Make the Case: ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Is Actually a Comedy, and the Best Film of 1999

Welcome to 1999 Movies Week, a celebration of one of the best years in film history. Throughout the week, The Ringer will highlight some of the year’s best, most interesting films, and in this series, make the case for why a specific movie deserves to be called that year’s best. Here, Manuela Lazic and Adam Nayman discuss the final film of Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut.

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Adam Nayman: In thinking about how we could make the case that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was—and remains—the best movie of 1999 (a very good year for movies, according to our Ringer colleagues and pretty much everybody else), I thought it’d be good to start somewhere a bit unexpected: with just how funny it is. I know that saying “[Weird Movie X] is actually a comedy” to make other people feel bad for not getting it is an annoying move. But Eyes Wide Shut is laugh-out-loud hilarious, on purpose. I was 18 years old when it came out, and I have vivid memories of it being treated as a pop-cultural punch line—as something to make fun of.

I understand why this happened: it’s a strange, arty, deliberately stylized movie that uses dream logic to address challenging themes of love, commitment, male vanity, and the fear of death; it speaks the language of symbolism and metaphor; Kubrick’s death earlier that year meant it carried a lot of pressure as his last will and testament; it has a lot of topless women. And, for the only time in Kubrick’s career, he worked with movie stars who were more famous than he was. The media scrutiny on Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s troubled marriage, and whether spending a grueling 400 days on a movie set shooting a drama about jealousy and infidelity damaged it further, predictably reframed the conversation about the film around celebrity, instead of cinema. Even more predictable was the way that critics of all kinds acted like horny teenagers—or accused Kubrick of being a horny teenager—when the movie premiered.

“Now we get the fucking laughing fit, right?” snaps Cruise’s Bill Harford during an early, pot-fueled argument with Kidman’s Alice, and I wish I could just play that clip every time I read or hear somebody say that Eyes Wide Shut is a movie to laugh at. It’s a movie to laugh with, and the scene where Cruise and Kidman get tetchy with each other in their underwear is Exhibit A. Alice’s case of the giggles is in response to her husband’s statement that she would “never be unfaithful to him,” an idea that she goes on to demolish over the course of an amazing, five-minute monologue that serves as the true beginning of the movie’s story and that sets “Dr. Bill” off on a series of nighttime adventures fueled by paranoid jealousy.

The comedy starts with the opening shot, which holds on Alice’s naked, statuesque body just long enough for us to get an eyeful before cutting away. Right off the top, Kubrick establishes a comic rhythm of interruption. (Another example: The stately Shostakovich waltz that plays over the credits is revealed as emanating from the Harfords’ own stereo—I don’t know why, but the shot of Cruise turning the music off strikes me as something out of Mel Brooks). These are little, witty touches; for a more spectacular example, check out the way that Kubrick and cinematographer Larry Smith turn the argument between Bill and Alice into a sophisticated sight gag. By the end, Alice is doubled over with laughter, at which point the film’s elegant Steadicam perspective gets supplanted by a bobbing, handheld camera—the image becoming destabilized right along with our (anti?)hero’s self-confidence as a husband, lover, and master-of-the-universe alpha male. After all, the larger joke about Eyes Wide Shut is that it’s a two-and-a-half-hour movie in which Tom Cruise can’t get laid (Maverick and Jerry Maguire didn’t have that problem). We’re going to have to talk at some point about whether or not Eyes Wide Shut is a movie about men—Stanley Kubrick included—gawking at women, but can we start by discussing how it is also, in a very serious way, a movie about women laughing at men? Or are you going to make fun of me for even suggesting such a thing?

Manuela Lazic: I will, in fact, laugh at you for suggesting this, but not because I disagree, and not with a full-hearted laugh. Imagine I’m doing something a little sadder—a little like Alice’s own laugh at her husband, perhaps—because of course women have to laugh at men in Eyes Wide Shut. But that’s never all they do. Alice has to get stoned before she can laugh in her husband’s face with so much frame-shattering, camera-disorienting abandon. Because if Eyes Wide Shut really is about men, it is also, more specifically and as you said, about how men perceive women—and there’s nothing really funny about that. Rewatching that pot-smoking scene, I was struck by how angry, sad, and exposed Alice gets when she starts to giggle.

