What did the high priest wear on his chest as a symbol of the twelve tribes?

Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Eve Tushnet

Home
Catholic
Religious Music & Entertainment

Last updated on: February 20, 2007 at 12:21 am by Eve Tushnet

2007-02-20T00:21:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

IT IS THE BEATING OF THAT HIDEOUS HORSE!: (I’m so sorry. Can you tell I’ve been waiting months to use that headline?)

Some thoughts on Eyes Wide Shut–a movie, I should say, that I’m still mulling over. It can’t be dismissed, even if my ultimate judgment remains “tries hard, finds subject difficult.” I apologize, once more, for the length of this.

First, The American Scene links to Lee Siegel’s defense of the movie. The first half of it isn’t addressed to me, since I was well-served by Sean Collins’s previous discussion of the movie (I’m pretty sure that’s why I Netflix’d it) rather than ill-served by hype and anti-hype. But I thought this was right-on and worth highlighting:

…In the novel, the password Bill uses to gain entrance to the orgy is “Denmark.” In the movie, it is “Fidelio.” Remarkably no critic I’ve quoted even brought up the password. This is a pretty bad lapse for reviews that called Kubrick’s meditation on marriage an empty aesthetic exercise, since the opera Fidelio is Beethoven’s hymn to conjugal love. Indeed, Kubrick structures his film with gorgeously subtle references to Fidelio and Christmas and Ovid and Homer though none of the critics here interpreted any of these allusions either. Nothing of the sort exists in Schnitzler’s tale.

review is here

Siegel also says this:

…Our tame middle-class critics so wanted Kubrick’s orgy to be dark and dangerous and full of sexual energy, but Kubrick wanted to show that sex without emotion is ritualistic, contrived, and in thrall to authority and fear. He was too wild for them. Everyone droned on about how unerotic Kubrick’s orgy is, but no one talked about how intensely erotic is Bill’s fantasy of Alice
making love with the naval officer. It is so erotic because Alice is the object not only of Bill’s desire but also of his love.

I think the first point is probably right (and therefore I was wrong to want the orgy scene to have the lambent eroticism of the best parts of O), but I didn’t find the Alice-fantasy scenes erotic at all. The black-and-white felt cliched; the whole thing did. That actually worked for me–I’m thinking that jealous fantasies, like most projections of the self onto the beloved, are usually cliched.

There’s lots of other close-reading-y stuff in Siegel’s review, some of it acute and some of it… well, maybe. It’s very much worth reading (despite its defensiveness) if you are interested in the movie.

I agree with Sean that we’ve probably reached the “agree to disagree” point (although I am still mulling). I do want to say two (relatively) quick things, the first a clarification of a place where I think my poor phrasing gave the wrong impression and the second an acknowledgment of a place where Sean is probably right about our divergent reactions to the movie. (Oh, and he shouldn’t feel weird about bringing up my underlying beliefs–I totally agree with him that our differences there are part of what’s going on here.)

The first: I think my second post, especially, at times implied something I don’t believe on either a religious or an aesthetic level: that children are what makes marriage real. On a religious level, this isn’t my belief. (I was reminded of something I noticed during those theology of the body seminars I went to over the summer–when Jesus points to Adam and Eve as models of married life, He’s pointing to a marriage that doesn’t, as yet, have children. They do eventually–Cain, founder of cities!–but they serve as models for men and women before that happens.) On an aesthetic level, I definitely think you could remove Helena from Eyes Wide Shut and still have an earthquake in the marriage be big enough for the impact the movie wants.

My point was more that once you introduce Helena, you have to use her either mechanistically or symbolically, and the movie chose the former. She’s a token to raise the stakes of infidelity at the outset, and she’s a reward at the end, but she isn’t affected by her parents’ discord and she doesn’t affect them; and I think that’s both untrue-to-life and a missed narrative opportunity.

In the hypothetical EWS-without-Helena, I am pretty sure the final lines would still feel like mutual self-absorption to me. Some bad alchemy of dialogue/concept and performance made it come across as wish-fulfillment (this may just be me, but I felt like Kidman’s voice even went kind of candy-colored at the very end), a return to status quo ante, an attempt to resolve the problem of sex by ignoring it. What Mrs. Dr. proposes is both necessary and radically insufficient for addressing what they’ve been through. I didn’t buy that she would suggest it so soon, and I also thought the movie didn’t recognize its insufficiency. The weird irrelevant-presence of Helena only heightened the underlying problems with the scene.

Second thing: Sean suggests that we diverged on the movie because he was reading its ending as a depiction of guilt and shame and I was reading it as a narrative about sin. That might be a big part of it, yeah. It’s possible we’re using words in different ways, here, but I think part of my problem is that in my view shame (especially) often traps people, forces a kind of miserable ingrowing of the personality, a self-swallowing that’s both terribly painful for the person undergoing it and totally useless to himself and anyone around him. The language of sin, by contrast, implies the possibility and requirement of repentance and redemption; a particular person may not fulfill that requirement, but it’s still embedded in the language.

And so while I saw Dr Harford as consumed by shame in his breakdown, that to me is not a state of mind that leads to resolution (or anything good!), and so I was disconcerted to see it (and its characteristic absence of actions of repentance, vs. expressions of misery) presented as the means to a renewed marriage….

I know I said before that my problem was Cruise’s performance–he wasn’t amazing enough to sell me on repentance-without-change–and now I think I’m saying something slightly different, that no matter how good his performance I still would have read it as shame rather than penitence. I’m not sure which is right; maybe both.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

February 19, 2007

Next Post

February 20, 2007

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Art Best-Of Gay Catholic Whatnot Mackerel-Snapping self-obsessed Too much is never enough Uncategorized

Select a Month November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 August 2022 July 2022 May 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002 January 2002

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What did the high priest wear on his chest as a symbol of the twelve tribes?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Headband Cloak Ring Breastplate