Given the context of instability that determines the notions of reality, perception, meaning, coherence and interpretation, the tears that Bill experiences as he returns home, collapsing before Alice, declaring, "I'II tell you everything, I'II tell you everything" have richly ambivalent implications. Bill is directly emotional finally, but is it because he has endured an endless complex of frustrating experiences or because he knows that the process of communicating them linguistically to Alice will issue only further frustration? This is the perpetual conundrum that makes Kubrick refuse any sense of cathartic release – throughout the films course each and every climax – literal and figurative, emotional, erotic and dramatic – is suspended and deranged. Everything in the film, has led to an understanding of the impossibility of complete self-relevation.

This is encapsulated precisely, if a little too perfectly, in the following morning's forgiving/redemptive statement by Alice: "The reality of one night is not the whole truth." This sentence however is not as simple as initial appearance assumes. Its grammar conveys more that the platitude that life is chaotic: fundamentally it opposes reality to truth. And further what of Bill's reply: "And no dream is just a dream"?

The exceptional authority of Kubrick's vision at the end of Eyes Wide Shut derives from the deliberate absence of symbolic meaning, the films determination to refuse the characters' and audience's attempts to take conclusive possession of any meaning.

Bill Hartord: Now, where exactly are we going . . . exactly?
Gayle: Where the rainbow ends.
Bill Harford: Where the rainbow ends?
Nuola: Don't you want to go where the rainbow ends?
Bill Hatford: Well, now that depends where that is.
Gayle: Well, let's find out.

Carnal experience is uncertain, non-teleological, undirected. While not entirely involuntary, it lacks the capacity to succumb wilfully to conscious intentions or abstract decisions. It is disruptive, irresolute, it defies of logic of expediency and the regimes of signification (one cannot say or know what it is that entices and allures, provoked and propagates – a moment/a sequence which becomes loaded with more affect and impetus than is required to explain it). It is like an ever-increasing hunger that supplements itself, feeds itself, on hunger, and can never be content with what it ingests, that defers gratification to perpetuate itself as craving, languishing in its erotic torments rather than hastening to quench them. Its temporality is neither that of logical development (one experience building on the last in order to create a direction/movement), nor that of investment (a relation between means and specific pre-given ends). Nor is it a system of recording memory (erotic pleasure is evanescent; the sensation is forgotten almost as it occurs); the memory of "what happened"/or moments, settings, gestures, behaviour may be open to reminiscence, but the intensity of the pleasure, the experience of voluptuousness, the ache/effect of desire has to be revivified in order to be recalled. In this case, there is no recollection but recreation, or rather creation/production.

Erotic desire cannot be recorded or stored, cannot be the site for the production of information or knowledge. Desire’s turbulent restlessness defies coding into signs, significations, meanings; it remains visceral, affective.

Libido is not irrational, illogical or even non-rational: rather it exhibits a logic of its own governed by modes of intensification. It does not provide information or knowledge, although it penetrates. It breaches the internal regions, secret sections of the body, but does not learn anything except that it cannot maintain, cannot capture the state of excitation. Lust cannot know itself; it does not know what it is or its direction, what it seeks. It does not discover, but immerses itself, insisting on a certain formless indeterminacy. It insists on an open responsiveness that can be viewed as a passivity/susceptibility to the actions/appeals of the other. Lust throws one into the vagaries of external psychic intensities – the others libidinal intensities.

If the sexual-drive is object-directed, and takes for itself a specific series of instances/objects, it is significant that the eros/desire has no objectives, no privileged objects only a series of intensities. The focus of enquiry should shift away from the structures of consciousness, intentionality and giveness to concentrate more acutely on what might be understood as a materialist analysis of the sexual desire using the work of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-Francois Lyotard.

The Deleuzo-guattarian scheme reacts against a framework or series which privileges the psyche and systems of representation and which understands the body/incarnation in terms of concepts/reasons, motives, causes, intentions, projects – that is in terms of interiority, however perceived – to one/multiple, that privilege the erotogenic surface, the body's "outside" its locus as a site for both the perception of the erotic (phenomenologically recognised) but also for the inscription and intensification of the sensitivity of bodily sections/regions.