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As Raphael later recalled in an essay forThe New Yorker, he was initially skeptical.
I dont think so.
Raphael thought about it.
Then he said, Neither do I.
The film they eventually collaborated on,Eyes Wide Shut, came out twenty years ago to mixed reviews.
One of the most consistent complaints about it was that its attitude toward sex seemed badly dated.
Relations between men and women, in other words, had in fact changed a lot.
But had they really?
MyEyes Wide Shutaddiction first took hold in the spring of 2016.
I was working on a novel and rarely left my apartment.
The book that I was writing was a sort of fairytale, and so was the film.
What critics saw as dated, I saw as timeless.
And then theres Tom Cruises character, the amazingly naive Dr. Bill Harford.
And to critics, that registered asbizarrely unrealistic.
Its nice.The President was getting head in the Oval Office.
Could any man really be as innocent as Dr. Harford?
By then, #MeToo was in full swing, and a lot of men had been named.
It was the him too?
of it all the fact that so many of the men I knew were so shocked by the revelations.
I knew that Dr. Harford would be shocked, too.
Was it because they were afraid of what might happen if theyd kept their eyes wide open?
Complicity is what Harford seeks: Hes desperate to be on the inside.
Who are these women, and why are they there?
They have supermodel bodies, and we can infer that theyve been hired to do a job.
But thats about all we know.
Later, her body turns up in the morgue.
The truth, he insists, isnt nearly so romantic.
She was a junkie!
The men at the party were not just ordinary people, he warns.
If I told you their names […] I dont think youd sleep so well.
Harford doesnt press him for those names or any other details.
He doesnt want to know.
We were all Dr. Harford.
And by that light,Eyes Wide Shutdoesnt seem quaint; it seems prescient.
And what do they have?
A domestic partnership built on her husbands ignorance of her desires.
She, too, is choosing complacency.
Her marriage depends on it.
And thats Kubricks point.
As long as men choose ignorance, and women accept it, the relations between them will never change.
Kubrick, the most controlling and precise of directors, knew exactly what he was doing.
