Whats that, her husband and the audience asks?
The camera holds on her face for a beat or two and then cuts to black.
It then ends with him returning to his household, restored but changed.
Kidman gives a searing performance in the bedroom scene, at once aggressive and vulnerable and mercurial.
Bill meanwhile remains inert on the bed, grounded in his certainty.
Yet the actual film is anything but sex-positive.
In short, Bills sexual voyage is thoroughly impotent, up until the moment he returns home.
Shut Eyes
On the surface, Alice and Bills final conversation confirms the movies fundamentally normative ethos.
Whatever their various temptations, Bill and Alice believe that sex belongs only within their marriage.
To be clear, thats not an invalid reading.
At no point inEyes Wide Shutdoes Kubrick portray sex as a good thing.
In every case, it involves arguments, exploitation, or death.
Bill spends the entire orgy hiding or under the threat of death.
Alice doesnt say that she and Bill need to make love or restore intimacy.
Rather these and other possibilities exist at the same time.
Alices demand might set Bill on a similar loop.
Perhaps in those final seconds, Alice looks at Bill knowing that hell be off again.
No interpretation completely makes sense, no reading satisfies every question.
The best we can do is posit a possibility before finding it insufficient, moving on to other possibilities.
And like Bill, it might leave him unfulfilled and searching for new meaning.
