Was “Eyes Wide Shut” a Cultural Watershed?

I didn’t think Eyes Wide Shut was so bad. Ok I agree it had some clunky parts, particularly the spat between the husband and wife, but I thought the movie was an excellent rendition of the novella, which I also liked.

I thought the dialogue the author excoriates was actually pretty good. What’s wrong with it? Particularly this: “Listen, Bill, I don’t think you realize the kind of trouble you were in last night. Who do you think those people were? Those were not just ordinary people there. If I told you their names—I’m not gonna tell you their names, but if I did, I don’t think you’d sleep so well.”

My curiosity about Eyes Wide Shut has more to do with it’s possible connection to the Epstein scandal and various other likely blackmail operations. Many people have associated EWS with the Epstein scandal, as the timing was appropriate to when these activities would have been in their heyday. There are other possible symbolic representations of these activities in the Hollywood/msm, for example, the great movie LA Confidential. I believe these films are a subtle revelation or warning to these politicians and movers and shakers that they have been ensnared in blackmail, that there escapades have been filmed and they had better behave themselves accordingly! There are many smaller, subtler references in tv and lower culture. Although, I believe EWS is more in the direction of a satire or protest than warning. Someone else pointed this out to me: what do you want to call your film mr Kubrick? (J)ust (E)yes (W)ide (S)hut! I don’t know. Do you guys think that is there?

@Moderator: If I may, two spelling corrections, both of which relate to a personal name.

1) Dr. Griffin uses “Schnitzer” in the very first paragraph and “Schnitzer’s” in the paragraph immediately following the long blockquote from the Times’s Janet Maslin. The spellings should be “Schnitzler” and “Schnitzler’s” respectively. (Note that Maslin spells the playwright’s name correctly.) Not coincidentally, besides being a man condemned in his own time as a pornographer and admired immensely by Sigmund Freud for that very reason, Arthur Schnitzler was, like Kubrick and Raphael, a proud and remarkably obnoxious Jew.

2) “Machiko Kacutani” should be “Michiko Kakutani.”

I’m so glad someone took the time to analyze this film at this depth. I agree with some of the criticisms in the review but also think there is more going on in this film. I always thought the film title “Eyes Wide Shut” was Kubrick’s way of trying to tell us something, like maybe that satanic cults are ruling the world in secret. I’ve heard that the satanic ritual scenes were filmed at one of Rothschild’s mansions. Some have speculated that Kubrick’s heart attack just six days after submitting the final cut was no accident and that some scenes (24 minutes?) were deleted because he was revealing too much.
Several years ago at a conference, I listened to a man speak who was very knowledgeable about Kubrick and has produced several videos about his theories of what his films were really all about. His name is Jay Weidner and a google search will show several of his videos and interviews on the subject. Essentially, Weidner believed that Kubrick was a super-genius with an IQ of about 200 who’s movies were multi-leveled in their meaning. He was a high level (32 degree) Mason and of course, also being a “chosenite”, he was well connected at the top levels of Hollywood. After making Dr. Strangelove, Weidner claims that the top brass at Hollywood were so impressed with Kubrick that they made a secret Faustian pact with him. They would let him use NASA’s state-of-the-art newly invented cameras to shoot his upcoming “2001, A Space Odyssey,” in exchange for his promise to film the fake Moon landing! Kubrick had developed a new technique of seamlessly merging a fake background into his set in his 1968 Space Odyssey movie which was successfully used the following year to seamlessly blend-in a fake Moon background to Arizona desert shots of the Apollo 11 astronauts, thus faking the Moon landing.
This might sound like crazy conspiracy theories to some but Weidner makes a compelling case in his videos. Many people today, including myself, think the Moon lading was a hoax. Weidner goes on to explain how Kubrick went on to cryptically embed cryptic symbolism about this in his subsequent film, “The Shining.”
So, apparently, Kubrick was a very clever fellow who, like other good directors, are able to seduce their audiences into accepting a multitude of beliefs, attitudes and disinformation that (((they))) want us to accept. Surely, many of these beliefs are consistent with their NWO agenda of dumbing down, demoralizing and corrupting the goyim.
Coming back to “Eyes Wide Shut,” I think there are two possibilities of what Kubrick is doing and maybe both are valid.
One is that the film is designed as degenerate social conditioning against us seducing us to accept sexual perversion and decadence as Dr. Griffin suggests. The other possibility is that Kubrick, as he did in “The Shining,” might be revealing that it is these Satanic secret societies ruling the world, hidden in plain sight and we should open our eyes instead of keeping them shut. The second scenario assumes that Kubrick feels a moral responsibility toward his audience which might be wishful thinking. Either way, there is no doubt that Kubrick was a genius and that there is a lot more going on here than meets the eye.
Maybe it’s just designed to keep us guessing. Again, there are many youtube videos analyzing EWS. Here is one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUlStJ__UuU&feature=emb_logo

