This blog will analyze the films of Stanley Kubrick for underlying meaning and symbolism, allegory, metaphor, etc. This includes the study and application of hints given to us in the movies of certain other filmmakers who were influenced by Kubrick; these hints have been designed by these filmmakers to help us interpret Kubrick's movies.
By the time Bill arrives at work (above left), Alice has gotten around to reading the paper (top right). Note that their daughter is occupied by watching TV, an activity which requires no involvement from Alice.
Bill is seeing patients (above left) while Alice primps the daughter (above right).
Bill's well into his busy schedule (above left) by the time Alice starts getting dressed (above right).
Bill has progressed even further into his daily workload (above left), while Alice is still getting ready for the day (above right). In Bill's workplace, Bill is shown as doing virtually all of the work himself.
Above left: Alice and her daughter wrap Christmas presents. Above: Bill makes it home in time to help raise his daughter. Left: At the end of the day, Alice asks Bill how he feels about wrapping the rest of the presents. Bill, tired from his long workday, says, "let's wait until tomorrow." The entire scenario depicted in the above is meant, in part, to get across the idea that those women (such as Alice) who embody the 'evil feminine' nature mentioned in part 4 of the analysis, oftentimes take advantage of certain men, in the sense that these men have a greater tendency than the women do, to accomplish 'real' (i.e., more strenuous) work.
In the ritual at Somerton, the red worn by the Master of Ceremonies represents 'Satanic' forces, i.e., evil elite Jews, and the blueish-colored clothing worn by the two persons, one on each side of the Master, represents the 'evil feminine'. Kubrick believed that evil elite hermaphroditic Jews, highly-placed radical feminists, certain high-ranking Freemasons and Mormons, and other parties, are currently planning to establish a real-life, modern-day 'utopia' in the United States, in southern Indiana.
The black coloring of the cloaks worn by some of the guests at the ceremony, indicates that the ritual taking place has something to do with the alchemicalnigredo stage, which is associated with, among other things, melancholia, and the encounter with the psychological shadow.[a] The ceremony participants represent persons who are, or who are associated with, the members of the real-life evil parties mentioned in the caption to the above screencap. The masks the participants are wearing symbolize the fact that the real-life evil parties are 'hidden' from plain view - they can operate 'under the radar', such that we don't see them for what they are: the source of much of the evil in present-day society.
Above left: When Bill gets home from the ceremony, he places a bag containing the mask and cloak he wore there inside a normally-locked cabinet, ostensibly so that Alice won't see them. Note the blue coloring in this scene - this indicates that an 'evil feminine' nature is present in the Harford household itself. Above right: When we see the mask on Bill's pillow later, this is an indication that Alice has access to the cabinet, unbeknownst to Bill.
Blue coloring is present even in the Harford bedroom. What is being suggested is that Alice herself is an evil feminine presence: She and Victor Ziegler have been leading Bill along the whole time - the entire sequence of events with Amanda, Marion, Domino, Nick Nightingale, and the others has been a plan being carried out; Bill has been set up. Part of the purpose of having him experience all the events that he does, is to get him to associate, deep within his psyche, the idea of philandering with the ideas of trouble and death, so that he will remain under his wife's control. Bill has been largely under the influence of his unconscious during much of the movie - either Alice and Victor are keeping him drugged or under some form of hypnosis, or he is, in fact, dreaming much of what we see; or, there is some combination of these. That Bill is being led along suggests that there is a 'hidden plot' in the movie; this will be discussed later.
a. Wikipedia, 'Nigredo'. Web, n.d. URL = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigredo.
Above left: In the first Gold Room bar scene in Kubrick's 1980 movie, The Shining, Jack Torrance thought he had sixty dollars in his wallet when he sat down, but when he looks in the wallet, he realizes the money is not there. As explained in the analysis of The Shining on this blog, his wife, Wendy, has stolen the money. Therefore, Jack must pay for the straight bourbon he has just been poured with credit. He is a recovering alcoholic, and tells the bartender he has not had a drink for five months. Above right: At the beginning of Eyes Wide Shut, Bill can't find his wallet, then when he asks Alice if she's seen it, she suggests that he look on the bedside table. Note that Bill looks under some books to find it; this suggests that Alice had been hiding the wallet from Bill.
