"Stanley is a BEAR..."
...and it's bears repeating.
“The number one threat… is bears.”
- Stephen Colbert
I. Crypto-K Genesis
After decades of hype and speculation, December 21, 2012 ultimately came and went without much fanfare. Much like when our computers survived Y2K on the millennium turnover 12 years earlier, the 13th Mayan baktun ticked over without any apparent technical issue. No planet-wide Emmerichian cataclysms or economic catastrophes occurred. The USA was still reeling from the Sandy Hook shooting exactly one week before, but on Friday, 12-21-2012, not much out of the ordinary happened—except for on an obscure corner of Youtube, where a video was posted with a link in the description to a website called CRYPTOKUBROLOGY.
On this website—rendered entirely in the now extinct (but recently emulatable) Adobe Flash—was an ominous introduction and around a dozen essays containing the densest, hardest, weirdest analysis of the films of Stanley Kubrick ever seen anywhere. Scholars of Esoteric Kubrick Studies at the time were equally amazed and put off by the detailed breadth of the analysis, but also by the grim undertones in the symbolism on display.
These were the opening few beats of Shawn’s first essay:
“The bar for Kubrick research has been raised” said one person in the know, and they were more right than they knew. Given where his study would lead, the fact that Shawn Montgomery decided to publish CRYPTOKUBROLOGY on the End Date of the Mayan calendar’s 13th baktun seems entirely appropriate, but at the time he regarded it as merely an interesting coincidence—given that his site was ready to be published so close to 12-21-2012, it simply “felt right” to publish on that momentous day.
Herein lies a perfect example of how Crypto-K was online well before it was ever formalized by anyone, because what Shawn did not know when he made this decision (but what would become of great interest to him years after the fact) was the fact that the Mayan calendar end-date 12-21-2012 came 4740 or 2370 + 2370 days into the 21st century.
More specifically, the Last Day of the 13th Mayan baktun is the 2370 + 2370th day after the Last Day of the Millennium.
This observation leads to the formation of a Parent Thesis, crying out for the attention of Crypto-K:
Consider the myriad of resonances between these two Parent dates: they are each the Last Day of Significant Long-Count Calendar Intervals—considered another way they represent Turnover Points on a timeline where “all the nines changed” (as Lolita points out when Humbert has maxed out the odometer on their car)—both carry Apocalyptic overtones, or perhaps an Apocalypse Unfulfilled (Y2K and 2012 are the two most significant apocalyptic non-events of our lifetimes)—they both even subtly promote the letter M, which is the 13th letter, just as 12-21-2012 ended the 13th baktun, the Mayan notation for the new cycle being 13.0.0.0.0—and The Shining properly beginning at exactly 00:13:00, a fact examined in detail in the opening beats of Shawn’s 2012 website, seen above—and they are, of course, evenly split between two 2370-day timespans.
So Shawn’s conscious decision to release on that particular day based on gut instinct, unconsciously conformed to an underlying order as to when events occur in relation to other events, revealed only when examined through the very Crypto-K ‘microscope’ which the website he published that day was a step toward developing.
Hopefully this is all sufficient to arouse in you an at least mild curiosity about the identity of the ‘Child’ at the mid-point of our two key dates—but that reveal requires some more context to properly appreciate, like what it was exactly that caused such a stir in the community when Cryptokubrology hit the scene.
II. The Subliminal Bears
Part and parcel to the Cryptokubrology website launched on 12-21-2012 was the idea of the Subliminal Bears. The theory proposed that Stanley Kubrick secretly arranged the mise-en-scéne of The Shining so as to paint for the viewer in every frame a pack of ravenous bears—bears that would register only on a subliminal level: you never think about the bears, but they are always there, lurking in the margins, like the 3D image in a Magic Eye book, only revealing itself after the eye has relaxed and forgotten what it is seeing as anything more than light, color and shape. The idea might at first seem outwardly insane—and there does seem to exist a subset of the population for whom the subliminal bears theory is unbearable, so to speak, and go insane if you suggest it—but the more one looks into it, the more it doesn’t go away, the more backing for it one finds, and the less implausible it becomes.
This is the kind of thing that can (and did in Shawn’s case) get you banned from internet forums—specifically from the one run by one of the most prominent Kubrick researchers in the space back then. After a few other troublesome characters (like John Fell Ryan and Mark LeClair) started making other problematic observations, the whole forum was abruptly taken down. C’est la vie.
The subliminal bears are one thing, but certainly no amount of cognitive dysphoria can deny all the supraliminal bear symbolism employed by Kubrick in The Shining. One of the film’s most iconic images is the man in the bear suit (seen by Wendy) performing fellatio on a party guest, for instance. But what student of The Shining doesn’t recall the disappearing and re-appearing bear rug?
And who can forget the pillow bear lurking behind Danny as he’s wearing the number 42 on his shoulder and being examined by the red-headed Doctor? The mouth of the bear is bright red, just like the elevator doors and the blood which will spill out of them, but note also the bright red streak on Danny’s shirt in the same location where he will later be injured (see below).
