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 18, 2007 at 12:09 am by Eve Tushnet

2007-02-18T00:09:00-04:00 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.

WAKING UP IS HARD TO DO: In which I revise and extend my remarks on Eyes Wide Shut.

First of all, I should reiterate that the whole “EWS as horror movie” thing is 100% Sean Collins’s insight, and 0% mine. A couple people have given me props for it, so again, it isn’t my idea, and I doubt I would ever have gotten it on my own. Viewing EWS as a horror movie totally added not only to my understanding of the movie, but also to my enjoyment of it, so I’m really grateful to Sean for getting it.

Anyway. Josiah Neeley writes:

…A friend of mine, who is a bit of a womanizer, says that it’s the scariest movie he’s ever seen. I’m not so sure I agree that the movie is about committing adultery in your heart, though. What drives Cruise throughout the film is not really lust so much as a semi-conscious desire to “even the score” and thereby get rid of the feeling that he’s been cuckolded. (The scene where those random street toughs bump into Cruise and shout anti-gay slurs at him is illustrative of this). What set Kidman off, and led her to tell Cruise about the soldier in the first place, was the fact that Cruise wasn’t jealous when told that another man was hitting on his wife but was instead turned on by the thought. So I think the film is more of a psychological thriller than a moral one. Cruise is presented a with a series of temptations that normally wouldn’t be much of a temptation (just as the girls at the party at the beginning of the film weren’t a real temptation for him), but because of what’s happened with Kidman he feels almost compelled to give in. Each temptation is more depraved than the last (first plain adultery, then prostitution, then basically child prostitution,and finally a sadistic orgy) representing a kind of descent into hell, until the woman dying after the party snaps him out of it enough that he can actually *talk* to his wife about it all.

The good girl/bad girl thing was interesting. What would you make of the fact that the woman who saves Cruise at the end is the one who he saves at the beginning of the film?

My only real complaint with the film aesthetically was that stupid music that played throughout the second half of the film whenever there wasn’t any dialogue (made more annoying by my sense that the only reason it was there was to fill up the silence). That doesn’t have anything to do with what you wrote. But it’s something I’ve been wanting to get off my chest for a while now.

Quickly: I think the sequence of events reinforces my belief that the movie is centrally concerned with “adultery in one’s heart.” Kidman’s character commits it, then needs reassurance that her sin was important, and her insistence precipitates the rest of the film’s events, all of which are mental/spiritual rather than carnal.

As for the “bad girls” question… I think, if anything, the point Josiah raises makes the movie creepier. The well-being of the women Ziegler et al. exploit is explicitly raised as a major issue… and then just dropped.

Sean Collins responds to my review here. Some thoughts:

To return to the horror framework, we can consider Bill and Alice Harford (but mostly Bill) to be this film’s “final girl.” Sure, he survived, but I challenge you to listen to the way he sobs “I’ll tell you everything,” or see the red eyes of his wife after he does so, or listen to that sadder and wiser conversation they have at the toy store in the film’s final scene, and say nothing has changed for them.

He’s totally right about Dr Harford as the “final girl.” And this is the point where I’m most willing to admit that my own preferences may be skewing my response to the movie. I’m really, really resistant to professions of feeling bad–especially male professions of feeling bad, see above re possibly skewed response to movie–unless accompanied by changes in behavior. I think if I had entered into Cruise’s performance in that scene, many of my problems with the movie would have dissipated; I can think of actors who could probably have sold me on his misery. But you have to be really, really, really good to sell me on repentance without change.

I understand that Cruise’s character feels really bad. People feel really bad about what they do all the time. And then they “walk back in the revolving door, and do it all again.” Some of that is just life. But some of it is a genuine question (which yeah, I put to myself all the time) of how much you’re really sorry, if you don’t actually change your life.