While the pot helps her to open up, laughter functions here (as it often does) like a self-defense mechanism for Alice to protect herself from feeling as upset as she should. Earlier in the film, she has a similar interaction with the suave Hungarian stranger who tries to get her into bed at Victor Ziegler’s Christmas party. Here again, she is wasted (this time on champagne). Alcohol and drugs get Alice to both reveal herself and peel away at the arrogance of the men around her, which perplexes both Bill and the stranger. She may remain silent during most of the Hungarian’s talk, but she is smiling at his terrible double entendres the entire time, and ultimately leaves him hanging.

As a woman who has suffered through such eye-roll-inducing talk from men, I was astonished by Alice’s decision to take this attempted seduction with a smile. But Alice’s approach isn’t testimony to Kubrick writing this character through a male misogynistic lens. On the contrary, it is the presentation of one of the few options that women have when confronted with the ludicrous vanity of men (my reaction would have been overt anger, disdain, and immediate flight).

When Alice is faced with this behavior again, this time from her husband, the smile she offered the Hungarian turns into full-blown laughter, before she explains with literally sobering seriousness what lies behind the smile. It’s a simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking moment because Alice really wishes Bill could understand that she, too, has desires.

For me, the funniest sections of Eyes Wide Shut are those when Bill is seen reflecting on his discovery of female desire, often when he’s in his car and Kubrick’s camera zooms in on his terrified eyes. In this alone time, he finally gets to explore his interiority and use his imagination (in other words, he gets to think!) instead of “acting” in and on the world. He is clearly disturbed by this new exercise. Alice, by contrast, is used to questioning her thoughts (like when she developed an intense crush on a naval officer during a family holiday, and couldn’t decide whether she wanted him to leave their hotel or take her away) and exploring the world through dreams. In fact, Bill’s deep dive into an underworld of performative sex, and life-threatening curiosity on the streets of New York and outside the city, is clearly paralleled by Alice’s abstract but not so unintelligible dreams: Unlike her husband, who has to physically move through space to find himself in situations that challenge his beliefs, Alice uses her brains to confront the truth about her perfect-seeming marriage.

I love this idea, and I love how Kubrick deploys it through this masterpiece. He manages to show how women’s need to rely on their interiority to live in the world is at once a blessing and a terrible example of inequality between the sexes. Right after Alice tells him about her longing for that naval officer, Dr. Bill receives a call and has to go to the bedside of a patient who just died. There, he meets the man’s daughter, Marion, who suddenly tells Bill that she loves him and that she doesn’t want to move to Chicago with her soon-to-be husband. Bill has been the love of her life all along. The moment is both hilarious and terrifying, thanks in great part to Marie Richardson’s explosively emotional performance as Marion, but also because of how this scene has been contextualized by Alice’s monologue (and because Richardson has been styled to look a bit like Kidman).

Kubrick, in his usual ironic, on-the-nose way, has followed Alice’s tale of overwhelming desire with an example of that very feeling in the person of Marion, for Bill to directly experience it himself. Here, he is the naval officer, and Marion is Alice: With her thoughts alone (“Marion, we barely know each other,” says Bill, needlessly), Marion has already built a relationship with the object of her desire. The scene becomes simultaneously funnier and more heartbreaking when Marion’s fiancé shows up and Bill says goodbye, leaving Marion to her fate as a wife and a misunderstood and desirous person—just like Alice has become.

Another undeniably funny thing about Eyes Wide Shut is its style. Each crossfade feels a little off but in a Kubrickian way—they have a calculated tonal significance, meant (I think!) to highlight the artificiality of the world Bill evolves in. The camera’s fluidity recalls The Shining’s long tracking shots in the deserted hotel of Jack Torrance’s mind. Yet Eyes Wide Shut is much weirder than The Shining (yes, such a thing seems possible to me): The obviously fake New York streets! The Wu-Tang Clan reference! The Chris Isaak song! Do you agree that this film is strangely clunky? And do you think it is clunky for good reason, beyond the difficult shoot? What makes this stiffness compelling? And do you think this film’s style has been influential?

