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Contextual Psychoanalytic Readings of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut

Introduction

“Despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, I have not been able to answer... the great question that has never been answered: what does a woman want?”

Psychoanalysis has been used as a prevailing interpretative tool in film analysis for a long time, especially within feminism. The nearly simultaneous creation of psychoanalysis and cinema in fin-de-siecle Europe has been frequently noted; likewise, the nearly concurrent migration of both institutions across the Atlantic, where both became firmly embedded in the American popular imagination within a few decades. Freud, however, did not reciprocate Hollywood's captivation with his undertaking. He utterly scorned the cinematic representation of psychoanalysis. Despite the abundant film masterpieces produced by the time of his death in 1939, he never deemed a single picture worthy of the "applied analysis" he practiced upon the verbal and other visual arts. Nevertheless, feminists have successfully used psychoanalysis as a tool for disclosing hidden structures of the workings of patriarchy within the film.

Laura Mulvey, and other most important feminist film scholars (Linda Williams, Teresa de Lauretis, Kaja Silverman etc.), rightly suggest that psychoanalysis should be used as a political weapon in order to show how patriarchy influences film form, which is, as a result, dependant on the logic of castrated woman. For a masculinist and phallocentric world order needs to be defined against a woman as its counter part and an intrinsic enemy (usually represented as a castration treat). This kind of Hegelian Master/Slave dialectics or in Beauvoirian terms, the causal relationship between the One and the Other, has been successfully dealt with by feminist psychoanalytic film readings. While many agree that psychoanalytic approach has achieved a great deal in uncovering deep-seated misogyny in film as an artistic genre, other authors believe that such theoretical framework has significant drawbacks and constrictions, which hinder film interpretations. For instance, Cynthia A. Freeland explains that psychoanalytic interpretative paradigms such as the castration threat or the dichotomous male and female gaze are essentially weak, reductive and questionable. She discusses new modes of feminist thinking about films, which include broader evaluation of film’s gender ideologies within the particular contextual framework. Both of the proposed views have a number of mutually excluding paradigms but, on the other hand, have important points of junction, which can be utilized for a simultaneous and more comprehensive feminist interpretation of films.

My paper utilizes the above-mentioned lines of inquiry and develops an interpretation of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which combines both approaches. The reason I have chosen illustrative scenes from Eyes Wide Shut is that it is an exquisite example of a multi-layered work that consists of at least two prominent aspects, which form two simultaneous levels of possible interpretations, namely, a psychological and a sociological one. Paper concentrates on psychological elements of the film while bringing them together with various other features like mise-en-scene, cinematography and sound, which than results in disclosure of a broader socio-cultural critique that Eyes Wide Shut offers. Along with this, I show how Eyes Wide Shut itself is raising questions about traditional relations of gender dominance by empowering female characters. Utilization of the main psychoanalytical paradigms (castration fear, narcissism, primal scene and voyeurism) show how female protagonists represent a powerful drive of the film’s narrative and how they, in correlation with other elements of film’s structure, pose a challenge to “normal” formation of gender stereotypes.

The main questions that this paper tackles by means of psychoanalytical and contextual readings are: What is the role of the woman as the castration threat? How does jealousy turn into revenge? How are female protagonists represented? The paper argues that Eyes Wide Shut contains elements that can be successfully read by implementing psychoanalysis but that the undermining of the wider social critique would be a significant oversight. I prove that combining psychoanalysis with other elements of the film is both possible and very much needed, especially when we have a Kubricks’s masterpiece before us. Eyes Wide Shut is a complex and difficult piece of art to analyze in its entirety without omitting elements that could be rendered as equally important. Similarly, feminist psychoanalytic theory is a field of thought that can not be easily summarized in any overview that pertains to be comprehensive. Due to the modest scope of this paper, I leave some of the important questions unanswered, some of the issues unattained and some of the statements superficial, while hoping that it will not hinder the overall goal of this paper to a significant extent. The first chapter gives an overview of the main psychoanalytical paradigms, which I use in interpreting Eyes Wide Shut. The second chapter introduces some of the critiques while proposing a new framework that includes both psychoanalytical and sociological readings that draw its conclusions from the postmodern critique of modernity and contemporary society. The third chapter explores two prominent scenes (the scene in the bedroom and the orgy scene) in Eyes Wide Shut that serve as an illustration for the theoretical frameworks presented in the first chapter. I conclude by reassessing the gains of psychoanalytic investigations alone and further advantages that come up when psychoanalysis is conjoined by socio-cultural aspects.

