Eyes Wide Shut and the Big Conspiracy
Of the countless achievements enshrined in Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic legacy, his active association with multiple conspiracy theories is seriously underrated. Not to indulge an increasingly conspiracy sick world, but for a filmmaker to touch conspiracies as disparate as the moon landing and contemporary sex cults, that’s real range. Kubrick’s canon is subject to hyper analysis, and the rate at which his films get interpreted as something other than the film entirely is dizzying. Confines of the text be damned, the real messages are the clues the maestro tucked into the margins. No film in Kubrick’s body of work embodies this phenomena quite like Eyes Wide Shut, and after 25 years of discourse and dissection, the burning indictment at the center of the film just might be how little people demand of their conspiracy theories.
There’s a prevailing notion that Stanley Kubrick films demand more: more attention, more of the viewer, more intellectually. With so much insistence on the master’s elusive genius, his films transform into something to be not gotten. Even more perilously, they become something to be understood. There’s a somewhat lauded documentary on this exact subject, Room 237, a portrait of the theories and theorists surrounding The Shining. Is The Shining is Kubrick’s mea culpa for helping fake the moon landing? Is it his condemnation of Native American genocide? Is the trick to play the film backwards and forwards at the same time? No matter the preferred reading, the subjects of Room 237 are certain The Shining is something to be obsessed over, atomized, and solved.
Kubrick’s persona as a distant, intense perfectionist, his exalted, small-ish canon, the mythos practically writes itself. Then there’s the lore. From his disavowal of Spartacus, to NASA lenses, to an unrealized Napoleon project, he tops it all off by dying right before the release of Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley is also just very good. People saw 2001 and were like, “yeah, okay, this guy could probably fake the moon landing which honestly kinda looked like shit.” Yet for all of his filmic magnitude, Kubrick’s greatest trick may have been retreading his pet theme of cynical humans unerringly exposed by their frailty—time and time again.
Eyes Wide Shut has a fascinating legacy where the conversation went from “is it any good?” to “this movie is the skeleton key for unmasking the sex crimes of the elite.” A bit of an oversimplification, but when outlets like Newsweek directly compare the film to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, that conspiracy theory has arrived. Upon release in 1999, it was widely agreed that the film was about sex. Janet Maslin wrote, “...the man who could create a whole new universe with each undertaking chose the bedroom as the last frontier…” Aside from Eyes Wide Shut being thought of as about sex, mostly people thought it was bad. Or at least an underwhelming final effort from the recently deceased master.
Yet the film endured. First came the reappraisal of Eyes Wide Shut. Then began the era of what (millennial grimace) Chuck Klosterman—in an essay about Room 237 no less—called, immersion criticism. Immersion critiques are readings informed by countless rewatches,
Based on the belief that symbolic, ancillary details inside a film are infinitely more important than the surface dialogue or the superficial narrative…It’s a matter of noticing things that the director included to indicate his true, undisclosed intention. In other words, it’s not an interpretive reading — it’s an inflexible, clandestine reality that matters way more than anything else. And it’s usually insane.
Even with an astute sense of the shape of things, old Chuck proved too optimistic. He claimed these readings were not like conspiracy theory, and that he wanted more of them.
These types of readings quickly spilled out of the realm of cinema and became a means by which to evaluate the entire world. Hidden symbols abounded as no leap of bad faith was one too far. An arcane detail in a logo, a pattern on curtains in the background, any hand gesture, these became the lexicon of an ever present conspiracy. Did immersion criticism give way to this larger acceptance of brain rot conspiracy theory? Was it the other way around? Or were these parallel symptoms manifested by so many humans suddenly untethered in an information supercell? Who knows, but what were once fringe ideas may now be the only thing on which everyone can agree: there is something going on.
While it’s tempting to get into a tedious back and forth about which conspiracies are real and which ones are not, this is not that essay. Instead, what’s worth scrutinizing is how much evidence is required to confirm a conspiracy theory? And just what does said conspiracy really confirm? In the case of Eyes Wide Shut, instead of linking out to numerous brain and algo warping theories, what about the normie conspiracy?
A plot layers deep, the normie conspiracy begins in 1926 with the publication of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle. A work that withstood the years, it was adapted for film and television in 1969, 1983, and 1989. Kubrick optioned the novella in 1970, completing his version almost three decades later in 1999 as Eyes Wide Shut. By all accounts faithful to the source material, Eyes Wide Shut includes elements from the novella like a masked sex party, a woman’s life given up for ‘sacrifice,’ and a costume shop owner who offers his teenage daughter as sex for hire. Does this exposé of the elite go all the way back to 1926? Did Kubrick already know about sex cult orgies in 1970 and find that Traumnovelle was the perfect adaptation to expose the elites? The normie conspiracy believes that Kubrick adapted a novella from an author who infamously wrote about sex in all of its shocking configurations. So much so that Schnitzler, who was also Jewish, was later a favored target of Nazi propagandists. See, Nazis, it’s a conspiracy already.
Normie out a little further. What if Nick Nightingale (Todd Field) only tells Dr. Bill (Tom Cruise) about the masked party to impress him? Bill only knows Nick as the guy who couldn’t hack med school. And Nick knows Bill won’t go to the party. Yet Bill goes, late, in a yellow cab that idles out front, with costume rental documents in his coat. Bill didn’t need to be identified by Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), but that didn’t help.