Another proof of Kubrick signposting subliminal bears is in the way the shape of the teddy bear’s eye mirrors the shape of the floor indicator above the elevator doors. By the principle of subliminal bears, the shot of the elevator doors actually conceals a bear’s face, the cascade of blood perhaps the result of its carnivorous fury. Shawn’s analysis yielded an even more potent fact: the shot of the Elevator and the shot of the Bear were placed by Kubrick 42 seconds apart, stitching that number even deeper into the subtextual architecture of his film:
What you might call the ur-subliminal bear of The Shining appears not on celluloid but in the marketing materials, specifically on the official poster—which is the first (ur) thing that moviegoers actually saw when they went to see The Shining—the poster on the wall outside the box office, a poster which was designed by the legendary Saul Bass, who drew multiple hundreds of iterations of different ideas for the poster before Kubrick was satisfied (unsurprising when it comes to a Kubrick production). Bearing no resemblance to anything in the film itself, the design for this poster always seemed odd: a yellow background with bold black lettering, and the frightened, oddly elongated face of a boy inside the T and some of the H in ‘The.’ It seemed so abstract (looking nothing at all like Danny Lloyd). It didn’t make sense because we didn’t realize that with this poster we were not looking at the frightened face of a boy at all. We were looking at the concerned face of a teddy bear in portrait.
Stare at it awhile until your vision melts and your eyes finally let you see, and you will never un-see it. The eyes of the ‘child’ are the ears of the teddy bear; the nostrils of the child are the beady eyes of the teddy bear; the child’s upper lip is the top of the bear’s snout; the agape mouth of the child is the bear’s big black nose; the shadow beneath the child’s crooked lip is the bear’s mouth.
Maybe you see it now, but “the question that will really bake your noodle later on” is, did Saul Bass see it? In other words was Saul Bass given specific instructions by Kubrick to draw something that contained a subliminal bear, or (more likely) did Kubrick simply allow Saul Bass to work, and then wait for the subliminal bear to show itself?
And could it be that this was the secret mission veiled by Kubrick’s beguiling reluctance in explaining what he wanted from his actors and production designers? Or, at least, one of them?
Now maybe you see why Kubrick stans of the time had such a hard time with this theory.
More ur-signposting appears during the shot where Wendy discovers that Danny has apparently been strangled. In the same room where a long-dead bear lies as a luxury item (an overt bear, literally lining the floor of The Overlook), the camera continues to adjust its position ever so slightly as Wendy approaches Danny, until at the final moment of her discovery it camera settles, and there revealed by the play of light between the second floor bannisters, a word appears. While Jack looks on and Wendy examines the bruises which have appeared on Danny’s neck and shoulder in the location of the red streak from the teddy bear shot seen above, Danny sucks his thumb in shock, a word appears to lurk above them hidden in the upstairs bannister above the red elevators. The word that appears is BEAR.
Perhaps the BEAR in the bannister represents the one responsible for Danny’s injuries—an immediate answer from the hotel to Wendy’s question “what happened to your neck?” Or is Danny himself meant to be identified with the bear in question? Jack’s hypothesis is that Danny strangled himself—the act of auto-strangulation is another Kubrickism (think of Dr. Strangelove’s possessed hand strangling himself). So the teddy bear may be seen as a part of Danny, or perhaps it’s meant as something else that has perhaps latched onto him from higher levels of reality.
In other words, is the Bear… Tony?
If we go to this scene in The Shining Forwards and Backwards (the sync-roadshow experiment by John Fell Ryan), Kubrick’s mastery of visual symmetry and Saturnine sense of timing shows itself in the moment Wendy turns Danny’s head to look at his neck: in reverse we see a brief vision of the tidal wave of blood from the elevators (including the “eyes” that match with the pillow bear’s eyes). It’s the vision that appears when Jack freaks out on Wendy after she suggests taking Danny down the mountain. And she did that in response to the incident involving “BEAR” (the word sitting there directly next to the floor indicator).
Seek out and give this version a watch—it’s a wild hallucinatory ride, but maybe the most accessible way of getting some idea of what Kubrick was really up to with The Shining.
The emphasis on a literal word hidden in the mise-en-scéne adds a layer of linguistics to the mix, as the Subliminal Bears begin to extend outside the film screen and enter our daily lives, hidden in the pathways of language itself. I.e., think of all the meanings of the word ‘bear’ and how often one uses it in daily life. Bear with me. I can’t bear the sight of you. It could also refer to the fact that Wendy bears Danny’s existence as she bore him in her womb during pregnancy. One bears a burden, and a burden is itself a “bear den,” by way of the ur-syllable that draws its tropic resonance from ursa, the latin word for bear. Ursa Major, our primary constellation and navigational guide—the Great Bear—it’s how we got our bearings as a species, how we first mapped out and continue to manage our position in space, or rather on Earth (which can be phonetically spelled urth). On its own, ur means the first or the original of something, so it’s interesting how suffixing -sa to it creates the word for bear—more evidence that, for some reason, bears hold a uniquely primordial place in the historical human pantheon of animal symbolism, and more reason why they have a uniquely prominent place in our glossary of Crypto-Tropes.
