My “Eyes wide shut” theory?

I think it’s Kidman’s character’s tale. Kidman’s character orchestrated the entire escapade to put her husband into a position where he’d agree to the relinquishment of their kid. But that relinquishment was going to come as a staged kidnapping Jon-Benet style or as the mother offering up the fruit of her loins into the lifestyle that she’d known as a kid anyway.

Her description of the fantasy was to shove her husband into the actual reality of the world she came from that he’d glazed over…in that way that some men just want a part-player beside them. The not in Kansas anymore, what world she truly came from storybeat was woven throughout.

The intro to the tailor & his whored out tween daughter, and the bookend of the tailor having been bribed and then offering that same kid to him …was Kubrick exposing Tom’s character to the actuality of his wife’s life as a child on both sides. It was like Tom was swaddled in that in the narrative arc.

He was only married to the visual representation of her…only shaken that she was mentally getting off on some random. His obliviousness was shown in his bumbling interactions with others throughout the movie.

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She needed the drinks at the party they went to because they’d been her stomping grounds as a sexpot. She’d gotten out via her cardboard marriage to him …but now she was bored and sexually dissatisfied due to the loops that had been left open in her, past life-wise. She’d been in the “Mandy” role and had escaped via him- heck, she may have even been at the actual orgy that night, masked. Or at least on nights when his work went over. He’d never know. Because he didn’t know his wife.

She also possibly remained detached from her daughter because she knew the cult was going to take her for letting her go. She would have had to be replaced and knew it all along. Same way Mandy knew she had to replace Tom for him to get out alive.

She was utterly disconnected from her own daughter because she grew up in the sex cult and had no real connection to kids other than as sex objects. Explains her dispassionate “Fuck,” = “we’ll just make another kid”, after they both had given their kid to the two old men. In the end it was all about his own daughter being on the bargaining table… from every direction, as seen by the red table board game at the end. He was just the last one let in on it.

Deeper? If she WAS the volunteer who saved Tom…and a replacement had to be found was just to make it all official, the ex-beauty queen newspaper article was a misdirection. It was too much for Tom to bear, processing-wise. The bookend of the tailor whoring his daughter was the really telling storybeat that lines up with what he’d done in the end to his own. He farmed her out to two old men too.

But Kidman’s character could’ve orchestrated it all because she was lonely IN the marriage with all that past life hanging over her, in order to make him complicit.