Eyes Wide Shut and the Societal Masking of Desire

by Christopher Barr

 













Eyes Wide Shut is about the laws of nature conflicting with social laws in marriage, a film about a husband and wife being sexual beings in a seemingly conservative, binding agreement.  It’s absolutely beautifully shot, acted and directed, this film being Stanley Kubrick’s last masterpiece in a long line of ground breaking, challenging pieces, before his untimely, mysterious death.

The film starts with an exposed woman, Alice, getting ready for a Christmas party.  Her husband Bill looks for his wallet and enters the bathroom where Alice, exposed yet again, is sitting on the toilet peeing.  They go to Bill’s friend Victor’s party where they drink champagne and proceed to enjoy this illusion of sophistication, separated.  Alice dances with an older man aggressively flirting with her while Bill is with two young pretty girls who are throwing themselves at him.  These desires are both thinly veiled behind laughter, art and dance, not to mention lots of alcohol.  Bill is then pulled away from his potential ménage a trois to deal with a pressing medical matter upstairs.  A naked woman in a bathroom was on the verge of overdosing.  Bill lent his expertise and smoothed over the situation.  Alice reminds the groping older man that she is married.  At home Bill and Alice are naked and kissing, Alice looking at the both of them in the mirror, Alice’s looking glass. 

It is important to note that both husband and wife deflected the advancements of their respective flirty strangers.  They both played by society’s rules and didn’t give in, thus breaking the social bond they both agreed to.  We then see them the next day fulfilling all their domestic requirements, Bill goes to work as a Doctor performing routine medical checkups while Alice looks after their little girl, both strolling through the banality of modern daily life.

 

At Victor’s party it was alcohol that allowed them to teeter on the edge of promiscuity and now a day later its marijuana.  Like most people these days, they require a mind altering substance to express themselves in a society that demands control and obedience of its populace.  Alice and Bill are in their bed smoking a joint asking each other about the strangers trying to pick them up at the party.  They argue about the reasons behind their potential infidelity.  This form of jealousy is certainly common among couples that wish to police the actions and the thoughts of their partner to avoid disloyalty.  That’s the seed of their argument, no matter how much Bill says he wants to be faithful because he loves Alice and is married to her, she isn’t convinced and she’s right not be, because we can’t know what’s really going on in the minds of our partner, but through our own deductive reasoning, we can assume that if I am thinking it, it’s likely that he/she is as well.  

 

Alice proceeded to tell Bill about a sailor she saw a year ago, that turned her on so much, that she would have given up her marriage and their little girl to spend one night with him.  As she told the story, this emasculated Bill to the point of tears, she did this as part of a defense mechanism, to combat against her lack of control over his thoughts as she can’t access his thoughts she might as well contaminate them.         

A thoughts war begins between husband and wife, and therein lies the problem with society and marriage.  We can’t control the thoughts of our partners; all we can do is try not to think about it at all.  But in the case of Bill and Alice, these last few days events has shed new light on old memories and our sometimes lack of free will.

The handsome sailor making love with Alice is all that is populating Bill’s mind.  Men often feel inadequate around their women because the pressure of sexual performance that is so prevalent in society.  A man has to be the best at everything and Bill is now thinking that the sailor is what turns Alice on.

Women are generally more introverted where men are more extroverted and the film breaks in two at this point where Bill acts out in the world and Alice plays within the mind in the form of fantasy dreams.

This film explores bottled up sexuality and the failing roles we try so hard to keep up.  In order to build and then live in society we have all given up a form of freedom that hasn’t let us go.  That freedom wants out of all the social cages that have been built to restrain it and express itself fully.  This of course cannot be aloud because that would be the end of civilization.  So our real freedoms must be restricted and suppressed with laws, rules and regulations, with medication and religions, in prison terms our true freedom has been condemned to a life, incarcerate without the possibility of parole.

After Bill is taking a walk with thoughts of Alice is bed with the sailor invading his mind, a group of thugs push him down and yell homosexual, derogatory insults at him furthering his already declining masculinity.  Bill then meets up with a prostitute that offers him a good time.  These are all manifestations of his inner thoughts realized.  What is it to be a real man in modern day society?  How much mucho does a man need to be, to feel satisfied with his self-image and his self-worth? 