Chapter I

Psychoanalysis and Film: Scopophilic Fetishism, Voyeurism, Castration Threat, Desire and the Female Voice

      Psychoanalysis dominated film theory for generations, variably conflated with semiotics, Marxism, feminism, deconstructionism, and so forth. Feminism was particularly interested in using psychoanalytical paradigms in fighting against patriarchy and its stereotypical cinematic representations that reinforce subordination and inferiority of women. For a long time psychoanalysis has been used to assert that women’s destiny is predetermined, that she is by nature passive, subordinate, and that, consequently, nothing can be done to change this. Feminists have decided to fight back against this essentialism, by turning back the double sword of psychoanalysis against the patriarchy. They have managed to unveil and challenge the basic presumptions that underlie women’s oppression and by doing that they opened up new spaces for change and different interpretations. It enabled utilization of those very same paradigms that feminism brought under question, as a subversive weapon that might change the “normal” workings of the unconscious. Eyes Wide Shut is one of the films that play with the unconscious and offer a psychoanalytic reading in a different guise. Before illustrating how Kubrick successfully addresses this issue, I present an overview of some of the basic psychoanalytic concepts in feminist interpretation that I utilize in the third chapter of this paper.

Dominant cinema does not leave much space for varying representations of females. According to the psychoanalytic theory, women are mostly perceived as a symbol of castration threat and a lack of the phallus. This threat leads to two main reactions that help male protagonists and viewers overcome the threat, namely, fetishistic scopophilia, on the one hand and voyeurism, on the other. The first path transforms a woman into a beautiful object that projects satisfaction per se, while the second solution involves sadism and punishment through control. Laura Mulvey suggests that the image of castrated woman gives order and meaning to the world, it serves as a forming factor of the patriarchal unconscious. Mulvey’s biggest concern is the passivity of the females as a bearer of the male look and how such mechanisms are materialized through subtle dominant patterns of film structure. Many of the prominent authors that investigate similar issues continue a line of inquiry previously developed by Laura Mulvey, either by offering certain alterations or by opposing it.

Linda Williams, following the steps of Mulvey, develops a psychoanalytic approach to the way female look (gaze) works within the horror narrativity, more specifically the occasions when female heroines are granted the power of the look, the look of sympathetic identification with the monster. She suggests that it is not only the sadistic voyeurism and fetishistic overvaluation that characterize the relationship between the male look and the female spectacle in the face of the castration threat. There is something more than punishment when the woman looks at the monster, a realization that they both pose a threat, which creates a potential power in the female look. This look has a subversive power to disturb the dominant patterns of patriarchal avoidance of the castration threat, and therefore offers a potentially important asset in feminist analysis.

Questions of desire are of great significance to feminist film theorizing. Feminists have criticized classical film narratives of being oriented towards male desire and pleasure, leaving the females a possibility of masochistic enjoyment, which corresponds to their passive and subordinate nature. Drawing on Mulvey’s discussion on desire, Teresa de Lauretis argues that the subject of classical narrative is masculine. Only the masculine hero is capable of progressing and changing, of satisfying his desires by crossing frontiers and penetrating into a different space. The space of his desire, says de Lauretis, is feminine: the figure of the woman is both the obstacle to and the object of the hero’s desire. A woman’s desire first demands identification with a feminine position defined by men; that is, a woman must become an object. She must either consent to femininity or be seduced/forced to accept femininity in order to fulfill her sexual function and her social tasks. A refusal to accept, participate in or surrender to masculine desire typically produces guilt, self-hatred, madness or death.

The importance of language and sound in psychoanalysis and consequently in feminist film interpretations is great. Ludwig Wittgenstein explained the significance of language by noting that psychoanalysis manages to produce consoling explanations, which are called insights, by means of persuasion and language. Psychoanalysis is in its essence a way of speaking, a way of utilizing language. Jacques Lacan similarly emphasizes the role of language and states, "…the technique (of psychoanalysis) cannot be comprehended, nor therefore correctly applied, if the underlying concepts are misconstrued. It is our task to demonstrate that these concepts assume their full sense only when oriented in the domain of Language, only when ordered in relation to the function of the Word." In the realm of feminist film analysis Kaja Silverman has paid due attention to the female voice in psychoanalysis and cinema, which was underrepresented in previous theoretical discussions. Female voice, just like the body, was held to normative representations and functions, in order to facilitate sexual difference and absorb the losses of males. Silverman argues that cinema organizes its vocal/auditory regime so as to protect the male subject against the unpleasurable. The voice “functions as a fetish in dominant cinema, filling in for and covering over what is unspeakable within male subjectivity.” 

