Without a doubt, certain holidays and ceremonies of the church were based on pagan models. In the fourth century Christmas was placed on the 25th of December because on that date was celebrated the birth of the sun (Natalis Invicti) who was born to a new life each year after the solstice.

-Mon. Myst. Mithra Usener 1905/Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism Cumont 1911

Bill Harford is lured to a ceremony that he unwittingly certifies as a ritual.

An ingenious series of visual gags minus Kubrick's up to release-date edit, Eyes Wide Shut is packaged with the name that tells anyone that walks under the marquee: you're awake yet asleep. You may watch every frame but you'll see practically nil. EWS is a film without a final cut; moviegoers are essentially forced to find the film within its potential trims. How long was Eyes Wide Shut to be? Likely not two hours and thirty-nine minutes. On the eve of 2001's premiere the director cut a twelve minute prologue, three days after The Shining's release, Kubrick cut a four minute coda, forcing projectionists across the U.S. to become his personal, local assistant editors. He tinkered up to, even after, the very last minute.

Kubrick, the ultimate technician of phenomenologic storytelling, requires a tactical audience to become conscious of his practice. Observation between continuities assembles into a highly rigorous story made of allegorical elements which pose an alternate, hidden parallel story to the apparent narrative. (Repeat sentence to understand). He makes cog-sci instructional films. Fiction is organized through exacting non-fiction.  Although many types of visuals litter his films with its 'story,' the visual weenies of EWS are the missing women (or is it just a woman?), surrounded by anonymously similar bodies, some with faces others without, some later simply mentioned in passing. These bodies metaphysically exchange with two of Alice's passages, her memory and her dream (the dream itself metaphorically linked in many ways to Alex's dreams of Clockwork Orange - a psychologist would code this an isomorph), which somehow matches Bill's journey beat for beat, even phone calls seem prescient rather than coincidental.

Kubrick is not a director that cowers in coincidence, there are both rational and metaphysical explanations for every connection in his films yet finding them is not the point (and maybe implausible), knowing they exist provides the audience with depth below the mundane machination. Becoming aware of them means your eyes are opening. The stories, the basic one we think we watch and the secret one we cannot easily see, merge and slowly become whole over time, after repeat viewings. That threshold, whether things are seen or not, is where the film gains its psychic power. Kubrick, as in his other films, drops bland, mostly hidden mirrors everywhere, then splits them with continuity shifts. Just watch Domino post-kiss (the tightest shot of the film), she seems to know Harford's name without Bill ever mentioning it, and slyly Kubrick reverses the tiger on her bed (disturbances in continuity employed as mirrors are his keys, of course). "Was that Mrs. Dr. Bill?" she purrs from the other side.

What is Eyes Wide Shut about? The ritual enslavement of the Moon that gave meaning to present day religion.

The film begins with dueling opening shots of the same room, an incisive grammatic point to get the film started. In effect these two shots act like a primer. A tool to teach an audience what to expect. It's the same room from two slightly shifted orientations. How they differ is key. The Christmas Tree, which stars as the film's key symbol and ceremonial object, is predicted by the combination of parting curtains and city lights. Alice and Bill begin the film facing this form. Beyond this obvious symbolic construction, Eyes Wide Shut is subtly about light qualities that offer modern ceremonies their psychic, for lack of a better word, jurisdiction. The female is associated with the moon (and its blue hue), crucially the human cycle of ovulation and menstruation is synched to the moon's 28 day return. The male is mythically linked with the sun and its yellow light. Kubrick composes the film as an interplay between both sexes' light-born metaphors, across visuals and spoken word, and their interlacing with western religions. 

First, Alice stands in his symbol's color. The room is overcome in yellow light, imitation sunlight, doubled tennis rackets sit centrally, watch symbols flow: Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) will soon mention his serve surrounded by glowing sun-shapes. Tennis is a game that lofts a yellow ball. These primer shots move into gesture: She moons us - which the twelve women replicate later during their ceremonial enslavement. Outside we establish Central Park West, also bathed in man-made yellow light, blotting out any chance for moonlight to reach street-level.  Second, Bill stands in her room, moonlit, a bluish-light which strikes their bookcase (meaning knowledge), not props for a game. And he forgets: his key gesture, also duplicated at the moon ceremony (when asked for the second password). Kubrick inverts their light. He even breaks any semblance of continuity: Bill has the red carpet, Alice doesn't. Once inside the bathroom, where both light values meet, she moons the moon (while wiping, away from us: bathrooms are places of transference in the Kubrick syntax). It continues, too subtly, even the moonlight in the slender bedroom mirror is cut with an overhead spotlight in their hallway. From blue to yellow. Disbelievers of Kubrick's precision should note blue moonlight strikes Domino's bookshelf as well (see the first image of the essay). Clearly these details are not coincidental.

