I've been reading a lot of Zizek and I'm loving the way he repeats and contradicts himself. Small doses like the one I just read are starting to feel like reading a column in a newspaper or magazine while you're on the bus or having coffee. But unlike most columns that you read and forget, Zizek offers little pieces filled with stuff that will bounce around in your head for a while.
Here he is on the ending of Eyes Wide Shut:
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0107.html
And, finally, this also fully vindicates the apparently vulgar conclusion of the film, when, after he confesses his nightly adventure to her, i.e. after they are both confronted with the excess of their fantasising, Kidman – upon ascertaining that now they are fully awakened, back into the day, and that, if not forever, at least for a long time, they will stay there, keeping the fantasy at bay – tells him that they must do something as soon as possible. ‘What?’ he asks, and her answer is: ‘Fuck.’ End of film, final credits.
The nature of the passage a l’acte as the false exit, as the way to avoid confronting the horror of the fantasmatic netherworld, was never so abruptly stated in a film: far from providing them with a real-life bodily satisfaction that would render superfluous all empty fantasising, the passage to the act is rather presented as a stopgap, as a desperate preventive measure aimed at keeping at bay the spectral netherworld of fantasies. It is as if her message is: let’s fuck as soon as possible in order to stifle the thriving fantasies, before they overwhelm us again. Lacan’s quip about awakening into reality as an escape from the Real encountered in the dream holds more than anywhere apropos of the sexual act itself: we do not dream about fucking when we are not able to do it – rather, we fuck in order to escape and stifle the excess of the dream that would otherwise overwhelm us.