u/altgodkub2024

In Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the sex party plays like a dream, a hall of mirrors. Lots of masked women who resemble Alice in body type. We see her in the same state of undress in the opening shot. Lots of masked men who, like Bill, are avoiding exposure. Some characters who people wonder, "Is that Ziegler? Or is that Ziegler?" And Nick who has to be blindfolded. He's about as rigorously drawn of a double for Bill as you'll find. He's blindfolded to keep his eyes wide shut to the machinations of the elite underworld, but what intrigues Bill is the time that blindfold literally slipped, leaving his eyes wide open. Characters who become many characters and uncanny places that feel both familiar and strange, uncanny, are hallmarks of Freud's "dream-work." So are slips. Bill wants to know everything. That blindfold not being "on so well" was loose out of a desire to see. Bill wants to see "everything" and ends up telling Alice "everything" to which she responds with dear, you're a mess, you can't handle everything, some things are better kept hidden or you won't sleep so well, so close your eyes again and let's just "fuck."

I'll add that Kubrick toiled away for years preparing to make the Holocaust drama Aryan Papers based on the novel Wartime Lies. The more truth his research uncovered, the more depressed he became. (It's didn't help that one of his core texts was The Destruction of the European Jews, a detailed book about the machinations of the Nazi killing apparatus.) He abandoned the project and quickly turned to Eyes Wide Shut using the crew he'd already assembled, a project that had obsessed him for decades. He kept one other set of ideas from the abandoned film. Aryan Papers is about Maciek, a young Jewish boy, and his aunt Tania who is beautiful and can have/manipulate men at will. They avoid detection by "masking" themselves with forged identity papers that pass them off as Catholics. Maciek even learns how to convincingly behave during Mass. There's a constant motif in the story of how Maciek must do whatever is necessary to not allow anyone to see him naked below the waist. He even remains very sick in bed rather than see a doctor. That's the exposure that would give them away, and Tania constantly risks her life, sacrifices herself, to make sure that never happens. Mandy was a Kubrick addition for EyesWideShut, not in Schnitzler's novella. She literally sacrifices herself to avoid Bill's exposure by removing his clothes. I mean, isn't that order to remove all his clothing odd when mask alone is sufficient to reveal his identity?

The whole point of Freud’s dream-work is to disguise things that are repressed and troubling. If they appear in one's dreams in naked form, they'll turn dream to nightmare and awaken the sleeper. Kubrick insisted all references to the characters in Eyes Wide Shut being Jewish be removed. The scene where Bill is tormented by young men hurling homophobic slurs at him replaced the same only with antisemitic slurs in an earlier draft. I think Eyes Wide Shut was Kubrick realizing he couldn't deal with the unvarnished truth of the Holocaust, and so he disguised it as something else.

Kubrick and Steven Spielberg were friends and collaborators and I can easily imagine one point of frequent disagreement. They had opposite views of humanity. Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut is about opening one's eyes to see the world unvarnished and closing them again after realizing it's just too much to handle, too disturbing of one's sleep. Disclosure Day debates whether people can handle knowing everything. Will it destroy faith in God or people? And the film answers, replacing Kubrick’s pessimism with Spielberg's optimism, in the affirmative, ending with a plea to open one's ears and "Listen." Disclosure Day's sequence beginning in the recreation of Margaret's childhood bedroom is like psychotherapy. It's about bringing what she has repressed out into the open so she and Daniel can move forward to fulfill their shared destiny.

In Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the sex party plays like a dream, a hall of mirrors. Lots of masked women who resemble Alice in body type. We see her in the same state of undress in the opening shot. Lots of masked men who, like Bill, are avoiding exposure. Some characters who people wonder, "Is that Ziegler? Or is that Ziegler?" And Nick who has to be blindfolded. He's about as rigorously drawn of a double for Bill as you'll find. He's blindfolded to keep his eyes wide shut to the machinations of the elite underworld, but what intrigues Bill is the time that blindfold literally slipped, leaving his eyes wide open. Characters who become many characters and uncanny places that feel both familiar and strange, uncanny, are hallmarks of Freud's "dream-work." So are slips. Bill wants to know everything. That blindfold not being "on so well" was loose out of a desire to see. Bill wants to see "everything" and ends up telling Alice "everything" to which she responds with dear, you're a mess, you can't handle everything, some things are better kept hidden or you won't sleep so well, so close your eyes again and let's just "fuck."

