RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Under the Rainbow

Feb. 18, 2015 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

01:32:29

Under the Rainbow

John, Roman, and Richard discuss Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), as well as its themes of conspiracy, male and female sexualities, duplicity, and the history of the bourgeoisie. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	Well, gentlemen, let's discuss the most disturbing erotic masterpiece of the 1990s, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
	And I'm, of course, referring to Days of Thunder.
	This is going to be a long, in-depth podcast.
	No, just kidding.
	Let's discuss Eyes Wide Shut.
	First off, John and Romain, how are you doing?
	I'm doing quite well.
	You're back in Hungary, where you're attending erotic Christmas parties with strange people such as Alice Met in Eyes Wide Shut in the opening scene.
	Is that true?
	Yeah, and of course, that guy who tries to seduce Nicole Kidman at the beginning is a close friend of mine.
	In Hungary, they're all over the place.
	They're taking women up to sculpture gardens.
	Rumal, how are you doing?
	You're our official decadent European on the podcast, so...
	Yeah, with the accent that goes with it.
	So, greetings, Richard.
	So, I'm back in Paris, and as you may know, and I would write a blog post about it, there's a huge controversy now in France about Michel Welbeck's last novel, which is entitled Submission.
	Submission, which, of course, in Arabic is translated by Islam, and it's about the Islamization of France.
	And what's funny is that we are recording on Tuesday, January 6th, and the book will be officially released on tomorrow, so 7th.
	And the controversy has been going for weeks now with people.
	Criticizing the books they haven't even read.
	And that's something very interesting, actually.
	I think the blog post will be posted before you post the podcast.
	But it will be entitled Literary Controversy in the Age of Tweets.
	Because you have people talking about books they haven't even touched because it hasn't been released.
	And it's telling about...
	I don't want to sound reactionary, but it says something about our decadent era.
	Yes.
	Well, there's no reason to read it.
	We know it's evil.
	You know, I would say this.
	I don't want to get sidetracked too much here at the beginning, but actually, Ullebeck, his novel Platform is a very interesting...
	You mean Platform?
	Yes, Platform.
	The novel platform, or in the French, platform.
	Like, uh...
	The French have a word for it, although I don't know what it is.
	His novel Platform, I think, is almost like a complementary...
	Novel to Arthur Schnitzler's Traum novella, Dream Story, which became Eyes Wide Shut.
	I think it is an erotic masterpiece for our time, and we might want to do a podcast on it, because it goes into this, a very kind of, I would say, Americanized, postmodern, and European as well.
	sexuality of pleasure is a right, and it's all about sex tourism.
	And I don't want to give anything away, but at the end of it, at the end of the novel, Islamic radicals come in and basically blow everyone up, almost deserving The book was released only two weeks before 9-11.
	Either he was informed that Mossad and the CIA were going to blow the tower.
	Well, I'm sure that's the case.
	Of course, my preference.
	Or the other hypothesis is that he was a visionary, but I don't really like this.
	Yeah, no, no, I would go for the conspiratorial angle.
	I mean, Roman's joking, but also another major theme in Eyes Wide Shut is obviously a conspiracy or a certain kind of terrible elite class that is a secret, invisible class.
	But I think another thing that you were saying about that, when Platform was released just days before 9-11, it's almost like he psychically prophesied it.
	And I think this is interesting when we think about this kind of social mood of when some movies come out.
	I think this...
	Eyes Wide Shut is a very angst-ridden film, and it's interesting that it came out in 1999.
	It's a kind of turn-of-the-century angst film.
	It's when the great Hollywood's power couple, Tom and Nicole, who did Days of Thunder and a lot of other more popular films, were doing this film where, in a way, they were both perfectly cast, and they kind of...
	It was almost like a photographic negative of some of their other works.
	It was like Tom Cruise was playing a Tom Cruise role, but he was displayed for all his naivete and duplicity.
	And actually, Kidman's bad acting when she's high and drunk has been often commented on.
	It's good acting.
	Yeah, but it's good bad acting.
	I mean...
	Because she's obviously a good actress and Kubrick is even more obviously a good director.
	He's more than good.
	And I think that when she plays Dumb, of course there's a purpose to it.
	It's to say that something's wrong.
	You know, when she's high and she's laughing at Tom Cruise.
	You know, the first time I saw it, I thought, you know, she was just acting bad and there was something unfinished with this scene, but I think it was completely, you know, it was something that Kubrick wanted to see.
	Oh, yeah.
	Did you happen to, so to speak, fuck?
	Yeah, no, it's an amazing scene.
	And her laughing at Bill's character, I think it was also very disturbing.
	She was, in a way, kind of laughing at Tom Cruise as well.
	I mean, I think there's all these elements.
	Let's do this, because we're talking around the subject.
	I think we should dive into it.
	John, why don't we do this?
	Let's start our discussion by talking a little bit about our first impressions of the film.
	Particularly aesthetically, because I think this is a very aesthetically rich film, and it's also, like all of Kubrick's films, a very aesthetically detailed film.
	Yes.
	Even these little things, like the names of the shops that they pass by.
	I remember one was called A Touch of Lace.
	Another was called Nipping It in the Bud.
	Just these little messages that Kubrick is sending the audience.
	But anyway, why don't we talk about this?
	Talk about, John, your first impressions of the film.
	Because you, like me, you actually saw it on opening day in the theaters.
	And talk just a little bit about your first impressions and your sense of the style of the movie.
	Well, I was very excited to see it because I'd been a Kubrick fan since I saw it in 2001 as a kid.
	I think he went something like 12 years after Full Metal Jacket without making a film.
	So when it came out, for people like me who'd been Kubrick fans for a long time, it was like the Messiah was coming or something.
	I remember following all the rumors about it that were online at the time, about what was going on on set and everything, because I think it still ranks as the longest shoot in cinema history.
	It was over 400 days that Kubrick shot, and that's not even counting the post-production.
	But there were a lot of, you know, the internet was around by then, so there were a lot of rumors.
	When I finally got to see it, like you said, it was on opening day.
	I wouldn't say I was disappointed by it, but I remember it didn't, like, amaze me like some of his other films did.
	I mean, like you said, it was visually very rich, but I don't think I got it yet.
	And I think there were two reasons for that.
	One is that at the time I was in my mid-20s and I maybe didn't have the maturity to appreciate it as much.
	And the other factor was just that you have to see Kubrick's films often more than once.
	In watching it in preparation for today, it was, I think, the third time I've seen it.
	And it's still not, I wouldn't rank it among my absolute favorite Kubrick films, but I definitely had much more appreciation for it now.
	But when you talk about impressions, I mean, something I can't help but notice are the connections.
	I think it bears more similarity to The Shining than anything else.
	Although there's references to, I think, every single one of Kubrick's films in it somewhere.
	I didn't even know this until I was reading up in preparation for today, but even Fear and Desire, which is his long-lost first film that he refused to have shown in later years.
	There's even a reference to But The Shining visually...
	There's a lot of connections there.
	I remember once reading an interesting essay about The Shining where it talked about how it's almost like a sadistically directed film because it constantly builds towards, you have this sense of impending dread, like something absolutely horrible is about to happen, but it never really happens.
	And I kind of got the same feeling with Eyes Wide Shut, that there was always this sense of something impending that's never completely fulfilled.
	I think that's a deliberate thing that Kubrick is doing.
	I don't think it's a failing of either film.
	Yeah, I mean, just to jump in, I had a similar view of it.
	I too had seen some Kubrick movies even when I was a kid.
	Seeing 2001, and I think I even saw Full Metal Jacket when I was pretty young.
