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E y e s Wi d e S h u t , u p d a t e d

Without a doubt, certain holidays and ceremonies of the church were based on pagan models. In the fourth
century Christmas was placed on the 25th of December because on that date was celebrated the birth of the sun
(Natalis Invicti) who was born to a new life each year after the solstice.
-Mon. Myst. Mithra Usener 1905/Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism Cumont 1911
 Bill Harford is lured to a ceremony that he unwittingly certifies as a ritual.
 
An ingenious series of visual gags minus Kubrick's up to release-date edit, Eyes Wide Shut is packaged with the
name that tells anyone that walks under the marquee: you're awake yet asleep. You may watch every frame but
you'll see practically nil. EWS is a film without a final cut; moviegoers are essentially forced to find the film
within its potential trims. How long was Eyes Wide Shut to be? Likely not two hours and thirty-nine minutes.
On the eve of 2001's premiere the director cut a twelve minute prologue, three days after The Shining's release,
Kubrick cut a four minute coda, forcing projectionists across the U.S. to become his personal, local assistant
editors. He tinkered up to, even after, the very last minute.
Kubrick, the ultimate technician of phenomenologic storytelling, requires a tactical audience to become
conscious of his practice. Observation between continuities assembles into a highly rigorous story made of
allegorical elements which pose an alternate, hidden parallel story to the apparent narrative. (Repeat sentence to
understand). He makes cog-sci instructional films. Fiction is organized through exacting non-fiction.  Although
many types of visuals litter his films with its 'story,' the visual weenies of EWS are the missing women (or is it
just a woman?), surrounded by anonymously similar bodies, some with faces others without, some later simply
mentioned in passing. These bodies metaphysically exchange with two of Alice's passages, her memory and her
dream (the dream itself metaphorically linked in many ways to Alex's dreams of Clockwork Orange - a
psychologist would code this an isomorph), which somehow matches Bill's journey beat for beat, even phone
calls seem prescient rather than coincidental.
Kubrick is not a director that cowers in coincidence, there are both rational and metaphysical explanations for
every connection in his films yet finding them is not the point (and maybe implausible), knowing they exist
provides the audience with depth below the mundane machination. Becoming aware of them means your eyes
are opening. The stories, the basic one we think we watch and the secret one we cannot easily see, merge and
slowly become whole over time, after repeat viewings. That threshold, whether things are seen or not, is where
the film gains its psychic power. Kubrick, as in his other films, drops bland, mostly hidden mirrors everywhere,
then splits them with continuity shifts. Just watch Domino post-kiss (the tightest shot of the film), she seems to
know Harford's name without Bill ever mentioning it, and slyly Kubrick reverses the tiger on her bed
(disturbances in continuity employed as mirrors are his keys, of course). "Was that Mrs. Dr. Bill?" she purrs
from the other side.
What is Eyes Wide Shut about? The ritual enslavement of the Moon that gave meaning to present day religion.

The film begins with dueling opening shots of the same room, an incisive grammatic point to get the film
started. In effect these two shots act like a primer. A tool to teach an audience what to expect. It's the same room
from two slightly shifted orientations. How they differ is key. The Christmas Tree, which stars as the film's key
symbol and ceremonial object, is predicted by the combination of parting curtains and city lights. Alice and Bill
begin the film facing this form. Beyond this obvious symbolic construction, Eyes Wide Shut is subtly about light
qualities that offer modern ceremonies their psychic, for lack of a better word, jurisdiction. The female is
associated with the moon (and its blue hue), crucially the human cycle of ovulation and menstruation is synched
to the moon's 28 day return. The male is mythically linked with the sun and its yellow light. Kubrick composes
the film as an interplay between both sexes' light-born metaphors, across visuals and spoken word, and their
interlacing with western religions. 
