Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Alice: Millions of years of evolution, right? Right?
Men have to stick it in every place they can,
but for women... women it is just about security
and commitment and whatever the fuck else!
Bill: A little oversimplified, Alice,
but yes, something like that.
Alice: If you men only knew...

Stanley Kubrick's technically unfinished (by him anyway) masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut was finally released on this day twenty years ago... where it was met with a great big "HUH?" I loved it immediately and have grown to love it even more with time, but I get the HUH, I really do. It's a three-hour-long unsexy unthrilling sex thriller that moves like molasses -- I get it! It's a challenging and strange motion picture. And yet with time it begins to feel more and more like it might be the most incisive film about long term relationships I've ever seen. (Give or take a Phantom Thread.)

The way it captures the sensation of moving through the world in the lonely singular spheres that we all travel in, through the inescapable machinations of the human mind and our very natures, tethered to another forever unknowable who's gliding around in their own sphere, and how it feels like the fucking Wizard of Oz whenever you get one of those good clear cruel glimpses inside somebody else -- all of our sublime and ornate ridiculousness, inexplicable and unfathomable -- and you're met with this profound marrow deep shudder of your own Nietzschean nothingness; a gilded mirror held up to a gilded mirror hovering above an abyss. I recognize it!