Is Bill Supposed to Cheat?
MP
unique angle...
____________
IS BILL SUPPOSED TO CHEAT?
by Alex Jack (alex...@cc.usu.edu.)
Critics and admirers alike seem to regard Eyes Wide Shut as being “pro-
monogamy," but I could never quite buy into this. For one, the whole
thing seems a little too ironic and smug to be taken directly as a
morality tale, particularly when we consider the all too pat last line
of the film. Two, the role that Nicole Kidman’s Alice plays in the
film has not been properly or thoroughly enough discussed, and if we
study the part long enough, we‘ll see that she isn’t exactly the
victim here. But we‘ll get to that in a minute. Three, and this might
be a weakness on my part, such a reading does not seem to gel well
enough with the rest of Kubrick’s oeuvre. The film is said to contain
references to all of Kubrick’s other films (Lolita and The Shining
seem to be the easiest to spot), and as such I think that it’s
particularly necessary to see how it fits into the puzzle.
I see 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as the Rosetta Stone in figuring
out Kubrick. He depicts savage apes evolving into the comfortable
sleepiness of modern civilized man and then evolving again into Star
Children, angels, <I<UBERMENSCHEN< i>, the great next step. Unless
guided upon the right path by space aliens, Kubrick seems to believe,
we’re perpetually stuck in our comfortable sleep. We’ve looked at A
Clockwork Orange, where our protagonist started out as Star Child and
forcibly regressed to a civilized machine-like state; The Shining,
where our protagonist found relief from the monotony of civilization
by regressing back into savage ape; and Full Metal Jacket, where
civilization had metastasized into our heroes’ bones and left them
incapable of either regressing or progressing to another stage. Now
there is Eyes Wide Shut, where civilized man again fails at
progressing toward the next evolutionary stage. This time it is not
because civilization has rendered him useless as in Full Metal Jacket,
but because he buys into its conventional morality and lacks the will
to surrender it and embrace something greater.
What I am basically saying here is that our hero Dr. Bill (Tom Cruise)
is supposed to cheat on his wife. Cheating on his wife represents a
rejection of the conventional slave morality of marital fidelity and a
progression toward a new self-made morality that values independence,
individuality, and the pursuit of one’s own human-emotional sex drive
over the collective. Bill’s unwillingness (not as much inability) to
pursue this greater morality is indicative of failure on his part.
Granted of course that we view the film through this distinctly
Nietzschean prism, the ending where he reunites with his wife and she
suggests that they need to fuck as soon as possible registers as happy
only in a deeply, darkly ironic way much like the nuclear holocaust at
the end of Dr. Strangelove, Alex’s deprogrammed sex fantasy at the end
of A Clockwork Orange or smiling Jack Torrance living it up in the
past at the end of The Shining. Eyes Wide Shut is distinguished from
these other films in that it depicts a failure that is ideologically
attuned to our conventional slave morality, rather than of a success
that happens to violate our conventional slave morality, but the end
result of both is similarly disorienting and perversely unsatisfying.
By “civilization,” we are essentially talking about the matriarchy.
The male sexual drive is defined by destruction. It’s all about
gaining power by taking it from others. The male sexual drive is
founded on values of individuality and self-interest and lends itself
easily to evolution of man to Star Child. The female sexual drive, on
the other hand, is assimilative. The female isn’t interested in
destroying her opponent as much as simply turning him into another one
of her. The motivation for the castration and emasculation of her men
is then to render them female. The male asserts his self-interest and
dominance through his phallus and by removing it, the female creates a
situation in which power is held mutually. The female subjugates
individuality for collectiveness and in doing so can never evolve
beyond her mortal state. She never regresses to the simian but
accordingly she never progresses to the Star Child. All her resources
are devoted to maintaining the monotony and stasis of the civilized
world.
If we look back on 2001, we see that in the time of chimpanzees the
collective and the individual, the male and the female, lived in
perfect harmony. Boy ape had to kill the tapirs and protect the
waterhole from the other tribes, and girl ape had to stay home and
raise the baby apes. In the space age, world hunger and war have been
eliminated. We don’t have to kill tapirs as we have ham sandwiches,
and the Cold War is over with Russia and the United States working
toward the same end. Our physiological needs have been conclusively
satisfied and we have entered a purely domestic age: the Age of the
Woman. Mankind has to be careful about losing himself in domestic
comfort. The domestic age is progress, but it is a mere stepping stone
to the end point. In order to achieve true spiritual actualization,
Man must destroy this female element, which has long since exhausted
its utility but still fights to perpetuate its useless existence, in
the same way the locust builds an immunity to pesticides.
Again, in looking at 2001, it’s not insignificant that the space age
segment is introduced by a female flight attendant tracking down and
replacing the floating pen of a sleeping passenger. She’s defined in a
domestic role and, rather notably, she’s the only one awake. Some
critics have remarked that the film foresees the demise of the
traditional family structure and as evidence point to the scene where
Dr. Floyd calls his daughter via video phone to wish her a happy
birthday. I would argue just the opposite, however. To me the scene
indicates that the available technology has been integrated entirely
with traditional family values, and modern man still feels obligated
to observe birthdays and be part of his daughter’s life even when he
is several thousand miles away from the Earth’s surface. While the
scene may suggest that the family going the way of the dinosaur, as it
is right now, this is still a predominantly domestic society.
The star of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the one character that everybody
remembers, is the HAL 9000. The character was actually originally
conceived as female. His final form is a fey male homosexual--but this
is ultimately only a slight change. The kind of homosexual that HAL
9000 represents is deeply socialized. He has a code of speaking that
obscures the weight and meaning of what he is actually saying (i.e.
“Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” “I’m afraid that I can’t do that,
Dave”). A supercomputer, HAL is not a creature of individual will, but
a product of a collectivist societal ethic. He believes that he is
justified in killing the ship’s crew because they were jeopardizing
the mission in putting him down. HAL is unable to even think in terms
of self-interest. HAL is feminine not only ethically but biologically.
His relationship with the crew members is like one between a pregnant
mother and her fetus. HAL not only controls the ship, for all intents
and purposes, he is the ship. He encompasses all the humans and they
live inside them. When they leave the ship and go into space, they are
attached back to him with what look like umbilical cords. When cut
off, they scream and wail and die, their relationship to the ship
being largely dependent and parasitical. For man to succeed in moving
to the next stage of evolution, he must slay this mother figure.
The Alice character in Eyes Wide Shut is a HAL figure. Only this time,
every film by ultra-auteur Kubrick being some variation of the same
basic theme, she succeeds and is not vanquished by her male. We
suspect that after the film ends things are going to pick up just as
they started, with the two going about preparing for another soiree
followed by sex and a day of doctoring and parenting. Like all of
Kubrick's films there is a scene in the bathroom. Now is it defecation
(simian, vulnerably mortal), bathing (modern human, bourgeois
indulgence), or urination (star child, asserting sexual dominance)?
It’s urination, by Alice in front of her husband as they get ready for
the party at the beginning of the film. This display of public
urination shows Alice as dominant relative to her husband. However,
relative to somebody like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, a true
ubermensch -- the Star Child grown to a Star Adolescent -- her
squatting position renders her as submissive. After all, it almost
looks as if she is shitting! The female must squat to urinate lest she
piss all over her feet, and this need to squat will always prevent the
female from evolving to the next stage. She’s innately, biologically,
unable of achieving the assertive standing pose.
Amusingly, while at the party, she excuses herself to go to the
bathroom. Bill is too dim to observe that she just went before they
got there. Why the apparent lie? What is she up to? She dances with a
Hungarian count that aggressively hits on her, telling her that
marriage was traditionally the only way that a woman could lose her
virginity and be free to do what she wants with other men. When she
leaves, the count asks her if he could see her again. She says that
that would be impossible as, duh, she’s married. Meanwhile, Bill
passively flirts with two models before being called to tend to his
wealthy friend Victor’s OD’d hooker. They get home to make love during
which Alice looks contemplatively and mysteriously at her own
reflection as her husband kisses her neck. This image is iconic; it’s
featured prominently in the film’s poster art. But what does it mean?
