Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick, 1999
Available for rental

Kubrick's swansong movie, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, uses a medical stereotype of a young wealthy American doctor in this tale of sexual temptation and neuroticism. In this vividly sleazy and almost surreal fable, the doctor played by Cruise undergoes what is best described as a "long dark night of the soul." Haunted to an obsessional degree by images of his wife's potential infidelity, he is presented with sexual temptations of escalating depravity. He escapes these through cowardice, ineptitude, and luck.

Cruise gives a sterling performance as the naive but far from innocent medic. He plays a young successful doctor in private practice, with whom all women seem to want to have sex. He flashes his medical identity badge every time he is presented with a problem, as though he were a member of the New York Police Department, and spends more money in one night than a British doctor of his apparent age would spend in a month. He also professes rather patronisingly to his flirtatious but faithful wife, played by Kidman, that he would never "cheat on her," yet by the end of his long night, he is making advances to a prostitute he's just met. By contrast his clinical bedside manner is professional to the point of satire. He explains to his wife that when he is performing a breast examination no thoughts of a sexual nature enter his mind and is stunned when a deceased patient's daughter declares her love for him. There seems to be a moral message implicit in the disastrousness of his sexual escapades.

Based on Arthur Schnitzler's book Traumnovelle (dream story), the film paints a disturbing and visually astounding picture of what might lie beneath a respectable veneer that people look at but don't see, hence "eyes wide shut." The film contains many scenes that might shock, but there is more to it than meets the eye.

Andrew N Papanikitas, third year medical student, Guy's, King's and St Thomas's Hospitals Medical School, London


studentBMJ 2000;08:175-216 June ISSN 0966-6494