Why ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Is a Bizarro Holiday Classic

It’s precisely this futility that makes Eyes Wide Shut such an essential Christmas movie, however, and makes the holiday so vital to Eyes Wide Shut. Bill Harford isn’t trying to get away from his wife — he’s trying to get back to her.

Christmas at the movies isn’t the same thing as Christmas at mass. On screen, the holiday isn’t a religious event so much as a shared shorthand for a certain frame of mind. The films that we’ve now come to most closely associate with the holiday (It’s a Wonderful Life, Meet Me in St. Louis, Die Hard, etc.) have one thing in common, and it’s not a reverence for the miraculous arrival of baby Jesus. The films that truly belong to this subgenre — the ones that incorporate the season in context of its broader emotional resonance — share a warm preoccupation with the feeling of return, of reclaiming something that the protagonist is afraid to lose or fears already lost. Theologically, Christmas is about birth; culturally, it’s about rebirth.

Bill Harford’s dark night of the soul might appear to have more in common with The Odyssey than It’s a Wonderful Life, but with each opportunity the journey gives him to throw his marriage away — and with each temptation he miraculously avoids at the last second — he finds himself that much closer to home. For Bill, every offering of sexual bliss is ultimately a perverse step back to his wife (hence the ironic choice of “Fidelio,” latin for “fidelity,” as the password Bill uses to gain access to an orgy of strangers).  

Retracing his steps in the cold light of the following day, Bill is gobsmacked by the many-faced Ghost of Sex Narrowly Avoided. The sweet prostitute he almost had sex with is revealed to be H.I.V. positive; the orgy house — once an enchanted kingdom of embarrassed pleasures — has been stripped of its magic, its consequences shown to him on a city morgue’s slab. By the time he finds the Creepy-Fuck-Party mask he wore to the previous evening’s shindig on the pillow next to his sleeping wife, the doctor can’t help but be overwhelmed by the reality of how far he’d gone, and how much further he had to go to make the journey home. Finally, Bill and Alice can wake up from their own dreams and begin to restore the one they shared together.