please stop making 'female' versions of things

Babygirl, Eyes Wide Shut and how women can, already, discern meaning

My new novel, Carrion Crow, is out in less than two weeks, on Feb 27th, which means this is my last chance to nag you to pre-order the book if you want to read what Alan Moore has called a ‘festering Edwardian nightmare’. And who doesn’t?

I’m also taking the book on tour around the UK and would love to see you at any of the events listed here—especially this newly-announced Libreria London event with the phenomenal

Alice Slater

.

---

I nearly walked out of the cinema while watching Babygirl, a thing that hasn’t happened in about a decade; the last movie I walked out of was The Revenant, and after a short burst of angry pacing and a really long wee I eventually went back in, which I lived to regret. The issue with Babygirl was very much the same as the issue with The Revenant: I was bored out of my fucking mind.

There is nothing worse, I think, than a film that is completely unstimulating. I don’t mean, that a movie has to be all explosions and shock-horror; quite the opposite. Films are fine if they’re well-made dumb entertainment and they’re equally fine if they are beautiful, well-acted, terse intellectual explorations of a topic with a lot of tortured longing. But when they are doing absolutely nothing new or interesting, treading a clichéd path with an unearned self-satisfaction, and acting like they are edgy and shocking at the same time, they bring out in me an intense ennui, the sort that only suits you if you’re smoking outside a French cafe in the rain.

I started writing a version of this essay picking apart why Babygirl was—for me, I realise some people like this film—so mind-numbingly dull. I referenced Baudrillard and the greatest essay ever written on god’s green internet. I talked about action without referent and about simulacra. There was a photograph of George Galloway pretending to be a cat, licking milk from Rula Lenska’s hands.

Babygirl (2024)

However, I started to bore myself, because really, Babygirl isn’t interesting enough to spend that much time on. It’s a film that is trying to be and say about half a dozen things and not achieving any of them. It’s so convinced it is doing something intelligent and sultry and sexy and feminist that it actually fails to do anything at all. It has no clue what it really wants to say, and so isn’t deep enough to dive into. But in my research for that essay I found something that triggered a different sort of annoyance in me, tapping into a longer-standing issue.

One of the main problems with Babygirl is that there is another film that stars Nicole Kidman as a woman in a relationship that is threatened by her admission of her desires—and that film was made by one of the greatest filmmakers to have ever lived, featuring two genuine movie stars at the top of their game, who gave almost two years to the project. Eyes Wide Shut constantly casts a shadow over Babygirl before you’ve even seen the latter film, to the extent that I started to feel bad for Babygirl director Halina Reijn, thinking of how unfair it was that you can’t make this kind of movie with this actress without everyone comparing the two. Then I discovered that actually, the director had intended this connection. More than that, in fact. From an article in Entertainment Weekly:

Babygirl is a tale of sexual fantasy made real.

For writer-director Halina Reijn, it was also a chance to further the narrative of an early role in Nicole Kidman's career, Eyes Wide Shut's Alice Harford. In the Stanley Kubrick film, Alice tells her husband, William (Tom Cruise), about a sexual fantasy she had about running away with a man she saw while they were on vacation.

The admission sends William spiraling, leading him down a dangerous road involving sex cults and murder. But the Dutch filmmaker always wondered what the movie where Alice actually acted on her fantasy might look like—so she wrote Babygirl.

….

The difference, though, is that in Eyes Wide Shut, "we follow Tom Cruise everywhere," Reijn continues. "We don't even know what [Alice is] going through. We're totally in his mind, heart, and soul. I want to know, 'What if she would've gone and actually would've lived her fantasy?' That's what this is—my answer, playfully and humbly, to the male Eyes Wide Shut.... All of us women are ready and hungry to see and hear stories about how we feel and from our perspective."

Listen. I am a woman. I've been one all my life. I have seen Eyes Wide Shut a handful of times, enjoying it more with each viewing. I have sat for hours with my partner discussing nearly every aspect of it. I find myself completely glued to every one of its 159 minutes. Not once have I ever thought, even for a second: huh, I wonder what would have happened had Alice lived her fantasy. Not once.

This is mostly because whether or not Alice lives out her fantasy is entirely irrelevant to Eyes Wide Shut. She could just have easily told Bill, in that early scene, that she had actually fucked the naval officer she met on their vacation rather than just dreaming about it. It wouldn’t have changed the rest of the film one bit. The point of her revelation, within the context of the film, is to show how thin the membrane is between dreams and reality when it comes to matters of sex and trust and safety and desire, to destabilise the couple and to throw Bill, in particular, into an overly-sexualised semi-dreamworld that pushes up again all of his morality and forces him to reconsider everything about their life together—their class position, their genders, even (if you can read between some very obvious lines) his sexuality. It is not about whether or not a woman cheats on a man; it is about our fears of our own sexual desires, and what they might uncover. Alice goes through a psychological journey in the movie just as much as Bill does; just because the camera is following Bill through the unreal streets of his own mental midnight New York doesn’t mean that Alice doesn’t get an arc. It is Alice who decides on what lesson the couple will take away from their brief schism at the end of the film, Alice who is both instigator and concluder of the narrative as a whole. You do not need to ask ‘what about Alice?’ in Eyes Wide Shut, because Alice is the driving force. The question posed by Reijn genuinely must be the least interesting question you can ask of this film, with the possible exception of ‘where did they get all those red curtains from?’ and ‘is that really Alan Cumming?’.

