Troubling Mastery: Scorsese’s and Kubrick’s Psychosexual New York Odysseys

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position.
– W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux-Arts” (1940)

“It’s also a film I cherish because it puts you in the authoritative hands of an old master.”
– Martin Scorsese on Eyes Wide Shut (his #4 film), Ebert & Scorsese: Best Films of the 1990s

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way round.
– Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters (1988)

* * *

Late in the twentieth century, fourteen years apart, two New York City-born and -raised “master” auteurs made their thirteenth feature-length films, released by Warner Bros. The first reworks myth, the noir thriller, and screwball comedy as a 9-to-5 Upper East Side office-jobbing yuppie, Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), fumbles through a nightmare of his lustful making and cannot get home after he tries to sleep with a woman in SoHo. The second reworks myth, the noir thriller, and the European arthouse drama as an Upper West Side doctor, Bill Harford (Tom Cruise), descends into a nightmare of his jealous making (starting in Greenwich Village, immediately north of SoHo) after leaving home one December night, rattled by his wife’s disclosure that she fantasized about sleeping with another man. The former is an existential, Freudian black comedy of single manhood, which remains a cast for the yuppie. The latter is an existential, Freudian anti-romance of married manhood (even uxoriousness), where the conservative tradition of matrimony is a willful illusion for the husband – a mask. And both Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) mainly track the tempted Manhattanite’s psychosexual odyssey through the city. In his surreal, nightmarish journey, a lavatory scene and a cab ride prove pivotal, the evening gets longer and stranger (aptly, the return-to-home quests of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and The Wizard of Oz are alluded to), and the suffering yet polite man is confounded, dismayed, and angered by female sexuality.

Yet these urban odysseys, centered on troubled males, are deepened by a playful sense of troubled mastery just beyond the frame, with the man at the helm mocking his maestro status. Other visual art, personal allusions, cameos, references to his other films, and in-jokes subvert the male director’s auteur-authority. Increasingly, as Hackett and Harford, unmanned and unmoored, struggle for psychosexual control, Scorsese and Kubrick question their male artistic control. And so the director, infusing his film with personal references and allusions, troubles the public sense of his mastery. Through the looking-glass of a film about a beset male, the romantic image of male-auteur control is belaboured until it cracks.

Casting Around for Control: After Hours

After Hours opens with a maestro’s music – Mozart’s Symphony No. 5, in D Major – over the credits. Then a rapid, smooth tracking shot, moving diagonally through a crowded office, dolly-zooms in on Paul Hackett. The signature camera moves throughout are dolly-zooms and semicircle arcs, suggesting rush, vertigo, and being-turned-around for Paul, sucked into the vortex of SoHo and increasingly spun-around, flailing, as he tries to escape its Kafkaesque depths. The camera knows exactly where it wants to be, and for the first thirty-seven minutes of Scorsese’s film, it is often leading us to Paul, observing what he cannot see or does not yet know about, or is slightly ahead of him.

This establishment of mastery – a sense heightened by Scorsese’s homages and allusions to the Master of Suspense throughout – in the film’s first third makes it seem all the more that Paul is getting out of his depth, losing his way, and not the master of his fate, let alone the strange evening’s ceremonies. His diner-table perusal of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, a plotless novel about a struggling writer’s descent into Paris’s underworld, triggers the film’s plot, with the blonde at the next table, SoHo resident Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), striking up a conversation about the book and giving Paul her number, leading to Paul’s descent into SoHo and feeling imprisoned there (“Prison EFFECT” is explicitly noted, more than once, in Scorsese’s shot-list [“Filming for Your Life”]). But as Paul struggles to show off his knowledge of Miller to Marcy, the camera keeps sliding in sideways to linger on the pair’s smiles and looks – it is far more smoothly assured and in-control than Paul.

