2015 was a Kingdom of Bullshit. We were assaulted by a relentless barrage of bullets and bile from real-world terrorists & political hate-mongers, all while media-trolls across the spectrum stoked the blazes for revenue clicks. It all fed our frenzy so hard we became indignation wendigos, our frothy jaws devouring each other’s fury and spewing it back so forcefully we even hated those we should’ve considered comrades. South Park killed it this year with its satire of the Outrage Industrial Complex, but the most 2015 show by a hair has to be Mr. Robot. It captured the zeitgeist perfectly without ever quite snagging the zeitgeist’s attention, but something tells me (even if it’s just wishful thinking) it’ll have a much bigger cult by the time Season 2 starts in 2016. Yeah, in a lot of ways Mr. Robot is just picking up where Fight Club left off 16 years ago— but goddammit, it’s about time somebody picked up where Fight Club left off.
The Fall-Back Hour is one of the most magical hours in the entire 4th dimension, and yet so many people seem to sleep right through it. If you’re still awake when we repeat 1 – 1:59 AM at the end of Daylight Savings Time, look at all the amazing things you can do and see!
1. If you perform a palindromic act during the Fall-Back Hour– for example, writing in pencil for 30 minutes, then spending the next 30 minutes erasing everything you just wrote, moving backward from the end– you will open a wormhole that leads to a Möbius Strip Museum.
2. If you fall asleep during the Fall-Back Hour, you will dream you’re in a labyrinth filled with flying jellyfish.
3. All TV broadcasts aired live during the Fall-Back Hour will appear on DVR recordings as old PM Dawn videos.
Who do you think those people were? Those were not just ordinary people there. If I told you their names– I’m not going to tell you their names– but if I did, I don’t think you’d sleep so well.
Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack)
“He is morbidly afraid of giving away any of his secrets,” says Eyes Wide Shut co-writer Frederic Raphael of Stanley Kubrick, “the best of which may be that he has none.” Raphael and I agree that Kubrick was a genius, and the Best Director despite never winning “Best Director,” though I’d add that Kubrick’s most genius gift was his ability to create the illusion– nay, the unshakable certainty— that his films contain galaxy-sized rabbit holes teeming with secret meanings, hidden agendas, conspiracy revelations, occult mysteries, coded confessions, esoteric symbolism, and arcane wisdom.
As the recent documentary Room 237shows, viewers have concocted all kinds of elaborate speculations as to what Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining is really about, from the Holocaust to the genocide of American Indians to Kubrick’s alleged fakery of the Apollo 11 moon landing.* It’s doubtful any of said speculations would’ve been inspired solely by readings of Stephen King’s original novel; similarly, no one ever would’ve dropped Kubrick’s name into their moon-landing conspiracy theories if 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t feel so uncannily like a space travelogue. Kubrick’s legendary fastidiousness and reclusiveness may have added fuel to this fire of overzealous theorizing, but there wouldn’t have been any sparks to begin with if he didn’t fill every frame of his films with authentic, palpable mystique.
*One night in college, I watched The Shining on repeat for like 10 hours to write a paper for some class with the word “Narrative” in its name. The result was 12 pages on the film’s parallels to the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.
How deliciously appropriate, then, that Kubrick’s final work was an endlessly fascinating, immensely analyzable, Illuminati-laced joint called Eyes Wide Shut.
NSFW VIDEO… BOOBS AND BUTTS EVERYWHERE!
Simply search “Eyes Wide Shut” on YouTube and your results include “The Hidden Messages In Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut,” “Eyes Wide Shut Unveiled, Decoded & Explained,” “Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Illuminati Symbology,” “Eyes Wide Shut – a steganalysis,” and “Kubrick & The Illuminati–” and that’s just Page 1. Of course, when the centerpiece of your movie involves a ritualistic orgy with super-rich folks in masks and robes listening to backwards Latin chanting, you’re begging the conspiracy junkies to watch it frame-by-frame and leap to their own paranoid conclusions. Which, if I may add my own wild conjecture, may have been Kubrick’s intention all along, his own trollish way of singing “The Walrus was Paul!“
Eyes Wide Shut (an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s novel Dream Story) is the tale of Bill Harford (Tom Cruise), an Upper West Side doctor who spirals into a surreal psychosexual odyssey after his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) confesses fantasizing about another man– an odyssey that eventually leads him to the aforementioned orgy. According to Frederic Raphael, the idea of the orgy being organized by a clandestine association of wealthy amoralists was his own purely fictional creation. Funny thing is, when he faxed the idea to Kubrick in the form of a classified FBI report, the director actually got a little paranoid himself:
FR: Get the material I faxed you?
