Friday One Sheet: EYES WIDE SHUT @ 26
As is the tradition for this column, the penultimate entry before the end of the year is an alternate poster for Stanley Kubrick's final film. It is the 26th anniversary of the original release of Eyes Wide Shut, and hot on the heels of a recent remaster with a radically colour-graded 4K physical media release, we have Ryan Woolworth's The Shining yellow inspired three layer design below.
On the right of the design, there is the scene of Doctor Bill's vision of a shore-leave sailor in Cape Cod having his way with his wife, Alice. This occurs after in a pot-induced confession of her overpowering lust one vacation afternoon, that almost caused Alice to dissolve her marriage on the spot. On the left, Bill is framed by bedroom art, and is looking directly at the the audience; perhaps considering the fantasy. Overlapping in the centre, there are husband and wife nearly, but not quite, kissing.
One way to interpret Eyes Wide Shut (note there are many, some crazier than others) is as a 48-hour odyssey of sexuality, power, and death, in which Dr. Bill is engulfed in all of it, but gets none of it. This is both emasculating and humbling for him at the level of his New York social status, and the future of his marriage.
This poster, in royal purple and distressed yellow, hints at the latter via collage. But it is also a nod to Kubrick's other domestic humbling horror picture, The Shining. Poster and opening credit sequence designer, the legendary Saul Bass, made dozens of stipple renderings for Kubrick before the release of The Shining. Kubrick demanded yellow as the primary colour, to evoke in cinema lobbies as would a traffic or industrial warning sign, even as Bass thought red was appropriate. Kubrick got his way.
Later, in the 1990s, bright yellow was co-opted as code for 'Sundance-Indie'. But back in 1980, there was almost nothing like it out there, and has made the original piece of key art, its own kind of classic.
Let us all continue to make Eyes Wide Shut the Christmas viewing tradition that it deserves to be.
