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The Ninth Gate has largely been recognized as satire, while Eyes Wide Shut so far has not. This has gone on long enough.

The two films come up together for good reason. Both were released in 1999, months apart, and both turn on the same set piece: a secret society of the rich and powerful, cloaked as their satanic alter egos, gathered for a ritual in a huge mansion, with an outsider slipping in where he doesn't belong.

Both films are spoofs, but Kubrick's masterpiece is usually recognized as a failed erotic thriller. Fails to thrill. Fails to be erotic. Kubrick in decline; Cruise and Kidman unlikeable.

The difficulty of unpacking Eyes Wide Shut begins before figuring out who is the butt of the joke: first you have to notice that there is a joke. And the person who hasn’t noticed that there is a joke often turns out to be its butt.

In The Ninth Gate we know who the joke is on. The costumes and cinema score—and, in some cases, literal enormous stone demons flanking a character—keep telling us.

— Not to mention the centuries of wisdom they contain, says grandiose Balkan about his books.

This poor guy, a decadent Faust, despite fervent dedication and true passion and faith—collecting the most wisdomcenturies of any modern satanic bibliophile!—hasn't even managed to get an appointment with the Devil yet!

Corso's main flaw is his myopia, but it hardly impedes him. His effortless cool leaves us no doubt, from the beginning, of his inevitable success. He is the only skeptic and straight man in a movie full of ridiculous devil worshippers, and the joke is clearly made at their expense. Only at the end do we get the twist: the devil does exist. She has been following him around the entire movie, dangling clues and waiting for him to piece together his simple rebus, which summons her in person after all.

In Eyes Wide Shut, as in The Shining, the joke is on us: the credulous audience, autocompleting the movie we expected. Kubrick didn't forget what he learned on Lolita and especially Dr. Strangelove: the satirical level is strictly more provocative and fun than the straight treatment. Failing to operate at the level of satire in his later works would squander cinematic capital. It would be an amnesiac artistic regression. It didn't happen. The satire continued; the subject of critique stopped being something you could point to inside the movie. It became participatory.

The Shining has us operating as enablers and propagandists, elaborately reinterpreting dialog and motives to preserve our preconceived idea of the plot. Eyes Wide Shut takes this a step further, having us delete entire scenes from our preferred summary of the movie.

The waste of film known as the Lou Nathanson house call is a classic example. By the time you get to the end of Eyes Wide Shut the first time through, you have blocked this out. It was long, painful, and did not seem to advance the plot meaningfully enough to merit its inclusion. Obviously the scene was not cheap to produce, and the audience might even suspect director senility to be a factor here.

But once you start decoding and unraveling rather than reflexively autocompleting the plot, you understand that this film has no throwaway yards, and every prop and line of dialog is a crucial clue in an elaborate puzzle that successfully outlived this suspected dotard by more than two decades.

There is a logic of economy, and it is the key to understanding why this scene exists: in addition to being—as one of the boringer scenes—a good place to bury a bunch of symbolism and rebus material, the scene's inclusion is itself a clue. If we have no reason to ever meet Carl and would rather delete him from the movie, why is he an uncanny, seemingly gratuitous mirror image of Tom Cruise?

Carl is not throwaway. He is a major character in the hidden plot. It is Marion who barely shows up in the rebus!

There are other scenes we purge, including the several relating to Mandy's death. These scenes about a dead hooker are highly inconvenient for the ongoing Harford marriage that seems to be the main thing redeemed by this weird film, on the surface.

Like our protagonist himself, we, the naive audience, experience the movie as a sequence of things that are happening to Bill, not as a plot against him. Domino is seen as a pitiable woman who has lost her way in life and has ended up out on the street, a callback to Sonya Marmeladova, not as an evil satanic vampress witch and arch conspirator.

We fail to consider the possibility that the people we have already met are the ones wearing the masks at Somerton.