SK: That’s the thing. Where’d you get this stuff?
FR: … Where do you think?
SK: This is classified material, how’d you get hold of it? I need you to tell me.
FR: You’re kidding.
SK: I don’t think so. Where’d you find this stuff? Did you hack into some FBI computer by chance, or what?
FR: Hack in? Are you crazy? I can’t hack into my own work without help. You asked me to give you some background on Ziegler and company. I gave it.
SK: Freddie, I need you to tell me totally honestly where you got this stuff. This is potentially…
FR: Stanley, totally, honestly, I got it where I get everything: out of my head.
SK: You’re telling me you made this up?
FR: But only because it’s true. You asked for it, I did it. I enjoyed it, as a matter of fact.
SK: It has no basis in fact?
FR: Stanley, I made it up, okay?
SK: How did you do that?
FR: Making things up is what I do for a living. It’s pretty well all I do. I write fiction. I make things up. I look at the world and… I make things up on the strength of what I see and hear, and guess. I do not mend fuses or water-ski or have a pension scheme. I made it up. It was fun; much more than fun…
SK: Okay as long as we’re not… on potentially dangerous ground here. It’s pretty convincing, you know that?
FR: Nice of you to say so. Think of it as an example of what I do when I’m free to play by myself. An apple for the teacher.
SK: And it didn’t come from anywhere that might be… you know… embarrassing?
FR: Look, it came out of my head, fully formed. How embarrassing is that? I made the whole damn thing up. It was not a big problem.
SK: How long did it take you?
FR: Maybe an hour, but I’m never going to tell you that.
from Frederic Raphael’s Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir Of Stanley Kubrick
Yet even though the whole Illuminati angle sprung from Raphael’s imagination (unless Frederic Raphael IS a member of the Illuminati spreading disinformation!), that doesn’t mean Eyes Wide Shut isn’t one of the most subversive films of 1999. There’s plenty of legitimate evidence that the film is thick with overtones echoing the oppression of the masses by sinister, ultra-powerful elites. Its messages are just a bit more subtle than those in SUBVERSIVE!!!! 1999 movies like Fight Club or The Matrix, a bit harder to notice amid all those sexy, naked women.
Then again, Kubrick’s depiction of sexy, naked women in Eyes Wide Shut is awfully subversive too. 1999 was a breakthrough year for unsimulated sex in non-pornographic films, thanks to Leos Carax’s Pola X and Catherine Breillat’s Romance. It’s hard to tell for sure if those couples are truly copulating in Kubrick’s climactic orgy (even when they aren’t shielded behind digitally-inserted bystanders), but it’s still pretty hardcore stuff for a big-studio Cruise/Kidman summer multiplex vehicle. (Link EXTREMELY NSFW.)
The subversive use of sexy, naked women doesn’t stop there. While a lot of the sexy, naked women are here for erotica’s sake, Kubrick features others to provoke more complicated responses. We see sexy, naked women in settings that are clinical (receiving breast exams in a doctor’s office), macabre (a hooker unconscious after an overdose, and later dead at the morgue), and borderline incriminating (15 year-old Leelee Sobieski, though not technically naked, struts around scantily clad for all her screen time).
All of which serves to tease and intensify the Sick Desperation of Dr. Bill. Like many straight white males of 1999 movies (Fight Club‘s narrator, American Beauty‘s Lester Burnham, Being John Malkovich‘s Craig Schwartz), Dr. Bill’s Sick Desperation involves a struggle against feelings of jealousy, sexual frustration, and emasculation. The more he tries to transgress the sexual boundaries of his marriage as a means of avenging himself against Alice’s fantasy, the more he fails, the more he’s taunted by strange flesh he can never possess. And to add insult to blueballs, Dr. Bill doesn’t even get the cathartic release of a good Sick Desperate Laugh; he merely gets to hear the Sick Desperate Laughter of Alice as she dreams of cuckolding and humiliating her husband.
Dr. Bill finally achieves closure by learning some valuable secrets, but not the kind of secrets he thought he wanted, the kind that get naughty in Masonic Long Island mansions in the abysses of night. Because, despite all the occult symbology and class warfare that may or may not exist in this movie, it’s ultimately about marriage. It hasto be about marriage. It’s right out there in the open. Kubrick’s simply making a film about marriage in a mythical way, where the mundane concerns of mere mortals get caught up in the epic, dizzying dream logic of the gods.