In the thirty-eighth minute of After Hours, though, the sharp distinction between art and life – the-world-within-the-film and the-world-outside-the-film – starts to fade. The distance between the camera and Paul, and between a seemingly removed, masterly filmmaking force and a sexual desire-driven, hapless character dissolves … and keeps dissolving. In the Terminal Bar’s washroom, in a scene reminiscent of Travis Bickle looking in the mirror (“You talkin’ to me?”) in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Paul stares into the mirror above the urinal, but his self-image is a bit askew and he is all wet from the rain and he looks a little dismayed. He begins to pee and then notices a graffito on the wall of a man, his phallus in the jaws of a shark (Figure 1). It is a crude Freudian image of castration, of being devoured by a predatory woman, and this fear of emasculation is echoed in increasingly existential, personally unsettling ways for Paul: Marcy says, of her recent relationship, “I just broke the whole thing off”; Paul is disconcerted by the rat-traps around Julie’s bed and startled by one snapping shut on a squirming victim; Paul’s head is partly shaved, as if he is Samson shorn of his virility; and Mr. Softee ice-cream truck-driver Gail’s comment, “It doesn’t look so hard,” as she beholds June’s sculpture, encasing Paul, suggests that Paul is too soft and not virile. Paul’s white masculinity is a cast, his “hardened narcissism” (Willett 159) clear from his hollow interest in a woman’s plight or in her art, which is, every time, “an alibi for narcissistic sexual gratification” (156); he is driven by lust, though he refuses to admit it. Paul looks at the graffito, quizzical, for a few seconds, stares down and back up at the mirror, mutters, “Ah,” as if to say no, shakes his head, zips up, and turns away. Yet Paul’s first extended moment of introspection draws the film into his orbit. When he leaves the washroom, for the first time the camera is led by him. It moves around Paul to reveal what he has already seen: the waitress, Julie (Teri Garr), sitting at a table, waiting for him.

And so, after the self-referential nod to Scorsese’s best-known film and the cartoon-art expression of a man’s fear of emasculation, with Paul then often leading the camera or seeing something before the camera does, Paul’s plight becomes more personal for the director and more connected to his sense of self. Scorsese had hinted at After Hours being unusually personal, intimate, and self-revealing in the meet-cute scene where, behind Paul and Marcy, he seats the couple that met and then made the film’s maker: Charles and Catherine Scorsese, former garment-industry workers and actors (Figure 2). (This cameo plays as a romantic, life vs. art in-joke – it is the seemingly unknown man and woman in the background who represent true love, or at least a long-lasting relationship, not Paul and Marcy.) Paul’s cashier-doppelgänger in the background, one of many doppelgängers, doubles, and imitations in After Hours, hints that the child of the couple, Scorsese, could be an alter ego for Paul, too. Yet while Paul the word processor is merely a hack writer, surely Scorsese is the assured auteur? Scorsese’s own cameo, though, mocks this notion. A serious, spotlight-holding man in military garb at Club Berlin, with its checkpoint and fences, as if a guard overseeing and catching any border-crossing transgressions, he is a jokingly ironic stand-in for an overcontrolling, authoritarian director, looking down from above (he shines the light around until it glares into the camera and our eyes, blinding us [to the truth of him?] for an instant) (Figure 3).

In truth, Scorsese felt that he was struggling and searching as a filmmaker when he took on Joseph Minion’s script for After Hours. The planned shoot for his longtime passion project, The Last Temptation of Christ, “fell apart,” he recalls, and “I wasn’t very happy” (“Filming for Your Life”). “The Last Temptation situation … had been a real trauma for him,” notes After Hours co-producer Amy Robinson, “and he knew that he needed to show that he had the will to go back to his roots” (“Filming for Your Life”); Scorsese also wanted “to show they hadn’t killed my spirit” (Ebert, Scorsese by Ebert 86). Whereas Paul will not admit in the washroom scene that his libido has led him to SoHo, Scorsese, in that scene recalling Taxi Driver and in other personal touches, seems to be reflecting on how his desire to keep making films has driven him to After Hours. Editor Thelma Schoonmaker remembers the shoot as a kind of return to Scorsese’s student-filmmaker days, but “he was very, very aware that he had to prove something and it must have been a very stressful time” (“Filming for Your Life”). Scorsese recalls the urgency that he felt to make this dark thriller-comedy about anxiety and urgency: “I really felt [like], if I don’t pull this one off, it’s completely over and I’ll never be able to get to make another film” (“Filming for Your Life”). He felt the need, then, to, like Paul, hack it. One critic notes that Scorsese’s “string of failed attempts [to make The Last Temptation of Christ] and [struggle with] Hollywood bureaucracy undoubtedly fueled After Hours’ potent mood of confusion, fear, and paranoia” (Eggert). The director, Robinson felt, was “exorcis[ing] his demons” (Kelly 189), and Paul, with his frequent feelings of trappedness, uncertainty, and dread, was something of a proxy, and a cathartic one, for Scorsese. Dunne recalls: “I know he said he related very much to Paul Hackett”; “I’d be going through some horrific Paul Hackett-ism kind of moment [and] I could see [Scorsese] in the corner of the frame … and I’d just see [him] just unable … to hold back from laughing … and he just found it hilarious, what was happening to him. It always reminded me of that moment he was telling me when [The Last Temptation of Christ] was cancelled: ‘What are you gonna do? Just laugh’” (“Filming for Your Life”). Scorsese may have felt Paul-like, too, one critic argues, because he had been hounded and pursued (like Paul by a mob) by religious fundamentalists over his adaptation of a novel that gave Christ human desires, and even, like Paul, wrongly accused as a thief, “trying to rob Jesus of his divinity” (Miliora 51).

