Next comes the crucial event that will generate the rest of the narrative. Alice shocks Bill by describing a moment of sexual fantasy and obsession that occurred a year earlier. This memory is revealed in something like the manner of a confessional with Alice as the "guilty" protagonist, Bill the silent, patriarchal "priest".

Alice's story doesn't simply unearth Bill's capacity for jealousy. More precisely, she reveals that her erotic feelings could have led her to destroy her marriage and family. The moment this hypothetical death is postulated Alice and Bill are rescued from further discussion by a phone call. Bill is called away because one of his patients has actually died.

Bill's comforting of the grief-stricken daughter mourning her dead father replicates the previous crisis moment with Alice. The actress superficially physically resembles Kidman, while her European accent vaguely suggests the male stranger who tried to seduce Alice at the party. Then there's the recurring theme of death threatening the stability of the family, and the fact that Bill must act as listener, again almost as a priest, as the woman recounts her father's last day. However, what is most prescient is the way the mourner's hysterical sexual behaviour mimics and amplifies what is occurring internally with Bill – though neither character is entirely conscious of it. Bill's anodyne platitude to counter the daughter's sexual provocation – "You're very upset now" – is only slightly more incongruous than the way her desperate plea – "Don't despise me" – refers to the shame and guilt that Bill experiences. He is wanting to "revenge" his wife, and an inexplicable opportunity is being presented.

Dialogue and behaviour cross the boundaries of identity in complex expressions and formulations, as feelings that should be articulated remain blocked. Language is both powerful and powerless, vividly suggesting significance without ever delivering satisfactory, functional meanings. Plot actions in Eyes Wide Shut unfold in an analogous mixture of pedantic realism and extravagant fantasy. Potential meanings – hinted at, suggested, cross-referenced, alluded to – start multiplying like accelerating cancerous cells. It is very much a process of anxiety.

As soon as Harford leaves home we are subsequently forced to mimic his fierce gaze as he surveys further heterosexual options to his deconstructing marriage. It is here that Kubrick's strategy becomes apparent: we the viewers experience Harford's "will-he won't-he" dilemma as if we were wearing him as a mask.

Another key sequence occurs in the scene between Bill and a prostitute named Domino. (Scenes in the film condition or reflect the ones before or after with decisive effects). Preferring not to specify the sexual practices available Domino says, "I'd rather not put it into words." Unknowingly she is compounding Bill's obsessive-compulsive state – she is unaware how disturbed Bill is that his wife Alice transfigured her sexual desires into words. Her statement is meaningful in its allusion to the film's themes and structure, yet meaningless in the interpersonal context in which Bill grants Domino no access to this structural awareness.

The strategy of having characters say things to others that are critically significant but in no way follow the discernible logic of the interpersonal situation, therefore restricting the characters from comprehending the meaning they are generating, is carried to its extreme in the orgy sequence. Everything spoken to Bill during the course of events appears highly charged with significance yet nothing has a legitimate referent. Even before the orgy is interpreted/vindicated at the end of the film by Ziegler, we are confronted with a dazzling linguistic enigma. One moment – suggestive yet consequently absurd – comes directly from Bill himself, who seeks to evade the atmosphere of ominous warnings of humiliating chastisement (an undefined punishment for an uncommitted crime to be enacted by an unknown, vaguely patriarchal authority) by saying in absurd self-defence: "I think you’re mistaking me for someone else”. Bill is misconceiving the relationship between what he speaks/how he addresses the world and his own identity – it is Bill himself, in his perpetual itinerary of erotic desires that he follows but can never enact, who has mistaken himself for someone else.

The disjunction between Bill's character and the context of the orgy dreamworld is significant. The sequence and the people function according to no discernible logic. Both the enactment of Bill's "punishment" and the redemptive act of an incognito woman (another surrogate for Alice) are strikingly incongruous. When later Alice, in a dream that mimics the orgy, then Zeigler and eventually Bill himself attempts to naturalize these events, we become confused in a increasingly anxiety–provoking manner. The orgy sequence intensifies the union of extremes so characteristic of Eyes Wide Shut fusing graphic directness of presentation with meaningless emptiness. As Eyes Wide Shut progresses, our anxiety for Bill increases as we become aware that by literalising the meaning of the events he's participated in he is in danger of persistent enslavement to fantasy.