đ§ Eyes Wide Shut: The Maximally Unhinged Theory
After watching Eyes Wide Shut about 50 times, I finally came to the conclusion that I had no idea what the plot of this movie was actually about. I watched the absolutely unwatchable YouTube content on the subject and began to suspect that maybe nobody understood its plot. That's when I decided I should get to the bottom of it. So I watched it a few more times, got nowhere, and gave up to try reading Finnegans Wake again. I was no closer to the answer than when I had started.
I remained convinced of two things:
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EYES SHUT. I was chagrined by analyses that reduced the movie to marriage and jealousy, as though the masks, passwords, disappearances, and dead hooker were merely watercolor scenery painted around a fundamentally domestic drama.
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EYES WIDE. At the other end was a bog of unsupported crap that turned every chance resemblance into confirmation of somebody's pet conspiracy theory about Jeffrey Epstein, the Illuminati and Fluoride in the Water.
Neither side could offer any explanation of the actual plot of the movie. And the biggest charlatans of all were the cop-out artists who declared that it was all a dream, thereby solving the mystery of Mandy's corpse by declining to solve it.
My theory of the plot wobbled. On the one hand thinking, what the hell, a little orgy never hurt anybody, sounds like fun, everyone there is a consenting adult, and Bill really is a naive jerk with a bad character who definitely had no business trespassing in their private home and deserved to have the shit scared, if not kicked, out of him and get ejected most rudely and with whatever dramatic sounding threat they wanted to attach. OK they are theatrical kooks, that changes NOTHING. And I think that's a fairly normal reading of the film.
The only problem is how Mandy sacrifices herself on the balcony which makes every one of the people in the room an accomplice to murder.
I took the Balcony Redemption Scene as the critical scene of the movie. This movie's version of Grady opens the Pantry Door, "Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL", and the Assassination of Gunnery Hartman. The central puzzle, the elephant in the room. And most analysis of this film, especially any analysis that claims this is a film about a marriage, doesn't even address the fact that there is a dead woman. And I think that's part of Kubrick's design. Mandy is a Chandala, a filthy whore and junkie that nobody gives a fuck about.
But it doesn't seem like a coincidence, at least not to me, especially not knowing what I know NOW, that when you unscramble the letters of Amanda Curran's name you can get:
CANAAN MURDAR
and that holds the door open about whether we are supposed to just ignore the whole unpleasant fact of the corpse on the slab.
I don't want to alarm you, but the world has always been run by an ancient cult of immortal vampires called the Vanity Fair.
HEAVEN | GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS | HELL
A triptych is a picture in three hinged panels. The form was born in medieval devotion, and by Bosch's day it was the very architecture of the great altarpiece. The centre panel is exactly as wide as the two wings together, so the Side Panels come swooping shut like fleetfooted Sphinges defending the Throne. Most of the year the altarpiece stood that way: shut, showing the faithful only the backs of its wings, painted in grisaille. On feast days it was opened wide, and the colour came out.
Shut: slab gray. Wide: a delightful candycane phantasmagoria filled with beautiful people engaged in the most peculiar activities, in a Zembla of lovely creatures and flowing streams and glimmering castles made of pink stone.
It's Not a Cafe
The movie starts with a Triptych
PILLAR | ALICE | PILLAR
The best way to interpret this one, if you aren't just staring at Nicole Kidman's butt, is like this:
GOOD | ALICE | EVIL
This is just the classic setup we're all familiar with. Nothing to explain so far. But I will point out that if you swing this one shut, it was never really about Alice's moral conundrum, it's a universal juxtaposition:
GOOD | EVIL
The triptych is the first key to understanding Eyes Wide Shut and it is given, on the first shot of the movie. It establishes what is called a sosie (pronounced so-ZEE) which is a kind of pun that relates two things by finding the common structure they share and juxtaposing the two counterparts on either side of their placeholder.
The opposite operation is also possible:
GOOD ALICE | EVIL ALICE
We BLEND the placeholder in the middle into each flap, and find out what it means. This is akin to opening your Fortune Cookie. This notation is a tiny algebra and there are basically only a few operations to master. Wide, Shut, and Blend. There is another one, which is recursively making new sosies from other ones, but we'll get to that later...