On 12/21/2012, at the end of the 13th mayan baktun, Cryptokubrology was published, and asked: is Earth a planet of apes, or of bears?
Almost exactly 2 + 3 + 7 years later, all these questions remain open, but in any case, all of this data should serve to cement Bears—whether subliminal or overt—as one of the central defining tropes of Cryptokubrology.
III. Bruno
So, now we can return to where we began, because with bears both subliminal and overt on the brain, it’s eye-catching to find the child of the 2370 day parent-thesis made between the Millennial 12-31-1999 and the Mayan 12-21-2012 to be 6-26-2006, the death day of Bruno the Bear.
Not just any bear (and not just any Bruno!): this Bruno the Bear (known more formally as Bear JJ1) became the subject of international media attention. Originally from Italy as part of the Life Ursus Reintroduction Project (LURP), the bear had escaped its preserve of land and wandered off into Austria, then Germany, consequently becoming the first Brown Bear on German soil in 170 years. Unfortunately Bruno was what the Bavarian President called a Problembär, who delighted in killing just because he could, a body count which included 33 sheep, a pointed amount to report, given the locale.1 After attempts to capture him failed, the Bavarian government stepped in and had Bruno shot. After it was done, Bruno’s carcass became a point of contention among the states involved, and a game of political football ensued between Rome and the Bavarian government. Rome fell yet again because Bruno’s stuffed carcass resides in Munich to this day, frozen on foreign soil, eternally tormented by taxidermied bees around his eye (as though the bees are tears).
Are you picking up the symbolism here? Sensing that there may be more to this story than meets the eye? That on some level this isn’t about a bear at all, but something else entirely, lying behind the mask of mere appearances? Bruno the Bear was shot and stuffed as a trophy of war while the Roman pontiffs stamped their feet—his death the child of two Last Days—that of the Millennium and that of the Mayan Calendar (2370 days either way), or, perhaps, the Last Day before the arrival of Crypto-K and its pronounced examination of Subliminal Bears.
And it has not to do with bears (or does it?) but we’d be remiss in not pointing out that 6/26/2006 was the 36th birthday of director Paul Thomas Anderson, seen by many as the prodigal son to Stanley Kubrick. 36 is a lower harmonic of 666 (the Fourth Seal of Crypto-K, and # of the Beast), and 36 years makes 432 or 42 + 153 + 237 months (the first Three Seals), and 432 plus its mirror 234 = 666. Happy Birthday, Mr. Anderson.
The idea that on some level the death of Bruno the Bear at the child position of our two last days was a birthday present for P.T. Anderson, a mere film director, might be hard to understand. But then look at his Magnolia, a film which premiered just months after Kubrick died. It features among other things, Tom Cruise (in one of his best roles), and a boy-genius character named Stanley Spector, who wets his pants on live TV after his pleas for a bathroom break are ignored. A Spector is a ghost, which is what Kubrick would be when the film released—but apparently he wrote this before Kubrick died—and again, Stanley Spector, while precocious, wets his pants and has a breakdown on live TV—not a good look. As for Cruise, he plays a men’s motivational speaker, whose ridiculous on-stage persona is introduced with “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” the Strauss theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, even knowing the reverence with which Anderson holds Kubrick, these story beats seem less like homages to the recently deceased director and more like pointed barbs.
But why would he want to do that?
One theory about the death of Kubrick that has made the rounds of Hollywood gossip circles (see above Mr. Siebert’s astute summary) has to do with Kubrick tying up Hollywood’s two most bankable male and female stars for an excruciating multi-year long shoot, with possibly more reshoots in store yet. With the movie probably 90% done and Kubrick taking his sweet ass time as usual the studio heads became increasingly impatient about getting Cruise back in the golden saddle, and thus they decided to cut their losses and just off the troublesome director instead of putting up with his old-world nonsense any longer.
The timeline goes like this: after seeing Boogie Nights (and probably Hard Eight as well) Cruise contacted Anderson and invited him to the set of Eyes Wide Shut to tell him he wanted to work with him, and to think of him when writing his next movie. This was when he introduced PTA to Kubrick—apparently, Kubrick was a bit of a disinterested prick at first (boyish Anderson not even 30 at the time) until he apparently softened up on learning Anderson had both written and directed Boogie Nights. Upon finishing Eyes Wide Shut (for the time being anyway), Cruise went immediately into filming Magnolia with PTA. Kubrick would screen the 1st cut of EWS for studio brass on 3/1, and then die, rather suddenly, 6 days or perhaps 153 hours later, and 55 days into the ongoing Magnolia shoot, a film in which PTA and Cruise seemingly make fun of Kubrick (portraying him as either a whiny pisspants, or an adult male chauvinist).
