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Stanley Kubrick's last film Eyes Wide
Shut and HBO's first 12 episodes of Sex and the City have
much in common. Both are derived from steamy works of fiction
— Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle and Candace Bushnell's
Sex in the City. Both are set in the same town — contemporary
New York City. Both are picaresque adventures in kinky sex.
Both make a point of differentiating female from male erotic
fantasies. And both, ultimately, are about the same problem:
alienation in a urban universe of promiscuous strangers.
Despite such similarities, they treat this subject quite
differently.
Kubrick is, of course, one of the acknowledged
innovative geniuses of the American cinema. He has also
had a long-standing interest in exploring the taboos and
boundaries of sexual liaisons. One of his earliest major
film, Lolita (1962), was based on Nabokov's novel about
a forbidden liaison between a college professor and a 12-year-old
girl. His adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (1971), from
an Anthony Burgess short story, contained such an explicit
rape that it was banned in England and received an "X" rating
in America. In fact, every one of his films since 1971,
with the exception of his Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket
(1987), contain female pubic nudity — a definite taboo line.
His concern with the sexual frontier, only adumbrated in
his earlier films, is given full vent in Eyes Wide Shut
(which contains such a profusion of public nudity that the
distributor, Warner Brothers, after Kubrick's death, digitally
masked much of it in order to get the minimum "R" rating
needed to release it widely). Eyes Wide Shut is about how
closely beneath the thin veneer of rationality wild sexual
fantasies lurk. A highly rational doctor (Tom Cruise) is
told by his wife (Nicole Kidman) that she entertains sexual
fantasies about making love to a stranger— fantasies that,
given the opportunity, she would act on even if it meant
destroying their civilized relationship. He finds, thereafter,
that he cannot control his own sexual fantasies. Although
the subsequent exploration of the male psyche is drawn out
in a visual trance that extends over two hours, this is
not only an extraordinarily controlled film, it is, in my
opinion, the most truly erotic film ever released by a Hollywood
studio.
This was not the view I had when I first
saw it in a theater. Whether it was the tenseness, impatience,
and disquiet of other members of the audience or whether
it was the baggage of expectation I brought with me, I found
EWS tedious, exhaustingly indulgent, and disappointing.
It was only later, when I saw the two-hour-39-minute film
on DVD in half-hour segments, that I realized how purposefully,
and at how many levels, Kubrick had designed and orchestrated
a dream experience that becomes increasingly mesmerizing
and traumatic. For example, Chapter 3 of the DVD presents
flashes, while Kidman is being waltzed around the room at
an ever-increasing tempo by a tall, erect Lothario, of flirtatious
encounters of other characters, so that the viewer is also
being spun in many directions and invited, like Kidman,
to skid out of control. The problem here is the viewer's
willingness to slip out of his comfortable mooring and go
on this organized flight from reality— a willingness that
is not aided by the distractions of a restive or snickering
theater audience. Eyes Wide Shut is thus one of those films
that works better in DVD than in movie theaters. (Warner
Brothers could not restore the deleted scenes to the DVD
since Blockbuster and other video chains have a policy against
carrying any movie for which an unrated as well as a rated
version exists.)
Sex and the City, which also can be seen
on DVD in half-hour episodes, is much more grounded in reality.
Four New York career girls—journalist, lawyer, public relations
promoter, and art dealer—go on and off sexual adventures
for fun and profit. Instead of concerning itself with the
effects of sexual drives on participants' rationality, this
movie examines how these drives can be used strategically
to achieve rational goals -- career advancement, networking
into elite establishments, accessing chic summer homes in
the Hamptons, pre-marital screening, and orgiastic satisfaction.
In one episode, the heroines acquire shoes by taking advantage
of the foot fetishism of a shoe salesman. And instead of
awakening the sexual imagination with enigmatic aperçus,
the scene anathematizes it with witty verbalization — women's
proverbial knowledge that makes it seem possible to control
sex. There is a good deal on the technology of sex—another
illusion of control—the vibrator in the episode, "The Rabbit
and the Turtle," for example, which the heroine uses to
replace men. In other episodes, the art of love is neatly
replaced by the science of measuring (especially penis dimensions)
and negotiating protocols for getting preferred sexual positions.
This is all done with great verve, lucidity, candor, and
wit, and even may prove helpful to singles in the city.
It is amusing because it is the very opposite of erotic
sex.
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