Eyes Wide Shut, the final 'fuck' as false exit
example · film: Eyes Wide Shut ·
retold in 4 talks
At the end of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, after the couple's fantasizing is laid bare, Kidman answers 'what should we do?' with 'fuck', the passage à l'acte as a stopgap to stifle teeming fantasies before they overwhelm them again, not a real supersession.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“the passage to the act is presented as a stopgap, as a desperate preventative measure”
“'Listen, we have to do something, we have to go home and fuck quickly.' I think this is an escape from the real.”
“Nicole Kidman tells him I have something very important to tell you… let's go home and fuck… real sex functions there as a defense against fantasy”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Stanley Kubrick3John Ruskin1Guillermo Arriaga1Lino Ventura1Simone Signoret1Rade Šerbedžija1Jean Cavaillès1"Jean-Pierre Melville"1
alongside works
Every retelling 3
At the end of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, after the couple's fantasizing is laid bare, Kidman answers 'what should we do?' with 'fuck', the passage à l'acte as a stopgap to stifle teeming fantasies before they overwhelm them again, not a real supersession., illustrating passage à l'acte,fantasy / fundamental fantasy
At the end of Kubrick's film, after all the erotic dreams, Kidman/Cruise resolve to 'go home and fuck quickly', Žižek reads this not as authenticity recovered but as flight into practical sex to avoid confronting the traumatic kernel of their fantasy life., illustrating pseudo-activity,fantasy as constitutive lie
Kubrick's orgy scene is deliberately aseptic/impotent; the film's true revelation is the final line ('let's go home and fuck') which, rather than grounding them in real sex, functions as a defense against the fantasmatic excess that has driven the whole narrative., illustrating fantasy as defense against the Real,the inexistence of the sexual relationship,Eyes Wide Shut