A poignant exploration of sexuality and eroticism, an opus focused on masquerade and the difference between reality and the unconscious, a collaboration of theoretical film-making at its best and two of the biggest stars in Hollywood: Eyes Wide Shut is the feminist film-theorist's dream-come-true. By self-consciously employing the "male gaze" as a device central to both the narrative and philosophical meanings of the film, Stanley Kubrick demonstrates in Eyes Wide Shut the very lengths to which this staple of feminist criticism is both applicable to Hollywood film and capable of being embraced, analyzed and, ultimately, questioned and subverted by complex film-making. Bringing into question the very relation between psychology and sexuality, Eyes Wide Shut exploits the cinematic gaze to perfection, essentially refracting it-through masquerade, moral and sexual ambiguity, generic manipulation, and grotesque spectacle-to include the gaze of various gender- and sexually-orientated points of view. Initially appearing to perfect and even to romanticize the "male gaze," only to overthrow its psychological and social association through formal and narrative subversion, Eyes Wide Shut suggests just how profoundly malleable (and, in many ways, superficially valid) were the first concepts and issues surrounding feminist film theory and its application to Hollywood cinema.

Perhaps the most extended fundamental concept of feminist film criticism, the "male gaze" was coined by Laura Mulvey in her groundbreaking essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1) to describe the underlying patriarchal domination of Hollywood and its consequent division of representation by sex, through which popular American cinema has served as a bastion for the social status quo and a subtle vessel for dominant patriarchal ideology. Essentially, the "male gaze" achieves for Mulvey a visual-based metaphor (both cause and result) for the systematic oppression of women in Classical cinema. Referring to the representation of women before the camera (and, subsequently, the male spectator), as well as to the representation of male-female relations in film narrative, Mulvey's "male gaze" works on a multitude of levels, each of which is accentuated-though, frequently, only to be subverted-by Stanley Kubrick's last film.

First is the level of the cinematic apparatus itself. Based on Freud's theory of the objectifying gaze, Mulvey derives the application of "scopophilia" (i.e. looking as a source of pleasure in and of itself) to the representation of women in cinema. As men traditionally held the means of production in film (as in every other capitalist industry), Mulvey argues that the representation of women has been derived from the pleasure of looking at them, which coincides with the representation of women's desire to be visually objectified ("to-be-looked-at-ness" (837)). Based on the fascination of sexual difference, this looking ("gaze") presents a threat to the dominant patriarchy that the male psychology solves in one of two ways: either through investigation, such as is the generic manifestation in film noir, or through fetishization, or pure objectification. (840) In one of these ways the male psychology deflects the threat of female otherness; in one of these ways, Hollywood traditionally presents male-female relations. Both of these essential facets of the "male gaze" are abundant in Eyes Wide Shut; however, this is no longer Classical Hollywood, and Eyes Wide Shut succeeds at progressive film-making because it removes the conditioning sexual orientation of the gaze itself.

Investigation-which Mulvey suggests is necessary for subsequent devaluation of the object (i.e. the woman)-is the fundamental narrative catalyst for Eyes Wide Shut, and its disturbing results are crucial in subverting the traditional "male gaze." Basically a nymphomaniac film noir, Eyes Wide Shut centers on Dr. Bill Hartford (Tom Cruise), whose investigative interests lead him to discover nothing save for his own meagerness, his own inability to reduce humans to objects and his impotence in an environment of such extreme sexualization. Bill's role as the source of narrative thrust both initially supports and ultimately subverts Mulvey's analysis (as well as subsequent analyses based on Mulvey's work), of the male protagonist and star as narrative manifestation and source of the "male gaze." Mary Ann Doane furthered the argument of patriarchal cinema by looking at the traditional domination of male subjectivity; moreover, as Jackie Stacey extends Mulvey's argument in "Desperately Seeking Difference," (2) the character that runs the narrative-traditionally a man-crucially defines the spectator's mode of identification and objectivity.(366) However, an essential generic aspect of the film noir that Mulvey appears to have overlooked is the chaotic world of the (almost always male) protagonist-in film noir, the protagonist is merely a pawn in an uncontrollable context. While Bill is the film's "protagonist," his inability to reach the goal of investigation symbolizes his incompetence, thus rendering him in a sense castrated (to use the parlance of our times) and subverting the traditional male-driven narrative.

Alternately to investigation is the option of fetishization: from the very opening, Eyes Wide Shut promises to be very much focused on the role of the "gaze" and its inherent objectification and fetishization, especially of the female body. For a multi-dimensional example, the film opens with a glittering image of Alice (Nicole Kidman) undressing. Not only does this initial image scream of Mulveian scopophilia in the hands of the "male gaze," it also supports Mulvey's derivative point about the fetishization of the female star (Kidman). Throughout the film-indeed the very subject of the film!-the fetishing objectification of the human body remains central. However, though there is certainly an abundance of the naked female form, Eyes Wide Shut takes this concept beyond the monolithic boundaries of Mulveian analysis, flipping the fundamental binary on its head. Firstly, there presides the narrative motif in which female nakedness is sterilized: in the opening sequence Bill must save a naked woman who has overdosed on drugs; in the perfunctory cross-cutting sequence of daily life, Bill sterilely inspects his female patients; Alice domestically gets dressed with their daughter. In each of these cases the female body is de-fetishized, a point that is explicitly remarked upon during Bill and Alice's conversation while smoking a joint. Thus, through formal, narrative, and direct comment, Kubrick reveals the subversion of the traditional "male gaze" as a primary meaning of Eyes Wide Shut.