Bill goes inside the prostitute’s apartment, I’m sure to discreetly restore his manhood after Alice challenged it.  Unfortunately the restoring of his manhood requires caveman style, naked man with naked woman action and instead he’s stuck in a shady apartment negotiating the terms of a natural act between a man and woman, through a capitalistic monetary system.  I suppose on a biological innate level it defeats the purpose of the hunt. Regardless, Alice calls Bill before anything happens with the prostitute and Bill is reminded of his binding marital rules and leaves without incident.

Bill goes to a bar to watch a medical school friend play in a jazz band.  Nick sits with Bill after his set and tells Bill of a party he will be attending later on that night, where he’ll be required to wear a blindfold while playing piano.  Nick says there are lots of beautiful woman there.  Bill, on his journey further down the rabbit hole talks Nick into telling him the location of the costumed party.  Bill goes to get a costume and is yet again derailed momentarily while rules and functions of society’s suppression prevent him from naturally exploring his sexual desires.

After using his symbolic authority as a doctor, Bill acquires his costume and goes to a mansion where inside there is a cult like, secret society of people all masked and cloaked performing some sort of choosing ceremony that leads to an orgy of sorts.  Bill, for some reason is immediately suspected for not belonging, or is that just paranoia, actually it isn’t, they are on to him.  The women are disrobed and choose their partners; they leave their masks on because it’s the body that’s required and not the personality of the face thus the individual.   

People want to express their sexuality without restraint; the function of society forbids this form of expression in order to control its population.  So using the strict rules that govern society, groups of elite people form a secret society so they can express their sexuality without restraint but are still subject to the rule of law, their law thus negating the desired natural flow of human sexuality.  This is where Bill comes in, he is society’s sexual oppression infected their little theatrical sex orgy.  There’s even an interesting point when Bill is upstairs watching naked people performing sex when a masked man clearly higher up, is with a naked masked woman, they both look at Bill.  When the film cuts to a different angle the naked woman with the same mask on, holding onto the higher up man, is clearly a different woman.  I think this is expressing the objects we often see women as.  This elite group is very clear how they see women and the director was testing his audience to see if they are subject to the same objectification.

Bill is caught and brought before the grandmaster in a sort of tribunal to answer for what he has done.  With all the faceless onlookers, Bill removes his mask thus re-entering his symbolic identity and the baggage that comes with a name.  After a young naked woman asks the council to take her as some sort of sacrifice, Bill is set free but is ordered to keep quiet about what he has seen there.  It is also important to note that the whole sequence at the masked party could have been a dream Bill had after smoking pot with Alice.

Bill gets home to hear about another dream Alice has had about the sailor, which led to an orgy where Alice had sex with many men, and poor Bill listens to this dream as his masculinity takes another hit.  It appears as if he’s yet again, not good enough for a woman like Alice.

Bill uses his symbolic authority as a doctor a few more times to find out that  his friend Nick has left town and possibly by force.  He then drives back to the mansion only to be given a note to cease his curiosity.  Ultimately he’s being forced back to the role of a doctor with a wife and a happy life cover story, and to leave this desire for sexual express and life fulfillment behind him.

After having more thoughts of Alice with the sailor, Bill goes back to the prostitute’s apartment.  I’m thinking at this point he wants to symbolically punish Alice for cheating on him in her mind, for putting him through the reruns of her naked body under the sexually electrified sailor.  The prostitute isn’t home so Bill flirts with her roommate only to find out that the prostitute was tested positive for HIV, signaling the severity of Bill’s own actions.  Bill then finds out that the woman at the masked party who stood up for him, was found dead.

Bill goes to Victor’s house to talk, where it is revealed that Victor knew about the masked party because he was there and that the girl who died was a druggy hooker.  Bill was told the whole thing at the masked party was staged to scare him because they knew he shouldn’t have been there.  Bill then goes home and finds the mask he wore at the party on his pillow beside a sleeping Alice.  She knows.  Bill becomes overwhelmed with what he did and breaks down crying, Alice wakes up looking at her crying, guilt-ridden husband.

