Eyes Wide Shut: Hidden in plain sight
boydrinksink.com
boydrinksink.com
It's such a bizarre wonderful dreamworld of the human psyche that Kubrick created. Like if Kubrick made a Fellini film.
That sounds like a recommendation! After reading:
> Kubrick was perhaps the world's most successful maker of mainstream art films.
I'd had a vision of Kubrick as the Thomas Kinkade of the 7th art, which luckily was quickly dissipated by:
> He found a way—like few before him or since—to make interpretive movies that are commercially successful in popular culture while simultaneously appealing to cult film audiences, intellectuals and academics, cinephiles, critics, artists, and fellow filmmakers.
I read in Roger Ebert's review, that he would have enjoyed a twist in the end, where Bill would notice the body of nick being pushed out on a bed on a hospital corridor, adding some more doubt about what has really happened. (I vaguely remember some bigshot has promised Bill that Nick was fine.)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120663/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rat
Of course The Shining shows that what Kubrick makes of a novel is not necessarily what the author made, but it's probably worth giving some credit for the dreamworld to Schnitzler—the novel is literally called, or so Wikipedia tells me it translates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Story), Dream Story.
After two divorces, I watched it again and totally understood the whole thing. It is a great movie.
Still, my favorite is Barry Lyndon...
I remember it being beautiful and interesting visually(and of course the incredible backwards opera music ritual scene) while missing the plot so completely after reading this article and some of the comments.
Related Kubrick quote from TFA:
> One of the things I always find extremely difficult, when a picture's finished, is when a writer or a film reviewer asks, "Now, what is it that you were trying to say in that picture?" And without being thought too presumptuous for using this analogy, I like to remember what T.S. Eliot said to someone who had asked him—I believe it was The Waste Land—what he meant by the poem. He replied, "I meant what I said." If I could have said it any differently, I would have. ("The Odyssey Begins", 1960 Horizon interview)
Spelling everything out for the (supposedly dim-witted) audience at the close is, reversely, something that frustrates me.
I don't believe Kubrick had particular problems with the British Board of Film Censors.
The BBFC never censored A Clockwork Orange, for example. They passed it without cuts, though they had seen a pre-print of the first completed half of the movie as was the custom, and had been concerned that it might not get certification. The censor commended the final movie.
Kubrick personally pulled it from distribution in the UK, after they had passed it and it had a limited release.
https://www.bbfc.co.uk/education/case-studies/clockwork-oran...
The BBFC do not and did not edit films. They are not a government body. They did once call themselves censors (the words of the acronym changed in the 80s), but the point of the BBFC was that the film industry was censoring its own work proactively, and maintaining their own certifications, to avoid government doing it. Similar to what the MPA(A) did.
They still sometimes suggest edits that would keep a film within a particular certification.
In the case of Eyes Wide Shut, it wasn't the BBFC that made any decisions to edit and cut that film; Warner Bros themselves did, based on the US classification they were aiming for.
> Kubrick died within a week of the film release, perhaps he knew too much, perhaps not.
Or perhaps, after a stressful filming, editing and production schedule, a 70 year old man had a heart attack in his sleep.
Ghislaine met Jeffrey Epstein the year Robert fell off the Lady Ghislaine. She did so because she was in NY schmoozing socialites because Sir Bob had bought a paper -- NY Post was it?
Robert Maxwell was a strange, multi-faceted bloke, a sort of chaotic-neutral crook and spy, and yet he really most likely just fell off his boat after having a heart attack, because he was a very large (by 90s standards) and very unhealthy old-looking man who didn't listen to advice about diet, exercise, health and risk, and was stressed out by being in unprecedented debt. He would not have committed suicide; not his style.
There's no big story to link the two, apart from the fact that Ghislaine wouldn't have been there at all mingling in the high-end social scene in early 90s New York if she weren't the daughter of a media baron who had just bought a paper.
If anyone did "whack" Robert Maxwell it had nothing to do with Epstein, who was at the beginning of his career as a blackmailer, grifter, influence broker and deviant. It's not even clear they met.
It would have had more to do with all the people Maxwell upset in his long, storied life as a potential triple-agent, spy, fraudster and bully.
Just wanted to respond to the idea that the intrigue, such as there is, around Robert Maxwell’s death is logically connected to the intrigue around Ghislaine.
