A fundraising boss of mine once defined the Rich to me:  There are the Wealthy, she said, and then there are the Immensely Wealthy.  And the most telling moment in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut illustrates just that.  That’s at the end, when Tom Cruise, a merely Wealthy doctor, is told by Sydney Pollack, his Immensely Wealthy patient, that all the ‘right’ people arrived at a fabulously decadent Christmas-time orgy in limousines—all but Cruise.  Who came in—a taxi.  So of course, sneers Pollack, his crowd all knew Cruise didn’t ‘belong.’

Just whatta ya gotta do in this world to make it to the A-List?

I’ve read several interpretations on Eyes Wide Shut (sex; masculinity; Illuminati!), but one I’ve not seen is on Class—and on a specific kind of class envy.  The film’s an amusingly cynical look at the gradations of wealth among very well-to-do New Yorkers, a small, select world riven by its own class structures and class consciousness.  Cruise’s multi-room Central Park West apartment, for example, has nothing on Pollack’s vast Fifth Avenue mansion, as cavernous as Grand Central Station and as gussied-up as Bloomingdales.  By such elitist demarcations is it determined who gains entry to the above-mentioned swanky saturnalia, where all the men huddle in robes and masks, like supernumeraries in the Don Giovanni ballroom scene, and all the women (all young, fit, and gorgeous) stroll around in their birthday suits, like extra-beautiful extras in a porn flick.  The rich, as Fitzgerald supposedly said to Hemingway, are different from Us.  To which Hemingway might have replied, Yes, they get to attend the world’s most boring bacchanal.

That’s what $100 billion-plus-change gets you.  Barenaked ladies and boredom.

One other take on EWS is that, along with its masks, orgies, wrapped men, and unwrapped women, it’s also a Christmas movie. As this article in Little White Lies notes, nearly every scene is rife with Christmas décor, Christmas lights, and Christmas presents.  Especially at Pollack’s eye-poppingly posh holiday party, almost a throwback to those compensatingly lavish sets of 1930s depression-America cinema.  It’s one of the few American movies that depicts Christmas as the insanely commercial enterprise it’s become; its final scene takes place in a high-end toy store where the lead couple search for pricey gifts amid shoppifying chaos.  Nothing says Christmas like blowing your bank roll at year’s end.

You could say these two themes—excessive wealth and excessive Christmasing—are linked, looping like garlands of holly in, out, and around the film’s displays of All That Money Can Buy.  Although a fashionable doctor, Cruise’s medical practice must include making “house calls” on Pollack (something, we sense, he doesn’t do for everybody) to insure he’ll receive his annual invitation to the latter’s extravagant Xmas blowout.  Just whatta ya gotta do to get asked to a party nowadays?  It’s at this ritzy fête that Cruise meets a former friend who’s come down in the world, to the extent he’s supporting himself and his family by playing gig piano at nightclubs and fancy soirees (his voice drops when he admits he now lives in…Seattle.  Location, location, location).  And it’s from this pianist that the doctor will learn of a hidden world of exclusive, upper-crust orgies, staffed by exclusively gorgeous ladies, that only the excessively privileged few can access.

The film is based on a 1926 Arthur Schnitzler novella, Traumnovelle (“Dream Story”), which Kubrick and co-screenwriter Frederick Raphael’s adaptation follows surprisingly closely.  Aside from updating the story from turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna to turn-of-the-21st-century New York, and shifting the holiday from Carnival to Christmas, the movie charts Schnitzler’s narrative almost incident by incident.  In the film, after the doctor, Bill (Cruise), and his wife (Nicole Kidman) attend Ziegler’s (Pollack) Christmas party, she tells him of a vivid sexual fantasy she once had about a young naval officer she had glimpsed in a hotel, experiencing such sudden lust that she would have gladly left her spouse, child, and domestic life for one bout of lovemaking with this barely seen stranger.  Stirred into both anger and jealousy by his wife’s confession, Bill heads out on a dreamlike night journey, taking him from a just-died patient’s expensive deathbed, to a hooker’s dingy Greenwich Village flat, to a half-empty nightclub (where the pianist reveals the orgy’s whereabouts), to a midnight call on a dubious costume shop (to rent a robe), to the orgy’s castellated Long Island manor, which looks oddly like Hill House (of The Haunting fame), and finally, the next day, to a morgue.

The obvious theme running throughout is the linking of Sex and Death:  The deceased patient’s daughter declares (right by her dead father’s bed) her overwhelming passion for the doctor; the prostitute Bill (platonically) visits turns out to be HIV-positive; the orgy’s masked attendants menace him with vague threats before throwing him out.  The physician also discovers a concealed world of unsavory, forbidden desires, such as the costume shop owner offering his ripely underage daughter as an extra ‘service’ to customers, and the orgiasts’ robotic screwing before other attendees’ jaded eyes.  Through it all, Bill is lashed by his own inchoate cravings to experience adventures, sexual or otherwise, that would, as it were, revenge himself on his wife for her revelation of another hidden world—of her fantasized lust and her willingness to abandon him to fulfil it.

Kubrick’s changing the story’s holiday from Carnival to Christmas also changes its meaning (spoilers ahead).  In Schnitzler’s narrative, the anonymous woman at the orgy who offers herself as ransom for the protagonist’s ‘sin’ of curiosity could be a Christ figure, taking on the burden of the doctor’s transgression; that Carnival (i.e., Mardi Gras) is followed by Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent, culminating in Good Friday and Easter, only reifies this meaning of the mystery of Christian resurrection and redemption (with the doctor released and eventually reconciled with his wife).  The orgy itself, ironically, could be a degraded religious mystery ceremony, entry granted only to select initiates seeking a debauched transcendence, the revelation of which is barred to outsiders.