Then it is a small leap to guess that Carl is at Somerton. Lo, we have another person besides Victor and Mandy who we have seen unmasked, who is likely to be found at the house! Now we understand that the scene is important and cannot be deleted. And we know Nick is there, but he's wearing a blindfold, not a mask.

Domino cannot be there; she's a lowly streetwalker. These are high-class models, not hookers. Milich cannot be there; he's a greasy foreigner who runs a costume shop. These are wrong assumptions based on our own characterizations and unconscious biases.

We don't even understand what the movie we are watching is. In real life, elaborate conspiracies are improbable. But the model is word games and puzzles in the newspaper, not realism. And word games are entirely based on eager recognition of patterns.

Victor was there. Everybody knows that. The first time we watched, we didn't necessarily suspect that, but it seemed super obvious in retrospect when he told us in the billiards room. That plot twist is a decoy belonging to the surface narrative. It's hardly revelatory. It operates at approximately the same level as the plot twist in The Ninth Gate. You might not have seen it coming, but it was a no-brainer once revealed.

Carl was there. Plausible. Szavost was there. Obviously. Domino was there. Less plausible. Milich was there. The guy in the bathrobe? Alice was there. Spits drink.

Alice was there, and she and Domino are Red Cloak’s flanking Officers! Now that’s a plot twist. But telling you the answer hardly gives you the experience of discovering it, much less a reason to believe it. It’s a deep, hard puzzle: you have to work through it yourself before the answer becomes as obvious in retrospect as Victor’s admission. That puts this film in a category almost entirely of its own, with at least The Shining for company.

It is in the nature of satire to state the opposite of the truth as if it were the truth. — Stanley Kubrick

— It was a terrific party the other night. Alice and I had a wonderful time.
— Well, good. Good. It was great seeing you both, says Victor ambiguously.

Bill, like the audience, doesn't catch Victor's double entendre. Which night are we talking about? In fact, Victor is talking about the masked gathering, as he soon makes clear—but not clear enough for us to perform the necessary logical inference about Alice, whose role we compartmentalize: innocent; sleeping beauty. Bill is a fool, too self-obsessed with his own fake image to notice what is happening amongst those in the plot who see clearly. Corso, on the other hand, is sophisticated:

— You really believe in the Devil, Baroness?
— Enough to devote my life and my library to him, not to mention many years of work. Don't you?
— Almost.

This bit reprises the old nearly-one-camel gag from Monty Python, which Kubrick himself found serviceable when he planted this detectably humorous response in his The Shining-era interview with Ciment:

I've always been interested in ESP and the paranormal. In addition to the scientific experiments which have been conducted suggesting that we are just short of conclusive proof of its existence, I'm sure we've all had the experience of opening a book at the exact page we're looking for, or thinking of a friend a moment before they ring on the telephone.

Told with a perfectly straight face. In The Ninth Gate, the casting itself is a giveaway. Depp has an ironic expression by default. You expect mischief from this rascal. Cruise and everyone else play it 100% deadpan, so you never get the slightest clue they're pulling your leg. It's not even clear if the actors themselves were read in on the joke.

The Ninth Gate is in part a spoof of Kubrick's techniques. The main tool we use to crack open the hidden plot of both Eyes Wide Shut and The Shining comes from way back in art history, the triptych, which is essentially a main doublewide panel flanked by two complementary wings. They are medieval altarpieces which were flapped shut except on feast days: an ancient form of entertainment that worked in part because the stimulation it provided was normally withheld. Kubrick uses them to encode what are called sosies, which are puns that can be used systematically to build out hidden structures of meaning.

DEMON | BALKAN | DEMON

When we meet Boris Balkan, he is lecturing about demonic "litterature," standing between two enormous stone devils. Kubrick is tasteful about his flanking wings; you have to go looking for the triptychs. Polanski carves them in stone, ten feet tall. Just getting those things into the room was a feat of logistics. We search in vain for signs of tasteful restraint.

