Issue Eight
Clockwork Terror: Marriage in The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut by Tony Magistrale
Forbidden knowledge is a common link...
Forbidden knowledge is a common link that connects The Shining to Eyes Wide Shut. Both The Shining and Eyes feature husbands who are drawn into secreted worlds that closely resemble one another in terms of their mutual decadence and dark seclusion. Literally as well as psychologically, Eyes begins where The Shining ends. Even Kubrick’s attraction to the dominant color scheme found at the Overlook–gold and ochre–reappears in the glittering Christmas party dance hall décor of Eyes. Indeed, throughout the film we feel as if we have entered into a psychosexual landscape that closely resembles the one in place at the Overlook when the ghouls have fully morphed into human form and commenced to party.
The Shining is unequivocally Stanley Kubrick’s darkest exploration into the horrors of masculine behavior and its impact on the marital union. Midway through the movie, Wendy visits her husband while the latter is seated in front of his typewriter. She is cheerful and genuinely solicitous about his writing project and progress; she tries to help by asking if later on he might like to show her something that he’s written. For the first time in the film, Jack’s reaction is an over-reaction. Most importantly, he banishes her from the Colorado Lounge with the patronizing command: “When I’m in here, and you hear me typing, or whether you don’t hear me typing, or whatever the fuck you hear me doing in here, that means don’t come in.”
This scene is important for several reasons. First, it is the initial moment in the picture when the audience sees for itself that Jack’s temper and frustration levels do not fall within an acceptable range, that he is not just being “grouchy”, that he is more than capable of exploding violently; and that Wendy is not only terrified of her own husband, she is also unwilling to confront his boorish behavior. For these reasons, the audience is now prepared for the escalating violence and deepening loss of respect for Wendy that will characterize Jack’s personality for the remainder of the picture. The scene’s violence embedded in Jack’s tone and diction alerts us to the reality that this is a writer suffering more than a mere case of writer’s block.
Additionally, the confrontation centers on Jack’s writing–his talent at communicating through the medium of language. Wendy clearly understands the importance of his work both as a means for Jack to find self-worth and for the family to regain its financial independence; indeed, she actually submits to his imperious cruelty as if it were an element in the composing process. In light of these literary impressions, later on in the film when Wendy and the audience discover simultaneously the contents of Jack’s manuscript–the repeated phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”–the revelation is all the more shocking. Kubrick senses the importance of this moment, how it signals the ultimate demise of Jack’s rational faculties, and films it with methodical care. The camera views Wendy’s discovery of the manuscript, the text that she has willingly undergone such humiliation in order for her husband to produce, from underneath the desk. Her face reflects a slow unfolding of terror as she rifles disbelievingly through page after page of the same typed phrase. And when Jack startles her reading by sneaking up from behind and asking sardonically, “How do you like it?” Wendy’s fear is encapsulated in her response immediately after her scream, “Stay away from me,” and her willingness now to employ the baseball bat as a weapon against her husband.
While The Shining employs more of the standard paraphernalia associated with the horror film–e.g., a haunted house, ghosts, shocking murders, etc.–The Shining is less about fear in unexplained supernatural phenomena (note how insignificant the actual ghosts at the Overlook are as corporeal entities and the fact that they do not emerge en masse until late in the picture) than it is about the terror of human silence and miscommunication. What scares us in this film is that a man can become so isolated within himself that he prefers the ghosts that haunt his imagination to the potential life-affirming relationship he shares with his family. Like Alex, Jack is petrified of becoming a “clockwork” man, fearful of being further reduced in stature to “shoveling driveways [and] work in a car wash.” Ironically, the ghosts at the Overlook transform him into the ultimate “clockwork” nightmare. By the end of the film his will is no longer his own and he is nothing more than an extension of the evil machinery that runs the Overlook. What better illustration of this “clockwork” condition is there than the reduction of Torrance’s prodigious language talents to the single mindless mantra, All Work and No Play, retyped endlessly?
In Eyes Wide Shut, a picture that relies so heavily upon masks–literal as well as metaphorically–we find ourselves in the comfortable life of Dr. William Harford, a well-respected physician in New York City, who lives in elegant quarters with a beautiful wife and daughter, and whose cozy world has abruptly been turned upside down. His wife, Alice Harford, after partaking in some powerful marijuana, discloses an elaborate sexual fantasy to her husband involving a dashing stranger she encountered months earlier in a hotel lobby. Although her sexual projection is merely that, no actual act of infidelity took place except in the highly explicit imagination of Mrs. Harford, her husband is so unnerved by his wife’s disclosure that for the remainder of the film he undergoes a “breakdown” that makes it impossible for him to maintain distinctions among separate worlds of signifiers, as fantasy blurs into reality.
At the Christmas party early in the film, before we know much of anything about the Harfords, the spectator learns perhaps the most important thing she needs to know: both husband and wife, like the rest of us, flirt with, and are highly susceptible to, the temptation to stray sexually from their nine-year-old marriage. Although tipsy on champagne, Alice is sober enough to recognize that she is highly vulnerable to the charms of the slick Hungarian flaneur, and that she had better relocate her husband before his seduction progresses any further. Dr. Harford, however, is equally distracted by two female models that appear on the verge of initiating him into a ménage-a-trois before their design is interrupted by a summons to attend Victor Ziegler’s girlfriend, who has overdosed on drugs. These parallel near-seductions set a context for the film’s examination of issues of adultery and sexual experimentation. The Christmas party opens the door to the topic of marital infidelity, prompting Alice, when she and her husband are alone the following night, to reveal her sexual fantasy about the navel officer in the hotel.