	There was a whole slew of Vietnam War movies coming out at the time.
	I'm a little bit younger than you are, but I think I was maybe even 20 years old when this came out.
	I was very excited to see it, and I actually was interested in these connections.
	I was in New York City, kind of fooling around, walking around.
	Probably quite literally walking around Lower Manhattan in a trench coat looking angry.
	So it was the perfect film.
	But yeah, I mean, I remember being...
	Most all critics were either disappointed or dismayed or kind of confused, baffled by it.
	And I think I was too to a certain extent.
	I definitely had your same experience, but I did like it a lot more.
	It's funny.
	When I first saw it, the movie felt unfinished or disjointed.
	I was almost thinking like...
	Did he die before he really finished it?
	They're missing scenes or something.
	And as I see it later, I've seen it maybe once every two years or so since then, and I like it more and more each time I see it.
	And not only do I like it more and more, but I also see it as a really tight, precise masterpiece.
	I don't think it's a disjointed film.
	I think it is a very well-constructed film.
	It is a deeply structural film.
	It has a structure of a sonata, really, with an opening thesis and an antithesis and then a synthesis.
	And there's a great deal of repetition in a good way, in the sense that he'll...
	He'll show you a scene and then he'll reiterate it.
	And it's almost as if every single, I think probably quite literally, every single scene in the film is a reiteration and a kind of parody, you could say, of another scene.
	So this is probably most obvious when Bill and Alice go to the Ziegler's party and then Bill kind of sneaks into the other party off in Long Island.
	And you can see this again and again.
	He visits the prostitute twice, and each time it's different.
	The first time he's naive and almost childish with this prostitute.
	He doesn't know what to do, and he kind of leaves, gives himself an excuse to leave.
	And the next time he sees another prostitute who's kind of...
	She has AIDS and there's this sex and death combination.
	Every scene has this repetition.
	There's a repetition of revealing dreams to one another, confessing dreams.
	There's even a repetition of the orgy scene where Bill is there.
	Witnessing this weird pagan Catholic sex orgy service slash theater performance.
	I don't know what it is, but someone with a large stick and a big red rug, and a mirror image of that is given when he visits Victor Ziegler's...
	I like when he says, oh, I was just knocking some balls around.
	Yeah, I wonder what that means.
	Anyway, to go back to it, I now see it as a really tightly constructed and structural film.
	And I didn't quite see that when I first saw it.
	But one thing I did notice...
	Formally speaking, and I think this might have been kind of a breakthrough for me in terms of just viewing art, is that I was thinking, wow, there are all these colors.
	There's this red, yellow, and blue, and it's very strong.
	And obviously Kubrick is interested in this.
	You could think of the title cards to Clockwork Orange.
	I remember thinking it's almost like there's a kind of allegory to these colors.
	They keep repeating.
	And, you know, you have the blue is very pronounced.
	When Alice and Bill are confessing their dreams to one another, you have blue coming in through the window.
	And you have that at both night and in the morning.
	And besides, it's clearly deliberate and synthetic, because in the morning, the sky's not blue.
	I mean, blue light.
	He's clearly trying to create an atmosphere and say something.
	You have red.
	The marriage bed is red.
	The door of the prostitutes.
	Apartment is red.
	The rug or the floor of the orgy is red.
	The pool table is red.
	This is red.
	And then there's yellow.
	It's also very strong.
	Yellow cabs.
	When he visits the daughter of the man who died, there's yellow.
	I think Kubrick, the poster for Nightingale is bright yellow.
	I think that there's a kind of almost an allegory, and I think there's some connotations with these.
	I think red has a connotation of blood, of lust.
	The marriage bed is red.
	There's obviously blood and lust connected with sex.
	Blue, I think, has some connotations with being blue, that is being vulgar, or sexual, or those connotations.
	I think yellow might almost...
	Be a kind of symbol of repression or something.
	Maybe even fear, yellow, often associated with fear.
	So I remember seeing that when I was like 20, and I was thinking like, wow, Kubrick isn't just filming something.
	He's like creating a painting, and also creating a kind of subliminal message.
	And it really did kind of...
	Blow my mind, so to speak, in the sense that I was...
	It was one of the first times I was thinking, wow, this film can be an art form and the director can communicate to the audience in other ways than words in the script.
	And so anyway, that has always stuck with me.
	So I think this movie...
	I agree with you.
	I don't think it's his greatest film and it's probably not his most iconic.
	You would have to go with 2001 or Clockwork Orange.
	But I think it is an amazing film, and it might be one of his most tightly constructed and most structurally complex films.
	But anyway, Romain, let me pass it over to you.
	Maybe you can talk about your first time seeing it, or your kind of impressions of it, or you can pick up on any thread that I've started.
	I do know I'm slightly younger than you, Richard.
	So, I didn't see it in theaters.
	So, in 1999, I was 16. I was allowed to see it.
	I think in France, you had to be 16 to see it.
	But actually, years later, when I was a student, I bought the DVD.
	And I really can't remember the year it was, because it's not that I was disappointed, but I...
	You know, maybe like beer, I thought that something was wrong there.
	But I didn't know what.
	And so I didn't watch it until years later.
	And it brings me to a rather recent period in 2011 when I was indulging in a new guilty pleasure then.
	Which was reading conspiracy theory websites like Vigilant Citizen or watching Alex Jones' documentaries.
	And then, you know, most of the time your ideas pop up when you're doing nothing or being idle.
	And I just thought, I don't know why, but I just thought of Eyes Wide Shut.
	And I said, I have to watch it again.
	And then...
	You know, everything was clear and I recognized this movie as a kind of allegory of the cave, you know, Battle's allegory of the cave.
	You have a sensible world that is deceitful and then you have people casting shadows behind.
	And of course the movie can be reduced to that.
	A part of it, and when I watched it the second time, I could see many, many things that we can discuss later that truly indicate that Eyes Wide Shut is a kind of conspiracy movie, even if it's more than that, much like Matrix or They Live by Tom Carpenter.
	So the second time I saw it, it was...
	I think I've been watching and reading conspiracy stuff for maybe two years, from 2011 to 2012.
	And it's not a coincidence that it was that very time that many people in Europe and in France were announcing.
	The crash of the euro currency and of many states in Europe, like France, Italy, or even Britain.
	And it didn't happen.
	So in 2013, I began taking conspiracy stuff less seriously because all of their predictions turned wrong.
	And then I just looked in the past and saw that Alex Jones had been predicting the collapse every three months.
	For maybe 15 years.
	So I took that list less seriously and I started appreciating Eyes Wide Shut for what it was.
	Not only a conspiracy movie, but something more, a kind of, maybe it could be termed the end of innocence.
	So this expression, this phrase has often been used.
	To describe the state of America after JFK was murdered.
	You know, the end of innocence.
	You can't believe in stories anymore because you have to face truth.
	And when I watch it now, it's more or less, you know, I accept what female sexuality is and I accept that our elite might be corrupt, but it's...
	It's no more corrupt than the people who vote for them or who support them or who benefit from them.
	So I'm more adult.
	And I'm closing on that.
	You know, if I'm looking at my eyes-watched journey, so to speak, I first watched it when I was a student.
	And at the time, I was a bit naive and foolish.
	And then when I started to see truth, I was...
	You know, crossing the dangerous path between the teenage years or the post-teenage years and adulthood.
	And now I see it with more relaxed eyes.
	Or it is corrupt, but it's fine.
	We're going to replace it by another one.
	So now I'm just seeing it as a kind of swan song.
	Yeah, I think that's the right way to see it.
	Why don't we do this?