I think that it’s meant to mirror the shot in 2001 of HAL observing
astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole talk about putting him down.
Here she is plotting just exactly how she is going to clip her
husband’s wings.
The following day they go through their daily routines and at by the
end of the night smoke some marijuana from their bathroom stash and
get in the mood. Alice expresses jealousy about Bill’s near-fling with
the two models. He tells her that while he is a man and all men have a
biologically urge to have sex with beautiful women, he’s an exception
to the rule because he loves her and would do nothing to hurt her. She
protests that the only reason he won’t fuck the models is out of
consideration for her, not because he really wouldn’t want to. To get
a rise out of him she offers a hypothetical beautiful naked woman in
his office who is getting a breast exam. She wants to know what he is
thinking about when he is feeling her up. He tells her that it’s sheer
professionalism and sex is the last thing on his mind. Then she asks
if this woman patient is possibly having fantasies about Dr. Bill.
Bill says that women don’t think like that. Alice then relates a story
about how she saw a naval officer while they were vacationing and she
was so attracted to him that she would gladly have given up her
husband and her daughter for just one night with him. Bill is shocked
and then called out on a house call before the problem can be fully
resolved.
Two things that I want to address right off the bat. This
“hypothetical” naked female patient actually exists. We saw her in the
previous montage establishing their daily routine. How did Alice know
about this? It’s quite simple: she is all-seeing and all-knowing, just
like the HAL computer. We will see further evidence of Alice’s
omniscience later in the film. Right before Bill is about to sleep
with a prostitute she calls him on his cellular phone and tells him
that she is going to call it a day. Later, when he comes home after
being exposed at the orgy (where he was forced to remove his mask and
nearly strip) Alice wakes up to relate a “dream” where they were both
stranded in a strange place without any clothes and she made love to
the naval officer that she told him about. After she finished with him
she fucked other men and was cycled around like the village bicycle.
Wanting to humiliate Bill, she then summoned him in order to laugh at
him. This monologue seems to indicate that she knew all about the
orgy. She seems to have been there, in a dream, as one of the whores
the men were fucking--one of the whores that Bill could never quite
bring himself to dominate.
And then there is the case of Nicole Kidman’s performance. When the
film first came out, I recall a superficial but pointed complaint by
one viewer that Kidman’s performance as stoned was entirely
unconvincing and evidence that she had never used the marijuana and
was relying on her exaggerated preconceptions of the drug. Quite; her
level of inebriation seems inconsistent throughout the scene.
Sometimes she’s silly, sometimes she’s accusatory, sometimes she’s
sentient. This problem is exaggerated particularly since Kubrick was
openly and blatantly disinterested in naturalistic acting. He disliked
“realistic” performances. This unconvincing self-conscious
performance, however, is integral in reinforcing both our perception
of Alice’s deceitfulness and the character’s parallels with 2001’s
HAL. Like HAL, she seems to be feigning insanity in order to force her
male to leave the nest, allowing her to proceed to castrate/neutralize
him.
Now, about the sex. Note that while Alice’s fantasy is biologically
motivated it still puts her in a submissive role. She is surrendering
everything she has for sexual bliss and is taking nothing in return.
This is her fantasy and even in fantasy she is unable to assume the
superior male sexual role of oppressor. She still needs to be the one
to be oppressed. The hierarchy in the film seems to be Star Child (the
naval officer, and by extension the men who orchestrate the orgy),
modern woman (Alice) who because of her innate inferiority to the Star
Child can only aspire as high as assuming the relatively submissive
role of his whore, and then modern man (Bill) who is unwilling or
unable to assume the Star Child role and as thus must then acquiesce
to his wife’s conventional moral code. Secondly, notice that Alice
directly states that it is not enough for Bill to restrict his sexual
urges. He needs to cease having them. For the castration to be truly
complete, Bill must be domesticated in mind as well as body.
Eyes Wide Shut is not exactly a remake of The Wizard of Oz, but it
shares some close parallels with that film connected by a few easy-to-
spot references. The two models want to take Bill “over the rainbow,”
and when he goes to procure a costume in order to crash a secret orgy
he goes to Rainbow Fashions located just over a rainbow sign. Going
“over the rainbow” clearly means entering a world of sexual adventure
and going through the Star Gate to become a Star Child. And like The
Wizard of Oz, this wonderland is deconstructed at the end by a kind
and gentle old man who reveals that it was all a hoax. Most
importantly, Eyes Wide Shut retains the problematic message of The
Wizard of Oz. We tend to succinctly describe this message as “There is
no place like home,” but there is a bit more to it than that. Wizard
of Oz protagonist Dorothy Gale puts it as:
“Well, I - I think that it - it wasn't enough to just want to see
Uncle Henry and Auntie Em - and it's that - if I ever go looking for
my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back
yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin
with!”
In other words, loving Uncle Henry and Auntie Em and not wishing to
hurt them is not enough. She needs to stop dreaming of anything beyond
her backyard.
The Wizard of Oz parallels are integral in establishing this morality
as a distinctly feminine one. I sense that this lesson was
traditionally meant only for the girls, lest they leave town and try
and pursue a college education or join the army or whatever. By
placing Bill in a role that was originally and rather definitively
held by a sixteen-year-old girl (playing twelve or thirteen, no less),
his feminization by following through and obeying this moral code is
made explicit. And it’s not only that; there are few cultural icons as
thoroughly identified with the gay community as Judy Garland and The
Wizard of Oz. Associating Bill with The Wizard of Oz doesn’t only
render him female, it renders him homosexual, code to women that he is
not only no longer threatening but, as he is completely incapable of
raping them and assuming a dominant sexual role indicative of a Star
Child morality, deserving of pity. (One of the reasons that the gay
best friend archetype in romantic comedies feels so offensive is that
the role is implicitly condescending and patronizing toward gays.)
This sense of pity is deeply felt by Alice. When describing her
initial encounter with the naval officer to Bill she says, “And yet it
was weird because at the same time you were dearer to me than ever
and. . . and at that moment my love for you was both tender and sad."
Bill’s sexual inadequacy is so deeply ingrained that other men
mistakenly assume that he is homosexual. He is nearly roughed up by a
gang of frat boys passing him on the street as one talks about getting
a “Mexican lap dance” right in his face. They push Bill against a
parked car and call him “faggot” and “Mary” before playfully and
sarcastically offering themselves up for sodomy. At the end of the
incident, one of them says, “I got dumps bigger than you!” curiously
suggesting that his anus has been stretched out. These boys’ misogyny
is exaggerated in a way that distinguishes them from the less-talk-
more-fuck misogyny of the Star Children. They’re trying to prove
something, suggesting that they are compensating for latent homosexual
tendencies and are using this latent “gaydar” to select Bill for
attack. More explicitly, the day following Bill’s sexual misadventure,
he is hit on by a flamboyant hotel clerk played by Alan Cummings. Bill
is looking for his friend Nick Nightingale who had led him to the
orgy. The clerk says that Nightingale was escorted out by a couple of
“very large men” that looked like the sort that you don’t want to mess
with. “If you know what I mean,” the clerk whispers to Bill before
hiding his giggles at the double entendre. Even the casting of Tom
Cruise in the role, an often-rumored closet homosexual, seems designed
to doubly emasculate the character on a meta-level.
