Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Health & Body

Up in the air
Can a 20-minute oxygen session counteract the effects of living in L.A.?
By Debra Ollivier
[07/23/99]

Risky business
Albert Einstein and Evel Knievel were both looking for the same high.
By Michael Alvear
[07/22/99]

Urge
Episode 4: Busty for an Oriental
Over the years my looks haven't changed, but the world has.
By Tracy Quan
[07/22/99]

Sharing your life
Why do people favor organ donation but balk at the final OK?
By Mike Perry
[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]

Complete archives for Health & Body

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

And this is neat. At the simplest level, it indulges a question perpetually fascinating to us non-Hollywooders: What's the deal with acted sex? We wonder if we could maintain professionalism, if fantasy and reality ever get confused for the Sharon Stones and the Michael Douglases of the world. Kubrick couches the question in the casting of Cruise as a doctor. The doctor, Mrs. Harford says, puts his hands on beautiful women's breasts. The breasts, the doctor says, are just part of the job.

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 ]

Folding our pre-movie curiosity about the famous couple into the film's frame, Kubrick confuses our viewing. The protagonists are sometimes characters, sometimes real people. We can imagine the making of the movie as crystallization of the self-consciousness that must pervade Kidman's and Cruise's public sexualities.

Summoning the archetypal moral divide between uptown and downtown, Kubrick keeps Dr. Harford's erotic inferno below 14th Street. But Kubrick picks the dorkiest part of Greenwich Village. Dr. Harford's wanderings about the Village play as a stock descent into depravity. Set in the Village's most commercialized and self-conscious streets -- these blocks are no longer bohemia, but rather a re-created, retail fiction of it -- the scenes smack of depravity's representation. Even the prostitute is a conspicuous amalgam of all celluloid prostitutes: "Wanna have some fun?"

As a result, we aren't lost in depravity -- as in, say, "Taxi Driver" -- but instead we're lost in the fantasy of depravity. It's through this frame that we watch Cruise and Kidman fictionalize their nonfiction marriage. Representation itself becomes the film's subject matter.

In destabilizing our relationship to itself, "Eyes Wide Shut" goes far beyond such simplistic meta-media explorations as "The Truman Show" and "To Die For." And the sex within, like the movie itself, is something that knows it's being looked at. Each steamy scene bears the awareness that a camera has it pinned. While this could be said about any number of voyeur flicks, the difference is that we're looking and thinking, not just looking and getting turned on.

Not that there's anything wrong with being turned on, but nothing beats a little cerebral sex now and then.
salon.com | July 23, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon