On Aspirational Viewing and the Cinematic Aura: Watching Cinema with My Eyes Wide Shut

It’s okay, Tom. We all get frustrated with our cinematic idols sometimes.

When I was in high school and quickly growing into the movie nerd I now am, I went through the phase that I now believe every cinephile goes through: I was obsessed with Stanley Kubrick. My first experience with his work was probably The Shining, which I saw in an edited version that aired on television, interrupted by commercial breaks to bring the running time (probably) to around three and a half hours. Even under those circumstances, the movie left its mark, but I hadn’t yet had a sense of auteur awareness: I thought of it as a horror movie, as an adaptation of a Stephen King novel (with whom I was obsessed enough in middle school that I completed a sixth-grade poster and book report project on Cujo, much to my teacher’s horror). I didn’t think of it as a Stanley Kubrick film. That didn’t come until I saw Full Metal Jacket: I watched it on a friend’s tiny television and we were both so entranced that we immediately rewound the VHS to re-watch the opening act with R. Lee Ermey’s incredible, foul-mouthed Gunnery Sergeant, only to find ourselves lost enough in the movie to watch the entire thing again. (Side note: It was probably also the first movie in which I watched the end credits in full. Not because of my appreciation for film craft, but for my appreciation for the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black,” which I had somehow never heard before. It was the perfect visceral capstone for the experience of watching such a violent, disturbing, yet cool movie.)

This revelatory moment led to my full-on obsession. Next was Dr. Strangelove and Lolita, both of which I caught in a double-feature on Turner Classic Movies on my own tiny bedroom television and both of which I adored immediately. Then A Clockwork Orange, which I liked but didn’t “get” then. Then 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I really tried to like. I really did. Barry Lyndon, too. I really, really tried. And that’s really the point of this post. What does it mean to want to like a film? Why would anyone even try to do that, when they don’t really feel the love? And is the love any less real if it’s affected and worked on rather than “natural”?

Eyes Wide Shut was given a wide release on July 16, 1999. I had waited for the movie’s arrival in theaters for what felt like a really, really, ridiculously long time, and in that period I did something that I hadn’t done for any other movie before then: I studied for the movie so that the experience would be as fulfilling as possible. I wanted to get the movie immediately, to get it “right” like it was test day after an unofficial semester of auteur studies. The “Stanley Kubrick Collection” came out on VHS a few days after my birthday, so it was a no-brainer birthday present. I reserved it at the store in advance and even went there immediately when it opened on its release day so that I could pick it up and settle down in bed to watch every movie chronologically through his career. (It wasn’t every movie: it started with Paths of Glory, but I had picked up Killer’s Kiss and The Killing, as well as the also-not-included Spartacus separately when I reserved my collection.) I spent the next few weeks in serious preparation for the exam that was Kubrick’s final film, the one that he declared his “masterpiece” at a screening a few days before his death.

A copy of Stanley Kubrick’s warning to me that my efforts to understand his movies are completely useless.

I watched and re-watched all of his movies, and I refused to allow myself to acknowledge that I wasn’t really that fond of two of his more “important” movies, even though I kept falling asleep each time I watched them. Why was there so much time spent on dying monkeys? Why so many lengthy shots devoted to Barry silently playing cards? I could watch real monkeys do nothing live at the zoo, and I could watch my grandparents silently play cards, had I any wish for either, but I really didn’t. And I just didn’t get these movies. But I willed myself into liking them through repeated viewings because, in the reading I had of course assigned myself to become an expert in all things Kubrick, I knew that the right people liked these movies. And, while I didn’t acknowledge it exactly, I wanted to be one of the “right people” who liked the “right movies.”

Here’s the thing, though: studying worked! It was quite a difference from watching American Pie alone in the theater the previous week. It helps that the entire film is structured as a big tease, and I didn’t quite pick up on the unsettling anti-climax of the film (we’re supposed to leave feeling unsatisfied, no?). In any case, I loved every second of the movie. Every image felt tactile on the big screen.

