Kubrick and Tyranny of the Image

If movies are the dominant art form of the 20th century, and I think they are, then we can best understand what they’re about by looking at the best movie maker of the 20th century. This is obviously subjective but I think you can make a better case for Stanley Kubrick than anyone. This is my theory of Kubrick’s work—there are many Kubrick theories, but this one is mine. I think it’s significant that Kubrick started as a photographer, and he always kept a photographic feel to all of his work. In an interview for the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, Jack Nicholson said that Kubrick’s aim was not to take photographs of reality, but to take photographs of photographs of reality. His movies thus don’t have a naturalistic feel—they feel like what movies should be, moving pictures.

Movies for him were all about images, rather than narratives or stories. But even though film was all about the image for him, he took an antagonistic stance towards images. Images were the enemy, in a deep historical and philosophical sense. He viewed images as having kind of a tyrannical hold on history, and that history is crippled the image in all its forms. (This theory is floated in the documentary Room 237, about Kubrick’s film The Shining. I want to take that idea and apply it to Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, instead of The Shining).

In all of his films, there’s this theme of images overwhelming and distorting humanity and reality itself. In the finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the astronaut’s face after seeing all those weird images at the end:

A Clockwork Orange probably has the most direct, famous example of this:

The Shining is all about the past being ugly, but only images—Scatman Crothers tells Danny this, to warn him that the ghosts he will see in the hotel are just images and they can’t really hurt him. And that’s what history is—living images, or ghosts, from the past, that overwhelm everything, but that can’t hurt us if we don’t let it.

History casts a long shadow—we seem unable ever to escape from it. The conflicts raging around the world today are eruptions of unresolved issues from deep history. So how can we deal with history? What is history really? History is a collection of images of the past, which dominate us, but they aren’t real. If history is an image, and the images dominate and torture us, how can we defeat them? By closing our eyes…

This is what Eyes Wide Shut explores. It was Kubrick’s last film (he died a couple months before it premiered in 1999). The title itself tells you to close your eyes, but to have some other form of awareness. They’re shut but widely so—allowing you to see more. Shutting your eyes implies blindness, but if they are wide shut, they are enabling a kind of vision that is otherwise inaccessible. Closing your eyes to gain more sight—that’s what the movie is about.

Like most of Kubrick’s movies, people didn’t really know what to make of it at first when it came out. There was tons of hype because it was his last movie, and it starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. There has been a rebirth of interest in the movie in recent years, I think, because of the secret society angle—Tom Cruise’s character infiltrates an elite sex party where everyone is doing semi-satanic stuff. This is a valid and interesting part of the movie, and well worth investigating, but not my focus here.

What the movie is really about is Nicole Kidman’s character Alice tormenting her husband, Dr. Bill (Tom Cruise). For seemingly no reason, one night she tells him that she has long harbored a sexual fantasy about some other man, a sailor they both encountered long ago. (She’s never acted on it, but she’s fantasized about fucking that specific sailor for years). She explains it all in excruciating detail. Why does she tell him this? Just to be a bitch, is my best guess.

Tom Cruise’s reaction to learning all this:

This scene occurs early in the movie, and it hangs over everything that happens after. While Cruise runs around all over the place, getting caught up in the weird elite sex cult, he keeps seeing these images of his wife getting fucked by the sailor, flashing in his head. It keeps popping up, tormenting and haunting him.

The recurring image of Nicole Kidman having sex with the sailor—it’s just an image, and not even of something real that happened. It’s an image of a fantasy that his wife had—that’s all it is. That’s what the past always is—an image, usually of something that didn’t happen the way we think it happened. And yet it has so much force, because we can see it—but perhaps this is the point, that anything we see is not real.

Kubrick’s work contains a seemingly infinite number of themes, but perhaps this is the central one—the simultaneous tyranny and emptiness of image, and the need for humanity to recognize this, so that history stops weighing us down. History is just an image, and like all images, it isn’t real.

Kubrick knew this better than anyone—he knew how to make images that seemed realer than reality, and he did it way before the age of CGI. The space scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, are better than anything from today, even with all the advances in computer technology since that movie came out in 1968.

But we keep doing it—that’s the catch. We keep allowing history to dominate us. We keep thinking that the images, ghosts of the past, are real, and give them power, when they don’t really have any.

A lot of Kubrick’s films are about facing the truth of history—but it’s always a bad truth. The truth of A Clockwork Orange is that the state is using mind control to create serial killers (basically the MK Ultra program). The truth of The Shining is that Jack Nicholson has always been a crazy axe-wielding murderer. His journey in the film is facing up to that and becoming strong enough to do it. The ghost Mr. Grady taunts him in the bathroom, and questions whether Jack has it in him to fulfill his destiny of becoming an axe murderer—and he has to prove that he does have what it takes (although ultimately he fails).

In Eyes Wide Shut, Tom Cruise discovers a bizarre sex cult, possibly a satanic one that engages in ritualistic practices including murder. (At the very least it is a sex trafficking cult). But it isn’t a case of some pure outsider discovering this strange world that they don’t belong to—he does belong there. Him and his wife both do. They probably go off to join it at the end. While they’re talking, they let their young daughter wander off behind two suspicious looking men. (The men resemble people who were seen in earlier parts of the movie mixing with the sex cult elites). They are just letting her be kidnapped and potentially sold into sex slavery, and they don’t even care.

“The important thing is that we’re awake now,” Nicole Kidman says to her husband at the very end. She says this when they are still totally blind—they just let their daughter wander off after two strange men. Their eyes are wide shut. The final line of the movie is Nicole Kidman saying that they have to get home right away, because they have something very important to do. What is that important thing? They have to fuck. They have both seen too much—Tom Cruise saw the cult, he saw the image of his wife fucking the sailor; and Nicole Kidman saw images in her mind of her husband at the sex cult. They have too much of the weight of these images, the weight of history, bearing down on them. They are ultimately too weak to do anything but resist it. They are awake, meaning they are looking right at it, and it has changed them.

Where do they go from there? Seems to me that this is an origin story for how the elite sex cult got two new members—it seems only natural that they would go on to join the sex cult. Tom Cruise already knows all about it, and his wife is obviously a freak.

I might suggest a subtitle for the movie: Eyes Wide Shut: or how they learned stopped worrying and love the satanic sex cult.