Once again, Frederic Raphael: “…like a man stirring in his sleep, S.K. almost faces the mundane American reality which says that a couple like [Bill and Alice] would ‘get a divorce.’ Yet he has become enough of a European for the marital myth to have leeched onto him. (We are probably the two most long-serving husbands in the movies.) He cannot quite see that the durable myth is pretty well autonomous, and its plot, however elasticated, largely determined: Oedipus and Jocasta will never be able to avert trouble by spending more quality time with the kids…”
The lesson, I suppose, being that love and marriage can survive much more easily when partners are honest and unashamed of their primal desires. Only when deceit and transgression come in to play is love seriously in peril. And even if the world is truly haunted by shadowy, amoral cabals, then you can always take solace in some good make-up sex.
Mort thought that history was thrashing around like a steel hawser with the tension off, twanging backwards and forwards across reality in great destructive sweeps.
History isn’t like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always– eventually– manages to spring back into its old familiar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its sleeve. It’s been around a long time.
I’ve been in kind of a rut lately, so I thought I’d shake things up a little. First, I bought a copy of “The Anarchist Cookbook” on Amazon. Then I called a bunch of my friends on my Verizon phone and ranted to their voicemails like “Let’s start a revolution against Big Brother and destroy the status quo!” and so on. Finally I went on 4chan and proposed that Anonymous should hack the White House and publish Obama’s browser history, or whatever it is Anonymous does. I was certain the government would quickly identify me as a potential threat to their surveillance-driven oligarchy, and my life would soon become much more adventurous and exciting.
Alas, I just received the following email from the NSA:
“Dear Mr. O’Brien,
We thank you for your interest in the United States Government, and are flattered by your desire to become an enemy of the state. Unfortunately, after careful examination, we have decided that you have neither the intelligence nor the influence to become a legitimate threat to us. Of course, we’ll still continue to monitor your every transaction and communication, and we wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavors. But we thought we should let you know that we really don’t take you very seriously as an adversary.
Sincerely,
The Feds
PS – Your dog’s bowl needs fresh water.”
“Cynthia, World-Famous Mannequin – Making It Up.” Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, 1937
We’re making it up… Us. All of us. All of it. The, world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality… We make it up. We made it up. We shall make it up. We have been making it up. I make it up. You make it up. He, she, it makes it up.
“…Tarantino is [a] film-maker who has nothing to say,” says Dangerous Minds’ Niall O’Conghaile. “Nothing to say except for having seen more movies than you.” Now maybe that’s not quite dangerous thinking, but it sure is lazy thinking, and O’Conghaile’s not alone. Lots of people seem to have half-watched Tarantino’s movies and expressed similar idle criticisms.
Yes, much of what Tarantino “has to say” involves movies, but that’s not nothing. Movies, like myths, affect us and reflect us. If words are loaded pistols (as Sartre quoted Brice Parain), couldn’t cinema be a burning theater packed with explosives (as Tarantino said in Inglourious Basterds)?
Couldn’t a “slasher” movie villain wield a car instead of a knife or chainsaw? Couldn’t a “heist” movie skip right past the heist? Couldn’t the person who seems to be the main character die halfway through, like in Psycho– but then be resurrected for a flashback that lasts the entire third act?
All well and good, you may be thinking, but those are all still questions that dwell deep inside movie critic territory. What could Tarantino possibly “say” about more profound matters, the human condition and such, like Bergman did? And aren’t all those so-called “statements” actually questions? Well to answer that last part first, I find it a lot more interesting when storytellers “say” things by asking questions rather than just “saying” them. As for the first part, here’s some other questions you may find more “profound”:
If history is written by the winners, couldn’t we use cinema to write an alternate history where the losers can at least get a well-crafted catharsis? And if we did do that, isn’t it possible that such a catharsis might feel a little icky, no matter how justified said catharsis is? Would the ickiness be worth it? Might we be better off living in a world where we can achieve catharses with the help of fake movie violence, even if it means a select few maniacs might use that violence to inspire real violence (which those maniacs probably would’ve committed anyway)? Because, if we didn’t exorcise our bloodlust at the movies (or on TV, or in video games), might that bloodlust find numerous other, more terrible means of escape? Sure, Goebbels may have fueled Nazi hatred with movies, but didn’t that whole mess start with Hitler’s book? What violent movies did American slave owners watch to feed their vileness? Oh, they didn’t watch movies back then? Well, if desperate times call for desperate measures, and if stronger illnesses call for stronger medicines, don’t more violent times call for more violent cinema?
(Full disclosure: Shockingly, I haven’t seen Django Unchained yet. But isn’t that the cool thing to do these days, blindly commenting on Django? Regardless, I’m pretty sure this’ll all hold up after I do finally see it.)