I won’t spend this space analyzing the film in any kind of real depth: plenty of great stuff has already been written about every aspect of it, from its explicit invocation of Freudian and Jungian psycho-sexual tropes to its representation of a death drive, to its class positioning, etc. It is useful here to point out, though, that the movie is fairly explicitly about a guy who is somehow dissatisfied with his life and aspires to climb the social ladder, first by becoming a doctor (it’s a running gag in the film that showing his credentials as a physician seems to open doors for him, letting him do anything and question anyone as he pleases), then by becoming essential for a rich patient, then by putting on a mask and entering an extraordinarily high-class space he neither understands nor particularly enjoys. He wants to be there in spite of (or even because of) the dangers it poses for his previously stable upper-middle-class identity, but his heart (and libido) just aren’t in it.

This plot functions as a pretty good analogue for my experience in studied enjoyment of Kubrick. I put on the mask of the kind of person I wanted to become and, even though I didn’t necessarily always enjoy the experience, I sauntered into Kubrick’s world, what with its promises of cultural capital and distinction and class!

We all walk into a movie theater wearing masks of who we would prefer to be.

In a somewhat controversial New York Times Magazine piece from a couple of years ago, Dan Kois discussed what he described as “aspirational viewing,” that is, watching movies as “cultural vegetables” for the cultural capital they can offer when the experience of watching them is actually less than thrilling. The piece is mostly about slow-moving cinema like Meek’s Cutoff or the original Solaris, which makes it a fitting piece to consider with my own experiences with the slow-moving 2001 and Barry Lyndon. That said, I think the idea can be expanded even further in considering how we emotionally respond when we’re constructing our aesthetic judgments and cultural tastes more generally. (For instance, this article was important as I was finishing off my dissertation on young Shakespeare readers.) On this subject, he writes:

As a viewer whose default mode of interaction with images has consisted, for as long as I can remember, of intense, rapid-fire decoding of text, subtext, metatext and hypertext, I’ve long had a queasy fascination with slow-moving, meditative drama. Those are the kinds of films dearly loved by the writers, thinkers and friends I most respect, so I, too, seek them out; I usually doze lightly through them; and I often feel moved, if sleepy, afterward. But am I actually moved? Or am I responding to the rhythms of emotionally affecting cinema? Am I laughing because I get the jokes or because I know what jokes sound like?

He got a lot of grief from this, but it’s an important question. And it’s one that certainly applies to my experiences in studied affection for Kubrick. If I look back “honestly” at his films now, I recognize that 2001 would have been a fantastic 90-minute film (and not the lumbering two hours and forty minutes it is), and that, while I still really like Barry Lyndon, it’s not the kind of film I’d normally like. In fact, thinking on them both today I can say with absolute certainty that I actually prefer Ridley Scott’s riffs on these two movies in Alien (and even Prometheus, to a lesser extent) and in the very lean yet still rich The Duelists.

But that’s not my experience with Eyes Wide Shut: my feelings for that movie haven’t changed. It was enduring love at first sight, which raises some questions for me about how it functions differently as “cultural vegetables.”

So many people responded to this article, claiming that it seems to miss the point about great movies and that his position of wanting to have watched movies (rather than actually watching them) is “bad faith” for a film critic. For instance, Bilge Ebiri points out that it’s a question of the movie itself: “The work itself should be what matters — not the rubric into which it fits.” Ebiri clarifies that

the real “aspiration” here should be not to merely consume things that are different, but to be able to see beyond those differences and separate the ones that work from the ones that don’t. Like the way my son eats those eggplant sticks: Not because they’re eggplant, but because holy shit do they taste good.

It’s a fairly disappointing return to the text as a text, separated from any kind of larger cultural structures, including the ones that dictate what we are supposed to like for reasons that have nothing to do with the film. Meanwhile, Richard Brody’s reaction in The New Yorker isn’t much better, admitting that personal taste has a big stake in criticism, but then explaining this “personal” taste by falling back on the exact cliches and fallacies about life experience and the beauty of “art” that Kois is questioning in the first place:

The more important question posed by Kois’s piece is what role personal taste plays in the critic’s work. My answer to that question is, a great deal. It’s important for critics to be precise and discerning and to have a broad view of the cinematic landscape and a deep one of cinematic history. They need also to possess a great fund of general and artistic knowledge and the literary talent to frame their observations in clear and memorable language. And most of all, they need to have an understanding of life that is made manifest in imaginative sympathy with artists. (A work of art encapsulates a lifetime of experience, and that’s exactly what a valuable critic brings to it.) But the work of the critic is, above all, prophetic—to invoke the future of the cinema, to see the films of present day as if retrospectively, by way of their inspiration of history to come and of the personal worldview they embody.