I’m equating homosexuality with the feminized male, but there is a
shot during the orgy sequence that depicts a masked man in a suit (a
Star Child) dancing with a nude male prostitute. While his presence
seems cutesy-pie and sort of perfunctory at first glance, I feel
obligated to revise this aspect of the film to accommodate him. I
think we need to distinguish between the pitcher and the catcher, top
and the bottom, dominant and submissive, the guy and the "girl."
Without taking into account the particulars of the sex act, the man in
the suit is the top. He’s wearing a suit; his boy toy is buck naked.
He’s rich and powerful while this boy toy is a whore hired to amuse
him. Power is really the only thing that matters here. Who’s on top?
Who’s calling the shots? Arguably the dominant homosexual is an
improvement over the dominant heterosexual, as he has completely
rejected all relations with the feminine world and completely rejected
conventional morality (which says that sex between a man and a woman
is the norm) instead of continuing to honor it (albeit on a low level)
through male-on-female rape. When I say that Bill has been made into a
homosexual figure through his emasculation, make no mistake, I mean
the kind of homosexual that gets fucked in the ass, which indeed is
the lowest that the human being can fall within the modern world. As
any student of fellow Nietzschean Oliver Stone’s deeply homoerotic
Platoon and JFK could tell you, the kind of homosexual that does the
actual ass-fucking is still the epitome of masculinity and of Star
Child ethics.
Even more perfunctory and more difficult to explain is perhaps the
lesbian couple in the same shot. Didn’t I just say that women were
biologically incapable of assuming the dominant role as they had to
sit down to pee? Perhaps, but the lesbian’s presence at this orgy
feels unlikely on a literal level and that is perhaps the point. But
still, this illustrates the male gendering of the Star Child race.
Wearing a suit and a bobbed haircut, the lesbian has essentially
adopted a male gender role. What’s more, in doing so, she has
implicitly rejected conventional feminist thinking which, of course,
is synonymous with the conventional moral thinking that emasculates
men, prevents them from evolving to the next stage, and maintains
monotony and stasis (i.e. “Rape is wrong”). This lesbian finds sexual
pleasure in exploiting and asserting power over her social, if not in
this case biological, inferiors. Just like all the other men in the
room, she likes the whores.
I’ve browsed a rough draft of the film’s original screenplay and was
intrigued by a certain omission from Alice’s dream. In the original
version she sees Bill being taken up onto a hill by a mob and
crucified. Alice looks on this with all her lovers and they laugh at
him. This bit seems to have been omitted from the finished film as it
may come off as somewhat pretentious and heavy-handed, but Eyes Wide
Shut is, of course, a film that has more than earned the right to
employ Christ imagery. Bill’s crucifixion and Alice’s enjoyment of it
mirrors a fantasy sequence in A Clockwork Orange of Star Child Alex
joyously flogging Christ while dressed “in the height of Roman
fashion,” again reinforcing the idea that Alice is on the side of the
Star Children and is enjoying her role as their whore. But it also
brings in that idea that Christianity is an effeminate religion that
reinforces effeminate values. Christian values are values of altruism,
collectivism and anonymity, values indicative of a slave morality. The
Christian God is also a human God that the rest of us must worship,
obey and emulate, whereas the idea behind the Star Child morality is
to evolve beyond the human stage through sheer will of power. Bill’s
becoming a Christ figure is part and parcel to his emasculation.
I said of 2001 that part of the reasoning behind the four-act
structure is to move beyond the limitations of the three-oriented
Christian (as represented by the Holy trinity and three-point
crucifix) world. The triangle, it’s worth noting, can only be folded
on a vertical line. The square on the other hand can be folded on both
a vertical and horizontal line. In that sense, it’s the superior form.
Eyes Wide Shut is a bit more structurally complex than 2001. Like that
film it uses a four-act structure. The first act is setting up Alice’s
confession. The second act is Bill’s misadventure. The third act is
the fallout of the misadventure, ending with Bill’s confession. The
fourth act is the fallout of this and the film’s eventual resolution.
It’s all very neat.
Within the second and third act are mirroring trilogies of failed
sexual encounters. In the second act, Bill attends to the daughter of
a patient who had just died. She tells him that she loves him, does
not want to leave town with her husband (“Dharma and Greg”’s Thomas
Gibson, sort of the poor man’s Tom Cruise and in the film the poor
man’s Dr. Bill), and just wants Bill to stay near her. This woman is
infatuated with Bill in very much the same way that Alice was
infatuated with the naval officer, which would allow Bill to assume
the dominant role of the naval officer were he to sleep with her. He
turns her down, however. His next encounter is with the prostitute
Domino. He is about to sleep with her (pathetically asking her “What
would you recommend?” when she asks what he likes, putting him again
in the submissive role) before being interrupted by his wife. And then
finally he attends the orgy where he is enamored by a mysterious woman
who wants to save his life, but is unmasked far before he can do
anything. This is as lucky as Dr. Bill gets, and during most of his
time there he is put in the position of passive voyeur.
In the third act, Bill drops off his costume at Rainbow Fashions. He
had seen the owner’s teenage daughter in a tryst with two Asian
businessmen the previous night and had seen her father harshly
chastise her and chase the men out of his store. When Bill comes back,
he sees that the owner has now reached a “deal” with the businessmen.
He offers her to Bill (she seems to like him), but Bill is too shocked
and disgusted to take him up on it. In his next encounter, Bill goes
to visit Domino and in seeing that she isn’t available puts the moves
on her female roommate. The roommate then breaks the mood by sitting
him down and telling him that Domino had just tested positive for the
HIV virus. That ought to teach him for going on these adventures!
Finally, he calls the dead patient’s daughter only to have her would-
be cuckolded husband answer the phone. He hangs up, now completely
emasculated, his every avenue for sexual adventure now long since
dried up.
These mirroring trilogies of sexual encounters aren’t as neatly
defined as the film’s overarching four-act structure. What constitutes
a sexual encounter anyway? I disregarded Bill’s initial encounter with
the costume shop owner because he neither pursued or rejected her, but
still she expressed sexual interest him as indicated by her whispering
in his ear before he went on with his journey. And perhaps I should
include his pursuit of the hooker at the orgy in the third act and his
discovery of her death. More to the point, the encounters of the third
act don’t follow a reversed sequence of those from the second, even if
we look at it as pairs of four; and, inconsistently, in many of this
incidents, he doesn‘t even encounter the original woman that he failed
to fornicate. I think that the film appears sloppy in this aspect
because Kubrick has set up a “natural” world of fours that the Dr.
Bill character is unable to comfortably inhabit. An emasculated Christ
figure, he can never quite get past number three. Granted, we should
try to tie down our readings to that which can only be seen on-screen
-- with Kubrick in particular, I always find this a problem -- but
even without foreknowledge of Bill’s literal transformation into
Christ, the continual interruption and successful smothering of this
non-hero’s journey toward enlightenment is both a challenging spin on
Kubrickian themes and fruitfully subversive.
stalepie09
> This is an interesting essay, which approaches Eyes Wide Shut from a
> unique angle...
>
> ____________
>
> IS BILL SUPPOSED TO CHEAT?
>
>
> Critics and admirers alike seem to regard Eyes Wide Shut as being “pro-
> monogamy," but I could never quite buy into this. For one, the whole
> thing seems a little too ironic and smug to be taken directly as a
> morality tale, particularly when we consider the all too pat last line
> of the film. Two, the role that Nicole Kidman’s Alice plays in the
> film has not been properly or thoroughly enough discussed, and if we
> study the part long enough, we‘ll see that she isn’t exactly the
> victim here.
Yeah she is. She isn't being loved enough and even if Bill is supposed
to "cheat," it's not cheating when you're with another woman, only if
a woman is with another man. I smile when I say that, but it's true.
If he left her FOR another woman, then she'd be left alone, without a
job, to raise that child and pay the expenses of that expensive
apartment.
