Following that, he goes to a jazz bar and meets with Nick Nightingale, his old friend, to learn that he is playing at a secret location that night, blindfolded. As it turns out, understanding the meaning behind all of those masks might unlock the secret to understanding the entire movie. Of it, Kubrick told Playboy: It’s not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. Tom Cruise's character Bill Harford in Eyes Wide Shut has many similarities with the historical role of the plague doctor, another key to understanding the meaning of the film. However, his world quickly comes crashing down once his wife confesses of her thoughts of infidelity with other men to his face, while being offended by his outlook of women’s natural inclination towards fidelity and docility.

At this point, I would like to go back to what I quoted from the film above. Child sex slavery, rape, drug overdoses, money can be used to buy everything. How uncoincidental still that Helena happens also to be the name of the Greek goddess of beauty.
Remember, absolutely nothing in this film will have been left to chance – everything is painstakingly nuanced to paint the precise picture Kubrick was getting at.

Thus the partygoers don the cloak and mask costume. Back home, he finds a sleeping Alice with the mask that he rented lying on the pillow beside her, seeing which he breaks down into tears and vows to tell Alice all of his misadventures from the past two days. Why did Jon Snow die? In that, eyes wide shut would mean a degree of knowingness, a kind of self-awareness of a certain sequence of events, and despite that, choosing to remain oblivious of it. This again could be considered symbolic of Kubrick using the film as his own mask through which he is able to say much more than would be otherwise possible. I like cats and Danzig.

Who made the Coke ad? The Presence of Absence & the Absence of Presence: War & The Holocaust, Tiger in a Tropical Storm: Life of Pi Meaning, Analysis, Movie Symbolism, Paint it Black Meaning: Rolling Stones' Song Lyrics Interpretation & Analysis, Dreamcatcher Meaning: History, Legend & Origins of Dream Catchers. – Introducing Sociology A Review of Eyes Wide Shut by Tim Kreider. In one painful example, for just one minute of final footage where Alice makes love to a naval officer, Kubrick demanded that Kidman shoot six days of naked sex scenes with a male model. It seems to be a contradiction. In scenes that Warner Bros now refuses to release, the director apparently expounded at some length on the existence of actual cults. However, before that, I think it is imperative to explore the two primary characters that inhabit Kubrick’s film: Bill and Alice. What is the meaning of the song "Paint it Black" by the Rolling Stones? Even though they never explicitly cheated on each other, we very well know that they were there. Like a plague doctor, Bill Harford is a physician who throughout the film makes house calls to treat his sick and dying patients. One might be all too naïve to consider that their marriage was lacking the energy of their yesteryears after years of domestication, the desire for which manifested in Alice through her dreams and fantasies; we all know relationships to be far more complex than that. Harford's problematic sympathy for these damsels in distress contributes to his mask being ceremoniously removed at the end of the masquerade party and may have indirectly led to the death of the mystery woman who helped him earlier in the evening. Charged as his last film is with symbolic references to death, we should not overlook the fact that in all of Kubrick’s films fear of dying is a constant presence and an apparent mirror image of his obsession with control. Seeing as though how clearly and profusely Kubrick expresses that “no dreams are just dreams”, especially in the context of this film, these represent desire for Alice. It is ludicrous to assume that a cloak and mask costume, no matter how ornate and expensive, can protect or immunize an upperclass member of society from coming into contact with the "contagions" of the lower class, either today or during the medieval period. He even sort of handled the wardrobe — for all his dressing low-key, Stanley actually loved clothes. Instead of knowing what he wanted on the set, he waited for the actors to seize upon it themselves, his intent being to film scenes so many times that it would wear down his actors and they’d forget the cameras existed. During the course of shooting Eyes Wide Shut, the director filmed 95 takes of Tom Cruise walking through a door. Kubrick wanted it to be kept that way because it was never about the cult.

After going to great lengths to rent a tux, costume, and a Venetian mask to get into the event, he does so, only to realise that the event was a kind of sex ritual, where cultists of some sort gathered and indulged in orgies in an almost spiritual manner.