Yet Scorsese, rediscovering his passion with a small-scale, low-budget, wacky little production in the neighbourhood next to where he grew up (Little Italy) – as if “to start all over again” (“Filming for Your Life”), as Dunne notes of Paul when he returns to work at film’s end – is also much like the SoHo women artists in the film, with their kooky little passion projects: Kiki’s sculptures, Julie’s drawings, and June’s sculptures. Ever since the auteur theory was developed by male critics in the 1950s and 1960s, the auteur has been figured as a masterly male director, with the “male artist being exemplary of the creative principle,” the “creator of aesthetics, creator of forms” (Ramanathan 10) in a medium long dependent, as Laura Mulvey has argued, “on the female form for visual pleasure” (10).1 Yet it is women in After Hours who are the artistic creators, and Paul’s gaze is not indulged in but often countered, matched, or vanquished by them, especially when the hopeful pursuer becomes the hapless pursued. Paul is variously intrigued, threatened, and saved by visual art (when the true thieves steal June’s The Scream-like statue encasing Paul, taking him out of SoHo, Neil [Cheech Marin] justifies it by saying, gleefully, “This is art!”), as if reflecting aspects of Scorsese’s psyche.

Ultimately, then, Paul’s besieged manhood, the prismatic focus of After Hours, is a playful, oblique refraction of Scorsese’s troubled mastery. The acute anxiety and stress plaguing Paul after his frustrations and failures to do it – hook up with Marcy – reflect Scorsese’s anxiety and stress, his acute feeling that he had to do it with this film, to prove himself again, as if becoming reborn, not unlike Paul, who is artistically transformed by the maternal June (Verna Bloom) and then emerges from the near-tomb and near-womb of the statue to dust himself off and return to work … much like Scorsese picking himself up from the disappointment of not making The Last Temptation of Christ, dusting himself off, and getting on with the work of filmmaking. As one critic notes, “a kind of transference has taken place from the director to the screen, leaving it a monumentally personal exercise of expulsion.… [After Hours] plays as if Scorsese [were] purging himself through cinematic style, his raw and unfiltered frustrations encapsulated on the screen through Paul’s endless suffering” (Eggert). The overlap between antihero and director, between desperately fugitive character and desperately driven filmmaker, is reflected back to us in that washroom mirror, when Scorsese reveals After Hours to be a comic, through-the-looking-glass adventure reworking the paranoia and setting and neo-noir style of Taxi Driver. The camera, often led by Paul after his castration-fear is expressed for him by a crude filmic image (Jaws meets Porky’s), dissolves the distance between the man inside the frame and the man outside the frame.