…Jeffrey Wigand, who’s out on a limb, does he go on television and tell the truth? Yes. Is it newsworthy? Yes. Are we gonna air it? Of course not. Why? Because he’s not telling the truth? No. Because he is telling the truth. That’s why we’re not going to air it. And the more truth he tells, the worse it gets!
Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), The Insider
I’d officially been a Smoker for quite a while by the time The Insider was released. So I not only knew the health hazards of tobacco, but, thanks largely to Jeffrey Wigand, I was also fully aware that Big Tobacco knew the hazards too, and had lied about knowing the hazards, and made their products more powerful and addictive anyway. Knowing all this, I still chose to be a Smoker, and I’d never be able to blame Big Tobacco, and I was fine with that, because Teenage Rebellion and Freedom USA and all that.
I wouldn’t call myself a Smoker anymore, though I still smoke occasionally, buying and consuming about 4 packs of Big Tobacco cigarettes a year. And even though I smoke far less than I did as a teen/early 20-something, I’m more irritated than ever about all the Anti-Smoking Noise out there.
Yes, Big Tobacco was pretty much evil in the pre-Wigand days. Michael Mann opens The Insider with 60 Minutes journalists Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) and Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) fearlessly standing up to hot-headed, gun-toting Hezbollah maniacs- which illustrates nicely just how intimidated CBS is later on when they initially cave to the wishes of God-wealthy Brown & Williamson.
But a funny thing’s happened since 1999. The cat’s out of the bag, and everyone knows just how unhealthy and addictive cigarettes are. There’s only so much we can hold Big Tobacco accountable for now; everything else sits on the shoulders of those who choose to smoke. Now it’s the Anti-Smoking movement that’s gone propaganda-crazy, and the defenders of truth aren’t guys like Jeffrey Wigand who go after Big Tobacco, it’s guys like Robert Arthur of Narco Polo who have to stick up for Smokers.
Don’t get me wrong- Jeffrey Wigand was a hero, despite being temperamental, possibly paranoid, and morally gray- going after Big Tobacco only after Brown & Williamson fired him from his lucrative job and threatened his family. In fact, it’s all those complexities that make Wigand (and Russell Crowe’s portrayal of him) so compelling, and so quintessentially 1999.
To quote Montgomery Burns: “I’m no art critic, but I know what I hate…and I don’t hate this.” Now if you know me, you might assume I would totally hate Jon McNaughton’s One Nation Under Socialism. That’s probably because you also assume that this painting is one-dimensional right-wing propaganda rooted in misplaced rage and utter ignorance of what “socialism” is. But those assumptions would be wrong! If, however, your artistic sensibilities were as keen as mine, you’d see that Jon McNaughton is, in fact, a subversive left-wing propagandist. That’s right: Sean Hannity is actually shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for commie agitprop, and Jon McNaughton’s laughing all the way to the non-corporate credit union!
To the untrained eye, One Nation Under Socialism appears to portray a sinister Barack Obama burning the U.S. Constitution because he hates it, and wants to replace it with whatever the Socialist Constitution is. But if you look closer, the truth is right in front of your nose. President Obama’s look isn’t sinister, it’s angry. Anger that comes from sadness and frustration. This is because it depicts Obama holding a Constitution that was set on fire by someone else. Notice how there’s no matches, or lighter, or any kind of fire-making device in his hand. Also, if Obama had set the fire himself, and wanted to look bad-ass and intimidating while doing it, wouldn’t he be smoking one of his cigarettes that was lit from the flaming Constitution? The absence of such things in One Nation is but one example of McNaughton’s trademark subtlety.
Besides, if Obama really wanted to burn the Constitution, why would he still be holding it? He’d just leave it on the floor or something. Why would he risk getting burns on his hand for some capitalist, democratic-republic, white-man’s rulebook? It should be obvious by now that he’s actually picking up a burning Constitution that he plans to save- a Constitution he found on the floor of the White House as he was moving in. The implication being that the George W. Bush administration were the ones who burned the Constitution, which is, of course, the theme of all good left-wing propaganda.
Perhaps the most telling detail of the painting, though, is the pointer finger on Obama’s left hand. Why is he pointing at the burning Constitution? Anyone with eyes can clearly see the thing’s on fire. Does the Obama in this painting think we’re so stupid that we can’t see a blazing fire? Certainly not. See, if we were to enlarge the painting, we would see that Obama is not pointing at the fire, but at a single word in the Constitution. It’s the word “Prejudice,” from Article 4, Section 3 (where it states, “nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State”). Basically, McNaughton’s Obama is telling us that prejudice is in our great nation’s DNA, and has been from the very beginning, and that’s why all those Republican assholes think he’s igniting our legal foundations with pinko-fire.
Popular Fiction 