> But we‘ll get to that in a minute. Three, and this might
> be a weakness on my part, such a reading does not seem to gel well
> enough with the rest of Kubrick’s oeuvre. The film is said to contain
> references to all of Kubrick’s other films (Lolita and The Shining
> seem to be the easiest to spot), and as such I think that it’s
> particularly necessary to see how it fits into the puzzle.
>
> I see 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as the Rosetta Stone in figuring
> out Kubrick.
If you gotta do all that, if you gotta go into his other films to
understand THIS film, then Kubrick really fucking sucked. He should've
communicated practically everything that needed to be communicated
within the single movie Eyes Wide Shut -- else, he should have called
his entire ouerve (I refuse to learn the spelling of that word) by
some name, even if that name was "Eyes Wide Shut," but he didn't,
unless "The Kubrick Collection" counts.
"should've" -- I don't understand why Google Chrome is underlining
that in red.
> He depicts savage apes evolving into the comfortable
> sleepiness of modern civilized man and then evolving again into Star
> Children, angels, <I<UBERMENSCHEN< i>, the great next step. Unless
> guided upon the right path by space aliens, Kubrick seems to believe,
> we’re perpetually stuck in our comfortable sleep. We’ve looked at A
> Clockwork Orange, where our protagonist started out as Star Child and
> forcibly regressed to a civilized machine-like state; The Shining,
> where our protagonist found relief from the monotony of civilization
> by regressing back into savage ape;
Okay, but what is savage about apes? They're not nearly as savage as
lions and bears. I know, they're our "ancestors" or whatever, but I
still don't get it.
> is then to render them female. The male asserts his self-interest and
> dominance through his phallus and by removing it, the female creates a
> situation in which power is held mutually.
How? Then they can't reproduce.
Men don't show their self-interest and dominance through their
phallus. This is so stupid. They show their self-interest and
dominance through their fists.
> The female subjugates
> individuality for collectiveness and in doing so can never evolve
> beyond her mortal state. She never regresses to the simian but
> accordingly she never progresses to the Star Child. All her resources
> are devoted to maintaining the monotony and stasis of the civilized
> world.
>
No idea what he even means.
Alice was supposed to mate when an alien? Out beyond Jupiter?
> If we look back on 2001, we see that in the time of chimpanzees the
> collective and the individual, the male and the female, lived in
> perfect harmony. Boy ape had to kill the tapirs and protect the
> waterhole from the other tribes, and girl ape had to stay home and
> raise the baby apes. In the space age, world hunger and war have been
> eliminated. We don’t have to kill tapirs as we have ham sandwiches,
> and the Cold War is over with Russia and the United States working
> toward the same end.
Actually, "2001" does show a bit of iciness between Russians and
Americans, which I thought was eerily prescient on Kube's part.
Some have said the earth by that point had become just a giant version
of the waterhole.
> Our physiological needs have been conclusively
> satisfied and we have entered a purely domestic age: the Age of the
> Woman. Mankind has to be careful about losing himself in domestic
> comfort. The domestic age is progress, but it is a mere stepping stone
> to the end point. In order to achieve true spiritual actualization,
> Man must destroy this female element, which has long since exhausted
> its utility but still fights to perpetuate its useless existence, in
> the same way the locust builds an immunity to pesticides.
>
Nonsense. HAL wasn't a replacement of man in any way.
Anyway, how did Dave and the aliens have a baby? With a male alien?
I don't think Kubrick would have put his own daughter in that scene if
he had felt that by then cihldren and women would be rendered
unimportant.
> Again, in looking at 2001, it’s not insignificant that the space age
> segment is introduced by a female flight attendant tracking down and
> replacing the floating pen of a sleeping passenger. She’s defined in a
> domestic role and, rather notably, she’s the only one awake. Some
> critics have remarked that the film foresees the demise of the
> traditional family structure and as evidence point to the scene where
> Dr. Floyd calls his daughter via video phone to wish her a happy
> birthday. I would argue just the opposite, however. To me the scene
> indicates that the available technology has been integrated entirely
> with traditional family values, and modern man still feels obligated
> to observe birthdays and be part of his daughter’s life even when he
> is several thousand miles away from the Earth’s surface. While the
> scene may suggest that the family going the way of the dinosaur, as it
> is right now, this is still a predominantly domestic society.
>
OK Fine, but you seemed to be saying something else a bit earlier.
> The star of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the one character that everybody
> remembers, is the HAL 9000. The character was actually originally
> conceived as female. His final form is a fey male homosexual--but this
> is ultimately only a slight change. The kind of homosexual that HAL
> 9000 represents is deeply socialized.
Yeah but the thing is most peoplethat engage in homosexual behavior
don't have that effeminate manner, which I always thought was a bit
obscure in HAL anyway.
I don't think Hal was homoesxual. He wanted to have sex with
astronauts? He wanted to have sex with other male machines?
The pods? Are the pods like a gerbil to a "homosexual"?
I don' feel like responding tot his anyomre. Ive said enough.
stalepie09
> sarcastically offering themselves up for sodomy. At the end of the
> incident, one of them says, “I got dumps bigger than you!” curiously
> suggesting that his anus has been stretched out.
That isn't true. The amount of shit, the shit pile, wouldn't be any
bigger if it came out of a wider ass hole. You still shit the same
amount. Even if he's talking about the width of the shit log it still
piles up into something of the same volume.
Cosmic Gnome
"MP" <mystic_...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:4e3de692-2e49-48ee...@g31g2000yqc.googlegroups.com...
>This is an interesting essay, which approaches Eyes Wide Shut from a
>unique angle...
Interesting in the most absurd ways, unique in its insanity. It must be one
of the most appalling, anti-feminist, homophobic, misogynist,
pro-patriarchal rants I've ever read about EWS. Notice how, for instance,
there is no reference whatsoever to Ziegler in this, frankly, irresponsible
'review'. Bill as a 'christ' figure? WTF? More like a Judas figure. (I would
have thought Mandy fitted the 'christ' description).
Really, almost every SENTENCE in this atrocious review is, not only false,
but completely absurd. It's as if this guy has read absolutely none of the
extensive existing commentary and analysis on the film (and in his willful
ignorance, then claiming that no such analyses exist, disavowing them in
order to peddle his totally twisted 'reading' of the film). So Bill is now
'our hero' in the film, while Alice is 'insane' ... oh for fucks sake, this
shit is beneath contempt (and his invoking of Nietzsche and slave morality -
has he even read or understood ANYTHING about Nietzsche's philosophy?).
It's as if this 'review' was written by Ziegler ...
[More later. What do you think of this reactionary dreck, MP?].
____________
IS BILL SUPPOSED TO CHEAT?
by Alex Jack (alex...@cc.usu.edu.)
Critics and admirers alike seem to regard Eyes Wide Shut as being �pro-
monogamy," but I could never quite buy into this. For one, the whole
thing seems a little too ironic and smug to be taken directly as a
morality tale, particularly when we consider the all too pat last line
of the film. Two, the role that Nicole Kidman�s Alice plays in the
film has not been properly or thoroughly enough discussed, and if we
study the part long enough, we�ll see that she isn�t exactly the
victim here. But we�ll get to that in a minute. Three, and this might
be a weakness on my part, such a reading does not seem to gel well
enough with the rest of Kubrick�s oeuvre. The film is said to contain
references to all of Kubrick�s other films (Lolita and The Shining
seem to be the easiest to spot), and as such I think that it�s
particularly necessary to see how it fits into the puzzle.
I see 1968�s 2001: A Space Odyssey as the Rosetta Stone in figuring
out Kubrick. He depicts savage apes evolving into the comfortable
sleepiness of modern civilized man and then evolving again into Star
Children, angels, <I<UBERMENSCHEN< i>, the great next step. Unless
guided upon the right path by space aliens, Kubrick seems to believe,
we�re perpetually stuck in our comfortable sleep. We�ve looked at A
Clockwork Orange, where our protagonist started out as Star Child and
forcibly regressed to a civilized machine-like state; The Shining,
where our protagonist found relief from the monotony of civilization
by regressing back into savage ape; and Full Metal Jacket, where
civilization had metastasized into our heroes� bones and left them
incapable of either regressing or progressing to another stage. Now
there is Eyes Wide Shut, where civilized man again fails at
progressing toward the next evolutionary stage. This time it is not
because civilization has rendered him useless as in Full Metal Jacket,
but because he buys into its conventional morality and lacks the will
to surrender it and embrace something greater.
What I am basically saying here is that our hero Dr. Bill (Tom Cruise)
is supposed to cheat on his wife. Cheating on his wife represents a
rejection of the conventional slave morality of marital fidelity and a
progression toward a new self-made morality that values independence,
individuality, and the pursuit of one�s own human-emotional sex drive
over the collective. Bill�s unwillingness (not as much inability) to
pursue this greater morality is indicative of failure on his part.
Granted of course that we view the film through this distinctly
Nietzschean prism, the ending where he reunites with his wife and she
suggests that they need to fuck as soon as possible registers as happy
only in a deeply, darkly ironic way much like the nuclear holocaust at
the end of Dr. Strangelove, Alex�s deprogrammed sex fantasy at the end
of A Clockwork Orange or smiling Jack Torrance living it up in the
past at the end of The Shining. Eyes Wide Shut is distinguished from
these other films in that it depicts a failure that is ideologically
attuned to our conventional slave morality, rather than of a success
that happens to violate our conventional slave morality, but the end
result of both is similarly disorienting and perversely unsatisfying.
By �civilization,� we are essentially talking about the matriarchy.
The male sexual drive is defined by destruction. It�s all about
gaining power by taking it from others. The male sexual drive is
founded on values of individuality and self-interest and lends itself
easily to evolution of man to Star Child. The female sexual drive, on
the other hand, is assimilative. The female isn�t interested in
destroying her opponent as much as simply turning him into another one
of her. The motivation for the castration and emasculation of her men
is then to render them female. The male asserts his self-interest and
dominance through his phallus and by removing it, the female creates a
situation in which power is held mutually. The female subjugates
individuality for collectiveness and in doing so can never evolve
beyond her mortal state. She never regresses to the simian but
accordingly she never progresses to the Star Child. All her resources
are devoted to maintaining the monotony and stasis of the civilized
world.
If we look back on 2001, we see that in the time of chimpanzees the
collective and the individual, the male and the female, lived in
perfect harmony. Boy ape had to kill the tapirs and protect the
waterhole from the other tribes, and girl ape had to stay home and
raise the baby apes. In the space age, world hunger and war have been
eliminated. We don�t have to kill tapirs as we have ham sandwiches,
and the Cold War is over with Russia and the United States working
toward the same end. Our physiological needs have been conclusively
satisfied and we have entered a purely domestic age: the Age of the
Woman. Mankind has to be careful about losing himself in domestic
comfort. The domestic age is progress, but it is a mere stepping stone
to the end point. In order to achieve true spiritual actualization,
Man must destroy this female element, which has long since exhausted
its utility but still fights to perpetuate its useless existence, in
the same way the locust builds an immunity to pesticides.
Again, in looking at 2001, it�s not insignificant that the space age
segment is introduced by a female flight attendant tracking down and
replacing the floating pen of a sleeping passenger. She�s defined in a
domestic role and, rather notably, she�s the only one awake. Some
critics have remarked that the film foresees the demise of the
traditional family structure and as evidence point to the scene where
Dr. Floyd calls his daughter via video phone to wish her a happy
birthday. I would argue just the opposite, however. To me the scene
indicates that the available technology has been integrated entirely
with traditional family values, and modern man still feels obligated
to observe birthdays and be part of his daughter�s life even when he
is several thousand miles away from the Earth�s surface. While the
scene may suggest that the family going the way of the dinosaur, as it
is right now, this is still a predominantly domestic society.
The star of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the one character that everybody
remembers, is the HAL 9000. The character was actually originally
conceived as female. His final form is a fey male homosexual--but this
is ultimately only a slight change. The kind of homosexual that HAL
9000 represents is deeply socialized. He has a code of speaking that
obscures the weight and meaning of what he is actually saying (i.e.
�Open the pod bay doors, HAL.� �I�m afraid that I can�t do that,
Dave�). A supercomputer, HAL is not a creature of individual will, but
a product of a collectivist societal ethic. He believes that he is
justified in killing the ship�s crew because they were jeopardizing
the mission in putting him down. HAL is unable to even think in terms
of self-interest. HAL is feminine not only ethically but biologically.
His relationship with the crew members is like one between a pregnant
mother and her fetus. HAL not only controls the ship, for all intents
and purposes, he is the ship. He encompasses all the humans and they
live inside them. When they leave the ship and go into space, they are
attached back to him with what look like umbilical cords. When cut
off, they scream and wail and die, their relationship to the ship
being largely dependent and parasitical. For man to succeed in moving
to the next stage of evolution, he must slay this mother figure.
The Alice character in Eyes Wide Shut is a HAL figure. Only this time,
every film by ultra-auteur Kubrick being some variation of the same
basic theme, she succeeds and is not vanquished by her male. We
suspect that after the film ends things are going to pick up just as
they started, with the two going about preparing for another soiree
followed by sex and a day of doctoring and parenting. Like all of
Kubrick's films there is a scene in the bathroom. Now is it defecation
(simian, vulnerably mortal), bathing (modern human, bourgeois
indulgence), or urination (star child, asserting sexual dominance)?
It�s urination, by Alice in front of her husband as they get ready for
the party at the beginning of the film. This display of public
urination shows Alice as dominant relative to her husband. However,
relative to somebody like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, a true
ubermensch -- the Star Child grown to a Star Adolescent -- her
squatting position renders her as submissive. After all, it almost
looks as if she is shitting! The female must squat to urinate lest she
piss all over her feet, and this need to squat will always prevent the
female from evolving to the next stage. She�s innately, biologically,
unable of achieving the assertive standing pose.
Amusingly, while at the party, she excuses herself to go to the
bathroom. Bill is too dim to observe that she just went before they
got there. Why the apparent lie? What is she up to? She dances with a
Hungarian count that aggressively hits on her, telling her that
marriage was traditionally the only way that a woman could lose her
virginity and be free to do what she wants with other men. When she
leaves, the count asks her if he could see her again. She says that
that would be impossible as, duh, she�s married. Meanwhile, Bill
passively flirts with two models before being called to tend to his
wealthy friend Victor�s OD�d hooker. They get home to make love during
which Alice looks contemplatively and mysteriously at her own
reflection as her husband kisses her neck. This image is iconic; it�s
featured prominently in the film�s poster art. But what does it mean?
I think that it�s meant to mirror the shot in 2001 of HAL observing
astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole talk about putting him down.
Here she is plotting just exactly how she is going to clip her
husband�s wings.
The following day they go through their daily routines and at by the
end of the night smoke some marijuana from their bathroom stash and
get in the mood. Alice expresses jealousy about Bill�s near-fling with
the two models. He tells her that while he is a man and all men have a
biologically urge to have sex with beautiful women, he�s an exception
to the rule because he loves her and would do nothing to hurt her. She
protests that the only reason he won�t fuck the models is out of
consideration for her, not because he really wouldn�t want to. To get
a rise out of him she offers a hypothetical beautiful naked woman in
his office who is getting a breast exam. She wants to know what he is
thinking about when he is feeling her up. He tells her that it�s sheer
professionalism and sex is the last thing on his mind. Then she asks
if this woman patient is possibly having fantasies about Dr. Bill.
