There is a Christmas tree in the corner of every room in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut, and yet it is not a Christmas film. Rather, it is a film about the Christmas period, with its multi-coloured lights and general conviviality, and how this interacts with a narrative of dreams, fidelity, unmet desires, and the darkest ends of curiosity. The question is how we look at this aesthetic choice in conversation with the film’s various themes: would the film have the same impact if it was set during a different time of the year? What is the impact of having a film set in, but not primarily concerned with, Christmas? Do we acknowledge the red velvet elephant in the room?
Eyes Wide Shut is a descent, a tension-driven journey to the farthest corners of desire: we watch as Tom Cruise’s Bill Hartford tries to put the lid back on Pandora’s Box, to no avail. The result is a hedonistic, clandestine plunge into the underbelly beneath the holiday cheer: society seems to come apart at the stitches, a sign of the times in light of the fin de siecle and dawn of the new millennium. The source material, Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (‘Dream Story’) is set during Mardis Gras, a comparably indulgent celebration – the switch to Christmas bears a deeper cultural relevance with the dissonance between social expectations of family stability and career success and our innermost desires. Interesting here is the inciting cause for the film’s narrative: the revelation from Alice (Nicole Kidman) that she, despite being a wife and a mother, has fantasies about a naval officer, powerful enough to destabilise their marriage and send Bill on an erotic odyssey: “I was ready to give up everything,” she says, “You. Helena. My whole… future.”
“To have ‘eyes wide shut’ could suggest a willing ignorance, a hedonistic euphoria, or a profound insight into the unconscious and its desires”
Indeed, eyes, dreams, and visions are the driving force behind the film’s tensions: the power of the look, the choice to look away, and, in particular, voyeurism. It’s here that the title rears its head: to have ‘eyes wide shut’ could suggest a willing ignorance, a hedonistic euphoria, or a profound insight into the unconscious and its desires. Be that as it may, the frays of Hartford’s marriage become apparent at the mere possibility of infidelity: Alice’s fantasies become tangible in Bill’s imagination. The dialogue between wants and needs drives the narrative, and is exacerbated (somewhat ironically) by Christmas: what we see isn’t so much a lack or a denial of pleasure, but a pursuit of the unattainable – Alice’s dreams of the naval officer, Bill’s brush with the hedonistic elite. The stasis of the nuclear family suffocates the ebb and flow of human desire: the action of the film is contingent on the interplay of the unconscious, unfed desires of Alice (dreams and visions that press on reality) and the active, reactionary desires of Bill (the journey to the utmost depths of depravity).
Against this narrative, the holiday backdrop acts as a moral framework against which the character’s desires are amplified: at a time when families are meant to come together and share in love and gratitude, Kubrick delivers a seemingly stable marriage that is entirely at odds. The film’s opening, an extravagant Christmas party, exemplifies this from the outset: Bill and Alice separate almost immediately and flirt with willing patrons. Positioning sex and desire at the heart of the thematic spectrum refuses the ascription of Eyes Wide Shut as a Christmas film: while it doesn’t lead with Christmas as its driving theme, it places the holiday in dialogue with the covert reflection of its constituent parts. The familiar wants and desires, dreams and reality, secrecy and revelation of Christmas is reflected in the vast inner world of the characters and the sensual underworld Bill ventures into.
“It places the holiday in dialogue with the covert reflection of its constituent parts”
At the deepest point of said underworld is the infamous mansion sequence, where all trace of Christmas evaporates and we bear witness to elite hedonism, all for the low price of the rental costume and the cab fare. This sequence is where the threshold between dreams and reality is at its thinnest: there are no lights and no Christmas trees – perhaps Kubrick meant for this moment to exist as temporally independent from the narrative, gesturing to both a deeper resonance and the nightmarish quality of the scene. The ‘Red Cloak’ character even has white cuffs around his wrists: a visual representation of the film’s perversion of festive themes and iconography, marrying the innocence and depravity of desire.
Nevertheless, the outcome of Bill’s brush with the elite drives him back to his family: ‘Fidelio’ is the key to it all. The breaking point where Bill breaks down to Alice in bed (a fitting location) resembles the reunion in It’s a Wonderful Life, only there is no thanking God (Kubrick was famously an atheist) or Clarence but a festering fear and guilt which relieves the tension only slightly. Kubrick denies us the relief of Christmas Day, subjecting us instead to the unbearable anticipation of a relief that never comes. The question of truth is compromised: Bill, and by extension, the audience, doesn’t know what to believe. Was the danger an illusion? Here is where the significance of Christmas is at its clearest: the holiday is built on beliefs and illusions, believing in the man in the chimney and the magic of one impossible night. Kubrick evokes this throughout Bill’s journey to the mansion: the sense of dreams coming true, desires made tangible. We buy into the illusions of grandeur in the mansion, before the rug is pulled from under us and we question whether it was true at all. It’s the cinematic equivalent of watching your dad eat the milk and cookies you left out for Santa.
“Here is where the significance of Christmas is at its clearest: the holiday is built on beliefs and illusions, believing in the man in the chimney and the magic of one impossible night”
The friction between male and female desire propels the action of Eyes Wide Shut: the ensuing action is arguably a retaliatory hedonistic journey, fuelled by curiosity. Formalistically, the journey resembles that of classic Christmas films like It’s a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol, each fit with its own saccharine moral message. However, of course, these holiday classics don’t see their leading men seduced by prostitutes or bearing witness to orgiastic debauchery. Instead, the moral outcome of Eyes Wide Shut concerns the distinction between love and desire: we can love one thing, and desire another at the same time.
The end of the film sees the family together in a toy shop: out of context, this could be taken from a family Christmas film, if not for the tension coursing through Kidman and Cruise. Indeed, the toyshop evokes the mansion, with the shared sense of want and fulfillment, picking and choosing the objects of our desires. The family unit is restored in service of the illusion of stability: “Maybe I think we should be grateful…that we’ve managed to survive all of our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream.” While Eyes Wide Shut is not a Christmas film, the subjectivity of dreams and illusions raises the question of how our reality is shaped by beliefs, both collective and singular: is the want to believe something powerful enough to make it true, just as we believe in Santa and other fantasies? The question then becomes whether or not we are awakened to this reality, and what lies beyond it. Don’t be fooled, this is not one to watch with your family after your Christmas dinner, lest you want a very awkward Boxing Day.
