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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Column
Y'all take care now
30,000 feet above Jackson, Miss., I came to believe it was time to start a novel.
By Anne Lamott
[07/22/99]

Gen X's change of head
To the women who came of age in the '60s, oral sex was an act of great intimacy. To their daughters, it's about as intimate as shaking hands.
By Shari Thurer
[07/21/99]

The modesty debate
Wendy Shalit: Stop pressuring young women to have sex!
Leora Tanenbaum: Every girl is a potential "slut."
By Lori Leibovich
[07/21/99]

Formula for disaster
Why do many doctors take a neutral or even pro-formula stance with their patients--despite evidence of the serious potential hazards of bottle-feeding?
By Katie Allison Granju
[07/20/99]

Son of hope
In a video aimed at turning young thugs into Christians, serial killer David Berkowitz confesses, "I was a real jerk."
By Cintra Wilson
[07/16/99]

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Kathryn: The hype is that this is Kubrick's last film. We've been waiting for it for 10 years.

Colin: I know it's Kubrick, but the media has totally oversold the movie, promising that this film cracks something open. I was waiting for that, in part because, after you saw it, you said that you felt like you were in another country. I didn't feel that -- not even close.

Kathryn: This film succeeds where few do; it creates the texture of a dream, a dream that doesn't feel like a movie dream, but a real dreamed dream. The only other movies that come to mind are Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad" and Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast." I think all three are films that when they're over, you feel as if you've woken up. You're disoriented, provoked.

Colin: Didn't happen for me.

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 ] Great bad sex Yes, "Eyes Wide Shut" is wooden and static. And wooden and static never looked so good. [ Health ]

Kathryn: But why were you disappointed? What did you want?

Colin: I wanted to be freaked out, like I was after I saw "Blue Velvet" or "Apocalypse Now" or "Last Tango in Paris" or "The Butcher Boy." I wanted to be broken and remade, and although I admired the film, I thought that the terms of its psychological investigation were rather shallow.

Kathryn: But the Tom Cruise character, Dr. William Harford, is broken and remade.

Colin: Yeah, he has his Boy Scout cap knocked off.

Kathryn: Yeah, he does, he's a sexual naif initiated into a destructive and violent sexuality he hasn't perceived before.

Colin: But he never has sex! The closest he gets is a few leers at the two models at the party in the beginning of the movie. What he does find out is -- surprise, surprise -- that his wife has the occasional hots for some other guy. I don't think that's big-time news. Smart men assume that about women, just as all women assume that about men.

Kathryn: So, he's not smart -- he's not sophisticated, he's not even a genuinely sexual being yet. From the start his wife is a more complex, grown-up character than he is -- surprise, surprise.

Colin: Yeah, yeah.

Kathryn: It's her revelation of sexual fantasies that begins his inquiry into adult sexuality. By the end of the movie he's learned that sexual intimacy is filled with risk and danger -- the threat of death. I loved the fact that he never actually has sex, that a series of opportunities unfolds in an absurd and surreal way, and that each time, he's literally saved by a bell -- the alarm of his own consciousness goes off, just like in a dream. I didn't see it as a realistic narrative at all.

Colin: Alice, the Nicole Kidman character, is more complex. I also think Kidman acts circles around Cruise, but that's another issue. Anyway, yes, Harford is learning about adult sexuality, but I don't buy the starting point of his journey. Here he is a big-time Manhattan doctor with a busy practice, with a privileged vantage on the world, its sorrows and tragedies and inequities, its fears and appetites, and he seems wholly ignorant of the fact that his wife's sexuality does not end at the point where his dick begins. He's utterly failed to imagine her and --

Kathryn: Wait, why isn't it possible that his professional imperative to witness nakedness and decay is the very thing that necessitates the denial of that in his own life, his own psyche? He's a bland and emblematic figure -- he's far less interesting than all the characters with whom he interacts but I don't have a problem with that. It makes him more recognizably the passive dreamer, the man who is asleep and undergoing a transformation ... even Tom Cruise's looks, his predictable handsomeness, contributes to this.

Colin: Presumably you married a man who is awake and decayed -- sort of like a corpse who drank too much coffee. Anyway, I agree with what you're saying about Cruise, I just can't get excited about him. I mean, give me Nick Nolte in "Mulholland Falls" any day. You get Nick with Jennifer Connelly, the gravel voice, and the great fedora.

Next page | "Admittedly, I have a lot of dreams about menacing, unexplained rituals"