Bill says that women don�t think like that. Alice then relates a story
about how she saw a naval officer while they were vacationing and she
was so attracted to him that she would gladly have given up her
husband and her daughter for just one night with him. Bill is shocked
and then called out on a house call before the problem can be fully
resolved.
Two things that I want to address right off the bat. This
�hypothetical� naked female patient actually exists. We saw her in the
previous montage establishing their daily routine. How did Alice know
about this? It�s quite simple: she is all-seeing and all-knowing, just
like the HAL computer. We will see further evidence of Alice�s
omniscience later in the film. Right before Bill is about to sleep
with a prostitute she calls him on his cellular phone and tells him
that she is going to call it a day. Later, when he comes home after
being exposed at the orgy (where he was forced to remove his mask and
nearly strip) Alice wakes up to relate a �dream� where they were both
stranded in a strange place without any clothes and she made love to
the naval officer that she told him about. After she finished with him
she fucked other men and was cycled around like the village bicycle.
Wanting to humiliate Bill, she then summoned him in order to laugh at
him. This monologue seems to indicate that she knew all about the
orgy. She seems to have been there, in a dream, as one of the whores
the men were fucking--one of the whores that Bill could never quite
bring himself to dominate.
And then there is the case of Nicole Kidman�s performance. When the
film first came out, I recall a superficial but pointed complaint by
one viewer that Kidman�s performance as stoned was entirely
unconvincing and evidence that she had never used the marijuana and
was relying on her exaggerated preconceptions of the drug. Quite; her
level of inebriation seems inconsistent throughout the scene.
Sometimes she�s silly, sometimes she�s accusatory, sometimes she�s
sentient. This problem is exaggerated particularly since Kubrick was
openly and blatantly disinterested in naturalistic acting. He disliked
�realistic� performances. This unconvincing self-conscious
performance, however, is integral in reinforcing both our perception
of Alice�s deceitfulness and the character�s parallels with 2001�s
HAL. Like HAL, she seems to be feigning insanity in order to force her
male to leave the nest, allowing her to proceed to castrate/neutralize
him.
Now, about the sex. Note that while Alice�s fantasy is biologically
motivated it still puts her in a submissive role. She is surrendering
everything she has for sexual bliss and is taking nothing in return.
This is her fantasy and even in fantasy she is unable to assume the
superior male sexual role of oppressor. She still needs to be the one
to be oppressed. The hierarchy in the film seems to be Star Child (the
naval officer, and by extension the men who orchestrate the orgy),
modern woman (Alice) who because of her innate inferiority to the Star
Child can only aspire as high as assuming the relatively submissive
role of his whore, and then modern man (Bill) who is unwilling or
unable to assume the Star Child role and as thus must then acquiesce
to his wife�s conventional moral code. Secondly, notice that Alice
directly states that it is not enough for Bill to restrict his sexual
urges. He needs to cease having them. For the castration to be truly
complete, Bill must be domesticated in mind as well as body.
Eyes Wide Shut is not exactly a remake of The Wizard of Oz, but it
shares some close parallels with that film connected by a few easy-to-
spot references. The two models want to take Bill �over the rainbow,�
and when he goes to procure a costume in order to crash a secret orgy
he goes to Rainbow Fashions located just over a rainbow sign. Going
�over the rainbow� clearly means entering a world of sexual adventure
and going through the Star Gate to become a Star Child. And like The
Wizard of Oz, this wonderland is deconstructed at the end by a kind
and gentle old man who reveals that it was all a hoax. Most
importantly, Eyes Wide Shut retains the problematic message of The
Wizard of Oz. We tend to succinctly describe this message as �There is
no place like home,� but there is a bit more to it than that. Wizard
of Oz protagonist Dorothy Gale puts it as:
�Well, I - I think that it - it wasn't enough to just want to see
Uncle Henry and Auntie Em - and it's that - if I ever go looking for
my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back
yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin
with!�
In other words, loving Uncle Henry and Auntie Em and not wishing to
hurt them is not enough. She needs to stop dreaming of anything beyond
her backyard.
The Wizard of Oz parallels are integral in establishing this morality
as a distinctly feminine one. I sense that this lesson was
traditionally meant only for the girls, lest they leave town and try
and pursue a college education or join the army or whatever. By
placing Bill in a role that was originally and rather definitively
held by a sixteen-year-old girl (playing twelve or thirteen, no less),
his feminization by following through and obeying this moral code is
made explicit. And it�s not only that; there are few cultural icons as
thoroughly identified with the gay community as Judy Garland and The
Wizard of Oz. Associating Bill with The Wizard of Oz doesn�t only
render him female, it renders him homosexual, code to women that he is
not only no longer threatening but, as he is completely incapable of
raping them and assuming a dominant sexual role indicative of a Star
Child morality, deserving of pity. (One of the reasons that the gay
best friend archetype in romantic comedies feels so offensive is that
the role is implicitly condescending and patronizing toward gays.)
This sense of pity is deeply felt by Alice. When describing her
initial encounter with the naval officer to Bill she says, �And yet it
was weird because at the same time you were dearer to me than ever
and. . . and at that moment my love for you was both tender and sad."
Bill�s sexual inadequacy is so deeply ingrained that other men
mistakenly assume that he is homosexual. He is nearly roughed up by a
gang of frat boys passing him on the street as one talks about getting
a �Mexican lap dance� right in his face. They push Bill against a
parked car and call him �faggot� and �Mary� before playfully and
sarcastically offering themselves up for sodomy. At the end of the
incident, one of them says, �I got dumps bigger than you!� curiously
suggesting that his anus has been stretched out. These boys� misogyny
is exaggerated in a way that distinguishes them from the less-talk-
more-fuck misogyny of the Star Children. They�re trying to prove
something, suggesting that they are compensating for latent homosexual
tendencies and are using this latent �gaydar� to select Bill for
attack. More explicitly, the day following Bill�s sexual misadventure,
he is hit on by a flamboyant hotel clerk played by Alan Cummings. Bill
is looking for his friend Nick Nightingale who had led him to the
orgy. The clerk says that Nightingale was escorted out by a couple of
�very large men� that looked like the sort that you don�t want to mess
with. �If you know what I mean,� the clerk whispers to Bill before
hiding his giggles at the double entendre. Even the casting of Tom
Cruise in the role, an often-rumored closet homosexual, seems designed
to doubly emasculate the character on a meta-level.
I�m equating homosexuality with the feminized male, but there is a
shot during the orgy sequence that depicts a masked man in a suit (a
Star Child) dancing with a nude male prostitute. While his presence
seems cutesy-pie and sort of perfunctory at first glance, I feel
obligated to revise this aspect of the film to accommodate him. I
think we need to distinguish between the pitcher and the catcher, top
and the bottom, dominant and submissive, the guy and the "girl."
Without taking into account the particulars of the sex act, the man in
the suit is the top. He�s wearing a suit; his boy toy is buck naked.
He�s rich and powerful while this boy toy is a whore hired to amuse
him. Power is really the only thing that matters here. Who�s on top?
Who�s calling the shots? Arguably the dominant homosexual is an
improvement over the dominant heterosexual, as he has completely
rejected all relations with the feminine world and completely rejected
conventional morality (which says that sex between a man and a woman
is the norm) instead of continuing to honor it (albeit on a low level)
through male-on-female rape. When I say that Bill has been made into a
homosexual figure through his emasculation, make no mistake, I mean
the kind of homosexual that gets fucked in the ass, which indeed is
the lowest that the human being can fall within the modern world. As
any student of fellow Nietzschean Oliver Stone�s deeply homoerotic
Platoon and JFK could tell you, the kind of homosexual that does the
actual ass-fucking is still the epitome of masculinity and of Star
Child ethics.
