The Emperor's New Clothes: A Study of Stanley Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut'

by Mark LeClair (the Wrong Way Wizard) - A Syncmas Rewind

The following essay was published in 2008 by my friend Mark LeClair, aka the Wrong Way Wizard. Mark was a brilliant musician who, in the summer of 2001 while working in the isolation of the extreme North, and lacking a copy of The Wizard of Oz, with some friends stumbled onto a sync between Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Unfortunately he became unhealthily obsessed with the sync-up and its implications, and soon found himself in the midst of a full-on psychotic break, which led to an unsuccessful suicide attempt, and then a stay in an institution (you can still hear him tell this story on an episode of Always Record over at Sync Book Radio).

After a few years coming down from the experience, and inspired by the likes of Goro Adachi and Jake Kotze, Mark began blogging about his own synchromystic insights derived from his experience, describing it as akin to what Philip K. Dick went through in 2-3-74. His blog The Wrong Way Wizard (subtitled Bringing Up the Rear on the Left Hand Path - Where Nothing is Impossible and So is Everything Else) was highly influential in that “scene” at the time, heavily impacting just about everyone who happened to stumble upon it (like the Velvet Underground of sync)—especially for those looking for a slightly more cynical take on the phenomenon than most other synchronauts. He became known best for his essays and theories on Stanley Kubrick: full theoretical Gnostic break-downs of 2001, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut, providing many highly original insights into these films—not to mention other massive decodes of Brian de Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise and the Coens’ Burn After Reading, as well as sync commentary on various then-current events (like the Aurora Batman shootings in the summer of 2012).

The essay that follows was the first of Mark’s I ever read (it was linked to me randomly by someone completely outside the sphere of sync), and the rest is history. A few years later I reached out and we became friends, and even started a short-lived podcast together. Unfortunately his mental state remained ever fragile, and after some inevitable drama, he decided to pull the plug, deleting his entire internet presence and history. Aside from a stray e-mail or two, I did not speak to Mark for 8 years, but then one day we managed to get back in touch—just in time for him to have contracted a terminal case of pancreatitis (brought on by years of frankly irresponsible drinking—he often bragged that he would watch The Ninth Gate and match Johnny Depp for every drink and smoke). We had one last long conversation a few days before Christmas 2022, and then a few weeks later I learned from his Mother that he died on January 23, 2023—1/23/23—a fact I’m sure he would have appreciated as a student of RAW and the “23 Enigma.”

Of course, nothing is ever gone on the Internet, as I told him, and that of course I had gone and saved what I could from the Wayback Machine, preserving almost all of his work, and even that I considered myself something of a Max Brod to his Franz Kafka. He seemed flattered that anyone would care about his work. Well, I know a lot of people cared, and hell, a lot more people might care to read this essay now in 2024 (and 2025 and beyond), than would ever have in 2008. He was genuinely ahead of his time in many ways.

So here it is, exactly as it appeared 16 years ago. (And it will always be free to read here.)

Merry Christmas.

Does this hurt?

The Emperor’s New Clothes: A Study of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut

by Mark LeClair

Originally Posted Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Preface

Here and now, on shelves for the Xmas season, the complete solution to Stanley Kubrick’s riddle Eyes Wide Shut. As a gesture of good faith, I'll let you in on the final prognosis: the world actually ended on Sept, 11th, 2001, and we are all dead. I shit you not. My proof is not oblique. The bravest of theorists have fumbled, but your bud Da WWWiz has made a sweet recovery. Dragging the ball beyond Uranus and into the end zone.

Happy Holidays.

You can skip this next part and go straight to the body of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' or look at the following Eyes Wide Shut refresher - it comes highly recommended.

Dramatis Personae, Plot Synopsis and Table of Contents of The Emperor's New Clothes

Players

The Wrong Way Wizard: Author of The Emperor's New Clothes and your narrator. 40-ish. Still lives with his mom.

From Eyes Wide Shut:

Alice and Bill Harford: a highly leveraged Manhattan physician and his bored and brilliant wife.

Helena: the Harford's daughter. A perfect little angel.

Roz: a babysitter.

Victor and Ilona Ziegler: a captain of industry and his long suffering wife. Patients of Dr. Harford.

Nick Nightingale: he's with the band. Dr. Bill's old med-school buddy.

Gayle and Nuala: twin serpents of desire.

Szandor Szavost: a Hungarian Count. He is starving for love.

Amanda Curran: One in a stable of perfect love slaves kept by the evil Ziegler.

Marion Nathanson: Grieving for her lost father. She loves Dr. Bill.

Carl: Marion's gold-digging fiancee. He is like Dr. Bill, but on the cheap.

The Yalies: a gang of roving rugby players. Homophobic jerk-offs.

Domino: street-walker, or is she?

Mr. Millich: proprietor of Rainbow Fashions.

Miss Millich: a daughter and a perfect doll.

Two Japanese Businessmen: Miss Millich's love monkeys.

A Cabbie: probably from Hackensack.

The Hierophant: A Red Man. Master of Ceremonies at Somerton.

Tricorn and Teardrop: could they be the Zieglers?

The Mysterious Woman: who is she, really? A lifesaver, for sure!

A Waitress: She knows Nick Nightingale, in the Biblical sense.

The Kinky Desk Clerk: Night Porter at the Hotel Jason, home of Nick Nightingale.

Sally: Domino's good-girl roomie, or Domino reborn?

The Stalker: maybe even death himself. Needs a haircut.

Also appearing, our special guests:

Alex de Large

Wendy and Danny Torrance

Private Joker

The Monolith

The Scientologists

Pink Floyd

Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Edward Bernays

Truffaut

P.K. Dick

Santa Clause

Jesus

Satan

Idi Amin

Mel Gibson

Maverick and Goose

...and host of your favorite stars.

And of course the one and only, the inimitable, the immortal--Stanley Kubrick.

A rare image from the set of Eyes Wide Shut. Director Kubrick oversees his stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

The Action of Eyes Wide Shut

Dr. and Mrs. Harford are off to Victor Ziegler’s annual Christmas gala. They say goodnight to little Helena and twirl away to the ball.

At the Ziegler's lush and luminous Manhattan stately home, Bill and Alice will quickly separate. Bill will talk to Nick Nightingale, who is playing piano at the affair. Then he'll wheel about with supermodels Gayle and Nuala, before being whisked up to Ziegler's private bathroom for a con-fab, where Mandy, Victor's love toy, has OD'd on heroin and coke. She is sprawled naked. The doctor's expertise and cool reassurance are needed to smooth things over. Ziegler states in no uncertain terms: Bill, this is just between us.

Alice has a pee and shares a long and sensuous dance with Count Szandor Szavost. The Count wants to lure Alice to the sculpture gallery and taste her milky white flesh. He is pretty smooth but Alice won't have it. She is married, after all.

At home after the party Bill and Alice make love in front of the mirror but Alice has other things on her mind.

The next day we follow Alice and Bill through their daily routine. Bill at the office seeing to his upper-middle class clientele and Alice at home with Helena. That night they will smoke marijuana and argue. Alice has a secret that drives Bill into jealous and depressive anxiety.

There is a phone call. A patient of Bill's, one Lou Nathanson, has died. It is late night, but Bill must make a condolence call.

Marion Nathanson, Lou's middle-aged daughter, is distraught, but not so much at the death of dear old dad. She's moving away with her boyfriend Carl, to Michigan, but doesn't want to go. She loves Dr. Bill you see. With all her heart. Bill, gobsmacked, but still kindly, suggests "...we barely know each other." Embarrassed, he escapes.

On the streets of Greenwich Village, Bill is accosted by an ornery gang of college boys looking to rumble. Still dizzy from this encounter he is pursued by the sweet, persistent Domino, who offers Bill to come inside her suite and get warm. Bill enters, but withdraws from Domino when Alice calls his cell to ask when he'll be home. Late, says he, don't wait up. Feeling guilty and angry, he leaves Domino's cozy flat to walk the streets of the Village alone.

Land ho! The Sonata Cafe is just ahead. Bill goes in to find Nick Nightingale at the piano. After Nick's set the two will share a chat over drinks. Nick will hint that he has another gig that night. A late night gig. Exclusive. Nick admits that he plays blindfolded. Bill is hooked. He has to go to this mystery-party. Begrudgingly, Nick gives Bill the password for admittance. But Bill will need a costume.

At Rainbow Fashions, Bill coaxes the irascible but world-wise Mr. Millich into opening up for business. It's after 1 am, but Millich gives in at Bill's promise of a couple of Benjamins. Inside, Millich discovers his teen-age daughter at play with two much older Japanese men. He chases her to bed and locks the men away to attend the police, but they'll have to wait while he fits Dr. Bill into his costume. A Tux, a Black Cloak and a Mask.

Bill is off to Somerton Castle to witness a weird circus of lust he'd have ne'er imagined but hours before. Nick Nightingale is at the piano, blindfolded. What is the meaning of this Ritual in the Dark? Before he can find out just what is going on, Bill will be unmasked as an outsider, an interloper who just does not belong. The Mysterious Woman, whose identity is a intriguing to Bill, will save him from an uncertain fate. He escapes with a dire warning.

Bill goes home and hides away his costume, the evidence of his night’s wilding. It is after 4am. In bed, Alice is in the throes of a nightmare. She will wake and tell her dream to Bill, adding injury to his unhinged jealousy.

The next morning, Dr. Bill will go to Gillespie's Cafe and then The Hotel Jason in search of Nick Nightingale. He'll learn, from the night porter, that Nick has been spirited away against his will by a pair of professional thugs.

Back at Rainbow Fashions to return his costume, Bill finds that he has lost the mask. That's OK. Just a $25 surcharge. And should the good doctor like a romp with the nubile Miss Millich, her proprietor father assures that too can be arranged, for a price.

Next Bill drives out to Somerton and stands before its imposing gates, staring into the security camera. And inside, they are ready for him. Bill is handed an envelope. Inside is another warning, which promises to be the last. Stay away and say nothing of what you have seen. Lost in a thick fog of fear and desire, Bill wanders the streets of the Village once more. He buys a cake and makes for Domino's pad. She is not home. Her roomie Sally answers. Domino, Sally will tell Bill, has been found HIV positive. Bill is shocked. Sally offers Bill a coffee and maybe more, but Bill makes tracks.

Wandering aimlessly, Bill discovers he is being followed. He buys a paper and ducks into Sharkey's Cafe. Inside he reads that Amanda Curran, ex beauty queen, has OD'd on drugs. Bill wonders: Is she the Mysterious Woman that saved me from my fate at Somerton? He must find out.

At the hospital, Bill learns that Miss Curran has died. He sees her body in the morgue.

Bill's pesky cell rings. It is a representative of his patient Victor Ziegler. Can Bill make an urgent house call?

Bill meets Ziegler in his ample billiard room. Ziegler explains the need for this visit. He is aware of Bill's odyssey. He was there at Somerton and saw everything. He warns Bill that he is in over his head. And yes, the dead Amanda Curran is indeed one in the same as the Mysterious Woman who saved Bill the night before. Bill demands an accounting but Ziegler only reinforces his threats.

At home Alice is sleeping. Next to her, on Bill's pillow, is the missing mask. How did it get here?

Bill falls into frantic spasms of grief as he tells Alice the horror he has survived. Later, Christmas shopping with Helena, the Harfords will agree they are lucky to be alive and there is nothing to do but go on living.

Boom-shaka-laka!

The Emperor's New Clothes

Domino Falls

On my 15th birthday, a wide-eyed fool in the dead of winter, I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time. It was a midnight show. Sold Out at the Paramount, Domino Falls' grand old cinema house, right downtown. The screen was colossal.

When the show let out onto the wild and windy streets of my little prairie megalopolis, I walked home for five miles, colder than Pluto, with my head lost in the cosmos. I thought I was going north. My life, my world, my universe, yes, the universe had changed for good. Here's the thing, I wondered, after this what!? How will I be the hero of my own life? Fuckin' Kubrick - just some recluse who I hadn't even heard of but 3 hours gone, some insane sonofabitch genius, had turned my whole world Danube Blue. So not only had Stan become my first real hero, but at once the ultimate nemesis, for he shewed a world so majestic and transcendent and full of hope, yet a world that I might never altogether reach or even comprehend.

A world full of stars.

I wanted that world. Regardless of consequence. I want it still.