Meditating on the above triptych, one might wonder, is Alice Good? Or on the contrary, is Alice the Red Madonna, that serial murderess who marries fools so that her real husband can drink their blood and thereby obtain eternal youth and vitality. In other words, is Alice Evil?
In fairness to Alice, she has a profession, and not the most normal one: she ran an art gallery, and it went broke. At the Ball, a diabolically smooth Hungarian aesthete offers her a way back in:
LOVE OF ART | ALICE | ART OF LOVE
Szavost â or should I say Suave Host â has friends in the art game. Very old friends: a colorful cult of cannibal Canaans who don't merely enjoy the Renaissance. They were at the Renaissance.
WIDE | EYES | SHUT
You can also "fully blend" a triptych, erasing both hinges. For example:
EYES WIDE SHUT
Fixed That For You
What's wrong with this picture?
SONATA | GILLESPIES
That looks right. In the movie, the Sonata is right next to Gillespies. The problem is just this:
SONATA IS NOT A CAFE | GILLESPIES IS A CAFE
Hmm. That's weird, they named it the Sonata Cafe, but it's a Jazz Club. And Sonatas are a CLASSICAL form, not JAZZ.
JAZZ | MUSIC | CLASSICAL
In fact the phrase Sonata Jazz stares one in the face and will not stop until one finally recognizes that the two words do not belong together.
GILLESPIES JAZZ | SONATA CAFE
Do mermaids have belly buttons? Take any navel questions to the briny baristaâshe's got answers out the gills. Just tell her you're a doctor and she'll spill the beans. She can even help you locate Nick Nightingale. She's Mrs. Nick Nightingale.
And she works at the diner named for YOU: Gilles. The farcical fool of French comedy who creeps into the coven's candy castle.
If you want to stop reading now and go figure this out for yourself, I've given you basically everything you need to know. There is at least one other thing that you will want to have, which is deep knowledge of at least page 3 of Finnegans Wake, and by deep, I mean you need to understand what is underneath the humptyhillhead.
An Occasion for Cham-Pain
The sosie is the basic technique of reading and writing a Rebus. A rebus is a ridiculous kind of picture book for idiots and children where images stand in for words, and you READ by discovering what the image STANDS FOR.
François Rabelais agreed. In Gargantua (I.9) he sneers at the courtiers who painted a sphere to mean espérance and "birds' pennes for pains", calling them "equivocals so absurd and witless, so barbarous and clownish" that every punner should be given a fox's tail and a vizard (Urquhart's translation). A clown's tail, and a mask.
RABELAIS | RAHAB | REBUS
The method is the rebus. Names, signs and props are words to be read. Two rules apply throughout. First, the surface story is the cover story. Nothing in this film is an accident, a mood or a misunderstanding. Second, it's a movie: in Eyes Wide Shut, the more unhinged the better.
This rules out the usual feeble, long-winded theories: that Bill is somehow being initiated as a 33rd-degree Mason without either his knowledge or complicity; that Victor is secretly Red Cloak despite his New York accent; or that the Ritual is an exposĂ© of the âIlluminati,â that notorious jet-set club apparently best known from photographs of the Rothschilds' Surrealist Ball, where Audrey Hepburn wore a charming birdcage on her head and Salvador DalĂ waxed enigmatic. These theories make the same mistake Bill does: they think a costume is for being sneaky.
The wind sesthers at Ziegler's party want to take Bill "where the rainbow ends". So where does it end? In Genesis the rainbow is God's token: "I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth" (9:13). The covenant ends at verse 17, and the very next story is Noah drunk and naked in his tent. Ham, Cham in the old Latin Bible, sees his father's nakedness. His brothers walk in backward with a garment on their shoulders, "and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness" (9:23). And Noah curses Ham's son: "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren" (9:25).
That is where the rainbow ends: in Canaan, with a curse on the man who sees.