Does it all add up? Did the Hollywood production heads really have Stanley Kubrick murdered in his sleep, all the way over in his isolated castle in England, just so they could get Mission Impossible 2 underway? And did PTA and Cruise laugh about it in Magnolia? Personally, I don’t buy it, but it could go some way to explain the perceived undercurrent of snark towards Stanley in Magnolia (and other films like Phantom Thread). Also, there’s a further chapter of the story that concerns Anderson’s 2012 film The Master and its possible consequences: ie, was the death of regular Anderson cast member Philip Seymour Hoffman (who was, incidentally, born on 7/23) a result of his and PTA’s ‘blasphemous’ depiction of the founder of Scientology? Other Scientologists include… Tom Cruise, of course, ostensibly a friend of PTA, but also Vivian Kubrick, Stanley’s daughter. It’s been argued that Eyes Wide Shut was in part a massive allegory for that peculiar religion. One must wonder… is PTA a Scientologist, too? But that’s a whole different subject, and one it might be best to avoid entirely, now that I think about it…
Now, About that Release Day:
IMDB has it that Magnolia premiered in the US on 12/8/1999 and in Canada on 12/10.
The day between, 12/9, marked 6666 hours since Kubrick’s death on 3/7.
It hit NY/LA theaters on 12/17, fully 9 months, 11 days since K-Death on 3/7.
The release in Canada on Christmas Day came 42 weeks after Kubrick’s death-day (as does Christmas Day every year).
The final US release on 1/7/2000 came exactly 10 months, or 306 days after Kubrick died, where 306 = 153 + 153, and reduces to 36, the birthday of PTA’s that led him to us.
As stated when we began pulling this thread, it doesn’t have much to do with bears, our ultimate subject. Or does it? There must be something to tie it back around before we move on to next part of this deep foray into Bear World.
Well, in looking over the cast of Magnolia, it turns out that there’s actually more than one Stanley. In the opening lines, the narrator Ricky Jay (an actor but also an actual magician/illusionist) tells a tale of synchronicity, which is, appropriately, the film’s unifying subject:
In the New York Herald, November 26, year 1911, there is an account of the hanging of three men. They died for the murder of Sir Edmund William Godfrey; Husband, Father, Pharmacist and all around gentle-man resident of: Greenberry Hill, London. He was murdered by three vagrants whose motive was simple robbery. They were identified as: Joseph Green, Stanley Berry, and Daniel Hill. Green, Berry, Hill. And I Would Like To Think This was Only A Matter Of Chance.
So the middle of the three vagrants we see hanged in the opening moments of Magnolia is named Stanley Berry. You are likely to forget about him immediately—his name will not register as anything odd to you unless you have been armed with all this context. But as the rest of the movie unspools, ambitious, perhaps overlong, full of many other characters (like Stanley Spector), PTA (or something) made sure that your subconscious will remember:
STANLEY BEARY.
What was the name of this post again? Hm, oh yeah.
Or how about:
STANLEY, BEARY SPECTOR
Now this is Crypto-K! Moving on!
So we have observed predicted tropic resonance between all these dates, except there’s one link yet missing. There are bears on 12-21-2012 (subliminal). There is a bear on 6-26-2006 (Bruno). But how are bears expressed on 12-31-1999?
It’s easy pickings. The bear is, of course, the traditional symbol for Russia, and this was the day Boris Yeltsin resigned as Russian President, leaving Vladimir Putin as acting executive. In other words, this last day of the Millennium was the first day of Putin’s reign as Russian President (Chief Executive ‘Bear’), a reign which persists to this day. Two Russians—two bears—playing political musical chairs in advance of the new millennium.
This parent-thesis serves as a perfect example of the way Crypto-K works. The Book of history becomes readable in a new way—some events can be shown to be more likely more than the sum of their co-incident parts than others.
But the K stands for Kubrick, so how does the Bear Trope and the death of Bruno relate to Kubrick himself? A Roman wandering into foreign territory is not unlike how Stanley Kubrick left the USA to make a life in the English countryside with his German bride (and imported Italian assistants), and died there, permanently interred on foreign soil. But the connection is also born out by the Crypto-K surrounding it: counting the interval between the death days of Kubrick and Bruno, 3-7-1999 to 6-26-2006—here we might expect to find something 237-related (there’s a reason we call Stanley Kubrick Mr. 237), and sure enough find something we do: the given interval amounts to 7 years, 3 months, 20 days, which can be reversed to 20 days, 3 months, 7 years for the full 237 effect.
In other words, the mid-point sitting 2370 days between 12-31-1999 and the “Bear” Putin’s rise to power and the publication of Cryptokubrology on 12-21-2012 with its singular emphasis on the Bear as a not-so hidden symbol in Kubrick was exactly 20 days, 3 months, 7 years after Kubrick died, and also the day a famous “rogue bear” was killed in the country that incubated the Illuminati in 1776.
So, even if they did kill the King—did they really kill him?
Speaking of 1776, Bruno’s death was also the 177th day of the 6th year of the millennium, but who’s counting?
Hm?
Oh, looks like it’s me. I’m counting.
IV. Red October
Since the bear is the traditional symbol for Russia, further backing for the connection of Stanley Kubrick to the larger Bear Trope Matrix can be found in 1984’s 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey wherein a fictional TIME Magazine cover presents us with a Cold War dichotomy and the headline: WAR?
