re: Deep State Part 2: Hollywood:The spell they cast.. (pg16 Epstein = Eyes Wide Shut)

quote:

---

IN 'EYES WIDE SHUT' STANLEY KUBRICK CAPTURED HORRORS OF JEFFREY EPSTEIN ERA

BY ANDREW WHALEN ON 7/12/19 AT 11:47 PM EDT

---

quote:

---

Art can suffice, by capturing the psychic sensation of an uncertain moment, so we might observe and improve our own fumbling efforts at reconciling ourselves to the world. But there is also the comforts of conspiracy theory: extrapolating from what's known to create an imagined order, built from clues inscrutable to most. Stanley Kubrick's final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, is embraced from both directions. Baffling critics and audiences in 1999, Eyes Wide Shut has become a defining movie of the Jeffrey Epstein era.

In Eyes Wide Shut, Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman), explore the possibilities of infidelity, newly possible with their entrance into high society, which lifts them from a state of childish naiveté, until Bill's explorations bring him to places he will never be allowed. In the movie's central sequence, Bill, stung by his wife recounting a sexual fantasy, follows an old friend to a secretive event at a Long Island mansion, where he gains entry to a masked orgy with a password. He is found and turned out. Because of his actions, or possibly not, a woman dies under suspicious circumstances.

---

quote:

---

Kubrick's 1999 death of a heart attack, just six days after screening a completed Eyes Wide Shut, left an opening for a conspiracy narrative to grow in the cracks of the movie's ambiguities. In part because it is replete with occult imagery, like a pyramid-faced mask (oozing the same Illuminati energy as the dollar bill), Eyes Wide Shut is subject to the same kind of analysis that lead people to conclude Kubrick faked the moon landing, then revealed his deception to the world on Danny Torrance's sweater in The Shining.

---

quote:

---

While subsequent years of child abuse cover-ups and political scandals—Epstein following the Catholic Church, Dennis Hastert, Operation Yewtree and Westminster's missing "paedophile dossier"—hasn't made Eyes Wide Shut any more or less shocking, they have made the extremities of orgiastic ritual more plausibly imaginable as a political or systemic phenomenon. Like the Yellow King of True Detective, Eyes Wide Shut's orgy came to stand for a whole complex of elite degeneracy. Reality is catching up to political reads of Eyes Wide Shut, like Norwegian historian Håvard Friis Nilsen's essay "Deterioration of Trust: The Political Warning in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut," which sees the movie as a warning against "a society where the social fabric of trust deteriorates into a hermeneutics of suspicion, paving the way to an increasingly authoritarian political climate."

---

quote:

---

There is no apparent heroic resistance against the secret society of the power elite," Nilsen writes of Eyes Wide Shut's ending. "What we see is an acknowledgment of the futility of control: they can neither control superior powers nor each other; loyalty is never guaranteed; they must be thankful for the moments in which they are awake." How many people in close proximity to Epstein turned away because of this same sensation? Bill and Alice can only achieve a brief moment of clarity. It's a thin victory, but likely a familiar one to anyone who has separated themselves from the sheeple, taken the red pill or otherwise defined themselves in a sliver of realization: online pantomimes of Kubrick's sought after dream state. In Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick suspends his characters between the reality on offer and looming hypotheticals. We find ourselves in the same place. Eyes Wide Shut tells us we are not likely to find our way out.

---