Demonic lamps are another favorite of Stanley Kubrick. The Overlook is lined with dozens of weird, gratuitous chandeliers. They evoke stag or goat or Baphomet, each one with a ghastly black crown like Sauron might wear. On closing day, a man in a red hat on a tall ladder adjusts one for minutes on end, making sure we'd have to be blind not to notice them. But their demonic presence is hardest to pin down when you look directly at them. When you actually focus your eye on these, they resolve into ordinary Western metalwork—overwrought but not overtly satanic. It's unsettling because this thing breathing down our neck turns out to be nothing after all. Nick Nightingale looks like a fortune teller, his weird table lamp inescapably a crystal ball. Those table lamps, which would be so annoying in practice, were chosen to conjure up the soothsayer, but when you scrutinize them, they pass muster. They are dumb but do not break realism. They are distracting, but stay on the safe side of plausible deniability. The Somerton mansion has some Lucifer-like lamps at the base of the stairs, and those are fairly overt, but we're inside the actual House at that point; we've gone through the looking glass.

Polanski takes and uses the demonic lamp thing as a gag. Here there is zero subtlety or doubt: the living room lamp at the Telfer estate is literally a black demoness with glazed eyes and billowing cloak rising from the crypt. The entire place is decked out in Beast-of-Revelation chic.

Another fun similarity between the two 1999 comedies about devil worshippers: the joke signs on businesses in the backgrounds of street scenes. The first one of these we noticed in Eyes Wide Shut was NU-RITE. This one stuck out because wino Nuala Windsor spells her first name for Bill, and it happens to be built around the French word for "nude". And NU-RITE appears to be provocatively asking us: Nuala knew, right? It's all right there, a 100% admissible fact of the rebus. Polanski spends his signage on pure silliness: a business on the street is named Beasty Feast.

According to an Internet wives' tale, Polanski billed The Ninth Gate as "Rosemary's Baby meets Eyes Wide Shut." In this telling, he names his own devil film and Kubrick's in one breath. "Sie merken, es ist eine Komödie," he said: you'll notice, it's a comedy.

And why would Roman Polanski honor a project as dubious as Eyes Wide Shut, one the Internet has already designated a total failure? For one thing, the two men were old friends. After Sharon Tate's murder, Kubrick spent long hours with Polanski. Polanski said: "I could see he was trying to understand my feelings and I don't blame him for it… He's a very wise man."

But more importantly for l'art pour l'art, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut were made in reference to Rosemary's Baby, about which Kubrick told Ciment in the same interview:

It was one of the best of the genre. I liked The Exorcist too.

The Ninth Gate opened in France on 25 Aug 1999, about three weeks before Eyes Wide Shut opened there. In the US it came out on 10 Mar 2000, eight months after Eyes Wide Shut (16 Jul 1999). In France, Polanski's spoof actually came first. But Kubrick's project was under development for 30 years. He bought the rights to Traumnovelle in 1968—while he was finishing 2001, the year Rosemary's Baby came out—long before he broke ground on The Shining. He directed several other films while he was working on Eyes Wide Shut in the background, about which his friend Polanski may or may not have known.

Kubrick is Coyote, well funded, several IQ points ahead. He knows from his chess hustling days in Washington Square Park that it is far better to be underestimated. Who gives a damn if critics pan your life's work? The joke's on them! Real artists who are savvy enough to see the humor appreciate the film. And Polanski wasn't the only one. Scorsese listed it as his fourth-favorite film of the 90s.

Life may be too short to properly appreciate Eyes Wide Shut. Fifty viewings weren't enough to decipher it. It took a method, a Prolog database and dozens of hours of research before we were "red in" on the joke. We had to chop it up into little bits played at half speed again and again. When something preoccupies a great mind for as long as Kubrick spent on this, it's bound to be misunderstood. But it is shallow to dismiss this film as a fall from grace just because Full Metal Jacket was more entertaining and watchable. It might not be our favorite movie, but it is a great work of art, and the most confounding puzzle Kubrick ever devised.