APRIL 2025 PICKS: LOOK, DON'T TOUCH

A collection of films with subversive voyeurism.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Stanley Kubrick’s psychosexual classic follows wealthy doctor Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) as he searches desperately for answers after discovering an unseen side of desire within his wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman). Eyes Wide Shut is most famous for its void of an orgy; emotionless, expressionless, so rote and ceremonial that it's easy to look on impassively. Eyes Wide Shut follows Harford down the doom-ridden void between clinical knowledge of sex and intuitively felt eroticism, living in his incapacitating fear of sitting comfortably with the latter.

Exotica (1994)

Exotica takes place in a strip club that looks out of a dream; a labyrinth-like space with hidden dens and two-way mirrors, and a center stage with lush greenery. The steadfast rules of looking but not touching during private dances are the paper thin social protections for the already overly-entangled relationships between both members of the club’s workforce and patrons. Exotica seems, on its surface, about watching, even gawking. But in reality, it’s much more concerned with the desire to be seen.

Variety (1983)

Variety’s Christine (Sandy McLeod) works in a little glass box — a ticket window at a seedy pornography theater in 1980s New York City. While occasionally flirted with, Christine is obviously not the main attraction of the theater. Variety ultimately places Christine as the watcher: looking down from the projection booth vantage point at the theater below her, following a patron she finds intriguing throughout his life, and fixating on the draw of the pornographic images she sees and hears as a part of her job. Christine is desperate to make sense of base desire, longing to make tangible and observe what almost always remains unseeable, ineffable.

Body Double (1984)

Body Double isn’t as much comparative to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window as it is swimming within the latter’s very same water. But Body Double is much colder, much meaner. Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) — divorced, depressed, debilitated by panic during his acting jobs, and often dressed in Jimmy Stewart piercing blues — peers through a telescope to watch a writhing woman dance seductively in a glass house. An obsession develops, a murder occurs, and Scully’s clouded eroticism, his hungry but hazy watching, leaves him both dangerously in the mix and deeply misinformed, with only gut obsession to assist him in clearing things up.