Even more perfunctory and more difficult to explain is perhaps the
lesbian couple in the same shot. Didn�t I just say that women were
biologically incapable of assuming the dominant role as they had to
sit down to pee? Perhaps, but the lesbian�s presence at this orgy
feels unlikely on a literal level and that is perhaps the point. But
still, this illustrates the male gendering of the Star Child race.
Wearing a suit and a bobbed haircut, the lesbian has essentially
adopted a male gender role. What�s more, in doing so, she has
implicitly rejected conventional feminist thinking which, of course,
is synonymous with the conventional moral thinking that emasculates
men, prevents them from evolving to the next stage, and maintains
monotony and stasis (i.e. �Rape is wrong�). This lesbian finds sexual
pleasure in exploiting and asserting power over her social, if not in
this case biological, inferiors. Just like all the other men in the
room, she likes the whores.
I�ve browsed a rough draft of the film�s original screenplay and was
intrigued by a certain omission from Alice�s dream. In the original
version she sees Bill being taken up onto a hill by a mob and
crucified. Alice looks on this with all her lovers and they laugh at
him. This bit seems to have been omitted from the finished film as it
may come off as somewhat pretentious and heavy-handed, but Eyes Wide
Shut is, of course, a film that has more than earned the right to
employ Christ imagery. Bill�s crucifixion and Alice�s enjoyment of it
mirrors a fantasy sequence in A Clockwork Orange of Star Child Alex
joyously flogging Christ while dressed �in the height of Roman
fashion,� again reinforcing the idea that Alice is on the side of the
Star Children and is enjoying her role as their whore. But it also
brings in that idea that Christianity is an effeminate religion that
reinforces effeminate values. Christian values are values of altruism,
collectivism and anonymity, values indicative of a slave morality. The
Christian God is also a human God that the rest of us must worship,
obey and emulate, whereas the idea behind the Star Child morality is
to evolve beyond the human stage through sheer will of power. Bill�s
becoming a Christ figure is part and parcel to his emasculation.
I said of 2001 that part of the reasoning behind the four-act
structure is to move beyond the limitations of the three-oriented
Christian (as represented by the Holy trinity and three-point
crucifix) world. The triangle, it�s worth noting, can only be folded
on a vertical line. The square on the other hand can be folded on both
a vertical and horizontal line. In that sense, it�s the superior form.
Eyes Wide Shut is a bit more structurally complex than 2001. Like that
film it uses a four-act structure. The first act is setting up Alice�s
confession. The second act is Bill�s misadventure. The third act is
the fallout of the misadventure, ending with Bill�s confession. The
fourth act is the fallout of this and the film�s eventual resolution.
It�s all very neat.
Within the second and third act are mirroring trilogies of failed
sexual encounters. In the second act, Bill attends to the daughter of
a patient who had just died. She tells him that she loves him, does
not want to leave town with her husband (�Dharma and Greg��s Thomas
Gibson, sort of the poor man�s Tom Cruise and in the film the poor
man�s Dr. Bill), and just wants Bill to stay near her. This woman is
infatuated with Bill in very much the same way that Alice was
infatuated with the naval officer, which would allow Bill to assume
the dominant role of the naval officer were he to sleep with her. He
turns her down, however. His next encounter is with the prostitute
Domino. He is about to sleep with her (pathetically asking her �What
would you recommend?� when she asks what he likes, putting him again
in the submissive role) before being interrupted by his wife. And then
finally he attends the orgy where he is enamored by a mysterious woman
who wants to save his life, but is unmasked far before he can do
anything. This is as lucky as Dr. Bill gets, and during most of his
time there he is put in the position of passive voyeur.
In the third act, Bill drops off his costume at Rainbow Fashions. He
had seen the owner�s teenage daughter in a tryst with two Asian
businessmen the previous night and had seen her father harshly
chastise her and chase the men out of his store. When Bill comes back,
he sees that the owner has now reached a �deal� with the businessmen.
He offers her to Bill (she seems to like him), but Bill is too shocked
and disgusted to take him up on it. In his next encounter, Bill goes
to visit Domino and in seeing that she isn�t available puts the moves
on her female roommate. The roommate then breaks the mood by sitting
him down and telling him that Domino had just tested positive for the
HIV virus. That ought to teach him for going on these adventures!
Finally, he calls the dead patient�s daughter only to have her would-
be cuckolded husband answer the phone. He hangs up, now completely
emasculated, his every avenue for sexual adventure now long since
dried up.
These mirroring trilogies of sexual encounters aren�t as neatly
defined as the film�s overarching four-act structure. What constitutes
a sexual encounter anyway? I disregarded Bill�s initial encounter with
the costume shop owner because he neither pursued or rejected her, but
still she expressed sexual interest him as indicated by her whispering
in his ear before he went on with his journey. And perhaps I should
include his pursuit of the hooker at the orgy in the third act and his
discovery of her death. More to the point, the encounters of the third
act don�t follow a reversed sequence of those from the second, even if
we look at it as pairs of four; and, inconsistently, in many of this
incidents, he doesn�t even encounter the original woman that he failed
to fornicate. I think that the film appears sloppy in this aspect
because Kubrick has set up a �natural� world of fours that the Dr.
Bill character is unable to comfortably inhabit. An emasculated Christ
figure, he can never quite get past number three. Granted, we should
try to tie down our readings to that which can only be seen on-screen
-- with Kubrick in particular, I always find this a problem -- but
even without foreknowledge of Bill�s literal transformation into
Christ, the continual interruption and successful smothering of this
non-hero�s journey toward enlightenment is both a challenging spin on
MP
whose failing is his inability to cheat on his wife, objectify women,
flirt with whores, mingle with "all the best people" and be generally
immoral. He essentially sees Bill as a failure because Bill can't
raise above his station and become like Ziegler.
The film does equate desire with money, Bill's impotency being the
result of his own class and the realisation that only the powerful can
actualise their banal, robot-fantasies, but this guy is arguing that
the conclusion Bill and Alice reach at the end of the film, is sort of
like them settling for second best. They're both too small to fuck
anyone else, so they settle for one another.
You say the article is anti-feminist, but doesn't his reading imply
that if Alice could have her way, she'd have run off with the "sailor
of her dreams" as well? Kubrick links Alice's "sailor of her dreams"
with the model of a boat in Ziegler's office and the captain's hat
Ziegler wears at Somerton. It's almost as though she desires a sort of
Ziegler figure herself.
Cosmic Gnome
>I think he's approaching Bill as a repressed Alex De Large figure
> whose failing is his inability to cheat on his wife, objectify women,
> flirt with whores, mingle with "all the best people" and be generally
> immoral. He essentially sees Bill as a failure because Bill can't
> raise above his station and become like Ziegler.
Yes. Which is to say that the article is transcendentally misogynist,
anti-feminist, which is why I said that it is as if it was written by
Ziegler ...
>
> The film does equate desire with money, Bill's impotency being the
> result of his own class and the realisation that only the powerful can
> actualise their banal, robot-fantasies, but this guy is arguing that
> the conclusion Bill and Alice reach at the end of the film, is sort of
> like them settling for second best. They're both too small to fuck
> anyone else, so they settle for one another.
>
> You say the article is anti-feminist, but doesn't his reading imply
> that if Alice could have her way,
But she does have her way, she COULD have run off with the sailor, but chose
not to because of her 'love' of Bill and her conjugal/marital vows. That
isn't the issue though; it is the very fact that Alice could have desires at
all, desires that exclude Bill, that is the whole engine or motor or
inciting incident of the film, that Bill - in his easy, complacent,
male-POV - can't tolerate, that constitute a total assault on his underlying
institutionalized sexism and narcissism, in which women are only permitted
to be either passive, domesticated trophy wives like Alice ("I'm sure of
you") or subservient and expendable whores and sex slaves like Mandy, are
above all not permitted to have desires of their own. This is what drives
Bill on his resentful odyssey as he hopelessly attempts to reassert his idea
of masculinity and patriarchal dominance over women (ie to be a 'man'; the
article, insanely, even suggests that any man who doesn't rape women is
feminized, is a ... homosexual! This guy's even worse that Sgt Hartman),
seeking out women like Domino to reassure himself that women are not a
threat to his male POV, that they are subservient and disposable and must be
kept that way ... until he realises, via Ziegler and Somerton, that he too
is subservient and disposable, in spite of being a 'doctor', which results
in his subjective destitution.
