Did Marion kill her father?

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"I'm not sure where you are drawing the conclusions that Bill views are that women are supposed to be passive, obedient and conformist; that seems like a projection to me. Do you have examples in the film to back that up?"

Examples? The entire film comprehensively demonstrates it, portrays it, confirms it. It is there on the screen ('projected onto it'). Bill is someone oblivious to the Real of Desire, to the role of desire in his subjective economy, who is in denial of his own desires (especially his transgressive ones; this is the reason he collapses when he see the mask on the bed next to Alice toward the end of the film: it is a manifestation of his repressed desires, of what he has been denying to himself and Alice throughout the film), and for whom women serve an entirely passive role in his libidinal economy. This is why he is 'shocked' when he learns that women have desires of their own (fantasies from which he is excluded), and later is even more 'shocked' when he is excluded from the desire-space of the Somerton elite. It is Bill's inability to deal with the fundamental sexual antagonism, his denial of it, his attempt to 'restore' his domestic fantasy world in which everything is fixed, reified, pre-determined, in which his wife has no desires of her own, that sends him off chasing after women (his nocturnal 'journey') such as prostitutes, as they restore for Bill the passive, obedient role of women in his psychic-libidinal economy. It is Bill who is engaging in 'projection' (and most viewers of the film, especially those who unconsciously or consciously identify with Bill and his delusions), is deflecting on to the Other his repressed desires and beliefs, displacing onto the Other the underlying truth about himself, the truth he is unable to acknowledge, the truth he aggressively denies in his daily life.

From previous commentary on the film: The film is about the inability of a 'male-centric' POV (a neurotic masculinity in the case of Bill Harford, the traditional, unreconstructed, narcissistic male fantasy world) to deal with female desire. The whole motor of the film is Bill's attempt to escape from, revenge himself upon, Alice's desire (which excludes him), and later the Somerton elite/power, who also exclude Bill.

Here's my conjecture: the film includes no dream sequences whatsoever apart from the recurring short monochrome inserts, of Bill's paranoid fantasy of Alice copulating with the Naval officer, a fantasy the reaction to which propels Bill to seek out other women/prostitutes in a failed attempt to reassert his illusory identity and his naively cosy fictional world. The only real dream in the film is one we do not see on screen: Alice's dream about Bill's humiliation. This, like her confession about the Naval officer, is the problematic desire whose exclusion - from the 'reality' of the Harfords' marriage - the film is about.

Alice's desire is certainly the 'problem': Bill's inability to deal with it is what propels him on his journey of self-discovery, or, more properly, self-dismantling. Bill wants to bracket out female desire - 'women aren't like that'; hence his attraction to Domino and the Somerton masked woman. As prostitutes/ sex workers, they resume the assigned place of women in his libidinal economy: they are the 'passive' recipients of male desire, not,as Alice has so terrifyingly revealed herself to be, agents of their own desire.

Doesn't Bill discover that the membrane separating his mind, his psychology, from the world of wealth, power and patriarchy was only ever an illusion? Hence the irony of his desperate attempt to shore up his identity by appealing to his professional status. 'I am a DOC-TOR' - meaning: I am what I am socially validated to be. 'Here's ... my card.'

What if Bill's desperate, obsessively reiterated announcement - to anyone who will listen - that he 'is a doctor' - is just an attempt to convince himself of his identity, to establish that his social standing (still) means something? Far from being Bill's 'fantasy', the film is about Bill's (ultimately failed) attempt to return to the fantasy - the complacent trance - of his previous life: a life not yet wrecked by the irruption of others' desires (Alice's, the Somerton group's) into it. Bill is the man excluded from those desires; an unwelcome interloper into others' dreams, the end result of which is his subjective destitution and identity disintegration and - perhaps - in an (anti)ethical choice of willed blindness...

What Alice says disrupts Bill's fantasy, which their bedroom exchange reveals so clearly, depends upon his being 'sure of her.' But the problem with making it all about Bill's 'self-discovery' (or the discovery of the vacancy of his self) is that this, precisely, echoes Bill's male-centric POV, and makes Alice/woman a bitpart player in his psychodrama.

Lacan has stated that "a woman is something all men must believe in".
Alice: "You are very sure of yourself."
Bill: "No, I'm sure of you."
Alice responds with hysterical laughter.

I think this is a very Lacanian moment, poignant and funny. A fantastic moment. A brilliant quote from the film. But one that, in my ignorance and Bill-like blindness, I see as intimately connected to the issue of a male-centric POV on women - something about which Lacan has more than a thing or two to say, too.

And, of course, Bill finds complexity difficult to deal with. Alice's motives are various: playful, cruel, loving, willfull.... But what Bill will concentrate on is that aspect of Alice's desire which does not include him. Now you could equally well take Alice's confession of her desire as even more exclusive of Bill than if she had just forgotten him, or been carried away by a momentary passion. Even though Bill was 'dearer to [Alice] than ever' - at the very moment when her love for him was at its most powerful - she was prepared to throw Bill over. What is scandalous to Bill's narcissism is the thought of Alice desiring anyone else; what is unbearable is the thought that she might have left him.