Feminism has extracted useful psychoanalytical findings and implemented them in interpretations of the dominant pattern according to which films are structured. As a result, they made those mechanisms more noticeable, transparent obvious and opened for further analysis. In addition, such endeavors might provide us with the means of possible change and transformation, which might, consequently, function in favor of women. Due to the limited scope of this paper, I have outlined only some of the main issues that dominate feminist psychoanalytical discussions, which I illustrate in the third chapter by examples taken from Eyes Wide Shut. Since the aim of this writing is to combine psychoanalytical paradigms with an analysis of the broader context that the film offers, the next chapter will present a necessary overview of some of the most important critiques of psychoanalytical approach.

Chapter II

Psychoanalysis and Its Critiques: Interpreting with a “Passionate Detachment”

Before moving on to illustrate how women are represented through contextualized castration fear, primal scene and voyeurism in Eyes Wide Shut, an account of how different theorists argue against psychoanalysis must be made. This will than serve as grounds for an alternative way, a way of using psychoanalysis as a contextualized tool in film interpretation, by relying on basic presumptions of postmodernism. The first part of this chapter examines several possible critiques of psychoanalysis, while the second part recommends a synthesis of psychoanalytic approach with various other elements that can form a context within which film operates.

In comparison to the extensive research that has been devoted to implementing various psychoanalytic paradigms in film analysis, little effort has been made to question and reevaluate the credibility that psychoanalytic assumptions pertain to. Steven Jay Schneider illustrates this effectively, when he stresses that there is a lack of critical meta-theoretical writings about psychoanalysis and exposes such trends in scholarship as irresponsible. It is his contention that the plurality of particularized psychoanalytic interpretations does not necessarily result in its validity, because authors tend to disregard numerous strong critiques that even come from the psychoanalytic theory, not to speak about those that come from outside of it.1 Although Schneider’s findings are directed towards the genre of horror film, they can nevertheless be applicable to other genres without significant alterations. This leads to an inevitable essentialism and isolation that prevents psychoanalysis from developing stronger arguments and positioning itself in accordance to new contextual demands. There have been many scholars, especially within feminist film theory, that prioritized psychoanalytic paradigms like castration threat, Oedipus complex and scopophilia in order to show to what extent patriarchy codes women as a spectacle, in other words, to fulfill their primary political and theoretical aims. Consequently, they left some other important questions unanswered.

In deed, as we have already seen in the first chapter, authors like Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Lauretis and Linda Williams have posed brave and pioneering challenges to the way patriarchy reproduces itself in the cinema. However, they failed to question their own theoretical tools and bring other possible and useful aspects of film analysis to the forefront. Cynthia A. Freeland gives a straightforward account against psychoanalytic analysis and argues that feminists use this theory because either they are not aware of the existing forceful philosophical critiques or that they simply do not care. They even ignore different fractions within the psychoanalysis (Jung, Reich, Horney etc.) which might be more adequate for a specific occasion. The main aspects that such interpretations lack are the sense of historicity, socio-political context and elements of narrativity and plot, without which an interpretation loses a lot of its authenticity.2 Psychoanalysis is a problematic theory in a sense that the only thing it offers is a rather dogmatic worldview, which is always in a great difficulty when it needs to prove its validity. Therefore, a logical question arises. Should we believe such interpretations?

Ludwig Wittgenstein offered an answer in various instances when he talked about psychoanalysis. He convincingly explained that psychoanalysis is a way of thinking, a way of speaking and a powerful mythology. Although he respected Freud’s unique and innovative explorations into the human psyche, he deeply believed that it has nothing to do with the truth but with mythology. Wittgenstein argued against Freud, that psychoanalysis is far from being a science and therefore utterly unreliable. On the other hand, he admitted that psychoanalytic theory offers an explanation of things that lie beyond the scope of scientific exploration. It offers an explanation not a solution.3 If we try to translate this to film analysis it would mean that psychoanalysis if used as a feminist tool against patriarchy, is not able to do much more than to provide an explanation or a mere description, without any real power to change things.

This undermines Mulvey’s argument from the very beginning of this text, that psychoanalysis should be used as a political weapon against patriarchy. For what is politics without a direct possibility of action? Perhaps, Mulvey realized this difficulty in her subsequent writings, when she considered other elements besides psychoanalysis that can influence film readings. She admits, “…the twentieth century saw a plethora of change across many social, economic, technological and cultural spheres. Out of this new conjuncture, cultural, theoretical and critical priorities have changed and such a radically altered context should necessarily affect film theory.” Therefore, many important aspects that form the context should be equally applied. This brings us to the concluding issue of combining psychoanalytical finding with the demands of the postmodern world we live in.