Victor hands Bill a scotch. Note that Victor already knows that Bill likes the drink straight. Bill sternly refuses a case of scotch that Victor offers to send him. Bill's voice sounds weak immediately after his first sip of his scotch. All of this is a hint that Bill has been trying to quit drinking, just like Jack in The Shining
Above left: Nick plays the piano blindfolded during the ceremony at Somerton in Eyes Wide Shut. Above right: Jack Torrance covers his eyes with his hands while sitting at the Gold Room bar in The Shining. In the analysis of The Shining, it was mentioned that Sigmund Freud says (in his The Uncanny), that fear of losing one's eyesight can be a substitute for the dread of castration: "The study of dreams, fantasies, and myths has taught us...that anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of going blind, is quite often a substitute for the fear of castration."[a] In Eyes Wide Shut, the 'dreamer' of some of the movie's events, Bill Harford, suffers from a fear of castration, by virtue of the fact that he here 'sees' Nick blindfolded while he's 'dreaming'. (Later in this analysis is to be discussed that much of what Bill experiences, takes place while he is in a dream-like state.) The fact that the dreamer of the events of The Shining, Susan Robertson, sees Jack covering his eyes in her dream, is, in part, a representation of the fact that she suffers from penis envy (the form castration anxiety takes in a female).
a. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock with Introduction by Hugh Haughton. Penguin Books, 2003. Google Books, p. 189. URL = https://books.google.com.
Above left: The red, white, and blue clothing worn by Stuart Ullman represents Freemasonry. Above right: The red and white color combination of this bathroom represents hermaphroditism. In alchemy, the hermaphroditic Hermes is born from a union of Red King with White Queen. (This union is sometimes called the chemical marriage, which, speaking alchemically, is what Wendy and Danny are to undergo; i.e., the conjunction of Sol and Luna, as discussed earlier.) The red is associated with the rubedo and the white with the albedo. In Greek mythology, Hermaphroditus was the two-sexed child of Aphrodite and Hermes (in Roman mythology, Venus and Mercury respectively). Recall that Wendy represents Venus and Danny represents Mercury. Thus, the foregoing is consistent with what was said earlier, about Wendy desiring to conceive a child with Danny.
Above left: Hallorann lying on green pillows. Green is a color sometimes associated with the Holy Spirit;[a] as we said earlier, Hallorann represents this. Hallorann can here 'see' or sense, that a horrible event is about to take place in the hotel (i.e., the room 237 occurrence involving Jack's interaction with an old, partially decayed woman, as shown further below). Above right: The lighted green bathroom in room 237. The green here represents the dark side of Wendy's (and thus Susan's) Jungian Self. The idea behind Kubrick's color symbolism, at least insofar as use of green, is that lighted, 'shiny' green represents the presence of evil, whereas 'plain' or deep green, e.g., that as used in dyes, represents the forces of good. However, as shown below, this latter kind of green can be associated with other colors to symbolize something negative.
Above: With regard to the meaning of the room 237 scene, the symbolism of the room's carpet colors (in the portion of the carpet that appears as shown above) is as follows: The green halo-shaped bands in the repeating pattern represent the Holy Spirit, which is 'present' in this scene by virtue of the fact that Dick Hallorann, who himself represents the Holy Spirit individually, can 'see' or sense the horror of the events taking place in the room; and the black signifies the alchemical nigredo, which is associated with, among other things, chaos, and putrefaction and decomposition. According to the online Encyclopedia Britannica 'Chaos (Ancient Greek religion)' page, "The modern meaning of the word [chaos] is derived from Ovid, who saw Chaos as the original disordered and formless mass, from which the maker of the Cosmos produced the ordered universe. This concept of Chaos also was applied to the interpretation of the creation story in the bible's Genesis 1 (to which it is not native) by the early Church Fathers."[b] Because of the association of the cosmological concept of Chaos with the creation of the world in the biblical book of Genesis (where "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" [Gen. 1:2, King James Version; emphasis not in original], then recalling from above that the nigredo is associated with putrefaction and decomposition, the black in the carpet pattern also indicates that the scene in the room has to do with death or corruption of the Holy Spirit itself. Recall that the room 237 scenario includes a view of Danny in a state of extreme anxiety, holding his breath or gagging (below left screencap), while he 'sees' his father interacting with the decaying woman (below right); also recall the connection of breath to the Holy Spirit.
Noting that the purple portion of the carpet pattern is roughly in the shape of a phallus, and recalling from earlier in the analysis the dactyl symbolism and the Faust metaphor (which connects 'Tony' with the phallus and thus, with creative and intuitive faculties), and also recalling the finger symbolism (the index finger corresponds to Jupiter), the phallus in the pattern can also be taken as a finger, with purple being a color sometimes associated with the planet Jupiter. Therefore, the purple phallus/finger in the carpet pattern also indicates the 'presence' of the god Jupiter, whom as we've said, is represented by Danny. What we have here is the metaphorical phallus inside the womb, the matrix, symbolizing the fact that Danny has had sex with his own mother. The tie-in with the Faust metaphor indicates that Danny's libido, which is at first directed toward his mother, will, later in his life, express itself in processes requiring creative and/or intuitive abilities, for example, in art, or in a superior ability to empathize with others.
a. "In ecclesiastical symbolism, green is the color of the Holy Ghost..." (--Jung, Emma and Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Grail Legend, Trans. Andrea Dykes, Princeton University Press, 1998, Google Books, p. 165, URL = books.google.com.)
b. 'Chaos'. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2015. Web. 17 May. 2015.
