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280 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 the Wlm and slunk out three hours later feeling horny, frustrated, and ripped oV. Kubrick was old and out of touch with today’s jaded sensibilities, they griped. The Wlm’s sexual mores and taboos, transplanted from Arthur Schnitzler’s Wn-de-siècle Vienna (jealousy over dreams and fantasies, guilt-ridden visits to prostitutes, a strained discussion of HIV that distantly echoes the old social terror of syphilis) seemed quaint and naive by the standards of 1999, year of the sordid Starr Report. One last time Stanley Kubrick had Xouted genre expectations, and once again, as throughout his career, critics could only see what wasn’t there. The backlash against the Wlm is now generally blamed on a cynical, miscalculated ad campaign. But why anyone who’d seen Kubrick’s previous Wlms believed the hype and actually expected it to be what Entertainment Weekly breathlessly anticipated as “the sexiest movie ever” is still unclear; the most erotic scenes he ever Wlmed were the bomber refueling in Dr. Strangelove and the spaceliner docking in 2001. He mocks any prurient expectations in the very Wrst shot of this movie; without prelude, Nicole Kidman, her back to the camera, shrugs oV her dress and kicks it aside, standing matter-of-factly bare-assed before us for a moment before the screen goes black like a peepshow door sliding shut. Then the title appears like a rebuke, telling us that we’re not really seeing what we’re staring at. In other words, Eyes Wide Shut is not going to be about sex. The real pornography in this Wlm is in its lingering depiction of the Introducing Sociology  t i m k r e i d e r So . . . do you . . . do you suppose we should . . . talk about money? —dr. william (“bill”) harford shameless, naked wealth of millennial Manhattan, and of the obscene eVect of that wealth on our society, and on the soul. National reviewers’ myopic focus on sex and the shallow psychologies of the Wlm’s central couple, the Harfords, at the expense of any other element of the Wlm—its trappings of stupendous wealth, its references to Wn-de-siècle Europe and other imperial periods, its Christmastime setting, the sum Dr. Harford spends on a single night out, let alone the unresolved mystery at its center —says more about the blindness of our 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. There is a moment in Eyes Wide Shut, as Bill Harford is lying to his wife over a cell phone from a prostitute’s apartment, when we see a textbook in the foreground titled Introducing Sociology. The book’s title is a dry caption to the action onscreen (like the slogan “Peace is our profession” looming over the battle at Burpelson Air Force Base in Dr. Strangelove), labeling prostitution as the most basic, deWning transaction of our society. Almost everyone in this Wlm prostitutes themselves, for various prices. But it is also a key to understanding the Wlm, suggesting that we ought to interpret it sociologically—not as most reviewers insisted on doing, psychologically. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times tells us that Kubrick “never paid much attention to the psychology of characters, much less relationships between men and women,” and in fact “spent his career ignoring (or avoiding) the inner lives of people, their private dreams and frustrations.”1 Unable to imagine what other subjects there could be, she, like so many critics before her, writes him oV as obsessed with mere technique. She is, Wrst of all, wrong; Kubrick examines his characters’ inner lives through imagery, not dialogue; as he said, “scenes of people talking about themselves are often very dull.”2 (In fact, it could be argued that most of this Wlm takes place inside Bill Harford’s head.) Secondly, and more importantly , she misses the point: Kubrick’s Wlms are never only about individuals (and sometimes, as in the case of 2001, they hardly contain any); they are always about Mankind, about human history and civilization. Even The Shining, until now the director’s most intimate family drama, is not just about a family, as Bill Blakemore showed...

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