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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dive DEEP into Stanley Kubrick's last film starring then husband and wife Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. While Jared explores the socioeconomic statements and cultural impact this movie had, Nick focuses on the filmmaking and structure, making for a fascinating discussion on an indelible film.
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Hello, everybody, and a happy holiday to you from the Muckrake Podcast.
Thank you, as always, for supporting the show.
You are the absolute best audience out there.
Anybody who comes on the show absolutely says it.
Nick, I know you share it.
I know that you're full of holiday spirit as we begin to take on one of everybody's favorite Christmas movies, the Yuletide classic, Eyes Wide Shut.
I was thinking about this because you had characterized that in the last time.
What did I miss?
I was frantically taking notes, I'm watching this movie carefully, but I don't think I recognized anything Christmas-y specifically.
Did I?
You didn't see Christmas trees and lights?
Oh yeah, right, it's a Christmas party in the very beginning.
It's a Christmas... technically, the funniest thing about this is we have chosen a movie that tangentially takes place during Christmas.
Yes.
But, and you know what?
Now that I'm even saying this, I'm thinking of ways to explain how that is relevant to this entire conversation.
But there's a whole lot, there's a whole lot to it.
All right, because I mean, I could be thinking the lights, it could be like New Year's Eve party, maybe, because you know what I need?
I need someone wearing a Santa hat if it's to be Christmas.
Maybe that's... I think if somebody in Eyes Wide Shut wore a Santa hat, it would be 10% to 20% more disturbing.
I think I would like it better, though.
You know, that's probably what makes something like Die Hard a Christmas movie for me, because someone's simply wearing a Santa's hat.
Now, Die Hard is a dyed-in-the-wool Christmas movie.
I mean, it's taking place at a Christmas party.
It's great.
But that's a hot take still, believe it or not.
But I'm in it with you for that one.
Absolutely a Christmas hit.
I want to point out, before we get into this, that Nick was the one who originally said we should do Eyes Wide Shut.
I don't know where that came from.
Oh, absolutely, you were the one who did it.
What?
You were the one who suggested Eyes Wide Shut.
I don't know why it happened, but I remember you bringing it up.
Before we get into our takes, how we feel about it, going through the movie and talking about the political, socioeconomic, and historical aspects of this, and it is chock-full of it.
There is a lot to talk about about what is happening in this movie in order to understand politics and history.
Just a little bit of background of this for people who haven't seen it.
By the way, if you're listening to this, the preview, go over to patreon.com.com.com.com.
Yeah, come come join us and enjoy.
We'll have our own little twisted holiday party.
Eyes Wide Shut was released in 1999.
It is based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella, Dream Story, and it is most famous For a couple things.
One, it involves a couple at the time, one of the most famous couples of the 90s and late 90s, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman acting in the movie as a married couple.
Never good, by the way, to have an actual couple on screen acting as a couple.
It's upsetting for a variety of reasons, which we'll get to, but it is most famous For being Stanley Kubrick's last movie before he died.
The cut that everybody sees was finished a couple of weeks before he died.
There's a lot of debate about whether or not it was finished, what it says about his legacy, where it sits in his legacy.
But one of the greatest movie directors of all time, bar none, no argument about it, This was his final movie and it deserves consideration and it deserves discussion and I'm sure we're going to have a lot to talk about.
Yes, in fact, it was interesting because I did see some research where he had considered, you know, he wanted a real married couple to be this way, and in fact, there's not many you can choose from, right?
It's not an easy casting job to do.
I think Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger were the other couple they were considering, which would have certainly made this a little bit of a different movie, but I certainly might have bought Alec Baldwin as a doctor more than, better than I did Tom Cruise as a doctor for some strange reason.
Wow, already coming after Tom Cruise's performance in this movie.
You know, listen, the guy really tried.
He was in it to win it.
There was no question.
I think Tom Cruise has an incredible ability to look at something that he doesn't understand and just stare at it.
That is one of his moves.
We've talked about it before.
Actors and actresses have, like, patented moves and moods.
And one of Tom Cruise's major moves is to look at something and just let it wash over him.
And he does that throughout this entire movie.
