Stanley Kubrick’s films since at least 2001: A Space Odyssey have verged into the territory of ambiguous meaning. In fact, one of the lasting legacies of 2001 which put it into the mainstream and has kept it there despite being a film that offers little to the typical moviegoer seeking non-stop action, lively dialogue and a neatly tied up ending is the opportunities it offers to stimulate arguments over meaning. Even more so, perhaps, has The Shining been elevated from its initial view by some as a mostly disappointing adaptation of a Stephen King bestseller to today’s status as one of the signature masterpieces of horror film due to the multiplicity of interpretation of its various symbols and unanswered questions. What differentiates 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining from Eyes Wide Shut is that the former two can be very much enjoyed by movie fans on a literal narrative level quite easily. Eyes Wide Shut, however, offers little even for fans of Kubrick unless you are willing to do two things
One of those things is watch the film over and over again. The obsessive qualities of Kubrick’s films require this as a mandate. For some, multiple viewing enriches: Dr. Strangelove may well be the only comedy that actually gets funnier the more you watch it. For others, this obsessive quality requiring multiple viewings becomes painful. As beautiful and enriching a film as Barry Lyndon may be, it is an excruciating idea to imaging having to endure it twenty or thirty times in order to get at what Kubrick is really trying to say.
The second thing, of course, is that not only must a Kubrick film be viewed multiple times, but it must be studied. Symbols, motifs, metaphors, décor, lighting, backgrounds, foregrounds, dialogue, music, editing, composition and, of course, the list goes on. Stanley Kubrick is so attentive to detail that in order to even be willing to go public with an assertion of what it means is to require the same level of attentiveness to detail in the viewing.
This analysis will not attempt to assert what Eyes Wide Shut means. The primary reason for this is that it seems so far not to mean anything. Which is to say that after two decades there has not arisen one overarching interpretation for what this film means in the way that there has for 2001 and The Shining. In the years since the film was released, it has remained firmly lodged in the position where 2001 and The Shining were during the first decade of their existence. By then, however, rather widespread agreement had coalesced around their primary intent.
Not so with Eyes Wide Shut. Read ten pieces of analysis and you may well find ten entirely different and often conflicting interpretations of what the film means. One of the most ridiculous that has been gaining traction is that Eyes Wide Shut is intended to be seen as a direct attempt to critique and expose the global conspiracy of the Illuminati. This idea is ludicrous because Stanley Kubrick was far too expansive in his critique of the world to limit it to just one far-fetched group central to a paranoid conspiracy theory.
Which is not to suggest that that the film is not a critique of the powers that are limited to a ridiculously small percentage of the population with the power to control the rest of us; even those that the rest of think have it pretty good, like wealthy New York physicians. Ultimately, the answer to what Stanley Kubrick was trying to say in Eyes Wide Shut remains closed shut. All that exist are highly subjective and often highly dubious interpretations that tend to divulge a whole lot more about the writer of the analysis than the subject. Which may be the whole point. Eyes Wide Shut was the last film Kubrick directed. The hiring of Tom Cruise never made sense to anybody and the film itself makes sense to even fewer. Maybe Eyes Wide Shut is nothing more nor less than mystery without a solution; maybe it is an elaborate practical joke by one of cinema’s most unlikely merry pranksters.
Maybe even keeping your eyes as wide open as possible through as many viewings as possible won’t unlock the secret because there is no secret meaning.