PS: With regards to their daughter, the absence of any major plot points concerning which was a big sticking point for Eve, I just didn’t think she played a particularly relevant part in their erotic and sexual lives. Given what I know to be Eve’s political and philosophical bedrock, I can see why this might strike her as a lacuna; given my own sexual outlook, it didn’t.

So… it’s okay that Helena is marginal to her parents’ erotic and sexual lives, because actual children are marginal to their parents’ ditto? Yeah, that isn’t persuasive to me.

Moreover, Helena is a wasted opportunity from a narrative perspective. I said in my earlier post that the obvious sex as generativity vs. sex as destruction dichotomy wasn’t the only way to use Helena; there are about a million ways she could be made important, in the way that actual children are important to their actual parents’ erotic lives. She’s a daughter, for example: Can Dr Harford look at her without wondering if she will grow up to be misused by men? She’s a sign of hope, that no matter how much two people screw up their relationship, they can still produce a child unearned and amazing. She’s a sign that his relationship with his wife is about more than just the two of them: Both of them have bonds of responsibility that extend far beyond the self, to a dependent child who loves them.

I really thought the movie was setting us up for some payoff there, in part because Mrs. Dr. makes it clear that her imaginary soldier fling happened after her child was born. I thought the movie’s ending would move its protagonists (Josiah Neeley’s email suggests why maybe Kidman’s character should be considered as much a protagonist as her husband) into the realm of deepened responsibility that comes with deepened love. Instead, Helena runs ahead of and away from them, as their final lines reinforce their mutual self-absorption. Their child really is treated as an accessory to the central fact of their couplehood. It’s hard for me to believe that Dr Harford has substantively changed his attitude toward vulnerable women when he seems so uninterested and perfunctory toward his own daughter.

Again, I definitely don’t think we’re supposed to feel that Bill had no responsibility to the woman at the orgy (or Leelee Sobieski, for that matter) other than “to avoid them,” nor that he was untouched by guilt over what befell them thanks to his unwillingness to do anything about it. In an ideal/real world he’d have called the cops the next day, but in the dream logic of the film, he woke up, and by then it’s too late to go back and rescue characters from your nightmare.

Okay, I think I understand the nature of Sean’s criticism here–it’s a point about genre. It’s absurd to think that Alice would be concerned about, I don’t know, the Red Queen’s political prisoners, after her return from Wonderland. You wake up, and while your dream can still affect you, you can no longer affect the dream.

That helplessness might be experienced as tragedy. And exploring or at least showing that tragedy might have “redeemed” EWS for me. It’s hard to say, because I don’t think the movie actually presents this helplessness as tragic.

It’s also really hard for me to see EWS as a dream-narrative for two reasons: 1. Yeah, sexual exploitation of women is a lot more normal than cards cutting off people’s heads for tart mismanagement. The movie wants the emotional frisson of real sexual cruelty, with no corresponding responsibility.
2. There’s no “entering the dream” moment. The colors are already intensified, the music already insistent, from the first moment. The Wizard of Oz was obvious, and I understand that you can use other methods to shift into dream-narrative, but I don’t think I can identify a moment when EWS shifted from black-and-white to Technicolor. It did obviously shift back at the end, though. And while on one level I think that’s right–we do slip slowly into dreams (and into sin), while often jerking sharply out of them–on another level it made it really hard for me to view the orgy/exploitation scenes as make-believe, something the characters could leave behind once they awoke.

Look, I know that “in dreams begin responsibilities” is a cliche, but… it’s kind of frustrating to me that I think all my problems with EWS are really the same problem repeated in different places, and if that problem were solved in even one place, I would probably be able to suspend my disbelief about the other places. I really wanted to like this movie: It’s amazing to look at, and, like I said, I thought the leads were good and the basic idea behind the movie was awesome. And then I felt like it failed to deliver on its promise.

Um. Sorry for writing a book, here, people. I hope this was interesting to someone. Like I said, I really do think you should watch this if it sounds even remotely interesting.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

February 17, 2007

Next Post

February 18, 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