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Eyes Wide Shut: Hidden in Plain Sight

Eyes Wide Shut is the last work of legendary movie director Stanley Kubrick, and like many of his films it contains layers of meaning not easily deciphered or understood on first viewing. Released in 1999 to mixed responses, Eyes Wide Shut has since garnered considerable interest and has come to be

Perhaps Eyes Wide Shut is many things at once; a disturbing satire, scathing indictment of the grotesquely wealthy and those with sleazy bourgeois values who seek to be like them, a fantasy story, and a sincere, thoughtful study of marriage, sex, and class, how these subjects relate to human perception and emotion, and the often unseen or imagined forces that drive us all. The movie in fact touches on many works of art, genres, and subjects that span thousands of years, including: the ancient myths Helen of Troy and The Tale of Cupid and Psyche, Beethoven's opera Fidelio, the 19th-century ballet Giselle, John Milton's 17th-century masque Comus, and classic children's fantasy stories such as L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Lewis Carroll's Alicein Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learned from our study of the dreamwork and of course the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego…It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.

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