And what of Victor Ziegler? It’s established early, he’s a society man eager to have sex with anyone that is not his wife. Maybe this supposed cult has no belief or agenda significant to Victor except for its, ahem, goings-on. Think of him, a little coked up, Viagra dissolving in his belly, and bored out of his goddamn mind during the robe ceremony. He scoffs at the pageantry, but understands it’s part of an exhausting custom where wealthy people do what they love best, dress up their perversions. It’s ritual, it's costume, it has arcane songs, but, in the end, Victor knows they’re here for sex. He prefers the months when it’s Gatsby themed. When he hears they’re going to go to the main hall to scare an intruder, it’s the only time he’s been excited about the robes and masks in years. Then, as the intruder’s mask comes off, he sees it’s goddamn Dr. Bill…
This sets the table for Mandy/Mysterious Woman (Julienne Davis/Abigail Good) to offer herself for sacrifice. It plays like bad theater. True melodrama of the lowest order, which is why, movie-wise it’s so great. Is there any chance, like when she’s first introduced in the film, that Mandy/Mysterious Woman overdosed? Perhaps Victor and the masked cabal are just too sinister. They could have pre-introduced Bill to Mandy after drugging her with a two-fold goal. First, to call Dr. Bill away from Alice (Nicole Kidman). In Dr. Bill’s absence, they knew Alice would dance with the handsome stranger, which would trigger her erotic memories, forcing her to share those memories with Bill, which would induce Bill’s psychosexual odyssey, and ultimately lead him to their masked sex party. This way (goal number two), when Bill ultimately arrives at the sex party, they can use the Mysterious Woman as his savior, and have a flawless cover, her fake overdose, for when she must be killed in tribute. All of this to quietly put an end to matters and frighten Dr. Bill.
Where these are the masterstrokes of conspiracy, the normie conspiracy dares to claim that the Masked Woman’s sacrifice was indeed fake, and her death is plausible as a tragic accident. The holidays are hard. Mandy was at risk and no one wanted to support her. Certainly not Dr. Bill, who did little more than revive her and wag his finger about her intake. These people had a hand in her death, their sheer indifference.
Quick aside, yes, two different actresses play Mandy/Mysterious woman. Where that is the best kind of chum for conspiracy, all that means to the normies is that if they are meant to be two different women in the film, the sex cult had no reason to kill either one of them. Bill never saw Mysterious Woman’s face, and his tears over Mandy’s dead body were only for himself.
The Mysterious Woman, much like Stanley Kubrick, was not murdered for knowing, or exposing the truth. The cabal of shadowy power brokers deserve a little more credit than that. Unconscionable wealth and power encourages the view of people as commodities. It’s always cheaper to keep them. Murder is noisy. The idea that conspirators would kill Stanley Kubrick and cut 30 minutes from the film in order to somehow divert attention from Eyes Wide Shut defies the cynical logic of power. And, honestly, if they’d seen enough to cut 30 minutes, they’d probably seen enough to wonder if it was maybe better on a second viewing.
And it begs the question, when was Stanley’s death in relation to this film acceptable? Six months after? A year? Is every director who died during the making of their final film the same scenario, execution for truth telling? Because, honestly, Aleksei German during, Hard to be a God? Or John Houston during The Dead?! Now that’s interesting. What the normie conspiracy believes is Eyes Wide Shut is not a confirmation of a conspiracy, but the greatest anti-conspiracy film ever made. A set of naive, selfish, foolhardy players so indulged and so desperate to serve their own interests, the only conspiracy they forge is the one they construct for themselves.
Naive? Obtuse? Wilfully ignorant of the film and world alike? To that, the normie conspiracy bellies up to the table with the stock response: prove the theory wrong. The amount of evidence a conspiracy theory requires is almost irrelevant. The true currency of conspiracy is what cannot be proved. When that’s the intellectual standard, every piece of evidence, hell, every source of information, can be characterized as hopelessly poisoned. With the burden of proof tossed aside, conspiracy exists in the eye of the beholder.
Based on that rubric, what conspiracy are the theories around Eyes Wide Shut out to prove? Do they all boil down to some version of, ‘People of wealth and power are deviants protected by the law but not bound to it?’ Consider this a big co-sign from the normie conspiracy. If ever present reality wasn’t confirmation enough, maybe hearing it from Stanley will help.
The few consequences in Eyes Wide Shut are telling. Wealthy Dr. Bill gets a strongly worded letter and resolution via sex with his beautiful wife. Middle class musician Nick Nightingale gets roughed up and sent to Seattle. And Mandy, the sex worker, is dead. If any conspiracy jumps off the page, it’s the conspiracy of what happens everyday. In reality, illegal sex trafficking looks a lot more like what happens at the costume shop than what happens at the mansion. People coerced into exploitation exist in so many tangible ways, to require lurid tales of corrupt elites to stir one to care is disingenuous. It’s no longer a conspiracy theory, it’s a fantasy of personal power with no interest in protecting those in need. When so little is demanded of conspiracies, what do they become? At the bottom of the innuendo, the provocation, the endless rabbit holes, it’s a selfie. It’s the long look back of a self induced myopia, an echo of the world one wishes to see. And that’s why the normie conspiracy thinks the movie is titled Eyes Wide Shut.
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