John McClane has just landed in L.A. to visit his estranged wife in her office in the Nakatomi Plaza. He sponge bathes the airport off his body while Holly casually chats and occasionally fidgets. The shared space of body and bathroom is a quintessential aspect of most marriages. For never having been in her office before he seems at home, more because of her presence and less because of the carpet crushed therapeutically between his toes. Their conversation is cozy and warming its way towards John staying at her house instead of with an old buddy over an hour away.
And then, like any good conversation can do, this one takes a tumble. John has just recently found out his wife has been using her maiden name, Genarro, instead of her married name, McClane. He is hurt. Feelings of rejection and abandonment coalesce into a silly putty of resentment and anger that she doesn’t see coming.
Holly heaves a sigh of vulnerability and says “I missed you.” John lets silence fill the room with its flammability before saying, in a voice of I’ve got you, “I guess you didn’t miss my name tho did you?”
The rest of the short scene is relationship argument perfection; over-talking, interrupting, cadence increasing. Her voice goes scorpion as he continues to be insouciant to her words. This is one of those many moments among humans when one person is unbuttoned and the other, refusing to open their own rib cage, grabs the whip from the wall and implodes the moment so their partner will know their pain without them having to ever speak it. These conversation do not heal and they rarely end well, and honestly if it hadn’t been for the greedy Gruber, Holly would likely still be a Gennaro and John would’ve spent Christmas in R(P)amona.
Mary has been trying for months to be noticed by George, but he’s too distracted by his own lifetime of sacrifice to see her. She sets the mood one evening with music and memories while the whole time he’s still stick-hitting the picket fence in his mind. And then the call from Sam Wainwright comes in - a man with an offer of ephemeral affection for Mary and ground-floor plastics for George.
George and Mary share a phone because it’s the 1940’s and there’s only phone per floor, if that, so their heads are close and he steals inhales of her hair without her noticing. Mere inches apart, their Rubin faces create Rubin’s vase, as Mary whispers intensely “He says it’s the chance of a lifetime.” George throws down the phone, torn asunder by his conflicting desires - his desire for Mary and his lust for a life outside of Bedford Falls.
He shakes her hard by her shoulders and shouts at her, “Now you listen to me, I don’t want any plastics and I don’t want any ground floors, and I don’t want to get married ever to anyone, you understand that?” His shouts may be aimed at her face, but he’s shouting at himself. Then he finally embraces her, squeezing her head in his hands as the realization of his feelings burst like a climax, but instead of drenching her cheeks in semen, he covers them in kisses. This tenderly aggressive scene is all face, and our mouths and eyes will aways be more intimate than our cunts and cocks. It’s love-porn the 1940s way.
And then we have Alice in her underwear, in an intimate conversation with her husband. Bill is exasperated, and mid-argument says “You got a little stoned tonight, you’ve been trying to pick a fight with me and now you’re TRYING to make me jealous.” Alice isn’t trying to make him jealous so much as trying to be seen for the fullness of who she is.
Earlier in the night when she donned a second skin of velvet and lace, her eyes in a faraway gaze, Bill said she looked great without even looking. So now, stoned and afraid he had sex with two models at the holiday party earlier in the night, Alice tells him a story of a naval officer on a while-ago family vacation; “He glanced at me as he walked past, just a glance, nothing more.” But that glance was momentous. Just a pass of a stranger’s eyes over her body elicited a fantasy in her mind where she leaves her husband and daughter just to be wanted, even for one night. All as a way to say to Bill, “It’s not just you who struggles with desire. We also want the eerie glow of blue deceit that washes the invisible from our limbs”
Like holly and John, Alice and Bill are separated by space. She coils into herself as he sits rigid in a posture of attack. They are not in the proximity of touch like George and Mary, they are far away.
Alice explains from her spot on the floor, “At that moment my love for you was both tender and sad.” It is this sheer honesty of love - the telling him how she “thinks” about her love for him - this is what makes this scene as revolutionary as it is awkward. But the true exquisiteness of it all is how aptly the scene shows how artificial we can appear to be even in front of the person who knows us best when we don’t feel known at all.
Merry Christmas!
You've almost redeemed Eyes Wide Shut to me, that's some momentous writing. I wish I saw the movie you did.
damn, this hit!!: “how artificial we can appear to be even in front of the person who knows us best”