I'll add that Kubrick toiled away for years preparing to make the Holocaust drama Aryan Papers based on the novel Wartime Lies. The more truth his research uncovered, the more depressed he became. (It's didn't help that one of his core texts was The Destruction of the European Jews, a detailed book about the machinations of the Nazi killing apparatus.) He abandoned the project and quickly turned to Eyes Wide Shut using the crew he'd already assembled, a project that had obsessed him for decades. He kept one other set of ideas from the abandoned film. Aryan Papers is about Maciek, a young Jewish boy, and his aunt Tania who is beautiful and can have/manipulate men at will. They avoid detection by "masking" themselves with forged identity papers that pass them off as Catholics. Maciek even learns how to convincingly behave during Mass. There's a constant motif in the story of how Maciek must do whatever is necessary to not allow anyone to see him naked below the waist. He even remains very sick in bed rather than see a doctor. That's the exposure that would give them away, and Tania constantly risks her life, sacrifices herself, to make sure that never happens. Mandy was a Kubrick addition for EyesWideShut, not in Schnitzler's novella. She literally sacrifices herself to avoid Bill's exposure by removing his clothes. I mean, isn't that order to remove all his clothing odd when mask alone is sufficient to reveal his identity?

The whole point of Freud’s dream-work is to disguise things that are repressed and troubling. If they appear in one's dreams in naked form, they'll turn dream to nightmare and awaken the sleeper. Kubrick insisted all references to the characters in Eyes Wide Shut being Jewish be removed. The scene where Bill is tormented by young men hurling homophobic slurs at him replaced the same only with antisemitic slurs in an earlier draft. I think Eyes Wide Shut was Kubrick realizing he couldn't deal with the unvarnished truth of the Holocaust, and so he disguised it as something else.

Kubrick and Steven Spielberg were friends and collaborators and I can easily imagine one point of frequent disagreement. They had opposite views of humanity. Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut is about opening one's eyes to see the world unvarnished and closing them again after realizing it's just too much to handle, too disturbing of one's sleep. Disclosure Day debates whether people can handle knowing everything. Will it destroy faith in God or people? And the film answers, replacing Kubrick’s pessimism with Spielberg's optimism, in the affirmative, ending with a plea to open one's ears and "Listen." Disclosure Day's sequence beginning in the recreation of Margaret's childhood bedroom is like psychotherapy. It's about bringing what she has repressed out into the open so she and Daniel can move forward to fulfill their shared destiny.

I am so glad I caught Disclosure Day for a second time in the theater. It benefits greatly from a big screen and surround sound. And because it seems to be on course to leave theaters quickly.

That's a shame. I enjoyed it the first time. A second viewing expanded it into something akin to a religious experience. (Literally, actually. "You haven't lost faith in God. You've lost faith in people.") What seemed a bit of a hot mess scriptwise on first go revealed a tight construction on second. As an example and as with any script, one should always begin by comparing the information we're first given with what we see/hear at the end. Opening: wrestling match. Loud audience. Protagonist sitting still and pensive at the center of the turmoil. We, the audience, are kicked in the face, almost literally. Ending: news feed going out to the world. Audience is hushed and paying rapt attention. Protagonist stands determinedly in closeup and addresses us, the audience on screen and off, with one word that we're in a perfect state to hear. "Listen."

I've been on the Internet a bit too much lately and many people, mostly cynics who flee from the first signs of sentiment and who clearly expected something from Spielberg they didn't get, found plenty of opportunities to roll their eyes and tune out due to any countless number of story improbabilities, but they shouldn't have been so quick. The movie is ridiculously self-aware of how far-fetched it is -- and, crucially, so are the characters. Example: Daniel repeatedly saying, "What am I doing?" as he baffles himself that his unlikely "plan" to steal a car, rescue Jane, and escape unscathed actually works! (It's like an inversion of the proverb: "Man plans; God laughs.") I'll put it this way. There's a huge difference between things being implausible for the audience and being difficult to swallow for the protagonists. For one thing, the second case which involves characters being swept along out of their control as if caught in a groove, makes everything strangely probable for viewers, unless they're not listening to the characters' utterances.

I also don't understand why people expected anything other than what the film delivers -- unless they have a very different idea of what Spielberg is about than I do. Maybe they just lean hard into his least personal and least sentimental works like Jurassic Park (a great film, don't get me wrong) while I'm more in love with E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. I'll limit myself to one example. Through a wide range his films, Spielberg loves the idea of suddenly placing his characters in peril on the edge of a physical precipice that, geographically speaking, comes out of nowhere. It's not meant to make real world sense so much as emotional sense. In Jurassic Park, the car tumbles. In E.T., the kids are swept away as if on a flying carpet. (Aliens via Spielberg possess seemingly magical powers. E.T. proves Gertie's "Give me a break" wrong by actually becoming invisible to her distracted mom in the kitchen. And building a device capable of contacting the mother ship out of household items! How far-fetched is that?) In Disclosure Day, Spielberg rescues his characters by employing a clever homage to his early chase film Duel. I can hear Daniel thinking "What are we doing?" all over again, but I'm not gonna lie. Part of me wanted that car to take flight and cause Daniel to shout, "WHAT'S HAPPENING!" Not sure if that would've made what follows easier or more difficult for detractors to swallow, but I would have smiled.

Only three Spielberg movies have made me cry as much. The Color Purple, Schindler's List, and A.I Artificial Intelligence. Well, Schindler's List is way out ahead of them all. That movie has destroyed me all three times. And speaking of the Holocaust. Disclosure Day clearly completes a trilogy about benign alien visitors being mistreated by authorities but forming a bond with chosen humans, a trilogy of empathy. But Disclosure Day, I speculate, also closes out a trilogy of his feelings about the persecution of Jews, and other Others like blacks, gays, and persons with autism, during WWII that began literally with Schindler's List and continued allegorically with A.I Artificial Intelligence. (Mechas as Jews. Humans as Nazis.) Twice now, I've watched the footage near the end of Disclosure Day and thought immediately of the beyond horrifying footage from films like Alain Resnais's Night and Fog.

I had an interesting experience while watching DD. I loved every second and felt completely on Spielberg's wavelength. At the same time, I noticed all of the things that ruined the movie for many and realized a lot of people were going to hate it. "I'm not stupid, you know," I say, quoting Gertie. The way people are so fiercely divided, so dug in, is kind of appropriate. The world collapsing into WWIII because people aren't listening to each other -- and a plea to start listening before it's too late -- is what the movie is about.

I think the movie is a litmus test. Are you willing to follow Spielberg wherever he goes, which requires one to greatly emphasize the feeling parts of one's psychology in a Jungian sense, or are you going to emphasize thinking and only see plot holes and improbabilities, which abound. Both are important aspects of a personality. Some people have more of one or the other, and a healthy avenue to wholeness is to develop a balance. I actually thought about Kubrick quite a bit while watching DD. Kubrick was very much a thinker. Spielberg is very much about feeling. They famously had a long friendship and I think each got something he lacked from their many conversations. Eyes Wide Shut and DD are almost Yin and Yang. Kubrick’s movie is a thinking person's look at characters who need to open their eyes and ends with a one word plea to stop dreaming and do something real. Spielberg's movie is a feeling person's look at characters who need to open their ears and ends with a one word plea to stop fighting and "listen."

DD is also a feeling person's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both movies are about Earth being visited by an alien intelligence that avoids detection and plants a seed in a chosen one (or ones). In Kubrick’s movie, humanity heads off to Jupiter and the Infinite once it's developed far enough technologically to uncover a monolith on the moon -- as well as being on the verge of being annihilated by nuclear war. In Spielberg's movie, the two people chosen as children for their superpowers, math aptitude and empathy, are activated and sent on intersecting paths to join hands (I gasped as Michelangelo and Metropolis came together for a glorious moment) and be the conduit between the head alien and the people of the world -- at a time when humanity is on the verge of nuclear annihilation. Does Kubrick’s movie play out with hard sci-fi, cerebral logic? Yes. Does Spielberg's movie play out in silly, improbable but sincere, sentimental, heartfelt ways similar to fairytale? Yes.

Btw, I think A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a masterpiece that combines the best of each great artist.

Disclosure Day opens with an image of Daniel Kellner sitting in an audience of spectators at a UFC/MMA-type fight. It’s loud. It’s a distraction for those in the crowd who are animatedly focused on the sport – all except Daniel, that is. He’s motionless, unaffected by the distraction. He’s filtering out the noise. He’s listening to the truth of his surroundings and an imminent threat approaching him.