I found myself, at 15, destined to be away like today's Tom Sawyer, to unravel an enigma. And I'll be a monkey's uncle if it weren't that after 20 years of searching the vast expanse of unbridled, frozen space of mind and soul, my quarry turned out to be a pun. A clever pun. A masterful play on words. 'Deus Ex Machina,’ Stan? Yeah, I get it. Ha, ha, ha.

I report this moribund little tidbit not for naught. You see, after learning as much of literary theory and the dramatic and cinematic language as one could for a lumpy prole and specifically for the purpose of revealing 2001 to myself, well... I just didn't think there was another curve ball in the works from the old Q-Brick. Then I watched Eyes Wide Shut and knew I was very wrong. And curses if the bastard didn't up and die without a word to explain his twisted yuletide horrorshow.

This story is a chronicle of my solution to Stan's final riddle. Eyes Wide Shut is my own private Everest, my K2, and I will have it, or go on living endlessly in the attempt. I have to. Why? Because it is there - blocking the light like a spot on the sun.

Note: There is a commentary to the audience of Eyes Wide Shut: 'Give up your inquiries which are totally useless.’ Dire consequences are threatened. Is Eyes Wide Shut this hostile to its audience?. At a safe distance it is a cruel albeit very funny joke.

Closer it could be dangerous. In his 2004 metaphilm exclusive Ears Wide Shut, Leon Weber proposes that Eyes Wide Shut may be a 'best of breed' movie about a conspiracy. The conspiracy intimated by Weber is that of an eastward moving cabal of one world oligarchs who have settled at a crucial time in the history of NYC. As per form, The Wrong Way Wizard will drag this notion into the daylight.

Herein we shall expose:

1) the conspiracy in question

2) the complete meaning of 2001: the year and the movie.

3) the cryptic monologue that closes Clarke's 2010 re: the people of the two suns.

4) the transcendental and absolute value of the events of Sept 11, 2001 as a conspiracy to be sure, but oh so much more so, as a function of pi.

And, of course...

5) the fantastic secret of Eyes Wide Shut: that the action of this nearly incomprehensible dreamplay unfolds just following the very real and terrific events of Sept. 11, 2001. An interesting feat for a movie released in 1999.

Please, gentle reader, remember the warning to Dr. Bill. What you learn here will be all too easy to understand and hard to shake. You might not sleep so well. Proceed at your own risk. The password is Fidelio.

Where the Rainbow Ends is Where it Begins

OK... The term EYES WIDE SHUT is a sly reference to Kubrick's personal life. Upon seeing 2001 for the first time, filmmaker Franco Zefferelli sent Kubrick a telegram. It read: 'You have made me dream with eyes wide open.’ Kubrick, notorious for imitating his own mythos, had a delicate sense of humor.

The acronym EWS is a big give away to the topography of the film. The missing letter from the set of E, W and S is 'N' where it stands for North. Well, North isn't exactly missing on the streets of Kubrick's Manhattan., Rather, the absence of North, as a symbolic compass, is firmly implied by the vicious re-cycle of infinite regression detailed in Bill's travels around NYC and environs. Being lost is a way of life on the loopy streets of EWS. In this way, EWS is a scathing criticism of the universal framework heralded by the Cartesian/Newtonian model and a document to end of this same delusion. Within the quadratic model, Kubrick says, it's all about being LOST. As long as we are deluded by the notion that we live on the exterior of a spheroid that is but one such body in a rapidly disintegrating and unbounded cloud of gas, we are always impossibly lost.

When teachers tell our kids kiddies that the polynomial equation is muchos importanto they aren't lying... well not exactly. The quadratic model for thought, artificially modulated to flummox the middle class comprehension of natural science, is imposed through mass education onto each and every human value system. Sex. Money. Love. Family and Politics. All of it a shell game. A 4D Rubik's Cube. A Devil's Quadrille. The specific value of the geography of Kubrick's exteriors and the applied force of the North in EWS will be explored a bit further along, but for now, stuff this in your Christmas stocking: someone is rearranging our world while we sleep. He's been mean to children and his methods are down right Catholic. So you'd damn well better watch out, kiddies.

Now then, the title and the end credit sequences of EWS are white lettering on a black background - like dominoes. The film that glitters in between these loose ends is a veritable kaleidescope of shimmering light. This runs a parallel to the marvelous and hateful The Wizard of Oz. In TWOZ, Dorothy's 'real' world, seen at the beginning and end of the film, is a flat sepia Black&White, where the troublesome middle world of OZ is dripping with florid and ominous color. Kubrick's homage to OZ, EWS is therefore first and lastmost delivered as a two-dimensional and strictly linear representation of all visible color phenomena. And just as Dorothy's journey through OZ is a dream (or nightmare) - so is the action of EWS. The deeper message is that life itself is a but a Techni-color dream. All of it.

The movie-going experience provides a simile to the film as revealed by its credits. The lights drop: it is dark/black. There is a flash of white light as the leader is spooled and then: seven colors spill out of the white and into the dark. In EWS Kubrick will use each of these seven colors to a level of subtlety that is wizardry. The process is reversed as the movie ends, credits roll and then the theater goes dark again. In this way Kubrick sees EWS and movies in general as a cypher for the life cycle: an orgiastic tightrope of tonality held at the ends by a single moment of clarity (birth/death). And beyond, utter emptiness. All exits are final.

Model Citizens

The casting of Cruise and Kid-man in EWS is analog to the oven-roasting of Hansel and Gretel by the Mean Old Witch. Kubrick is a crypto-alchemist and his two big stars are the base metals he wants to marry up. As a couple, Tom and Nick are the epitome of middle-class virtue at the end of the Consumer Century. They are realized individuals. They are goods to market and Kubrick will pimp them out for an IPO. Now, I am not saying, nor would I, that Tom's and Nicole's work in EWS contributed to the dissolution of their marriage. By all accounts the Cruises enjoyed a warm relationship with Stan. Kid-man was distraught when he died. Nevertheless the portrayal of middle-class matrimony as a Lacanian power struggle ending in hopeless abandon is not friendly.

Next: Tom's life as a Scientologist and as a rumored homosexual play a critical counterpoint to the character of Dr. Harford, especially if you accept Cruise's claim that he is not gay.

First: regarding Scientology. Mother Hubbard's little mood-cult is a direct rip-off of Freudian theory as it has been applied to sociology, especially by Dr. Edward Bernays, whose techniques are used by everyone from corporate advertisers through to MKUltra to achieve what Bernays calls the engineering of consent. The heart of this motif is played out in the conundrum of the masked ball of EWS. Dr. Harford is totally unaware of the practices of his mind-fucking Occult Overlords (about the dead Amanda Curran, Ziegler will say: "she got her brains fucked out!") In fact, Dr. Bill thinks he is one of the chosen. This image forms a reflection of Cruise and his earnest and fanatical belief in Scientology. Cruise's beliefs are a hallmark of social conformity. Does he know that the provenance of his beloved religion is based on the practices of an Occult madman making a well planned bid for world domination? Stan must've been sure that Cruise was mostly in the dark on the history of behavioral mind control and darker tenets of Scientology, or he wanted it to seem that way, because he overlays Dr. Harford onto our Tom as smooth as gold leaf upon gold.

About the gay thing. Freud, whose work is a character within EWS, thought everyone was a little gay, but did not approve of homosexual behavior. EWS obliquely agrees. Homosexuality is a key pivot to the much touted human right to free expression - an expression that Freud feared as savage. As I will try to show, EWS, on one level, threatens that conformity is the only safe pursuit. Forget happiness. We must see our hero Dr. Harford as we see ourselves - just a little gay and that's OK, but....

In a second act street scene, where the good doctor is accosted by a gang of preppy gay-bashers, he is shaken and stirred but not embarrassed by their characterization. We all know that homo-phobia conceals the desire for the extreme homosexual encounter. It is the anally obsessed Yahoos from Yale that are gay, not Dr. Bill. In this minor and shocking scene, Kubrick forwards the idea that male homosexuality is ofttimes a violent manifestation of the desire for power and holds that Cruise himself, the uber-conformist, is straight as a bowman's arrow.

The Yale vs. Harford confrontation may also be seen as a candid-snap of the practices of the Yale based Skull and Bones Society.

Da WWWiz promises to come round this corner again, a little later on.

Introit: Waltz

The film begins and ends to the strains of Dmitri Shostakovich's Jazz Suite. As jazzy as Dmitri tried to be with this piece he surely created a perfect waltz in the Viennese fashion; maybe he was being ironic. Anyhoo, Vienna is important because it is the fin de siècle birth place of psychoanalysis and the setting for the inspiration to EWS: Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle. Traum-novelle means dreambook. Schnitzler was an ardent Freudian.

Also, the term Vienna is a nice homophone to Veniza: Venice. Venice, as proposed by Mr. Weber in metaphilm's Ears Wide Shut, was for a time a strategic stronghold in the oligarchic mega-conspiracy made flesh in EWS. Kubrick has scratched a rose-line from Venice through Vienna and probably Paris and London straight into the heart of of OZ central: NYC. Please remember that it's just exactly at that moment of phony linear time when Freud's theories spring to life in Zoo York that ol' Ziggy Joy dies in London. It is beginning to seem that ghost of Freud decided to make westward ho with the oligarchs we pursue. Could we trace the Jewish Freud back to the Catholic Dante? How far eastward will we go in search of God's simple truth. Freud, going back in our footsteps like Danny Torrance, turns out to be Moses.

The connection to Freud, psychoanalysis, and the conspiracy of our infatuation can not be over-stressed. EWS is itself an attempt, through incomparable artifice, to carry out a mass analysis and re-program. The program in question initiates the Age of Horus, which reads in some plain words as an attempt to socialize and market individualism and de-construct the western nuclear family - among other delights. Kubrick delivers both a scathing comment on 20th century values and a psychoanalytic trigger for the New World Values that will replace them. This will be elucidated at length, but to begin, readers can watch the excellent Century of the Self, a four hour documentary by Adam Curtis, now on Google video. To wit, the theories of Freud and his followers are the origin of technology used in the mass manipulation of the middle-class.

More striking is the use of the Jazz Suite waltz as a motif for TIME. As it opens and closes the film, this clockwork waltz insinuates an important Occult teaching. TIME, too, is a mechanism bound by iso-perimetric curvature. Stan is telling us that TIME, like the black and white credits of EWS, is the binary pulse that binds our reality - but only tempo-rarily. Kubrick uses Strauss' Blue Danube in 2001 to the same ideal. The waltz is used to bridge the enormous gap of ages implied by the famous monkey-bone/spaceship cut. Time, we are told, is wrapped within itself, an illusion of itself. But what an illusion!

Isis Unveiled

The opening image is a pretty quick peek at a dorsal Alice Harford as she disrobes. It is worth a note that this single moment is the only in the film that is interlaced with the black and white credits. A mere clip on the Movieola, it stands as a movie within itself. As it compares to the tale told in the strange drama to unfold, this shot may be the most revealing in cinematic history. It is meaningful in multiple context. First, it's a pun upon the title of the film. And myriad Occult revelations burn into the mind's eye...

As a pun upon the phrase 'Eyes Wide Shut,’ Alice's pose works in two ways. As she disrobes we see her but do not see her, because she is turned away from the camera. This is a visual term equal to the expression 'you see but do not see'. Also, the clip is about as long as the interstice of the normal blink reflex. Stan says - If you blink you will miss it! Eyes Wide Shut indeed.

As she stands between twin pillars, Alice is the perfect picture of the High Priestess of Tarot. The pillars are key. Again, the onlookers 'rear view' reinforces the idea of Isis as visible yet invisible, as the mythic Isis as Priestess of Tarot is described as unseen. We see Her in the many faces of maya, but this is not the complete vignette: the true face of Isis is not revealed, as yet: or is it? No false promises, good reader mine. We will see.

The light source, the illumination for Alice's strip-tease, comes from a lamp in the corner of the room and is reflected by closetdoor mirrors. In 2d relief the lampshade forms a pyramid with no capstone - the Great-Grand-Goggle of Occult symbology. The eye of illumination traditionally pictured above the pyramid is implied by the lamp-light. It is the light of secret initiation. This simple prop - a plain lamp - gives off a lovely and modulating light. By using this hidden glyph - this eye of illumination - Kubrick has winked his own eye as it peers at us, his audience, through the lens of the camera. We are in the middle, between this gleaming eye and the finished work up on the screen. And it is no ordinary work, for it exposes the fact that in EWS as in life, true comprehension of whazz goin' on is only found behind the scene, out of the picture, lurking overhead like an eye in the sky.