First, Alice stands in his symbol's color. The room is overcome in yellow light, imitation sunlight, doubled
tennis rackets sit centrally, watch symbols flow: Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) will soon mention his serve
surrounded by glowing sun-shapes. Tennis is a game that lofts a yellow ball. These primer shots move into
gesture: She moons us - which the twelve women replicate later during their ceremonial enslavement. Outside
we establish Central Park West, also bathed in man-made yellow light, blotting out any chance for moonlight to
reach street-level.  Second, Bill stands in her room, moonlit, a bluish-light which strikes their bookcase
(meaning knowledge), not props for a game. And he forgets: his key gesture, also duplicated at the moon
ceremony (when asked for the second password). Kubrick inverts their light. He even breaks any semblance of
continuity: Bill has the red carpet, Alice doesn't. Once inside the bathroom, where both light values meet, she
moons the moon (while wiping, away from us: bathrooms are places of transference in the Kubrick syntax). It
continues, too subtly, even the moonlight in the slender bedroom mirror is cut with an overhead spotlight in
their hallway. From blue to yellow. Disbelievers of Kubrick's precision should note blue moonlight strikes
Domino's bookshelf as well (see the first image of the essay). Clearly these details are not coincidental.
For a jarring shift in filmic value, Kubrick did something to this film he never attempted before: he push-
developed EWS's negative two-stops, which intentionally amps chroma, calling attention to the values hidden
inside color temperatures. This is an irreversible effect since the process alters the negative in its bath.  A bright
white light to the naked eye on set is suddenly golden yellow, a bright blue-hued moonglow is now richly blue.
From an optical point-of-view, it's the reverse of Barry Lyndon's .9 super speed lenses and their candlelit
opulence. The Christmas Tree, a pagan sun-worshipping symbol converted to Christianity, is likewise amped,
and is the focus for these enhanced contrasts.
Why place so much focus on chroma, light-temperature and white balance?
EWS is laced with a strategically concealed war between sunlight and moonlight, suggesting pagan ceremonies
and rituals have retained their effects continually even though they've been modernized and dressed with
renaissance and present-day props and settings. The moon is even referenced in wordplay (the first dead body,
Lou Nathanson=luna then sun), propping (spot Mandy's massive pearl ring), and deadly ritual: the masked ball
begins with a nighttime moon worshipping ceremonial subversion. There, Kubrick exhibits 12 women who act
out a lunar procession (12 moons compose a year, the word month comes from moon), mooning the audience
like Alice and bowing in servitude to a blending of Christianity and Islam (the music is scored to prayers sung
forwards and reversed, the architecture externally neo-renaissance and internally Moorish revival, the ceremony
is hierophantic-papal). He's targeting all of Indo-European thought. Kubrick is illustrating with light how men
created this ceremony prehistorically to dominate the feminine night, to reverse what was once worshipped
before men attained systematic control, and he reveals slyly it's been transforming for many millenia into this
secret annual ritual. This moon ritual subversion might have been the first 'organized religion' (ie: the
enslavement of moon worshipping females might have initially required a society to codify priesthood, create
hierarchies to rapidly disperse this change). This is much simpler than conspiracy like the illuminatis. It's not a
conspiracy, just a carefully and not so carefully veiled war. It appears both as a dream and a conspiracy that
Kubrick enters through a key conflict on Earth: the war between male and female. And he illustrates it with a
married couple, who experience the same thing, though one experiences it awake, the other while asleep. Watch
the color red become the carpeting of choice, leading from Bill's dressing room, to Victor's party to Rainbow
Fashions to the moon ceremony to Victor's pool table to toy store.  The morgue and the exterior entrance to
Somerton are the only places that have pure white light (they're similar gateways). Alice dreams under the
effects of moonlight, the only character with this color isolation. Using red in his sets, Kubrick switches to blue
light then back, moving moonlight inside for key scenes of degradation, when women must be ritually
controlled. They end the film in red, the toy store, becoming Ziegler's faceless cue balls. Her final request is a
fuck, which is what Ziegler's entire ceremony is about: Fornication Under the Control of a King, admitting the
film is a dramatized satire. Women don't want power, they've been psychically enslaved to want to be
overpowered.
