Stanley Kubrick’s movies linger in the mind for a lot of reasons—their methodical but abstract storytelling, their painterly images and use of sound, their deeply unsettling undercurrents of violence and sex. But they also, to a one, evoke distinct worlds, their cameras slowly probing their architectural settings and elucidating the power structures in which the characters operate. In an interesting new video, Nerdwriter compares Eyes Wide Shut to a VR game, with its first hour setting up an identification with Tom Cruise’s character that clicks into place at the infamous orgy scene. There, POV cameras pull us more directly into his masked headspace, making its dreamy denouement all the more disorienting. In so doing, Nerdwriter argues, Kubrick does no less than instruct us how to view a film, while also getting in some depraved sex-party yucks, of course.
Anyway, it’s a thoughtful take on Kubrick’s oeuvre, as well as the possibilities of virtual reality, but it also begs the question of what an actual 2017 Eyes Wide Shut VR game would be like. A guess: You’d, like, stand in a room and watch people have sex, and then one would turn to you and ask you to look at someone else having sex, and then you’d do that, and eventually you’d solve a puzzle that would take you to a new sex room. If it had motion controls, maybe you could manually place cameras in front of the people having sex. Then you win? All told, it’s probably for the best that the film has thus far remained a film.