Nayman: I’m going to have to go to the judges on those Wu-Tang references; according to the internet, Eyes Wide Shut is actually Illuminati propaganda filled with subliminal imagery. I would, of course, happily watch a Room 237–style essay about Eyes Wide Shut’s hidden messages, except that there probably isn’t quite enough ambiguity in the film to support it. I like that you called Kubrick’s irony “on-the-nose,” because it is, which doesn’t mean that it isn’t also suggestive and complicated (as you have already described in the scene with Marion, although you left out the part about Marion’s fiancé being a visual doppelgänger for Bill, played by Thomas Gibson, which means there’s one degree of separation between one of the best American films of the ’90s and Dharma & Greg).

As for style, I think it’s more that Eyes Wide Shut extends and refines techniques and motifs dating back to its director’s earliest work; it’s almost like a greatest hits album. For instance, that late shot of Alice, fast asleep with the mask on the pillow beside her, is a direct reference to a shot from Kubrick’s (excellent) sophomore feature, Killer’s Kiss. That movie is also evoked by the presence of those creepy mannequins in the sex shop where Leelee Sobieski appears as a 21st-century version of Lolita, right before Bill goes to the mansion that looks like the Overlook Hotel ... but I’d better stop before this turns into Room 237 II after all.

I’d agree that Eyes Wide Shut is aggressively artificial, and that the phoniness of its Manhattan setting is crucial: to quote that other modern deconstructed-rom-com masterpiece They Came Together, it’s like New York City is a character in the movie—a weirdly untrustworthy one. Kubrick’s carefully color-coded version of the world’s most photographed city—all of those blue filters and all the Klimt-style gold at the edge of the frame—is not just a case of aesthetic flexing but a cue to understand that we’re somewhere between the literal and the figurative. Eyes Wide Shut is not interested in building up a sense of everyday reality; its architecture is the rickety constructions of the subconscious.

The German title of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, on which Eyes Wide Shut is based, translates to “A Dream Story,” and it’s that slightly tranced-out quality—of events experienced with “eyes wide shut”—that I think Kubrick finally perfected here after deploying it more sparingly in his earlier movies. The tracking shots in The Shining (and Full Metal Jacket) are hypnotic, but in Eyes Wide Shut, the effect of all that serene, gliding camera movement is to submerge the viewer in layers of aspirational fantasy. Bill and Alice’s high-rolling life is a dream, and then, as we discover, there are even deeper layers underneath, both in terms of what the characters desire and also the topography of their New York. One hint to what the movie is doing as far as dreaming goes, lies in the—again, quite hilarious—way that Bill, for all his wealth and social status, moves through the movie as an almost completely passive figure, especially after the revelation of Alice’s imagined infidelity. In almost every scene, he ends up repeating or parroting the dialogue of other characters, as if he has no ideas of his own.

I truly love Cruise’s performance, and I think that it makes for an interesting contrast with his Oscar-nominated work the same year in Magnolia. There, as Frank “T.J.” Mackey, Cruise weaponized his clean-cut, sex-symbol status to play a guy peddling penis worship (“respect the cock”) to a millennial-incel audience. As Magnolia went on, we saw the scared, grieving little boy inside the persona. In Eyes Wide Shut, Cruise’s characterization is less sentimental, because Bill isn’t psychologically damaged or in need of redemption. He’s a cipher, and considering the significance of masks in the movie’s design—with the selection of Venetian masks in particular evoking a long history of literary and theatrical eroticism—the way that Kubrick uses Cruise’s flawless visage as a mask for Bill’s insecurity and lack of imagination is ingenious.

Obviously, in a movie filled with double entendres and body doubles, the infamous secret-society sequence with the guests all decked out in masks is meant to parallel Victor Ziegler’s Christmas party, with the difference being that Bill goes to the latter alone, as a bachelor. I don’t know if you want to talk about what goes on the mansion, but if Eyes Wide Shut is a “dream story” what does it mean that a 20-minute sequence set at an orgy plays out like such an absurd and embarrassing nightmare?