The framework out of which this paper generates its inspiration for proposing a project of contextualizing psychoanalysis is postmodernism. The postmodern outlook in its most general sense speaks for a multiplicity of approaches, which cannot be linked together in a grand narrative or an overarching theory. It is unsettling and frightening and threatens to undermine the solidity of any rule-governed enterprise, such as psychoanalysis. This is perhaps why psychoanalytic theoreticians have been reluctant to take a step back and with a critical distance reevaluate their standpoints. Making postmodernism seem scary is an unfair and naive comprehension, which is best illustrated by Lyotard's statement that each self lives in a fabric of relations that is more complex and mobile than ever. Seeing things in this sense of its complexity allows us to recognize that such complex and open systems are neither predictable nor determined. In brief, the postmodern approach moves from the general theory or metanarrative, which aims to explain everything, to particular ones that depend upon the set of local conditions, i.e., the context. Consequently, we should move away from fixed narratives and slide into an adventure of new and jet unexplored possibilities of interpretations, truths and meanings, but still remain within basic psychoanalytic concepts that feminism makes use of. In the next chapter I examine illustrations of how Kubrick plays with psychoanalysis, postmodernism and changing political, economic and cultural conditions of fin-de-siecle world.

Chapter III

Eyes Wide Shut - Selected Illustrations

Eyes Wide Shut is Stanley Kubrick’s last and perhaps most complex work. This film genuinely represents a synthesis of everything he has ever done, a synthesis of the civilization critique (Dr Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange etc.) with a subtle exploration of psychological dramas of contemporary human kind. A lot was expected from this film, as it was intensely advertised as the sexiest film ever to be made. That this is not so, is clear from the very first scene were we see Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) taking her clothes off and standing naked in front of us for a moment, while the Waltz #2 from Jazz Suite by Dmitri Shostakovich highlights the situation, when suddenly the screen goes black and the main title appears. It is as if to say, “Ok, you’ve seen her- now, lets move on to something more serious!” This scene gives us a clear idea of what exactly to expect from this masterpiece. Kubrick is obviously playing with traditional cinematic gaze and deliberately interrupts the voyeuristic pleasure. Similarly, throughout the film he plays with other various deep-seated patterns of dominant cinema, and therefore challenges their authority and authenticity.

Eyes Wide Shut is based on Traumnovelle, a book by Arthur Schnitzler. This Austrian writer was contemporary with Freud and quite admired by him. Traumnovelle (also known as Dream Novel/Story in English) and Eyes Wide Shut, have an ambiguous and dreamlike structure where reality and dreams are mixed and confusing with unclear boundaries. Characters (and readers) are quite often unable to know if what happened was real or imaginary. Kubrick gives a post-modernistic tone to the film, by intersecting reality and fantasy, the Truth and the Truths, fixed and fragmented (fluid) identities. The entire work was filmed on the set, in the artificial New York, and the choice of a real married couple to play an invented married couple, are meant to blur the distinction between what is real and what is not, between the film and extra-filmic reality.   Therefore, following the suggestion given by the authors themselves through the titles and style of the book and the film, I make an analytical reading of the film as if it was a dream with a "manifest content" – which would be the plot – and a "latent content" – which will be the result of its interpretation. Kubrick has successfully transferred the social situation of fin-de-siecle Vienna to the fin-de-siecle New York, with adaptations that mark a harsh critique of modernity. He left us numerous clues, which are supposed to prevent us from interpreting the film exclusively through psychological content or only through sociological elements. Probably the most apparent example of this is the scene in the prostitute’s apartment where we can see two books on the table, one is entitled Introducing Sociology and the other Shadows of the Mirror, which direct us to two different but interrelated paths of interpretation. Consequently, apart from a psychoanalytical exploration, I attempt to investigate elements that point to a wider cultural and sociological context. In the first part of the chapter, I analyze the crucial scene when Alice admits to having sexual desires towards other men, which sets the whole story going. Second part is looking into the famous orgy scene, which, in many respects represents a culmination of Bill Harford’s (Tom Cruise) agony and general societal hypocrisy.

