Uncovering the Danger in His ‘Eyes’

. . . Sex sells everything.

And sex kills.

--Joni Mitchell, “Sex Kills”

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Dangerous stuff, sex. And it didn’t take AIDS to make it so. A dozen years or so ago, with the plague first looming large, so-called serious adult thrillers became cautionary tales, and the pundits who draw lines between the movies and real life had a ball.

“Fatal Attraction,” “Basic Instinct,” “Body of Evidence,” “Sea of Love”: What were they if not reactions to the scourge of AIDS? Sleep around and you die, these movies seemed to say.

That was a scary time, and the sudden popularity of “erotic thrillers” owed something to our fears. But what, exactly, was new about them? Except for the greater explicitness, that is, and a tweak here and there (such as female bisexuality) to keep things looking fresh?

Sex has always been risky business. Check out vintage films noir from the ‘40s for proof. Fred MacMurray sealed his fate in “Double Indemnity” with his first lustful leer at Barbara Stanwyck’s legs. Or go back to “The Blue Angel,” the 1930 German film in which alluring, mysterious sex, embodied in a smoldering Marlene Dietrich, destroyed Emil Jannings’ well-ordered life.

These movies, and others like them, didn’t need a real-life correlation to tap into the scarier aspects of intimacy. Goofy, carefree release may be what kids are after--”American Pie” anyone?--but the mature take on the subject has always been touched by menace.

Which brings us to “Eyes Wide Shut.” In the last few months, while rumors abounded about the film that is Stanley Kubrick’s last, all Warner Bros. allowed was that it would be a psychological thriller about sexual obsession and jealousy. But, being a Kubrick movie, it bears as much similarity to what we’ve come to think of as psychological erotic thrillers as the director’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” does to “Lost in Space.”

Kubrick’s film is so ambitious and so intriguingly ambiguous that it almost seems shameful to speak of it in company with these other movies.

In the sexy movies that flourished at the peak of the AIDS scare, danger most often was objectified in the form of a pistol or an ice pick. But “Eyes” is no by-the-book thriller imbued with the added edge of topicality; it is a psychological drama in the truest sense of the term.

When Tom Cruise’s Dr. Bill Harford, wracked by jealousy and doubt, is called away from his wife in the dead of night, he walks out into the sex-haunted boulevards of his own subconscious mind, into unexplored regions where lurk carnality and lust in their most unsettling forms.

No weapons appear in Kubrick’s sexualized fever dream of a film, but it’s scary nonetheless, and not just because of the shadowy figure who stalks Cruise by night. Rather, it’s because of what that trench-coated figure and the other dangers represent.

Very little in “Eyes” seems real or naturalistic (the scenes of the Harfords at home in the movie’s earliest moments and the very last scene are exceptions). As for the rest of the film, most of it makes sense only when viewed through the prism of a dream. How else to understand the otherworldly orgy where Cruise eventually finds himself, “disguised” in a mask and hood but as the manifestation of his deepest sexual fears?

In a house full of strangers, surrounded by troubling visions of passion, always watching, never taking part, Cruise is found out. They all wear masks--even conversation feels spooky here, as if the words we hear are unspoken thoughts--but everyone can see that Cruise does not belong. He is a stranger in the realm of passion. And the penalty for his intrusion, which he barely escapes, is death.

Before it opened, people primed by rumors and lies were awaiting an erotic film but in truth “Eyes” is hardly sexy at all. Unlike in the bawdy teen comedies currently on screen, the sexual visions that beckon from these shadows come at a cost, in one case, quite literally. Immediately after a pack of bullying frat boys threatens Cruise on the street, thinking him gay, he accepts a prostitute’s offer to go to her room. Money is exchanged, but little else. Only later does he learn what might have been the true price had their transaction been completed.

Quite aside from issues of artistic vision and approach, one thing that distinguishes Kubrick’s enigmatic movie from mainstream sexy thrillers is that even when those movies deal explicitly with real-life relationships they tend to do so within the strict context of a crime drama.

Long before “Sea of Love’s” (1989) refreshing frankness about its true subject matter--modern dating--the fear of sex had become a well-established Hollywood theme; Michael Douglas made a specialty of roles in which he paid the price of failing to keep his pants up.

But as in most of the movies in this genre, recognizable human emotion and depth weren’t hallmarks. “Fatal Attraction” (1987) starts out realistically, for example, then disintegrates into a standard Hollywood horror movie. And the copious sex and bisexual vamping in “Basic Instinct” (1992) hardly camouflage the hollow formula at its core.

Oddly, perhaps the most clear-cut AIDS analogy may have been “Cruising,” the 1980 film that actually preceded mainstream awareness of the disease. In what may now be seen as a gay dress rehearsal for “Sea of Love,” Al Pacino stars as a cop who goes undercover in a nightmarish sexual demi monde to ferret out a vicious killer.

Such cinematic advertisements for abstinence seem to be much less popular in theaters these days, but the genre’s bastard child has become a mainstay of late-night cable TV. These low-budget, low-class sex thrillers tend to be heavy on sex, light on thrills; unlike their theatrical predecessors of the 1980s and early 1990s, they seem to show a waning of the fear of sex. Starring unknowns (or familiar actors past their prime), these detective movies are nothing more than a pretext for soft-core pornography. Most of them, with titles like “Fatal Instinct” and “Basic Attraction,” go straight to cable or to video.

Mainstream films for adults still deal with sex and sexual matters, only not so often as a central metaphor in thrillers. One critic last year saw “Two Girls and a Guy,” the James Toback comedy starring Robert Downey Jr., as a fairly accurate representation of the modern sexual mood.

“What the film is trying to get across,” critic Peter Rainer of New York magazine wrote, “is that the AIDS-era generation of sex players has gotten frisky; people are ready to experiment again.” The men in Neil Labute’s “Your Friends and Neighbors” of last year are like grown-up versions of the sex-crazed boys in “American Pie.” The difference is that this caustic comedy doesn’t play it strictly for laughs. As stylized as this movie is, the fear and loathing that sex inspires in it ring true.

“Eyes,” too, deals with real-life concerns, only it cloaks its themes in dreamy metaphor and ambiguity. Early in the movie, a man who tries to seduce Nicole Kidman, who plays the wife of Cruise’s character, says, “Don’t you think one of the charms of marriage is that it makes deception a necessity for both parties?”

Everyone in this movie wears a mask of one sort or another. Kidman’s character has worn one for at least a year, ever since she caught sight of a man who so inflamed her passions that she would have abandoned her marriage for one night with him. Cruise’s character also is masked, first by his own self-deceptions, then by the lies he tells to conceal where he’s going, where he’s been, his thoughts, his desires.

He is constantly being outed in this movie. Even before his unmasking at the orgy, his wife’s would-be seducer at that Christmas party says of Cruise, “I’m sure he’s the kind of man who wouldn’t mind if we . . . danced.” The suitor hasn’t even met Cruise yet already has tagged him as indifferent to his wife, the kind of man who would let her be led upstairs by a stranger.

Near the end of the film, Cruise comes home to find Kidman in bed, having discovered the costume mask he wore to the orgy. It lies on his pillow, where his own head should lie.

This is his final “outing,” and it’s more frightful than anything he has previously endured. And ice picks and bullets can’t compete with it.