It can not be explicated, but discovered only through the correct use of metaphor.

Next is the window at the back of the shot. Alice faces it. The window square is an important Occult signal that I will go into in a later part of our story, but as a teaser here's a wee pip: the Hebrew letter Dalet meaning Doorway also forms the main structure of the letter He, which means Window (a window to another world, as Dr. Harford will find on his odyssey). Secretly, He also means Seed. The combination of a Window and a Seed will grow into a mighty oak during Alice's first and cataclysmic monologue. And a bit more: the idea of a seed entering doorway forming a window to another plane of existence should prick up the ears of any would be psycho-naut and/or fans of Kubrick's 2001:ASO.

The final Occult volley of this first scene comes from a game of love, namely: tennis. Games are doubtless afoot in EWS, but much more than serving up a historical Ace on the courtly game of Kings and Queens (all the good people play, you know) the criss-crossed rackets that sit on the floor at the base of the pyramid lamp are are a masterful trump of occult messaging. Pink Floyd fans will recall the use of tennis (table tennis, in this particular case) as an image from the video for The Division Bell's “High Hopes.” Like EWS, The Division Bell is a self-acknowledging critique of the cybernetic model of Norbert Wiener. Stanley Kubrick instructs that the binary exchange of information must be appreciated from a subjective, metaphoric standpoint.

Thusly, EWS will reveal that the game of l'oeuf is much more than just knockin' some balls across the net - it is the nihilistic initiative to crack the Cosmic Egg and con the game. To hoodwink evolution and end the objective exchange of information with subjective union: a guilt free booty-call. It's the weird hieros-gamos at the center of the Masked Ball. The act of Sexual Magick that these high-falootin' fuck-ohs believe might produce Rosemary's Baby or some other freaky shit.

Ya gotta love it.

Looking for Dr. Goodbill

Two dominant themes are introduced in the first line of dialog, delivered by Tom Cruise's priggish alter ego Dr. Bill: Honey, have you seen my wallet? The Act of Seeing (or Looking) and Money (Bills, both as credit and debit).

Stanley Kubrick got started as a photographer for a magazine called Look. The repeated references to the Act of Looking dovetails EWS with Kubrick's early work as a shutterbug. The same device also connects the action to the title of the film. I will leave the reader to scavenge for these many references so rich with nuance when looking for themselves. Have fun. Wear dark glasses.

As for the theme of Money, well, it's a specific Occult emphasis. And it is no accident that we are talking about American Money. At Ziegler's party, when Alice introduces herself to Szandor Szavost, she states: ...I'm American. She may as well open with: I am Money. This exchange pays toll to the opening image of Alice as Isis. The now well known sigil for Isis is that of the Dollar Sign: $$. One doesn't need to be an economist to see it spells Is-is. There is square and solid foundation to this claim. The common depiction is of Isis seated or standing upon a Cube. This Cube represents Saturn, her father, from whose brow she issues forth. Now, Isis is often tied to the number 7. This is because she is the seven veils of the maya, beyond which lie the pure light of the Supernals. This image is recreated as the cabbalistic Tree of Life, with its Ten Sephirot. The lower 7 of 10 houses represent the forces that act upon and form the material world, the false Matrix. Above and distant are the 3 Supernal Houses, separated from the lower 7 by the veil of Isis, shown in this rendering as the abyss. Old school images of Isis, rendered in 2d, show Isis upon a simple four-sided Square. This counts, for it gives us the fraction 7/4. On Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon the track called Money is measured in 7/4 time. The shattering meaning of the fraction 7/4 and the esoteric secrets of money will follow. Be a good patient.

For now, the undertow of the Money motif is the objectification of women as a fundamental denial of reality. Throughout his dark night, Dr. Bill treats Money like he does Women. He doesn't look at it. He doesn't understand it. dHe doesn't love it. He just uses it. The ignorance of this objectification is refracted into an array of metaphoria. EWS is an exhaustive and gross anatomy on the Cartesian corpus of objectivity. Under the knife, Dr. Bill is a dunce beyond compare. Through obedience to the fallacious model of universal objectivity, Harford is become a false ego and blind to the simplest processes of the world he inhabits.

I want to take a quick look at the probable background of our good-buddy Dr. Harford. He likely comes from the home of on overbearing and overprotective Mother. The traditional Oedipal Mom. Cruise's Doctor Bill is the grown up Danny Torrance (from The Shining), whose nickname was Doc. Bill turns out to be quite brave, caring, and not too stupid, but he is stupendously ignorant of the world he's living in. He just doesn't see. A perfect bourgeois fool. Monty Python's Upper Class Twit. The refined product of a Western education system built to turn out an obedient class of consumers seduced by the promise of meaningless pseudo-wealth. Dr. Bill is a poor numb skull and he doesn't even know it. He might just as well be penniless.

And about the name Harford: reversed it spells Dr. of Rah. Rah could be a homonym for the Egyptian Sun god Ra. Ra is analog to Apollo, the Greek Sun god, to whom doctors give an oath of service. Also, the meaning of the British slang term Rah has a revealing similarity to the person of Dr. Harford.

Black Christmas in July

EWS was released on July 16th, 1999. Out on a limb, I think that if Stan could've secured a July the Fourth release he would've done so. Perhaps there is a secret in the simple fact that sixteen is four-squared. It happens that July the Fourth is the date of the Ball in the Gold Room, pictured in a still photo at the end of Kubrick's The Shining. There is a neat connexion between this portrait of a ghostly party that happens every day and a sequence from the Python film The Meaning of Life that can help us unwrap the riddle of releasing a Christmas Movie in the summertime. In TMOL, a group of diners die from food poisoning and are whisked-off to Heaven where it happens to be Christmas all the time. In EWS, Kubrick super-impresses July the Fourth onto Christmas. America is the acme of Consumer Culture and the feast of Christ is a feast (like most feasts) of consumption. I'm talking about cannibalism here folks. Transubstantiation. Soylent Green is Jesus, man! By acting out our desire for individualism as consumers of goods and service we partake of the meta-body and blood of Christ. The big pig-out is maxxed for the yuletide season, but it really never stops.

The 20th century addiction to this metaphysical consumption of Christ permeates every level of western culture. This is most certainly engineered by Dr. Bernays (mentioned above) and other social programmers that use the same methodology. The way it is handled in the American and European media would have Marshall McCluhan cry for mercy. Conditioned by TV, Movies, Music, Popular Books and News from infancy, the middle-class now identifies a comfortable life of powerless wealth with the act of glorifying Christ through conspicuous market consumption. Whether you are Christian or not what matters most is the installation of the value system. Money sharp evangelists like Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar are but a few among pawns moved by the Invisible Hand to nudge humanity into the belief that Christ died for our right to be individuals capable of objective feelings. We are then gently, deftly directed to express these feelings in the open marketplace, as users. It is thus that our base animal instinct, so feared by the sociological masters, is funneled into harmless and meaningless consumer behavior. Even knowledge and spirituality have been inexorably fettered to material concerns. Everything is a commodity. The entire so-called free-market is but an engine that drives us to the next Black Christmas.

Yes Virginia, there is a Satan Claus

As we make our first reach into the frozen space of EWS's special use of Christmas symbolism, I begin with some thoughts about Superman, particularly the late 70's flick starring Christ-opher Reeves as The Soup. The child Kal-el escapes Krypton in a starship incubator. A falling star. Later, the young Clark Kent makes for the North Pole to find his long lost father in a palace of ice. The motifs of a Falling Star, of Ice, and the North Pole are a cool note. Ice is a symbol for the planet Saturn - as it is a frozen ball of gases. The falling star is Lucifer, errant son of Satan/Saturn/Santa. Blavatsky, in The Secret Doctrine tells us that Satan is the true name of Jehovah - architect of our Matrix - the eye on the pyramid. And it doesn't matter if it's true and Satan really exists, or instead serves as a programming tool. Santa sees us when were sleeping and knows if we're awake and knows if we've been bad or good, so...

The mere notion alone that there is a mean and chilly old bastard keeping the nightwatch, looking in from on high, is more than enough to keep all of His lost children working happily to further the betterment of humanity through social conditioning, paying with our lives ever upwards into the pyramid of usury. Funny part is, like Dr. Bill, we hardly know it! We are brainwashed to brainwash ourselves. Christ/Superman (and his multiple simulacra) is the infamous policeman in the brain - a programming technology of Satan used to promote the civil behavior of the denizens of Hell. The same cop that anti-consumer groups of the 60's - like the Weatherman - wanted purged from the collective soul - so that humanity could express it's long repressed natural libido and return to the equivalence of form left behind in the Garden of Eden.

Holy Hex-a-gram, Batman!

Now it just so happens that the planet Saturn is in the position North for the ceremonial Ritual of the Hexagram, an act of Magick designed to attune the Magus to the frequency of the Solar System. The Satanic link to the direction of North should not be lost to those with even a touch of Occult awareness. As discussed, the missing term of the acronym EWS is 'N' for North. Because North is only implied but not present in the world of Stanley Kubrick's millennial Manhattan we can then identify Dr. Harford's world, and our own too, as PERDITION. Wherever you are you are lost. Cast out of Eden for eternity. It is a world ruled at super-cosmic arms length from the unreachable arc of Saturn, a god somewhat disappointed by his own creation. The best he could do was send a kid to bring us the good news. We're all immortal. Big Whoop. The bad news: we ain't going nowhere. Nowhere but into a timeless dream. But hey, it's better than Hoboken. To clarify this somewhat elusive point, we must have a hard look at a ceremony called the Ritual of Hexagram, seen through the lens of Stan's 2001 and straight into Clarke's 2010.

Take another look at the cabalistic tree of life. There are Ten Houses, numbered one through ten, and One Forbidden House, numbered eleven. In the Ritual of the Hexagram, house number three (the planet Saturn) is brought down and superimposed over the eleventh house (the planet Uranus). In this way the accepted planetary attribution of Saturn is substituted for the forbidden Uranus to form a perimetric hexagon of houses numbered three, four, five, seven, eight and nine. In the center of the hexagon is house number six (the Sun). The performance of this ceremony now fixes the student at the center of the solar orrery as witness to the movement of the planets as far away as Saturn. The status of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto can be appreciated with a correct understanding of the term forbidden, which in this special sense does not mean disallowed but rather impossible. That Saturn is the extreme limit of this working is symptomatic of TIME itself. Saturn must be known as Father Time to all the good children and is now revealed as an actual entity, the placental wall of which forms the barrier to all temporal phenomena. The official position of Saturn on the tree, which is beyond the veil of the forbidden, is a profound lesson that inside the curvature of TIME we remain completely ignorant of its higher functions. Beyond TIME, we are told is the forbidden, an impossible manifold metaphor. By our association to the impossible unknown realm outside of time, reality within TIME is actually unmanifest. None of it has even happened, at least not in the way we like to assure ourselves. History, both social and natural, is an illusion suspended beyond geometry.

Film buffs don't need to be reminded that Kubrick's first plan for 2001, to culminate around the rings of Saturn, was derailed by the failure to create a convincing mock-up of the mighty Father of Time. The title of Odyssey's final section was called Jupiter and Beyond... as an attempt to compensate for the short-comings of the special effects team. The implication is that, by metaphor, 2001 takes the viewer outside of time. Such discovery is bolstered by the appearance of a second sun as the denoument to Clarke's follow-up, 2010. The gravitronic effect upon planetary motion of the appearance of a solar body in the orbit of Saturn could very well sequence the end of linear time. This one time novelty (2010 was published in the early 1980's) has today become a fully fledged internet conspiracy theory under the name of The Lucifer Project.

We can now easily transpose a distinct class of metaphoric types:

• North, both as an occult orientation and as the magnetic earth-pole of lore.

• Santa Claus

• Satan as a personality and as the planetary body of Saturn

• The alchemical attempt to 'stall' or slow down time (as in the denouement to Superman wherein Superman reverses time)

• The hexagonal shape that has formed at the pole of Saturn

• The Magical Ritual of the Hexagram

For Thomases who doubt the technological basis for ceremonial magick, here are two good leads: Jack Parsons and the distinguished A.C. Clarke. Parsons was Aleister Crowley's hand picked and milk-fed successor. Parsons was also a literal rocket-scientist. A madman and a genius and self styled Anti-Christ. He worked for NASA at the JPL. A.C. Clarke, whose attitude is summed up quite neatly from his own pen -
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” - is also a high mucky-muck at NASA.

