Shortly before Christmas, New York moviegoers could choose between seeing two Tom Cruise films that were screening simultaneously:\u00a0Jerry Maguire\u00a0<\/i>at Lincoln Center (as part of a retrospective celebrating him), and\u00a0Eyes Wide Shut\u00a0<\/i>at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (as part of a Christmas movie series). Sorry I could not watch both and be one viewer, I opted for\u00a0Eyes Wide Shut<\/i>. \u201cYou had me at hello\u201d and \u201cShow me the money!\u201d would have to wait for another day. Surely I was taking the cultural high road, the Guermantes Way, if you will, one that would certainly never meet up with any quippy, Tom Petty\u2013inflected sports romance.<\/p>\n
Since the bemused response to the release of Eyes Wide Shut\u00a0<\/i>in 1999, the film\u2019s\u00a0admirers have been increasingly winning out over its critics. But both camps agree that\u00a0the film is a closed universe, meticulously\u00a0arranged down to the smallest detail, the\u00a0ne plus ultra\u00a0<\/i>of auteurist micromanagement.\u00a0Kubrick was a famous hermit who refused to leave England to film\u00a0Eyes Wide Shut<\/i>, although it is set in New York. Instead he constructed an enormous studio replica of Greenwich Village, and everything was shot in this controlled environment.\u00a0Tom Cruise, as though under Kubrick-ordered house arrest, didn\u2019t make another movie for the entire duration of the project (from 1997 to 1999). If you didn\u2019t like the movie, you saw the final product as hermetically sealed and emotionally sterile, a bad imitation of New York and the way that real people talk and feel. But if you liked the movie, it was because\u00a0each of its frames could be subjected to exhaustive analysis in a thousand term papers, like a game of hidden pictures, mined for occult symbolism, motifs of consumerism, and every possible allegorical reading.\u00a0Kubrick\u2019s obsessively detailed vision seemed particularly to license a shot-by-shot deconstruction. (I invite you to google: \u201cEyes Wide Shut illuminati\u201d for a good time.) <\/p>\n
Whether one was frustrated by the film or saw it as an engaging puzzle depended especially on whether one saw the film as giving coherent or interesting answers to the Big Questions that it raised (with no small note of self-importance): Is fidelity possible?\u00a0Was it all a dream? What exactly is happening in the notorious orgy sequence? What is the difference between masculine and feminine desire?<\/p>\n
But in taking up these questions, in debating the finer points of the film, we might ourselves be going about with our eyes wide shut to the most prominent, glaring aspect of the film\u2014even to the point of disregarding the very first words onscreen: \u201cTOM CRUISE. NICOLE KIDMAN.\u201d For it turns out that\u00a0Eyes Wide Shut\u00a0<\/i>has almost nothing to say about its ostensible topic\u2014marital fidelity\u2014but it has a great deal to say about Tom Cruise. It might even be that the key to\u00a0Eyes Wide Shut\u00a0<\/i>is not lurking in a coded image appearing only for a split second, but rather in the entire world-famous corpus of Tom Cruise\u2019s acting work. But this would ruin our idea of\u00a0Eyes Wide Shut\u00a0<\/i>as a claustrophobic world unto itself.<\/p>\n
I first began thinking about Tom Cruise in this way after I came across something Claude Chabrol said\u00a0while directing his final film,\u00a0Bellamy<\/i>,\u00a0which was also\u00a0his first ever collaboration with G\u00e9rard Depardieu. He intended the film as a portrait of Depardieu, but admitted it could really only be \u201ca vision of one of his many aspects.\u201d Before\u00a0I read this, I had never pondered the star of\u00a0Green Card<\/i>\u00a0as someone over whom to have flights of vision. The deconstruction of his persona could only be the breaking of a butterfly upon a wheel.\u00a0That of course is because audiences, even critics, never see stars with the eyes of directors.<\/p>\n