a) Bedroom Confession and the Fear of Castration

Kubrick introduces Bill and Alice as a happily married couple. They have been married for eight years; they have a beautiful daughter, Helena. They are beautiful themselves as well. Beautiful and rich. They live in a huge, high-quality designed apartment with many paintings, which attracts our attention, which are introduced through numerous establishing shots. Kubrick brings to the audience an atmosphere of easiness, of comfort, and of satisfaction, of happiness. Lighting and colors are used to emphasize homey warmth (deep red and beige) and to anticipate mystical feelings that are about to set off (dark blue). It is obvious, though, that color is presented as more significant then light. The importance of color over light is made possible by Kubrick's refusal to use studio lighting in a film shot almost entirely on a studio set. Instead of the usual studio lighting, he used the available light sources visible in the shot, such as lamps, Christmas tree lights and so forth. When this was not adequate, he used Chinese paper ball lamps to softly brighten the scene. We can observe an endless number of lamps and Christmas decorations throughout the film, in almost every shot. This creates an overall sense of gloominess, lugubriousness, darkness and mystery. The color was enhanced in an unusual manner in the lab where the film stock was “force-developed by two stops” in processing to bring out the intensity of color. This is a new kind of cinematic color invented by Kubrick, working against the standardized norms of film lighting and processing.

Choice and quality of colors along with the relaxing and cheerful classical type music (Waltz #2 from Jazz Suite by Dmitri Shostakovich) that follows the protagonist’s every move, suggest that they are a couple in a manner that they do not even have to think about it. It goes without saying. The way that they move in the first few shots is smooth, as though they are skating, not walking. At times, the sound of the background non-diegetic music is louder then the dialogs, revealing contrapuntal and didactic (distanced and ironic) position what tells us that what they are saying is not as important as the rhythm and routine with which they do it. The camera faithfully follows their every movement alternating between medium long shots and close ups, taken from an angle that would correspond to an eye level. This can suggest that we should not take notice of the camera, that we are invited to participate in protagonist’s harmonious life, of which they are proud of. It is as if there are no obstacles for them at all. No resistance at all. Everything floats. They float. They cover distances (from one room to another, from the toilet to the room, and both together to the door of their apartment) with a kind of lightness, but at the same time with a kind of speed, which is at times highlighted by faster pace of background music. They take care of everyday chores and trivial conversations with ease, taking each other for granted. Everything around them is their creation, the effect of how they move. We could say that they are the creators of their lives. They are the creators of their marriage, of their love, of their happiness. They own, they possess everything around them, even each other. They are certain and secure. However, not for long.

After finishing their daily duties, a couple decides to smoke pot and relax in their bedroom. Bill begins a bit of foreplay while Alice starts questioning him about the party last night. She gets querulous and begins to talk about last summer, which leads to the disclosure of her desire for a total stranger, to Bill's stupefaction. Bill wants to have sex, while Alice wants to unravel time, “last night...last summer” and their whole past collapses into the present. She discloses her desires towards a naval officer for whom she was prepared to leave her whole life behind, including Bill and her daughter. While arguing with Bill, Alice stands framed in the bathroom doorstep. The blue that fills the bathroom quite arbitrarily, behaves as if it were a gas because it does not obey gravity, seems to go any-which-way just like Alice's speech at moments heightened by champagne, dope or the memory of a desire. In her speech, she stretches syllables and vowels to a point where their semantic values are displaced by musical values. The consequent unpredictability of what she will say, of how her words will turn out, creates a correspondence between her speech and this blue. In this scene Alice, with Van Gogh's and Christianne's (Kubrick’s wife painted most of the paintings on the walls herself) mediation, enables Kubrick to draw out the power of color and voice as a transformative force. Through mise-en-scene and sound, female protagonist’s empowerment is emphasized.

The voice of Alice, poses a direct threat to Bill. She destroys everything he was once sure of. She too has sexual desires even though she does not have a penis and even though she is a mother and therefore supposed to be modest and chaste. The uncanny sensation is present throughout this scene. Alice asks Bill: “…millions of years of evolution. Right? Right? Men have to stick it every place they can, but for women, for women it is just about security and commitment… and whatever the fucking else..? … If you men only knew!!?” Her confession seems to answer the question and prove that- yes, women do same things! This leaves Bill sitting on the bed frozen in a catatonic stare. The psychoanalytic threat of the power-of-difference, turns into a threat of the power-of-sameness, in other words Bill’s fear of castration begins to immerge. His wife turns out to be a complete stranger. Her power over him is so strong that she enjoys this with a satisfying smile on her face, while observing her husband’s agony. Kubrick left both of the protagonists in their underwear to make them equally de/sexualized, while directing our attention to other more important things that are going on between them. Kubrick is defending the feminine sexuality. While confessing her fantasy, the doctor’s wife claims equal rights regarding the sexuality. This is what unbalances him, pushing him towards a sexual reassurance in further unusual situations. In a way, this "confession" has a clear connotation of a jealous aggressive revenge, a retaliation because the wife was feeling betrayed at the party. Thus, the wife’s "confession" is totally successful in achieving its vengeful objectives, since it causes a huge narcissistic wound in her husband, along with the fear of castration, which will further result in an attempt to punish her by revengeful adultery.