The film ends with the whole world focused on a revealed truth. Humanity is no longer distracted by the news/lies of the world that had captured their attention just moments before. A veil has been lifted. And a single-word message has been passed from a visiting and deeply concerned alien through Daniel who can speak their language then whispered to Margaret who can speak humanity’s language. To the suddenly, raptly attentive world, she utters the message: “Listen.”

“Listen.” A plea to open one’s ears, cut through the noise, and access the truth. It’s uttered with urgency. WWIII is on the doorstep. There’s a reason it’s a key word in texts ranging from Hebrew prayers to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

Much of the film in between is a chase with two characters racing, unknowingly, toward an intersection, a shared destination. And not just at a climax that, hopefully, averts humanity’s end, but back in time as well. Like how Billy Pilgrim came “unstuck in time,” Daniel and Margaret travel back to a moment when their shared destiny was chosen. Him because of an aptitude for math. Her, and the movie emphasizes her past because it’s the one closest to Spielberg’s sentiments, because of her deep empathy. She’s taken back to a recreation of her childhood bedroom and sees herself surrounded by animal imagery including butterfly wallpaper, singing “Someday my prince will come” from Snow White, a famously empathetic character toward all things from animals to Dwarfs to, almost fatally, wicked witches. Fairytales, especially as popularized by Disney, profoundly influenced the young Spielberg as evidenced by their being everywhere in his work. Just taking his two films about friendly aliens alone, Close Encounters, at one point, ended with the song “When you wish upon a star” and E.T. includes a bedtime reading from Peter Pan.

That chase is also a traveling-back-in-time for Spielberg. His early feature film Duel is evoked repeatedly, most noticeably by a tense scene of car versus train. It’s him remembering how he became the filmmaker he became. A bit of nostalgia by a nearly 80-year-old, certainly. Then again, Duel is also about two men (I assume the truck driver is male) who lack communication, who aren’t listening to one another. One wishes they’d talked it out in the roadside diner, shared a beer, and gone their separate ways. But I guess that would have erased the remainder of a very tense and enjoyable movie.

That final spoken word also offered a different connection for me. Spielberg was famously friends with Stanley Kubrick. They spoke often and not just about A.I. Artificial Intelligence which Spielberg brought to fruition after Kubrick’s death. I speculate. Was Spielberg thinking, at least a little bit, about the final spoken word of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, as well as his work overall? Kubrick’s final film depicts a world of masks, lies, and distractions and with one word issues a plea to open one’s eyes and participate in an act grounded in reality. Disclosure Day repeats that same plea substituting ears for eyes.

I look forward to another watch.

Count me firmly in the camp of the Disclosure Day lovers. There's a lot up there on the screen. Probably too much to unpack quickly after one viewing. And I can also empathize (that's a bit of a joke) with people who don't like it. It's quite a mixture of One Battle After Another-esque critique of our present day, sci-fi dialog coming at you just fast enough to not think about too much, allusions to Spielberg films including Duel (a film about two guys who could probably settle matters over a few beers if they only had a chance to calm down and see the situation through each other's eyes), fairy tales (especially Hansel and Gretel), Spielberg's lifelong fascination with Roswell, and heart-on-sleeve Spielberg sentimentality. That's quite a cocktail for a world gone cynical to swallow, especially the sentiment. The final 40 minutes or so plays like the ultimate litmus test for whether you're willing to follow Spielberg anywhere, or not. I mean, there's stuff here that would roll the eyes of people who can take Always, Hook, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence straight, no chaser. I, on the other hand, watched it all play out with a big, sloppy smile on my face (another Spielberg reference, by the way) and marveled at the audacity of the feelings on display.

​

Beyond that overlong paragraph, I'll add it's bravura filmmaking, especially in a car meets train scene that well-ups the ante from Duel, like E.T. it's, more than anything, a plea for empathy, and I found it profoundly moving. I read some time ago about how we'll know how to recognize and communicate with alien intelligence only when we've first learned how to do so with other forms of life right here on this planet. (The empathic heroine's childhood bedroom is filled with animal imagery.) For instance, we'll know we've made progress when we stop eating and starting conversing with octopuses. (I just learned this is proper rather than octopii.)

​

I can also neatly summarize my current thinking about the film and how it operates with my four included images. And, oh yeah, Emily Blunt deserves all the accolades she's been collecting.