alancumming.com

---

Of course, you can’t disagree that with Reijn that historically, most movies have taken the position of the prototypical white man, particularly the white American able-bodied relatively affluent straight educated man. I don’t disagree that we should have more stories about women, across the whole spectrum of womanhood. Of course we should. But what rankles me here is implication here is that Eyes Wide Shut is not a film for women. It is for and about men (“the male Eyes Wide Shut…”), hence we need a women’s version of it; women can’t relate to Bill Harford, so they need a movie from Alice’s POV. Preferably this film will have a girlboss character, so we can all root for her, and it will make hamfisted points about the pressures to look good and about motherhood while completely sidestepping anything outside the most shallow of feminist thoughtpools. Otherwise, the implication goes, how could our tiny little brains possibly get anything from it? How could we, as women, relate?

The year is 2025. Why are we clinging to the idea that films and books and narratives are not ‘for women’ because they aren’t told from the perspective of a female character, or because they aren’t bending over backwards to make wildly trite ‘feminist’ points that a seventeen year old could have come up with? I am truly so exhausted by the implication that only films made by and starring women can have anything interesting to say about a woman’s experience of the world. I, a woman, have the capacity to read and watch all manner of things and glean meaning from them, even if it stars or is directed by or was written by a man. Yes, we need more female filmmakers, writers, directors, actors represented across the many intersections of womanhood. This is true. But the worst possible version of this is to write ‘female versions’ of stories that already exist, of films that have already been made, either pulling out female characters already rendered well and portrayed beautifully and putting them in much worse, much shallower narratives for the sake of a toothless, mainstream, sanitised and sellable version of feminism, or simply taking male characters and making them female for some unclear purpose. We don’t need a female Ghostbusters, we don’t need a female American Psycho (directed, already, by a woman) and we don’t need a female Eyes Wide Shut. Women already like and understand these movies, varied as they are, and we can understand when they do and don’t have something to say about womanhood and women’s experiences. We have intellect, we have context, we can understand art. When it comes to female narratives, for the love of god give us films that genuinely have something to say.

---

There’s another thing about this comment that grates, and it’s the implication that no matter how hard he tries, a male auteur can’t possibly have anything enlightening or interesting to say about the modern female condition. This bugs me as a writer, as someone who writes male characters as much as she writes female ones, but more than this, I feel like it is convincing a whole swath of (young) women that there is nothing they can possibly get out of a film like Eyes Wide Shut; there is nothing it could say about a woman’s position. I don’t think anything could be further from the truth.

There is a moment at the start of Eyes Wide Shut when Alice, Nicole Kidman's character, is at a society party with her husband, Bill (her then-real-life-husband Tom Cruise). She is tipsy and bored; she puts her glass of champagne down and when she goes to pick it up, she finds the handsome older man next to her has picked it up.

'Um', she says. 'I think that's my glass.'

'I’m absolutely certain of it', he says, holding her gaze intensely, as he drinks from it regardless.

Alice is turned on by this, intrigued by the powerplay underway. To me, this is distills everything Babygirl spent the first hour trying to do, and it achieves it in about eight seconds. The conversation that she goes on to have, dancing with this handsome stranger, shows them engaged in a tug-of-war with consent, Alice playing in the waters of attraction and adultery and ultimately restating her boundary against it. A few days later, Alice and Bill are both high (Bill: ‘this pot is making you aggressive'), and Alice tells her husband about the situation with the handsome Hungarian who was desperate to fuck her. He responds by saying he doesn’t believe she would never cheat on him, as if, once married, women cease to have any errant desire. Alice, angered, mocks his idea of his own desexualised professionalism precluding any sexual interest in the topless female patients whose chests he examines. She engages in a ludicrous mimicry of her husband, baiting him, insulting him, the whole works. In the 13-minute-long scene, which famously took several weeks to shoot and had extensive input from the actors, Alice is given a complexity that Romy is never allowed in the two hours of Babygirl. And her confessions, coupled with the lingering effects of the the party—where Bill was summoned to help resuscitate a sex worker who overdosed while having extramarital sex with his affluent patient—leave the woefully naive Bill drawn into a world of realisations about sex, drugs and power that he finds difficult to parse, and which threatens to torpedo the life that he and Alice are living.