As careful and controlled as After Hours seems, even circling back to finish where it started – Paul is freed from his actual cast only to be cast back into working single manhood at the office for yet another day – Scorsese reframes and undercuts the assumption of the auteur-as-male-master, channeling his career fears and worries into a dark screwball comedy about a hapless careerist that crackles with apprehension, conflicted attitudes to art, and the struggle to regain oneself. Ultimately, though, the director found far more satisfaction in authoring Paul’s odyssey than Paul, sitting stunned at his cubicle,2 finds after his harrowing night. “‘Thank you for giving me back my love of making movies,’” Robinson recalls Scorsese saying to her and Dunne on the last day of shooting (“Filming for Your Life”). And Scorsese later said, about After Hours, “It’s renewed my faith” (Peachment 148).

Masking Doubts: Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Shut opens with a maestro’s music: Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2 from his Suite for Variety Orchestra. Then we see Alice (Nicole Kidman), Bill’s wife, slipping off her black sheath dress in their penthouse apartment’s bedroom alcove, its two classical-style pillars framing her sylphlike form, as if she is not only statuesque but a statue to be appraised. The signature camera moves throughout are scrupulously careful, even stately; moments where people walk down long, echo chamber-like hallways or through crypt-like spaces in stately homes are drawn-out to seem more meaningful and dreamlike, a languid mood deepened by dissolve-cuts and by Bill echoing others’ lines to him, making scenes seem more theatrical, odd, and dreamily ominous.

The famous, viewer’s-eyes-wide-opening shot of Alice/Kidman establishes the film’s tensions over exposure, sensuality, sex, and privacy. But it is also a fixed shot of Bill/Cruise’s naked wife, as if channeling not only the gaze but the outlook of her husband, the fixed, clinical, calm, set-in-his-way-of-thinking Dr. William Harford. And it seems to signal that Kubrick’s auteur eye will make us male voyeurs – the country-house orgy scene is full of naked women and sex – or, as Judith Mayne notes about another film, it is as if, here, “[t]he inner space of the room has been … penetrated” as Alice/Kidman is made part of Mulvey’s “ideology of spectacle” (33). Indeed, Kubrick’s film has been criticized as “male-gaze cinema” (Pulver).

Yet Eyes Wide Shut quickly replaces the idealized, sexualized Alice with the down-to-earth everyday Alice (Chion 48) – peeing, putting on deodorant, arguing while high, etc. – and counters the male gaze with Alice’s gaze. The most important spectator, as if much of the film has been constructed for her, is Bill’s wife, to whom he tearfully tells, presumably, all of his exploits the past two nights, “making her the retrospective witness of all that we have seen” (54). And the camera’s first crucial subjective point-of-view shot is Alice’s. It is Alice, watching Bill flirt with two nubile young women at the Zieglers’ Christmas party – we follow her gaze through an open glass-paned double door (Figure 4) – who not only counters the male gaze but uses the moment to later start a pivotal argument with Bill, an argument in which she rebuts his conventional, sexist notion that women are less sexual when she describes for him (triggering his nighttime odyssey) how she once vividly fantasized about not just sleeping with but leaving him for a naval officer. At the Zieglers’ party, as she sees Bill with the two women, Alice cuts a caper with an older, flirtatious man, and her verbal dancing with him conjures up the Shostakovich waltz that starts and ends this study of a marriage, concerned with whether or not Alice and Bill are moving in-step with each other.3

Yet from start – almost immediately after the film’s seemingly cold, distanced, voyeuristic opening shot – to end, Kubrick playfully masks, again and again, art-versus-life distinctions between the marriage and man within the film and the marriage and man behind the film. Soon after Alice gazes at Bill, the male gaze is countered in a slyer and more personal way … by Kubrick’s wife. When Bill is called up to the bathroom (a lavatory is a crucial setting in every one of Kubrick’s major films) at the Zieglers’ party, the camera in that private space is at crotch-height. We behold Mandy (Julienne Davis), a woman in heels (much like Alice’s shoes in the pre-title scene), sprawled on a red chair. Her pubis is in the center of the frame and Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) is putting his pants on, and so she, lying there so still, seems reduced to sex-object and death-object (she has overdosed; she will later die of an overdose, with Bill visiting her body in the morgue). There is a painting on the wall that seems to be of an eroticized nude, because its central feature has been carefully blocked for the camera pan by the posts for the glass shower stall at one end of the bathtub. But after Bill comes in, checks Mandy’s pulse, and asks Victor what happened, Victor, first framed in a medium shot so that his face is blocking the woman’s pubis and abdomen in the painting – the man’s face front-and-center, blocking out a woman’s sex, where every man comes from – then leans forward slightly as he tells Bill what drugs Mandy took, and now we see that the woman in the painting is pregnant (Figure 5). This reminder of woman-as-future-creator – as if a memento matri – is Christiane Kubrick’s painting Paula 6 Months on Red, and it counters crude male conceptions of woman as sexualized or deathly object (Victor even falters in remembering the woman’s name for Bill); instead, this is a woman as bringer of life. Here and elsewhere, Christiane Kubrick’s paintings serve as inverting mirrors: framed, still art nesting within a moving-image, framed artform, they showcase the complicatedly feminine in a story seemingly centered on a near-inscrutable, self-involved male. Thus, within and behind a story about a marriage, the director’s wife, like Alice, counters and answers the director’s initial male gaze (especially in the opening shot), her still-life subjects unmanning the impression that women are mere live-action objects. Even amid the orgy, populated by female models acting as if in a trance or a dream, when one masked woman exhorts Bill to leave, she suddenly “becomes a nonpuppet, an individual, a real person” (Rasmussen 347).

