Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut [1] particularly highlights the traumatic power of the gaze variations on the . The screenplay, of great clinical finesse, is taken from the short story Traumnovelle [2] by Arthur Schnitzler, an author admir by Freud. The day after a festive evening, Alice reveals to her husband Bill that during a recent vacation, she may have been sensitive to the gaze of a neighbor: “With a look he examin me, a simple look, nothing more, but I could hardly move […] he haunt my thoughts, if ever he want me, even if only for one night, I was ready to give up everything that made up my life”. Alice nevertheless remains divid since she supports herself with her love for Bill.
This revelation opens a shattering abyss for Bill
who will enter into a kind of wandering against a backdrop of unleashing the scopic drive. He imagines his wife in the arms of another. His wandering will lead him to a stubborn desire to see, in transgression, silent sexual mobile database intercourse during a libertine costume party. When he returns home, he finds Alice agitat by a dream that makes her laugh and that she tells him about with great emotion: “I was how to win brand advocates wonderfully well, in a magnificent garden stretching nak in the sun; a man came out of the forest, the man from the hotel, he laugh, he made fun of me, he kiss me, then we made love, then I fuck other men, lots of others, and I knew that you saw me when I went from one guy to another.”
It is therefore a question of variations
At the beginning, we are dealing with an eroticizing gaze. From the first scene, we briefly see Alice from behind, nak, changing. During the first evening, the suction scenes pass through conversations and exchanges of glances. Then the power of the gaze exces, goes beyond the field of desire and, from Alice’s fantasy: “I could be numbers barely move.”, it petrifies. During the evening at the manor, the gaze oscillates between eroticism and objectification, with a ritual in which women are distribut like objects, without words. When Alice, by the confession of her fantasy, suggests a pleasure not limit by the signifier, a residual scopic pleasure appears in Bill – first in his thoughts then in a push to see that leads him to a libertine evening. In Alice’s dream, the gaze also appears as a limitless, demeaning, sardonic exhibition.