Helena's Big Adventure

There is a common device, a page right out of many Fairy Tales, much loved by modern story-tellers and filmmakers. Through this device the enormity of reality is cryptically linked to the dream of girl or young woman. Not to mention the obvious example of The Wizard of Oz, a fine filmic version of this motif can be found in Cronenberg's A History of Violence. In the opening sequence of AHOV, just as a little girl is murdered by a monstrous sociopath, another little girl wakes up from a nightmare, screaming. The viewer is sub-consciously directed to wonder if the killer from the opening scene might've emerged from the girls nightmare. Later, her father, Tom, will be challenged by this same cold killer, and the resulting madness will put him through a grim struggle for the survival of his fragile reality. Violence's Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is in just the same boat as our Dr. Bill.

The transmogrification of a child's dream into a test of her parent's strength-quotient is transparent. To socially proper humans children are of the highest value. The child will test boundaries to ensure the safety of the material world and the cohesiveness of the family unit. The malevolence of reality is scary and a child must re-examine their level of security every time they go to sleep. They use their parents to gauge the limits of the social game. This is the role of the parent - as servant to the child. Foot soldier on the front-line, beating back the inevitable and inexhaustible evil of childish imagination. Most parents I know are horrified of the unblocked potential of their kids, and the child inside themselves.

EWS uses the device of a little girl’s dream to this same effect. In the first act, Helena, the Harford's se7en year old daughter, asks if she can stay up to watch The Nutcracker while mom and dad are gone to Ziegler's Christmas party. This scene, in the commonly pointless Kubrickian fashion, establishes the classical relationship of the master to his audience. The main action of The Nutcracker is the dream of a young girl. Jeffrey Scott Bernstein, in his excellent shot by shot analysis of the first act of EWS, suggests that the reference to 'The Nut-Cracker' is a codeword that EWS is a kind of puzzle - something that one must crack one's nut to understand. The Wrong Way Wizard very much concurs, and will go further. This two word quip, 'The Nutcracker', is vital to the paradox of EWS. Think of the close up eyeballs of A Clockwork Orange: Stan is telling us that, through the medium of the eye, his hero and the audience are about to be peeled wide open. Dr. Bill will be conditioned likewise to Alex de Large. But, instead of a mere 2d movie horrorshow, Bill will stumblebum through the paces of his daughter's wild fantasy world in glorious 3d and straight into the heart of Hades: a gauntlet that will prove or disprove his very genetic viability. Good thing it's only a dream.

Again we consult the tree of life for insight. Please note that the tenth house hangs like a pendulum alone beneath the ninth. When Helena asks to stay up past '...nine o'clock' she provides a diagram of the clockwork pendulum at ten. The Nutcracker Suite is about one hour long. Helena will be up until ten, in the world until ten, but Alice and Bill will stay out past eleven. This key is corollary to the forbidden nature of that which lurks outside of time, beyond the exterior curvature of the orbit of Saturn - no small distance from the world of our perpetual infancy. Uranus is a long way from Saturn. A long fucking way.

Here we go!

The Division Ball

The Christmas party at the Ziegler's is the first operation in the Alchemical Wedding of Bill and Alice Harford. Just as in a prosaic wedding ceremony, the bride and her groom must be separated for a time before being eternally joined in unholy matrimony. After meeting their host and hostess, the Harford's each go their own way. Bill will talk to his long-lost buddy Nick Nightingale and play snakes and ladders with Gayle and Nuala, before being called away to see Victor Ziegler in his private ice-palace: the upstairs bathroom. Alice will make away for a pee and later get drunk and dance with sensual Szandor Szavost, Grandmaster of the 'Order of the Blue Lotus.’ A death worshiper.

To begin, let's follow Doctor Bill. The conversation with his ol' bud Nightingale seems superficial. The two men size each other up, in a friendly way. It's been ten years. They share a drink and a few words before Nick is demanded elsewhere. Not much to see it seems, but it is soil that nurtures a progeny: the casting of individual men, both in EWS and at large, as lone spermatozoa. We learn that Nick hasn't managed to swim quite as near the Cosmic Egg as his med-school pal Bill. This is reinforced by the snippy way that Nick is called off to service by Ziegler's man, a stark contrast to how, only moments later, Dr. Harford is smoothly urged upstairs to meet Ziegler. All of this is added up to show that our Billy is just better stock than the itinerant minstrel Nightingale. More likely to produce. Higher on the food chain.

In no small way, the audience is meant to see Nick and Bill not as individual men but as versions of the same experiment (remember that Apollo is the god of Music as well as Medicine). These frat boys were tuned-up and turned-out to perform by the same fish-factory, but like spawning salmon, only one or two will get far. Dr. Bill, with all his flaws, will make it. Out to the brink of chaos and back, because he is a good man, a good father and a good husband. Nick, so cavalier about his social short-comings, will make it pretty far out to sea but he won't make it home any time soon.

Next is Bill's stroll with Gayle and Nuala. After an awkward introduction, Bill walks a serpentine through a grand concourse with Gayle on his right arm and Nuala his left. The girls want him to come and play where the rainbow ends - a place that Stan has told us, through the stark credit sequences, is total nothingness (or as close as you can get). The enduring image of the trio as they slink along is that of the caduceus, universal shield of the Medical Arts. Physicians, who swear by Apollo, are used as literary and dramatic simulacrum for Christ the Healer. In The Shining, Kubrick dresses Danny Torrance in an Apollo 11 sweater; and of course, Danny's nickname is 'Doc.’ The little doctor Danny is also urged to come away and play, and by a pair of girls no less. Danny and Bill are the Christ at different ages but in the same world: the maze of Satan.

Escorted to Ziegler's bathroom Bill is treated a peek in on the real Victor Ziegler: rapist. Bill may tell himself that ol' Ziggy is just an aging poon-hound get'n'some, but nothing could be further from the truth. The beautiful model with the 'great tits' is a mind controlled sex slave, and not merely, as Ziegler will later scoff: a hooker. There are three features of this scene that merit special attention:

1. The large shower stall in the center of the room.

2. The towels that hang on the towel-rack.

3. Ziegler's quip: “...ah, a snowball, a speedball, something like that. Heroin and Coke.”

Numbers (1) and (2) can be taken at once, just like you do at home. The big glass shower stall and the blue on pale blue towels both inscribe the shape of a cube. The towels in particular form a clear 2d example of a cube, seen with one edge closest to the beholder. The letter 'M' implies this same perspective of a cube. There is little doubt that these cubes stand for (a) the Matrix (b) Free Masonry and (c) the Merovingian Bloodline and muchos more. My own point is of baser stuff: the towels and shower reveal the identity of Victor Ziegler. He is Mephistopholes. The connexion of Santa, Ice, the Cube or Brick and the planet Saturn (who is Satan) has been established. Mephisto is just one more ice-cube in the glass. One more brick in the wall.

It is intriguing that the name Ziegler is Yiddish for bricklayer. Could it be that Ku-brick is telling us the he himself is Ziegler? Perhaps not. But you can bet your bottom dollar that Ziegler has as much power (more!) over the world of EWS as Kubrick over his film version of that world. Stan wanted us to know this.

Victor's account of Mandy's overdose is another cheer (or razz-berry!) at The Wizard of Oz. In OZ, Dorothy and her clique are led into a field of poppies (heroin) where they fall to sleep. But Good Glinda sends snow (cocaine) to wake them up. This bitchin' cocktail is the speedball that Victor says Mandy has taken. Kevin Smith, in his comely little film Clerks, reminds us that a snowball is performed when lovers share, in a kiss, the semen produced by fellatio. You may notice that although Ziegler maintains that it has been five or more minutes since Mandy went over the rainbow, he is just pulling up his pants as Dr. Bill comes to the door. And take special note of the framing of Ziegler's mouth as it overlays the large Klimt-esque portrait of a nude that hangs on the wall behind him. Was Ziegler sharing a snowball with Mandy just before the doctor came to the rescue? There is specific Occult text that supports such an idea. We will learn more as we go looking for Alice.

The Red Queen

Alice has twirled away to the loo. She peed just a short while before leaving home and for some reason worth noting, has to go again. Was she into the hooch before leaving for the party? Maybe, but I think it might be something a touch more sensitive. Alice is in or approaching menstruation. When sly Szandor Szavost chooses Alice to woo, he can smell blood. He drinks her champagne as a bold prelude to his desire to engage in the reversed version of Ziegler's bathroom snowball. He wants to consume her. Period.

Szavost to Alice: Have you seen Victor's collection of renaissance bronzes...do you like the period? Mmmmm...replies Alice with the sound of lips bathed in milk and honey. Renaissance Bronze is the tangy metallic taste of Alice's period; it renews, maybe immortalizes, if you can get at it. Szavost will try. The Occult ritual revealed is related, in poetic code, by Crowley in The Book of Lies. The Stanza in question, called The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs, is also numbered 69. Go figure.

It is at this point that we draw precariously nigh onto the more dizzying heights of EWS. Da WWWiz proffers a second warning: I have mummy truths to tell. Mock me at your peril.

I never liked a Vampire I didn't meet

OK. Szandor Szavost is a Vampire. There I said it. Szavost, like the best story tellers, sticks to his own story. He is Ovid himself, not a reincarnation, mind you, but Ovid in person. Understand this: I am talking about a real Vampire here, and not merely within what readers may presume to be the imaginary world of EWS. Da WWWiz's Vampire hypothesis strikes right at the heart of the conspiracy hinted by Mr. Leon Weber in his Ears Wide Shut. Recall that said conspiracy moves across the globe from east to west - quite literally fleeing the daylight.

A cursory exam of mainstream Vampire mythos is helpful. The problem with being a Vampire is well known. You must take care to avoid creating new vampires or conspicuous corpses. There is a mob of stake and torch wielding villagers around every corner and man are they pissed. The Vampire community poses the only viable alternative to extinction - the socialization of Vampirism. This is affected through the twin mechanics of education and fashion, symbolized by Nuala and Gayle. Fashion (Gayle) is used to disguise the pantheon of bloodsuckers down through the ages by subtle changes in appearance. Education (Nuala) is straight-up hypnotism: the self-satisfied Cartesian Quadratic framework and its malformed progeny, Objectivism, and no more than a storefront magic trick. All done with mirrors.

Nowadays, Vamps hardly sleep at all, they just change into bats a few hours before dawn and make flaps for the next party westward, where horny housewives, out for a night in society, linger, a little tipsy, just dripping with red red groovy. Yum-yum. And for lady Vamps, a salty seaman is just as tasty and some say twice as nutritious. Come, come, little children - love one another. And so it is that no Vampire who cares for his good name has bothered to kill anyone in aeons - to bite you not. Nowadaze they just wanna eat you out. As for Da WWWiz, count me in.

By comparing the progressive curve of concentric circles, we can extrapolate that the nature of Vampirism is exactly that of One World Judeo/Christo-ethical politic economics and the B.S. objective spiritualism perpetrated every morning from somewhere over Tibet. Every solar day the charming cult of Vamps circle the globe through a chain of what becomes an endless party at the edge of night. This is made possible only by the slower cycloid movement, along the same curve and to the same point, of the parasitic cartel of international banks and churches that serve the necessary social framework to support the champagne life of jet-setting Vampire glitterati.

Baby Love

At home after the party the naked Bill and Alice make out in front of a mirror. The music is Chris Isaak's throbbing “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing.” The pivotal term is baby. As Dr. Bill staggers blindly through the streets of Greenwich Village later on in the movie, he passes the same mailbox (male) over and again. On the side, in graffiti, reads the word baby. The baby in question is the good doctor himself, as the Christ Child. The lost seed looking for a land to find his purchase. And the bad bad thing? Well fucking of course. To Freud, whose theory is at the seat of EWS, every hetero-lay was a session of incest. The only fuck ever is between Oedipus and Jocasta: the Rejects of Eden, whose bloodline flows into the veins of Christ.

The same frame work is played out in the miserable novel and even more miserable film Cold Mountain, a cheeze-ball version of Homer's Odyssey. Cold Mountain is the story of a poor schlub who makes his way across a civil-war zone just to give his seed the proper home and then get killed for nothing. But that's OK cuz he sired a little squirt: a girl. Cold comfort. The sum total of this equation is that men are little else but sperm donors. Kubrick delivers the same mail. Men are lost children. A one in a million shot. Is anyone surprised?