	Since Romain brought up this issue, why don't we go into the conspiracy side of the film?
	And for one thing, almost like Romain, I almost want to...
	Get rid of it.
	Let's talk about it.
	Because it's there.
	Alex Jones is not being silly to see this as he's revealing the Illuminati cult.
	That's clearly in the film.
	That's part of the author's obvious intentions.
	But I think in a way, if you focus on it only as that, I think you, in a way, misunderstand the film.
	There's actually a...
	I'll link to this in the show notes.
	There's a movie review by the blogger who goes by the name Yggdrasil who talks about this.
	I'll just mention a couple things real quick and then I'll pass it to you, John.
	It's hard not to see a couple of things.
	One of which is the very strongly Jewish character of Victor Ziegler.
	He's cast by Sidney Pollack, who's a film director and sometime actor.
	I think, John, you mentioned that Harvey Keitel was actually originally cast, and they actually even filmed some scenes with him.
	Harvey Keitel is Jewish, but he's less obviously Jewish, I would say.
	But Sidney Pollack is very obviously Jewish and has a, I don't even know where he's from.
	You know, he has a, maybe something, a quality to them.
	Yeah, he has a quality to them that seems maybe a little bit LA or maybe a little bit New York as well.
	Like, you know, hey kiddo, you really gave us a scare.
	Well, he didn't say it that way, but.
	Oh, the way he talks is, you know, exactly what I grew up with, you know.
	I mean, that's New York Jews, that's how they talk, you know.
	Yeah, he was classically new.
	Yeah.
	Well, to anybody, he doesn't...
	Yeah, but they see all go in as prostitutes, so...
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, I think the fact that he did that is interesting, to say the least.
	Now also, I would also mention that, and I think we should get more into this later, but there's a very strong old world flavor to Eyes Wide Shut.
	The fact that it's based on this 1920s novel by Schnitzler connected with Vienna and all this, but there's this old quality, like the Sonata Cafe, the Venetian mass themselves.
	The Men's Mall Towers, the place where the orgy.
	Oh, right.
	You mean the actual, I don't know the name of it.
	Yeah, they go to this Actually, what's interesting is It's that it's a Rothschild's house, which is no coincidence.
	You know, I don't want to insist too much on that, but it's not a coincidence.
	And it was used by Nolan in Batman Begins.
	Oh, wow.
	As Wayne Maynard.
	Do you remember it?
	It's the very same house.
	That's amazing.
	I did not put that together.
	And, you know, when...
	Actually...
	I put it in my outline, Richard, but it's fine.
	It's not an indication that Nolan is walking in Kubrick's Path.
	Yeah, without question.
	And Mansmore Towers, obviously, is in England, which actually I think almost all scenes have been shot in England, maybe a few months in New York Street.
	And it's a Rothschild's house, one of their houses.
	And it's an Indian palace.
	So the outside is very European looking.
	It looks like Westminster in a way.
	But the inside looks like a kind of Indian palace.
	And there's Indian music during the orgy.
	Yeah, and it has like an arabesque quality.
	That you could perhaps associate with indulgence.
	You know, when you say that it has a 1920s flavor, it's, you know, the Orientalism of the European elite at the time, especially in...
	It was no longer Austria-Hungary, but it was still influenced by it, was very important.
	And there's no coincidence to it.
	But we were...
	Mentioning the conspiracy stuff and like you, I don't want to insist too much on that because it would be reducing the movie to what it's not.
	But not only is there the Rothschild's house, but you also have one of the first characters with very old world and it's Sandor Savas.
	So the guy, the Hungarian guy who tries to seduce Alice at the opening party.
	Actually, Sandor was the second name of Anton Sandor LaVey, who was the founder of the Church of Satan, which, again, can't be a coincidence.
	There's also, during the orgy, there's a black mass.
	It's a Romanian orthodox mass played backwards.
	And when you play a mass backwards, it means that it's a satanic mass.
	So I don't think that, you know, Kubrick just...
	Reverse the tape and oh, it's fine like that.
	Let's say it like that.
	It means something.
	Another thing, I'll be quick, I promise, Richard.
	It's that the high priest at the orgy, so the leader of the gang, or maybe not the actual leader, because the actual leader might be the guy with the oil mask.
	But the high priest...
	So he's dressed like a great inquisitor and with the cardinal's purple.
	But on his throne, or so to speak, throne, there's a double-headed eagle, which is a Masonic symbol.
	And maybe one last conspiracy thing is that just before Bill Crawford is, you know, encircled by all the Participants.
	He crosses a room where there is a kind of ball with people dancing and you have a very, very Masonic theme.
	So prostitutes are naked and they're white and men are with a black cloak.
	And you have a white guy naked dancing with a guy in black.
	And a woman who is wearing his tuxedo and cloak.
	Yeah.
	And so she's black and dancing with a prostitute who is white.
	And you know, the opposition between black and white, the feminine masculine principle, can be found in many Masonic symbols, like, of course, a checkerboard or things like that.
	And again, it's no coincidence.
	And guess what?
	I'm done.
	Just one note in passing.
	Ziegler at one of the last scenes says to Bill, if I told you their names, I don't think it flips so well.
	So you can imagine that there's maybe the Federal Reserve chairman or people like that.
	Or maybe, I don't know, there's a guy who sounds British.
	So maybe it's the prime minister.
	I don't know.
	When he says that to someone, Bill Crawford, who is obviously belonging to the upper middle class, when he says that, it means that it's people who are very powerful.
	It's not like you have Rush Limbaugh.
	You have people who are really at the very upper crust of the elite.
	Oh, yeah.
	Maybe bank governors, CEOs.
	People like that.
	So, all that, you know, taken together means something about this conspiracy stuff and I'm really not talking about that anymore because I don't want to pollute the podcast with Alex Jones' material.
	No, you've been reading too much Vigilant Citizen.
	That's a fascinating website.
	It's a guilty pleasure for me, too.
	Some people look at pornography.
	I will go read Vigilant Citizen at 2 a.m. when I can't sleep.
	I'm going to pass it to you, John, but let me set it up a little bit.
	Again, I think we're all agreed that you can't ignore this, but you also don't want to reduce the film to that.
	We were joking before we turned the recorder on that every country, famous saying by a very famous man, every country, every people has the government it deserves.
	And in a way, every people has the elite it deserves, which is...
	I think everyone is aware that every society will inherently have an elite.
	But who...
	Who they imagine that elite to be is, in a way, quite telling.
	And I think in good times, like in a positive social mood, economy's doing well, everyone's happy, we like to imagine our elite as certain types of figures.
	And that is, we like to imagine them as politicians.
	Like, oh, that...
	Darn Nancy Pelosi.
	She's supporting gay marriage.
	Nancy Pelosi is the elite.
	Or Perry Reid.
	This is the Fox News type thing.
	But also famous entrepreneurs.
	Steve Jobs is the elite.
	Again, a powerful yet extremely benign.
	He doesn't want to control the world.
	But I think in darker moods, we almost start to see there's another elite.
	And it's the chairman, that person who works on the Federal Reserve Board, who no one even knows his name, yet he's a billionaire and immensely powerful.
	We start to imagine this darker elite.
	And it's interesting that this Eyes Wide Shut kind of is a...
	Can be compared with a very famous Alex Jones video where, much like Bill Hartford, he sneaks into the elite's pleasure palace.
	In Alex Jones' case, he snuck into the Bohemian Grove party.
	And he kind of films these, he sees these bizarre things.
	What it is, you don't know.
	I mean, Bohemian Grove really is an actual elite event.
	I mean, I don't think anyone could deny that.