But there is another answer, the one Joyce intimated in a 1926 letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver: "at the rainbow's end are dew and the colour red".
1. The seat: L.
The seat is not just theatre prop or rich collector's antique. It is El, the Ark of the Covenant
On the street outside the It's Not a Cafe a business sign reads JAMES TOBIAS LOMAS, INC.
Take MASONIC out of LOMAS INC and one letter remains: L. The sign can then be read JAMES TOBIAS L. (checked). James is Jacob; Tobias is the hero of the Book of Tobit, whose bride Sarah had already lost seven husbands, each killed on his wedding night. The Masonic reading everyone reaches for is indeed thereâbut it is also a decoy. Discard the decoy. Remove MASONIC, and the sign tells you what to read instead.
From the FRONT, the seat is EL. In PROFILE, the seat is L: the THRONE. The full stop is its attendant censer, swung ceremoniously by Red Cloak. Nightingale's dramatic synth drones, smoke gets in your eyes, the chanting tape runs backward, naked women mesmerize.
PLEDGE | TURN | PRESTIGE
The Turn is where the magic happens. This is where the wizard brings out the dazzling tricks, the mirrors, the smoke and spectacle of dangerâabove all, getting you fixated on the morbid possibility that the trick might go terribly wrong and the ravishing assistant might actually get sawn in half. In some ways she is the main attraction. You watch her because you are supposed to watch her. The illusionist can put almost anything else in plain sight.
2. The seat is the Ark: the footstool, the censer, the rod
The throne of God in scripture is a box with a lid, the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant. David calls it "the footstool of our God" (1 Chronicles 28:2). God speaks "from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark" (Exodus 25:22). What the Ark holds is listed in one verse:
"Which had the golden censer, and the ark of the covenant overlaid round about with gold, wherein was the golden pot that had manna, and Aaron's rod that budded, and the tables of the covenant." (Hebrews 9:4)
That gives a censer and a rod. Red Cloak holds both. The censer is what keeps the priest alive in front of the seat: "the cloud of the incense may cover the mercy seat that is upon the testimony, that he die not" (Leviticus 16:13). The Day of Atonement then puts blood on it: "he shall take of the blood⊠and sprinkle it with his finger upon the mercy seat" (16:14).
Of course they have the Grail. They have the Ark, and Christopher Columbus is a more than 500-year-old vampire. Every schoolchild who has ever tried LSD can figure it out from there. Our Jar of Manna, our Holy Grail, our Tree of Life. Just needs bloodbedabbling.
Looking is the crime. Men died at Beth-shemesh "because they had looked into the ark of the LORD" (1 Samuel 6:19). Uzzah touched it, "and there he died by the ark of God" (2 Samuel 6:7). Dagon, the idol of another god, was found "fallen upon his face to the earth before the ark" (1 Samuel 5:3). Gilles, the farcical fool of French satire, walks into Somerton eyes wide, LOOKING for a good time. They have the Ark, the censer and the rod. That's L. And that is why they kill.
3. Who can sit there: the usurper
Who is powerful enough to sit on the Ark without being destroyed? Only the one who claims to be God.
"I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation⊠I will be like the most High." (Isaiah 14:13â14)
In Hebrew, "the most High" is Elyon. God's title is EL ELYON.
ELYON = LEON + Y
(checked.) Read it a second way and it splits as EL + LYON: El and the lion, lyon in the heraldic spelling. Red Cloak is played by Leon Vitali. The film's own newspaper names a "London fashion designer Leon Vitali" and refers to "Vitali empire insiders". VITALI contains VITA, which is Latin for life (checked). Life is what the one in the seat keeps.
"Thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas." (Ezekiel 28:2)
"Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God⊠so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God." (2 Thessalonians 2:4)
So the ruler sits in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas. That man is Christopher Columbus, Almirante del Mar OcĂ©ano. His flagship, the Santa MarĂa, ran aground on Christmas Day 1492, and its timbers built a fort he named La Navidad.
