"Eyes Wide Shut"
What was Stanley Kubrick trying to tell us with his last film?
A friend just sent me the following clip from Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut, along with the question, “What was Kubrick trying to tell us?” WARNING: The clip contains adult language and themes. Viewer discretion advised.
Funny that my friend should ask, because it’s a film (based on a novella) to which I have given a lot of thought.
Eyes Wide Shut was Kubrick’s last film, and it was released in 1999. Long before I watched it, I read with great interest the story on which it was based—that is, Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Dream Story (German: Traumnovelle).
Schnitzler began his career as a medical doctor, earning his degree from the University of Vienna medical school in 1885, but soon abandoned his practice to pursue his literary interests.
Dream Story is about 35-year-old doctor in Vienna’s upper-middle class named Fridolin. He is a confident, comfortable, and highly respected young man, and it doesn’t occur to him that the world in which he lives—civilized, restrained, polite, and elegant—is far less stable than it seems.
One night his wife confesses to him that she’d recently fantasized about having a sexual adventure with a young naval officer they’d encountered during their recent summer vacation. Despite having repeatedly encouraged his wife so speak frankly with him about her fantasy life, her confession profoundly troubles him.
And so, after making a patient house call, he decides not to go home, but instead to go out on the town in Vienna, which happens to be celebrating the carnival season, with various balls going on late into the night.
At a piano bar he bumps into an old college buddy named Nachtigall, who tells him that he will be playing piano at a secret high-society orgy that night.
Voraciously curious, Fridolin gets a mask and costume and follows Nachtigall to the party at a palatial house in the suburbs. Fridolin is shocked to find several men in masks and costumes, along with naked women wearing only masks, engaged in various sexual activities. A young woman (wearing a mask) warns him to leave, but Fridolin ignores her plea and is then exposed as an intruder. The woman then proclaims that she will sacrifice herself for him, and he is allowed to leave.
Later Fridolin reads in a newspaper about a young woman who was just found dead under mysterious circumstances, and his heart sinks that it may have been the girl that offered herself to be sacrificed for him.
Schnitzler was apparently inspired by stories he’d heard about the Viennese industrialist, Carl Kellner, who founded the Ordo Templi Orientis. Kellner figured out how to make paper out of wood pulp, and he built a splendid villa at the Hohe Warte 29 in the affluent suburb of Doebling.
Kellner apparently influenced the British mystic, Aleister Crowley, who was the founder of the Thelema cult. Former British Prime Minister Rischi Sunak was co-founder of the hedge fund Theleme Partners, an early major investor in Moderna.
Schnitzler was intrigued by the idea of powerful, rich men forming a secret society in which they could take unlimited liberties with beautiful young women. Kellner and Crowley seemed to regard this activity as a form of radical liberation and power that they associated with Lucifer, whom they conceived as a bringer of knowledge and freedom to man.
Did Kubrick know—at the time he started shooting Eyes Wide Shut—about Jeffrey Epstein’s gatherings on Little Saint James island, which Epstein acquired in 1998? I don’t know, but even if Kubrick did know about Epstein’s activities, these probably weren’t the inspiration for the film, because Kubrick had been fascinated by Dream Story since the 1960s.
So what was Kubrick trying to tell us? I believe that he perfectly understood something about which the vast majority of people are unaware—namely, that all of us have a very dark side. Most people don’t realize that, under certain circumstances, they are capable of doing thing that they assume (during normal times) they would never do. They have deeply ingrained habits of suppressing their awareness of their dark side. Insofar as they are dimly aware of it, they often cloak their impulses from themselves and others with virtue signaling.
Rewatching the above scene, I wonder if Kubrick thought of Victor Ziegler (marvelously played by Sydney Pollack) as the devil. Note his concluding lines about mortality (spoken to a medical doctor who genuinely cares about his patients).
Someone died; it happens all the time. Life goes on; it always does—until it doesn’t. But you know that, don’t you.
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Many, perhaps most children who are sexually trafficked do not survive until adulthood. Thus, the woman died. I think the idea that these women were in fact children was a bridge too far to put into a movie, even for Kubrick, but that is what I take it to mean.
9 years ago a woman came into my life (I'm a woman myself) who had been sexually trafficked starting at age 3 for two decades. I disagree that people generally have a dark side, but a surprisingly large minority of the Western population are pedophiles and sociopaths. I am not a eugenicist, I am staunchly against that, but probably about 10% of us -- those men (and complicit women -- in shocking numbers) could go, and humanity would benefit greatly.
The crazy thing about pedophiles is they're not even particularly secretive. They're not ashamed or hiding in the shadows, they're a community who all share resources, kind of like the mob. They all know each other. I just think they aren't caught because normal people have such strong psychological defenses that we refuse to see what is in front of us when the red flags show up -- not even a conscious decision -- we are probably blocked subconsciously. It's such an awful notion that we literally can't see it. My friend tried to tell adults (hinting more than fully saying) on multiple occasions, and it never went anywhere. Another meaning of eyes wide shut.
And isn't it interesting that Kubrick "died" right after he began alluding to the fact that he filmed the fake moon landing, and wanting the complete Director's Cut of Eyes Wide Shut re-released.