CLOTHES WIDE OFF

But now Nicole and Tom face one of life’s little ironic situations. On the one hand, they’re really shy and private. On the other hand, a movie studio recently paid them millions of dollars to take off their clothes and be filmed having sex, and both Tom and Nicole want as many people as possible to spend seven dollars apiece to watch the movie of the two of them having sex. They get a share of the gross receipts, you see. To complicate matters further, the moviemaker Stanley Kubrick, who convinced them to take off their clothes and be filmed having sex — not that it took that much convincing, probably — is dead! He croaked! In fact, he died just after he finished editing the movie. Fortunately, he did shoot an advertisement for the film that has been playing in several thousand theaters across the country.

And what does the ad show? Tom and Nicole having sex, of course; not rutting, precisely, but you do see Tom standing naked next to Nicole, while he kisses her neck as if he’s trying to peel an artichoke with his teeth. You get two incredibly shy, incredibly private people and pay them to have sex before millions of customers, and you’ve got the very definition of an ironic situation.

Or what used to be called an ironic situation, anyway. Nowadays it’s called marketing. And pretty smart marketing, too, for the best kind of marketing is the kind that is, so to speak, invisible, and as far as I know no one has yet drawn attention to the stupendous job Nicole and Tom and (posthumously) Kubrick have done in presenting as a major artistic event what would otherwise be considered, under more traditional understandings, a peep show.

But already it’s agreed: The movie Eyes Wide Shut, which opens nationwide on July 16, has the potential to be a cinematic watershed, an artistic event wildly anticipated by all thinking people with a refined aesthetic sense, by all people who care about the future of film as an art form, and by all people who want to see Nicole and Tom do it. These are all the same people, by the way.

Apart from its merits as a movie, whatever those may turn out to be, Eyes Wide Shut is a final testament to Stanley Kubrick’s genius as a promoter. Shortly before his death, Kubrick fashioned the movie’s marketing plan to the smallest detail, from the length and scope of the television ad campaign to the contents of press kits mailed to movie critics. This, as much as celluloid, was Kubrick’s metier: He was a master of marketing and, just as important, a fastidious self-mythologizer.

In a recently published memoir, Frederic Raphael (who co-wrote the movie’s screenplay) recalls finding Kubrick alone one afternoon in the living room of his vast mansion, holding a ruler above Indonesian newspapers spread out on the floor. The auteur had been measuring the size of the display ads for one of his movies, to ensure they conformed to the distributors’ contract. Kubrick’s devotion to the arts of commerce is always ignored, for while in private he fretted and groaned over the profit-and-loss ledgers, he managed publicly to maintain, as no other director has, the image of an artist loftily removed from the contamination of mere money-grubbing.

He did this, first, by making a handful of very good movies, and second, by treating journalists and critics with utter contempt. Like some small children and certain breeds of dogs, hacks in the entertainment field are drawn irresistibly to anyone who despises them. Kubrick refused to grant interviews or sit for photographers and let it be known that he considered popular movie criticism to be amusingly inept. Tactics like these make entertainment journalists drunk with admiration. For all their giddiness, they are self-aware enough to know that someone who ignores them or treats them with revulsion is merely exhibiting good taste. So it was with Kubrick, who, as a consequence, could comb his press clippings from a forty-year career and find scarcely a single unflattering word.

Kubrick’s contempt for the hacks of the entertainment press has been roundly confirmed, of course, time and again. Their reaction to the various teases that form his marketing plan for Eyes Wide Shut has been everything he could have wished. First he refused to discuss the film publicly while making it; this only inflamed their interest. He “swore his actors to secrecy” about the movie’s content; this ensured that it would be the primary subject of all their interviews. Finally he stipulated that the movie not be “pre-screened” for critics until the day before its official opening. Normally, this would make the critics suspicious, since studios refuse to preview a movie only when they know it’s a turkey. But because Kubrick hated them so, the scribes of entertainment journalism are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Eyes Wide Shut is expected to be a masterpiece.

But the glittering crown jewel of Kubrick’s marketing plan was the involvement of Tom and Nicole, neither of whom, interestingly enough, seems to be as dumb as the reporters who write about them. Rolling Stone, for example, sent an interviewer halfway round the world, to Australia, to interrogate Nicole as part of the promotion for Eyes Wide Shut. In the interview, which like most celebrity interviews took place over a nice cup of cappuccino, Nicole mentions how easy it was to film the sex scenes. “As people,” Nicole goes on to say, “Tom and I aren’t exhibitionists,” and there is absolutely no indication that the reporter spat steamed milk the length of the restaurant. Instead, what the reporter did was write sentences like this: “Though Kidman’s life has changed dramatically, some things will always stay the same. Like her struggle for simplicity. Any special attention makes her visibly uncomfortable.” On the cover is a picture of Nicole, naked from the waist up, wearing hip-hugger suede pants and covering her breasts with a fedora. Poor kid: shy to the end. Kubrick would be delighted.

Andrew Ferguson is senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.