Nine: Alice dreaming

Kubrick inceptions his audience

Two masks

Welcome to the fourth movement, the fifth act, the crown and king’s road of our epic December series on your new fave Christmas movie. In the closing posts we’ll be tackling filthy lucre among other filths, those bosom bodies Eros and Thanatos, and the annual festival of heteronormativity. But today we plunge into the Land of Nod. Before you take your sleeping pills, and if you’re new here, you might wanna start with the first post.

The film’s episodes in their night-day pattern of arousal and petite-mort are not the whole story of Eyes Wide Shut. Neither is the fact that the episodes in the first half of the film all get curtailed. Had that been the story, the film would’ve been more like a sex comedy, in which a hapless horny man is forever cockblocked by the universe.[1]

Instead the film’s presiding spirit reveals itself when Bill gets back home from his misadventures to find Alice laughing in her sleep over a dream, which on waking she tells him in tears.

Over the film’s opening titles and montage we heard a waltz till it was silenced by Bill turning off his stereo: as well as on the motion-picture score it’d been playing in his apartment, i.e. it was ‘diegetic sound’. So too Alice’s dream happens in the world of the story, but its central, anguished place in the film sends…