I referenced Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut in my last post and, in doing so, was reminded of how it came up brief in conversation on Saturday night. B said that he enjoyed the movie and was the only person he knew that did. I felt much the same way as I really liked it as well but can't think of anyone I know who feels as I do. This brough to mind a review I read last week of the film called Introducing Sociology: A Review of Eyes Wide Shut by Tim Kreider. Kreider's premise was that the movie was panned largely because viewers had false preconceptions of what the film would be. Namely, they thought it would be about sex and that there would be a lot of it in the film. They were, of course wrong, and Kreider argues that this left many folks unable to read the text of the film:
Critical disappointment with Eyes Wide Shut was almost unanimous, and the complaint was always the same: not sexy. The national reviewers sounded like a bunch of middle-school kids who'd snuck in to see it and slunk out three hours later feeling horny, frustrated, and ripped off. Kubrick was old and out of touch with today's jaded sensibilities, they said. The film's sexual mores and taboos, transplanted straight out of Arthur Schnitzler's fin-de-siecle Vienna--jealousy over dreams and fantasies, guilt-ridden visits to prostitutes, a strained discussion of an HIV test that echoes the old social terror of syphilis--seemed quaint and naive by the standards of the sordid year 1999. One last time Stanley Kubrick had flouted genre expectations, and once again, as throughout his career, critics could only see what wasn't there.
Kreider argues that, while audiences couldn't get beyond the lack of sex, they missed the critique of class in the film:
The real pornography in this film is in its lingering depiction of the shameless, naked wealth of millennial Manhattan, and of its obscene effect on society and the human soul. National reviewers' myopic focus on sex, and the shallow psychologies of the film's central couple, the Harfords, at the expense of every other element of the film-the trappings of stupendous wealth, its references to fin-de-siecle Europe and other imperial periods, its Christmastime setting, even the sum Dr. Harford spends on a single night out-says more about the blindness of the elites to their own surroundings than it does about Kubrick's inadequacies as a pornographer. For those with their eyes open, there are plenty of money shots.
I appreciate that Kreider looks at EWS as part of Kubrick's oeuvre and his reading of the film is, in my opinion, appropriate for most of Kubrick's work. It was not uncommon for Uncle Stan to ask the viewer to look beyond the main characters towards their environments in order to grasp meaning. Think about it. How many of Kubrick's characters have much depth or are meant to be utterly likable? Take 2001. Do you sympathize much with Dave Bowman? Does HAL have a lot of depth? No! What about the protagonist of A Clockwork Orange? Alex is a sadistic bastard. The film isn't about him; we don't get to see what caused Alex to be the way he is. Instead, ACO is about what happens to him and what is done to him. Kubrick's films really aren't character studies - they're examinations of the larger contexts in which people find themselves.
Now, you may have no interest in Uncle Stan's method of storytelling and that's fine. But I agree with Kreider in that it's unfair to be critical of EWS for failing to be something that it's not trying to be.
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