The Emperor's New Clothes: Seeing Through 'Eyes Wide Shut'

If you want a quick rundown of the players and main action of Eyes Wide Shut, click here.

Caveat: All seven parts of `The Emperor`s New Clothes` are being re-worked based on some new evidence. A complete solution to the mystery of EWS will be proposed for publication within the next couple of daze (circa Oct 10-12, 2008). Readers are warned that the current version of this work will not present the solution as promised. In order to show crucial groundwork, some research is necessary. The fully researched article will be delivered, come hell or high water, for American Thanksgiving, 2008.

The Emperor's New Clothes: Seeing Through 'Eyes Wide Shut'

Domino Falls

On my 15th birthday, a wide-eyed fool in the dead of winter, I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time. It was a midnight show. Sold Out at the Paramount, Domino Falls' grand old cinema house, right downtown. The screen was colossal.

When the show let out onto the wild and windy streets of my little prairie mega-lopolis, I walked home for five miles, colder than Pluto, with my head lost in the cosmos. I thought I was going north. My life, my world, my universe, yes, the universe had changed for good. Here's the thing, I wondered, after this what!? How will I be the hero of my own life? Fuckin' Kubrick - just some recluse who I hadn't even heard of but 3 hours gone, some insane sonofabitch genius who had turned my whole world Danube Blue. So not only had Stan become my first real hero, but at once the ultimate nemesis, for he shewed a world so majestic and transcendent and full of hope, yet a world that I might never altogether reach or even comprehend. A world full of stars.

I wanted that world. Regardless of consequence. I want it still.

I found myself, at 15, destined to be away like today's Tom Sawyer, to unravel an enigma. And I'll be a monkey's uncle if it weren't that after 20 years of searching the vast expanse of unbridled, frozen space of mind and soul, my quarry turned out to be a plain old pun. A clever pun. A masterful play on words. 'Deus Ex Machina', Stan? Yeah, I get it. Ha, ha, ha.

I report this moribund little tidbit not for naught. You see, after learning as much of literary theory and the dramatic and cinematic language as one could for a lumpy prole and specifically for the purpose of revealing 2001 to myself, well...I just didn't think there was another curve ball in the works from the old Q-Brick. Then I watched Eyes Wide Shut and knew I was very wrong. And curses if the bastard didn't up and die without a word to explain his twisted yuletide horrorshow.

This story is a chronicle of my solution to Stan's final riddle. Eyes Wide Shut is my own private Everest, my K2, and I will have it, or go on living endlessly in the attempt. I have to. Why? Because it is there - blocking the light like a spot on the sun.

(Note: There is a commentary to the audience of Eyes Wide Shut: 'Give up your inquiries which are totally useless'. Dire consequences are threatened. Is Eyes Wide Shut is hostile to its audience?. At a safe distance it is a cruel albeit very funny joke. Closer it could be dangerous.

In his 2004 metaphilm exclusive Ears Wide Shut, Leon Weber proposes that Eyes Wide Shut may be a 'best of breed' movie about a conspiracy. The conspiracy intimated by Weber is that of an eastward moving cabal of one world oligarchs who have settled at a crucial time in the history of NYC. As per form, The Wrong Way Wizard will drag ths notion into the daylight. This is not a critcism of Mr. Weber's excellent article, for it is quite possible that he is being coy: throwing down the gaunlet, rennaissance style - real old school. It is a Wizard's pleasure to accept such a challenge with panache, a la Cyrano de Bergerac.

Herein we shall expose:
1) the conspiracy in question
2) the complete meaning of 2001: the year and the movie.
3) the cryptic monologue that closes Clarke's 2010 re: the people of the two suns.
4) the transcendental and absolute value of the events of Sept 11, 2001 as a conspiracy to be sure, but oh so much more so, as a function of pi.

And, of course...

5) the fantastic secret of Eyes Wide Shut: that the action of this nearly incomprehensible dreamplay unfolds just following the very real and terrific events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Please, gentle reader, remember the warning to Dr. Bill. What you learn here will be all too easy to understand and hard to shake. You might not sleep so well. Proceed at your own risk. The password is Fidelio.)