More beautiful is the mirror motif as a tool of MKUltra. Many readers of Da WWWiz are already informed of the meaning of the mirror in programming language. Some extreme theorists may even argue that, in programming sessions, victims are forced to gaze into a mirror, sometimes a broken mirror, to reinforce the shattered persona desired by the programmer. But such vulgarities are hardly necessary and rarely, if ever employed. Faced with the truth of it, conspiracy theorists needs must be disappointed. There is no working MKUltra outside of the already ancient and perfectly codified media deluge that goes back to Noah. You, you trans-finite thumbsucker, paid to see Eyes Wide Shut, didn't you? If you think about it, you are paying still. The price of freedom is your very memory.

We follow the piper for our lives.

Intermezzo: Valses Noble et Sentimental

The graceful gymnopedie that opens the 2nd act is a deft ballet of Middle American Life with a malevolent subtext. Dr. Harford, at the office, softly asserts his blind male chauvinism. He doesn't give even a glance to the women who work for him. He walks on by. Meanwhile, back at home, Alice has a simple and intimate day with her daughter . She is an involved, caring and patient mother. But an evil lurks beneath. This innocent little montage shows a culture careening out of control in the act of soulless consumption and conformity.

I hone in on two special examples. The doctor's exam of a young lad and the scene of Alice and Helena wrapping Christmas gifts. There is a dark bond between these scenes from a marriage.

To start us off we need some shading from master wit Oscar Wilde. In his intro to Dorian Grey, Wilde offers a very tidy commentary on the oceanic subject of ART. The summation of his thesis: All art is useless. As usual, Wilde his having his way with us. The value given art by the unwashed mushrooms of the middle-class is fatuous, a fantasy of good taste. The real worth of art is that it is used by an elite class to manipulate mankind at large. Art in this sense is a Cartesian lattice framework. All of its relationships are presumed unbounded, which is to say, on the exterior of a sphere, as is the phony Cartesian/Newtonian universe. Wilde's art is useless is analog to the MGM motto: Ars Gratia Artis. Wilde prefers wit to Latin. Art, Wilde seems to say, is useless because it is entirely self referential, but not without use. It is the chief tool of the Great Social Cluster Fuck, disseminated through church and corporation as one, to promote the illusion of an unhinged algebraic house of cards that threatens to collapse at any and every moment.

The particular work of art at play in EWS is the 'Passion of the Christ.’ No, not Mel's version. This passion is planted like a land-mine hidden in a school yard. So that you have a chance to see it coming, here is how it trips off...

Dr. Bill examines a wee-feller while a concerned mom looks on. For this instant, the doctor has been cast in the role of Joseph at the nativity scene. A chilly virgin hovers over her angel-boy. The doctor asks of the boy-child two questions one right after the other: Are you looking forward to Christmas? and Does this hurt? (as he touches the boys throat!). These questions are meant to be taken as one. Does it hurt? Christmas, that is? The answer is a killer. Damn right it does, Doc. It is after all, the cannibalism of my eternally resurrected flesh, dude. Touching the boys throat as he does, Dr. Harford recalls that many pre-Gutenberg myths of Christ have him meet his fate upon the gibbet. And of course, Judas, the unmasked Christ, hanged himself.

The melody at Dr. Harford's office plays a canon to the domestic bliss at home. Alice is wrapping an expensive Van Gogh art book. This simple image conveys the role of art in the life of the bourgeois. Middle class values are wrapped-up, packaged, and otherwise starkly meaningless. As culturally Christian consumers the Harfords, like the Americans they stand in for, are rashly unaware of the dark Satanic mill that feeds their breezy, shallow life of consumption. Meta-Christ is crucified every time a credit card is authorized for a pair of Manolo Blahniks or a big screen TV or a donation to the United Way or a trip to Yosemite 'to find myself.’ We have rigorously programmed ourselves to trade in our presumably natural and quite pedestrian desire for hot, man on woman, man on man, woman on woman, sister on brother action, for the chance to self-identify with Christ by going shopping. Sit on Santa's lap. Don't pay a cent until 2012.

And, at least according to EWS, it's better that we don't give in to these carnal urges so easily controlled by our hidden masters. We might accidentally have some fun: forget who we think we are and do as we really want to.

Johnny Appleseed

I have a peculiar idea about the use of weed as a symbol for a space-seed. Could it be that marijuana is actually a seed or virus that carries a message from outside the reach of the orbit of Earth? Compare the well publicized 'secret code' for weed, 420, with the final message (42) delivered by Douglas Adam's Deep Thought, from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Add to this the occult flashcard glyph for the planet and influence of Jupiter, as seen on the tree of life in house number four. Deep Thought is a computer that bears remarkable similarity to another Incredible Machine, a certain HAL, that can now be telegraphed from orbit around Jupiter and right onto the fascination of cuddly Kubrick. If you meditate on it the next time yazz all get hizzy, perhaps a bell will ring. But for now peep in as Bill and Alice smoke some herb in their bedroom and da shizzle hits the fizzle, nizzle.

The main theme of Alice's withering monologue hinges upon a Window. He, the fifth letter of the Hebrew Alpha-Bet and analog to the English letter E, means both Window and Seed. This is a germinal touchstone. Alice delivers her monologue, on the floor with her legs folded, right beneath a big window. The eyes are drawn to the window because Kubrick has rearranged the props on display in the window sill. Where before sat a Christmas card reading 'Peace' and other sundry paraphernalia, now there is a stack of Video Tapes (screen right) and a stack of CDs (screen left) perched in each corner of the window like pillars with Alice's head centered between them. Does she recall her memory of illicit love from the twin media of Philip K. Dick's Valis or the like? Yeah, in a big way. But that is not all. The empty window is Alice's head, or more pointedly, her mind, so the first message of this scene is that the nature of reality is entirely subjective. The window, and by metaphor, Alice's mind, is divinely empty, the so called tabula rasa. A bona fide holy grail to philosophers. Now, with the window at the position of 'north' we can trace the lightning path by spelling out the acronym EWS. North, as the first media, is the empty window/mind and is paired with the topmost house of the tree of life. What resides herein is permanently ineffable and entirely pure. Imagination. Next, at the East, is the second media, which is produced, like video-tape, by the application of magnetic feedback. In the third media, at the Western gate, are the CDs: binary language as the first manifestation of the Logos. At South is Alice's vulva, which as media, acts as the extreme barrier between the material and spiritual realm.

Listen closely to Alice's stress of the English word He as she drops her A-bomb. The He of which she speaks is the young naval officer of her Cape Cod fantasy-fuck. A naval officer is a seaman. A Seaman is semen. Semen carries the seed. The seed is He. Now I am well aware that the proper articulation of the Hebrew letter He is as Hay, but poetic license is at work here folks. Alice's He is the semen of all men, all potential breeding stock. The shell-shocked Bill is learning, for the first time, that a woman's love of a man begins and ends not in the heart but in the loins that will nurture his seed. Alice has unwittingly unleashed the daemon.

It is neat that Kubrick blocks his actors to mirror the deathbed scene in 2001 with Bill as Bowman and Alice, with the window looming over her, as the Monolith. Poor Bill is nowt but a dribble of dust that must enter the living as a seed among millions in the vast and fickle space of Woman-hood. It's no wonder that he doesn't feel so special anymore. Just watch, under Kubrick's tender lighting, as he turns quite yellow.

For pop culture buffs: there is a funky link between this idea of a seed: He, 2001, and the kids TV show The Electric Company. In an oft-run cartoon sketch from TEC, an old man is observed reaching towards a monolithic stone to the music of Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra. As the stone crumbles it reveals a lower case e. The music rises as the old man cries: Eee! Eee! Eee!

The Harfords live in apartment 5a. Ea! Ea! Ea!

What, gentle friend, do you make of that?

Late last night, while we were all in bed...

The phone rings in the marital boudoir, interrupting Alice's revelations. The doctor is needed for a late night house call - a patient has died.

Bill's condolence call to one Marion Nathanson, old maid, is both a mirror to Alice's monologue and is crossed over with Oedipal vertices. As his cab races into the Village, Bill is driven through a fire lane. In The Shining there is a curiously elliptical scene (warning: this scene has been cut from older American prints). In it, Danny and Wendy Torrance sit watching Summer of '42 on TV. So42 is a tale of the love affair of a teen boy and much older woman. Stretched out on the spacious floor of The Shining's Overlook Hotel, a squirrelly Danny Torrance will ask his mother if he can go get his toy fire truck. His clinging mom doesn't want to let him go - but Danny smells smoke. It's the Oedipal fire.

Bill too is about to be scorched by Oedipal determinism. Lou Nathanson lay dead in his bed, where Marion is holding a lonely wake. And in apparent grief this beautiful and older woman will offer herself to the good doctor, heart and soul, just as Alice might to her Seaman if given half a chance. Marion's confession to Harford: I love you, I love you...! is cold hard proof that Alice is on da money. The entirety of Alice's argument is cemented for good. A woman will give everything away for one chance at primal life-giving communion. And just as Dr. Bill died on the inside at Alice's unravelment, so will he end up dead like hopeless Marion's poor dad. His own powers can not save him. The physician heals nothing. His once realized ego is a total shambles.

And Dr. William Harford's journey through Hell is just beginning.

Wandering Dude

As we descend onto the streets of the Village, I would like to overlook the much loved idea that Bill's outlands d'amour on his widening erotomaniacal gyre are the manifestation of the good doctor's own psycho-sexual mentations. Kubrick wanted his audience to come to this very view-point, but it is a false-witness to conceal a fact that few movie-goers can confront head-on: that each and every social transaction in the western-hemisphere and probably the whole-world-wide is enfolded-entire by the mystery of sex. All of them. Havelock Ellis quipped: Sex is the central problem of life. Kubrick divides Ellis' black and white one-off into a spectrum of correspondences and Dr. Bill's every encounter will carry it home. Power (especially in the exchange of money or service) is the basis of social structure, and sex is not only the ultimate expression of this of power, it is its most critical component - just ask algebraic psychoanalyst Lacan (not at all co-incidentally a faithful Freudian).

The basic human need to express ourselves sexually has been decoded and then retooled as the the instrument of mass social-control. I won't speculate that Freud himself, or his inner circle, intended the theory of the psycho-sexual human to be used in such a way as I have edified. But there can be no doubt that Bernays and other 20th century social engineers intended exactly the full range of sensual response to be channeled into the maintenance of the class-based structure of so-called civilization - and they were successful.

Rough Trade

Let's examine Harford's confrontation with the Yalies.

The term homosexual is an oxymoron. One can't have sex with someone of the same sex as oneself. Sex is the act of coupling that may bear progeny. William Jefferson Clinton exploited this semantic distinction to his everlasting infamy. Whatever you are doing, suggests Clinton, it ain't sex unless it might make a baby. Homosexuality could be better termed homoeros. Homoeroticism is one behavior of the children of Pan, but is not sex. Homoeros is a sociological by-product, engendered by the bizarre quarantine of the sexes as they mature through adolescence. One need only attend a gay-pride parade to see how closely the civilized gay community holds the right to freely express their sexual selves with the freedom of being children. There is no western-type homosexuality to be found in isolated tribal cultures and it goes without saying that children in such cultures usually achieve adult sexual expression at a much younger age than in the civilized world. Yes, of course there are homosexuals in these tribal cultures, but this is found mostly connected with the shamanic proclivity to explore the extremes of experience. The shaman is often trans-genderal and is generally regarded with fear and respect - the opposite of how western-homosexuals are treated by the culture they struggle with and within.

Dr. Bill's troubling encounter with the Yalies can now be solved. As a group of the same sex the young men are completely safe to express their normal and childlike homosexual urges in an attack on Bill. A curious proof for this contention from Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451. The firemaster is reaming out two subalterns in his glass-walled office. He is very angry at the two young fireman, who seem a smidge chagrined by it all. In the next moment the firemaster will ask Montag, hero of F451, to organize some sports for the morale of the firemen. Games, sports and everyone's fav, global thermonuclear war, are the well known and well worn bi-roads of male homosexual sublimation. Back in EWS, the Yalies are just a team of pre-pubescent boys in the shower after gym-class, yearning to be touched and to reach out and touch, and the only ones in sight are other little boys.

Within this twenty seconds of EWS lies the answer to the persistently annoying question: why is being gay such a problem, anyway? Well, because the unleashed freedom of sensual expression will cause the complete breakdown of society, that's why.

Economy, Class, Government, Elite Power, all of it will be lost for good as we revert to Eden.

Tiajuana Taxi

The reported homoerotic initiations of Yale's Skull and Bones society give another clue to this scene as a specifically post 9/11/2001 event.