	I mean, very famously, Richard Nixon attended and said, he said some very funny line, like, that's on tape.
	It's like, ah, it was a bunch of faggy shit, or something like that.
	But, you know, there are these parties.
	know, I mean, everyone gets together on weekends or during the summer.
	And so we shouldn't be surprised that bankers and politicians and CEOs get together.
	Uh, and, um, But again, much like Bill, Alex Jones saw this stuff, and he didn't see any actual backroom deal.
	He didn't see any actual crime, really.
	But he just saw this bizarre, theatrical, pagan rite.
	And it's pretty shocking.
	It's a kind of companion video to Eyes Wide Shut.
	So what do you think about this, John?
	Before we put conspiracy theories to bed, what do you think about some of these threads that I've mentioned and just that element within Eyes Wide Shut of there's something behind the other room that's going on that you don't see that's really sinister.
	and really nasty done by the rich and powerful.
	Well, since you mentioned the elite, Richard, if you want to, connecting this to our recent Abola podcast, if you want to look at it from a traditionalist point of view, Abola would say that what we have today is, yeah, of course, a society always has an elite and traditionalists are always in favor of a social hierarchy.
	But what happens in...
	Times of modernity is that the hierarchy is reversed.
	So it's the worst people who form the elite.
	And actually, the people who are the true aristocrats seldom have any actual power, or at least very little.
	So yeah, you could see that this idea that the elite is somehow sexually perverted and very materialistic, which is definitely suggested in the film.
	I'm not saying that Kubrick is a traditionalist, but that would be one way to read it.
	Certainly the element is there, and I wouldn't deny any of the things that Roman pointed out.
	I'm almost certain that Kubrick must have been aware of those things.
	I just think I don't think Kubrick set out to point the finger at anyone specific.
	I mean, you know, this was the late 1990s.
	We'd already had Oliver Stone's JFK and the X-Files.
	I mean, you know, everything in the 90s was conspiracy oriented.
	I kind of see it as part of his general critique of power relations, which runs through all of his films in various ways.
	Even in Barry Lyndon, like we talked about before, it's about somebody trying to get admitted to the elite and finding out that it isn't quite what they thought it was.
	Being out of his death.
	Yeah, I mean, that's a recurring theme in many of Kubrick's films, maybe even all of them.
	Although I think another aspect of that is something that struck me when I was watching it is that you've mentioned, Richard, before that...
	Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in the film sort of represent this 1990s bourgeois, upper middle class kind of elite.
	But I think the film is also about them discovering that they're not the real elite.
	Yes.
	I think this is something that's, you know, a lot of the people who I think imagine themselves as the elite in America today are the furthest thing from it.
	I mean, they're really just consumers with a bit more money.
	But I think they're actually lulled to sleep with this idea that they're the real elite.
	I mean, one of the things that's funny for me is how in the film, whenever Tom Cruise wants to convince somebody that he's never met before, that he's telling the truth, he shows them his medical board card.
	It's supposed to show them that he's like, oh, I'm a doctor.
	Obviously, I'm telling the truth.
	I mean, it's kind of like...
	And he shows that in the worst circumstances.
	Like, he's trying to get a costume in order to go to an orgy.
	And he's like, I'm Dr. Harper.
	He's like, he's a police officer.
	Yeah, it's very funny.
	Because it shows that duplicitousness of even so...
	I hate to say it, of Tom Cruise, in a way, his persona.
	It's all an act.
	It's during the day that he's wearing his costume.
	That he plays this very, you know, obviously very down-to-earth, but also very respectable, reliable type person.
	You know, when he's leaving to go to the Ziegler's party, he goes to the babysitter, Roz, who he doesn't know her name.
	He forgets her name, but then he goes to the babysitter, and he goes, you know, I'm going to have a cab waiting for you when you get back.
	And it's just this kind of bullshit type gesture or putting his, when he visits his patient who's dying, putting his hand and all of this thing, you see this kind of mask or this pretense.
	Yeah, and part of that is the idea that he's not nearly...
	as elite as he thinks.
	I mean, obviously, even though Sidney Pollack is his friend, he never got invited to any of these parties.
	So that was probably quite a blow to his ego.
	No, he does house calls for the elite.
	Yeah, basically.
	Yeah, to clean up their messes at the beginning of the film.
	Although I didn't want to talk...
	Oh, go ahead, Ramon.
	Actually, I was just jumping in because you were saying that he was not really elite.
	It destroys another myth of the 90s that money can't buy everything.
	As the Beatles said famously, money can't buy you, but it also can't buy you power.
	Money is just a consequence of power.
	Wigler, obviously, is very rich.
	He's not powerful because he's rich the other way around.
	Even if Tom Cruise, Bill Hartford, I said Crawford before, forgive me.
	Bill Hartford is wealthy and is by any decent standard rich.
	He's not powerful.
	And when he starts crossing the boundaries that were put around him and his family...
	He discovers that he's as powerless as a hooker that turns up dead at the end of the orgy.
	He's just a servant of the elite.
	He's a doctor.
	And it's another myth.
	And Richard said it when he weighs his doctor card everywhere.
	With the therapeutic state, we've been led to believe that doctors are a kind of elite.
	Before that, before the welfare state, doctors were more like middle class.
	And that's what they've been for most of history.
	And it's only because the obsession of the Western man since 1945 about his health and actually his own death, which gave so much wealth and power to doctors, medical doctors.
	Even with, you know, the increase of power by doctors, it's just an ancillary function to the elite.
	So Ziegler is very, you know, pleased with having his doctor, you know, when Mandy is dragged out in his bathroom, he's very pleased that his doctor can come.
	Come in one second and save him because his wife is just around.
	It's very convenient for him, but he's just lucky for Ziegler.
	He's not a friend.
	He's just serving him.
	And even if he's rich, he's far less rich than Ziegler and the other guy.
	Just a mask he's bringing at the party is very cheap.
	You know, it's $25 because, you know, he forgets it or maybe the elite steals it when he's at the OG.
	But the Venetian masks that the elite guys bring, it's not $25.
	At least 100 times more than that.
	Oh, yeah.
	Well, I would say Bill, I mean, when you just think about his name, Bill, Dr. Bill.
	Doctor and Mrs. Dr. Bill.
	Like a bill.
	It's a dollar bill, yeah.
	Like a bill he has to pay.
	Or a dollar bill.
	Yeah, right.
	It's both in a way.
	Like his debt, his burden, and then also just his...
	I don't know how much money he spends in his 48-hour period of the film.
	You see his wallet get smaller over the course of it.
	He's handing out $2,000 in cash, effectively, to little people doing stuff for him.
	Like, I want to pay you anyway, $150.
	And that's all it is.
	That's all he is, is that Bill.
	It's actually the first line, Bill's first line, I think it might actually be the first line of the movie.
	Honey, have you seen my wallet?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Oh, yeah, you're right.
	Again, that's who he is.
	And I totally agree with Romain's view.
	I mean, he discovers what real power is.
	Real power is not giving the...
	Tabby 100 and thinking that you're a badass.
	Again, that's the power of this person whose eyes are wide shut.
	You can't really see the world and can't see his place in it.
	I think maybe we can use that to transition to the relationship between Alice and Bill.
	Before we do that, Richard, can I just touch on one last conspiracy-related thing?
	Oh, good.
	I did think it was worth mentioning, since Roman did bring, and you as well, Richard, mentioned the Jewish connection by having Sidney Pollack as the only identifiable part of this elite, is that Frederick Raphael, who's Jewish himself, who wrote the screenplay of the film with Kubrick.