Alice's young naval officer is Leon Vitali, alias Christopher Columbus, the Captain of the Santa MarĂa. Schnitzler's Dane in Traumnovelle is no sailor. Kubrick made him one. Alice was ready to give up Bill, Helena, her entire future for this gorgeous, gloomy Mariner. She gets her poor dear fool Bill high, leaves him agonizing with sexual inferiority and jealousy, and sends him out upon the Winds of Plutonian Night to be devoured by the vampires of Canaan.
4. The rank holders: Moloch and Jezebel
At the trial Red Cloak sits enthroned between two hooded figures. The god of Carthage, Baal-Hammon, is shown the same way: crowned on a throne flanked by two sphinxes. The cherubim of the Ark are the same pair.
JUDGE | RED CLOAK | JUDGE SPHINX | BAAL-HAMMON | SPHINX MOLOCH | EL ELYON | JEZEBEL MILICH | RED CLOAK | DOMINO
Domino is Jezebel. All's fair in vannesy, and Vinessa Shaw as Domino is no exceptionâespecially once fair is foul and foul is fair. In a movie about masks and capes, Domino is a fully loaded pun, and yes, she IS Red Domino, leading the Big Bad Wolf through the emerald door and onward into Peter Grenning's cOZy apartment. Don't worry, nobody will be there. He's somewhere over the rainbow. But do excuse the mess. A tornado tore through.
She and Sandor Szavost work the Harfords from both sides. Each goes after the other one's spouse:
DOMINO | HARFORDS | SANDOR BILL | MARRIAGE | ALICE
Vanessa atalanta is a butterfly dressed for the part: black wings slashed with scarlet, a tiger coat, and a stuffed tiger on her bed. She is the Red Admiral.
VANESSA | NAVAL OFFICER | PINZĂN
Her first line is about timeâ"Do you know what time it is?"âand so is a later one: "I don't keep track of the time." She doesn't keep track of the time. She just pounces when her agent tinkers the bell: the murdarous she-demon Sarah, alias Sally, blows Bill soundly over the head with her hammer and saw, blinding and bewildering him. And there, just around the corner, lurks the faerymaster's mistress: the ancient vampress dominatrix DOMINO, the pickup-pro pied piper whose procession proceeds to Peter Pan's apartment.
Where the HELL are you gonna get a costume at this hour?
Milich is Moloch. In the cover story, the costume-shop owner sells his "daughter" out of the back room. We see that Milich is a PIMP, not a father, and the GIRL turns out to be a primeval vampress childâhence why she whispers in Tobias's ear, "You should have a cloak lined with ermine," before inscrutably raising her eyebrows and backing away with her sly nymphette's leer.
And as Moloch, Milich is of much higher rank than he appears in his dingy shop since good old Peter Grenning blew off over the rainbow to Neverland. Moloch is the god to whom Red-blooded parents go "to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire" (Jeremiah 7:31). His very name belongs to the Semitic MLK family: king, ruler, rule. The shabby little costume-shop owner outranks Dr. Harford by several thousand years.
If Moloch seems familiar, perhaps it's because you remember him from van Eyck's famous painting Horned Beast in Red Tunic.
You might object: It's Not a Tunic. I certainly cannot PROVE that the bloody rag is a tunic, but it is nowise a TURBAN, as anyone with EYES WIDE can fairly see.
When Milich is securing his bathrobe and making sure we can get a good look at his thumbs, he seems like some greasy foreigner tossed ashore, but make no mistake:
MIL | IS | READ
He is an old erudite wizard. His shop is a stall at the Fair, where the Wares are "lives, blood, bodies, souls".
AMIL | IS | RED
He will be at the Magic Circle. Expect him.
Milich has heralds of his own: two perverted jackals, sphinges in the plain senseâcostumed beasts who flank and guard the Niña.
Peter, alias Aeolus, who possibly picked a peck of pickled peppers, is the keeper of the winds, and he has blown off to the Windy City. Peter is a piper, and the Principal Piper of all pipers is the goat-reeking god who makes music and much mirth by blowing wind between the reeds:
PIPER | PETER | PAN
The Homeric Hymn says the gods named him Pan because he delighted them all, and Aeolus keeps all the winds. His Household is the Wind; the apartment squat is just a destination for doctors who die of drug overdoses:
GALES | AEOLUS | YALES
The gales are his six daughters, including the wino wind sisters who blew Bill, Knew All o' Westminster and Gayle. The Yales are his six sons, the brutes in the borough who abuse and buttend bland, blind Bill.