There’s a great deal to be said about this fake magazine cover but for now note that the USA is repped on the left side by Arthur C. Clarke, while the right shows Russia (aka, the Great Bear) with a cartoon Kubrick as its representative. It makes sense based on SK’s Romanian heritage, but given what we have already explored, there are of course more esoteric reasons for associating SK with “the bear,” including the “Great Russian Bear.”
2010 was directed by Peter Hyams, who was born on July 26 just like Kubrick and Carl Jung. Hyams was the grandson of the Russian Jewish impresario Sol Hurok (note ur syllable present) and a prolific veteran sci-fi director in his own right. His first hit film was 1977’s Capricorn One about NASA faking a manned mission to Mars (clearly inspired by the Apollo conspiracies that would later become associated with Kubrick). Perhaps due to this very information, Kubrick gave Hyams his blessing to make the first ever sequel to a Kubrick film. In the end, Hyams paid Kubrick back with a cameo as the Great Russian Bear on a magazine cover that reads “Time-War?” Are we supposed to believe that Hyams made that call, and not Stanley himself, so obsessed with his public image as he was? It’s a little… strange.
Stranger still was the apparent tribute paid via the film’s release date—12-7-1984—exactly 237 weeks after The Shining premiered. That’s one alignment we have mentioned many, many times before, but again we ask, who made that call? Was that just a coincidence? Or did Kubrick himself possibly insist on that release date, silently? Along the same lines, did Kubrick also have something to do with the release of Scanners with the number 237 on its poster (and implied in its plot) exactly 237 days after The Shining? Or was that David Cronenberg’s move, announcing his presence in the game? No, his announcement would have to have been Fast Company, the film by Cronenberg with the number 237 in its dialogue released before The Shining. My mistake.
Whatever the answer, it opens up the possibility of another parent-thesis, this time surrounding The Shining by 237 weeks and resonating with bears, especially those of the Russian kind. Kubrick put a spotlight on the number 237 and bears in The Shining, and 237 weeks later, he appeared (in print form) as ‘the Great Russian Bear’ in the sequel to his own film. Crypto-K suggests we now look 237 weeks before The Shining premiered to see if any Bear Resonance appears, and if that resonance clarifies the situation in any way.
Of course there may be multiple synchro-resonant events on any given day (and these same days may have to be re-examined in other contexts), but here we are looking specifically for events involving Bears and/or Russia. It is simply a matter of one internet search and finding the Wikipedia page for November 1975. Quoted below is the first entry under the heading “November 8, 1975 (Saturday)”:
Shortly before midnight, Moscow time, the crew of the Soviet frigate Storozhevoy mutinied, as second-in-command Valery Sablin, locked up Captain Anatoly Putorny, then seized control of the vessel. The mutiny, which would fail, would inspire the best selling Tom Clancy novel, and later a film, The Hunt for Red October. Captain 3rd Rank Sablin would be convicted of treason and be executed on August 3, 1976.
There we have it, an event in Russian/Soviet history which would go on to become known through a piece of US media: a mutiny among “bears” that would inspire an unknown insurance salesman named Tom Clancy to write his first (ur) novel: The Hunt For Red October. Clancy would go on to write many more books, essentially becoming a media liaison for the military-industrial complex, and he is now, in death, a franchise unto himself, spanning many different formats and raking in millions of dollars every year, and it was all inspired by that first (ur) novel of Tom Clancy: The Hunt For Red October, which was itself inspired by an event which occurred exactly 237 weeks before The Shining premiered!!
When a Crypto-Matrix starts clearly pointing at things with a 237-week-long stick, it behooves the Cryptokubrologist to take a closer look—in this case, The Hunt For Red October, directed by John McTiernan—to go and watch the film with these tropes in mind, looking for anything that could conceivably be interpreted in a fashion relating to Stanley Kubrick and/or (for the moment) Bears.
The Hunt For Red October arrived in US theaters on 3-2-1990, which happens to be exactly 273 weeks after the release of 2010. In other words, it released 237 + 273 weeks after The Shining premiered and therefore 237 + 237 + 273 weeks after the real-life events that inspired it (in case there wasn’t already sufficient reason for including it in the discussion).2
Tom Clancy’s novel and John McTiernan’s film take the story of Valery Sablin’s doomed mutiny 237 weeks before The Shining’s premiere and, of course, turn it into a rousing success story for the USA. Before the end of the Cold War, those who studied the case thought that Sablin had intended to defect to the USA. By changing the ho-hum real-life frigate to a high-tech nuclear submarine, Clancy had found the perfect raw material for a high stakes Cold War thriller: a rogue Russian (Bear) wanders off the reservation, and the hunt is on—note the similarity of this story to that of Bruno the Bear! It did not end well for Bruno, nor did it end well for Valery Sablin, but Clancy’s Captain Marko Ramius has better luck, perhaps because he’s in a Hollywood production and played by 007 himself, Sean Connery.
It is Connery’s eyes overlooking the Soviet coastline that we see in dramatic close up in the film’s opening moments, indicating that the story will be told from his perspective. Now observe that Sean Connery was born 8-25-1930—8/25 being the 237th day of the non-leap year, so maybe imagine, if you will, whenever you see Sean Connery, the number 237 stamped onto his forehead, especially in these opening moments of The Hunt For Red October, the way you might also think of him as a Virgo.
