Eyes Wide Shut and Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey

In the next scene, Bill and Alice kiss and embrace in front of a mirror, naked (I will take this time to point out that Tom Cruise is one lucky bastard, but again that's another essay entirely. Walking the wet and empty city streets, he passes a group of young men who represent a contrasting way of handling one's masculine inadequacies and sexual fears. Not make love, or even have sex, but "*censored*. They escort him up the hill in a red SUV.

In "Traumnovelle", a young man named Fridolin walks the streets of a snow-covered Vienna in the late 1800s.

Bill visits the grieving daughter of patient Lou Nathanson, and it is not before long when she interrupts their superficial conversation with an awkward kiss and consecutive "I love you"s. The complex sub-plots of the film thicken, and Bill is drawn into a tangled web of mysterious identities and characters. Bill Harford is a wealthy medical doctor, and his wife Alice is an art collector. First, Bill sees an old friend from medical school, Nick Nightingale, playing piano with the jazz band. The costume shop owner finds his young Lolita-esque(Lolita is another brilliant Kubrick film) daughter in a back room with two Chinese men, and it becomes obvious that the owner, Milich, is pimping his own daughter. Campbell says, "With the personifications of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the "threshold guardian" at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. Ziegler confesses that he knows everything about Bill's escapade at the mansion, and he attempts to convince Bill that the redemption, the sacrifice, the characters, were all staged (many different theories exist about whether or not this is true; the most appealing conclusion is that it doesn't matter, and what does matter is the effects that the experience has on Bill. A cab takes him through woods and forest (a contrast to the city buildings and roads) to the hill of a mansion, where two men in black suits wait at the large iron gate.