	He did, in an article, very publicly accuse Kubrick after his death of being anti-Semitic and quoted all these things that he claimed Kubrick had said.
	I mean, I hesitate to make too much of it because just about everybody else who knew Kubrick has said that this is preposterous and they don't believe he actually said these things.
	There is a lot of evidence that he was aware of it.
	He specified that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, in their role, that any trace of Jewishness should be expunged.
	Because in the original Schnitzler novel, it's suggested that the couple is actually Jewish.
	And Kubrick very deliberately reversed this.
	So he must have had some awareness that...
	Just to interject real quickly, that is very interesting of just this, you know, changing role of Jews.
	I mean, in the sense that, I mean, in 1926 Vienna and then 1998 New York City, I mean, it's a very different world.
	I mean, I'm not saying that Jews were not powerful for quite some time.
	But, nevertheless, in Vienna, being a Jew, it still is a bit of a mark against you.
	You're not quite in the in-group.
	Again, you might be very wealthy but not be powerful.
	You're kind of a bit of an outsider.
	I mean, Freud was a, obviously...
	Successful bourgeois, but he was without question an outsider of society.
	You know, in our world, in postmodern America, the outsider is the insider.
	I mean, you could not claim that Jews are alienated from modern society, although some have this almost fantasy of themselves, that that's the world they see, that evangelical Christians are the true powerful people who are anti-Semitic, some weird view that they have.
	But no, you can't go to a meeting of AIPAC or something and be like, oh wow, these Jews really don't have any power in this country.
	It's the opposite.
	But anyway, I think that's interesting that Kubrick saw it that way.
	I think making Bill's Jewishness a kind of dark secret that he wants to avoid, I think that is kind of in a way untrue to...
	Yeah, I mean, I don't know exactly what to make of it, but we can only speculate what Kubrick wanted us to get from it or whatever.
	I mean, I'm not trying to suggest that Kubrick was trying to do a culture of critique.
	He was trying to be Kevin MacDonald or something, but I think he must have been aware of it.
	At the same time, actually.
	At the same time, about the same time as the book.
	I don't think these are coincidences.
	I think there is something, you know, it's interesting that Alex Jones, you know, stormed the Bohemian Grove, Eyes Wide Shut, Culture Critique, I think...
	And Matrix.
	And the Matrix.
	Again, I'm not trying to reduce these, all of each of these artistic or scholarly achievements.
	I'm just saying that there was almost something in the zeitgeist that people, there was an unease or an angst that was being expressed itself.
	Kubrick said something like Hitler was right or some pretty outrageous statement like that.
	That was one of the things that Fred Raphael claimed he said.
	And I think another thing, he asked Raphael what New York Jews talk about when they're alone together or something.
	And Raphael claimed to be horrified.
	I assume most people listening to this know, but Kubrick himself was...
	At least racially Jewish.
	I don't think he was religious and was from New York.
	If he actually did say it, it was a somewhat ridiculous question.
	It's funny because there's all this duality to Kubrick's films and there's a duality to Kubrick.
	He's a New York Jew who in a way had a very European, Gentile sensibility.
	You know, Barry Lyndon is not a...
	You can't get much further away from Woody Allen than films like Barry Lyndon.
	By the way, Woody Allen was also considered for Ziegler's role.
	I just wanted to throw in there.
	Really?
	That's hilarious.
	It would have been a comedy.
	But Woody Allen is...
	Well, it is a side remark, but Woody Allen is more European than Sidney Pollack, for example.
	He's fascinated with Shakespeare and French literature.
	Yeah, that is a good point.
	You know, I kind of like Woody Allen, and every time I say to my right-wing or far-right friends, you know, just look at me like I'm going to, you know...
	bring some butt joints or join the, you know, Hare Krishna brotherhood.
	It's just, no, there's something interesting with that, but not as much as Kubrick, obviously.
	Yeah.
	Well, just to go back to what I was saying, I mean, there's a duality of Kubrick.
	I mean, he's an American Jew, but he's a European.
	I mean, he lived in England He's a Gentile wife.
	The Gentile Wife.
	His films have a very strong...
	Who was related to a Nazi filmmaker.
	Oh, wow.
	I didn't know that.
	Interesting.
	His wife was the niece of...
	I forget his name, but he was one of the main film directors of the Third Reich, and Christiane Kubrick was his niece.
	She's German.
	Interesting.
	I'll put that in the show notes.
	And then also, there is a very strong element of satire to his...
	I mean, you know, Dr. Strangelove.
	But you see satire everywhere.
	Satire in Beard and Linden, satire obviously in Eyes Wide Shut.
	But then at the same time, there's almost this other element of very earnest heroism.
	I mean...
	There's heroism of Barry Lyndon, although it's kind of masked in a little ways.
	Obviously, in 2001, that is not satirical, what he's doing.
	So I think there's just this, and even in Full Metal Jacket, Full Metal Jacket, as I've mentioned before, I can't wait till we get to it.
	Full Metal Jacket is the ultimate anti-war movie, while at the same time being the ultimate pro-masculinity, pro-war film ever filmed.
	And it's both.
	It's anti-American and then also pro-war for its own sake.
	I don't think I'm exaggerating.
	It's a pro-masculinity, yet weirdly kind of anti-masculine movie.
	Again, it's just this duality to Kubrick.
	You can't...
	It's there.
	Oh, gosh.
	I'm now rambled.
	I've forgotten my original comment.
	We're all talking, but I should, I think.
	It just came back to me.
	Christian Kubrick is the niece of Veit Harlan.
	He was the director of The Eternal Jew.
	Oh, my God.
	In the Third Reich.
	What a connection.
	But I guess what I was saying is that in terms of the dualism of Kubrick, it's kind of like both.
	Like he wanted to make, there was actually a point where he wanted to make a movie on the Holocaust.
	And I think, and you know, again, he was friendly or friends really with Stanley, excuse me, Steven Spielberg, and I think he felt at post Schindler's List he didn't want to to make that.
	At the same time, his ultimate fantasy, unrealized dream, was to making this Napoleon film that I imagine would not be satirical.
	She's suspicious.
	I think it would probably be Riefenstahl-esque, perhaps.
	Who knows?
	No one does.
	So I think there's a dual element to it.
	So I could, in a way, imagine Kubrick saying something like Hitler was right, as simplistic as that might sound, but then I could also imagine him saying something very ironical and the opposite.
	I was wrong?
	In an ironic tone.
	Yeah.
	But you know about his Napoleon project, if he had done it to Vienna, I think most of his liberal fans would have been really embarrassed because, you know,
	There's this Israeli historian, Ziv Sternhow, who said that fascism began with Napoleon, and especially Napoleon III, so later in the 19th century, but which indicates that any fascination with Napoleon is suspicious, even when it's left-wing people, because, you know, there's a left-wing tradition of Napoleon and a right-wing tradition.
	Now it's more the right-wing one, obviously, but in the 19th century, there were very left-wing people where Napoleon's, you know, masculinity.
	At least half of it is suspicious and it makes Kubrick more than just a New York Jew, you know.
	Right.
	I mean, if Woody Allen made a Napoleon film, it would be...
	He did it!
	You know, it's Love and Death in 75. And it's very funny, actually.
	We should do a podcast on it.
	Not just on this one, but...
	I don't know enough about Woody Allen.
	I was about to say that it would be a lot like his version of Casino Royale, his James Bond film, which was this...
	Totally absurd farce.
	Actually, it was absurd.
	You know, there's a kind of copycat of Napoleon because he feels he's going to be assassinated.
	And there's a scene where you have two Napoleons fighting.