Where the Rainbow Ends is Where it Begins

OK... The term EYES WIDE SHUT is a reference to Kubrick's personal life. Upon seeing 2001 for the first time, filmmaker Franco Zefferelli sent Kubrick a telegram. It read: 'You have made me dream with eyes wide open'. Kubrick, notorious for imitating his own mythos, had a delicate sense of humor.

The acronym EWS is a big give away to the topography of the film. The missing letter from the set of E, W and S is 'N' where it stands for North. Well, North isn't exactly missing on the streets of Kubrick's Manhattan, it is rather firmly implied by the vicious re-cycle of infinite regression: being lost is a way of life on the loopy streets of EWS. In this way EWS is a scathing criticism of the universal framework heralded by the Cartesian/Newtonian model and a document to end of this same delusion. Within the quadratic model, Kubrick says, it's all about being LOST. As long as we are deluded by the notion that we live on the exterior of a spheroid that is but one such body in a rapidly disintegrating and unbounded cloud of gas, we are always impossibly lost. When teachers tell our little kiddies that the polynomial equation is muchos importanto they aren't lying... well not exactly. The quadratic model for thought, artificially modulated to flummox the middle class comprehension of natural science, is imposed through mass education onto each and every human value system. Sex. Money. Love. Family and Politics. All of it a shell game. A Devil's Masquerade.

The specific value of the geography of Kubrick's exteriors and the applied force of the North in EWS will be explored a bit further along, but for now, stuff this in your Christmas stocking: someone is rearranging our world while we sleep. He's been mean to little children and his methods are down right Catholic. So, you'd damn well better watch out, kiddies.

Now then, the title and the end credit sequences of EWS are white lettering on a black background - like dominoes. The film that glitters in between these loose ends is a veritable kaleidescope of shimmering light. This runs a parallel to the marvelous and hateful The Wizard of Oz. In TWOZ, Dorothy's 'real' world, seen at the beginning and end of the film, is a flat sepia Black&White, where the troublesome middle world of OZ is dripping with florid and ominous color. Kubrick's homage to OZ, EWS is therefore first and lastmost delivered as a two-dimensional and strictly linear representation of all visible color phenomena. And just as Dorothy's journey through OZ is a dream (or nightmare) - so is the action of EWS. The deeper message is that life itself is a but a Techni-color dream. All of it.

The movie-going experience provides a simile to the film as revealed by its credits. The lights drop: it is dark/black. There is a flash of white light as the leader is spooled and then: seven colors spill out of the white and into the dark. In EWS Kubrick will use each of these seven colors to a level of subtlety that is wizardry. The process is reversed as the movie ends, credits roll and then the theater goes dark again. In this way Kubrick sees EWS and movies in general as a cypher for the life cycle: an orgiastic tightrope of tonality held at the ends by a single moment of clarity (birth/death). And beyond, utter emptiness. All exits are final.

Model Citizens

The casting of Cruise and Kid-man in EWS is analog to the oven-roasting of Hansel and Gretel by the Mean Old Witch. Kubrick is a crypto-alchemist and his two big stars are the base metals he wants to marry up. As a couple, Tom and Nick are the epitome of middle-class virtue at the end of the Consumer Century. They are realized individuals. They are goods to market and Kubrick will pimp them out for an IPO. Now, I am not saying, nor would I, that Tom's and Nicole's work in EWS contributed to the dissolution of their marriage. By all accounts the Cruises enjoyed a warm relationship with Stan. Kid-man was distraught when he died. Nevertheless the portrayal of middle-class matrimony as a Lacanian power struggle ending in hopeless abandon is not friendly.

Next: Tom's life as a Scientologist and as a rumored homosexual play a critical counterpoint to the character of Dr. Harford, especially if you accept Cruise's claim that he is not gay.