b) The Orgy Scene as the Primal Scene

His narcissistic wound and fear of castration leads to an immediate consequence, more evident and superficial. He goes out and looks for revenge. If the wife can betray, he feels authorized to do the same. However, I believe the narcissistic wound has consequences of a deeper nature beyond a simple wish for revenge. When listening to his wife’s "confession", the husband is involved by an "uncanny" feeling, of the "unheimiche". He does not recognize his wife in that woman who is telling him that. His wife, who used to be so familiar to him, looks like a stranger, another woman, a woman never seen before. This deep "uncanny" feeling, this unchaining of the experience of something strangely familiar, something familiar and strange, is a sensation that goes along - as Freud says – the emerging of an unconscious wish, of the repressed fantasy. It appears when something that should remain hidden comes to light. It is the return of what has been repressed, aroused by the wife’s talk; it is the childhood experiences connected to his own mother, the painful discovery that the mother had sexual wishes from which he was excluded. Being aware of the wife’s erotic fantasies, which make him jealous and feeling excluded, the husband regresses, recalling in that very moment painful experiences from the past, related to his infant sexuality and to the discovery of his mother’s , his parents’, the adults’ sexuality from which he was irrevocably excluded. This hypothesis allows the understanding of the whole nightly dreamlike sequence that follows the character’s action – the meeting with the patient’s daughter, with the prostitute, and with the woman he encounters at the mystical orgy. Every woman he meets has red hair, pale face, slender body, all of which reminds us of Alice/mother.

Especially important is his visit to the masked ball, within the secret society, a sequence that happens inside an atmosphere totally marked by the "uncanny". Like the husband inadvertently realizes the wife’s sexual wishes, he also inadvertently discovers that there is a secret society where high-powered men have their sexual practices. He is obsessed with the image of the wife-mother having sexual intercourse, he is obsessed with the discovery of the secret society. He is like the child who finds out that the parents have a sexual life, that all adults have a sexual life. In this regard, there is in fact a sexual "secret society", which he did not know and was excluded from; a situation common to all children. From this view, we can understand that the scene of the ritual orgy in the secret society is a dreamlike representation of the primary scene, of the parents’ copulation, subject to a great voyeuristic appeal. The husband tries to participate in the primary scene but is stopped, recognized and expelled. His expelling from the orgy where all the "great men" are – meaning "the parents" and "the adults" – is a repetition of the painful castration, of the necessary exclusion from the parental coitus. The several episodes that circumscribe the orgy and the secret society, which involve aggression, violence, attacks, and murders are representations of the uncanny atmosphere, mixed with sexuality and violence what is proper of children’s versions of the primary scene, of the most archaic Oedipus fantasies. Alice’s confession, and the castration threat she represents, makes him search for the way to overcome this fear by engaging in fetishistic scopophilia and voyeurism in the orgy scene, but this only leads to further frustration without a positive outcome.

As said before, considering this plot as the "manifest content", we notice at once the extraordinary importance of sexuality. It is the sexuality that moves the whole plot; it is what arouses the couple’s crisis, which, in its turn, leads to the central and shocking disclosure of a secret society frequented by the high ranks of the power, where ritualistic orgies are carried out. This leads us to the sociological interpretation of the film. The existence of this secret society is the main evidence of the perversion and corruption of the high-powered man, those who should be the guardians of society’s morality and ethics. This is the moment when Kubrick discloses contemporary society as evil and oppressed with money and consumerism. Bill's nocturnal journey into illicit sexuality is, more significantly, a journey into invisible strata of wealth. Money (as phallus) is the subtext of sex from the very first temptation of Bill’s. When Bill passes through the ornate portal past golden-masked doorman, we should know that we are entering the realm of myth and nightmare. This sequence is the clearest condemnation, in archetypal dream-imagery, of elite society as corrupt, exploitative, and depraved, what they used to call, in a simpler time, evil. The pre-orgy rites are overtly Satanic, a Black Mass complete with a high priest gowned in crimson, droning organ, and backward-masked lyrics. We can observe the opulent surroundings (including more appropriated historical styles, from Moorish to medieval to French imperial, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, tapestries, oil portraits of stern patriarchs), the mannered, leaden dialogue and the camera afloat like the disembodied point-of-view in a dream. A ballroom full of naked, masked couples dancing to "Strangers in the Night", show us just how subversive Kubrick pertains to be.