A quick Google, or indeed Reijn’s comments, would suggest to you that Eyes Wide Shut is about an irritated lover getting involved in sex cults to get his end away as revenge on his wife. I find it incredible that anyone can come away from the movie with this impression. Not once in Eyes Wide Shut do the principle couple have sex; in fact, Tom Cruise’s Bill Harford doesn’t sleep with anyone, the film being much more interested in him not having sex, not engaging, not allowing himself to confront his own true desires, which are open to interpretation but incredibly fun to ruminate on. This is Eyes Wide Shut in a nutshell, like much of Kubrick’s work: it shies away from any obvious interpretations, refusing to talk down to its audience, but it lays the groundwork on which you can build your own meaning, honing in on the breadcrumbs that the filmmaker has left for you. It creates space for you, the audience member, to be an active participant in its meaning-making. And because of that, its messages become even more impactful.

There is much to be said about the film’s unreality, its surreality, its subtextual sexualities, its exploration of power. It rewards repeat viewings, allowing you as the audience to reveal new moments, new meanings with each watch. In one almost throwaway scene, Alice, a stay-at-home mother, is doing maths homework with her child, and the homework is about how to figure out which man has more money than the other—seemingly an innocuous exercise, until you put it into the context of the film, where it becomes incredibly sinister, one woman trapped in a position by a perverse system of class and power quite literally teaching her daughter how to game this system in the only way she, a girl, will be allowed to. If Alice and Bill were in the higher class—the class that doesn't have to work, the class that flexes its power over Bill by wrenching him away from luxurious parties he has been generously invited to, or pulling him away from his family in the middle of the night to tend to their pleasure-derived injuries—their daughter might not have to learn this lesson. But Eyes Wide Shut shows over and over that the innocence of children, already fragile, is eroded more quickly according to where they are on the class ladder. Already we have seen the child of a costume shop owner, lower on the ladder than the Harfords, pimped out to the incredibly weird, kabuki-theatre-esque men* she was caught with the day before. She does not get to have a childhood; she is bought and sold and sexualised when she is still a young teenager. Bill and Alice’s daughter has not yet gone down this path, because she has not had to. The implication is that the prostitution of Helena Harford will occur later and in a different way; she will have to figure out who has money and attach herself to it, lest she fail and end up as one of the faceless overdosing sex workers used and abused at the parties of the despicably rich. Everyone is playing the same game. Some fight their way up while others don't—but none of these girls escape this process. It is how they must exist in Bill Harford's world, whether he sees it or not. But gender is never entirely separate from money and power; the lack of it feminises men within this system, makes them vulnerable to violence and sexual exploitation, just like the women. When Bill is chewed out by his rich patient for infiltrating a dark and confusing ritualised sex party, he explains how the real partygoers knew that Bill wasn’t one of them: because he showed up in a taxi instead of a limo, and they found the tuxedo rental receipt in his coat. It is not a coincidence that the result of Bill’s unmasking at the party is the clear threat of rape, and neither is it a coincidence that the only thing that delivers him from his fate is the sacrifice of a (lower class) woman. The message is clear: in this inescapable system of gender, money, power and sex, you can't hide what you are. And what you aren't.

Eyes Wide Shut might be about one man's terror that he is actually gay (one of my favourite readings), but it is also about the narrow barrier between attraction and action, and how the desires and satisfaction of the upper classes come at a great cost to everyone else. It is about the fact that even within the Harfords’ relative upper echelon, the women are disposable, purchasable, always available, their class position failing to protect them from another layer of oppression, that of the patriarchy—which also threatens men as well. And it is not a coincidence that at the end of the film, Alice Harford suggests that they go back to being grateful for what they have, closing their eyes to whatever it was they were forced to see—the truths of their sexuality, the shakiness of their fidelity, the cruel lessons about power, complicity and on whose backs their relative privilege stands, as well as how vulnerable they truly are within this system. The title of the film takes on a new meaning.

Eyes Wide Shut says so many more interesting things about being a woman in the modern western world than Babygirl can even attempt to. In Babygirl, there is no criticism whatsoever of Romy’s class position, even when it is obvious to the viewers that the success of her company results in the loss of thousands of working class jobs; the film does not comment on this at all. Babygirl thinks it is talking about gender and power, but you can’t do these things properly without talking about money—where it comes from, who has it and who doesn’t have it. In Babygirl, when it comes to capitalism, all there is to take away from the film is that women have to get Botox to get to the top, and if you fuck the wrong person you might lose your class position. And in the end, Romy doesn't lose any of it. She girlbosses too close to the sun, yet continues to soar.

If the entire point of Babygirl was to ask what would happen if Alice Harford had followed her fantasy and had an affair, the answer given by the film itself is that absolutely nothing would have changed in her life, except that she might have been slightly more assertive at work. It is saying much less, in fact, than the film that gave rise to the apparently obvious query. Can we ask a more interesting question next time? Or, even better, let female writers and directors create something new altogether, something that might be really worthwhile?

---

*I never quite understood what was going on in this scene until I read this amazing Reddit post. That’s the thing about Kubrick; if you want to get everything in his movies you are at one point going to have to go back and watch a 1986 Sigourney Weaver film you’ve never even heard of.