The distance between Bill, the seemingly clinical, coolly reasoning protagonist, and Kubrick, the film’s supposedly cold, calculating, masterly filmmaking force, is further dissolved throughout, undercutting assumptions of male mastery within the film and behind the camera. One critic remarks that, “For years, two misleading adjectives have been used to describe Kubrick’s work: ‘cold’ and ‘perfectionist’” (Rosenbaum), and, as if parodying that assumption, Bill regards women as objects of dispassionate study (i.e., patients) or sexual objects. He projects such certainty and knowledge – the epitome of the coldly all-knowing, masterly male that Kubrick was thought to be – that he spurs Alice to unman him by relating her fantasy. Bill, in that argument with Alice in their bedroom, is “the fixed point” in the visual schema of the scene (Chion 30-31) as he tries to fix Alice, “the mobile element” (30), in place (thus echoing the film’s fixed shots) with his diagnosing and possessive language, so full of knowingness and certitude: “I think we both know what men are like” (Kubrick and Raphael 43); “You’re my wife … you’re the mother of my child[,] and I know you would never be unfaithful to me” (47); “I’m sure of you” (48). Later, as Bill stares at his wife, the last words to echo in his head are from her dream of an orgy that she confessed to him that morning: “I don’t know how many [men] I was with” (132). Bill is haunted by his inability to know, to control his wife, and to be sure of her; then we see him sitting in his office, his place of reason and control and professionalism overtaken by his imaginings of her having sex with the naval officer. The protagonist’s imaginings, then, fuel the odyssey at the heart of the director’s yuletide reimagining of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella; in this surreal, intimate Christmas carol, the haunted man must rediscover his goodwill for his wife. But Bill Harford the doctor seems like a proxy for Stanley Kubrick the director, too, because he is a cipher, much like Kubrick seemed to be (his reclusiveness was played up in the media and there were few photographs of him), and he seems so knowing, certain, and controlling, like the supposedly all-knowing Kubrick, famous for his years of research and preparation, his cold, careful compositions, and his many takes for a scene (Eyes Wide Shut set a record for the longest continuous film-shoot at 400 days). Indeed, the “myth of [Kubrick’s] control as the exemplary and supreme mode of movie direction” (Brody) abides, with Kubrick still exalted as the grandmaster of twentieth-century cinema.

But Eyes Wide Shut shadows a man losing control of himself and his life; and, in truth, Kubrick was not so untroubled or such a master on set as has been built up in the gilt-framed picture of the supposedly genius director. Longtime assistant and factotum Leon Vitali recalls that Kubrick became “another Stanley” during the making of Full Metal Jacket: “it was like, ‘Pow! Pow! Pow!’” [Vitali smacks a fist into the other hand, much like Bill “beating his fists in anger” as he thinks of Alice’s fantasy about the naval officer {Kubrick and Raphael 60}], and “with each day … I could see and feel Stanley getting … more and more tense and nervous” (Filmworker). Many close to Kubrick have noted that his study of marital intimacy was his most personal work, not least because he “shot most of it himself” (Rosenbaum) and worked closely with “a very small crew” (Chion 28) while allowing the actors copious time and space for improvisation (27).