He uses female bodies as another symbol of societal and cultural deterioration. In Eyes Wide Shut, there are 12 perfect female nudes and only one naked woman (Alice). The dozen nudes are interchangeable commodities both because they are prostitutes and because they are of an identical body type rendered anonymous by being masked in the high-class orgy. Their speech, gestures and movements, their breasts, hips and legs, are all standardized. The scene makes the metaphor of sexual "objectification" of women visually literal. The ritual prostitutes, who are themselves objects purchased for sexual use, wear masks that make them identical and interchangeable. Their nude bodies are unnaturally perfect, smooth and immaculate as mannequins, photographed with the cold Kubrickian detachment that desaturates them of any eroticism. The sex we see consists of static tableaus of spectators (some of them digitally generated) posed around mechanically rutting participants. Again, Kubrick is on the side of females, by disclosing the rotten manner with which contemporary society oppresses and uses women as objects and mere commodities.

The expected eroticism of the bodies is transposed into the cinematic image. The very substance of Kubrick's film is erotic, while, despite their promise of happiness, the perfect nudes remain disenchanted commodities, plastic bodies, molded to the desire of late twentieth century mediatized beauty. It is not aimlessly that the ritual itself and the high officers of the orgy have some resemblance to the rites and symbols of the high clerical officers of the Catholic Church. The masked ball is a sign of the general hypocrisy. There is, in fact, a chain of allusions to the Judeo-Christian fall-and-redemption myth throughout the film; Alice's dream about being "naked and ashamed," and fucking "in a beautiful garden"; the Harford’s Edenic apartment crammed with plants and paintings of gardens; the picture of an apple with a single vaginal slice cut from it on the wall of Domino's (the prostitute) kitchen; the self-sacrificial ritual at the orgy. In fact, these Biblical allusions only serve to show us how bankrupt the Christian ethic is in America at the turn of the millennium, how completely it has been diminished and undermined by the culture of commerce. In other words, just business. The Harfords themselves don't really see their surrounding mise-en-scene, their wealth, their art, the ubiquitous Christmas glitz. They're preoccupied instead with their own interior lives, the petty lusts and jealousies, which they think of as distinct from their exterior world. But again and again Kubrick visually links his characters to their settings, indicting them as part of the rarefied world in which they live and move. At the end, the husband being disorganized and unbalanced, the woman reveals herself as the strong element of the couple. It is she who supports him by saying that they should consider themselves lucky for having survived their own sexual fantasies. By acting this way, she tries to put into their minds and into their lives what had been denied, repressed or projected so far.

    Conclusion

“For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women: and it is not new. Enough ink has been spilled in the quarreling over feminism, now practically over, and perhaps we should say no more about it. “ 

No, absolutely not!!! Years have passed since Simone de Beauvoir wrote this, but it sometimes seems that we are at the very beginning of our path. As we solve old problems new ones emerge, for society can be characterized by its plasticity and feminism must efficiently adapt to rapidly changing conditions. Psychoanalysis has been a crucial framework for deconstructing the hidden patterns of patriarchal functioning within the film art. As I have demonstrated authors have had differing and usually opposing views on what psychoanalysis can achieve and what are its limits. Both streams of thought are right and wrong at the same time. On the one hand, they were wrong for asserting that only their opinions are possible and viable, while they excluded other possibilities, but on the other hand, they were both useful in pointing to particular parts of the problems. They both very much deserved a recognized place within the overall puzzle that they are trying to solve. This paper offers a modest contribution to an eventual resolution of the above disputes. In the first stage I introduced both the most prominent paradigms in feminist psychoanalysis and some of its existing critiques. In the third part I combined psychoanalytical reading of scenes from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut with the broader socio-cultural context that this film offers. I show how Eyes Wide Shut itself is raising questions about traditional relations of gender dominance by empowering female characters, and how it marvelously casts a shadow of doubt on the very foundations of this society . It is my contention that such contextualiztions can be very useful in feminist rethinkings of the film texts, because they suggest and disclose patriarchal aspects that could otherwise go unnoticed, especially in today’s post-modern settings. I show that the emphasis should be on the diversity of interpretational paths, for only by doing this we can shed light on differences and their representation within films.

