not gonna tell you their names, but if I did,

I don't think you'd sleep so well.