The central disease of QAnon/BritAnon thinking is the belief in omniconspiracy, when it’s entirely normal for notable people to be connected by only a handful of degrees of separation, just like everyone else is.
Every now and then the omniconspiracy touches on something a bit unusual —- this, or a dead staffer, say —- and uses mere proximity to establish a connection that doesn’t exist, and then uses that connection to magnify and anchor the conspiracy.
If so he did that in 2001, whereas Kubrick died in 1999.
Still remember reading the book the movie is based on: “Traumnovelle” by Arthur Schnitzler.
Having read this during high school and also AFTER seeing the movie adaption, iirc the closing conversation vary by quite a bit.
The Very Bad Wizards podcast on it is interesting/fun too. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/very-bad-orgies-kubric...
Idk the rampant pedophilia in the movie certainly rhymes with revelations about Epstein.
That’s the whole mythos of the movie and why people like the OP wrote a huge thesis on the themes and motivation behind the movie.
A few off the top of my head, this is a very personal list and I can't even claim that all these movies are 'good' in any particular sense. Just that they put me into this state: * basically anything in lynch's cannon. I'm not always the biggest fan of his stuff, but sometimes they hit me hard. * Cronenberg's Videodrome and it's spiritual sequel Existenz * Donnie Darko & Southland Tales (objectively just an awful movie) * Prince of Darkness * Enter the Void (not for the faint of heart) * Paprika * Solaris (the original mostly, there are some qualities in the remake) * Stalker * Dark City * Sorry to Bother You * The Fountain * 8 1/2 * The Ninth Gate * and certainly Eyes Wide Shut
Additionally, many of David Fincher's provide a similar experience
Not Fincher, but a late edition. I would put PTAs 'Inherent Vice' on the list if I could edit it.
> Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), and A Clockwork Orange (1971)—three of his most celebrated works, and all three black comedies (about pedophilia, nuclear war, and violent crime, respectively).
Hardly comedies (except Dr.S) and the "abouts" are superficial. A Clockwork Orange is about the nature of free will, not violent crime!
The bit about Prescot Bush "who helped fund Hitler's regime" is a long bow to draw. Maybe technically true in some tiny irrelevant sense.
If anything the author is underselling the connection. Millions of 1930's dollars; gold, fuel, steel, coal, bonds etc [0] can hardly be described as 'tiny irrelevant'.
> ... the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year [2009], show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.
Prescott was also implicated in the 1933 Business Plot [1]:
> In July 2007, a BBC investigation reported that Prescott Bush, father of U.S. President George H. W. Bush and grandfather of then-president George W. Bush, was to have been a "key liaison" between the 1933 Business Plotters and the newly emerged Nazi regime in Germany,[51] although this has been disputed by Jonathan Katz as a misconception caused by a clerical research error.[52] According to Katz, "Prescott Bush was too involved with the actual Nazis to be involved with something that was so home grown as the Business Plot."[53]
Both links below offer many sources, including the BBC and The Guardian, along with multiple official archives.
0 - https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/how-bushs-grandfa...
I don't place any much credence in anything published in Democracy Now! If anything Prescot Bush is known for his opposition to McCarthy, for example.
And, the main/original reporting on this was by the Guardian in '04 and the BBC in '07 after more files were released. I don't know where you pulled Democracy Now! from?
> But what involvement did Prescot Bush have and when? Your links aren't conclusive at all.
Did you read the link? Or my comment? They're pretty clear as to where they're getting this information:
> Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush's involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.
If you have any proof that the BBC and The Guardian were lying about this, feel free to present it.
Honestly it's really, really weird that you'd double down on this after being presented with the above articles. If they don't convince you, fine, but it doesn't seem you've actually read them.
> If anything Prescot Bush is known for his opposition to McCarthy, for example.
Sorry; opposing McCarthy (20 years later) means he didn't support Nazis how exactly? Not trying to be mean or anything but you seem a bit too confused on this topic to be making declarations of innocence.
I'm not an expert, but I knew of the history of Smedley Butler and the Prescott Bush/Union Bank history.
Those articles don't add anything substantial. Maybe if you like you could mention the most substantial or damning fact from among them. You shouldn't feel the need though.