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Up in the air
Can a 20-minute oxygen session counteract the effects of living in L.A.?
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[07/21/99]

Soft-contact safety questions
A new study shows a higher risk of infection with soft contacts, especially if worn overnight.
By Dawn MacKeen
[07/19/99]

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As with the infinitely layered act of sex, the movie spirals inward in a labyrinth of levels. Also like sex, it's too rich and complicated to get to the bottom of. The only option is to enjoy the lateral navigations, the pleasure of complexity itself.

Also Today Philosophy of the bedroom Mary Gaitskill, Greil Marcus, David Gates, Lisa Zeidner and A.M. Homes weigh in on "Eyes Wide Shut." [ Arts & Entertainment ] Tom and Nicole and Colin and Kathryn "Eyes Wide Shut" provokes literary couple Colin and Kathryn Harrison to spar over marriage, passion, jealousy and the lure of dangerous sex in a vanilla world. [ Mothers Who Think ]

It took Kubrick two years to get flawlessly wooden performances out of his stars. Kidman and Cruise come off like Actors -- stilted, Hollywood, fake as plastic roses -- and keep us from losing ourselves in plot for any longer than a minute or two. Remember, we're acting, they remind us again and again. We remember, and it's the consequent remove that makes the movie's erotics as fascinating and unsexy as sex can ever be.

When photos of beautiful naked people pass through our art galleries, we don't get turned on. We look, then move to the next and look, then move to the next and look. This is a function of the museum -- a stadium for musing: Few institutions engender more self-consciousness. In a gallery, one's task is twofold: Experience the art, then experience yourself looking at the art. We don't interact privately or spontaneously with the exhibited works; our evaluation occurs within a clear and ordered relationship. With such explicit parameters, it's hard to get lost. Without getting lost, it's hard to get hot and heavy.

Such is the sex in "Eyes Wide Shut": We observe the flesh, but also, always, observe ourselves observing. The eerie woodenness of the performances has the effect of the theater lights having been left on -- there's no getting into a zone. Instead we watch perched between the fictive world, where Dr. and Mrs. Harford exist, and the real one, where Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are real people with real lives that we read about in real tabloids.

This detachment is most manifest in the movie's sex scenes. Gorgeous bodies press against each other, but in the most static interpretation of passion. Breasts look like Everybreast, the sex is explicit but choreographed, and nobody's eyes seem to mean it. It's like watching lousy theater: We can't immerse ourselves in the turns of Hamlet's soul, and are instead left with questions like "What on earth are these people doing?" By the end of the production, unable to get sucked in, we've mushroomed this question into a million others about the director, the actors and perhaps our own decision to spend a Saturday night among them.

While for some it's just this awkwardness that proves Kubrick himself has blundered, there are signs that Kubrick is channeling our intellectual meandering into a layered consideration of fantasy. Throughout the movie Dr. Harford indulges in the painful vision of his wife having sex with another man. The sex never happened -- it was just a fantasy of hers, uploaded into a fantasy of his -- but his jealousy lends the fictitious image clarity. The picture haunts him to the point of irrationality, and it's this irrationality that delivers him to the movie's famous orgy scene. So as the previews assure us, we have husband and wife, separately poking around the fringes of infidelity. But as Kidman points out, she pokes merely in dream, while he actually attends an orgy, actually visits a prostitute. A schism opens between fantasy and reality.

Then Kubrick draws a schism in the schism.

Next page | Mrs. Harford never got naked with another man -- but Mrs. Kidman did