	And it's absolutely ridiculous.
	And Napoleon is just a short Corsican with an Italian, a sick Italian accent.
	Right.
	That's how he would do it.
	But if Kubrick did do his Napoleon film, it would be something else altogether.
	I mean, I could imagine these battles.
	Yeah, it's really a shamey date.
	Oh, I know.
	But it's almost better in our imagination.
	I've heard a rumor that Spielberg wanted to actually turn that into a miniseries.
	He's working on it now.
	He's working on it now.
	And Spielberg has obviously done war films, but...
	Spielberg is a very talented and very skillful director.
	But he's not Kubrick.
	He's not Kubrick, and he won't have that, for lack of a better word, fascistic element.
	He also doesn't have the depth.
	He doesn't have the depth of intellect that Kubrick had or aesthetics either.
	No, no, no, I don't think so.
	I actually think there's an article that's bubbling or brewing in my mind on Spielberg that I think I want to write.
	And I wouldn't want to write on Spielberg if I didn't think that he wasn't important and interesting.
	But, you know, he's not Kubrick.
	Kubrick is someone who kind of amazes me.
	Well, Spielberg is...
	Spielberg is Spielberg.
	It kind of helps you understand modern America, Spielberg does, and a certain kind of Jewish element to it as well.
	Obviously.
	Yeah, but I think Kubrick is almost like an artist, like you want to read him, like you want to reread a philosopher.
	But anyway, let's do this.
	We've rambled, we've gone on a tangent, as we want to do, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
	Let's get back to Eyes Wide Shut.
	Let's talk about...
	I think there's another element that we need to talk about, and that is the relationship between Bill and Ellis.
	And particularly as this kind of...
	How do I go about...
	How do we get into this?
	Maybe by mentioning that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were...
	You know, the gossip, the it couple, as a vegetarian citizen termed it.
	And it was, you know, at that time, in 1999, they were all over gossip magazines.
	So, obviously, again, there's no coincidence that Kubrick took them, just because it's about the failure of a couple.
	And, you know, there's no wonder why he took the most famous...
	And also, I think also important here is that this is a traum novella and Eyes Wide Shut.
	They're novels and films about the bourgeoisie and about their, let's say, hidden angst, the masks they wear, their lack of self-understanding, and lots of things.
	But they're about the bourgeoisie.
	But I think what's kind of interesting about...
	Doing Eyes Wide Shut in 1999 and making it set in that time period is, you know, Schnitzler's period, you know, 1920s and Vienna, it's kind of caught in between a lot of things.
	You know, I mean, Vienna, there might be an element to it that we might associate with Victorianism of a kind of prudish...
	Highfalutin, hoity-toity bourgeoisie.
	But also, I mean, Vienna itself, it's obviously the home of Freud.
	It's the home of really amazing artistic expression in the fond siècle of Klimt.
	Others, Gustav Mahler.
	It was a...
	Amazing source of genius.
	And there was also a modernist element.
	In Vienna, there was an element of political populism that was proto-national socialist and was certainly anti-Semitic.
	There was also an element of Zionism in Vienna.
	It was an amazing place for all these contradictory forces.
	The New York City of the late 90s is something very different, and it's also a place that I would say where you have a kind of, in a Freudian sense, a kind of illusion of not being repressed.
	It's kind of interesting when the Sandor, the Hungarian, comically slimy Hungarian person, he talks about making love.
	Women will only get married so they can make love to the men they want.
	Why don't we go to the sculpture garden?
	We can go visit some of the Ziegler's Renaissance bronzes.
	You appreciate the period?
	This kind of talk.
	Have you ever read Ovid?
	That, you know, if you went to a...
	I mean, because the New York City of the late 90s is not that different from the New York City of 2015.
	If you went into a party in New York City and talked like that, I mean, I think you would get laughed out of the room.
	You would be laughed at.
	Yeah, you have to be ironic and kind of, you know, hipsterish or coy or something like that.
	But I think, in a way, what he's saying, when you look at the...
	He talks about making love, but Alice and Bill, what do they talk about?
	They talk about fucking.
	And I think it's interesting, that word, because obviously, fuck is an expletive.
	It has a dirty quality, or it has also a very man, masculine quality.
	Yeah, especially in the mouth of women.
	I know, it sounds weird.
	It's the last word of the movie.
	The last word of the movie is...
	The last word is Kubrick's move.
	Yeah, fuck.
	I agree.
	It has always amazed me, you know, that especially American women say something like, I fuck men, which obviously feminists don't like that, but...
	But they do like it.
	Yeah, but guilty.
	It's men fucking women.
	It's not the other way around.
	For obvious mechanical reasons.
	And that women can say that they fuck men, there's something twisted about it.
	And that Nicole Kidman says it so many times without Tom Cruise saying it anytime.
	Yeah, that is interesting, Tom Cruise.
	And you can see this when you meet modern girls.
	They'll use language that we would associate with a men's locker room.
	Like, I want to fuck him, or something.
	It's like, what?
	Clean out your mouth with soap.
	But if a man said that, it wouldn't bat an eye.
	Fuck means what it means.
	But I think it's also in this...
	In this film, I think what Kubrick's saying is that they don't even use euphemisms anymore like making love.
	They just say fucking, which is, again, it's expletive, it's dirty, it's masculine, it's juvenile, all this kind of stuff.
	But they're just as naive and repressed as someone who, in the Victorian age, would use some highfalutin...
	Euphemism like he knew her or they slept with her.
	Some of these things that we like to say, they're just as repressed.
	They're this post-liberated society that is just as unaware of themselves as Victorians.
	I think that's one aspect that Kubrick's saying.
	Let's talk about...
	Maybe about sexuality in general, because there's a couple.
	And then, of course, there are other characters which are kind of, as the term you used is right, doppelgangers of Alice.
	So you have Domino, the hooker on the street.
	You have Mandy, the high-class call girl.
	And, of course, you have Helena.
	The daughter, who is important because the very first scene, we see her grooming just like her mother.
	It's kind of a Russian puppeteer of big one and small one.
	And she's doing just like her mother.
	She's red-haired just like her mother, but also like Mandy.
	And Domino is blonde, but...
	Auburned kind of blonde, so to speak.
	And Helena is being sexualized just like the other women.
	Her name's Helen, Helen of Troy.
	I mean, she's a prize.
	Is it Helen or Helena?
	Well, it's Helena.
	I'm just saying that the connotation, Bill is all about money.
	Alice is going through the looking glass.
	She's Alice.
	Helen is a prize.
	I had promised I wouldn't bring conspiracy stuff again, and I won't.
	But there's the same stuffed tiger in Domino's room and in the toy store where Helena is looking for a Christmas present.
	And again, it's not just because Kubrick was out of decor and just said, let's bring these tigers, it's Christmas.
	You know, it's saying something, especially since Domino is quite young.
	She's maybe 20, while Mandy, the higher, you know, it's a higher class of prostitute.
	She's 30. She dies at 30. So Domino is still a girl and the scene with Bill Hartford.
	It's like teenagers on their first date.
	They're speaking very naively and she's lying on her bed, but there's a stuffed tiger just behind her.
	So she's not really a woman, but she's still like a teenager.
	So the same stuffed tiger at the toy store and the girl, the daughter, seems to be interested in it.
	If I were a Christian, I would say that it's a denunciation of the sexual revolution, but obviously it's more than that.
	But it's also that.
	What do you think?
	I have a lot to say on this, but I'm going to pass it to John first.
	But I would just say, maybe to get John going, what's interesting about this film is that when you think about it, For an erotic film, you think this is a guy's stuff.