A yale is a heraldic beast that stands as a supporter beside a coat of arms. AEOLUS ~ YALES. Now we understand why the Yales, the belligerent sons of PAN, bound so boisterously about the bacchanal. They are the least inhibited of the orgygoers, and do most of the actual FUCKING.
5. Round about the throne
"And in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind." (Revelation 4:6)
Ezekiel gives the four faces as a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle. Revelation's beasts are "full of eyes" round the throne, doesn't specify if they are wide or shut. Mapped onto the film:
- the lion is Leon;
- the ox is Moloch, the bull-headed god;
- the eagle is Domino, the winged admiral;
- the man is Bill.
6. Old Nick
Nick Nightingale is Old Nick, the Devil himself, and he tells Bill so: he has a wife and four boys in seAT L.
The Devil has four boys. The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage (in Mathers' English edition of 1898) sets out the hierarchy of Hell: "The four princes and superior spirits be: LUCIFER. LEVIATAN. SATAN. BELIAL." Anton LaVey made them the Four Crown Princes of Hell in The Satanic Bible (1969) and gave each a point of the compass: Satan the south and fire, Lucifer the east and air, Belial the north and earth, Leviathan the west and water.
BELIAL
LEVIATHAN | OLD NICK | LUCIFER
SATAN
The family business is the one Satan describes in Job, when the sons of God come before the LORD: "From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it" (Job 1:7).
NYC | TRAVELS | SEA TO | ROAMS | FRO
Nick oscillates from Coast to Coast. A fallen angel: NEVER a doctor. His son is the morning star; the father sings by night: NIGHT|IN|GALE.
And there is a gale in his name. Satan's weapon against Job's children is a wind: "there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house" (1:19). The Devil is "the prince of the power of the air" (Ephesians 2:2). We could do a comparison:
NICK | MUSIC | PAN NICK | WOMEN | PAN NICK | BOOZE | PAN NICK | MONEY | PAN
But just one moment! Old Nick doesn't drink. He is a DECEIVER and a TEETOTALER who only PRETENDS to drink. The jury is out on whether or not he is a Mormon. And Pan pipes pro bono, while Old Nick plays for pay. "You gotta go where the work is," says he.
He is the sly serpent whispering soft subtleties: If Old Nick hadn't told him about it and given Bill the PASSWORD none of this would have happened.
7. Vanity Fair
John Bunyan named the cult in 1678:
"It beareth the name of Vanity Fair because the town where it is kept is lighter than vanity."
That phrase is Psalm 62:9: "Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie: to be laid in the balance, they are altogether lighter than vanity." Bunyan's fair is "no new-erected business, but a thing of ancient standing," established by Beelzebub, Apollyon and Legion. Its wares include places (Lou's lieu), wives, husbands, children, servants, and "lives, blood, bodies, souls." Legion declares: "My name is Legion: for we are many" (Mark 5:9). Pan's household fits: the wind brothers, the many.
At the fair, the pilgrim named Faithful is tried and killed. In the film the password is FIDELIO.
There is only one fair. Every mystery religion is this same cult under another mask: Baal, Bacchus, Osiris, Moloch. The year's end, Christmas to New Year, is the film's season. Plutarch puts the birthdays of Osiris, Isis and Set in the five days at the year's end, which makes it the Set festival.
8. The sacrifice: Mandy, the grail and the manna
Inside the film's newspaper, beside the story of Mandy, runs the headline DUMPSTER BABY'S TEEN PARENTS HIT WITH SLAY RAP. Every letter of it rearranges into:
PETER | ST | SAUL HATH MANDY | TWIN STRIPPERS | ABBEY
Read straight through, that is ST PETER SAUL HATH TWIN STRIPPERS MANDY ABBEY (checked, every letter). The saints above hath the women below: possession and stewardship. Victor is custodian of Mandy. Carl is custodian of her twin, Abbey, whom the paper calls her sister Jane. Victor, the elder, is Peter. Carl is SAUL, the young man at Stephen's stoning who became Paul. They are not named after the apostles; they are the apostles.
