One minute of darkness.

An open-heart surgery.

Steven is a heart surgeon, married to Anna, an ophthalmologist, and they have two children, Kim and Bob.

Martin is a teenager whom Steven frequently sees, but the nature of their relationship is unclear.

The bourgeois family appears conventional, and the environment in which they live is comfortable.

Only the boy seems like an intruder, even aesthetically: his constant presence gradually becomes more explicit. He looms like a foreign body in a disembodied reality, weaving the codes of an unpredictable fate.

The music is decidedly intrusive; Schubert's Stabat Mater foreshadows what will tragically happen, contextualized by an inextricable humor.

The shots accompany the vision as if an external eye is observing the scene; but it is not the divine watching: God is dead, Nietzsche would say, but the sacrificial ghost is not.

Meanwhile, the mythological story begins to unfold; the presence of Artemis, who demands Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia, enters the surgeon's house through the boy whose father died after heart surgery. The story begins to unravel, and the curse, laced with vengeance, takes its course.

Bob and Kim will be struck by paralysis in their legs, and as soon as the bleeding from their eyes begins, death will swiftly follow.

No entity will intervene to stop Steven from making the sacrifice, as the biblical God did with Isaac and Jacob.

The Greek gods are inflexible, Lanthimos knows this well, life is tragic, and as Silenus said, the most desirable thing for man is “not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.”

But Anna and Steven will be relentless: the family is the driving force that justifies any moral, profane, sadistic, cruel parable with that comic force that only sanctimonious idiocy can perpetuate.

Lanthimos enjoys himself, scrutinizes, observes, narrates, remains silent, claims not to know, but shamelessly pretends.

His is not provocation but an artistic representation of the tragic smallness of humanity, afflicted by a ridiculous and unaware insignificance that accompanies it without guidance.

Lanthimos perfectly constructs Eyes Wide Shut Part Two:

Steven is a surgeon, Bill was a doctor, Alice-Anna is still in Schnitzler's double dream, but here the ophthalmologist is a metaphor for those eyes, so stubbornly closed that they open in the face of the plasticity of sacrifice and vengeance.

Moreover, with her husband, to whom she submits with mechanical sexuality, she reconstructs the family fabric: Steven has now internalized guilt, and the Bill who enjoyed orgies and indulged in sin has become a gloomy man, surrendering to the responsibility of his act and consequently sinking into the unconscious action of the Superego.

He doesn't understand, however, that he has gone from the compulsive obligation of enjoyment (Enjoy!) to the obligation of sacrifice (You Must!), as Lacan would say.

Steven must help Martin, must comply with the manipulator's demands, but why?

Steven not only killed his father but also refused to mate with his mother...

The unprecedented master-slave dialectic that emerges does not redeem itself Hegelianly in the slave becoming the master of the master because here the master and the slave are the same, and self-sacrifice is aimed at increasing profit where surplus value is the reward.

The completion of the sacrifice must generate a gain: freeing the subject from the anguish of choice and the burden of their own freedom.

Like Bill, Steven is an idiot, unable to choose, unable to decide, and Anna-Alice is the ghost of his Superego.

Both must sacrifice themselves to try not to lose anything, to try to escape their existence's incurably lacking and finite nature.

They must rid themselves of the weight of their freedom, being guided by a master: they identify with the cause to justify their actions, a hypnotic identification, a pure, unique, granite "reason," devoid of doubts, fully sacrificial.

The fundamentalist identification with a cause: saving what can be saved.

They must "rid themselves of the weight of freedom," subjecting themselves to a "law" that imposes obedience and justifies the reaction.

It is their specific "moral masochism": suffering is true enjoyment, and in sacrifice, there is the unconscious possibility of redemption, circumventing the danger of choice.

As Freud said, the fascination with sacrifice not only does not extinguish vengeance but feeds avidly on its vicious circle.

Lanthimos has crafted his sacrifice: he has donned the gaze of the Superego, torn every veil, penetrated every orifice, impaled every human remnant, gathered the fragments, and ruthlessly photographed it.

He has surgically reassembled it for the autopsy, report: brain death.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice