Main Character’s Queer Aspect and the Quality of Sex in Eyes Wide Shut

In this paper, I will discuss a queer aspect of a main character, Dr. William Harford, whom Tom Cruise plays, and examine the quality of sex in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. We can see this movie as a quest of William for his self-identification. His self is dismantled or made fluid in various ways. Firstly, his convinced position as a husband of Alice is shadowed by her confession of the notion that she tempted herself to play around with a naval officer during their family vacation. This notion obsesses William many times in this movie and makes its motif. Secondly, his social position as a doctor, a father, a friend, and so forth is endangered by a possibility to infect HIV by a one-night stand with a prostitute, Domino, and by a disgrace resulting from his failure in sneaking into a sexual orgy. He has a narrow escape with a help of a woman, who turns out to be Mundy whom William examines at a dance party in the opening scene. In either case, he uses these female characters as his agents or alter egos to identify himself and, at the same time, those female characters are others to be incorporated into his self. In this sense, William can possess a queer orientation in his identity.

This movie presents sex as a trial of William’s identity and as a scene of transsexuality of his identity. He has to do this quest to break out his obsession by experiencing the same kind of sexual situations as his wife might have encountered. In terms of this, he is identified as his wife. During the quest, his masculinity is stripped away because of his transsexual identity, so he never has a sex in this movie except he plays a masculine role as a husband and father in his family. When he tries to have a one-night stand with Domino, a call from his wife prevents it. If he had it, he could infect HIV. Here, Domino represents his position. As I wrote before, he is found out to be a stranger in the sexual orgy. He is forced to be naked and disgraced, but a woman, who is Mundy, literally sacrifices herself for him. He comes to know in the newspaper that she is secretly killed. Here, Mundy represents his position. After all, he never has a sex with other women than his wife so that he can believe his wife’s honesty from his point of view as a man. We can think the way in which his female alter egos experiencing what his wife might have gone through are killed by the representation of a murder of Mundy and he recovers his masculinity.

This movie once tries to dismantle not only a main character’s identity but also a family as a social institution by introducing sex as a discourse. Sex can privilege a man and a woman as a status of couple in the major society. Masked sexes depicted in the scene of the sexual orgy or sexes masking one’s identity “mask” the privileging power. When the identity of an individual who involved with masked sex like William is “unmasked,” the power works not only for the one but for the other of the couple. The power can negatively work for his whole family. The persons involved with the party try to exclude those who revealed their identities because this power should be under the mask for enjoying sex as an act. From the opposite viewpoint, the scene of the sexual orgy seems to be rather asexual despite the fact that the scene is full of sexual acts. That might be because the party is insulated from the society for its quality of the party and masks, and therefore both sexes (men and women) acting sexes are in the condition of gender-free. In comparison with the sexes in the sexual orgy, the sex which is acted by William and Alice, played in the very first scene of the movie or implied at the very end of the movie by Alice’s words, is more sexual since sex as a discourse is exposed and unmasked.

I examined William’s character from the perspective of a queer aspect of his identity by looking at this movie as a quest of his self-identification. In this movie, sex as an act is the key to make the main character into a trance of his transsexual experience. He finally returns to a sex with his wife, which stands for his social status, after experiencing “anonymous sexes” which is stripped from the social contexts.