Trouble in Paradise: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), from Generic Instability to an Ethics of Trouble

More than twenty-five years after its release, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut remains one of the least acclaimed films of the director, despite his own assertion that it was his finest film ever. Advertised as an erotic thriller, Eyes Wide Shut has tended to be seen as a let-down, a strangely puritan reflection on sexual anxiety from the director of the much more explicit A Clockwork Orange. I will argue that this dissatisfaction arises from the gap between some viewers’ expectation of a highly provocative, sex-filled work, and the frustration of all viewers’ expectations sought by Kubrick. Indeed, though Bill Harford’s journey stems from a marital crisis which ignites psychosexual anxieties, such a premise leads him to experience a global state of unrest which evolves beyond marriage and sex: sexual and gender anxieties bring forth a cognitive and a metaphysical crisis. Given the highly subjective quality of the film, which brings the viewer to experience the world as filtered by the main character’s consciousness, Eyes Wide Shut thus becomes a highly troubling viewing experience indeed. Whereas many expected erotic thrills, the film frustrates the spectator’s scopophilia, as the expected pleasure derived from watching Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s love life is thwarted, and instead seeks to produce hermeneutic and sensory bewilderment. I argue that the film explores the various modalities of trouble to ultimately develop an ethics of unrest.