And I think in that way, that's successful.
Well, I've always talked about how, to be a successful actor, you need to master a couple of things, technique-wise.
One of them is that look of something that's far away in the distance, that you have horror on your... No, it has to go from blank to horror, right?
You have to be able to master that expression, that morphing of the expression.
And there's no question, he's got that and more, like what you were talking about, the gazes and the looks off-screen.
That's magnetism, there's no question.
The Tom Cruise move is actually, like, really, really patentable.
It's him staring at something, not knowing how to feel about it, and then breaking out into, like, a movie star grim.
And it can be used for a variety of different things, right?
It can be, like, him being charming.
It can be him being befuddled.
It's a really remarkable thing, and he does that throughout this entire movie.
And for those who haven't seen it, We'll go through very quickly what is actually happening in this movie, what the plot of it is, and we'll sort of deal with it.
There's a lot going on in this movie.
It is not a comfortable movie.
It is not a holiday classic, as I've been joking.
It's a psychological drama that includes a lot of playing around with insecurities, curiosity, human sexuality, relationships.
Monogamy, you name it.
It is a complex, layered movie just for anybody who wants to know what they're getting into.
In it, Tom Cruise is a doctor who is married to Nicole Kidman.
There are several scenes in which they're sort of talking to one another.
We'll get into that.
And they find their marriage and their relationship changing.
And Tom Cruise is How do I put this, Nick?
He goes out for a journey into a different world.
He encounters a lot of different things that involve sexuality, romance, finding himself, and he ends up at a sex party with the powerful elites in a mansion out in the middle of nowhere, which we will definitely get into.
You know, I love the idea of using a text like maybe Dante's Inferno, for instance, as a template for a movie.
It feels a lot like Dante's Inferno, for sure.
Okay, because here's the thing.
If you've ever seen the movie After Hours, Griffin Dunn's Scorsese film, that literally is Dante's Inferno.
I don't even know if anyone really even knows this, but there's a lot of subtle clues that maybe we'll do that one day.
And that really appeals to me.
But this one, it didn't seem clever enough if that was what they were really trying to evoke, in a way, that made me like, oh yeah, that's really, really cool near the Easter eggs I'm seeing.
I was having trouble with that, I think, overall.
But I do want to actually even comment, separate from that, is I saw the movie in 1999 in the theater, before I was married, right?
And it's interesting to sort of watch it again, maybe probably for the first time since then, now, you know?
And so their lives that we see, Nicole Kim and Tom Cruise's lives, are sort of in between where I am now and where I was when I watched the movie, right?
And it is fascinating, maybe we can explore it for a second, just how much different movies do feel to you, depending on where you are in your life, and how that might resonate or not resonate, or maybe, you know, make more sense.
So I wonder if it made more sense to me as a younger person and a little bit less sense this time around.
Well, I think, first of all, Those types of texts are very telling, and I actually think there's something to say about Rorschach-like texts that change as you get older.
Catcher in the Rye is one of those.
Like, one of the most famous ones.
You read Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, and you hate the world, and you are right there with Holden Caulfield, and you're like, the world is bullshit and it's full of phonies.
You read it later on.
The last time I read it, I want to say it was four years ago, I was an adult, and I was like, someone help this guy.
You know what I mean?
Like, he has been absolutely let down by every adult in every institution in his life.
Somebody needs to help him, right?
That is an interesting thing, and I will say Eyes wide shut and I've watched it.
I bet this was probably my somewhere in the area of 10th or 11th time watching it because it feels Kubrick's movies.
And this is one of the reasons I like them quite a bit.
They reward repeated viewings.
You know what I mean?
Like you notice new things and as you get older, like you said, I think they reveal certain things about yourself.
Like, there are moments where Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are talking about their marriage, talking about their relationship, or talking about sex.
I didn't understand that when I was, let me see, 99?
I would have been 18 when... 17!
I would have been 17 when this came out.
I probably didn't see it until I was 19 or 20.
I didn't know anything about relationships or communication or sex or intimacy.
And now I watch it and I'm like, oh, I kind of see what's happening here in certain places that I didn't appreciate in the past.
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