ABBEY | BILL | MANDY VIRGIN | BILL | WHORE
Abbey is a virgin for a simple reason: her sister never fails to swoop in and abscond with whatever man she is getting to know.
The women are slaves. When Bill asks Mandy to leave Somerton with him, she refuses: "I can't!" Then warns: "Because it could cost me my life! And possibly yours!"
Mandy is the sacrifice, the ram. Abraham's ram was caught in a thicket, "and Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh: as it is said to this day, In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen" (Genesis 22:14). If Mandy is the ram, is El Elron, I mean Elyon, Abraham?
Lou Nathanson. LOU is French lieu, "the place", and NATHAN means "he gave". Together: PLACE GIVEN. The place is for Helena. Then MAN|DY, MAN|NA. That sounds like something Echo's marionette Marion might mention. She's going to be moving, you know. In May. She's marrying a math major and moving to Michigan. The golden pot of manna sits in the Ark, laid up "to be kept for your generations" (Exodus 16:33). They hold the manna, and they hold the grail. Bread and blood: they have both elements.
9. The vampires
"For the life of the flesh is in the blood." â Leviticus 17:11
Listen: the Canaanites are immortal vampires. El Elyon leads them, and Christopher Columbus was only one of his masks. And when Mandy gives herself up, they quaff the Holy Grail, which they also possess, for eternal life.
Sandor Szavost and Ilona, alias Helen of Troy, are not merely old money. They are tomb-born ancient Canaanites: incestuous, polygamous brother-sister lovers, married thousands of years ago at a sacrifice to Moloch.
Mandy and Abbey are undead vampresses too: the Painted Sisters, controlled for centuries by their deranged tyrant handlers, Victor and Carl, alias St. Peter and St. Paulâvampires themselvesâand kept as undead sex slaves.
Alice is the Red Madonna. The House needs fresh blood, so she takes husbands and spawns, and her real husband, Columbus, murders them. She is Athirat, consort of El, goddess of the sea and of sacred trees: wife of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. The Christmas Tree is her sigla.
As for the slab: an undead vampress can easily lie on one for a few hours. Which means Victor's explanation, that it was all theatre, is also true. Somerton is in the house Anne Rice built: the Théùtre des Vampires, where real vampires play actors playing vampires, kill a real victim onstage, and take a bow.
10. The street
On the door where Bill is seated at the Sonata "Cafe", right in front of his face, a sign reads ALL EXITS ARE FINAL, with EXITS in huge type and an EXIT sign above the door (about 0:56:00). There is no re-entry, and the film keeps that promise:
- Bill leaves the house and is never naive again.
- He calls Marion, and Carl answers.
- He returns to Somerton and gets a second warning.
- He returns to Domino, and Sally deals with him. Sally is the Wicked Witch of the West. Creepy Bill slips his hands in her shirt, that's OK, right? Brrrrr! Wwwow!
Aeolus, too, refused Odysseus a second time.
The Sonata is Hades, the Underworld, a liminal passage on the way to HELL, after you 'ford the River Styx. All Exits Are Final. It's Not a Cafe.
11. The fleet
Christopher Columbus is Leon Vitali. We said so in section 3, and we are not going to waste your time proving it.
Now a confession. Back in section 4 we sat two figures on either side of the throne:
MOLOCH | EL ELYON | JEZEBEL
and called it the answer. It was not. It ran aground, like the Santa MarĂa on Christmas Day, and like Columbus we built what we could from the wreck. What we salvaged was this: Columbus sailed with three ships:
NIĂA | SANTA MARĂA | PINTA
When Bill comes to the back chamber to rent his wares, there are mannequins of Christopher Columbus and Alice, the betrothed, spotlights shining on them, immediately inside the gate. "Looks like alive, hein?" says Milich. "YES!" Bill agrees, turning a thumbelina's pirouette, "It's WONDERFUL!" Then Milich gives away the theme of the party:
CLOWNS | OFFICERS | PIRATES
Each ship had an owner and a captain, and they were not the same man. The owners stay home. The captains sit beside the throne.
