The Podcast for Social Research · The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Podcast for Social Research, Episode 89: Eyes Wide Shut — a Film Guide

·1 hr 22 min·5 clips

Jude directly compares the film’s elite sexual world to the Jeffrey Epstein story and “super elite impunity.”

The session opens with Lauren welcoming the audience to a screening of Eyes Wide Shut. She introduces Jude Weber and Danielle Drury, and explains that the room will hear brief background remarks before moving into a longer, interactive discussion after the screening. Jude takes the lead. He frames the evening through his work as a cultural historian and through an upcoming class on Vienna, using that context to set up the discussion. Schnitzler is the first anchor. Jude points to the film’s source material and to the feedback loop between the text, the city, and the movie’s treatment of desire, status, and social performance. Freud quickly enters. The conversation turns to a 1910 essay on object choice in men, to the familiar split between love and lust, and to the broader psychoanalytic frame that makes the film feel like an argument about sexuality as much as a narrative. The group keeps returning to point of view. They note that the women in the film are almost always filtered through Bill’s perspective, and that even when the conversation names sex workers or roommates, the film gives them only limited interiority. The Bechdel test becomes both a useful joke and a serious diagnostic. That line of thought opens onto the way the women are coded, how their friendships are barely visible, and how the film’s visual arrangement keeps substituting one woman for another in Bill’s field of vision. The talk also lingers on Alice. Her fantasies, her maternal image, and the broader question of what counts as a woman’s interior life in the film give the discussion a sharper edge without flattening it into a single moral reading. Class arrives late but stays. The speakers return to the film’s aristocratic pressure, to the difference between Vienna around 1900 and New York at the end of the twentieth century, and to the awkward fact that class feels obvious in one setting and harder to name in the other. The exchange remains conversational. There are self-corrections, digressions, and clarifications, but those shifts keep the argument moving rather than diluting it, which suits a show that likes to think in public. The room is invited to participate. The discussion closes by circling back to the need to talk more directly about class, while also signaling the related course material and the broader intellectual life around the screening.

As heard by us

A Kubrick discussion that keeps returning to gaze, class, and perspective.

Eyes Wide Shut gets treated less like a prestige mystery and more like a talk about gaze, class, and what the film allows its women to know. The discussion starts with the film's making and moves through Schnitzler, Freud, and Vienna, but it lands best when it stays close to…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want Eyes Wide Shut read through Freud and class, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Podcast for Social Research