It does not take long for the film to get to the point, when watched through the lens of Crypto-K. After the opening moments introducing Ramius, his second Borodin (Sam Neill), and the submarine the Red October, the title card lands, and then we land in the home of the usual Clancy protagonist, Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin in a star-making role), pouring over his papers. He is interrupted by his daughter who appears carrying a teddy bear. The dialogue proceeds as follows (these are the first words heard in English):
JACK: “What are you doing? You’re supposed to be upstairs sleeping.”
SALLY: “Stanley keeps waking me up.”
JACK: “Oh, I know what that means. … Okay Cricket, you listen to me. Go upstairs with Mrs. Wheeler right now and go to sleep. When I’m on my business trip, I’ll get Stanley a little brother.”
In a most unlikely turn of synchronicity, the teddy bear in The Hunt For The Red October is named Stanley, and in his first scene, Jack Ryan makes it his mission to find Stanley a little brother. That’s amazing, given where we came from, but OK!
Jack Ryan then leaves and makes his way by plane (flyer) to CIA headquarters where he meets with Admiral Greer, played by James Earl Jones. Already we have another Kubrick connection, because don’t you know it, it was Stanley Kubrick who kickstarted Jones’s career by casting him as one of the bomber pilots in Dr. Strangelove—the ur feature film role for Jones, who would of course go on to become the iconic voice of Darth Vader, Mufasa, among many other roles (including this one).
After exchanging pleasantries and pouring coffee, Jack Ryan sits and the discussion turns toward his daughter and what we saw in the previous scene.
JACK: “She announced to Caroline and I the other day that her life would be considerably less lonely if we were to buy her a baby brother. But she decided it would be enough if we were to buy one for Stanley.”
GREER: “Who’s Stanley?”
JACK: “Um, Stanley is a bear.”
*long pause*
GREER: “All right. What’s important enough to get you on a plane in the middle of the night?”
The way this dialogue is played through the usual cinematic methods suggests that it’s more important than it seems on the surface. First of all, there’s the allusion to buying children, which is a creepy choice of words. As soon as the second sentence quoted begins, the camera starts to track closer into Jack Ryan’s face, and the shot reaches its apex when he says Stanley. Then reverse to a similar tracking shot into the Admiral’s bewildered face as he says, “Who’s Stanley?” and then back to Jack Ryan, even closer now as he responds, “Um, Stanley’s a bear.” Then we have a full on close-up of the Admiral, who seems to have a knowing smirk on his face as they decide to move on to more important matters.
What’s that all about, eh? On the surface it seems to be dialogue written to communicate how awkward and bookish Jack Ryan is for a hardened CIA officer, but seen in the context of Crypto-K, it feels like they could almost be speaking to each other in the code of some secret secret society. One simple possibility could be that this dialogue was directed at no one other than Stanley Kubrick himself. We (and they) know he watched… everything.
So that James Earl Jones first made his name in a Cold War drama about a Rogue nuclear bomber run amok directed by Stanley Kubrick was likely not lost on John McTiernan, who cast Jones as the Admiral in his own Cold War drama about a Rogue nuclear submarine run amok (and a teddy bear named Stanley). Oddly enough he doesn’t mention any of this during the Making Of feature when asked about the casting choice. Perhaps on the DVD commentary?
The events of the film then play out—Ramius carries out his plan successfully with the aid of Jack Ryan. A KGB mole on board the ship attempts to sabotage the plan at the last minute and Borodin is killed. His dying words are “I would like to have seen Montana”—referencing a vow with Ramius in an earlier conversation to visit Montana together once they are safely within the USA. Montana is another Kubrickism, because Montana is where the opening shots of The Shining were filmed (in Glacier National Park, Montana)—and in fact, a detailed analysis of those shots of Montana was published in the first essay on the Cryptokubrology website published on 12-21-12 that kicked this chapter off (“Movin’ to Montana soon / Gonna be a mental gloss tycoon”).
The final scene of The Hunt For Red October has Jack Ryan in quiet post-climax conversation with Ramius on the Red October before they arrive at their final destination. This fades into to the final shot of the film, in which we see Jack Ryan on a plane in the air, finally asleep—and sitting in the seat next to him is not Ramius but Ramius transformed into a new fresh-furred teddy bear, Stanley’s little brother. The credits roll over this climactic shot of the bear, indicating that Jack Ryan has completed his most important mission: procure a “little brother” for “Stanley.”
In another sense, what has happened at the end of The Hunt For Red October is that an agent of the enemy, R, has been brought within the embrace of the USA. And what does that new union spell?
URSA.
In any case, whatever it all means, according to The Hunt For Red October, “Stanley is a Bear.” Now we can fully complete our Parent Thesis zeroing in on the “Kubrick/Bear” trope which began this section:
But what does it mean to say “Stanley is a bear?” And why does this dialogue appear in this film (based on a CIA novel), based on a real-life incident that took place in the Soviet Union exactly 237 weeks before The Shining premiered, when 237 weeks after, Kubrick is shown to be a ‘bear’ (Soviet) in the sequel to his own film?
