Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Eyes Wide Shut analysis - part 3: Correspondences with 'The Shining'





Above left: In the first Gold Room bar scene in Kubrick's 1980 movie, The Shining, Jack Torrance thought he had sixty dollars in his wallet when he sat down, but when he looks in the wallet, he realizes the money is not there. As explained in the analysis of The Shining on this blog, his wife, Wendy, has stolen the money. Therefore, Jack must pay for the straight bourbon he has just been poured with credit. He is a recovering alcoholic, and tells the bartender he has not had a drink for five months. Above right: At the beginning of Eyes Wide Shut, Bill can't find his wallet, then when he asks Alice if she's seen it, she suggests that he look on the bedside table. Note that Bill looks under some books to find it; this suggests that Alice had been hiding the wallet from Bill.









Victor hands Bill a scotch. Note that Victor already knows that Bill likes the drink straight. Bill sternly refuses a case of scotch that Victor offers to send him. Bill's voice sounds weak immediately after his first sip of his scotch. All of this is a hint that Bill has been trying to quit drinking, just like Jack in The Shining






Above left: Nick plays the piano blindfolded during the ceremony at Somerton in Eyes Wide Shut. Above right: Jack Torrance covers his eyes with his hands while sitting at the Gold Room bar in The Shining. In the analysis of The Shining, it was mentioned that Sigmund Freud says (in his The Uncanny), that fear of losing one's eyesight can be a substitute for the dread of castration: "The study of dreams, fantasies, and myths has taught us...that anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of going blind, is quite often a substitute for the fear of castration."[a] In Eyes Wide Shut, the 'dreamer' of some of the movie's events, Bill Harford, suffers from a fear of castration, by virtue of the fact that he here 'sees' Nick blindfolded while he's 'dreaming'. (Later in this analysis is to be discussed that much of what Bill experiences, takes place while he is in a dream-like state.) The fact that the dreamer of the events of The Shining, Susan Robertson, sees Jack covering his eyes in her dream, is, in part, a representation of the fact that she suffers from penis envy (the form castration anxiety takes in a female).


a. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock with Introduction by Hugh Haughton. Penguin Books, 2003. Google Books, p. 189. URL = https://books.google.com.


   






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