Throughout Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick undercuts assumptions of himself as a cool, composed master of perfectly composed films by orgy-mingling the artistic and the personal with personal allusions in the mise-en-scène, artistic contributions and cameos by helpmates and longtime help, and references to previous films. To start, Kubrick “had been introduced to [Traumnovelle] by his second wife, Ruth Sobotka, in the 1960s, and he had wanted to make an adaptation of it ever since 1968, the year in which Sobotka committed suicide” (Dovey 179-80). The principal setting, the Harfords’ grand penthouse apartment, “was based on the one where Kubrick lived with his [third] wife, [Christiane,] in Manhattan in the early 1960s” (Chion 25). Cruise recalled, “He recreated it. The furniture in the house was furniture from their own home” (Ebert, “Cruise Opens Up”). The estate where the orgy takes place, Somerton, is “meant to be [in] Glen Cove [on] Long Island,” and the Kubricks “lived very close to [Glen Cove] in the 1960s” (Kolker and Abrams 171). And so the film’s marriage is shadowed by the director’s marriage. The mise-en-scène subtextually and intertextually counters Bill’s male gaze, too, because the visual art emphasizes female creativity and self-expression: most of the paintings in the Harfords’ home and the Zieglers’ home are by Kubrick’s wife Christiane, and some of the paintings in the apartment are by Christiane’s daughter Katharina (Kubrick’s stepdaughter), including a portrait of the director’s favourite cat (Stevens). (Kubrick – who was 63, the same age as Schnitzler when he wrote Traumnovelle, when he started working in earnest on the film [Chion 13] – and co-writer Frederic Raphael had intended to make Alice a painter [Raphael 73], like Christiane, but instead made her a recent art-gallery manager; Alice’s hair and glasses resemble Christiane’s [Gengaro 224].) In a film where Bill meets, is warned by, or feels threatened by look-alikes, stand-ins, and fantasy-substitutes, in what must be the director’s “sly, reflexive joke on overly attentive audiences” (Cocks 289), look-alikes of Christiane and Stanley Kubrick – the married couple behind the film about a married couple – sit at a table in Café Sonata (289) (Figure 6). They sit there as Bill talks to Nick Nightingale (Todd Field, who, in a further blurring of real life and reel art, was one of two film directors cast in major roles, along with Pollack; Field had made short films and would go on to direct In The Bedroom and Little Children), a conversation that will lead him to imperil his marriage by gatecrashing the rarefied orgy in Somerton. Katharina appears with her son as a mother and patient, respectively, in a scene in Bill’s office (Stevens), a scene that is, perhaps, the reportedly workaholic Kubrick’s wry joke about the importance of checking up on, caring about, and remembering one’s family (Figure 7). Kubrick also cast his art director and production manager as Bill’s secretary (Kolker and Abrams 69), his assistant director as a butler (69), and his driver and handyman Emilio D’Alessandro as a newspaper-seller (69) – a restaurant in the film, “Caff[é] [D]a Emilio, [is] named after him,” and one “with the same name was located downstairs from Kubrick’s parents’ Los Angeles apartment” (69). Kubrick had Vitali act as Red Cloak (69)4 – a store in the film is named Vitali’s, too (69) – and, as an in-joke, Vitali’s name appears as that of a fashion designer in the newspaper article about Mandy’s death (Gengaro 224) that Bill reads in a café, Sharkey’s, “named after a crew member” (Kolker and Abrams 106), yet another instance of the director “honoring his colleagues by placing their names at various parts of the [film’s] sets” (84). Unlike Scorsese, Kubrick was not, it seems, unduly troubled in his making of the picture, but, in linking himself to the psychosexual world of Eyes Wide Shut and shadowing Bill Harford, through so many personal touches, allusions (including echoes of at least four of his films [Webster 161-63]), and connections, Kubrick implies that his own marriage and sense of self may have been troubled, at times, like Bill’s, by doubts about his relationship, thoughts of infidelity, and unfulfilled desires. Yet Kubrick, by including so much of his wife’s art, seems to have learned what Bill needs a nightmarish odyssey to understand: “a new kind of love for his wife in which he will recognize her as an equal” (Dovey 175). And in casting so many of his assistants in on-screen roles, Kubrick acknowledges the collaborativeness of filmmaking, further undercutting the notion of the director as hallowed and almighty.