The crack in the relationship becomes a potential break when Alice challenges Bill's complacency - his taking her for granted. Alice's confession is an act of aggression which poses the question: does their relationship depend upon the exclusion of her desire?

I think the film is organized around the question of whether desire and conjugal love must, inevitably, be opposed. Alice's desire is exclusive - she would have given up Bill (and their daughter) for the naval officer. Is conjugality entry into the patriarchal order: an order which denies female desire, which - like Bill ignoring Alice at the beginning of the film - cannot see it? Must they choose not to see, elect to have their eyes wide shut, in order to save their marriage?

Rather than clearing up all ambiguities, as some have complained, the Ziegler scene in the pool-room amplifies them. Ziegler appears to be saying two contradictory things at the same time (a classic double bind): what happened at Somerton was a mere charade, of no consequence; what happened there was enormously, dreadfully important ... the contradictory but complementary discrepancy upon which power and ideology depends, depends on duping the subject.

Then Bill has a vertiginous revelation of his place in the social world, and a hint of what the rich and powerful are capable of. More enigmas open up - who are the Somerton people? Is Ziegler lying, and do the Somerton group kill Mandy's redeemer?

Shocking as this may sound, Power, it should go without saying, is a recurrent theme in Kubrick's work. And economic power is clearly a theme of EWS - a theme, note, not the theme. Is there a film more concerned with the price of things? (See, for instance, Tim Kreider's analysis of EWS on the Kubrick site http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0096.html.)

Nevertheless, the relationship between Bill/Alice's marriage and Ziegler/Somerton - between the psycho-sexual and the thriller elements of the film's narrative - seems to me profoundly uncertain. Bill is plunged into his journey towards 'subjective destitution' by Alice's account of her fantasy, to be sure, but the extent to which the nature of bill and alice's relationship "is necessary" to the social status bill seeks to achieve (assumes he has achieved, even if he hasn't examined the consequences of that achievement) strikes me as very difficult to read.

Where do Somerton and Ziegler fit in to this picture? Are they on the side of desire or of 'society'? Ziegler would ostensibly seem to be on the side of society, the symbolic order, patriarchy: yet he is also something of a Sadean libertine, a repulsive superegoic figure, the classic obscene pervert. He is both the Father who says No (guarantor of the symbolic order) and the Father who enjoys (wrecker of the symbolic). But what is definitively excluded from Ziegler/ Somerton's desiring-circuit - and from Bill's? - is female desire. Women only gain entry insofar as they are passive, bought, marginalized, abused.

In Lacanian terms, desire=the real; therefore, Alice's confession of her temptation to abandon Bill for the naval officer and her later dream of Bill's humiliation (both fantasies in which Bill is sacrificed, note) cannot be treated as 'merely' fantasmatic constructions. Waking life - 'we're awake now' - is not more but less real than what is revealed in dreams and fantasies, and it is the flight into the 'ordinary', the domestic, the apparently well-constituted identity, that is escapist. Alice's dreams and fantasies indicate a - to Bill, intolerable - space in Alice's desire where he is absent. This is another way in which EWS differs from the 'it's all a dream' genre of numerous Hollywood and other movies: dreams in EWS - as in Freud or Lacan - are not escapes from reality, but realizations of desire.


What, then, of Alice's final word? There's no question - is there? - that Alice 'loves' Bill ---- the issue seems to be whether married life/ conjugal love can survive another more dangerous form of love: desire. Does the word '*beep*' suggest a reintegration of desire into conjugality? Is it, then, a counterpoint to the alleged 'waking up' (flight from desire/the real)? Or was the 'waking up' precisely a recognition of desire - paradoxically, a refusal to accept the distinction between dreams/fantasies and ordinary domestic 'reality'?

The assumption in many interpretations of EWS is that Bill is shaken out of his complacency into some kind of revelation. But the revelation seems to be essentially negative - i.e. Bill, his marriage, and the social milieu in which he moves are not what he thought they were - however, he seems to be no closer to understanding what they actually are, choosing, with Alice, to shut their eyes again, to retreat back into domestic fantasy, to keep the Outside outside.

The ending of EWS is certainly not blatantly happy. And it's not a question of a couple turning away from those less fortunate than themselves --- in a sense, it's the reverse, they are ignoring the corruption of those more fortunate than themselves ... and let's not forget that this may involve a murder.