First: regarding Scientology. Mother Hubbard's little mood-cult is a direct rip-off of Freudian theory as it has been applied to sociology, especially by Dr. Edward Bernays, whose techniques are used by everyone from corporate advertisers through to MK Ultra to achieve what Bernays calls the engineering of consent. The heart of this motif is played out in the conundrum of the masked ball in EWS. Dr. Harford is totally unaware of the practices of his mind-fucking Occult Overlords (about the dead Amanda Curran, Ziegler will say: she got her brains fucked out!) In fact, Dr. Bill thinks he is one of the chosen. This image forms a reflection of Cruise and his earnest and fanatical belief in Scientology. Cruise's beliefs are a hallmark of social conformity. Does he know that the provenance of his beloved religion is based on the practices of an Occult madman making a well planned bid for world domination? Stan must've been sure that Cruise was mostly in the dark on the history of behavioral mind control because he overlays Dr. Harford onto our Tom as smooth as gold leaf upon gold.

About the gay thing. Freud, whose work is a character within EWS, thought everyone was a little gay, but did not approve of homosexual behavior. EWS obliquely agrees. Homosexuality is a key pivot to the much touted human right to free expression - an expression that Freud feared as savage. As I will try to show, EWS, on one level, threatens that conformity is the only safe pursuit. Forget happiness. We must see our hero Dr. Harford as we see ourselves - just a little gay and that's OK, but....

In a second act street scene from EWS, where the good doctor is accosted by a gang of preppy gay-bashers, he is shaken and stirred but not embarrassed by their characterization. We all know that homo-phobia conceals the desire for the extreme homosexual encounter. In EWS it is the anally obessesed Yahoos from Yale that are gay, not Dr. Bill. In this minor and shocking scene, Kubrick forwards the idea that male homosexuality is ofttimes a violent manifestation of the desire for power and holds that Cruise himself, the uber-conformist, is straight as a bowman's arrow.

The Yale vs. Harford confrontation may also be seen as a candid-snap of the practices of the Yale based Skull and Bones Society. Da WWWiz promises to come round this corner again, a little later on.

Introit: Waltz

The film begins and ends to the strains of Dmitri Shostakovich's Jazz Suite. As jazzy as Dmitri tried to be with this piece he surely created a perfect waltz in the Viennese fashion; maybe he was being ironic. Anyhoo, Vienna is important because it is the fin de siecle birth place of psychoanalysis and the setting for the inspiration to EWS: Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle. Traum-novelle means dreambook. Schnitzler was an ardent Freudian.

Also, the term Vienna is a nice homonym to Veniza: Venice. Venice, as propsed by Mr Weber in metaphilm's Ears Wide Shut, was for a time a strategic stronghold in the oligarchic mega-conspiracy made flesh in EWS. Kubrick has scratched a rose-line from Venice through Vienna and probably Paris and London straight into the heart of of OZ central: NYC. Please remeber that it's just exactly at that moment of phony linear time when Freud's theories spring to life in Zoo York that ol' Ziggy Joy dies in London. It is beginning to seem that ghost of Freud decided to make westward ho with the oligarchs we pursue. Could we trace the Jewish Freud back to the Catholic Dante? How far eastward will we go in search of God's simple truth. Freud, going back in our footsteps like Danny Torrance, turns out to be Moses.

The connexion to Freud, psychoanalysis, and the conspiracy of our infatuation can not be over-stressed. EWS is itself an attempt, through incomparable artifice, to carry out a mass analysis and re-program. The program in question initiates the Age of Horus, which reads in some plain words as an attempt to socialize and market individualism and de-construct the western nuclear family - among other delights. EWS is both a scathing comment on 20th century values and a psychoanalytic trigger for the New World Values that will replace them. This will be elucidated at length, but to begin, readers can watch the excellent Century of the Self, a four hour documentary by Adam Curtis, now on Google video. To wit, the theories of Freud and his followers are the origin of technology used in the mass manipulation of the middle-class.

More striking is the use of the Jazz Suite waltz as a motif for TIME. As it opens and closes the film, this clockwork waltz insinuates an important Occult teaching. TIME, too, is a mechanism bound by iso-perimetric curvature. Stan is telling us that TIME, like the black and white credits of EWS, is the binary pulse that binds our reality - but only tempo-rarily. Kubrick uses Strauss' Blue Danube in 2001 to the same ideal. The waltz is used to bridge the enormous gap of ages implied by the famous monkey-bone/spaceship cut. Time, we are told, is wrapped within itself, an illusion of itself. But what an illusion!