Over the past decade,\u00a0Cruise has subsequently lost all control of his persona, owing to a certain incident on Oprah Winfrey\u2019s couch, an ugly spat with Brooke Shields, and the bizarre and unsavory involvement of the Church of Scientology in his marriage to Katie Holmes and in their child. I am personally disappointed with myself that I can name that child. Although Cruise has continued to be a bankable star, his most telling latter-day role is a cameo in\u00a0Tropic Thunder<\/i>, in which Cruise wears heavy makeup and a fat suit, to perform a vulgar and detestable impression of a studio executive.\u00a0We still like seeing Tom Cruise, the actor, in movies. But we can no longer abide the Tom Cruise persona. He must wear a conceptual fat suit.<\/p>\n
This was not always so. Tom Cruise is billed in\u00a0Eyes Wide Shut\u00a0<\/i>as playing\u00a0Dr. Bill Harford, an Upper West Side practitioner who goes on a nocturnal odyssey of bizarre erotic encounters, but he really is playing Tom Cruise\u2014the same character as\u00a0Jerry Maguire, Charlie Babbitt (Rain Man<\/i>), Vincent Lauria (The Color of Money<\/i>), Maverick (Top Gun<\/i>),\u00a0et al. In all of these roles, he is more or less a con man. What gives this character unlimited dramatic interest is the varying degrees to which he is conning himself and the not-yet-entirely-eradicated line in the sand of personal integrity. For this reason, he works best with a professional argot, a polished routine or script, and the intensely one-upping patter of homosocial domains (the pool hall, the barracks, the locker room). Whenever he departs from this line, as in the\u00a0Mission: Impossible\u00a0<\/i>films, the result is a mirthless misfire.<\/p>\n
Nothing in\u00a0Eyes Wide Shut\u00a0<\/i>happens to Dr. Bill\u2014everything happens to the entire concatenated personal history of the Tom Cruise character. If it was not possible to watch\u00a0Jerry Maguire\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Eyes Wide Shut\u00a0<\/i>simultaneously at Lincoln Center and at BAM, perhaps it is possible to watch them together as mutually illuminating. After all,\u00a0Jerry Maguire\u00a0<\/i>was the last movie Cruise made before collaborating with Kubrick, when he was the biggest star in the world.<\/p>\n
Sports agent Jerry Maguire, in a moment of delirious integrity, gives up the dehumanizing ambitions of his job at a huge, humming corporate firm to take a gamble on himself and his values\u2014only to come up short. He trades the competitive, castrating Kelly Preston, with whom he had standing-up-against-a-wall sex, for the maternal Ren\u00e9e Zellwegger. In the words of Cuba Gooding Jr., Tom Cruise is \u201cshoplifting the pootie\u201d from the single mother, but even that sounds more erotic than their relationship looks. He does\u00a0not\u00a0<\/i>have\u00a0standing-up-against-a-wall sex with Ren\u00e9e Zellwegger.<\/p>\n
In both films, Tom Cruise\u2019s job is to cater to the megarich, subduing his own ego, whether to Sidney Pollack and his shadowy cabal of powerful connections or to Cuba Gooding Jr.\u2019s thirst for outlandish bling. His specialty in both films is that he makes \u201chouse calls,\u201d i.e., he seals the deal with a personal touch and an implication of going out of his way\u00a0for you<\/i>, the patient\/client.<\/p>\n
But in\u00a0Eyes Wide Shut<\/i>, Cruise is not playing\u00a0his<\/i>\u00a0game. He is not only out of his league, outmatched\u2014cinematic cues that he need only gather together his character\u2019s passion and integrity for one final push\u2014he doesn\u2019t know the rules or even the players. After the opening scenes set up the Tom Cruise persona, he spends the rest of the film terrified and off-balance. The culprit? Female desire, Nicole Kidman\u2019s provocative admission that\u2014far from being a domesticated, passionless trophy pledged forever to fidelity by motherhood\u2014she has flights of raw, un-self-regarding lust. Like Anna Karenina (in the book; none of this is conveyed by Keira Knightley\u2019s turn), Kidman is\u00a0seized by desire as by a demonic force. She isn\u2019t \u201cexpressing\u201d her personality by her object choice. There is instead a vertiginous dropping-out of all of her supports and decencies and self-concerns. This isn\u2019t even pleasant to her; it is more a feeling of \u201cI don’t care what happens to me.\u201d We have to assume that she\u00a0has<\/i>\u00a0values\u2014but they are all eclipsed. She literally cannot help herself, in every sense. She tells Cruise of a certain naval officer she had exchanged glances with, \u201cIf he wanted me, even if it was only for one night, I was ready to give up everything. You, our daughter, my whole fucking future, everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
