I was so excited to see it — and I was very, very disappointed.
— Christopher Nolan
To say that the pool room scene is doubled by the Somerton orgy is not to say that one is the 'truth' of the other. Or, rather, it is to say that they are BOTH the hidden truth of each other. Eyes Wide Shut is very clear-eyed about the way in which power always contains two aspects, simultaneously: excessive mystagogic staging and banal normalization are two sides of the same coin.
One last time Stanley Kubrick had flouted genre expectations, and once again, as throughout his career, critics could only see what wasn't there. [T]he real pornography in this film is in its lingering depiction of the shameless, naked wealth of millennial Manhattan, and of its obscene effect on society and the human soul. [F]or those with their eyes open, there are plenty of money shots.[…]
The Harfords themselves (like most of the film's reviewers) don't really see their surrounding mise-en-scène—their wealth, their art, the ubiquitous Christmas glitz. They're preoccupied instead with their own petty lusts and jealousies.
[…]
Everyone [Alice] encounters in the first fifteen minutes of the film compliments her appearance; Bill dutifully tells her she always looks beautiful, the babysitter exclaims, "You look amazing, Mrs. Harford," and she's also flattered by such admirers of beauty as Victor Ziegler and Sandor Szavost. Ziegler tells her she looks "absolutely stunning—and I don't say that to all the women." "Oh, yes he does," retorts his wife—a joke that resonates unfunnily when we find out who "all the women" associated with Ziegler are. [A]lice's real status is unmistakably suggested: the wife as prostitute. She's identified with the hooker Mandy through a series of parallels: they're both tall redheads with a taste for numbing drugs, we first see them both in bathrooms.
[…]
When Ziegler finally calls [Bill] onto the carpet for his transgressions, he chuckles at Bill's refusal of a case of 25-year-old Scotch[,] not just because this extravagance would be a trifle to him, but because Bill's pretense of integrity is an empty gesture—he's already been bought. Bill may be able to buy, bribe, and command his own social inferiors, and he may own Alice, but he's Ziegler's man.
[…]
The open-ended narrative forces us to ask ourselves what we're really seeing; is Eyes Wide Shut a movie about marriage, sex, and jealousy, or about money, whores, and murder? Before you make up your own mind, consider this: has there ever been a Stanley Kubrick film in which someone didn't get killed?
[Kubrick's] relationship to the very idea of actors was bipolar. Should one use them as mannequins (Robert Bresson’s word for his practice with non-actors), or find good ones and let them tear up the scenery? The latter sort of permissiveness had resulted in Sellers’s work in Lolita and Dr Strangelove and would lead – with more mixed results – to Jack Nicholson’s performance in The Shining. Kubrick’s ambivalence in this matter faced a final test in Eyes Wide Shut. Was Tom Cruise an actor or a mannequin?
— David Bromwich (London Review of Books)
After Dr. Bill Harford's wife, Alice, admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met, Bill becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter. He discovers an underground sexual group and attends one of their meetings -- and quickly discovers that he is in over his head.