For a jarring shift in filmic value, Kubrick did something to this film he never attempted before: he push-developed EWS's negative two-stops, which intentionally amps chroma, calling attention to the values hidden inside color temperatures. This is an irreversible effect since the process alters the negative in its bath.  A bright white light to the naked eye on set is suddenly golden yellow, a bright blue-hued moonglow is now richly blue. From an optical point-of-view, it's the reverse of Barry Lyndon's .9 super speed lenses and their candlelit opulence. The Christmas Tree, a pagan sun-worshipping symbol converted to Christianity, is likewise amped, and is the focus for these enhanced contrasts.

Why place so much focus on chroma, light-temperature and white balance?

EWS is laced with a strategically concealed war between sunlight and moonlight, suggesting pagan ceremonies and rituals have retained their effects continually even though they've been modernized and dressed with renaissance and present-day props and settings. The moon is even referenced in wordplay (the first dead body, Lou Nathanson=luna then sun), propping (spot Mandy's massive pearl ring), and deadly ritual: the masked ball begins with a nighttime moon worshipping ceremonial subversion. There, Kubrick exhibits 12 women who act out a lunar procession (12 moons compose a year, the word month comes from moon), mooning the audience like Alice and bowing in servitude to a blending of Christianity and Islam (the music is scored to prayers sung forwards and reversed, the architecture externally neo-renaissance and internally Moorish revival, the ceremony is hierophantic-papal). He's targeting all of Indo-European thought. Kubrick is illustrating with light how men created this ceremony prehistorically to dominate the feminine night, to reverse what was once worshipped before men attained systematic control, and he reveals slyly it's been transforming for many millenia into this secret annual ritual. This moon ritual subversion might have been the first 'organized religion' (ie: the enslavement of moon worshipping females might have initially required a society to codify priesthood, create hierarchies to rapidly disperse this change). This is much simpler than conspiracy like the illuminatis. It's not a conspiracy, just a carefully and not so carefully veiled war. It appears both as a dream and a conspiracy that Kubrick enters through a key conflict on Earth: the war between male and female. And he illustrates it with a married couple, who experience the same thing, though one experiences it awake, the other while asleep. Watch the color red become the carpeting of choice, leading from Bill's dressing room, to Victor's party to Rainbow Fashions to the moon ceremony to Victor's pool table to toy store.  The morgue and the exterior entrance to Somerton are the only places that have pure white light (they're similar gateways). Alice dreams under the effects of moonlight, the only character with this color isolation. Using red in his sets, Kubrick switches to blue light then back, moving moonlight inside for key scenes of degradation, when women must be ritually controlled. They end the film in red, the toy store, becoming Ziegler's faceless cue balls. Her final request is a fuck, which is what Ziegler's entire ceremony is about: Fornication Under the Control of a King, admitting the film is a dramatized satire. Women don't want power, they've been psychically enslaved to want to be overpowered.