Who remembers David Fincher's dog-daze thriller The Game: where hero Michael Douglas is drugged and dumped in Mexico, literally nailed into a coffin. Of course it's for his own good and the same can be assumed true of Bill's run-in with the gay bashers: the Yahoo-Yalie's are bragging about their recent shenanigans in Mexico and as they meet Bill, one can spy a taco shop across the street. The link here is Mexico. Mexico (and sometimes Spain) is a cinematic shop-code for death or the near death experience. Think, if you like, of the recent simulacra of Q's 2001: Aronofsky's The Fountain. The Fountain is set in Spain and like it's Grandpa 2001, is obsessed with the mystery of death (2001 just hides it much better). Any major-meta-movie whizz will surely tell you the the motif of Mexico/Spain = Death is used over and again, and especially by American filmmakers.

Conspiracy theorists hop around ground-zero, NYC, like jumping beans. Ask and most can give startling details of the myriad web that links the Skull and Bones Society to the protracted events leading up to 9/11. Many a robust young researcher has been exhausted chasing leads to back before the second world war and yonder still. There are some sharp points to be made, no doubt, for those with a nose for finery, but Da WWWiz wishes to show the big rainbow connexion. 9/11 = Death. We have blinked, missed the rapture, and hopskotched the kingdom of Malkuth straight into Hell. 9(10)11. It is just that simple and just that awesome. The overarching mystery of 9/11 is no commonplace conspiracy, but the full-scale initiation of humanity into death culture. EWS is both a document and keystone to these events: on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, all the lost souls were dragged, kicking and screaming, beyond the surly bonds of Time toward Uranus and the depths of Hades. O shit!

As we follow Harford through the streets what must be post 9/11 Manhattan, we dare to broach our most intricate of design.

Her Name is Mystery

Domino, meet Bill. Bill, meet Domino. Domino is not a prostitute. One: she actively pursues Dr. Bill. Two: she is uneasy about discussing both sex and money. Three, and this is proof positive: she kisses like nobody's bid-ness. Pros don't kiss.

The trouble with Domino is not who she so clearly is not but rather: who is she?

Domino unmasked is the Whore of Babalon. She is Sex as Plague but she will spare the doctor. He may be faithful after all. Good luck, as he pulls out of his embrace with Domino, he is away with just a bit of a cough. And as we find out later, she'd have infected him without mercy if he'd failed this little test. She was ready to mark him with her very blood. Domino's apology to Bill: ...it's the maid's day off... is a clue that she may be nearing menstruation and the scrambled eggs in her frying pan tell the same tale. Bill gets out alive... just. As said whore of undeserved infamy, Domino chances Bill a slower journey where Gayle and Nuala wanted to lead him but quick. And just where is where the rainbow ends? Death. Paradise. The flat face of a rectangular domino is just that of the upward faces of a pair of dice. Through Kubrick's crafty punnery we identify Domino, as we have Alice in the rear-view mirror, as Isis, and particularly as her Seventh Manifestation, which is the final barrier between the world of the living and the dead.

Isis, we see, has many faces. Seven, the highest prime from one thru ten, is an occult expression for transfinite complexity. Simply, one can understand that seven is always just one less than INFINITY. Fractions with a denominator of seven repeat a decimal array of seven digits, endlessly.

Money Shot

Here is a rough pitch of our ascent. We must establish, once and for all, the bond between Time and Money and the fraction 7/4. Note that 7/4 is a rebus for July the Fourth. Our 4d Matrix is measured as if within a cube and by four axes: Forward and Back. Up and Down. Left and Right. Before and After (O, Tempora!).

cubes within cubes

Occult keeners will note that the cube is a prominent symbol of the planet and planetary influence of Saturn. Saturn, our Father Time, is the father/sole generator of Isis, who, as Manly P. Hall tells us, issues fully formed from her father's brow. Isis is seated or standing upon the cube. In 3d there are three faces to this cube. This is famous triple manifestation of the Supreme Goddess taught by J.G. Frazer, Robert Graves and other pagan/occult researchers. Fun cube factoid: When looking at a cube in 3d one can see only 7 corners of the cube. Ancient 2d images of Isis show her upon the square. Placement of 3d/2d gives the integral fraction of... 7/4.

Stoned co-eds of every place and name glow a rich green when they tell you that if you overlay The Wizard of Oz with Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon the color sequence of TWOZ begins precisely at the moment the track “Money” rolls out its first cha-ching. In cinema jargon this is called a money shot. A money shot is any shot that is extra-especially aimed to impress the audience. Please recall that Floyd's “Money” is metered out in the very rare 7/4 time signature.

Deeper investigations will note that a little earlier in TWOZ, the Wicked Witch of the West appears in her guise original (as mean old School Marm Elmira Gulch) at the precise moment of the wake-up chimes that begin Floyd's Time: track #3 of DSOTM. As we go deeper still, keep in mind the slate black gown worn by The Wicked Witch. The Black Robe is a standard symbol of Saturn. Now it just so happens that when you overlay DSOTM with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey Floyd’s “Time” peals out at the precise moment that the Slate Black Monolith first appears to the proto-human tribe. Later on, when Money begins, the viewer of 2001 will see, for the one and only time in the movie, the IBM logo. It is right there, readable above an on board navigation monitor as the Pan Am Jet docks with the International Space Station. Watch for it!

The connexion of Floyd’s Time to the Black Monolith ought to be straight away clear: Saturn = Time. It happens we prefer that an acronym of International Space Station spells ISIS. IBM is the industry standard for cash registers. And, as stated, I-S-I-S overlain is $$.

ISIS, by now, must = 7. So, it thusly follows that seated upon a square she becomes 7/4. This explains Floyd’s use of the unusual 7/4 Time signature for the track Money.

$$ = ISIS = Money.

Isis - Cash Cow

The legitimacy of the 2001/DSOTM/Wizard of Oz super-synch-up must be seen to be believed. Here are your instructions.

1. Syncing OZ and DSOTM is simple enough: just start the movie from the MGM Logo at the same time as the first track DSOTM. Put your CD player on replay and watch the whole movie to the strains of Floyd.

2. The 2001/DSOTM sync is a bit trickier, but completely justified. After considerable experimentation Da WWWiz has determined that the album DSOTM is, in fact, actually designed for play over the opening of 2001. Please carry out this protocol yourself. Begin playing DSTOM at the attack of the last note of the Title Overture Also Sprach Zarathustra. If you wonder, gentle friend, why wait!? for the end of Sprach to start up the Floyd sync, consider the following: the theme of Sprach is a cryptologic spelling of the name ISIS. Strauss called his theme, which is inscribed musically as 1-5-1-5-1, the Nature Theme. Nature is of course the Matrix of Illusion and ISIS is understood as the Master of that very same illusion. It should fascinate that by reading the numbers of the Nature Theme as letters we are given ISIS-I.

3. Enjoy the multitude of synchro-niceties. Be the first kid on your block to collect all INFINITY of them!

Now we can extrapolate that annoying little nugget of 9/11 symbol-synch, the precise occult meaning of the number 175. The potential meaning of flight numbers 11, 77, and 93 proved an easy tumble for 9/11 researchers with a bit of occult background. 11 has been clarified. 77 is the Hebraic numeric that means 'OZ', which oughta satisfy on 77 for our purposes. 93 is a bit tougher, but research unearths that 93 is a numeric for Aleister Crowley's word 'Thelema', which means 'The Law'. We will read for this degree just ahead when we face at last, the nature of natural law, but for now, what of the flight numbered 175. As yet, no link is clear, unless...

Well, I’ll bet my bottom dollar that 7/4 = 1.75. So at long last and not to put to fine a point on it: Flight 175 struck the South Tower. It was the second tower to be struck. The attack that most everyone awake saw as it happened. The big moment of 9/11. To coin a phrase: Flight 175 was the Money Shot. Dr. Bill offers Domino One-Fifty for her services, hinting both the nature of Bill's full desires (crudely: $50 per hole), and that he is too shy-shy for the pot-o-gold at the end. Bill's wanderlust circles gingerly toward nowhere, through the maze of the post 9/11 Village of OZ.

Let's join him and go dig some tunes...

Maverick and Goose

Down in the Sonata Cafe, pianist Nick Nightingale is just finishing his last set with a pick-up quartet. His fortune-telling session with his ol' pal Bill is gonna turn out to be the last mistake he'll ever make. Soon he'll be with the fishes in the East River. The sad part is that in this melancholy world of ours, poor Nick can't help but spill the beans to his friend. The explanation for this is found again in the sexual power struggle modeled by Lacan. Nick's and Bill's chat is a magnification of their previous meet at Ziegler's Christmas party; a standard boys club oneupsmanship. The message here is that such exchanges are critical to the programming language of social communication. Men must test their sexual worth as a matter of self-preservation. As Kubrick has already taken home in 2001, only one of us is going to make it big. A guy's gotta take every chance, no matter the caution. It's survival, man.

Through this innocent tete-a-tete Bill will learn that he's not as far up the totem as he has always believed. Nightingale, it seems, knows of a world Bill himself has yet to imagine. Because this is an affront to his sexual ego, Bill cannot let Nick's squawking show him up. He must follow where Nightingale has gone, and go farther still. In this way we understand that both Nick and Bill are victims of an evil mechanism fabricated quite literally for the purpose of upgrading humanity to Supermen. Bill will make it to the red red heart of the Magic Circle, but only to face at last that he is nothing more than a slave to the rhythm. A flash in the pan. Easy to replace. One spermatozoa and about to get flushed... but he don't know it, yet.

And there is greater Gnosis. Bill's and Nick's con-fab is a perfectly woven recapitulation of the betrayal of Christ by Judas, sealed with a kiss. Because this betrayal is the direct action of Judas's free will, we must confront that in EWS, Nick knows that Bill is headed for serious trouble, and probably for death, of a sort. Nick's skittish and amused tone throughout this encounter instruct that it is all a set up. A set up so sophisticated that it operates on the level of reality. Given his personal exposure it is a sad but nevertheless amusing irony that Nick doesn't fully acknowledge he too faces jeopardy. Later, we shall explore the possibility that Nick's future is really quite bright, but for now, before crossing the street to Rainbow Fashions, just a caw about Kubrick's choice of Nightingale as the name for Bill's navigator into the underworld. Of course, a bird sings, and Nick is a perfect pigeon. But: harken to the sly parallel to Cruise's Maverick and Anthony Edward's Goose, from Top Gun. Both Nightingale and Goose are avians who will act as a guide to Cruises' doppelgängers. And like Goose, Nick is soon destined to kiss the sky.

The Costumer is Always Right

Bill buzzes Rainbow Fashions hoping to find proprietor and one-time patient, a Mr. Peter Grenning. He is greeted by the irascible Mr. Millich, who explains that Grenning has moved to Chicago “...over a year ago.” The metaphor is at least two-fold. Peter Grenning is the severed penis of eternal greenman Osiris, object x of Occult worship. But one flap westward along the Vampire Great Circle, known to 'the in crowd' as the 20th Century Unlimited, is Chicago: the American Mecca of Freemasonry for 100 years. Bill is way behind the curve, for even following the convolutions of 9/11, he hasn't figured in the necessity of moving the money out before the fire. Dr. Bill is the last Manhattan Man. Dazed and bankrupt.

The interior layout of Mr. Millich's quaint olde shoppe, Rainbow Fashions, has an interesting ability. It rearranges itself every night. Fans of the marvelous Alex Proyas flick Dark City ought to twig to this right away. Dark City is a comicbook boiler-plate for the Manipulation of Mankind by an Invisible Elite. And so it goes...

In Rainbow Fashions Kubrick interlaces image and text from three of his early works: 2001, A Clockwork Orange and Lolita.

The long black carpet of the display room is Kubrick's Monolith. Kubrick uses the same trick in The Shining when Danny reaches to touch the door of Rm. 237. Bill's nightmare-ride is initiated by a likewise touchstone - the black carpet upon which he stands. And the same promenade of ghouls is traced straight from the closing scene of ACO. In it, Alex de Large, hero of Orange, is number-one with a bullet. His trials would make Bill's seem like a trip to the Bronx Zoo. But he is of a wee-bit tougher stuff. In the final shot of ACO we see Alex at the old in-out-in-out with a quite malenky young devotchka who would obviously rather be elswhere. Flanking the lovers are two rows of applauding gentry, dressed in Edwardian Sunday-best, urging them onward in their abandon. Bill, on Millich's carpet, between the rows of costumed mannequins, is at the same party. Unlike de Large, he will be put out on his ear. I think it is fair to say that droog Alex is the reincarnation of Bill, the capitulation of Bill's failure to break the chains of Oedipal determinism. As Alex, Bill is stripped once and for all of his misgivings and neurosis. Alex is a pure living machine and will hear the cheers of Valhalla as easily as falling out of a window. Dr. Bill, on the other hand, will have to be patient.