That Jews dominate the porn industry is certainly relevant in this essay. See Nathan Abram’s essay in http://jewishquarterly.org/issuearchive/articled325.html?articleid=38. The Communist influence is also relevant. Allen Ryskind’s book, “Hollywood Traitors,” exposes their methods. Among them the depiction of Americans as morally decadent. Commie writers are charged with the effort to infuse as much propaganda into their work as possible. The purpose of porn in film and everywhere else is to demoralize the population, to break down family life and the social order. Furthermore, it seduces consumers into becoming corrupt like the purveyors of porn themselves. That is the purpose of porn coming from Kubrick and others, to create revolutionary malcontents, commies, socialists perverts and Democrats.

(Mod. Note: “Aristo”, perhaps you should submit your long articles to Dr. MacDonald for publication rather than post them in TOO comments. Comments are supposed to be on one or two issues, related to the article they’re posted under. Long conversations with LONG texts submitted as “comments” just don’t seem appropriate. This Mod’s first reaction was “TLDR”, so I just scanned it for slander, name-calling, and illicit expletives. I’m familiar with your comments, so didn’t expect any. But it’s still too damned LONG. Shorter, Puleeeeeze.)

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Dear Doctor Griffin,
Thank you for your interesting essay on “Eyes Wide Shut” by Mister Stanley Kubrick. I shall herein contribute my own experience with this film which is paradoxical because I’ve both a negative and positive opinion of it. When I lived in England at the time Mister Kubrick was filming it, there were discussions of the necessity of censorship that would be required, a lot of immature hoopla about it going to be ever so erotic, as in pornographic, and that there would be overt sex scenes with the film thespian couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, interpreting the Harfords, Doctor William, also known as Bill, and wife Alice. The only other story that circulated was that Miss Winona Ryder had been involved, and this has never been accurately substantiated, at least to my knowledge, nor what might have been the cause of her departure, if, I repeat, she ever was a participant in the project. This was more than just rumour yet the pure fact is unknown to me and I refuse to speculate, but there was discussion that the two leading characters in the film, as in the novel, were Jewish. Hence the possible presence of Miss Ryder, even though one does not have to be Jewish to interpret a Jew; at the end of the day this wouldn’t be evident, despite in the novel by Mister Arthur Schnitzler, “Traumnovelle” / “Dream Story” Doctor Fridolin and Albertina are. I often wonder if Mister Kubrick was forced to not have them as Jewish in the film. This is not shallow conspiracy wondering on my part, for later I’ll reveal a fact about Kubrick being forced in another circumstance to take a decisive action. Now before I precede let me say that I would not call the film erotic but stagnant pornography: the orgy scenes are very cold and rather without much human feeling, even though depraved and humiliating is the explicit descriptive sex act outside of its proper context. The film was never censored in England or elsewhere in Europe, but only in America: the scene at the mansion where a gathering of a modern Hell Fire Club are having a Satanic orgy, and perhaps much more is to ensue, the image of Bill/Cruise is superimposed on the sex scenes of copulation and other acts. Here I must point out a positive aspect of the original uncensored cut to keep in mind, that each room Bill in costume enters is a different degree of crossing a threshold for a level of sexual activity with also posed bodies in a sexual context that all have a meaning of one’s gradation in this organisation. Each room is symbolic, much like all symbols in Metaphysics, good or bad, mystical and occult, such as the Stations Of The Cross, Tarot Cards and so forth. Also, another deliberate symbol: the inverted Star Of Bethlehem on the tall Christmas Tree at the party held by Mister Victor Ziegler, a patient of Doctor Harford’s well played by Mister Sydney Pollack. As for The American print one can never make sense of the equivocation of a given Board of Censors who can permit the most overt sexual acts in one film and in another, the acts are tame compared to the former, yet censorship is called for. And there weren’t any sex scenes involving the Harfords, which was most likely publicity to stir up interest for those who are superficial film goers and need to be basely stimulated. Unless a Presbyterian of the most rigorous Calvinist mind flips out over a couple having a discussion in their underwear.
A. I. While the film was being shot in England an article-interview appeared in a Sunday edition of one of the four broadsheet newspapers of London. I believe it was an interview going back some years, perhaps to when Kubrick was making “Spartacus”, and he expressed his desire to bring to the screen Mister Schnitzler’s novel. Now, Mister Schnitzler was a Jew, most likely secular, and his literary work had an immense impact and influence upon Doctor Sigmund Freud. In my opinion one of the most damaging minds to have corrupted our culture and its world, along with Social Darwinism and Cartesian Logic. It was Doctor Freud who stated that the Roman Apostolic Catholic Church was the greatest obstacle to our revolution. Our, as in his and those he was allies with. You refer Doctor Griffin to Mister Luis Buñel; an excellent filmmaker but a first rate blasphemous apostate. He had been deeply religious, an altar boy serving Holy Mass, but then when he was sixteen he left the Church. Kubrick by the way shows his Babylonian Talmudic desecration of Christ Our Lord in “A Clockwork Orange”, having Our Lord dancing at the center of chorus girls with a face that is satanically scorned in a kitsch painting in the room of the protagonist Alex. Much like how Jesus is perversely vilified at the end of Mister Buñel’s overrated crap, “Un Chien Andalou”/ “An Andalusian Dog”. Both bring to mind the satanic faggotry of Mister Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising”. Kubrick was every bit as dark as Mister Buñel, despite the different personalities of the two men. He omitted the final chapter from Mister Anthony Burgess’ eponymous novel which is one of Redemption of the character-protagonist Alex. Imagine, and everyone pay attention to this, the American publishing world said American audiences would never accept this, so Mister Burgess was finally forced to omit chapter 21 from the New York edition. What an example of a society and its elite of well-planned social engineering and its framework of consensus reality control. Kubrick claimed he never knew of the final original English edition’s twenty-first chapter until having completed his screenplay and considered it implausible and irregular. I will be positively arrogant to say, Bull! He knew what he was doing; Kubrick was a calculating person and had a dark mind. And he wasn’t a maverick filmmaker at all. Robert Bresson, Vittorio De Sica, Carl Dreyer and Kenji MIzoguchi were. He had his talent no doubt, but? The maverick always got funding from Hollywood finance yet Mister Francis Ford Coppola, a superior film director, with five Oscars could never obtain funding and has had an aborted career. Sir Laurence Olivier never found money for his “Macbeth” project. We know this story only so well. He also was shrewd in what could sell, as was another intellectual burgess Engelian-Marxist degenerate, Mister Bernardo Bertolucci, acquiring Mister Marlon Brando and a victim to be the young Miss Maria Schneider instead of the original choices of Mister Jean-Louis Trintignant and Miss Dominique Sanda. Kubrick originally wanted The Rolling Stones to interpret Alex and his Droogs; observe the facial physiognomy similarity of Messers Mick Jagger and Malcolm McDowell. It appears I have digressed from “Eyes Wide Shut” but there is a reason I allude to “A Clockwork Orange”.