Deceptively righting the boat of the unconscious, Sydney Pollack's in-story director plots a high price staging to hide-and-seek a body to rule it a suicide, from a living actor who plays the aptly named Mandy (Julienne Davis) to a dead body fully annunciated as Amanda Curran (also played by Julienne Davis) yet Pollack (Ziegler) claims she's also a mysterious woman met only while masked: "Mysterious Woman" (Abigail Good)-or is she? This masked woman chooses him, their masks kiss, and then begs him to leave fearing for both of their lives. Has he really met her before? Here's another clue, the other woman he meets at the masked ball also seems to recognize him. Any idea who she is? In the script she's called Young Woman but remains unidentified in the credits. Kubrick has, in effect, already told us who she is in the film's logic (she's Domino, a long way from her ermine coat). These sleights of hand are the splinters of the film. Though Bill meets Mandy in the opening scenes of the film he appears to not recognize her once dead, and he remains confused by Ziegler's explanation; of course he does, it's a preposterous lie. Two depressants and one stimulant affect the various women who inhabit the first party. A woman awakens from one after a sexual encounter, another falls asleep to one while dancing as a prelude to sex.  The first bedroom scene and the speech by the window is conjured through another depressant: marijuana. Prior to finding Mandy unconscious, Doc Harford tells his momentary, rainbow-luring friend Gayle who compliments a random act of his kindness, "that is the kind of hero I can be...sometimes."  Once inside Ziegler's bathroom we discover just what kind of hero Harford really is. Like the Ullmann interview in The Shining, here Harford is offered the film's central decision once he finds Mandy on the verge of her O.D. Just as Jack Torrance should have recognized the Hotel's obvious malevolent distortions, Bill should be aware of the monstrous party he's entering. Any medical professional worth their degree would immediately put down the charade, the pretense of socialization, and would read the situation as potentially doomed. A callous man has just finished fucking an overdosing woman. He both barely remembers her name and is noticeably displeased once told he should protect her for a few hours. The heroic Tom Cruise we usually validate would offer the woman his coat, grab his wife, order a car (or an ambulance) to a hospital and explain to Victor he was close to being complicit in a woman's death, and that perhaps he wants to rethink his life. Instead he performs the most cursory examination in medical history; the precision of Kubrick's key mode-jerk is crucial, he brings along the audience's complicity in protecting Ziegler, he slyly reframes Cruise's heroism - Bill's playing apologist to Victor's indirect criminality (which later becomes direct). That is the hero Harford can be sometimes. He appeases the status quo to uphold its psychic value, which he is part of or pretends to be (or more accurately, he plays upholding parts in films). No wonder Cruise has no memory of who Mandy really is despite meeting her twice. Buried in the film are visual explanations for these memory faults: the film's been rigged with some jarring alternate framings to loosen our connection to any kind of reality in millenial New York. While Kubrick hints at conspiracy theory, he also hints there is none (Alice's dream), and that's the game of Eyes Wide Shut, is it a dream or a conspiracy, does the individual see more than there is to avoid the simplest explanation? What we are told is clearly not enough. Like Schnitzler's novel justifying the appearance of psychoanalysis in Vienna, Kubrick's film is making a dour investigation into our medical cosmological frame in 1999 New York. Did psychoanalysis work? Evidently, and our Dr. Harford stands in as the archetype and symbolic apparatus, no. Pills, drinks, drugs. The century begins in a German novel and ends in an English film. His satire of New York ("the band sucked tonight") is maybe the most advanced filmic nuance in recent history, just look at Tarantino's Parisian backlot for contrast. It's clearly a conjured, artificial occupation city, and NY is clearly a decaying cheap novelty of 20th century commerce. Rainbow Fashions (above the rainbow not below it) has its own password, the costume Harford needs, and once in the rear, red-carpeted/blue-lit room, Milich offers his mannequins as "life," and look closely they are live humans. Dig deeper and you can see how distorted Kubrick's NY is, Nick performs at an absurdly named Sonata Cafe (sonata is not a name remotely associated with jazz) while next to it is a cafe named Gillespie's where Harford searches for Nick. Everything is switched.