Regardless of any potential answer to those questions, the fact remains that all of these elements were already pointing at each other by virtue of where they land on the human timeline—all it took was to arm oneself with the numbers 42, 237, etc., and a little imagination. Kubrick armed human beings with the number 237 when he released The Shining in 1980—we just failed realize it until a few decades later.
V. The Return of Bruno
Research into commentary on the bear in The Hunt For Red October lead to the discovery that this was not the first time John McTiernan employed bears in such a fashion. The first instance of this can be found in his greatest success: Die Hard, which premiered exactly 1313 days after 2010 and exactly 19 months and 19 days before The Hunt For Red October. By repeatedly using this same bear device, trivia notes state that McTiernan was being self-referential. No one seems to ask what the bear’s supposed to reference in the first place. So what exactly was it doing in Die Hard? We must cast the gaze of Crypto-K onto the classic film and see what pops out.
The story of the bear in Die Hard starts with the West German-born Bruce Willis, perfectly cast in a role that would redefine an entire genre, one he seemed born to play. The role of John McClane led to a career explosion for Willis, who became an action icon in the 1990s on the back of the Die Hard franchise, not unlike how Red October launched the career of Tom Clancy (and Alec Baldwin). Before that, however, in 1987 Bruce Willis experienced a career detour (or nadir) as a rhythm and blues singer in an HBO mockumentary named… Bruno (just like the dead bear we examined earlier).
So then it starts to make sense why in the first scene of Die Hard, “Bruno” pulls a huge teddy bear out of the plane’s overhead compartment, after engaging in some ritualistic dialogue much like what we saw in Red October:
A Plane lands in a sunny locale. John McClane grips his armrest a little too tightly. His neighbor sees this and decides to say something:
MAN: You don’t like flying do you?
MCCLANE: What gives you that idea?
MAN: You want to know the secret to surviving air travel? After you get where you’re going, take off your shoes and your socks, then you walk around on the rug barefoot and make fists with your toes.
MCCLANE: Fists with your toes.
MAN: Yeah, I know. It sounds crazy. Trust me, I’ve been doing this for 9 years. Yes sir, better than a shower and a hot cup of coffee.
MCCLANE: OK.
McClane gets up, and the Man notices his sidearm. McClane notices his noticing.
MCCLANE: It’s okay, I’m a cop. Trust me, I’ve been doing this for 11 years.
“Trust me, I’ve been doing this for 9 years.” “Trust me, I’ve been doing this for 11 years.” 9 and 11. Call and response.
This opening scene also plants the seed of the movie’s best gimmick: that McClane must face his ordeal without any shoes or socks: ie, barefoot, which should be read as bear-foot, of course. Bruno – bear/bare feet – carrying a teddy bear, and that odd instruction to “make fists with your toes”—well, isn’t that something a bear would do? To make fists with your toes is to associate your feet with your hands, merging the two. The instruction implies ritualistically that John McClane must channel his inner four-legged animal, which is obviously the bear, to survive the coming onslaught of terrorism.
At the end of the quoted dialogue, McClane immediately takes his large teddy bear out of the overhead compartment and leaves – or rather, tries to leave. He is immediately confronted by an attractive stewardess, admiring him and his bear. As he momentarily questions his whole existence before exiting, another stewardess announces over the PA, “Have a Merry Christmas!” Some of what’s happening in this scene would only become noticeable (if not obvious) in a post-9/11 world, but now the chain of associations can’t help but be followed: Planes. Fear of death. 9 and 11. Bears. Christmas. In the next scene, Holly jokes with her pregnant co-worker: “that baby’s ready to tend bar.”
Maybe this would all be excusable as coincidence if the rest of the film didn’t exist along with it—or even just the movie poster, which (just like Saul Bass’s poster for The Shining) has already signaled to the viewer something important while their eyes wander waiting for popcorn, before any dialogue had been heard at all: a high-rise office building (divided in two by shadow) exploding in the face of a concerned audience.
McClane and his bear meet their limo driver, Argyle. Blue-collar McClane sits up front of the Monolithic automobile while the bear sits in the back, seen repeatedly through the rear-view mirror, and for the rest of the film the bear hangs out in the limo with Argyle, the two of them serving as a secret audience to all the radio chatter between McClane, the terrorists, and the police. The terrorists’ plan involves breaking into the Nakatomi corporation’s high-tech vault (cracking 7 sequential locks to do so)—inside which are held hundreds of millions of dollars worth of, yes, bearer bonds.
Ultimately Die Hard is a story about a man trying to save his marriage. McClane comes from New York to LA where his estranged wife has taken a high-paying corporate job. Presumably a gift for their children, the bear can also represent McClane’s semi-bachelorhood. As the narrative unfolds, the bear becomes less and less of a presence, until at the end of all the action, McClane and his wife Holly enter the limo together to be driven home (or hopefully to the hospital).
