In the very first shot, Nicole Kidman, her back to the camera, slips out of a black dress and into her glamorous nudity. In the first major scene, at a Manhattan party, a chic hooker lies splayed and naked under the watchful care of Dr. Tom Cruise, who later inspects a topless blond in his examining room. When he's not staring at beautiful women, he's thinking about them. Especially his wife, who has confessed to an unconsummated sexual attraction to a Naval officer. Now the good doctor can't purge the image of his wife prodded to ecstasy by a hunky sailor.
Its merits and debits can be argued, but Eyes Wide Shut had the chance to do something important: put the sex back in American movies. Lately, there hasn't been nearly enough. In the U.S., most R-rated films (those under 17 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian) get that tag for lurid violence and language. If there's a bosom on display, it's usually either as a gag (the prosthetic dugs in There's Something About Mary) or a lure to humiliation (the strip-teasing coed who coaxes two premature ejaculations from a teenager in American Pie). Nothing erotic here--just the use of flesh as a tool of degradation. In the typical American movie, sex is violence.
Stanley Kubrick knew a few things: that sex, and the longing for it, can be brutal, but in subtler ways; that, no matter how active we are, we think about sex more than we engage in it; that sex is what happens not between our legs but between our ears. And, since nobody else was making films about this dreamy erotic impulse, he did.
That made the release of Kubrick's final film an important test case. It raised early hopes that the phrase "adult entertainment" could be rescued from the porno industry and refer, as it once did, to stories about grownups for grownups. The benighted Hollywood rating system had already flunked the test by demanding changes in a few mild scenes during a very stately orgy. Now it was the American audience's turn. Could moviegoers be enticed and enlightened by the glow of erotic intensity? Would they sit still for a slowly unfolding tale of would-be passion?
This is not a parochial matter. Hollywood makes the movies the world sees. If Eyes Wide Shut cashed in at the domestic box office, the moguls--born followers and trend groupies all--would make more films, perhaps better, hotter, deeper ones, about two things a lot of people still do: have sex and get disturbed about it.
But first, American audiences have to grow up. They must not be embarrassed by, and thus dismissive of, the sexual impulse when it's shown on the big screen. That seriousness is hard to find, now that American moviegoing is essentially an infantile experience. We convene in a big, dark room and laugh at what shocks us. Ooh, look! that truck/guy/world just blew up! Yaaay! To expect people keyed to the juice of cartoonish carnage to get a thrill or shiver from a couple of actors in an intimate embrace is like asking a kid to give up his Pokemon for a volume of love sonnets. No wonder that, in the U.S., the consumption of movie eroticism has become solitary. Porn theaters have given way to triple-X videos, lap dancing to laptops.
But sex is too important to be left to the sex-film industry. Lovemaking and its attendant anxieties constitute a powerful experience, the most convulsive emotional and physical drama in most people's lives. And it warrants as much artful attention from our top film auteurs as space operas or teen revenge fantasies.