But the Christmas setting, particularly the consumerist Christmas as celebrated in America, shifts the slant.  Rather than wanting secret knowledge (as in religious mysteries), Bill wants what the super-rich have.  Conspicuous consumption is also a kind of ‘orgy,’ and here it means Beautiful Women—women the doctor may look at but not possess (“such women!” as the yearning pianist exclaims).  The film is saturated with beautiful nude female bodies, starting with its first scene of Kidman dropping her dress off her slim, perfectly shaped torso to reveal her trim, naked backside to the audience.  Although Bill claims he can, in his professional capacity, look at naked ladies without desire, he also, in such capacity, is denied them.  In a scene not in the novella, Ziegler summons Bill to attend to a beautiful naked woman who overdosed at his plush party; when Bill enters the (fabulous) bathroom where the woman is, Ziegler’s also there, pulling on his trousers.  Bill can ‘have’ the woman only in a medical sense, whereas Ziegler, it’s implied, gets to have her in other ways.  Being really rich really does grant privilege.

If there is a Mystery to which Bill seeks an answer, it’s that of his wife, and her fantasy of sex with a nameless man, visions of which constantly disrupt Bill’s waking thoughts.  His wish to discover this ‘why’ (as well as to contain these disruptions) goads him on his odyssey of Fear and Desire (coincidentally, the title of Kubrick’s first film), and to penetrate that erotic Long Island wonderland filled with “such women” as he’s never seen.  All the other women Bill meets that night, who all throw themselves at him with carnal abandon, could be stand-ins for his wife, fantasized projections of her own desirability to him.  In the movie’s context, however, his (and her) coming to terms with their wayward desires (ending on the film’s famous last word, “Fuck”), concludes not in domestic privacy (as in the novella) but in the toy store, amid throngs of frantic shoppers and shelves of toys (Kidman, reading the price tag on one stuffed item, demurs when her small daughter asks for it).  Desire, when ordered and contained, is to be kept under wraps, like an unopened present.  Except for consumer consumption.

The film’s one other major addition not in Schnitzler is a Revelation scene.  Near the end, when once again summoned to Ziegler’s immense (seemingly unending) mansion, Bill learns that Ziegler was at the orgy, that ‘they’ all knew who Bill was (the taxi and costume-shop receipt giving away his non-elite credentials), and that Bill should not be sticking his blunt nose into where it doesn’t belong.  Ziegler further assures(!) Bill that the threats, the unknown woman’s sacrifice, even the talkative pianist’s abduction by two burly men, were all fake, staged to “scare the living shit out of you.”  “That little cocksucker” fumes Ziegler (meaning the pianist) “made me look like a complete asshole.”  As to who were the orgiasts—“Those were not ordinary people,” says Ziegler, but declines to say more (Davos conferees? Illuminati elect? More assholes?).  So Bill is sent on his way, with some questions answered, some secrets disclosed, but Access still denied.  At least he can finish his Christmas shopping.  No one will interfere with that.

This room is bigger than my apartment.  Dang.

I first saw EWS long before I had read the Schnitzler story; and the penultimate scene at Ziegler’s residence then seemed to make sense—clearing up those WTF? questions about the orgy, its attendees, even hinting as to who were its, uh, organizers.  Now that I’ve read the Schnitzler original, Kubrick’s added scene seems extraneous.  No Ziegler character or explanation is in the novella; the doctor receives only a note warning him off, he never finds out who the sacrificial woman is, and that’s how it should end—as a mystery, an Unanswered Question.  Were the events real or a dream?  We don’t know and don’t need to.  The mystery is its own answer.

One can argue, of course, that, this being Kubrick, this Ziegler scene is not so straightforward:  That everything Ziegler says may be a lie, that real deaths may have happened, that the doctor’s life may be in danger.  But what the Ziegler scene affirms is that the costume-party orgy did happen—no ambiguity there.  Everything’s tied up with a big (Christmas) bow round it, and we can go back to our shopping.  Literally.

And the Ziegler scene is no throwaway.  Nearly 15 minutes long (supposedly, per IMDB, it took 200 takes and three weeks to film), it’s ponderous, emphatic, slow-paced (as is the entire film); my, but it must have Meaning.  I had my own fantasy about this scene, as to what it would be like if another director had filmed it.  Had Hawks done it, it would be fast and funny; had Lubitsch, it would be light and witty; had Hitchcock, it really would be a throwaway, like the Simon Oakland vignette at the end of Psycho—a sop, a quick wrap-up, a MacGuffin to audiences and critics wanting an Answer.  But Kubrick, and his ponderosity, mean to tell us Something, a message, a moral, a—revelation.

And that is:  Splurge on the limo.  Cabs are so middle-class.

Somehow, that seems perversely apt for this wayward year of 2023.

Merry Christmas.

You can buy or rent Eyes Wide Shut on YouTube here.  Rated R; perfect viewing with the roasting chestnuts and eggnog.

You can read Arthur Schnitzler’s novella “Dream Story” (Traumnovelle) in English on the Internet Archive.  It’s about 100 pages long (log-in required).