	It's about guys and our lust for women and sensuality and so on and so forth.
	What sets the whole plot off is the...
	It's female sexuality, but it's not even expressed female sexuality.
	It's like the notion of female sexuality.
	What sets the whole plot off is basically Bill and Alice's pot-infused discussion, where Alice basically reveals to Bill that she has passionate...
	Sexual desires.
	I wouldn't even say erotic, just sexual desires.
	She had a desire for a sailor that was so strong that she would have given up her life and her child and her marriage for one night with this person.
	This is unbridled, unrestrained.
	I mean, that is the trauma for Bill, and that sets him off on his nocturnal journeys.
	So maybe just talk about, I mean, what do you think about female sexuality and that element to this film?
	Yeah, I mean, you could see that both from the female and the male perspective.
	I mean, I think in large measure you could see the film as You know, male discovering female sexuality.
	I mean, I mentioned this before we started recording that something that's always struck me about the film is that there is still something kind of anachronistically 1920s Vienna about it in some ways.
	Well, the naval officer being the object of Nicole Kidman.
	I mean, that's such a trope of...
	Of European literature from that time.
	It's almost comical that in the late 1990s, that would be Nicole Kidman's obsession.
	But beyond that, I have to admit, I find it somewhat difficult to believe that there would be somebody of Tom Cruise's age.
	You assume he's like in his late 30s or early 40s.
	who's that naive about sexuality and so forth.
	But he really comes across as being quite clueless.
	And like you said, I mean, this one revelation is enough to set him off on this sort of odyssey where he has to prove, well, he's obviously trying to prove his manhood many times.
	Yeah, he tries to have sex with every woman he meets, and it never succeeds.
	Even when he's paying them, which is interesting.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	No, I think he's trying to prove his manhood, but I think also just because you fucked doesn't mean you really understand the world.
	Right.
	He thinks that that's what it will give him.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And I think there's all this element to it.
	One of the elements is that he's emasculated.
	When he passes by this frat boy's...
	Yeah, that's a great scene.
	Yeah, in his first nocturnal journey, they knock him over and go back to San Francisco and all these kind of funny things.
	You can see that, again, I think that was also kind of telling of this ostensibly powerful bourgeois man almost seeing himself as powerless, as lacking a cock.
	And that goes with all these other themes.
	The way that I would...
	Talk about female sexuality is that...
	And this is hard to get into because it's such a...
	In a way, it's such a profound topic.
	I guess the best way to get into it is through this scene.
	And when they're smoking pot, and I guess it's the day after there's Ziggler's party.
	Because immediately after the Ziegler's party, they do the bad, bad thing, and they look at themselves in the mirror and so on.
	This is the day after they're smoking pot.
	I always have to cringe a little bit at that scene.
	It's so un-Kubrickian.
	It's like he just wanted to get...
	You know, a hot song in there or something.
	Oh, but I think you have to look at it as ironic.
	Yeah, no, I mean...
	And then there's this hard cut to the day.
	Like, you wake up and the music changes to that.
	I think it's a Shostakovich waltz.
	Like...
	Yeah, it's very jarring.
	It's actually his jazz music.
	Yeah, yeah, Shostakovich jazz.
	But anyway, to go back to that scene...
	It's, you know, they're smoking pot and he, you know, she talks to him about Sandor's attempted seduction.
	And, you know, Bill in this kind of, you know, pillow talk like voice is like, yeah, he wanted to fuck my wife.
	And then she and then Alice gets very annoyed.
	And at the very beginning, I think her annoyance struck me as like.
	The kind of thing, almost dorm room feminism.
	Like, it's this just annoying bullshit of, like, you think that the only reason he wanted to talk to me is because he wanted to have sex with me?
	And in a way, Bill slash Tom Cruise is justifiably annoyed.
	But then...
	Alice really gets at something deeper.
	And I think she gets at both a personal confession and I think she gets at something much deeper about reality and civilization.
	And the personal confession is that she experienced this kind of desire that was so powerful, it in a way smashed the bourgeoisie.
	You know, it's almost like it wasn't the proletarian.
	It was her lust of, I'm going to give it all up.
	What she's saying is, I'm going to leave my class.
	I'm going to leave you.
	I'm going to leave even my child.
	I'm going to give it all up and not adhere to the bourgeois norms, but just become a slut.
	It's not even that she wants to leave Tom Cruise for one man, but she emphasizes a couple of times that in her dream she doesn't even know how many men she had sex with.
	Which kind of relates to this...
	I'm not sure it was out in the 90s yet, but in recent years there's been these theories about sexuality that monogamy was a development of later class relations and religious prescription and so on is actually unnatural and you get that dream kind of.
	Suggest, you know, the undermining of the bourgeois.
	Yeah, no, I think there's a lot to that.
	I mean, you know, it's in her dream.
	I mean, she is involved in the orgy.
	And also there's this very strong ambiguity because when he comes in, this is after his nocturnal journeys where he's been, he's failed.
	How Tom Cruise fails to have sex with women.
	That's quite an accomplishment.
	But anyway, he...
	He goes back and she's laughing.
	She's giggling.
	And then she wakes up and her face turns into a horror, one of horror.
	And it's this Freudian element that what you desire is what you fear.
	You know, your nightmare is also your fantasy.
	And that, I mean, you see that at Freud's first major...
	It's a wet nightmare.
	Exactly.
	The interpretation of dreams, I mean, that's kind of what it is.
	I mean, you're filled with horror at these things that you desire.
	And anyway, so there's this ambiguity where she's laughing, but it's horrifying.
	And it's a nightmare and it's a fantasy all at the same time.
	And, you know, so again, just to go back to the earlier scene where she's confessing to him.
	So she confesses that she has this lust.
	She has sexuality.
	And then she says, you men think that, you know, oh, it's evolution.
	Men want to stick it in every hole so that we can have as many babies as possible.
	But females have to care for the children so they want safety and security and continuity and blah, blah, blah.
	And I agree that there's a lot of truth to that.
	I agree with Bill that, yes, that's oversimplified, but it's true.
	But there's a whole other level to it.
	And I think kind of getting at what you were saying before, I mean, If you think about pre-civilization, not just pre-bourgeoisie, but pre-civilization, these are matriarchal societies.
	These are societies where you need women and their reproductive capacity is the most important thing in the world.
	It's a central thing.
	Female sexuality has to be it.
	It has to be the center of the universe and existence.
	You can kind of see this in primal, prehistoric sculptures of these fat, pregnant, big-boobed women.
	That's kind of like the first vision of art.
	Well, maybe not exactly.
	You see hunting and cave paintings, but it's this female sexuality, female fertility.
	The ritual at the beginning of the orgy is very suggestive of that, where it starts with the women are sort of being blessed, and I love that scene is so...
	Like, it's so primordial.
	But, you know, he performs this ritual.
	He sort of, like, blesses or maybe, like, gives a power to each of the women.
	But it's sterile sex.
	You know, it's twisted.
	It's sterile sex.
	It doesn't lead to any offspring.
	And, you know, because many, many words are twisted in the movie.
	Like, for example, Fidelio, which, of course, is a...
	An opera by Beethoven, which means faithfulness.
	Fidelity.
	And the password for fidelity.
	The password for a thing that is mainly about infidelity and about cheating on their wives is called Fidelio.
	And you have these high priests blessing these women, which are...
	I had never thought about it, but now that you say it, they look like fertility goddesses.
	You know, their masks, the way they stand.
	It's really like these fertility statues that were found in Europe.
	But they're infertile, as you say.
	These women are girls that are on the pill, and they've got all sorts of STDs, and they're just blow-up dolls, basically.