II. I viewed the film “Eyes Wide Shut” when it opened on a Friday in London. I am not impressed until there is the duologue between Bill and Nick, during which Nick gives him the address of where he will be playing that night. I considered, and still do, the film acting to be poor except for Mister Pollack, since Kubrick couldn’t direct actors at all, and whatever good or even excellent performances he did have in his earlier films was because of the professionals he had performing for him who were of classic cinema such as Messers Kirk Douglas, Sterling Hayden, James Mason, Adolphe Menjou and so forth.

III. Saturday the next day, the daily newspaper, “The Guardian” formerly “The Manchester Guardian”, gives out as a supplemental gift, the novel in paperback, “Dream Story”. I read it with deep interest and it suddenly was obvious that our film director and his co-screenplay writer Mister Frederic Raphael did not know how to adapt it. In fact, adaptation is a mistaken word all too often used; it was a superficial reworking of the story. In the novel there is a fascinating scene of a dream the wife, Albertine, has of her husband being crucified, and if I remember it correctly it is as if he’s Christ on Cavalry. Very rich is the description. This is very different than the juvenile moronic adult adolescent dialogue Alice Harford/Kidman has of dreaming of being fucked over and over by many men. And the poor film actress she is, Kidman, pronouncing the word fucked, only shows the lack of depth of this pretentious slickly made piece of excremental celluloid. Aesthetics and technique are important to any work of art, notwithstanding without depth of meaning and spiritual ascendency it is a half way house creation.