At the toy store the next day they reconcile and decide to stay together forever.  Alice says they are awake now and they should go immediately home and…fuck.  This to me is not fully awake; this is recognizing they can’t do anything about their thoughts and desires.  The marriage and the rules in society can only go so far until true desire needs expression.  So if they are awake, they are awake to knowing they are trapped.

Fidelio….

Black Swan and the Darker Side of Existence

by Christopher Barr

 

"There are no limits.  There are plateaus; but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.  If it kills you, it kills you."  - Bruce Lee

Black Swan was a challenging, dark psycho-drama descending into the scornful world of competitive ballet.  This extraordinary film tells the story of a fragile ballet dancer that becomes the lead in the New York production of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Swan Lake’.  She is tasked to play the gentle white swan but slowly goes mad as she frighteningly digs inside herself to become the seductive black swan.

“Either through the influence of the narcotic drink, of which the hymns of all aboriginal humans and peoples speak, or with the invigorating springtime’s awakening that fills all nature with passion, these Dionysian impulses find their source, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete loss of self-recognition. Even in the German Middle Ages singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, moved from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse…. There are people who, from the lack of experience or thick-headedness, turn away from such manifestations as from “folk-diseases,” mocking or with pity derived from their own sense of a superior health. But of course these poor people have no idea how corpse-like and ghostly their so-called “health” looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian swarm buzzes past them.”

–Friedrich Nietzsche

 

This film is also a telling of the Apollonian and the Dionysian from Nietzsche’s stand point.  The sweet girl must alter herself into a much darker more ravenous persona.  This becomes quite difficult for Nina, the lead character, to embrace as it’s hard for her to transform what she is; it’s hard to give up structure to change.  In the beginning Nina is subject to Schopenhauer’s principle of individuation, which stresses a gentler reign of reason, intellect, but ultimately banality.  The sexually-aggressive director of the ballet pushes Nina to explore an uncharted side of herself, for the benefit of the ballet and for her own livelihood.  This iconoclastic man was somewhat of a philosopher in his own right, certainly a selfish one at times, but he like Socrates via Plato, pushed Nina to unleash herself from the shadows of the cave to come into the day of enlightenment.   

 

There is a cost to letting it all go, as we see in the film, where Nina spirals down a path that’s self-destructive.  She begins to hallucinate, seeing herself in the faces of other people looking at her as well as the pink stuffed animals adorning her ‘little-girls’ bedroom and her mother’s self-loathing art all appearing to be looking at her, judging her.   She also has a seductive lesbian love scene with Lily, a pretty young woman in her ballet company that becomes quite revelatory as she continues to feel ambivalence toward her desire to be Lily or kill Lily.  This metamorphous culminates with what appears to be real injuries to her body along with webbed feet and her own legs creepily snapping back into bird-like legs during a very intense moment in the film.  She also pulls black feather stumps out of her back and her skin often ripples into bird-like skin when excited.  She eventually sprouts black bird feathers on stage as she finally becomes the exuberant black swan.   

 

From a Freudian view, we can see Nina as the Ego, Nina’s controlling mother as the super-ego and Lily as the Id, leaving the ballet’s demanding Director as somewhat of a mediator or totalitarian therapist.  Beth, the little princess, was Nina’s future, her sacrifice to the dark side.  Beth was older and because of being pushed out of the spotlight she became resentful, hating Nina for her youth, for her attention.  Nina’s ego was what she was battling to keep the little girl intact, behaving and pleasing her moralistic mother while the more chaotic sexual woman was screaming to surface.  She struggled with Carl Jung’s Shadow, that inside darkness that we all fight to keep imprisoned as we live our so called free-thinking lives within the concrete jungle of modern day society.  

Nina’s mother clearly sees herself as a failure and pushes her daughter, vigorously in a direction to succeed so she can, in a last desperate attempt at fame, live vicariously through her daughter’s achievement, no matter what the cost.  Nina pays dearly for her mother’s selfishness.  Her mother in the bathroom clipping Nina’s fingernails was like her clipping her wings, keeping Nina little, meek and easily controllable.  Lily is Lacan’s object petit a, Nina’s own desire within herself, Nina’s quest for fulfillment beyond the satisfaction of her biological needs.  Nina’s expression of her lack can be seen in Lily’s ability to freely do what she wishes to do.   Nina’s unconscious desire to complete herself drives her subconscious to pursue an unlimited jouissance, total satisfaction.  