Isis Unveiled

The opening image of EWS is a 3 or 4 second peek at a dorsal Alice Harford as she disrobes. It is worth a note that this single moment is the only in the film that is interlaced with the black and white credits. A mere clip on the Movieola, it stands as a movie within itself. As it compares to the tale told in the strange drama to unfold, this shot may be the most revealing in cinematic history. It is meaningful in multiple context. First, it's a pun upon the title of the film. And myriad Occult revelations burn into the mind's eye...

As a pun upon the phrase 'Eyes Wide Shut', Alice's pose works in two ways. As she disrobes we see her but do not see her, because she is turned away from the camera. This is a visual term equal to the expression 'you see but do not see'. Also, the clip is about as long as the interstice of the normal blink reflex. Stan says - If you blink you will miss it! Eyes Wide Shut indeed.

The Occult facets of this same shot are a veritable Liber 777.

As she stands between twin pillars, Alice is the perfect picture of the High Priestess of Tarot, most notably the Crowley Thoth cards. Again, the onlookers 'rear view' reinforces the idea of Isis as visible yet invisible. We see Her in the many faces of maya, but this is not the complete vignette: the true face of Isis is not revealed, as yet: or is it? No false promises, good reader mine. We will see.

The light source, the illumination for Alice's strip-tease, comes from a lamp in the corner of the room and is reflected by closet door mirrors. In 2d relief the lampshade forms a pyramid with no capstone - the Great-Grand-Goggle of Occult symbology. The eye of illumination traditionally pictured above the pyramid is implied by the lamp-light. It is the light of secret initiation. This simple prop - a plain lamp - gives off a lovely and modulating light. By using this hidden glyph - this eye of illumination - Kubrick has winked his own eye as it peers at us, his audience, through the lens of the camera. We are in the middle, between this gleaming eye and the finished work up on the screen. And it is no ordinary work, for it exposes the fact that in EWS as in life, true comprehension of whazz goin' on is only found behind the scene, out of the picture, lurking overhead like an eye in the sky. It can not be explicated, but discovered only through the correct use of metaphor.

Next is the window at the back of the shot. Alice faces it. The window square is an important Occult signal that I will go into in a later part of our story, but as a teaser here's a wee pip: the Hebrew letter Dalet meaning Doorway also forms the main structure of the letter He, which means Window (a window to another world, as Dr. Harford will find on his odyssey). Secretly, He also means Seed. The combination of a Window and a Seed will grow into a mighty oak during Alice's first and cataclysmic monologue in EWS. And a bit more: the idea of a seed entering doorway forming a window to another plane of existence should prick up the ears of any would be psycho-naut.

The final Occult volley of this first scene comes from a game of love, namely: tennis. Games are doubtless afoot in EWS, but much more than serving up a historical Ace on the courtly game of Kings and Queens (all the good people play, you know) the criss-crossed rackets that sit on the floor at the base of the pyramid lamp are are a masterful trump of occult messaging. Pink Floyd fans will recall the use of tennis (table tennis, in this particular case) as an image from the video for The Division Bell's 'High Hopes'. Like EWS, The Division Bell is a self-acknowledging critque of the cybernetic model of Norbert Wiener. Stanley Kubrick instructs that the binary exchange of information must be appreciated from a subjective, metaphoric standpoint. Thusly, EWS will reveal that the game of l'ouef is much more than just knockin' some balls across the net - it is the nihilistic initiative to crack the Cosmic Egg and con the game. To hoodwink evolution and end the objective exchange of information with subjective union: a guilt free booty-call. It's the weird hieros-gamos at the center of the Masked Ball in EWS. The act of Sexual Magick that these high-falootin' fuck-ohs believe might produce Rosemary's Baby or some other freaky shit.

Ya gotta love it.

END OF PART ONE. PART TWO HERE.