Crucially, as they embrace in the backseat, the bear is no longer there, or at least no longer visible. Unless they’re going for the ursine-three-way, that qualifies it as another disappearing bear! The disappearance of the bear accompanies the restoration of he and his wife’s holy matrimony (at least until Die Hard 2). But remember where we started with all of this: The Shining and its lurking (and disappearing) subliminal bears. McClane’s bear almost seems the same species as Danny’s bear (a possible parasitic, supernatural entity)—which makes barefooted John McClane thus equivalent to Danny Torrance in a different universe. Interestingly enough, the name of the first terrorist killed by John McClane? Tony.
Another way of looking at it: John McClane (Bruce Willis) came to the building (Die Hard) with his bear (failed career/alter ego Bruno), but he leaves with his wife (career success), driving an auto-monolith towards the Land of Oz—Oz equaling 77, which happens to be the number of weeks from the release of The Return of Bruno to the premiere of Die Hard—and Oz meaning, literally, the gleaming, onscreen twin towers.
Wait, what?
Yes, as Argyle drives John and Holly off screen in their black limo (a kind of monolith with wheels), the camera rises up to reveal two other buildings looming over the scene. We have seen them before, in a shot at the beginning of the film, approaching Nakatomi Plaza, off to the side. They are the Twin Towers. At least, they are twin towers, and look very much like a much less tall WTC the way they are filmed here, we cannot see the actual top, so they seem taller.
Both the opening and the closing credit roll of Die Hard could not make it any more obvious that the movie is secretly about 9/11. Watch it for yourself this Christmas—it’s not an accident that they call it a Christmas movie! It’s definitely about Santa Claus. EMTs and Firefighters scurry about the smoking ruins of a skyscraper as paper falls everywhere. The scene heavily evocative of what would later be seen from certain angles in NYC on 9/11/2001.
For good measure, two firefighters ride a crane in the near foreground, the structure of which rotates until it becomes the number 7 (for Building 7?)—all as “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow” plays, which should be taken as a reference to the cloud of asbestos that would be released over NYC on that day—because if you know your film history, asbestos was what they used for snow in The Wizard of Oz—additionally, of course, the Twin Towers in NYC were the filming location for the Emerald City of Oz in The Wiz with Michael Jackson. Clearly this is all meant to evoke the specific brand of carnage seen on 9/11, more than a decade in advance, right? The question of what McTiernan knew remains open, but it’s worth mentioning that he was later attacked in court by the powers that be and ultimately forced to do Time (as in prison), which ended his filmmaking career and nearly killed him. After a study of his work, it doesn’t take much to guess why his career might have been run off the road so utterly (we didn’t even touch on Die Hard 3).
Like McTiernan’s career, it may seem like this post has run off course – after all, we were talking about bears and Stanley Kubrick, now what’s this about Die Hard and 9/11? What feels like running off course may actually be more like hitting bottom. We purposely fell down a cine-historical rabbit hole littered with bears, 237, and Kubrickisms, and now after much tumbling, we find ourselves staring directly in the face of 9/11 somewhere that it should not rightly be, that is, in a famous 1980s action (Christmas) movie.
Most interestingly, given all this context, Die Hard saw its final wide release on 7/20/1988, which happened to be exactly 19 years since the Apollo Moon landing.
In other words, Die Hard was released on the Moon landing’s 19th birthday.
Coincidence? What does that even mean anymore?
Through using Crypto-K, and following the bear trope after seeing Stanley Kubrick associated with the Great Bear in 2010, which released 237 weeks after The Shining (about subliminal bears), then examining what took place exactly 237 weeks before The Shining premiered, we were led through Soviet history to a film where we were told matter-of-factly that “Stanley is a bear,” and then following the bear trope deeper into that director’s filmography, we land on a precognition of 9/11/2001 by way of a film (released on a 19 year metonic harmonic with the Moon landing) about terrorism in a high-rise office building that begins with a plane landing and references to 9 and 11, then ends with an image of the Twin Towers against a smoking paper-strewn sky.
To quote an entirely different movie: this means something.
Right?
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This is the same Bavaria which incubated the real-life Illuminati—the Bavarian Illuminati was founded on 5-1-1776, exactly 1530 hours before the inception of the USA on 7-4-1776, while 1530 hours after 7-4-1776 was the day the world’s first submarine attack took place – the relevance of which will become clear here soon.
273 weeks also equals 1911 days, where 19 = S and 11 = K, so SK, the initials of you-know-who—recall it was in 1911 that the supposed hanging of the 3 vagrants including Stanley Berry occurred as told in Magnolia. Also, now you see the relevance of the first submarine attack referenced in the previous footnote—though the mutiny occurred on a frigate, The Hunt For Red October is about a mutiny on board a high-grade nuclear submarine.
scary shit, also i just watched die hard with a vengeance, tons of 911 stuff in that too
Great post, Alex. In 2013-14, McTiernan served time at the Federal Prison at Yankton, South Dakota. The same lock-up where Dale Cooper's doppelganger - "Mr. C." - is being held. The "jailhouse" warden is a "Dwight Murphy," played by actor James Morrison. Recall it is a "Spider Murphy" who is playing saxophone, as noted in Elvis Presley's 1957 hit "Jailhouse Rock." Let's rock!