And what of Lolita, so dolorous and hazy. The sitting area, where Lee-lee is caught inflagrante delicto by Mr. Millich, playing house with her Japanese boy-toys, is a cozy Reichian Orgone room that everyone wishes they had in the back-yard or basement. Inside it everyone is a child and it's perfectly OK if that childish magic turns into sexual exploration. The Organism demands it. Making her escape from daddy's put-on rage, Little Miss Millich, just as Lolita to Humbert Humbert, will whisper a sweet nothing into Dr. Bill's ear: You can love me. It is the featherlight touch of a genius. The pure sexual energy of children can not be suppressed, says Stan. Willy-nilly - for as we will be assured when we return our costume to the ruthless old Mr. Millich, young desire can be diverted into a commercial concern.

Swing Low Sweet Chariot

In his taxi outside Somerton, Dr. Bill tears in two a one hundred dollar bill, to persuade his driver to wait for him. First: the position of Dr. Bill in relation to the cabbie. It is a mirror to just before, at Rainbow Fashions, when Miss Millich stands behind the brave doctor to hide from her father's raging. Connoted herein is the framework of a psycho-sexual power structure. Miss Millich takes a position of control, she has Doctor Bill wrapped around her finger. In the back seat of the chariot, Bill holds the same current of sexuality over his driver. This image repeated later as Ziegler delivers his veiled threat on the lives of Bill and his family, in his billiard room. The stress is that power is wielded from above and behind. Roughly the position of a movie-goer unto the lens of the projection room. This is way, way more than a blithe academic statement about power of the filmmaker over his audience - it's the working of a master programmer on the collective soul.

The torn hundred is the rending of the Mother. The essence is that of Isis, the eternal woman. We are being treated to another variation of the inexorable link between Money, in particular American Money, and the Goddess. A cursory look at part of the Gnostic Myth: the immortal human, Christ/Lucifer, the Wandering Jew, pulled himself away from his Father's perfection as an act of self-discovery. The best analog is that of the Buddha, who left his father's walled palm-garden to achieve enlightenment. Enlightenment and Illumination are one mechanism. Anyway, in Gnostic terms, so that the eternal child would not fade away and die at last, the Great Mother will rend her own body and use a piece of herself to surround him as he tumbles endlessly across the cosmos in search of a home he will never find. This womb and its stillbirth are the twins of PKD's Valis, Isis and Osiris, designated mourners one to another. When Bill tears money he is re-enacting the really-big-shoo of the Gnostic Cosmic Magic Trick, he is tearing a woman in half.

Also present here in the cab is the idea of re-deem-shun. Just as Bill, in just a few wild and weird minutes forward, will be re-deemed by the Mysterious Woman, he will redeem the torn bill for his ride home to the safety of his true-love's arms.

Semper Fi

It is time to decode the password to the ball: FIDELIO. There are many intriguing facets to this term. It is the name of a Beethoven Opera with a thematic motif similar to EWS. It is the name of magazine, published by the Schiller Institute: baby of American political marginalist Lyndon H. LaRouche. Schiller, who penned the poem that inspired Beethoven's 9th, wrote, often controversially, on politics and economy. The Schillerian doctrine is the foundation to LaRouche's core philosophy. Kubrick, as Leon Weber tells us in his Ears Wide Shut, subscribed to Fidelio Magazine. I can't help but wonder how he might've read and chuckled as LaRouche strains to marry a utopian socio-economic plan with the principles of transfinite math. LaRouche is a really smart guy who falls into a old trap. He seems bitter at the triumph of the oligarchic Il Nuovi faction that has the world in the cruel grip of a talon, while at the same he celebrates the unutterable perfection of Nature. By his own carefully weighted arguments, we must expect LaRouche to hate the beaver building a dam as much as he does the economic and political factions that have built his own world. The mature response to such a discovery, Da WWWiz thinks, is one of awe and not of rage, however politely expressed.

FIDELIO is a seven letter word that means faithful. We speak not of the faith shown by one person or committee of persons to another, nor of the faith in a speculative god or gods. Instead, this is the faith of complete abandon, which one must show before being permitted to enter the circle and cross the abyss of chaos. By pronouncing his right to entrance, Bill trips in behind the seventh curtain and into...

The Houses of the Holy

The winding drive up to Somerton is a look back at both The Shining and Full Metal Jacket. I am thinking of the Sidewinder, the road leading to the Overlook Hotel, and of the crooked-creeks of the Nam seen from the helicopter ride on Joker's trip to Hotel Company. Kubrick superimposes the plan of the Overlook Hotel onto the Ten Rooms of Somerton and by including a similar snap-shot from on high in FMJ, implies the whole stage of human geography is a vast maze of laundry chutes-and-ladders.

The ritual underway is, as discussed, sexual magick against the forward progress of linear time. Horny euro-trash and nouveau rich? Not at all. Satanic Cultists? Now yer talkin’. The music to Bill’s entrance is called Backward Priests. Inside the circle Red Cloak swings his censer, a circle within a circle, and dispatches pairs for the hieros-gamos so carefully calculated, across oceans of time, to forestall the Apocalypse.

And what of the head-scratcher: how is Bill recognized so quickly once inside Somerton? In his lecture series Occult Signs and Symbols, Rudolph Steiner describes the visual faculties of the Atlanteans, our genetic masters. Where the ordinary naked man sees a Vitruvian frame-up, Atlanteans instead see a signature aura. Consider the way in which Dr. Bill is framed with the spotted colored lights of EWS's many Christmas trees. This is how the supreme Occultists and their minions at Somerton discover his identity so easily. He is literally naked to them. The costume conceals nothing. Dr. Harford is swathed in the Emperor's New Clothes.

As Bill enters the ritual red room, please pay special notice to the light from the lamp against the wall. Above the lamp you will find an inverted triangle of light. This is the same eye over the pyramid implied by the lamp in the opening shot of Alice slipping from her dress - but this time the triangle is inverted. Why is this? Well it so happens that the commonly depicted eye over the triangle, the eye of illumination itself, is a trump l'oeuil. As one ascends the pyramid of illumination, it turns out that this eye is actually inverted! One must picture an hourglass. The entire of creation pours from the top and onto the chaotic pyramid below. It is not until near the top of the wood pile that one can behold that the eye of creation is inverted to the world. The hourglass is the tool of Father-Time. Kubrick cements this keystone with the slow zoom in on Ziegler, the brick-layer, looking down and then nodding at Bill from the upper-deck of the red ritual room. His mask wears a tricorn hat with one point frontmost. We can now assure ourselves that Ziegler is the highest present emissary of Satan, perhaps Satan himself.

Next, note the woodwork that adorns the chair of the Hierophant Red Cloak. It is the same as this masonic emblem, and surprise, an inverted black triangle gleams above it all. The good times at Somerton are the wellspring of chaos from which our pyramidic reality is formed. This is why these strange goings on seem somehow outside of time -they are right at the bottleneck of an hourglass. The natural result of unbridled chaos is a stable pyramid. Somerton is, for tonite, the pin-point location from which that chaos spills into the world below. And above it all at the 33rd degree: the dark prince of the many cults of Saturn. The Old Lamplighter. Mr. Mephistopheles.

The formal structure of the kabbalistic Tree of Life yields the same fruit. The supernal triangle is separated from the lower world by our now familiar chasm of chaos. As discussed, in the Magickal Ritual of the Hexagram, to this nexus of chaos is brought the planetary body of Saturn. The Earthly aim of this ritual is the combination of the upper inverted triangle of light with that of the lower triangle of the material world. Such is the art that drives the doings at Somerton. The two triangles, which also form a Star of David are not only the tongue/genital combination of lovers in 69, they are also the deltas of the pubis coupling in the act of commonplace man on woman intercourse.

Sexual abandon is the ultimate act of chaotic magick and it is the basis for universal order. Ordo ab Chao.

A Bat Out of Hell

The Mysterious Woman and her sacrifice on behalf of Dr. Bill is as I have described: the act of giving birth into the cosmos. There is only one woman and she must give her blood to the survival of her eternal child. This passion is necessary to the development of Bill into a real adult, passed through the refiner's fire and updated to the brutal necessities of maintaining reality at a cosmic level. Amanda Curran may die, just as the American Century of Liberty must also die, but thanks to this sacrifice Dr. Bill will live on, upgraded into a new metal. A 21st century man. A New World Man. A man who has earned his lumps and knows the painful truths that scurry in the shadows of the heart and mind.

Imagine, try to empathize, with the amalgam of Bill's emotions at this moment. He is probably still buzzed from his weed-sesh with the wife. Combine this with events of his circumambulations: Bill must be glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife. Supremely paranoid. The events of 9/11 are quite fresh, no more than 3 months gone. Still an open wound. By squirming like a camel through the proverbial eye and into Somerton, looking for a chance to forget his nearly unbearable suffering, Bill has come crashing into the truth he sought to avoid.

Any open-minded meditation upon Sept. 11, 2001, floods the mind with at first incomprehensible riddles. The brave seek answers and begin to connect the dots. A shape begins to appear. The seeker can stop with a complete hypothesis: evil men, shadow men, bankers and oilmen, a secret one-world power. Some seekers go deeper into the woods: Satanic Goofball Cultists and their midnight rituals. Nazi connections. The Fourth Reich steps out from behind the American Flag. Not satisfied, a few scrabble onward: an at least rudimentary knowledge of Occult Technology is a must have. Occult science is that of metaphor and the big truth of 9/11 is that it is a Hierophantic event, planned for two-thousand years by the priests of On and Tibet and altogether inevitable. Beyond this third degree, aspirants court the Abyss itself, gaze into the yawning yaw of Yah-weh and cry out: More Light! The result is self-evident. For Doctor William Harford, the journey was a lightspeed leap from ignorance to Gnosis. He just growed up. Fast.

Mystery lovers: spoiler alert! What would have happened to Dr. Bill if the grateful Amanda Curran had not stopped the proceedings and redeemed him. He would have been invited, noblisse oblige, into the Vampire circle. These folks, vamps, I mean, aren't total assholes. Every now and again they want a little fresh blood at court, to keep things fun. And we have our answer to Alice's act one query: Why does Ziegler invite us to this thing every year? The Harfords are being screened for their potential contribution. Tasteful, discreet, good-looking, not too stupid, etc. Da WWWiz, it seems, doesn't have a chance in hell.

For now we follow him home in the wee hours, hide the costume, and find Alice in the throws of a terrible dream.

The dream is a schoolbook allegory of the fall from Eden. The sin of shame. Now, Alice's handsome able seaman stands in for the seed of knowledge partaken by Eve. As she describes her dream and how she laughs at Dr. Bill, we must know he has hit rock bottom. His carefully managed image of upstanding citizen, healer, and pocketful of Grade A Jizz has been decimated. He may not confront it just yet, but he knows at last that he is one of the fallen children of Cain, born from the stain of Eve's immortal sin and cursed to roam perdition until the end of time. He knows where he is for the very first time, and it's the only game in town.

Nothing Could Be Finer

It's morning and Bill has yet to sleep.

We'll tag along with Dr. Bill as he retraces his steps through reveries gone by. At Gillepsie's, next door to the Sonata Cafe, Dr. Bill will learn that the pretty waitress did a little ballin' the jack with carefree Nick Nightingale. As she coyly states: ...he comes in here. It seems that everyone on planet-flesh has been getting freaky but our hero Bill. He is totally sexually inept. He projects himself onto his objective world and adores the image, but can not love the other. A fully prepared product of western consumer culture, he directs his sexual urges into his phony social-identity. Die cast action figure of the Grand Oedipal Narrative, this guy is a lay only a mother could love, for even within the tortured angst that is unrequited lust, he will turn away every chance at get'n'some strange. Marion, Domino, Miss Millich, all of them brushed-off. Even the ready-willing-free-and-beautiful Sally. Sally, whom we'll suss is Domino healed of her HIV by Bill's very touch and transformed into a dreamgirl who just wants to say thanks! Any sane person would fuck 'em all. Even the kinky desk clerk at the Hotel Jason, Nick's old digs, is worth a tumble. What I mean here by sane is of specific gravity. Sanity is a virtue defined by a sole component: the conscious awareness that we are a living in a mad house - out of our minds. Welcome to the Hotel California. As balladeers The Eagles inform, it can be a lovely place, if you are on the proper medication. According to Wilhelm Reich, who was imprisoned and his work destroyed as a threat to society, the right medicine is the freedom of the organism. Unbounded sexual expression. Our Occult Masters reserve this practice for themselves alone. The coherence of social order demands it.

