1999: A Christmastime Sex Odyssey

Chris Forrester discusses Stanley Kubrick’s final film and how its yuletide setting deepens its interrogations of sexuality, masculinity, and marriage.

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Of all the great cinephile debates (what is and isn’t a masterpiece, who are the great filmmakers, which Godfather movie was the best), one of the more incessant is the annually resurfacing “is it a Christmas movie or not?” The usual players therein are the likes of Die Hard (McTiernan, 1988) and Gremlins (Dante, 1984), but a more recent figure — due, in part, to a late reclamation as one of the director’s great films — is Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), a Christmastime portrait of emasculation and marital dissolution. 

In the domain of “Christmas,” or holiday, films, it might be reasonable to distinguish the usual suspects into a couple of tiers. There are, of course, the seasonal mainstays like White Christmas (Curtiz, 1954), Miracle on 34th Street (Seaton, 1947), and The Nightmare Before Christmas (Selick, 1993), in which the holiday itself figures directly into the plot. Secondarily, there are movies in which the holiday offers a backdrop of thematic resonance: It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946), more recently The Holdovers (Payne, 2023), and even genre fare like Batman Returns (Burton, 1992) and Black Christmas (Clark, 1974). And more distantly, films like The Shining (Kubrick, 1980), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Fincher, 2011), or The Hateful Eight (Tarantino, 2015), where a blanket of snow perhaps invokes winter and invites a degree of seasonal appreciation but in which Christmas itself is absent or of negligible significance. 

The (worthy) films of the Great Debate generally fit into the middle category, and often prove the most interesting variety: films not necessarily for Christmas but nonetheless very meaningfully about it; less the kind to watch under cozy blankets or over a glass of spiced wine than through which to reflect on the less often thought-about facets of holiday tradition, melancholy, and composure. Eyes Wide Shut is likely the pinnacle of such films, rife with both the aesthetic pleasures of a good holiday film (twinkling Christmas lights, cozy interiors, lush fir trees) and a very pronounced consideration of the propensity of the season to unleash the repressed instabilities of domestic life. Where the image of the prototypical Christmas film might be of skaters gliding across a frozen lake, Eyes Wide Shut is a film about the cracks in the ice and the threat of the murky dark beneath.

A brief introduction: Kubrick’s final film, and initially his most maligned (on release J. Hoberman called it “ponderously (up)dated — as though Kubrick had finally gotten around to responding to Michelangelo Antonioni’s druggy Blow-Up”), charts the jealous, psychosexual cracks in a marriage that emerge after two mutually-witnessed episodes of near-infidelity at a lavish, upper-crust Christmas party. Then-couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman embody, with naked confessionalism, the jealous couple; him a doctor always fraternizing with wealthy clients and quietly assisting their not-always-of-legal-origin ailments such as when an overdose at the party distracts him from his wife’s exploits, and her a stay-at-home-mother in search of a job and perhaps also purpose and independence within a stifling marriage. 

The inciting event of the film comes not from the party, but rather from its aftermath, an oft-quoted (Frank Ocean’s Love Crimes sample’s Kidman’s rant), oft-meme’d (Cruise’s smarmy “this pot is making you aggressive”) exchange in which Kidman’s Alice confesses to having had erotic fantasies about another man years prior, a revelation that proves destabilizing for Cruise’s Bill’s evidently feeble sense of masculine security. The exchange here proves aesthetically destabilizing too, a transitory point at which the film shifts from elegantly composed tableaux of the dwellings of the elite to strangely lit, occasionally even manufactured-looking street scenes. 

And so the emasculated husband takes his wounded stoicism on a nighttime odyssey of sexual transgression where he cheats on his wife, is heckled in the streets with homophobic ridicule, bears witness to a disturbing act of pedophilia, and finally finds himself at a strange, sexually occultish costume party at an estate outside of the city. There, he wanders the halls as masked participants fornicate on tables, chairs, each other and others watching, the women nude and men mostly clad in long black robes. 

The film’s structure is, befittingly of Kubrick, rather slippery; its inciting incident arrives late and its narrative unspools as if a mysterious dream — not as a continuous build toward a climax, but as a rise (to the central orgy scene) and fall enshrouded in mounting uncertainties — and its true emotional conflict (that between Bill and Alice) sits largely aside from the primary action (Bill’s journey into this strange sexual social underbelly). The two halves of the film, as separated by the orgy, seem to almost mirror each other, with Bill’s journey in each repeating a number of the same steps as first he burrows into the unknown and later retraces his voyage in search of meaning — and in fear of its consequences. The basic story beats of Eyes Wide Shut come from Traumnovelle, a 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler, but in Kubrick’s version the setting is transposed from Vienna to contemporary New York, and the novel’s Mardi Gras backdrop changed to Christmas. 

On paper, the Christmastime backdrop might seem ancillary to the film’s conflicts of wounded masculinity and marital strife, but in execution it becomes a decisive factor, in both mood and theme. Much of Eyes Wide Shut is possessed of a dreamy mood that shifts elusively between gauzy, oneiric surreality and parasomnic nightmare. Key to that is the holiday context and Kubrick’s approach to it, which uses candy-colored Christmas lights (and at times proxies/echoes of them in the form of neon shop signs) as diegetic light sources, the blue darkness of winter night as an otherworldly purple glow that bathes its nighttime scenes, and the general lighting scheme of its interiors that suggests the coziness of winters through a veil of dreaminess. The effect here is one of great aesthetic pleasure, as well as of unreality, in keeping with the general mood of the film.

The Christmastime setting also intensifies the film’s focus on marital dissolution amidst its central crises of masculinity and desire. Cruise’s nighttime cavortings from seedy costume shops to masked orgies are a stark contrast to the obvious seasonal mood and its associations of familial togetherness at parties (as in the opening sequence), in childcare (as throughout), and in preparation and observation of the actual holiday (as in its final scene). Thus the sharp absurdity of his crusade of insecurity stands out like blood in the fresh snow — or an outsider at an occult orgy unaware, when asked, that there is no “house password” — and the film becomes one of the great marriage movies as an investigation of masculine instability within the confines of domesticity.

An often-overlooked component of the film (and of Kubrick’s cinema in general, likely due to his severe reputation as a Serious Artist) is its humor, which is for much of the runtime conceptual but becomes palpable in its winking, riotous final moments. Having come home to find his formerly missing mask resting on a pillow next to his sleeping wife and confide in her about his nighttime escapades, Bill apologizes to Alice the next day in a store as they take their daughter holiday shopping. Amidst aisles of stuffed animals and bustling shoppers backlit by glinting Christmas lights, Alice suggests that there’s something they must do as soon as possible. And thus their marital strife comes to a (temporary) close, resolved not by renewed fidelity, commitment, or emotional intimacy, but by sexual immediacy. That one thing? “Fuck.”

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Eyes Wide Shut screens tomorrow, January 16, at 7pm as part of the three-film series I Like to Watch: Voyeurism in Cinema.