Somebody once described Kubrick as an 'Extraterrestrial anthropologist', which is a great phrase... It seems to me that Kubrick was in many ways the inheritor of the nineteenth century naturalist tradition which saw characters as determined by environment. Kubrick's films are intensely, and consistently, focused on psychology, but not as some theatre of interiority. Rather - as we see most explicitly in ACO - human mental processes are seen as shaped, influenced and manipulated by forces outside the cogito. The tragic flaw in many of Kubrick's characters - in Alex, in Redmond Barry, in Jack, in Joker, in Bill - is their conviction that they are 'master of their own destiny', in control of their own minds. The Shining is a classic example of this fatal delusion. Rather than being a projection from within his mind, as many have contended, what happens in The Shining is an effect of Jack's mind being overwhelmed, overtaken by The Overlook, by a malevolent Outside.

In EWS, we see Kubrick the extraterrestrial anthropologist turning his gaze upon the domestic, the intimate and the conjugal. And not for the first time, since BL and TS share, in parts, a similar focus.

Finally, EWS is not simply 'Bill's dream', as some critics suggested, nor are films themselves 'simply' dreams. If all films are dreams, there would still be a difference between watching a film and dreaming because watching a film would be to experience _someone else's_ dream. This theme seems to me central to EWS: whose desires are we subject to? Bill finds himself excluded from Alice's desire, then included - to some degree unwittingly - in the ritualized desire-space of the power elite at Somerton. To make the Somerton ritual simply a fantasy of Bill's would be to remove the film's political dimension entirely, reducing everything to the domestic and the private. But if the Somerton scenes are 'real', then the distinction between the public and private, between the world of power, influence and wealth and what happens inside one's own head, collapses. Not because 'everything is a dream' (one's own dream), but - on the contrary - everything is someone else's dream, someone else's desire.

More broadly, The film is concerned with power, ownership and money and the way they connect with issues of identity, intimacy and sexuality, and any interpretation that concentrates on identity etc to the detriment of the social and economic 'themes' is not only willfully blinding itself to whole swathes of what happens in the film, it is missing one of the most important and unique aspects of EWS. As a result, any interpretation that concentrates exclusively on Bill/Alice's marital concerns would be turning a blind eye to large expanses of the film. Indeed, Bill's relationship with Ziegler strikes me as at least as pivotal to the film as his relationship with Alice. One difference betweent the Schnitzler novel and EWS is the introduction of the Ziegler character. Ziegler's main role, it seems to me, is as a power-broker and representative of wealth. Why include him if not to point up this theme?

Such a reduction of the film to the domestic marital problems of a complacent, four-eyed bourgeoise couple, but specifically Bill's, is cutting psychology loose from everything else - folding all exteriority inside a solipsistic white male fantasy space - that is what is constitutively flawed in such an 'interpretation'. My objections to 'psychological' interpretations of this type are not objections to psychology per se, but to a hermetic, anti-social, ahistorical version of psychology, drearily consonant with the Cartesian master program of European metaphsyics in its assumption that the whole cosmos is important only in relation to the conscious male subject. Which condition, incidentally, is exactly the sleepwalking egocentric complacency Bill begins EWS so conspicuously cocooned in.

And, of course, power wants us to believe in commonsense, that what goes on in our own heads is more real than geo-politics, which is what Ziegler does to Bill when he meets him in the pool-room.

An interpretation that concentrates on Bill's 'identity' and 'hurt' and his 'quest for self-discovery' surrenders the film into being an 'eternal', ahistorical disquizition on fairly well-known existential themes, voided of specific reference to contemporary culture/ society. When what is most interesting is an exploration of those themes in the context of a very precisely drawn socio-economic world, that of neoliberal capitalism at the end of the second millenium.


"overemphasizes a projection of gender philosophy into Bill' psyche"

No, it's a critical commentary on the film, of what we see on the screen and on what his happening in it, a film in which Bill and his insular psyche is but a bit-part player, for the film is about the nature of contemporary Power, about the inter-connections between (contemporary) power, wealth, capital, money, and intimacy, domesticity, identity, sexuality, of how the latter are mediated and structured by the former.

Gender is not a philosophy, but a symbolic identification. When we are dealing with sexuality we need to delineate three levels: 1. the elementary empirical-biological level, the level of image, the designation 'male' or 'female', a purely arbitrary determination, an imaginary designation (a simple, banal, 'fact'); 2. gender identification, such as the 'masculine', the 'feminine' or some other, gay/lesbian. trans-gender, etc, defined and determined by a set of symbolic determinations, and what most people confuse with sexuality itself, with sexual difference; and 3. the most crucial level or dimension, the Real of sexual antagonism/difference itself, the inherent conflict and anxiety and ambiguity of sexuality itself (the conflict between the symbolic and the real, between words and things, between reality and the Real, between reality and fantasy, between repression and the repressed) that is immanent to all humans irrespective of gender or biology (what many find strange, weird, uncanny about someone who is 'trans-gender' is precisely because they directly embody this inherent sexual antagonism, manifest it directly), the fact that all identity is a social-symbolic construction, is an ILLUSION, a fantasy formation, someone else's fantasy, someone's else's desire. Identity is always a MASK behind which there is Nothing; humans are not essentially anything, but a complex and inherently conflicted assemblage of desires, identifications, and interests.