In a film centered on a man whose life is a mask of convention and certitude, then, Kubrick masks and reframes and reimagines his own troubles and his own understanding of the opposite sex with his art. The older, wiser Kubrick has been dropping his mask of mastery throughout, though, while the younger, cockier Bill only does so belatedly and overtly. Bill’s masculinity is a mask that he dons; after nearly ripping away the mask of conventional, upper-class WASP husband at the orgy, it is only the next evening, when he sees his mask lying on the pillow next to Alice, as if it has replaced him, that he breaks down (Figure 8). In an echo of Bill’s mask of mastery, the call girl’s name, Domino, is a type of Venetian mask and can refer to the long, loose, hooded cloak worn at the Venetian Carnival or at masquerades, like the cloak that Bill wears to the orgy (“domino” comes from the Latin dominus, meaning “lord” or “master”). Bill’s masculinity, like Kubrick’s veneer of masterly art, can thus be seen as not only a mask but an elaborate masquerade, a hood, and a cloak. But Bill, so unnerved by Nick Nightingale’s disappearance, Amanda Curran’s death, and Victor Ziegler’s unsatisfying explanation for it all, finding his rented mask on the pillow next to his wife, there in his stead, can no longer keep up his cool, reasonable, in-charge masculine pose:

emotionally wrecked, [he] walks slowly towards the bed and sits down with tears in his eyes. Finally, he can restrain himself no longer, and breaks down into uncontrollable sobbing.

ALICE wakes to see BILL’s complete helplessness as he collapses and lays his head on her breast. She puts an arm around him as he sobs.

BILL

I’ll tell you everything. I’ll tell you everything. (Kubrick and Raphael 160)

Here, the film, something of a mask for Kubrick’s psyche, wide-open, reveals itself, with Bill’s breakdown and confession to Alice, to be not about the male gaze or male power but the dissolution of a projected male persona of power, reason, and control – a dissolution confirmed when Bill and the film look to Alice at the end for her counsel and the last word. Indeed, “time and again, Kubrick continually undermines [Bill’s] self-image and self-possession” (Kolker and Abrams 177). And, given that twentieth-century cinema’s purported and perceived male paragon of the all-powerful, calculating, and controlling auteur is behind this moment, Bill’s breakdown radically troubles the masklike image of Kubrick as almighty auteur. In his ceding of control and his submission to his wife, Bill openly reaffirms his identity as husband and admits his need for and reliance on his wife in his marriage. Throughout his last film, though, despite overtly affirming his identity as director, Kubrick slyly acknowledges, again and again, his need for and reliance on his wife, other family members, and his crew for his filmmaking.

In the end, then, though Scorsese’s and Kubrick’s psychosexual New York odysseys frequently strip down their characters – Paul loses his money, keys, shirt, some of his hair, and nearly his life; Alice strips down in the opening shot while Bill, unmoored by his wife’s revelation, then nearly made to undress as punishment for being an intruder at the orgy, is stripped of his bearings and his ability to distinguish dream from reality – both films are ultimately playful and subversive works of self-implication and self-exposure. Each director deepens his knowing look at and criticism of an egoist looking at women in simplistic, selfish ways with knowing, winking references to his life, his work, and himself. Thus Scorsese and Kubrick, through their apparent male proxy-protagonists, further trouble any sense of male mastery or a possessive male gaze by troubling the perception of the male auteur as possessor of a masterly cinematic gaze. Mirrorlike, art can reflect and refract life; in these two films about a man’s shattered self-image, each containing key mirror scenes, the director, wryly cracking self-reflexive, offers cracked self-reflections. Blurring art and life with personal allusions, cameos, and in-jokes, the two directors suggest that they are not so far removed from their stricken protagonists as the distanced or fixed camera and meticulously composed mise-en-scène make it seem. By slyly placing himself and his psyche at the same level as our world’s suffering Hacketts and Harfords, the director never raises himself above his character or his viewer. He is with us and of us, not loftily above us. Each film explores a paranoid and fear-filled night, death creeping along its edges, only to close on yet another humdrum day because, as Chion notes of Eyes Wide Shut, for all its strangeness, here is a film “about life … everyday life” (41). As if to remind us of that, Kubrick’s life ran out days after he finished editing his thirteenth work of art. In the end, death masters us all.