IV. The last scene in the film is practically the duologue between Bill and Alice taken from the novel which is never convincing, and I do not even think the profundity of it was understood and if it was it was diverted by the last line being Alice’s: “Fuck”. This duologue works in the novel, without the word Fuck, because it is philosophical and such talk is common on Continental Europe with the Upper Burgess, in this case Austria, not Upper Middle Class Americans in New York. The only thing this film taken at face value represents are the muddled perfunctory minds of Kubrick, Raphael, Cruise and Kidman. Dexterous film making with pretensions of being high art with a deep significance of what life’s inner workings are about based upon a materialistic sexual interpretation. I am going to be blunt: I do not even believe the high praises given to it by the film critic Janet Maslin or the film director Martin Scorsese. Did either of them actually study the novel? Because their comments about the film regard the book and not the film. Jealously doesn’t propel at all Doctor Harford on his night journey and there’s no way that one asks, did what we are shown really take place or was it all in Bill’s mind. Kubrick even reworks a scene of mask wearing persons from Zalman King’s “Wild Orchid” and the same camera shot of a front view of a mansion, in England, in Terrence Fisher’s “The Devil Rides Out”. This latter an excellent film the best I know of for its genre, notwithstanding, and second to, the exceptional and frightening in a very subtle manner, “The Seventh Victim” by Mister Mark Robson.

B. I. Why then did I go to see it again the following Monday? Because I truly believe that from the time Kubrick wanted to make it more than thirty years before certain experiences in his life took place. Let me first explain: Most of the time if I see a scene or two of a film and know not the title, or I may not have seen it previously, I can tell it is by Mister Michelangelo Antonioni or Mister Ingrid Bergman, just to give an example. I never experienced this with Kubrick, except with “Eyes Wide Shut”. Doctor Bill Harford retraces his steps the evening after he went to the mansion. This is what happens with Alex in “A Clockwork Orange”. What we have are Kubrick characters in two films with motifs and traits present that I do not find in his other films. This is where I see the film from a different perspective despite my maintaining that as a screen version of the novel it fails.

II. I truly believe that, despite his darkness and his seemingly anti-Christianity, and his possible problems of being a Jew, Kubrick had also understood there were controlling forces in our society that are subversive who have attained power, well-established and are steeped in darkness, which final agenda is to dominate us. The written word, either as a play, poem or novel, or the image of a painting, never have the same impact and breadth of contact with the multitude of persons that the cinema does. Both Messers Vladimir Lenin and Benito Mussolini understood this and Mister Douglas is correct that the cinema is the art of the twentieth century. Nor can the other arts capture and endanger certain nefarious forces at work, just as a photograph that has captured a person or any image or a particular object that could have serious repercussions, as Mister Antonioni shows us with a photograph within his motion picture, in “Blow Up”. But let me provide you with an excellent example of this fact between the cinema and two other art forms, the novel and drama on stage. In 1954 Mister William March wrote the exceptional novel, “The Bad Seed” about a psycho-sociopathic little girl, Rhoda Penmark. When the story ends she lives. One year later Mister Maxwell Anderson adapts it for the stage successfully, and as in the novel Rhoda lives on. In 1956 Mister Mervyn Le Roy, always psychologically probing, directs the excellent film version, from a screenplay by Mister John Mahin adapted from both the novel and the play. Yet! The censors have Rhoda killed off by lightning. Her continuing to live would have been too shocking for audiences and have adverse affects and effects upon the public that such a sick mind should survive. Not so as times change with the Paul Wendkos version in 1985 with a screenplay by Mister George Eckstein; Rhoda is uncensored. Here she lives on happily ever after to perform her satanic acts of homicide.