Beyond this subversion of fetishization is its complete reversal, a possibility neglected by Mulvey but acknowledged by Jackie Stacey: the role of the male star as fetishized object.(Stacey, 366) Tom Cruise, perhaps the best example of a male movie star over whom the heterosexual female (or homosexual male, bisexuals, and perhaps heterosexual male and homosexual female, if it fits their mood) spectator swoons, is objectified in this film as well. Frequently showing this male star in suggestive ways contradicts the "male gaze" on both levels: not only does it throw into question the sexual identity and orientation of the camera, but it also provides consideration for the heterosexual female and gay male spectator. Moreover, Bill's castrated protagonist trumps Mulvey's analysis of the male star's characteristics as being "not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego…."(838) The film not only reveals the star (Cruise) as object of the gaze, but it reveals his character (Bill) as a weak and incomplete ego, thus castrating him yet again (ouch!).

Not only is the Mulveian "male gaze" thus subverted by the de-fetishization of the female body, the objectification of the male star and the generic destruction of the fictional male hero, but the film's narrative and theoretical approach to masquerade forefront the fundamental revisionist concepts of the "gaze" applied by Mary Ann Doane in "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator." (3) Doane expounds upon initial concurrences with Mulvey-that dominant Hollywood traditionally attaches male subjectivity to the gaze, and that the "male gaze" requires sexual difference-to consider the role of masquerade in concealing female identity and distancing the female spectator. Doane views masquerade as a necessary device to grant the female spectator distance enough to identify with the characters, which Eyes Wide Shut does for both spectators. The film delights in masquerade-the narrative climax of the film centers around a costumed orgy-and its relation to identity and sexuality; however, whereas Doane views masquerade as responsible for masking the female identity, the film views it as the necessary distraction for the gaze so as to liberate the identity. Still, Doane's appropriation of Helene Cixous's adage that "women are body"(46) applies directly to the representation of both women and men at this party: wearing only masks, they are literally beheaded and are only body. Liberating the body, Eyes Wide Shut seems to be creating a world based entirely on an equal distribution, or neutral affirmation, of Doane's prerequisite of "sexual difference,"(45).

However, this scene again subverts the sexual divide offered by feminist criticism. Shot through Bill's narrative subjectivity, there is no preference given to sexual image: not only is Bill yet again castrated (he is the only person present that does not have sex) but, in the style of Orson Welles praised by Andre Bazin for its reclamation of spatial and temporal unity ("realism"), the scene is shot in deep-focus long-takes, thus formally revealing an asexual point of view of the cinematic apparatus. (4) Moreover, Kubrick transcends the narrow demarcations of Mulveian analysis by beheading both sexes, reducing them each to bodies, and in doing so directing the asexual gaze toward a representation of hedonistic copulation, liberated (through masquerade) from politics.

Eyes Wide Shut is, however, anything but asexual; indeed, it reveals its subversion of monolithic feminist analysis through its institution of multi-sexual gazes, which I will call the "poly-gaze," both on the level of the cinematic apparatus as well as between characters in the text. Not only does the apparatus itself reveal the fetishization of male and female stars and characters (thus providing "poly-gaze" fodder for both male and female spectatorship of any sexual orientation); but, within the film, the subjective point-of-view and third-person glance (i.e. from one character to another) are thrown from all sides and at all people. Employing both critically-analyzed methods (echoing Doane's analysis of the female recourse for appropriating the gaze: Alice wears glasses!) and formal devices (eye-line matches, shot reverse-shot), Eyes Wide Shut presents a world in which eyes are anything but "wide shut." Men gazing at women, women gazing at men, women gazing at women and men at men-Eyes Wide Shut subverts the Mulveian "male gaze" through formal and narrative methods, rendering the traditional male and female as lost bodies roaming through a confusing world beyond the scope of monolithic gender- or sex-based analysis. Moreover, by embracing the "gaze" (as well as other fundamental concepts of feminist criticism) and using it self-consciously, both by revealing its limits and by making it both subject and object of the film, Kubrick reveals just how profoundly capable cinema is of acknowledging, manipulating, and subverting the patriarchal traditions of Classical Hollywood. While Eyes Wide Shut seems at first glance to fit perfectly into Mulveian feminist criticism, it ultimately illustrates just how incomplete the monolithic version of this theory is; and, how, itself being based on over-simplifications and inaccurate and inflexible generalizations, the theory of the "male gaze" has finally been co-opted by more well-balanced critics and even film-makers in order to reveal both its theoretical validity and its all-encompassing shortcomings.

Notes

Written in 1975, reprinted in ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Pp. 833-844.

Reprinted in ed. Patricia Erens, Issues in Feminist Film Criticism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990). Pp. 365-79.

Reprinted in ed. Patricia Erens, Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, pp. 41-57.

Andre Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," reprinted in ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Pp. 43-56.

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