Straight Panic: an Eyes Wide Shut Christmas

You better watch out. You better not cry.

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here)

It’s not only because the most annoying people in the world have had their fun with Die Hard that Eyes Wide Shut is next to get touted as a Christmas movie. Neither has the film finagled its way into that category by just happening to be set at Christmas, set-decorated with tinsel. Eyes Wide Shut is a Christmas ghost story by way of the spirits of the unconscious. And like Charles Dickens’s most famous one it has an old-fashioned warning to make.

Ever since Eyes Wide Shut came out in September 1999 its reception has been, for better or worse, coloured by Stanley Kubrick’s death six months earlier. To its admirers the film is a fitting swansong; to those not impressed the question remains open whether perfectionist Kubrick could’ve pulled off the film better had he lived long enough to give it his finishing touch. Not least by making the film less uneven and episodic, a common criticism back then and now.

It’s always been wrong. Throughout his career Kubrick fitted together the parts of his films via pairings: parallels, contrasts, inversions. The reason Full Metal Jacket comes in distinct halves isn’t so we all prefer the first to the second but…