Deceptively righting the boat of the unconscious, Sydney Pollack's in-story director plots a high price staging to
hide-and-seek a body to rule it a suicide, from a living actor who plays the aptly named Mandy (Julienne Davis)
to a dead body fully annunciated as Amanda Curran (also played by Julienne Davis) yet Pollack (Ziegler)
claims she's also a mysterious woman met only while masked: "Mysterious Woman" (Abigail Good)-or is she?
This masked woman chooses him, their masks kiss, and then begs him to leave fearing for both of their lives.
Has he really met her before? Here's another clue, the other woman he meets at the masked ball also seems to
recognize him. Any idea who she is? In the script she's called Young Woman but remains unidentified in the
credits. Kubrick has, in effect, already told us who she is in the film's logic (she's Domino, a long way from her
ermine coat). These sleights of hand are the splinters of the film. Though Bill meets Mandy in the opening
scenes of the film he appears to not recognize her once dead, and he remains confused by Ziegler's explanation;
of course he does, it's a preposterous lie. Two depressants and one stimulant affect the various women who
inhabit the first party. A woman awakens from one after a sexual encounter, another falls asleep to one while
dancing as a prelude to sex.  The first bedroom scene and the speech by the window is conjured through another
depressant: marijuana. Prior to finding Mandy unconscious, Doc Harford tells his momentary, rainbow-luring
friend Gayle who compliments a random act of his kindness, "that is the kind of hero I can be...sometimes." 
Once inside Ziegler's bathroom we discover just what kind of hero Harford really is. Like the Ullmann
interview in The Shining, here Harford is offered the film's central decision once he finds Mandy on the verge of
her O.D. Just as Jack Torrance should have recognized the Hotel's obvious malevolent distortions, Bill should
be aware of the monstrous party he's entering. Any medical professional worth their degree would immediately
put down the charade, the pretense of socialization, and would read the situation as potentially doomed. A
callous man has just finished fucking an overdosing woman. He both barely remembers her name and is
noticeably displeased once told he should protect her for a few hours. The heroic Tom Cruise we usually
validate would offer the woman his coat, grab his wife, order a car (or an ambulance) to a hospital and explain
to Victor he was close to being complicit in a woman's death, and that perhaps he wants to rethink his life.
Instead he performs the most cursory examination in medical history; the precision of Kubrick's key mode-jerk
is crucial, he brings along the audience's complicity in protecting Ziegler, he slyly reframes Cruise's heroism -
Bill's playing apologist to Victor's indirect criminality (which later becomes direct). That is the hero Harford can
be sometimes. He appeases the status quo to uphold its psychic value, which he is part of or pretends to be (or
more accurately, he plays upholding parts in films). No wonder Cruise has no memory of who Mandy really is
despite meeting her twice. Buried in the film are visual explanations for these memory faults: the film's been
rigged with some jarring alternate framings to loosen our connection to any kind of reality in millenial New
York. While Kubrick hints at conspiracy theory, he also hints there is none (Alice's dream), and that's the game
of Eyes Wide Shut, is it a dream or a conspiracy, does the individual see more than there is to avoid the simplest
explanation? What we are told is clearly not enough. Like Schnitzler's novel justifying the appearance of
psychoanalysis in Vienna, Kubrick's film is making a dour investigation into our medical cosmological frame in
1999 New York. Did psychoanalysis work? Evidently, and our Dr. Harford stands in as the archetype and
symbolic apparatus, no. Pills, drinks, drugs. The century begins in a German novel and ends in an English film.
His satire of New York ("the band sucked tonight") is maybe the most advanced filmic nuance in recent history,
just look at Tarantino's Parisian backlot for contrast. It's clearly a conjured, artificial occupation city, and NY is
clearly a decaying cheap novelty of 20th century commerce. Rainbow Fashions (above the rainbow not below
it) has its own password, the costume Harford needs, and once in the rear, red-carpeted/blue-lit room, Milich
offers his mannequins as "life," and look closely they are live humans. Dig deeper and you can see how
distorted Kubrick's NY is, Nick performs at an absurdly named Sonata Cafe (sonata is not a name remotely
associated with jazz) while next to it is a cafe named Gillespie's where Harford searches for Nick. Everything is
switched.