The Santa MarĂa, Holy Mary, is the flagship, and Columbus captains her. Her owner and master was Juan de la Cosa, who fled the Christmas wreck in the ship's boat rather than help Columbus save her. That is Victor, who leaves the overdosed Mandy to Bill and goes back to his party.
The Pinta, the painted one, was captained by MartĂn Alonso PinzĂłn, and he deserted. He broke away from the fleet "to make individual discoveries and to find treasure". When the ships met again there was "a furious argument" with Columbus, and on the way home PinzĂłn raced ahead to Spain to get his story in first. The court snubbed him. He came home to Palos "exhausted and suffering from a recurrent fever", was "taken from his ship in a stretcher", and died. That is Lou Nathanson, the Deserter and the Departed, dead in his bed in his nautical themed chambre Ă coucher, his treasure safely accounted for.
NATHAN|ZON | PIN|ZON | PIN|TA
LOU NATHANSON: PLACE GIVEN. He gives his place on the Pinta away. It was the Pinta's lookout who first cried land, and Columbus took the reward, claiming he had seen "a light 'like a little wax candle rising and falling'" four hours earlier.
The Niña, "the little girl", was nicknamed for her owner, Juan Niño, "little boy". After the Santa MarĂa was wrecked, Columbus sailed home in her.
That is where our first answer broke. We had Milich on the Niña: Moloch, who sells his little girl, the owner of "the girl". But Moloch is an owner, not a captain, and owners stay home. The figure at Red Cloak's side has no beard, and Milich does. Moloch never sat at the trial. So who did?
Speak of the Devil, we have assembled quite a demonic congregation of Canaan idols, but the elephant in the room is who DIDN'T make it to Somerton. And I am NOT talking about Alice. She's RIGHT THERE, El Elyon's Right Hand Officer. Alice, the Red Madonna, in fact, she is El Elyon's WIFE. No, I refer to BAAL. I haven't seen him ANYWHERE!
Now SPELL the fleet:
A | L | P ATHIRAT | EL ELYON | PINZĂN
Athirat is El's consort, the goddess of the sea. El Elyon is the seat and the one who sits in it. And PinzĂłn's place, given away, has been taken. Here is who sits at the trial, on the throne and either side of it:
ALICE | COLUMBUS | DOMINO WIFE | CONQUISTADOR | HARLOT
Alice is the Niña: her little girl is Helena, and the king comes home in his wife's ship. Domino sails the Pinta in Pinzón's place, the painted lady in the painted ship: Jezebel "painted her face" (2 Kings 9:30). Holy Mary sits at the centre. And Alice is the Red Madonna.
Together, the four faces of Revelation spell
ALICE | BILL | COLUMBUS | DOMINO A | B | C | D
Now Blend Alice's two husbands!
ALICE | BILL-COLUMBUS | DOMINO
One last turn of the screw. BILL is BAAL. First Bill goes to the Ball, then Victor calls Bill to the billiard room, he is just knocking a few balls around, but he'd prefer knocking Bill around. Bill goes to the Ball. Bill becomes Baal. Nick knew it the moment he saw him, back at the start of the night: "OH, MY, GOD. BAEL!" Bael is the same god demoted to a demon, the first spirit of the Goetia, who "maketh thee to go invisible", which is exactly what Bill buys a costume to do. Baal gets kicked out of the club and becomes Bael. His friends miss him, so they throw him a party. BILL is BE-EL-ZE-BUB. Which is to say Bill is El. Beelzebub is Baal-zebub, "the god of Ekron" (2 Kings 1:2), and Bunyan has already told us who cofounded the Fair: Beelzebub.
So there were two devils at the piano bar all along, two old friends from medical school:
BILL | DEVIL | NICK BLACK | COLOR | WHITE
One finished and became the good doctor, eyes SHUT. One dropped out and fell, eyes WIDE. Nick plays piano in black and white.