>she'd have run off with the "sailor
> of her dreams" as well? Kubrick links Alice's "sailor of her dreams"
> with the model of a boat in Ziegler's office and the captain's hat
> Ziegler wears at Somerton. It's almost as though she desires a sort of
> Ziegler figure herself.
It is the fact that she desires, this is what is a challenge to male
hegemony. This is what the Zieglers and Bills cannot tolerate. The only
irony here is that if she had had her dream fulfilled (dreams being the
realization of desire), it would turn into a nightmare (as all direct
realizations of desire always are), being married to a murderous psycho like
Ziegler, where she would be even more enslaved, more expendable, more
subservient.
Cosmic Gnome
as a metaphor for its operation, its 'inner sanctum) under late capitalism
as it exists today. So it might be worthwhile to examine what we mean by
patriarchy ...
Patriarchy" is not only male dominance, but male dominance according to a
particular distribution of power among the dominant/dominated. Not all males
are dominant under patriarchy, but masculinity (a specific coding of
maleness particular to patriarchy) is the medium through which dominance is
transmitted from the top of the power hierarchy to the bottom; those who are
in dominant positions within the overall power structure tend very strongly
to be male (and, when not male, to reproduce masculine patterns of power
ownership and use). Alongside this comes the coding of femininity as a set
of attitudes, relational patterns etc. deemed appropriate for the dominated.
(This is why "feminisation" is a considered bad thing to happen to a male
person under patriarchy; to be in default of masculinity is to risk
significant loss of status relative to the hierarchy).
The word "coding" is important in the above paragraph, which isn't a set of
assertions about what men and women are really like: instead, it's a set of
assertions about a set of assertions (more strongly, performatives) about
what men and women are really like ("Because women aren't like that,
Alice!"). Patriarchal codings of masculinity and femininity define
stereotyped patterns of power relationship: force versus cunning (Henry
Rollins's "All women are evil, all men are morons"), predation versus
manipulation and so on. These stereotypes are writ large, in bold colours,
in cultural representations of masculinity and femininity, but the
representations are a sort of kids' Sunday cartoon supplement version of the
actual dynamics. Real men and women behave in all kinds of interesting ways.
But patriarchy persists as a social form by imposing a set of norms relative
to which the behaviour of real men and women is judged, deviations noted and
disciplined and so on.
Patriarchy has an interesting and slightly strange relationship to
capitalism, since the latter doesn't actually require strongly hierarchical
power relationships in order to function, and is at best parasitic on
existing gender roles, divisions of labour etc. - increasingly, the
behaviours, attitudes and coping strategies of the dominated (traits of the
patriarchal stereotype "femininity") are being urged on the male workforce,
for example.
"MP" <mystic_...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:739e7e69-da15-48de...@j39g2000yqh.googlegroups.com...
kelpzoidzl
>
> news:739e7e69-da15-48de...@j39g2000yqh.googlegroups.com...
>
>
>
> >I think he's approaching Bill as a repressed Alex De Large figure
> > whose failing is his inability to cheat on his wife, objectify women,
> > flirt with whores, mingle with "all the best people" and be generally
> > immoral. He essentially sees Bill as a failure because Bill can't
> > raise above his station and become like Ziegler.
>
> > The film does equate desire with money, Bill's impotency being the
> > result of his own class and the realisation that only the powerful can
> > actualise their banal, robot-fantasies, but this guy is arguing that
> > the conclusion Bill and Alice reach at the end of the film, is sort of
> > like them settling for second best. They're both too small to fuck
> > anyone else, so they settle for one another.
>
> > You say the article is anti-feminist, but doesn't his reading imply
> > that if Alice could have her way, she'd have run off with the "sailor
> > of her dreams" as well? Kubrick links Alice's "sailor of her dreams"
> > with the model of a boat in Ziegler's office and the captain's hat
> > Ziegler wears at Somerton. It's almost as though she desires a sort of
>
Some applicable images---a little Von Trier perspective:
http://img70.imageshack.us/img70/5249/pdvd002n.jpg
http://img70.imageshack.us/img70/2272/pdvd007u.jpg
http://img70.imageshack.us/img70/6208/pdvd004l.jpg
http://img70.imageshack.us/img70/8282/pdvd006y.jpg
dc
kelpzoidzl
>
> news:739e7e69-da15-48de...@j39g2000yqh.googlegroups.com...
>
>
>
> >I think he's approaching Bill as a repressed Alex De Large figure
> > whose failing is his inability to cheat on his wife, objectify women,
> > flirt with whores, mingle with "all the best people" and be generally
> > immoral. He essentially sees Bill as a failure because Bill can't
> > raise above his station and become like Ziegler.
>
> > The film does equate desire with money, Bill's impotency being the
> > result of his own class and the realisation that only the powerful can
> > actualise their banal, robot-fantasies, but this guy is arguing that
> > the conclusion Bill and Alice reach at the end of the film, is sort of
> > like them settling for second best. They're both too small to fuck
> > anyone else, so they settle for one another.
>
> > You say the article is anti-feminist, but doesn't his reading imply
> > that if Alice could have her way, she'd have run off with the "sailor
> > of her dreams" as well? Kubrick links Alice's "sailor of her dreams"
> > with the model of a boat in Ziegler's office and the captain's hat
> > Ziegler wears at Somerton. It's almost as though she desires a sort of
>
Dude you need to overcome your familial hangups.
I know you'd like to be a little princess and taken care of in a
eternal nanny state, Mean 'ol men scare you I know, ...but srsly
you need to realize that what you are asking is physically
impossible, Mediocrity, is the only outcome of your commie dream
machine. Lower the bar for all, brings it down to the lowest common
denominator.
Your supposed feminism is a ploy as well. Grow a pair. No real woman
wants a sissy.
dc
Don Stockbauer
Of course there's always cybernetic socialism.
kelpzoidzl
>
> Of course there's always cybernetic socialism.
Open Scourge
dc
Don Stockbauer
Actually, you have no choice.
kelpzoidzl
It is all my choice and my reflection.
dc
Don Stockbauer
Once a planet evolves billions of creatures able to globally
telecommunicate with each other, cybernetic socialism (aka the global
brain) automatically locks in.
kelpzoidzl
As all the creatures say WTF!
The future is already in the infinite past. Don;t go off the deep
end.
dc
MP
<hundredmillionlifeti...@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> "MP" <mystic_prow...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
I understand your point now. In the article he cites 2001 as the
"Rosetta Stone for understanding Kubrick's later films" and I think
this got me locked into thinking about the film as a sort of pseudo-
Nietzschean "evolution movie". Reading the article, I found myself
thinking: "Yes, dispite his long journey, Bill's newfound awareness of
his station, of his context, doesn't allow him to "succeed" like the
Zieglers!"
But I suppose the point is that Bill is now in posession of
information, or feelings, that Ziegler doesn't possess. Or rather that
Ziegler's success is dependent on ignoring and disregarding this
information. We don't know what job Ziegler does, but the irony is
that he probably makes money off selling products that cater to the
desires of others (assuming he's some kind of business mogul), their
desires only interesting to him in so far as he can turn them into
cash.
Don Stockbauer
You don't either, kelp. We're stronger with you than without you.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion, I suppose. To me, the future
is in our immediate future.