Matching Cruise to his archetype is an easy stretch, he's the hero that falls to regain something. Seduced while he uncovers conspiracy in The Firm (more of Kubrick's hints: directed by Pollack), here Cruise is offered similar anxieties. His character forgets wallets, masks, names and faces, all the while doubling lines incessantly "Look at me, Look at me." To drive the point home, he has Bill then use forgetfulness as a form of deceipt when he's asked for the password for 'the house.'  Would the ceremony alter without Harford's deception - would it still have its mysterious hold?  Kubrick litters the film with lines and actors from other Cruise films, the most prominent one is Carl (Thomas Gibson) who was the villain of Far and Away. So let's go over this once more: Victor marks Bill as a doctor on the make (a case of scotch), and slips a comatose body into the hospital later identified by Dr. Harford (it's a homonym, a dead-ringer for Harvard) who visits the morgue to certify, unwittingly, both her identity and her 'accidental' cause of death. Three actor-directors guide our ivy-league labeled mark onwards (Pollack, Todd Field, Alan Cumming). Witnesses abound who recite exposition self-consciously while illustrating basic gestures of servility (getting coffee, watching kids) an exhibition for audiences gazing at 1999 from other eras. A continuously animating symbol appears at each setting, the Christmas Tree, which symbolizes not the birth of a messiah, but the rebirth of a sky object. The sun that goes to war with the moon, and wins. It wins the public, annual celebration Xmas, while the moon garners merely a secret orgy with a ritual death in absentia, both entirely ruled by men. In every way the tree is the opposite of 2001's monolithic central metaphor: The Dark Anamorphic Screen turned upright. Instead of playing a magnetic role, the tree is usually ignored, its function underplayed, the only mention of one in dialogue is laughable: Harford acknowledges Domino's tree to make polite, nervous filler. He later shuts one off at dawn.  Once you actually add up the stakes the film plays with, Cruise's offscreen penultimate rant to his wife that begins with, I'll tell you everything, is not laced with the sexual peccadilloes of a hopefully moral husband, the one we plant in our minds, but the careful encapsulation, enumeration, one meeting to the next, a connect-the-dots of I was led on a wild goose chase to certify a body, I was set-up by Victor, then the Pianist at the party who lured me to a mansion that was exactly like your dream. Victor pulled the strings the entire way and even tried to bribe me with a case of scotch. I was duped into protecting a criminally negligent overdose. That is the Tom Cruise film we never saw but witnessed.  Eyes Wide Shut. And as the direct offspring of Clockwork Orange, a film in which an inadvertent murder sets off a series of judgement mirrors (judgements that travel between subcultures) we witness but don't 'see' the opposite, an inversion, with female pairings, circular ceremonies, and a murder that hinges on the main character, one where blame is assigned, the other where blame is covered-up. And the most unusual aspect of the exchange is Victor lies because he wants Harford to have doubts, for him to speculate the ceremony might be a ritual that really causes death, that it might posses a supernatural power over females. In effect, causing Harford's doubt offers power to the film, to the power of any myth. Reading the ritual from the outside, it probably occurs annually (12 women=12 moons), and requires an unknowing outsider as a witness to certify the sacrifice (by witnessing it he renders it sacred). The outsider has a faint complicity in the sacrifice, Harford leaves an O.D.ing Mandy in Ziegler's care. It has form letters pre-printed to warn the annual outsider off. It's almost a comedy: Wife: "Why do you think Ziegler invites us to these things." Husband: "This is what you get for making house calls."

Both films, shot in the environs of London, are set somewhere after 1997 (the similar names of the autos: in Clockwork it's 1997 Durango, and the Range Rover Cruise pilots is a 1997 model), essentially alternating realities, a prediction from 1971 and an actual one, the first alive with violence that goes awry, this one, the actual, sedate and innoculated, a clinical Brave New Mirror World, a living death aided by drugs, where the most extensive party is actually staged in the manner of a religious prison/inquisition to fool the lead character, and it behaves as the most complete satire of religion ever achieved; a party with masked sexual encounters. At its 'height' is a mythical ploy of redemption (see redeemer archetypes in religion) to show off a body-double to explicitly identify only a body.  And bodies and sex are the variables. A disease infects the character Domino, wearing an ermine coat, who clearly is herself staged to encounter Dr. Harvard. Think twice and you can tell the HIV reveal is as staged as the letter, as the hotel clerk, as Millich. All have been prepped to deliver. Domino's name is culled from a specific type of priest, masked and hooded, prior to the Renaissance. The masked behavior magnified in the prison-like sex party dates from the Renaissance's mimicry of this Domino attainment.  Of course the female Domino is another disappearance verified within the film, the question remains: who is this body? Unanswered by the film's credits, it's blandly leveled into fiction by Pollack, who conducts his masking of the event over a bright red pool table in memory to the party, swilling scotch.  Both Clockwork and EWS have excursions to the country. A Clockwork prison-like experience is duplicated in the masked ball, entrance procedeures, punishments, Corova Milk Bar tables emerge as live sexual acts, some even duplicating tables (proving Kubrick would have fought any restriction and shown us the full construction of his furniture-like sex-play). As the satire of religion reaches its peak, Cruise is threatened with Satan's/Adam's unmasking (down to nothing like Mandy) and then is redeem-duped. And Kubrick goes further, even deeper is his satire of staging, as the scenes minus Ziegler's control-input have an inert quality, a zombie sleepiness, the motions Cruise's Harford and Kidman's Alice go through without any impetus, or external conflicts, finally add up to two monologues Kidman delivers as their own mirror. Their only conflict is sexual and is delivered as oratory in differing light qualities, Kubrick's unusual heightened flashed-negative look, her warnings become the only tension that pulses in the bland situation dramedy left for Kubrick to direct in Ziegler's absence.  When Kubrick has Cruise off Ziegler's grid the city is monotonous, dull, the intention to show their/our world as nearly terminally slumbering is twisted satire on a level seldom imagined. If you're bored by it, it's because you're living among it, Kubrick is no doubt assured future humans who've evolved out of the west's self-torture will laugh at its conditions, practices, self-deceipt and conflicts. As for threat, only the penetration of homophobic college kids offers any real proof of violence, of the hooliganism imagined from 1971, the exertions of Clockwork Orange, the infernal flexing of rage has all been supressed by the arrival of the 'real' 1999: EWS. Altogether a comatose indictment of our culture. A stunningly weird nightmare rendered seemlessly dull. Whoa. And the details: countless visual shifts announce an allegorical pulse that moves from shot to shot, telling us what it all means.