For Dr. Harford, it will be necessary to pull away the mask of his Mystery Self before being able to be sexually free and without guilt. Moreover, as he will read in the funny papers, his social impotence has cost someone their life. This visceral shock carries with it a sub-textual cue. Is EWS a form of Reichian or Gestalt therapy upon its audience? Therapy to ease the transition into a New Age, which dares to promise that we can once and evermore be children? I guess we'll see.

Next stop, the Hotel Jason, where Bill learns that Nick might be in too deep and we are treated to another page from the Gnostic Mythos. From the Evangelion of Judas comes the heretical account that Jesus demanded that Judas betray him to the Romans. Jesus consoles Judas, who wishes not to obey, that although his trials for this deed will be most difficult, he will be rewarded. Jesus tells Judas that his star will shine more brilliantly that any of the other apostles. This model gives a metaphoric definition of the reward, to Judas the betrayer, of thirty pieces of silver.

Silver is second only to gold. And so we see that Judas is second only to the glory of Christ. This secret teaching is lain over EWS. During most of their meeting at The Sonata Cafe, the letters S-o-n, from the Sonata Jazz neon sign, glow a silvery blue next to Nick's head. Contrast the amber gold of Bill's brewski to Nick's gunmetal Vodka Tonic. And Nick carries a silver pen in his suit jacket pocket. Kubrick validates the Gnostic myth. Jesus made a sacrifice for mankind. Judas made the same sacrifice for Jesus. There is a second son. There will be a Second Sun.

But for now, Bill returns the costume to Rainbow Fashions. And the mask is missing. Hmmm...

Vincent and Theo

The return visit to Millich completes another clew to the technology of the EWS conspiracy. Every morning, it is the Japanese who are first to work, up with the sun and gettin' to business. Their business: the art game that Szavost spoke of to Alice at the Ziegler's Christman Ball. Compare the blocking from the act two scene where Alice and Helena wrap gifts, to that same night, at Rainbow Fashions, where Millich pulls a velvet cape from a wall hook to expose Japanese businessman #1 shivering in his BVDs. Millich has unwrapped the same Van Gogh wrapped-up athome by Alice. This pair of scenes edify the voodoo process of pricing. The Japanese are very fond of art and pay any price to own it. Thus, with the rising sun, we can trace both the slower progress of snivilization at large right along with the practice of east-to-west usury denounced in essays by LaRouche and his believers at Fidelio Magazine. Art, in EWS, is the metaphoric archetype for the desire of consumer culture. The asians get it first and pay the most.

Moving westward, both value and quality decrease. And so it is that by nightfall, Bill will see the vestal beauty of the alabaster Miss Millich debased into the corpse of Amanda Curran.

If I Knew You Were Coming...

After his useless return to the gates of Somerton, Dr. Bill will visit with Domino's friend Sally and be stalked as he roams the streets of Greenwich Village. He'll grab a newspaper and duck into Sharkey's Cafe. The paper has a grim report.

But first, about Sally: Sally is Domino. Kubrick is trying to tell us that there is quite literally only one woman, with many faces. Mother, Sister, Daughter, Wife. All as One. We might infer that if Bill was ready to open himself Sally would have made healing love with him. The New Age carries the promise of free sensual expression. An expression free not only of social or moral complication but also of the slightest guilt. The good Doc still isn't ready. He needs a first hand look at the death of the 20th Century Value System on a slab before him. Too bad, Sally is kinda cute and probably a monster in bed. Instead, Bill wanders out into the Village where he flees a scary lookin' stalker. When is this numbnuts gonna get the message? Soon enough.

I want to take this opportunity, as we visit the morgue to see the body of the late Mandy Curran, for a look at an interesting synchronicity that lends itself to the notion that the world we inhabit is but a the ripple of a dream. EWS is identical in thematic structure to the recent The Last King of Scotland, with Forrest Whittaker. TLKOS tells the story of a callow young doctor who fancies himself an idealist. This doctor will befriend a shirtless Idi Amin early on in the movie. Later, he will work for Amin. And we will follow him into a morgue to find his dead lover, murdered by Amin's ruthless machine. Dr. Bill will be put through the same paces by Victor Ziegler. When he meets Amanda Curran in Ziegler's luxurious john, Victor is shirtless. Now, at the morgue, Dr. Bill finds that someone who he loved has died, and at the behest of Bill's own employer. It is up to the reader to decide themselves the significance of this dual occurrence. Is our world a dream where such co-incidences spring forth from the imagination, or are we being manipulated by an inscrutable class of invisible puppet-masters? Da WWWiz prefers that it's a dream. Safer that way.

Get Thee Behind Me, Victor!

In his opulent billiard room Ziegler will sum up for Bill the final account of his misadventures. Victor doesn't have to spell it out, and as anyone knows who has ever talked to someone really powerful, these people NEVER spell it out.

Instead Ziegler will sketch an outline for Bill to color in on his own.

One look at Victor holding his cue-stick looming next to his red-felted pool table, the position of the green lamps in a tricorn configuration over his head, tells the whole story. He is the great force behind the proceedings at Somerton. Master of Masons. His glib and sinister account of events is a ghastly game of blind mans bluff. It's like this Bill. These are the things we do. We fuck our stable of slaves as we enslave the masses. We perform black rituals and in so we control everything. The only reason you get out alive is 'cuz I kinda like ya kid, you've got chutzpa. But you have been warned. This is the way of things. Grow up and get used to it. It's a New Age.

Here, for the enjoyment of all, is the summation of the Law of that Age, from The Book of the Law.

Liber Oz:

The law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Thou hast no right but to do thy will. Do that and no other shall say nay.

Every man and woman is a star.

There is no god but man.

Man has the right to live by his own law --

To live in the way that he wills to do:

To work as he will:

To play as he will to rest as he will:

To die when and how he will.

Man has the right to eat what he will:

To drink what he will:

To dwell where he will:

To move as he will on the face of the earth.

Man has the right to think what he will:

To speak what he will:

To write what he will:

To draw, paint, carve, etch, mould, build as he will:

To dress as he will.

Man has the right to love as he will:--

'Take your fill and will of love as ye will,

when, where, and with whom ye will.

Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights.

'The slaves shall serve'.

Love is the law, love under will.

Given the mastery of Kubrick, no one should be at all bothered that the opaque density of Ziegler's primer on the facts of life actually lends more weight to the film as a picture of the real world. In my research I have found everything from the contention that EWS is an Illuminati mind control tool to the fanciful idea that Kubrick was trying to reveal the secrets of the elite, and was murdered for doing so. These seductive notions may indeed be true, but I am not so sure. To me, EWS is a picture of the world as we all know it to be, in our own dark and wounded hearts and I think that it is designed to help mitigate that world, to help everyone see what is right before their eyes.

It is here in the Billiard Room, we propose our final combination, to debunk the elusive hypothesis of Weber's Ears Wide Shut. First, regarding that EWS is an attempt to realize a best of breed movie about a conspiracy. Well, maybe so, but Da WWWiz would have to rebuff that every Kubrick film is about the very selfsame conspiracy. Thereby, EWS is a best of breed Kubrick movie and by extension a best of breed Movie movie. The correct category for Eyes Wide Shut, as it compares to other movies is this: it is not a movie, it is a Total 20th Century Codex. The whole she-bang of life on Earth in the good ol' 1900's can be extracted from the metaphor of EWS.

This is a large claim so I will stand on it. The key is the number of the Harford's apartment, numbered 5A. This motif is used throughout the film. Kubrick is numbering the age that he depicts as the Fifth Age, the Piscean Age, which is grinding to a halt as you read. The magnetic power of Kubrick's metaphor is that it clings to the external world from which it is manifested and somehow carries it's audience across into impossible abyss of the unleashed imagination foretold as the Age of Aquarius. EWS is an Ark. By the method of housing reality for posterity EWS is the one and only cinematic equal to the impossible Quintuple Axel, and likewise it defies gravity. Events not made in any way explicit are implied to the level of absolute certainty. Earth culture has been shaped, for 2000 years, by western values, and the World of EWS is tied on every level to the mutli-colored arc of that civilization. It's all inside.

The second hypothesis I'll tackle is that of the conspiracy in and of itself. Let's start with what it isn't.

It isn't...

• the conspiracy of a one-world banking oligarchy once based in Venice.

• a cabal of cabala: Rosicrucian scum-bags who've nowt better to do than play at black magic by night while by day they pick the pockets of the John Q. Public straight down to the third-world lint ball at the bottom.

• Nazi Vampire Jet-Setters.

...but wait, you cry, and you are right, the conspiracy of our concentrations is all of those things but so much more, my long-suffering peruse-ers. It the conspiracy of TIME. Somewhere, hovering over Tibet, Satan and his A-Team tinker with Solomon's clocks, and once, every two-thousand years or so, at the end of an age, they solve for Pi. The events of Sept 11, 2001 are both predicted and depicted by EWS. When Alice drops her dress we can pinpoint the undoings of EWS as just after 9/11. Compare these images of the Thoth Priestess, the Waite Priestess and the nude Alice Harford with the words attributed to ISIS by M.P. Hall in The Secret Teachings of All Ages: I, Isis, am all that has been, is, or will be, and no mortal man has ever me unveiled. Kubrick shows ISIS stripped bare. The Twin Pillars of Boaz and Joachim have tumbled down and we have entered the land of the dead. Eyes Wide Shut is the chronicle of the secret conspiracy behind those events. The greatest conspiracy the universe has known. And we're all in on it.

Masque of the Red Death

The game has ended and the players have mostly gone home, but there are one or two loose ends to tie.

There is a phenomenon observed by the Science of Sleep Study. In a marital bed, one partner alone will move to the side of the bed their lover uses. Kubrick uses this fact to expound his mystery of the missing mask. Disturbed by her dream at the end of Act Two, Alice is on Bill's side of the bed (you'll remember him finding his wallet on the bedside table in Act One). But now, next to the mask on Bill's pillow, Alice sleeps on her own side of the bed. We are meant to infer that the mask is Bill. When you watched the Jim Carrey vehicle The Mask, I am sure you were goodly amused that he just couldn't get rid of that mask, however he might try. We may understand that Dr. Bill Harford has the same problem. He owns this mask. It is his real face, a composite of social and cultural co-ordinates that until moments ago, Bill thought was an authentic personality. It is all there is to him. There is nothing underneath. It is here that Dr. Bill, as he breaks down to the soul, has completed the Saturnine processes of the Alchemical Wedding. He is purified. He is awake. His confession to Alice is the easy part. But what will he do with the rest of his life?

Business As Usual

At the toy store with Helena, Bill and Alice take a second honeymoon. They have been shattered and put back together, better than before. And, as the sign for the tinker-toy K'nex tells from the wall of the store, their wedding is built to last. It's a marvel and a pity that the effect didn't rub off onto the real life marriage of the Cruise's, for the good of the kidz'n'all. Even so, I, for one, am happy for them, the lot of them and their collective serial spouses. They seem to be gettin'-on just fine in life. But here, at the end of my journey through Eyes Wide Shut, I worry what it all means to me, livin' in a trailer park with my mother. Me and the faceless millions like me. No chance at all of getting laid.

What I do know, as the Jazz Suite Waltz rises for the third and final time, is that the conspiracy theories are right, but oh so wrong. Sure, we the masses are but slaves to the consumer middle class who are in turn the dice in a global and probably universal game of social and genetic Yahtzee, played by some eldritch race of 4th dimensional pain-sucking lizards. I know it. But I also know that there is nothing anyone can do about it short of steam-rolling Earth to good-old flat again. Our reality is in the shape a pyramid: the most enduring structure imaginable. That's that.

Life is a pyramid scheme and it ain't gonna tumble. And if'n you're at the very bottom of that tower or at the very top doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this town. My town - Domino Falls. 'Cuz here, all of us are scrambling for a toehold as the sands of the ages thunder in from chaos above.

Fuck.

Roll Credits.

The End?