Back in 1999, audiences weren’t sure what to make of Eyes Wide Shut.
What would be Stanley Kubrick’s final film (the directing giant died just six days after screening his first cut for Warner Bros. and the film’s stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman) revolved around a secret society of powerful figures in New York City who took part in sex rituals with prostitutes.
When an interloper stumbles into their affairs in the form of Cruise’s character, Dr. Bill Harford, disturbing things begin to happen. A piano player goes missing. A sex worker dies of a conveniently timed drug overdose. And a creepy mask appears on a pillow beside Bill’s sleeping wife, Alice, played by Cruise’s then-wife Kidman.
The premise, many felt, seemed far-fetched.
Decades later, the film has grown exponentially in influence, admiration and, yes, plausibility, as the Jeffrey Epstein saga has shown that such a scenario is no stranger than Kubrick’s unsettling fiction.
“There’s so many conspiracy theories out there now, it’s hard to know what’s to be believed and what isn’t,” Eyes Wide Shut director of photography Larry Smith said of the film’s evocation of the Epstein case on the It Happened in Hollywood podcast. Smith oversaw a dazzling restoration of the film for Criterion Collection.
“But,” Smith continued, “I think we’re intelligent enough to understand just how the cards are stacked, aren’t we?”
Indeed, what Kubrick captures is a world where someone like Jeffrey Epstein becomes almost inevitable: a dark nexus of money, secrecy, impunity and male sexual desire warped by institutional power.
Epstein’s victims were not unlike the girls at the masked orgy, including the mysterious woman who warns Bill, “I don’t think you realize the danger you’re in now.” They are economically vulnerable young women viewed as disposable by the powerful men who made up his illicit social network.
Like the orgy sequence that turns sex trafficking into a highly aestheticized ritual, Epstein relied on the trappings of extreme wealth (private jets, private islands, private massage services) to window dress his own crimes. The ring became an open secret; those who attempted to expose it were intimidated into silence. All of that occurs in Eyes Wide Shut.
Kubrick’s film was as much an exploration of psychosexual marital dynamics as it was an indictment of unchecked power. It was his great genius that the film would so presciently capture the zeitgeist a quarter-century later.
For more on the making of Eyes Wide Shut from cinematographer Larry Smith, listen to the full episode of It Happened in Hollywood.
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