Other Blogs / ‘Permission to stare’

Actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" (1996).

“You’re not even looking at it.” — Alice Harford in “Eyes Wide Shut”

Jim Emerson, the founding editor-in-chief of RogerEbert.com, recently posted a piece on his blog called “Darren Aronofsky Agrees With Me”. In the piece he writes:

“Last spring I was on a panel at the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, CO, called “Why We Still Go to the Movies.” The first thing I said (because it was the first thing I thought of) was: “Permission to stare.” I wasn’t thinking about any particular movie (the title said “the movies”) or about the business or anything like that. I was trying to get at the essential appeal of the movie-watching experience.”

In Emerson’s post, he proceeds to write about close-ups. But I think his phrase, ‘permission to stare’, hits on something else essential to watching movies. There’s always been something quite voyeuristic about the activity. And I don’t mean that pejoratively. That’s just the dichotomy. Many filmmakers have understood this and used it to present issues about what it means to see, observe, watch, and empathize. That’s a large part of the vehicle behind films like Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” (a 1960 movie about a serial killer who murders women and tries to film their dying looks of horror) and “Man Bites Dog” (a 1992 mockumentary about a film crew trying to document the crimes of a serial killer with a degree of dispassion). Of course, those are highly morbid ways of playing with the audience/film relationship. But when I read Emerson’s piece, my mind immediately went to Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”. (A 1996 drama based on Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler’s story “Traumnovelle”, written in 1925.)

There are so many scenes in “Eyes Wide Shut” meant to create this weaving in and out of distance between the audience and the picture. Sometimes you’re in close. (Too close.) And sometimes you’re pushed to arm’s length. Most of the voyeurism and distancing concerns actress Nicole Kidman’s character Alice Harford. At the beginning of the film, we see her dress and undress before preparing to go to a ritzy party. She urinates while we wait for the plot to inch forward. It’s all a bit troubling for many film watchers. I saw a few leave the movie about halfway through, when I went to see it. I suspect because it’s tinged with a creepiness. It’s ominous and displacing, in the Freudian sense of the word. At the time of the movie, the actress was married to famed actor Tom Cruise, who was her co-lead in the film. I remember a few complaints, before the movie came out, from some Kubrick fans asking why the director would choose this mega-Hollywood couple for his film. But it’s a brilliant bit of casting. Presenting a real-life married couple, pretending to be an on-screen married couple, causes a number of scenes in the movie to be different than they would have been otherwise. For example, in the opening scenes of the movie, you can’t help but wonder if what you’re seeing on screen is near to what occurs in real life. Is it an approximation of what it may be like when the real Cruise and Kidman get ready for a big gala? In this age of celebrity obsession, the lines are getting blurry. It’s a strange piece of the film, that made me uneasy, as if Kubrick was pointing his audience out as cinematic voyeurs.

There’s also the scene at the party, where Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise) is called in to examine an attractive party-goer, who has overdosed on drugs. She lies naked, sprawled in a chair, barely conscious. Under the circumstances, it’s not titillating. But obviously, the actress in question is very attractive. It becomes a dilemma of the mind. It calls into question the relationship between film-goers and film, doctor and patient, sexuality and dispassionate duty. It’s unsettling to say the least, but brilliant and cognitively displacing.