	Well, it's a fake ritual.
	It's not genuinely sacred.
	It's an imitation.
	It's what Avila would call counter-traditional.
	It assumes the form.
	But still, I have to admit, I find it somewhat beautiful.
	Oh, of course.
	Wildly erotic.
	Yeah, there's no two ways about it.
	I actually don't find that whole scene erotic at all, I have to say.
	I mean, for a film about sex, I don't personally find it very erotic.
	Kind of clinical in a way, but I think Kubrick intended that.
	It's all of those things.
	Yeah, I mean, it's a very...
	Well, we won't go into it, but let me get back to what I said before.
	Female sexuality is at the center of existence.
	You can't exist without it.
	The fact that you need the sun to grow crops and to live, you need female sexuality.
	It's this big thing.
	But civilization as a patriarchal institution, in a way, has to be about controlling and channeling and limiting.
	It's something we really can't take.
	I mean, I'm probably weirdly sounding like a leftist feminist here, but stick with me, because I think in a way those people are getting at something.
	We should never dismiss anything because of its label.
	No, origin or label.
	No, I agree.
	We, as men, almost have to tell ourselves these lies that we are the only ones who want sex.
	It's almost like civilization had to be built by controlling female sexuality, saying that, no, you're not the most powerful, we have these other institutions.
	Civilization is not a fertility cult.
	Civilization has all elements.
	It has classes, it has priestly elements, it has...
	Military elements, political elements, so on and so forth.
	Economic elements.
	But it can't just be that fertility.
	So we, in a way, have to repress female sexuality.
	And one of the ways we do this in the modern age is men like us lie to ourselves that, oh, we're at locker room talking.
	Oh, I want to go fuck her.
	Oh, yeah.
	And when you think about it also, courtship is a masculine...
	It's about men being positive and females being negative.
	When you court a woman, whether it's in the Victorian age or in postmodern America, it's still the man doing it.
	Maybe this is changing now, but for centuries at least, the man goes out, he says things, he tries to coax and persuade the woman to do things.
	The woman is resisting, she's negative, and then maybe at the very end she'll give in, but probably not.
	And so these are these kind of civilizational forms, like courtship, like male sexuality.
	And in a way, we can't handle the truth.
	We can't handle the real, which is the fact that all of existence really is based on that female fertility, female sexuality.
	Yeah, that...
	Anyway, I'll let you guys...
	That's kind of my...
	That was the way I viewed this film this last week when I re-watched it.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, Kubrick is always getting at this idea that civilization is kind of a veneer over these very primordial, kind of instinctual things.
	I mean, that's running through all of it.
	But I also think that when I watched it this time, what struck me is that in the orgy scene, it's these women, prostitutes, who go and they select who they're going to have sex with.
	It's not the usual thing where...
	You know, the guy goes up and says, oh, you know, you look pretty hot.
	You know, it's kind of reversed, which is...
	But just a side note, I wonder how Mandy recognizes Bill Hartford.
	Because he's out of place, but it's impossible to recognize him just because he has a cheap mask.
	You know, it's...
	And he instantly knows who he is.
	A mask feels more than a face.
	Actually, the message is that these creepy Venetian masks are the real face of the elite, but also of Bill Hartford.
	He looks like a sea angel, which is kind of a beta white knight, as they would put it in the manosphere, and it's exactly what he is.
	And this movie is...
	Also about what Matrice and then the Manosphere calls the taking or swallowing the red pill.
	But eventually, and I think we should talk about that maybe as a conclusion, but we are not there yet.
	But it's back to the blue pill because his powerlessness just leaves him with a feeling of impotence.
	Not only sexual, but also, you know, social, political, and he just has to surrender to his wife's urges to fuck.
	And it's the same with Nick Nightingale, which is a telling name again, you know, the bird that sings at night, or the piano player who only plays at night in jazz clubs or orgies, and who is punished for removing his blindfold.
	And the hooker is killed by drug abuse, whether it's an accident, a suicide, or a murder, doesn't really matter.
	And of course, the drugged out prostitutes at the opening party.
	So, you know, everyone is discovering or uncovering a part of truth, but so unbearable that they have to go back to...
	We see illusions built around their lives.
	And, of course, it's to cover sexuality, but the real nature of sexuality that, of course, it concerns other areas of life, like politics or the economic structure, like the real importance of a medical doctor in today's world.
	Yeah, no, I think we're all kind of saying the same thing from different perspectives on this.
	John, you might want to go back to what you were talking about before in terms of female sexuality.
	Well, this occurred to me while you were saying what you were saying, Richard, about female sexuality, about this idea that maybe in tandem with his wife's dream.
	Dr. Bill's orgy scene, there's something very primordial about it, even though on one level, yes, it is a false sort of sacredness.
	On another hand, maybe Kubrick is suggesting a return to this sort of primordial sexuality where it's more matriarchal and the sexuality is uncontrolled.
	Also, you can notice it's not all men in the masks.
	I mean, there's quite clearly women as well.
	I don't want to read too much into that, but it's not exclusively a boys' club.
	I can't remember the verse now, but another thing that's kind of been forgotten, maybe you remember this from the time, Richard, but when the film first came out in the orgy scene, they were singing...
	I hit some verses from the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit, and some Hindu groups objected, and it was replaced with, I forget what's there now, I think like an Orthodox piece or something?
	Yes, it's a Romanian Orthodox Mass, which is played backwards.
	Yeah, but originally...
	Yeah, originally it was Sanskrit, but the Hindu groups objected.
	Hinduism, much more than Christianity, has this matriarchal element to it.
	You have the goddess Kali and so forth.
	I just think this suggests to me that Kubrick was trying to...
	Suggest something very primordial about sexuality there, that it's something that we repress, but it sort of re-emerges.
	Yeah, I would say primordial sexuality is matriarchal, and civilization is a patriarchal institution, and maybe a patriarchal delusion.
	And civilization certainly includes the bourgeoisie, which kind of has to, you know, you can't fully go there.
	You can't fully go all the way into female sexuality.
	You've got to pull back and put on a mask and, you know, live out a certain, play a certain role.
	Yes.
	You know, and I think that's what Kubrick's saying.
	And he's not saying that from what would be a kind of left-wing standpoint or a certain left-wing standpoint of like, oh, let's just redistribute wealth and get rid of these social classes and then we'll all be natural and free and peaceful and wonderful.
	No.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	I mean, it's like you said before about the duality.
	I mean, Kubrick is showing...
	The problem is inherent in civilization, but at the same time, like with war, I think he's trying, well, it's necessary.
	We just have to recognize it for what it is.
	And even ennobling.
	I think what he's saying in Full Metal Jacket.
	But at the same time, the Vietnam War is crazy and all these Americans who want to turn gooks into Americans or whatever are idiots.
	At the same time, there's something deeply human and deeply masculine and deeply noble about even the Vietnam War.
	And I think that's this great irony that if you go into that film thinking it's platoon or a left-wing kind of thing, you'll miss it.
	If you go into it thinking, oh, this is a right-wing pro-war movie, like G.I. Joe, Rise of Cobra.
	You'll also miss it, believe it or not.
	Anyway, okay, wow.
	Should we put a bookmark in it, or is there some other lingering thing?
	I feel like we want to return to all these movies, because I feel like even after speaking for two-some hours, there's so many other elements to it.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, we could probably go on for 10 hours.
	But maybe returning it another time is better.
	Yeah, let's do that.
	Well, thank you.
	I definitely enjoyed this.
	I really enjoyed getting to know this movie and thinking about it on a deeper level.

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