This pursuit is impossible to achieve within the limits of reality, it is beyond the pleasure principle which gives it a deadly aspect, in that it operates without regard for the welfare of Nina’s symbolic identity.  So Lily is all the things Nina wishes she could be but can’t so this brings hatred and resentment to fruition.  Nina must kill her desire in order to free herself from her own psychological symbolic restraints, so she kills the Lily in her mind.

Nina spent most of the film trying desperately to please others to become perfect.  Because of such a sacrifice to her own self-fulfillment, she finally let go and started to please herself, she psychologically, symbolically killed herself, falling into a complete psychotic state.  She didn’t have the mental faculty to properly balance the two opposing sides successfully in her mind, resulting in her losing both sides. 

Nina was 28 and living home with her mother in a dollhouse-type environment, where her mother controlled.  Nina’s desire was to please the mother, to behave and essentially be her mother’s walking and talking doll, to become the phallus and continue to search for her lack.  Human beings seem to be sort of doomed to this particular plight.  You are born and envy the mother, she leaves you alone in the room and you cry, she comes back and you are happy, then your father steals her from you so you begin to loath him and compete for her affection, thus castrating yourself from the only real hope for absolute freedom.  As one gets older one develops a desire to please others to make up for the failure at pleasing the mother.  One must share her symbolically with the world and this can be very undesirable.  But yet one longs for the time before time so to speak, the time before castration, before you unknowingly and naturally gave yourself over to your mother, a time where it is believed true peace could have been had.  We all struggle with this in our lives, some of us become aware of this need and an understanding of our inability to completely correct it, and some of us still struggle with it, to the point that we begin to hate others rather than please them as a way of rejecting our sensitive side, in a society that only wishes to swim with sharks.   

 

Nina’s mother exploited her daughter’s need for her, subconsciously for the most part, she imprisoned her to such a point that when Nina finally broke free and successfully preceded her she couldn’t handle it and she symbolically died on that stage.

The film is tragic as it tells the story of failed enlightenment, the side effect to awaking, the problem of conformity.  The film is expressing to its audience the downside to fulfillment, not to say that its wrong but some people are so far gone that the path to the door that one must open, isn’t for everyone.  Some become tragic figures that can’t escape the symbolic cage of linguistic assignment.  Some remain a prisoner of this for the rest of their days.  Black Swan is about the tragedy of a girl that had all the potential for enlightenment but didn’t have the psychological faculty to sustain it, to operate within it and live beyond symbolic freedom.

12 Years a Slave and the Authority of the BIG Other

by Christopher Barr

“When we speak (or listen, for that matter), we never merely interact with others; our speech activity is grounded on our accepting and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions. That is to say, our communication with others (and with our self, perhaps) is grounded in and acted out through ‘the big Other.’ The big Other comes through us in how we speak and in how we comprehend the other.”  -  Slavoj Zizek

12 Years A Slave was a brilliant film depicting a point in early American history that most people would wish to forget, but should never want to.  It’s based on the autobiography of Solomon Northrup, a black man that lived in New York State with his family as a free people.  He dined and wined and played violin while living a life of a cultured man in an intellectually growing society.  He was then sold into slavery and lived 12 years as a beaten man that was the property of his white masters.

Solomon was a bit unique in the traditional telling of this story, the story of black people during slavery.  Unique because unlike the stolen black people shipped to American from Sierra Leone, Africa, Solomon was already an American enjoying the wealthy fruits of the new world.  He was pulled from that life and transported to a life of living hell, a hell thanks to the white people that believed that these black people they had purchased were their property.

One thing I found most interesting about this film was the authority a human being held over another, simply as a point of rule.  There was no actual universal rule that justified why one race of people held dominion over another race of people.  There were a number of times throughout the film I was thinking, ‘storm the master, kill him or her and then be free.’  But the slaves didn’t, these plantations and cotton picking fields didn’t have barbwire fences like prisons do today.  There were no walls, no prison guards, just obedience, fear of the Big Other, fear of grand authority when none existed in the real world but only within the Symbolic Order, the rule was that those black slaves were property.  Not only did the masters know it but the slaves knew it all too well.

