The only ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ scene Stanley Kubrick didn’t approve: “Which was stupid”
Discussions with your film-loving friends about the best Stanley Kubrick movie can often end in tense disagreement. For me, it’s always going to be 2001: A Space Odyssey, despite my usual aversion to science-fiction. Yet, the film’s epic analysis of humanity will never not take my breath away, no matter how many times I watch it.
For my best friend, it’s the dark comedy of Dr Strangelove that he believes to be Kubrick’s masterpiece, and for another friend, Barry Lyndon represents the ultimate scope of the director’s achievements. There’s no definitive answer, of course, but you might cause considerable controversy if you say Eyes Wide Shut – Kubrick’s final film.
Perhaps you’ll be accused of having perverted taste. Perhaps people just don’t understand the many layers of meaning behind Kubrick’s final stroke of genius. The thing is, the filmmaker actually died before the film was ready for release, leaving his family and the studio to make the final adjustments before it was able to be distributed. Thus, can the film ever be called Kubrick’s masterpiece if he didn’t make some of the creative decisions himself?
Eyes Wide Shut is a compelling film, featuring the then-married couple Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise as Alice and Bill, a couple whose relationship becomes strained with dreams of infidelity bubbling to the surface. Cruise’s Bill wanders off into the night and discovers a mysterious masked orgy – which is certainly not something you stumble upon every day – but in Kubrick’s world, anything’s possible.
Fulfilment, jealousy, gender roles, and the inherent corruption and breakdown of social order so often associated with sex are explored through Kubrick’s astute lens, and you’d be lying if you said that Eyes Wide Shut wasn’t a terrific final movie for the director to bow out on.
Just a few days after Kubrick sent a cut of the film to Warner Bros, he tragically passed away, although rumours circulated suggesting that this was the finished version of Eyes Wide Shut. In fact, various edits were still yet to be made, predominantly to appease censors who were concerned about the masked orgy sequence and how it would affect the film’s age rating.
The scene is a core moment in the film, with Bill coming face-to-face (or mask-to-mask) with the city’s elites as they engage in a seemingly Satanic ritual. The masks that the characters wear are heavily inspired by classic Greek theatre, with the identities of the orgy-goers concealed from each other in a way that feels truly terrifying. Who is Bill standing among?
With Kubrick’s death leaving the orgy scene unfinished, his widow, Christiane Kubrick, helped to make the scene suitable for release. In an interview with Artur Piskorz, she explained, “We had to do the music and deal with the advertising. We had one censorship thing—the orgy. We superimposed some images, blocking the objectionable fornication. Which was stupid, because it was meant to be shocking.”
Christiane wasn’t happy with the demands to make the scene less explicit, but sometimes the studio has the final say, and with Kubrick no longer around, she had little choice in the final version of the film. “Stanley wanted it to look like a cliché of a Roman orgy. And the only orgies that we are allowed to hear about are what the Romans did, which was something to do with eating grapes, drinking wine and somehow having no furniture and lying on the floor. And that was the point, despite people complaining it was a cliché.”
Did the scene turn out how Kubrick would’ve wanted it? Absolutely not. Yet, that orgy scene has certainly haunted many viewers since the film’s release in 1999. Who can forget that terrifying soundtrack?