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Works Cited

After Hours. Directed by Martin Scorsese, Warner Bros., 1985. DVD, Warner Home Video, 2004.

Brody, Richard. “‘Filmworker,’ Reviewed: A Documentary About Stanley Kubrick’s Right-Hand Man.” NewYorker.com, 9 May 2018, www.newyorker.com/culture/ richard-brody/filmworker-reviewed-a-documentary-about-stanley-kubricks-right-hand-man.

Chion, Michel. Eyes Wide Shut. Translated by Trista Selous, British Film Institute, 2002.

Cocks, Geoffrey. The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, & The Holocaust. Peter Lang, 2004.

Dovey, Lindiwe. “Eyes Wide Shut: Kubrick and the Representation of Gender.” Stanley Kubrick: Essays on His Films and Legacy, edited by Gary D. Rhodes, McFarland, 2008, pp. 170-81, 206-07.

Ebert, Roger. “Cruise Opens Up about Working with Kubrick.” RogerEbert.com, 15 July 1999, https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/cruise-opens-up-about-working-with-kubrick.

Ebert, Roger. Scorsese by Ebert. U of Chicago P, 2008.

Eggert, Brian. “After Hours.” Deep Focus Review, 7 December 2013, https://deepfocusreview.com/definitives/after-hours/.

Eyes Wide Shut. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Warner Bros., 1999. DVD, Warner Home Video, 2001.

“Filming for Your Life: Making After Hours.” Special feature, After Hours DVD, Warner Home Video, 2004.

Filmworker. Directed by Tony Zierra, Kino Lorber, 2017.

Gengaro, Christine Lee. Listening to Stanley Kubrick: The Music in His Films. Scarecrow, 2013.

Kelly, Mary Pat. Martin Scorsese: A Journey. Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991.

Kolker, Robert P., and Nathan Abrams. Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film. Oxford UP, 2019.

Kubrick, Stanley, and Frederic Raphael. Eyes Wide Shut: A Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael and The Classic Novel That Inspired the Film[,] Dream Story [1926] by Arthur Schnitzler. Warner Books, 1999.

Mayne, Judith. “The Woman at the Keyhole: Women’s Cinema and Feminist Criticism.” New German Critique, no. 23, Spring-Summer 1981, pp. 27-43.

Miliora, Maria T. The Scorsese Psyche on Screen: Roots of Themes and Characters in the Films. McFarland, 2004.

Peachment, Chris. “Night of the Living Dead.” Scorsese: A Journey Through the American Psyche, edited by Paul A. Woods, Plexus, 1986, pp. 145-48.

Pulver, Andrew. “Stanley Kubrick’s best films – ranked!” The Guardian, 4 April 2019, www.theguardian.com/film/2019/apr/04/stanley-kubrick-best-films-ranked.

Ramanathan, Geetha. Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films. Wallflower, 2006.

Raphael, Frederic. Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick. Ballantine, 1999.

Rasmussen, Randy. Stanley Kubrick: Seven Films Analyzed. McFarland, 2001.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” The Chicago Reader, 23 July 1999. Reprinted at JonathanRosenbaum.net, 16 February 2020, www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1999/07/in-dreams-begin-responsibilities/.

Stevens, Isabel. “‘When You Hold a Mirror to Society It Rebels’: Katharina Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut [sic].” Sight & Sound, November 2019, https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/katharina-kubrick-eyes-wide-shut.

Webster, Patrick. Love and Death in Kubrick: A Critical Study of the Films from Lolita through Eyes Wide Shut. McFarland, 2011.

Willett, Cynthia. “Baudrillard, After Hours, and the Postmodern Suppression of Socio-Sexual Conflict.” Cultural Critique, no. 34, Fall 1996, pp. 143-61.

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Images are screenshots from the films.