Lazic: One cannot talk about Tom Cruise without bringing up the idea of masks and disguise—and, tangentially, the realm of dreams. As you say, Kubrick uses Cruise’s perfect face as a veil in and of itself, and therefore a signifier of falseness: There’s nothing perfect lying beneath his perfect features. This is similar to how the actor’s visage was employed three years prior by Brian De Palma, the master of the body double himself, in the first Mission: Impossible film. There, Cruise used masks to deceive his traitors and alter reality. But of course, the most existentially disturbing mask that Cruise ever wore was the facial prosthetic his character David Aames was offered after his accident in Cameron Crowe’s 2001 psychological epic Vanilla Sky—or was he? “It’s only a mask if you treat it that way,” says one of the doctors, but David can no longer pretend that this smooth, consistent, standard face is his.

Just as this disappointing substitute for a face takes David into a nightmarish version of his life in which he is not handsome and doesn’t get the girl, Dr. Bill’s Venetian mask transports him to a dark place where other people, as you say, keep their protective camouflage and force him to show his real face, humiliating him.

This scene in the mansion is so deliciously cringe-worthy because it is such an overblown, tongue-in-cheek yet disturbing abstraction of what Bill is experiencing out in the world, after he finds out about female desire. His experience at this sordid party is a grotesque, dreamlike copy of his aborted adventure with Domino (also the name of a type of Venetian mask, of course!), a sex worker played by Vinessa Shaw who picks him up, takes him to her place, has to decide herself what she will do for him, and eventually can’t even get to it because he soon chickens out. She even feels too sorry for Bill to want his money. Just like he stands on the outside looking in at orgies at the secret gathering, Bill can’t participate in this superficial sexual masquerade with Domino. He’s too aware of his own pretense and of this woman’s selfhood. Kubrick makes Bill’s discomfort in Domino’s tiny room just as crushing as his shame when the cloaked cult unmasks him, because they are essentially the same sensations.

After his wild—or anti-climactic, considering he only got to have a look at things—night at the mansion, Bill searches for answers in Ziegler, his boss, played by Sydney Pollack. Their small talk when Bill enters his superior’s expensive office is as absurd as it gets, until Ziegler snaps: He comes clean to Bill, explaining that he too was at the secret meeting, but also, and more importantly, that the shaming ceremony that Bill was subjected to, including the suggested sacrifice of a woman for his sake, was “all staged to scare the shit out of [him].”

At last, the masks finally come down, and casting Pollack as Ziegler proves perfect. With his hyper-naturalistic acting style and gregarious manner, the legendary actor-director is the polar opposite of Cruise’s ideal looks—it is no coincidence that, from very early on in the film, Ziegler reveals his drug-fueled sexual activities to Bill. In this film, Pollack’s down-to-earth appearance is aligned with Ziegler’s bone-chilling honesty. Again, Kubrick parallels this scene with another one, set out in the world: Bill goes looking for Domino, but instead of finding her at her apartment, he meets her roommate, who kills the explicit sexual tension between them by announcing that Domino has been diagnosed with HIV. Did Domino really have the virus? Did she even exist? Although Bill didn’t end up having sex with her, he shivers when he learns how close he came to danger, and the entire chapter feels like a Fatal Attraction–esque cautionary tale about what men do to prove their masculine prowess to themselves. With Ziegler and Domino, Bill is twice denounced for trying to keep on the mask of male sexual vanity and control.

I love that scene with Pollack because it feels like Kubrick revealing his tricks in the clearest, most direct way he ever has. What follows is one of the most astounding, delectable, and moving displays of discomfiting a man I’ve ever seen in cinema (in the same category, see Phantom Thread and most other Paul Thomas Anderson movies). That’s what is truly funny to me: how weepy Bill gets when he sees the mask on his pillow, and how Cruise says “I’ll tell you everythiiiiiiing”!