At the trial Bill stands facing Red Cloak, and El Lyon is his mirror image. Bill notices that he has the same company:
ALICE | HARFORD | DOMINO WIFE | BILL | HARLOT GOOD | BILL | EVIL
Both men are married to Alice. The fool and the god. An image of the fallen one mirroring the flesh of her REAL husband: a perfect reflection.
GOOD BILL | EVIL BILL BAAL | BAEL
Mandy grabs Bill, and the man who takes her upstairs is Christopher Columbus himself: Red Cloak, back from his quickchange. It's as though good Bill turned into evil Bill when he went upstairs with the whore. One is reminded of the man with the softly glimmering wedding band in the infernal caverns of Hades.
Ovid tells us what the blind prophet said when Narcissus was born: he would live to a ripe old age "if he never recognizes himself." Bill looks straight into the mirror and does not recognize a thing. That is how he gets home alive. There's no place like it! You were there! and you were there, and YOU were there!
So who did it? Like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Garden of Earthly Delights, the TRUE end of Eyes Wide Shut is the middleâthe back half itself is just Kubrick shuttering the altarpiece and wrapping up the Christmas parcel. And like Clue, this film has more than one ending.
Ending A. Bael comes home. His friends throw him the party, the blood is drunk, and BILL, BAAL at last, climbs into the seat of El. The usurper is usurped. That's how it could have happened.
Ending B. The Commodore did it. L. Ron Hubbard was a naval officer before he was a prophet, and he ended up commodore of a private fleet of three ships, the Apollo his flagship, known simply as "Flag", crewed by officers who sign a billion-year pledge. Three ships, a commodore, a crew of immortals. Even his ships line up: DIANA | APOLLO | ATHENA. Lou Nathanson was L. Ron, short for El Elron, thus his intense nautical obsession. Red Cloak is a title, and Leon Vitali has taken up his mantle. Except that Scientology was never led by Leon Vitali. (No.)
Ending C. The Pope did it. Red is the colour of his office, the red cape and the red shoes. Red Cloak is the Vicar of Christ, and his two deputies are St. Peter and St. Paul, Victor and Carl, the two saints who stand guard at the steps of St. Peter's. A vicar is a stand-in, hence Lou Nathanson, and VICTOR is half a VICAR already. (No.)
Now fully blend the lot, erasing every hinge. Nick is a devil and Bill is a devil: they collapse into one. El Lyon is Bill's mirror image, and BAAL on the throne faces BILL on the floor: they collapse into one. The fool and the real husband share one wife: one. Fold every triptych in the film onto its hinge and there is a single man left standing in the room.
Ending D. Here's what really happened. Read the man down and the fleet across, and they cross at the throne:
HARFORD
PINZĂN | COLUMBUS | ALICE
EL (THE SEAT)
Now, read down the upright post of the cross:
HARFORD = COLUMBUS = EL
The Wake has a name for that man:
HERE COMES EVERYBODY H. C. E.
Everybody, and the wife, the god and the harlot. Six letters, one room:
H C E + A L P = CHAPEL
But wait. That means the plot of Eyes Wide Shut is really just the plot of Finnegans Wake. A story about a man, a wife, and a family, after all. And we were so close to unlocking a maximally paranoid conspiracy theory! MAN + WIFE = CHAPEL?? And it was all a dream AFTER ALL??
Husband and wife, asleep in one bed, slipping in and out of each other's dreams in subtle ways, while the fire crackles in the grate and the winds whine softly at the windowpane.
The sources
| THE BIBLE |
ART OF LOVE | EYES WIDE SHUT | FINNEGANS WAKE
| TRAUMNOVELLE |
The film, Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, Ovid, the Wake, Bunyan and the Bible: these are the sources, and everything above is read from them. The project's Prolog base holds each claim with its source, its status and who made it. The unhinged layer is kept in its own scope there, apart from the readings it rests on.
Is the world run by an ancient cult of immortal vampires called the Vanity Fair?