Matching Cruise to his archetype is an easy stretch, he's the hero that falls to regain something. Seduced while
he uncovers conspiracy in The Firm (more of Kubrick's hints: directed by Pollack), here Cruise is offered
similar anxieties. His character forgets wallets, masks, names and faces, all the while doubling lines incessantly
"Look at me, Look at me." To drive the point home, he has Bill then use forgetfulness as a form of deceipt when
he's asked for the password for 'the house.'  Would the ceremony alter without Harford's deception - would it
still have its mysterious hold?  Kubrick litters the film with lines and actors from other Cruise films, the most
prominent one is Carl (Thomas Gibson) who was the villain of Far and Away. So let's go over this once more:
Victor marks Bill as a doctor on the make (a case of scotch), and slips a comatose body into the hospital later
identified by Dr. Harford (it's a homonym, a dead-ringer for Harvard) who visits the morgue to certify,
unwittingly, both her identity and her 'accidental' cause of death. Three actor-directors guide our ivy-league
labeled mark onwards (Pollack, Todd Field, Alan Cumming). Witnesses abound who recite exposition self-
consciously while illustrating basic gestures of servility (getting coffee, watching kids) an exhibition for
audiences gazing at 1999 from other eras. A continuous alternate monolith appears at each setting, the
Christmas Tree that symbolizes not the birth of a messiah, but the rebirth of a sky object. In every way it is the
opposite of 2001's monolithic central metaphor: The Dark Anamorphic Screen turned upright. Instead of taking
a magnetic role, the tree is usually ignored, its function underplayed, the only mention of one in dialogue is
laughable: Harford acknowledges Domino's tree to make polite, nervous filler. Once you actually add up the
stakes the film plays with, Cruise's offscreen penultimate rant to his wife that begins with, I'll tell you
everything, is not laced with the sexual peccadilloes of a hopefully moral husband, the one we plant in our
minds, but the careful encapsulation, enumeration, one meeting to the next, a connect-the-dots of I was led on a
wild goose chase to certify a body, I was set-up by Victor, then the Pianist at the party who lured me to a
mansion that was exactly like your dream. Victor pulled the strings the entire way and even tried to bribe me
with a case of scotch. I was duped into protecting a criminally negligent overdose. That is the Tom Cruise film
we never saw but witnessed.  Eyes Wide Shut. And as the direct offspring of Clockwork Orange, a film in which
an inadvertent murder sets off a series of judgement mirrors (judgements that travel between subcultures) we
witness but don't 'see' the opposite, an inversion, with female pairings, circular ceremonies, and a murder that
hinges on the main character, one where blame is assigned, the other where blame is covered-up. And the most
unusual aspect of the exchange is Victor lies because he wants Harford to have doubts, for him to speculate the
ceremony might be a ritual that really causes death, that it might posses a supernatural power over females. In
effect, causing Harford's doubt offers power to the film, to the power of any myth. Reading the ritual from the
outside, it probably occurs annually (12 women=12 moons), and requires an unknowing outsider as a witness to
certify the sacrifice (by witnessing it he renders it sacred). The outsider has a faint complicity in the sacrifice,
Harford leaves an O.D.ing Mandy in Ziegler's care. It has form letters pre-printed to warn the annual outsider
off. It's almost a comedy: Wife: "Why do you think Ziegler invites us to these things." Husband: "This is what
you get for making house calls."