Brody makes some interesting points about time at the end there, but he’s making a point about individuals, which is not what Kois is doing. Brody is making a point about individual life experience (peppered with laughable phrases about how art “encapsulates a lifetime of experience”); Kois is making a point about the structure of feeling and how it is shaped by forces outside of text that are difficult to pinpoint. The thing other folks miss about aspirational viewing is that the goal isn’t only its pedagogical and social purpose. Those are there, but the more important, more immediately, more visceral part of aspirational viewing as Kois describes it is the real desire to enjoy something on an emotional, affective level when one’s heart isn’t in it.

If we think about this in relation to Eyes Wide Shut, the point becomes even more complex. Had I gone into that theater in 1999 without the work of studied enjoyment that I put into that experience, would I have loved the movie? Would I have even liked the movie? It’s hard to say for sure. A lot of people with really good taste and similar sensibilities to mine really hated Eyes Wide Shut in its initial release, only changing their evaluations of the film after years had passed (revealingly so, I think, as with many of his films — the work of taste culture in action). People often point to how “cold” and “distant” the movie feels: one could counter that the entire film is meant to feel like a dream, but dreams are visceral and feel real, which is definitively not how this film works. The film keeps the viewer at a cold distance at every single turn, and that cold distance even seems to bleed on the screen, as Tom Cruise bundles himself up in a thick overcoat and gloves.

He is a pretty cool customer in this movie.

It seems to me that the difference here is that it feels less immersive, less visceral, less engaging, less intense, because the important part of the experience is not what’s happening on screen. In this sense, Brody and company are completely off, and Kois even feels dismissive of the really important aspect of the cinematic aura of cultural vegetables with his flippant references to dozing during great movies. The drama that pulls me in to Eyes Wide Shut happens not on the screen but inside me! All of the work of culture (including my own subjective personality, but also the impulse the study, the desire to enjoy, the desire to wear a mask of someone better) was happening in my head space and I didn’t even recognize it. In other words, the work itself had very little to do with my love for it: the rubric into which it fit was almost entirely what mattered. It helped to produce what Benjamin describes as an “aura” around the film, a sublimity that encourages awe, respect, and even love. And this cultural drama in my head also explains why so many people didn’t respond in the same way to the film that I did, when logically, the Benjaminian aura should affect everyone pretty much equally.

It should also be pointed out that the mechanical reproduction that Benjamin critiqued was necessary in setting up the contrast between an artificial experience and a “real” one, even though this real one was just as constructed. What I ran into in full force when I sat in the theater in 1999 that I didn’t encounter with 2001 and Barry Lyndon was precisely the aura that Benjamin describes, even if it isn’t exactly how he describes it. Watching my first Kubrick film on the big screen certainly helped to build that distinction between this experience and all the experiences of watching his films on tiny televisions. But my act of studying was what allowed me to experience that sublime aura of pure art in full: it was the work that I did in my aspiration to enjoy it that allowed me to enjoy the film in the first place. In other words, the distinction in types of cinematic experience worked with the kind of distinction I was trying to build in myself, “distinction” in the sense of cultural value of cultural capital that Bourdieu describes. My experience of the aura was directly proportional here to my desire to distinguish myself from other (lesser) people who couldn’t love Stanley Kubrick in the same way because they couldn’t get him like I did. Even my own friends and family weren’t exempt from my elitist attitude, as I studied my way into becoming better than them, at the very least in this one tiny area of aesthetic appreciation. That kind of study would have been unavailable to me had this not been an “age of mechanical reproduction” that allowed me to walk into a store and walk out with the better part of an artist’s life work for home viewing. And my own personal attitude and aspirational position were able to seize upon these conditions to make possible a real love for something.

To conclude, I should be clear about one thing when exploring this studied affection: yes, this love is completely constructed out of conditions of mass-marketing of films and out of my attempt to will myself into understanding and enjoyment of an auteur that is already very much constructed as an auteur….

But the love is still real, and while I care about how I felt this way, I don’t want that love to go away.

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This was part of a larger series on the year in cinema in 1999: to check out the other entries, click here.