How do you think this character arc fits in Kubrick’s filmography? Do you think Bill has really gotten the message by the end, or is Kubrick again being sarcastic about Bill’s newfound willingness to understand his wife? I find that the Barbie doll that their daughter Helena picks up at the toy store in the last scene, interrupting their conversation, may be a sign of things to come for her, and for women in general …

Nayman: I think “I’ll tell you everything” is funny too, although the hard cut to Kidman’s face the morning after—with those dreamy blue filters swapped out for some harsh natural light—is probably the most emotional moment in the movie for me, the one where the script, the actors, and the filmmaking combine to allow for authentic fragility amid the satire and sarcasm, and to address the “real” transgressions that have been coded into Bill’s adventures. I refuse to offer a definitive interpretation of whether or not Bill did a “bad, bad thing” either during Eyes Wide Shut’s duration or at some other point in his marriage to Alice; the point is how we see him given every opportunity to do so and failing mostly because of external circumstances rather than any moral imperative (again, this is a movie in which Tom Cruise definitively fails to get laid).

The scene where Bill visits the morgue and sees the corpse of the woman who “saved” him during Ziegler’s orgy—gazing at her as she lies naked on the slab, her body exposed and her eyes wide shut—anticipates the morbid cruelty of Pollack’s monologue, which is all about concealing the truth, about the seduction of repression. It’s also, quite literally, about staring death in the face. That’s why when we see Bill reading a copy of the New York Post with the big-type headline “LUCKY TO BE ALIVE” (an image that used to be my Twitter avatar), it plays, like so much of Kubrick at his best, two ways: it’s a grim sight gag that also hints at the mind-set Bill is about to bring home with him as a husband and father.

Dr. Bill’s newfound willingness to communicate with his wife is sincere, and as a result, it’s funny: the two things don’t cancel each other out but instead are heightened in tandem. In the scene in the Macy’s, he insists on using a very particular “F-word” to suggest a solution to their marital impasse—“forever.” This is a significant idea given the context of Kubrick’s career: a lusting for immortality (for some kind of “forever”) is always tied to male protagonists in his films, whether it’s Barry Lyndon yearning for an aristocratic title that he can pass on to his son, or Jack Torrance in The Shining telling his son he wants to stay at the Overlook “forever and ever and ever” (presumably all by himself, after he’s done butchering his wife and son). In sharp contrast to his attitude in the early scenes, where he took both Alice and her fidelity for granted, Bill now clings to the renewed promise of enduring domestic bliss. Alice, though, counters with an F-word of her own, offering a more provisional solution to the problem at hand—and getting the last dirty word in Kubrick’s entire career. In the end, Alice wants exactly the same thing as her husband, and in giving him a piece of her mind, she rescues Eyes Wide Shut from the kind of bleak, ambiguous ending that was typically Kubrick’s stock in trade. It’s a happy ending, right?

Lazic: It’s funny that you should ask me that because the last time you did, it was about Phantom Thread—and I think these two endings are comparable. Plus, I’m pretty sure Phantom Thread will go down as the best movie of 2018 the same way that Eyes Wide Shut is obviously no. 1 for 1999.

Nayman: Yes, that was the thing that we were setting out to prove several thousand words ago, I think we did it. Anyway, go on.

Lazic: There is a sense of mutual delusion at the end of PTA’s film, as the couple finds a perverse system to repeat ad infinitum in order to stay satisfied with each other. But of course, who’s to say that neither of them will ever get tired of mushroom omelettes? The ending of Eyes Wide Shut is more down to earth, thanks to Alice’s pragmatism. Even though there’s a similar sense of Alice wanting Bill “flat on [his] back, helpless, tender, open, with only [her] to help,” the difference is that she wants him in that position not to overpower him, but to have sex with him, and “as soon as possible” rather than regularly. Her ambitions aren’t as big as Alma’s in Phantom Thread, perhaps because she refuses to work that hard at saving her marriage: She won’t be having crazy dreams and laughing in his face every time he needs to settle down a little just to remind him that she, too, is a person with desires and not just a perfect spouse. “Now we’re awake, forever” is a line that could have been uttered by PTA’s hopeful, mad couple, even as they begin a dreamlike (or nightmarish?) existence together. Alice, with her sense of reality in check, now has her eyes wide open. She has no patience for mindfucks.