In the final rush to binge watch Christmas’s most beloved films, we recall one holiday film not mentioned in the same breath as "Rudolf" and "Love Actually": "Eyes Wide Shut." Stanley Kubrick’s final film, made in 1999, has been on the mind of reviewers this year as David Fincher’s high-profile marriage thriller "Gone Girl" drew comparisons to the classic.

While news headlines remain dominated by events that make secrecy look like a concept of the past, critical praise of "Gone Girl" proved the enduring relevance of "Eyes Wide Shut" as a film that looks at the intense unknowing that can exist between two people. While surveillance is a very modern fear, personal information that is by nature inscrutable hasn't quite bit the dust as a source of cinematic terror.

"Eyes Wide Shut" follows doctor Bill Harford and his wife Alice to an extravagant holiday party thrown by one of his patients. Bill runs into an old friend with a piano gig at a secret society and follows him to the site of a ritual, masked orgy. Bill is haunted by his wife’s admission that she once strongly contemplated infidelity with a man they saw on vacation, and throughout the movie it seems as if Bill will stray outside the marriage--thus, erotic tension runs high.

"Gone Girl" is the story of a husband suspected of his wife’s disappearance and murder, with the (spoiler alert) massive twist that she meticulously framed him for the crime. When it was released earlier this year, the two films were immediately compared. Richard Kelly--best known as the director of "Donnie Darko"-- called them “two of the most thought provoking films about marriage ever made.”

Writing for The New Yorker, Richard Brody says “‘Gone Girl’ goes a step beyond Kubrick’s film, by rooting the action in the particulars of the digital age. The new public realm—the intentional representation of private life in public view and the way that those representations quickly get out of hand—is at the center of Fincher’s movie.” Both films are fundamentally about secrecy in relationships, but Fincher’s also must contend with the type of modern technology that makes secret-keeping hard to do.


Aviva Briefel is a professor of English and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin College and co-editor of the book "Horror after 9/11 World of Fear, Cinema of Terror." The book is an examination of how the public’s fears change based on what is going on in the world, and how directors might capture that zeitgeist to make a movie truly scary.

Breifel points out that we are in “very little control of the type of information we select” to share with the world, although “social media gives us a false sense of control”. She contrasts HAL-- the mutineering computer adapted by Kubrick in 1968 into the film version of "2001: A Space Odyssey" to Samantha, the operating system in the movie "Her"(2013), whom the main character falls in love with.

The thought of artificial intelligence was terrifying in 1968, now we think of our smart technology as “extensions of ourselves” and movies like "Her" represent “normalcy within a sci-fi scenario”, say Briefel ... however tentative that normalcy is. The ability to manipulate technology, and our public image, is the new means to secrecy preservation.

In 2011, The Guardian published an article titled ‘The movie plots that technology killed’. They wrote that “In recent years, directors have incessantly been forced to confront the narrative-busting intrusion of new technologies, resigning themselves to the fact that plotlines that were completely plausible as recent as 10 years ago are no longer plausible now.”

I rewatched "Eyes Wide Shut" and noted every time today’s technology would have made a difference in the plot… many times. The cloud that descends on The Harfords when Alice reveals having fantasized about another man just as easily could have been a confession of having tracked him down on Facebook. Instead, the possibility of what could have happened lends a sinister tone to the plot. Similarly, the intrusion of Bill into the erotic rituals of a secret society lack believability in an era when every person would be toting a camera phone in their pocket. Not to mention all the times Bill could have just summoned an Uber.

So why is secrecy still scary? Some of the biggest stories of the year involve issues of privacy: failed pushback against NSA surveillance, the "Fappening" and the Sony hacks. Isn’t it logical to assume in this digital age that audiences would be more scared by what is knowable about a person, versus what is not?

Briefel points out that "Gone Girl" is forced to account for technology in its plotline. Amy--the disappearing wife-- manipulates technology to further her ends. She uses a payphone and cash to avoid being tracked by cell phone signals and credit cards, and she stages her own captivity via surveillance cam.

The more immediate fear on the public’s mind might be control of our own information, but the need to know another’s secret motives certainly isn’t dated. "Eyes Wide Shut" as it is couldn’t be made today, but a similar film was very successful.

"Gone Girl" opens with husband Nick’s confession that he wishes he could break his wife’s head open to get a satisfying answer to the mysteries “What are you thinking? How are you feeling?” These questions endure and the inability to answer them does strike a certain fear into the heart of anyone in a loving relationship, despite the portrait of a lover that technology delivers to our fingertips.

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