In the end, Kubrick pulls off the slyest of all tricks, he creates a ceremony of redemption to hide a ritual murder: the Mandy/Mysterious Woman switch that Ziegler takes direct credit for by lying about it (the lie 'unmasks' him). Even more powerful is his hint that the mystery Harford is offered is the root of religion, since Ziegler really has no reason to lie. He transforms the ceremony into something more than a ritual by exhibiting it to Harford, allowing his momentary participation, then deceiving him. What Harford comes away with is not an answer but a paradox and a warning that keeps this deception secret. He adopts its legend as everyman does with religion. And it's inexplicable, a mystery rooted in the psyche that races across the community in hushed whispers. This almost unseen gesture of Ziegler's is what Kubrick suggests male religion is employed as: the destroyer of women, and the ritual desecrater of their formerly worshipped, once equal sky-symbol.

The book William Gibson wrote an introduction for and admitted he didn't understand. If Cormac McCarthyism has a counterpart in science-fiction, it is Dhalgren, the most absurdly accurate 'apocalypse' set in some form of earth, in a time-frame no one is exactly sure about. And hallucinations occur sometimes in words that no longer exist (you'll have to read it to see what I mean). It might be a work that outlives us and tells future generations what we really knew about the decay of knowledge and the oral histories that will travel along our children's, children's children. Memories barely of the beginings of the end: "the riot began with a murder, some say it was a plane that crashed. No one really knows. That was the time of fear." The hero is an amnesiac who is labelled "The Kid" and enters the soon to be mythic city of Bellona, only now its inhabitants live mostly in memories, and whatever fragments of life can be scraped by on - temporarily, since cities have no purpose except to store mass memories and here, there are few being made. Just living from cans, having sex, and fighting and sometimes group socialization. Oh, wait, it sounds like our present day cities, only without electricity, cars, running water... Maybe the memories will have meaning. The following chapter-heading paragraphs transition to third-person immediately afterwards.

"2  It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now. In the long country, cut with rain, somehow there is nowhere to begin. Loping and limping in the ruts, it would be easier not to think about what she did (was done to her, done to her, done), trying instead to reconstruct what it is at a distance. Oh, but it would not be so terrible had one calf not borne (if I'd look close, it would have been a chain of tiny wounds with moments of flesh between; I've done that myself with a swipe in a garden past a rose) that scratch.

II   Here I am and am no I. The circle in all, this change changing in winteress, a dawn circle with an image of, the autumn change with a change of mist. Mistake two pictures, one and another. No. Only in seasons of shortlight, only on dead afternoons. I will not be sick again. I will not. You are here.

..How can I say that that is my prize possession? (They do not fade, neither those buildings or these.) Rather what we know as real is burned away at invisible heat. What we are concerned with is more insubstantial. I do not know. It is as simple as that. For the hundreth time, I do not know and cannot remember. I do not want to be sick again. I do not want to be sick."