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Indeed, Siegel (a contributing writer for the New Republic) seems to take the critical reaction personally. He defends the film in ardent, high-falutin tones: "I love the way Stanley Kubrick expresses the film's theme of social and psychological double entendre in the film's very title -- 'I's Wide Shut' -- and through his choice, from the title song, of a waltz by Dmitry Shostakovitch, a guileful composer famous for writing music whose subtle motifs seemed to celebrate Stalin but actually undermined him."

Me too. But those subtleties were lost on the Saturday-night date crowd who wanted to see Tom doing Nicole while hoisted in that pulley thing he broke into CIA headquarters with in "Mission: Impossible." Again, those folks -- the moviegoers who actually make or break a major release -- told their friends who told their friends and soon the film was playing to empty houses. But unlike Rosman, Siegel doesn't blame magazine editors and TV producers for falling for "Eyes" hype ("The Sexiest Movie Ever?" as Us magazine wondered); he blames the critics.

When challenged by a real work of art, he posits, the kind that demands attention, "they decided not to respond to the film. They decided to respond to the hype. And the result was that the hype totally determined the experience of the film. They wrote about it as if it were a work of diversion and not a work of attention."

Philistines! It could just be that they hated it or were bored or thought the Hungarian guy sounded goofy; it could be that they wanted something to happen when Tom was out on the prowl all night, that they wanted to see him get his dick wet. But that, Siegel writes convincingly, is missing the point. "Eyes Wide Shut" is not about sex but the anticipation of sex and the dangers inherent in sexual fantasy. That Tom's midnight prowl is set off by something that never actually happened (his wife, played by Kidman, tells him of her desire for a stranger that was never fulfilled) was seemingly missed by the critics who trashed the film. It is Siegel's contention that the film was never met on its own terms: rich, symbolic ones that owed a lot to its inspiration, A rthur Schnitzler's "Rhapsody: A Dream Novel."

After comparing its stylized, orchestrated quality to the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski and No drama and Pound's "Cantos," Siegel writes: "It is perfectly possible not to like Kieslowski or No drama either; for that matter it is possible to dislike Ezra Pound's 'Cantos' or Henrik Ibsen's plays or Andrea del Sarto's paintings. But one cannot simply dismiss them. One must make one's negative judgment of them also a mode of understanding them."

It is Siegel's contention that most critics either did not appreciate or understand the structure of the film, right down to its other-worldly "Alice in Wonderland" quality. "The critics wrote as if Kubrick had aimed and failed to make a 'Frontline' documentary about life in present-day New York," he writes. Worse, they judged it on the standards of "South Park" or "The Spy Who Shagged Me" and such comparisons are surely unfair: Nobody gets shagged rotten in Kubrick's movie. Those who want to consider Siegel's precise reading of the movie and its symbols will have to wait until it comes out on video. Or get yourself over to the Worldwide Cinemas at 50th Street and 8th Avenue. It's playing there now, right beside "The Phantom Menace."
salon.com | Oct. 8, 1999

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