Both films, shot in the environs of London, are set somewhere after 1997 (the similar names of the autos: in
Clockwork it's 1997 Durango, and the Range Rover Cruise pilots is a 1997 model), essentially alternating
realities, a prediction from 1971 and an actual one, the first alive with violence that goes awry, this one, the
actual, sedate and innoculated, a clinical Brave New Mirror World, a living death aided by drugs, where the
most extensive party is actually staged in the manner of a religious prison/inquisition to fool the lead character,
and it behaves as the most complete satire of religion ever achieved; a party with masked sexual encounters. At
its 'height' is a mythical ploy of redemption (see redeemer archetypes in religion) to show off a body-double to
explicitly identify only a body.  And bodies and sex are the variables. A disease infects the character Domino,
wearing an ermine coat, who clearly is herself staged to encounter Dr. Harvard. Think twice and you can tell the
HIV reveal is as staged as the letter, as the hotel clerk, as Millich. All have been prepped to deliver. Domino's
name is culled from a specific type of priest, masked and hooded, prior to the Renaissance. The masked
behavior magnified in the prison-like sex party dates from the Renaissance's mimicry of this Domino
attainment.  Of course the female Domino is another disappearance verified within the film, the question
remains: who is this body? Unanswered by the film's credits, it's blandly leveled into fiction by Pollack, who
conducts his masking of the event over a bright red pool table in memory to the party, swilling scotch.  Both
Clockwork and EWS have excursions to the country. A Clockwork prison-like experience is duplicated in the
masked ball, entrance procedeures, punishments, Corova Milk Bar tables emerge as live sexual acts, some even
duplicating tables (proving Kubrick would have fought any restriction and shown us the full construction of his
furniture-like sex-play). As the satire of religion reaches its peak, Cruise is threatened with Satan's/Adam's
unmasking (down to nothing like Mandy) and then is redeem-duped. And Kubrick goes further, even deeper is
his satire of staging, as the scenes minus Ziegler's control-input have an inert quality, a zombie sleepiness, the
motions Cruise's Harford and Kidman's Alice go through without any impetus, or external conflicts, finally add
up to two monologues Kidman delivers as their own mirror. Their only conflict is sexual and is delivered as
oratory in differing light qualities, Kubrick's unusual heightened flashed-negative look, her warnings become
the only tension that pulses in the bland situation dramedy left for Kubrick to direct in Ziegler's absence.  When
Kubrick has Cruise off Ziegler's grid the city is monotonous, dull, the intention to show their/our world as
nearly terminally slumbering is twisted satire on a level seldom imagined. If you're bored by it, it's because
you're living among it, Kubrick is no doubt assured future humans who've evolved out of the west's self-torture
will laugh at its conditions, practices, self-deceipt and conflicts. As for threat, only the penetration of
homophobic college kids offers any real proof of violence, of the hooliganism imagined from 1971, the
exertions of Clockwork Orange, the infernal flexing of rage has all been supressed by the arrival of the 'real'
1999: EWS. Altogether a comatose indictment of our culture. A stunningly weird nightmare rendered
seemlessly dull. Whoa. And the details: countless visual shifts announce an allegorical pulse that moves from
shot to shot, telling us what it all means.
In the end, Kubrick pulls off the slyest of all tricks, he creates a ceremony of redemption to hide a ritual murder:
the Mandy/Mysterious Woman switch that Ziegler takes direct credit for by lying about it (the lie 'unmasks'
him). Even more powerful is his hint that the mystery Harford is offered is the root of religion, since Ziegler
really has no reason to lie. He transforms the ceremony into something more than a ritual by exhibiting it to
Harford, allowing his momentary participation, then deceiving him. What Harford comes away with is not an
answer but a paradox and a warning that keeps this deception secret. He adopts its legend as everyman does
with religion. And it's inexplicable, a mystery rooted in the psyche that races across the community in hushed
whispers. This almost unseen gesture of Ziegler's is what Kubrick suggests male religion is employed as: the
destroyer of women, and the ritual desecrater of their formerly worshipped, once equal sky-symbol.

 
 Dr. Harford gazes into the Post and sees two myths, text in black and white, inner and outer, one is fictionally his, "Lucky to Be Alive"
the other is the fiction told to the police and hospital, the Amanda Curran overdose. On the wall behind him is the mansion's ceiling -
from the party. Something quite black and white affixed shows a mythic battle extending from his head.
Dialogue opens unconscious doors:
"Well I don't think its quite that black and white, but we both know what men are like." Bill Harford
"Why can't you ever give me a straight fucking answer." Alice Harford
 

Alex, walking through his post-1997 reality, gazes at the past, actually the present where the film is being shot, a man wearing 1971
clothes, gazing at books, on the shelves in his inset are boxes of film.

present | market | mythistory | mutation | motion | state change | head | inner | killer | mystery | outer | test

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