Films as artifacts have always used unique manners of depicting and challenging conditions we live in, either by critiquing the existing realities or by creating new ones. As we have seen, films themselves, on the one hand, are tools for posing important questions and making this world a better place, but on the other hand they can also be used for perpetuating the status quo, preventing the possibility of a different view. Feminists have uncovered such mechanisms and tried to develop a theoretical framework for wider social, cultural and political change. Psychoanalysis is one of the strategic weapons for feminist struggle against oppression and misrepresentation. Change is in the very heart of feminism and therefore in feminist interpretations of psychoanalysis as well. If its goal is to erase negative essentialisms and stereotypical images of women in the cinema, it must also take care of similar essentialisms within its basic presumptions. A reform of feminist psychoanalysis is needed in order for it to be able to successfully deal with new and ever changing circumstances of the contemporary world. Making psychoanalysis more permissible and flexible will benefit both feminists and film as an art form.

Notes

Introduction

Sigmund Freud, Autobiography and New Introductory Lectures, (Belgrade: Matica Srpska, 1981), p 219, my translation.
2 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Visual and Other Pleasures, (London: Macmillan Press, 1989) p. 14-15.
3 For a detailed discussion of the Master/Slave and the One/Other dialectics see G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) and Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1989)
4 Interesting arguments against psychoanalytical film analysis are presented in the Edward Buscombe’s, Christine Gledhill’s, Alan Lovell’s and Christopher Williams’, “Psychoanalysis and Film” in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, (London: Rutledge, 1992) p. 35-47.
5 Cynthia A. Freeland, “Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films” in David Bordwell and Noel Carroll Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: The University of Minnesota Press, 1996). p. 205.

Chapter I

 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Visual and Other Pleasures, (London: Macmillan Press, 1989) p. 14-15.
 Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks”, in The Dread of Difference. Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) p. 15-34.
 Teresa de Luretis, “Desire in Narrative”, in Alice doesn’t. Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, (London: Macmillan Press, 1984) p. 103-57.
 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett. Compiled from notes taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees and James Taylor (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1966) p. 41.
 Jacques Lacan, "The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis," in Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 8.
 Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988) p. 38.

Chapter II

1 Steven Jay Schneider, Introduction- Psychoanalysis in/and/of the Horror film, excerpt from the Introduction to Freud’s Worst Nightmares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), available on http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/15/horror_psych.html (Last accessed December 11, 2004).
2 Cynthia A. Freeland, “Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films” in David Bordwell and Noel Carroll Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: The University of Minnesota Press, 1996). p. 199.
3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett. Compiled from notes taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees and James Taylor (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1966) p.44
 Laura Mulvey, “Looking at the Past from the Present: Rethinking Feminist Film Theory of the 1970s”, an unpublished article
 Jean –Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Theory and History of Literature, vol.10, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) p. 15

Chapter III

 Arthur Schnitzler, Dream Story, (London: Penguin Books, 1999)

Conclusion

 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. xxxiii

References

Buscombe, E. Gledhill, C. Lovell, A. and Williams, C. “Psychoanalysis and Film” in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, (London: Rutledge, 1992)

de Beauvoir, S, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1989)

de Luretis, T. “Desire in Narrative”, in Alice doesn’t. Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, (London: Macmillan Press, 1984)

Freud, S. Autobiography and New Introductory Lectures, (Belgrade: Matica Srpska, 1981) my translation.

Freud, S. Interpretation of Dreams, edited by Strachey, J and Freud, A. (New York: Simone & Schuster, 1997)

Freeland, A. C. “Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films” in Bordwell D.and Carroll, N. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: The University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979)

Lacan, J. "The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis," in Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968).

Lyotard, J. F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Theory and History of Literature, vol.10, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)

Mitchell, J. Psychoanalysis and Feminism, (London: Penguin Books, 1990).

Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Visual and Other Pleasures, (London: Macmillan Press, 1989)

Mulvey, L. “Looking at the Past from the Present: Rethinking Feminist Film Theory of the 1970s”, an unpublished article

Silverman, K. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988)

Schneider, S. J. Introduction- Psychoanalysis in/and/of the Horror film, excerpt from the Introduction to Freud’s Worst Nightmares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), available on http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/15/horror_psych.html (Last accessed December 11, 2004).

Williams, L. “When the Woman Looks”, in The Dread of Difference. Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996)

Wittgenstein, L. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Barrett. C. Compiled from notes taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees and James Taylor (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1966)

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