No one says these things to Tom Cruise. You might say that the entire universe of his other films is predicated on the impossibility of these words. In\u00a0The Color of Money\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Rain Man<\/i>, there are fleeting moments of jealousy where his (nearly identical) girlfriends start being unduly interested in Paul Newman or Dustin Hoffman\u2014but not before we are thoroughly apprised that these men (the only non\u2013Tom Cruises on the scene) cannot get it up. In\u00a0Jerry Maguire<\/i>, this role of impotent rival is played by the adorable child actor Jonathan Lipnicki. But neither Kelly Preston nor Ren\u00e9e Zellwegger have other men on the horizon. Don\u2019t be ridiculous.<\/p>\n
So why are these women with Tom Cruise? Straight down the line, Cruise\u2019s early films read as a manual in male insecurity and phallus worship: the jet fighter, the football star, the driver of Lamborghinis, the hustler who can really handle his stick … and the woman\u2019s role is only as a kind of vanishing mediator, who will point him away from these narcissistic substitutes for masculinity and towards his authentic self. In\u00a0Jerry Maguire<\/i>, this means realizing that Kelly Preston is having sex not with him, but with his career. This isn\u2019t her fault, of course\u2014she couldn\u2019t have sex with his inner, postnarcissistic integrity, because this requires the reflected, admiring gaze of a male child. Whereas when Kelly Preston and Tom Cruise have sex, only their dog is watching them.<\/p>\n
In\u00a0Eyes Wide Shut<\/i>, Nicole Kidman\u2019s desire, her pleading for an urge that exists totally outside of the logic of Tom Cruise movies, is the really terrifying power\u2014not the shadowy powers that organized the synthesizer-scored orgy in a Long Island mansion. The interpretive crux of the movie is when Kidman relates a nightmare that she had while he was away (awake) on his night of mystery. It is the identical scenario\u2014in her dream, Tom Cruise is observing an orgy\u2014but with her at its center, getting off with who knows how many people,\u00a0for him to watch\u00a0<\/i>and be humiliated. But notice two things: first, that this is a horrifying nightmare, she wants no part of it; second, that not only is Tom Cruise the \u201cobserver\u201d in the dream itself, but the dream is produced for him as its audience, addressed to him by her unconscious (and then related to him upon waking). She is essentially flinging his own desire (to be a spectator at the orgy) in his face; it has nothing to do with what\u00a0she\u00a0<\/i>wants.<\/p>\n
The orgy itself is probably the least sexy scene in cinema history, surveyed with completely flat affect by a crowd of masked onlookers. It has been ruined for him in advance by his wife\u2019s challenge earlier that night\u2014it may even be that he \u201cstands out\u201d as not belonging to the company by virtue of this disenchantment. What is certain is that the necessary element for Tom Cruise to get off\u2014the confirmation of a male viewpoint (to give yet another example, think of the split role performed by Anthony Edwards and Val Kilmer in\u00a0Top Gun<\/i>)\u2014that a woman\u2019s touch is then called forth to dissipate and reorient, is nowhere present here. In fact, there is no man in the movie who could even play this role: Nicole Kidman is only approached by\u00a0Sidney Pollack\u2019s\u00a0friend, while Tom Cruise\u2019s piano player friend is de-eroticized by unfortunate facial hair.<\/p>\n
Before its release,\u00a0Eyes Wide Shut\u00a0<\/i>was promoted as \u201cthe sexiest movie of all time.\u201d The reverse is probably true. The entire movie is a calculated denial of the sort of sex scene that we find in\u00a0Top Gun\u00a0<\/i>(scored to \u201cTake My Breath Away\u201d). It is almost a running joke that Tom Cruise doesn\u2019t\u00a0ever have sex, in scene after scene of orgies and women throwing themselves at him. And the second that Nicole Kidman tells him that they need to go home right away to do something important\u2014to do what? \u201cFuck.\u201d\u2014then the movie has to end right there. Because Kubrick by then has accomplished the incredible: you\u00a0do not want<\/i>\u00a0to see the most famous couple in the world have sex.<\/p>\n