The level of his wife’s candor and unbridled passion produces in the good doctor a jealous reaction that unleashes the monster within himself. It is as if Alice’s willingness to risk everything in their marriage in order to sleep with a strange man is worse than actually performing the act itself. Moreover, the fact that his wife has not physically betrayed him provides little comfort to the formerly self-disciplined Dr. Harford as it only fuels the full range of his own imaginary explorations (filmed in black and white) into what his wife might have done had the opportunity presented itself. In a matter of minutes William Harford undergoes a jarring dislocation; he discovers the frail bonds that hold together the existence he has created for himself and his family. While technically not betrayed by his spouse, his naïve conception of her character and the marriage upon which he put his faith–“I know you would never be unfaithful to me”–are severely rocked; his innocence is shaken. It is as if there are suddenly two Alices: the woman he thought he knew–his loyal wife and mother of their child (note how often in the film Alice is shown to be a loving and doting parent)–and another woman who exists behind her domesticated “mask,” who is willing and capable of betraying and wrecking the complacent universe the Harfords have constructed.
The audience then follows the doctor into the highly unrealistic worlds of a kind and beautiful urban prostitute (who remains only remotely interested in his money) and an equally surreal suburban cult party where the party revelers, except for their elaborate masks and stark nudity, are unnatural. Instead of simply accepting his wife’s proclamation that good women are also capable of “doing a bad, bad thing,” Dr. Harford’s patriarchal orientation towards female martial purity and his own superficial understanding of his wife force him to confront a world that he can no longer comfortably identify or control.
Like Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Harford opens himself to the darkest recesses of his own repressed psyche. The suburban masquerade party he crashes is merely a projection of Harford’s quest into his unconscious, and perhaps this sheds some light on the unexplained appearance of a displaced party mask on the doctor’s own bedroom pillow at the conclusion of the film. The “eyes wide shut” oxymoron is an apt description of both the doctor’s severely limited understanding of women, especially his own wife (“If you men only knew,” Alice chastises), as well as the condition of a waking dream, the state of suspended reality that Harford inhabits for most of the film. Indeed, the dream-like scene where he is confronted and exposed as an interloper in front of the assembled party revelers indicates the doctor’s own subconscious awareness of the fact that he possesses neither the courage nor the true desire to undergo a full immersion into the decadent world of sin and illicit sex. While he acknowledges the willingness to “go to someplace more private” with one of the masked beauties, as in the early sequence with the two seductive models at the Christmas party, he never actually does so. Instead, he immediately punishes himself for articulating this desire when he finds himself publicly humiliated in front of the orgy participants and is commanded to take off his clothes.
In further confirmation of this, all of Harford’s excursions around the perimeters of illicit sex bring no real satisfaction or even much sustained eroticism as each of his titillating encounters ends up focusing on only the most terrifying aspects of sexuality: the lovely prostitute he meets on the street turns out to be HIV-positive, the secret sex cult in the suburbs proves to be more about violence and retribution than it is about liberation or fun, Alice’s own dream of multiple lovers exists solely to debase her husband, “to make fun of you, to laugh in your face,” even the sex proffered from the young girl in the theatrical costume shop is perversely unappealing. Afraid of fulfilling his own unconscious projections even as he is compelled to pursue them, Harford’s coitus fantasies are always interrupted–suggesting a frustrating debilitation, intercourse with neither orgasm nor emotional relief–by a telephone call from his wife, an officious sex priest in scarlet, a summons to resuscitate Ziegler’s drugged party girl, a sobering revelation of an AIDS diagnosis that deflates an erotic liaison with the street prostitute’s roommate, or the intrusion of a fiancé that interrupts a grieving daughter’s passionate embrace. Like his wife’s submission to the erotic stranger, Bill Harford’s fantasy life is less about sex than it is about self-debasement and punishment for fantasies he never consummates.
In their final conversation at the end of the film, husband and wife appear to acknowledge that the experiences they have undergone were more imaginary than real: “We should be grateful that we managed to survive all of our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream,” Alice Harford posits, more unsettled than she is relieved by everything that the couple has undergone. Kubrick’s Dr. Harford flirts with the same level of sensual dissipation that dooms Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, but pulls back in time before the Hydes that lurk both within and without irrevocably ruin his life. Although husband and wife are allowed to escape their collective nightmare, to retreat back into the safe and exclusive union of their bourgeois marriage, Kubrick’s message in this film is that neither does so unscathed. As a sobered Dr. Harford concludes, “No dream is ever just a dream”; the dark places that exist within the human psyche, even a relatively normal and well adjusted psyche, informs us that nothing touched by the human is ever wholly innocent or controllable.
Tony Magistrale is Professor of English at the University of Vermont. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, Magistrale is the author of several books, including, most recently, Hollywood’s Stephen King (Palgrave).