by Alice McIntyre
Eyes Wide Shut (1999), the last film directed by Stanley Kubrick, is a wonderful walk through an anxious maze. Based on the novel Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler, Eyes Wide Shut follows the doctor Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) as he deals with the ramifications of jealousy. The night he and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) attend the Christmas party of wealthy patient Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) and narrowly avoid the advances of interested parties, they decide to get baked and talk about past sexual temptations. When Bill states naively that he isn’t jealous of other men’s attraction to Alice because he believes women have a natural inclination to fidelity, she laughs at him and recounts having fantasized so strongly about a naval officer she encountered during one of the pair’s vacations that she considered abandoning Bill and their daughter.
The thought of this sends Bill into a paranoid compulsion to have an affair. After an interrupted encounter with a prostitute named Domino (Vinessa Shaw), he meets with an old friend from medical school, pianist Nick Nightingale (Todd Field), who tells Bill about a job he has playing the piano blindfolded at parties featuring beautiful women. After some insistence, Bill gets the location, acquires the necessary mask and costume, and takes a taxi to the mansion where the party is being held. Upon gaining entry, Bill discovers that a ritualistic orgy is being held by an unnamed secret society.
Events proceed from there, and are quite hair-raising. The film does a wonderful job of placing the viewer in Bill’s neurotic state of mind, with a somewhat sparse classical-inflected soundtrack heightening the viewer’s sense of tension. Kubrick’s visuals are excellent, too, particularly during the pre-orgy ritual which recalls gothic and horror elements.
The subject matter of the film, a brush with a secret society of sexually depraved social elites, recalls a number of current political issues, first and foremost the widespread proliferation of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits that a global cabal of Satanic pedophiles rules the world and outgoing president Donald Trump is a savior sent by god to defeat them. This preoccupation with supposed sexual decadence, manifested everywhere from QAnon to transphobic “bathroom bills” to the insult “cuck,” borders on a pathology.
QAnon, like any other conspiracy theory, is symptomatic of growing (and often justified) distrust of media institutions and mainstream political discourse. It is an attempt to un-explain the world, to simplify reality by ascribing all anxieties and social wrongs to one, undefined social group. The proliferation of QAnon, and related nonsense such as Flat Earth, Coronavirus Denial, and “Pizzagate,” recalls the saying popularized by German socialist August Bebel that “anti-semitism is the socialism of fools.” The caricature of Jewish people as a narrow, greedy, parasitic minority reflected a distortion (often consciously whipped up by the ruling class, such as in the Dreyfus affair in France) of social consciousness into prejudiced hysteria and violent pogroms. It is by no accident that not-so-subtle streaks of anti-semitism have made their way into the Q milieu.
Conspiratorial thinking, and QAnon in particular, is no idle and innocuous phenomenon. Under the guise of opposing child sex trafficking, QAnon supporters have staged public protests which enable the dissemination of the theory into the political mainstream. As Trump’s loss in the 2020 election shakes and disillusions the theory’s adherents, the possibility of continued desperate violence such as the Aug. 20 car attack in Texas looms.
The emergence and proliferation of conspiracy theories and similar phenomena (such as liberal obsession with “Russiagate”) represents a dangerous period of social conflict and uncertainty. With the pandemic continuing unabated and the economic crisis hanging above the heads of millions of working people, further polarization and descent of political discourse into hysteria is likely inevitable. Fantasies of strange cults and cabals won’t be leaving the popular imagination any time soon.
Eyes Wide Shut, for its part, is available for streaming on Hulu.
Verdict: Spiked Eggnog/10. A good way to spice up your Christmas!
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