Eyes Wide Shut

Stylistic features

Cinematography and mise-en-scène

Kubrick adopted several stylistic conventions in Eyes Wide Shut. As with Barry Lyndon, much of the lighting in "Eyes Wide Shut" comes from the 'pratical' lights (the lights that can be seen in the shot and are meant to be the source of light within the fiction of the story). Kubrick's style can best be described as 'simulated natural lighting' because it looks closer to the way lighting looks in real life as opposed to movies, but is still artificial. For example, the scene with the man in the red cloak and gold mask is lit by a 'pratical' spotlight from high above that one could describe as existing within the fiction of the movie, but the darker shadow areas were lit to some extent by a diffuse fill light that is not motivated by any source within the scene, perhaps a 'china ball' or helium ballon fixture off screen. Kubrick occasionally departs from this naturalistic strategy into overt, unrealistic expressionism such as the intensly saturated blue light that flood the bathroom of the Harfords when they are arguing or the same blue light coming in through the windows of Ziegler's billard room. The film negative was deliberatly underexposed throughout the movie and then 'pushed' in processing to create a grainy image. "Eyes Wide Shut" made extensive use of Christmas lights (the story is set in the Christmas season). The colours red, blue, yellow and green feature predominantly in the film. This is enhanced by the use of Christmas decorations. It is often suggested that the colour scheme is an important symbolic schemata. This theory has weight, considering the four 'modern art' posters in the hospital hallway which individually consist of these colours (suggesting a consonance of location and symbolic meaning) and Kubrick's reputation as a master of detail. More simply it may suggest the primal or basic nature of the thematic content. Shop-fronts and street signs also express a quasi-semiotic meaning in that they convey information to an observant audience that the characters are unaware of. For example, before Bill enters the prostitute's apartment building, they stop at a store with the sign 'The Lotto Shop', perhaps indicating that he is gambling with his health.

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Narrative structure

The story follows a dramatic structure of leaving the familiar world, entering situations that are in some way an otherworld, and returning to the familiar world. In the third part of the movie, Bill revisits the scenes of the adventures he had the night before. This is reminiscent of the structure Kubrick used in A Clockwork Orange, in which the character Alex revisits each of the locations at which he performed violent acts in the first part of that movie. Each location of Dr. Bill's unactualized sexuality is stripped of sexual mystique.

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