Eyes Wide Shut: Everything I learned from not watching Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

“If you don’t like it, don’t watch it,” they say whenever somebody moans about a fight. “Watch something else,” they add, and with that it is hard to argue. You don’t, for example, show up at a secret orgy wearing a mask and cloak, having given the password “Fidelio” at the gate, and then later complain about the sight of pricks, tits and arseholes and the sound of forced excitement. Instead, you know exactly what you are getting into and therefore decide, based on experience and expectation, whether you want to proceed with watching it or not. 

When a film, or in this case a fight, is shown on Netflix, there is really no reason to moan about something one has no intention of watching. So great are the options, you need not look very far for alternative ways to momentarily nourish a dwindling attention span, nor is there any need to take a stand against something not to your liking. Thanks to Netflix, freedom is just one click away. You can even dip in and out. Leave without saying goodbye. Hit it and quit. 

Earlier in the week I had these exact thoughts and this same experience with the documentary series Netflix were pushing ahead of the eight-round heavyweight fight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul. In an effort to get into the spirit of things, I had tried to play along – that is to say, watch it – but lasted all of four minutes, realising by then that life was too short. 

That I bailed, and so quickly, was not a reflection on the production values, nor the person talking on camera at the time, but instead had more to do with the sudden realisation, at around the four-minute mark, that I was neither remotely interested nor the intended audience. Even though I am a boxing fan, you see, and someone with an affection for all-access documentaries, this one wasn’t for me – and that was okay. There were other things available on Netflix I could watch to pass the time. 

This too applied to the fight itself, of course, also shown on Netflix on Friday (November 15). Suffice it to say, I knew the very moment Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul was announced that it was not a fight for me, or fans like me, and therefore approached it in much the same way I would any other bit of “content” Netflix throws to a crowd to which I don’t belong. The cheap dating shows, for example. Or the glossy, mind-numbingly predictable rom-coms and horror films. Or the 12-part documentaries about serial killers or serial swindlers which could easily be edited down to one part and the story told in an hour. 

As for whether I would actually watch Tyson vs. Paul, even out of some base, morbid curiosity, I was content to leave that in the lap of the gods. This meant that on Friday I went to bed at the same time I normally would and decided that if I struggled to sleep or woke up to urinate just before the first bell, I would swallow both my pride and principles and watch Tyson and Paul fight. If not, I wouldn’t. 

In the meantime, having entered the building and bought my ticket, I had a look at the options available to help kill time before the peepshow started at 4 or 5 am (UK). One option was a new film, Emilia Pérez, which had received some critical acclaim at Cannes in the summer, but turned out to be a musical and the truth is, being no fan of musicals, I lasted no more than four songs. After that, and in keeping with the night’s theme, I sought comfort and familiarity in nostalgia and watched Eyes Wide Shut, a film recently added to Netflix and one I hadn’t seen in years. 

Twenty-five years old now, Eyes Wide Shut was of course Stanley Kubrick’s last film before his death and stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, a married couple at the time. It is based on the 1926 novella Dream Story, with the setting switched from twentieth-century Vienna to 1990s New York City, and is essentially about how one man’s view of both his marriage and his masculinity is shattered when his wife reveals that she once fantasised about another man. 

Prior to that, the husband had felt safe in his ignorance, or perhaps better to call it arrogance. Yet now, having had his belief system compromised, he spends the night walking the streets of an artificial New York City in a daze, encountering numerous women who offer to help him prove his masculinity before finally infiltrating a masked orgy of an unnamed secret society. There, to the sound of ominous humming and the plink of pianos, he embraces his inner voyeur, watching other people have sex in various rooms through the holes in his own mask. By turns shocked and intrigued by what he sees, Dr Bill Harford cannot look away. He drifts from room to room, witnessing scores of men and women copulating in all manner of positions, and is eventually reassured by the fact that, to them, the ones partaking, all this is deemed perfectly normal; something they do on a regular basis. 

Only when Bill is later ordered to give the second password – not for admittance but for the house – and cannot provide it does the doctor’s fantasy then become a reality. It is at that point he is asked to remove his mask, which he does, and also his black cloak and whatever else he is wearing underneath it. It was at that point, too, I remembered the whole reason for staying up: Mike Tyson and Jake Paul. 

Specifically, I now thought about how the wearing of masks and robes allows fighters like them to conceal certain fears and express certain desires ahead of a fight. I also thought about the peace of mind we, as human beings, all get from something communal, something shared, and how if everyone is doing it, and everyone believes in what it is they are doing, there can surely be nothing odd about it, much less wrong with it. Finally, I thought about the idea of being asked to strip down in a room full of people wearing masks and cloaks and how, in boxing, this is basically what happens on fight night and what happened last night with Mike Tyson and Jake Paul. For an occasion such as that, never are there more people, more voyeurs, and more masks, and each voyeur invariably brings to the party their own hang-ups, insecurities and kinks. Some come for fresh meat, while others have a greater desire to see the withered, haggard body of someone they once both feared and revered. Whichever it is, to a man they all gather round and watch, phones at the ready. Some only watch – content just to say they’ve seen it – whereas others, the more impressionable and enthusiastic, become aroused by all they see and can hardly contain themselves. They join in, in other words. They contribute to the orgy and don’t mind whether they are the ones giving or receiving, so long as they are welcome and invited back. 

More than just the title of a film, the phrase “eyes wide shut” effectively means refusing to see something in plain view, perhaps because of naivety or preconceived notions of what this something should look like. In the film, the title refers to sexuality, explicitly female sexuality, and the refusal of the male protagonist to see that women can have both sexual fantasies and a substantial sex drive. In boxing, on the other hand, it means to look at a spectacle like Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul and see competition, sport, something of merit. It means to deny any integrity or critical thinking in favour of simply joining in, having fun. You are, as a willing observer, aware but uncaring of the consequences. 

Truth be told, had I not fallen asleep halfway through Eye Wide Shut, I may have also joined in last night. I may have fetched my mask and cloak, dropped my trousers, and watched the orgy of intermingling limbs and sagging flesh from the comfort of my living room, itching for cheap thrills and a satisfying climax. 

As it was, with fatigue and not my principles the enemy, I succumbed in the end. I never got to see Jake Paul abuse a 58-year-old Mike Tyson for entertainment and money and I never got to see him then hold and placate Tyson in the aftermath for fear of being eaten by him. I saw not one of the 18 punches Tyson landed in the fight, nor did I see Tyson struggle to move his legs or walk back to the corner wearing on his face an expression of sadness traditionally captured only in stained-glass windows. I saw no reason to confirm what I already knew, so in the end I saw nothing at all. 

The next morning, I discovered there was nothing to miss. Better yet, rather than wake up disappointed, I was soon able to conclude that I had got from Eyes Wide Shut everything I could get from Mike Tyson and Jake Paul in a boxing ring. I also accepted that just as some fights should never be made, some fight reports are best left unwritten, and some stories, including ones about men desperate to prove their masculinity by getting half-naked in a crowded room of voyeurs, are better off fictionalised.