III. A. Now to conclude, here is why I call my experience with this film a paradox. It is a failure and a mess as far as the story goes on screen in conveying any of the essence of Schnitzler’s book. If Doctor Freud had viewed it, he would’ve considered it a third rate comic book sexual romp void of imagination, without even the most simple student of psychology finding it of interest. Nevertheless, the other branch of the paradox is what I know for sure, and why I truly believe to be the truth about Kubrick coming to certain conclusions about occult forces in our society. Back to “A Clockwork Orange” to understand the aforesaid as to what I find positive about Kubrick and his “Eyes Wide Shut”. I saw the film in Manhattan when it first came out in 1971. It fascinated me at the time for I was quite young. I went to see it again some months later in 1972 with my father, and I remember him commenting that the most important line in the film is when the Anglican minister exclaims “This boy has no choice.”, or similar words, subsequent to being present to observe Alex who has undergone a rehabilitation mind control treatment. When in Italy, the film was released in 1972 at the Venice Film Festival to great applause, receiving praise from practically everyone. But something eerie took place I believe beginning from the Winter of 1972 into 1973: Arancia Meccanica Bande / A Clockwork Orange Gangs. These organized individual criminal groups were attacking persons in various parts of Italy just as one views said criminal acts in the film. Quite interesting that this was also the epoch of the Anni Di Piombo / Years Of Lead and the Strategia Di Tensione / Strategy Of Tension. I definitely do not believe there was any relationship between these psychotic thugs and the political strife and terror occurring at that time. These insane delinquents were eventually taken care of by law enforcement and their life span could be defined as ephemeral. Years later I find myself in England and I learn by chance that “A Clockwork Orange” had been banned from being screened in Britain in all venues, whether cinema or on television. Interestingly enough, there had also been a similarity of a gang or two as in Italy committing crimes in England which brought about a polemical debate with Kubrick that the film was or wasn’t responsible for these heinous actions, such as the rape of a young Dutch woman. Kubrick cut the film which interestingly hadn’t been censored by the British Board Of Censors. In 1973, two years after its release, the film is pulled from circulation and so it remained banned until December of 1999, three months after the release of “Eyes Wide Shut”, keeping in mind that Kubrick passed away just after completion of this, his last film in March.

B.I One of my best and closest friends had performed in Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon”, of 1975. He was in the scene of the aristocrats gathering one evening at a noble estate. Being a highly cultured man and aware also of the society and world we live in, my friend like a number of us encounters those of our same culture milieu. He is also from a most elite family himself. He discovers that the reason why Kubrick agreed, so to speak, to ban “A Clockwork Orange”, was because he was threatened that if he did not, his wife Christine Harlan and daughters Anya Renata and Vivian Vanessa would be murdered. Why? Refer to what I compose above about the cinema as opposed to other arts in having a broader and more overt reach into the public’s life, hence the example I give with “The Bad Seed”. The powers that be, albeit, indeed powerful with their principalities are greatly paranoid. And anyone, even by default or indirectly who touches upon what they conceive as an exposure and revelation of their plans is seen as a serious threat. And this is just what certain inner sanctum personages at the Tavistock Institute Of Medical Psychology feared about the film, not the novel, “A Clockwork Orange”. What I relate herein is the truth.

C. Doctor Griffin I respect your difference of opinion concerning the duologue between Bill and Mister Ziegler, at the latter’s home, but I find it to be excellent. It is ever so realistic and truthful. Such discussions can occur and do, as there are persons like Mister Ziegler and others of great wealth and social standing who gather for their ritualistic ceremonies of perversion and, God help us, whatever else. Actually I should say God help the innocent lured to them or even abducted or taken to these encounters unaware of what is to play out. Some of you may not believe what I state. I cannot force you. I leave you with this final anecdote. Another intimate friend of mine is a Homicide Detective, the youngest and most honored in the history of the New York Police Department, Hank Cinotti. Famous as having been the detective yet never publicly reported of The Son Of Sam Case. This was not the story of one man, Mister David Berkowitz, but that of him and others. Homicide Detective Cinotti had even discovered that a number of the members of Son Of Sam had associated at one time of another with The Manson Family. Another investigator of this case was the journalist Mister Harry Daley. One night he and Cinotti following a lead found themselves on a high hill like ground of the Woodmere Golf Course, in the New York village of Woodmere. They both observed fascinated a most eerie scene of a number of limousines driving onto the lower grounds of the golf course. Disembarking from the vehicles were persons dressed in costumes and masks, and to put it in Mister Daley’s words, “Not one of them was worth less than fifty million.” Persons like Zeigler and his ilk do exist. They are indeed dangerous, and it is this and other factors of darkness that Kubrick was aware of that make for me his “Eyes Wide Shut” of interest although an artistic foul up.

A question I ask myself, and I do not know of Kubrick’s whole life, did he have a problem being Jewish, and despised Jewish culture, the non-religious specifically, and was he anti-Christian? The sacrilegious depiction of Christ Our Lord in “A Clockwork Orange” could be an example of the dystopic world of the evil personified Alex. Kubrick’s first two films were very respectful of Christianity, Roman Apostolic Catholicism: his first “Day Of The Fight” is about the Cartier brothers, boxer Walter and his twin brother Vincent who helped him train. After their early morning pre-dawn workout they attend an early week day Mass and receive Holy Eucharist. His second short also a documentary is about a priest who pilots a plane to take the sacraments out West to Native Americans: “Flying Padre”. Interesting that of Kubrick’s seventeen films,, Mister Jan Harlan omits only this one from his documentary about his brother-in-law’s life. God Bless, Aristo Boho