You know, nobody understands Eyes Wide Shut. Nobody.
Every time it gets mentioned people look at you like they’re remembering the trauma of their one attempt to read Das Kapital.
Watch the full video essay
Because Eyes Wide Shut is one of those films that, despite…or even because…of being very obviously about *something*, has become a kind of cultural Rorschach test for people who don’t want to see uncomfortable truths.
So Eye Wide Shut has generated a proliferation of bullsh*t interpretations.
“Ah, yes, Tom Cruise represents the Jungian Animus confronting the Shadow Anima.”
“Actually, Nicole Kidman is the Feminine Other confronting the social patriarchy.”
Or whatever conspiracy theories Reddit users dream-up from the comfort of their gamer chairs.
And of course now… now… we have the Epstein theory.
Re-ignited recently by Roger Avary, of Pulp Fiction fame, claiming he half remembers overhearing a conversation somewhere once about a rumour that the studio re-cut Eyes Wide Shut.
And KILLED Kubrick when he protested.
Which must be true if it’s on Joe Rogan.
The idea is that the reclusive Kubrick, who by the 1990s was hiding in an English mansion like a sort of anxious, bearded tortoise, somehow knew who the feck Jeffrey Epstein was.
Yes. Old Stan was apparently spending his days inventing new camera lenses and his nights going, “I must warn humanity about that finance bloke who sources blow jobs for Bill Clinton.”
But like all good conspiracy theories, this one is formed around a gritty bit of truth.
Kubrick’s movies are symbolic. They are coded. But they’re also brutally direct statements we refuse to acknowledge, because they make us feel like the stupid, complicit mammals we are.
2001?
Ooooh, is the monolith aliens or God or the collective unconscious? Is it about a giant smartphone sucking us in to the next dimension? No, although that is a fun theory. Kubrick’s Space Odyssey is much, much more direct.
“You dumb apes and your stupid rockets aren’t going anywhere until you EVOLVE.”
Clockwork Orange?
Is it the bleak, violent dystopian future we’re heading towards? No, it’s just Tuesday in Britain. And the uncomfortable truth that society breeds droogs like Alex because it needs violent, expendable young men.
The Shining?
The ultimate house on the hill and haunted hotel movie, that author Stephen King has always hated because Kubrick didn’t make a horror movie. He made a real movie that shouts its message in your face with a hereeee’s JOHHNNY. The biggest danger to women and children isn’t poltergeists…it’s men.
Full Metal Jacket?
A haunting condemnation of war as a generally bad thing. Nope. It literally shows you America brainwashing young men then sending them to rape and kill ordinary people. America is evil and the Vietnamese girl has every right to revenge.
And we joke : “Five dollar, me love you longtime.”
Because Stanley Kubrick wants to shove the nasty truth right in our face until we can’t ignore it.
But somehow we always can ignore it.
#
And then we get to Eyes Wide Shut.
And it’s all there, in the title.
Eyes. Wide. Shut.
The bourgeois liberal individual—yes, you, with your tote bag and your Guardian subscription—you can literally be marched into a mansion full of elites wearing masks and chanting in Latin while doing unspeakable things to trafficked Eastern European women…
…and you’ll go,
“Ah, well, you know… maybe it’s just a dream? Maybe it’s symbolic? Maybe it’s about marriage?”
No.
Kubrick is saying:
The ruling class could and do openly reveal themselves as sex-cult Satanists, and you would find a way to rationalise it because accepting it would break your IKEA-conditioned mind.
#
Now listen to Slavoj Žižek.
I know we’ve all tried and listened to hours of Zizek and all we learned is that he always sounds like he wants to sneeze.
So let me translate one of Zizek’s best theories, which I was reminded of by the superb Mikey and Nance on The Dangerous Maybe. Link in the description for their full deep dive.
Every human order. Every workplace, sports team or nation state, has rules. But you don’t join the order by following the rules.
You join the order by how you, in unison with other order members, break the rules. You become a worker by bitching about the customers with your fellow workers. You become a player by shouting at the ref with your fellow players.
And you become truly part of the elites who rule our society, by participating in acts of harm and abuse against the poor and vulnerable of that society.
It’s obscene.
Behind the order of society we see is the obscene, the unseen, order of society that forms its bonds of trust via shared acts of obscenity.
It’s not a conspiracy.
Not a secret cabal in a volcano.
It’s just the fact—well-documented, not even hidden—that sexual abuse functions as a bonding ritual for powerful men.
A trust network.
A shared secret.
Like a golf club, but with worse behaviour and even worse fashion choices.
So it’s weirdly naive to think Eyes Wide Shut is a warning about Epstein.
It’s far, far worse.
It’s the archetypal pattern of male power. The template. Epstein was just one banal, predictable, inevitable iteration of it.
And we refuse to see it.
Even when it’s right there, ritualised, gaudy, obscene…
our eyes propped open,
our eyes forced open,
our eyes…
wide shut.
Listen to the podcast audio
Damien Walter 