I’m reminded of a book I read when I was studying criminology about police detectives commenting on troubling cases they had.  One such case was of a man with a knife that broke into a house during thanksgiving and held a whole family at knife point.  There were five little kids, four women and five men, all varying in age.  This one man with a knife entered their house, overtook everyone, tied them all up and proceeded to murder them one by one.  He started with the youngest, two little girls, cutting and slicing them and then worked his way up to the oldest.  It took him all night but he slaughtered and tortured them all, then left, never to be caught.  The cops on the case were horrified, as anyone would, but they were perturbed about one thing, after realizing the perpetrator held only a knife, why didn’t they jump him?  There were five grown men and four grown women, why not jump him?  Surely one or two might’ve been killed but they would have eventually overpowered this man.  But they didn’t, their collective fear of the authority of the Big Other kept them, unfortunately in their place long enough for this crazed man to fulfill his sick fantasy.

What I find thought-provoking about the Big Other is it only exists within the Symbolic Order and outside that, it is meaningless.  It’s us who give it meaning as did the black people during the slave days.  Through our ignorance, either self-imposed or governmental, we simply comply because we don’t know better.  We do this with areas that don’t harm us directly like religion and government in most cases, but yet we comply because they seem to know better and we don’t question it.

No human being should have to be subject to slavery no matter what their race, but we live in a world of slavery.  We always have and always will.  The elite will continue to enslave its populace, but the difference from now and then, is we are unaware of that slavery.  Unlike inmates in prisons who are aware of their incarceration, we are unaware of our own slavery and servitude to the corporate and governmental system, which pays us enough to make us feel free but never enough to rise up above the system and revolt.    

The only point to tell a true story of slavery is to juxtapose it with the state of today.  People need to reflect on themselves and their station in modern society, where they work and who rules over them.  This film was about the death of cultivation, the death of learning so the so-called strong can hold supremacy over the so-called weak.  This is the story of today as it was the story then, not to take way from the atrocities of that time in American history, but it’s important we don’t think of the film as simply a period piece that society has grown and evolved out of.  I think we should see the film as something contemporary and present, we should see the film as a telling of how we are capable of treating each other, and how the aspiring man can become victim to those that have fallen, not religiously but intellectually and logically.

Religion in this film plays the part of mediator; it allows the white man power over their black slaves without dogmatic judgment.  As religion is not an actual real phenomena outside the imagination of men, the ruling class were able to make their laws on slavery divine, simply because they said so, before they wrote the book in the name of a divine creator they themselves created.  Black people followed this white man’s bible as scripture from the lord and savior without ever realizing that they as a race were scammed two fold, not only do they follow it but they followed it into their own servitude.  It can be said that it wasn’t up to them to understand that they were to become victims of property labor law in the early days of the United States.  Ideally the innocent should be free of such thoughts but in the time of slavery it simply wasn’t the case.

Why do we fear a man with a gun, because he may shoot us?  Why do we fear a man with a voice over a hundred people because he has the power to kill us all?  Or does he, I’m thinking there might be a bluff in there somewhere.  Maybe the point of the story is the person we fear the most when it comes to how we look at the world is ourselves.  The Big Other is how we look at the world and not how the world is.  Slavery exists today and is hidden from our first world purview, so we can all sit and lament about how bad they all had it, as we watch our 300 channels and wear designer clothing, manufactured by modern day slaves that live during our time but simply out of our view.

“My narrative is at an end.  I have no comments to make upon the subject of Slavery.  Those who read this book may form their own opinions on the ‘peculiar institution.’  What it may be in the other States, I do not profess to know; what it is in the region of Red River, is truly and faithfully delineated in these pages.  This is no fiction, no exaggeration.  If I have failed in anything, it has been in presenting to the reader too prominently the bright side of the picture.  I doubt not hundreds have been as unfortunate as myself; that hundreds of free citizens have been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and are at this moment wearing out their lives on plantations in Texas and Louisiana.  But I forbear.  Chastened and subdued in spirit by the sufferings I have borne, and thankful to that good Being through whose mercy I have been restored to happiness and liberty, I hope henceforward to lead an upright though lowly life, and rest at last in the church yard where my father sleeps.”     - Solomon Northrup  (Closing passage to his autobiography.  1853)