URL = http://www.britannica.com/topic/Chaos-ancient-Greek-religion.
Above left and right: The eight-point compass rose-like pattern on the wall in Victor Ziegler's home, here represents the Egyptian Ogdoad, a set of four male-female pairs of deities worshiped in ancient Egypt. Each of the eight points on the outer star represents one of the Ogdoad's eight deities. The outer star has four larger points, and each of these represents one of the four male deities of the Ogdoad. As denoted on the right-hand screencap, the four larger points on the outer star can also be taken to be pointing north, east, south, and west, respectively, indicating that Kubrick is here drawing a correspondence between the four male deities of the Ogdoad, and William Blake's four Zoas (from The Four Zoas): Blake associates each Zoa with one of the four major compass directions - north, east, south, and west. Blake, in his later mythology, developed an ogdoad consisting of the four Zoas and their four feminine emanations. Blake called them the Eight Immortal Starry-Ones. Below left: Alice dances with another man at Ziegler's party. Below right: Bill talks with two women at the party. Bill, Alice, the man Alice is dancing with, and the two women with Bill, all taken together, here represent five of the eight deities of Blake's ogdoad. The group of five people is also a reference to the space station meeting in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, as indicated below.
Left: Three women and two men (five people in total) are seen conversing at a table in the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Dictionary of Symbols, under the entry for pentagrams, says that the number five symbolizes the union of the number three (the male principle) with the number two (the female principle), and thus symbolizes hermaphroditism.[a] Therefore, the grouping of five people in the space station meeting represents hermaphroditism, with there being an emphasis on the female principle in this case, since there are more women than men in the group. (All of this symbolism also applies to the grouping of five in Eyes Wide Shut discussed above.) Blake considered real-life hermaphroditic persons to be inherently evil.[b]
a. Dictionary of Symbols. Ed. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Trans. John Buchanan-Brown. London: Penguin Group, 1996. p. 747.
b. That Blake considered real-life hermaphroditic persons to be inherently evil, is indicated by the following quote from his prophetic book, Jerusalem:
Above left and right: The first time Danny sees the twins, he's in the hotel recreation room playing darts.
Later in the movie, after having just made a right turn while riding his tricycle at the entrance to one of the Overlook's many corridors (top left), Danny next comes to a wall which forces him to turn left (top right). Immediately after turning left, Danny encounters the twins and stops moving (above left). The fact that the girls are wearing blue dresses means that they symbolize an 'evil feminine' presence. Danny's vision of the twins standing, alternates with one of seeing both of them dead (above right).
The above set of screencaps shows how each time the camera cuts to the standing twins, between shots of of Danny's face, and the dead twins, the (standing) twins appear to get closer to Danny.
The final time we're shown the dead twins (above left), Danny has an extrememly horrified expression on his face (above right).
Referring to the sets of screencaps above, the first time Danny sees the twins, his attention had previously been diverted - he was playing darts. It is implied that he had been wrapped up in his own amusement, and kept playing for a while with them standing there, not noticing them. Regarding the screencaps showing Danny riding his tricycle, then coming to a stop when he sees the twins, recall from earlier in the analysis that Carl Jung says, "[A] leftward movement is equivalent to a movement in the direction of the unconscious, whereas a movement to the right...aims at consciousness."[a] A clockwise motion is a movement toward the right, and thus, toward the conscious, which is, according to Jung, a movement toward the "correct" side; and a counterclockwise motion is one to the left, and thus the unconscious, which Jung calls the "sinister" side. By turning left while riding in the hallway, Danny has made a movement toward evil and is now confronted by a great danger: the twins, representing the imbalanced duality of his own mother (representing that of Susan Robertson), as well as a more general 'duality of Woman'. The fact that the (standing) twins appear to get closer to Danny, as he views them, indicates that Danny will directly confront this danger that they represent.
In a later scene in the movie, in which Danny is again riding his tricycle (shown at left), it can be seen that he is wearing red, white, and blue clothing (the white is in his sneakers); the national flag of the United States of America (shown above) consists of these same three colors, so Danny represents some component of the American public. As stated earlier in the analysis, Danny looks like he's 6 years old; then, since the movie is set in 1977, Danny specifically represents those Americans, or at least those American males, born into the generation which includes the birth year 1971; i.e., what is now called Generation X (those people born during approximately the years 1965 - 1983). Therefore, within a societal context, what Kubrick is saying (or more correctly, predicting), is that the men of Generation X will occupy themselves with their own amusing diversions to the extent that they will be tardy in seeing the threatening presence of the 'duality of Woman', which will have actually already been around for a while. Note that in this view of Danny from behind, the blue upper straps of his overalls, in combination with the shape and color of the tricycle seat-back, makes Danny appear to be wearing a blue dress. This indicates that Susan's duality has had a feminizing effect on her son.
Going back to the point in the movie at which Danny last sees the dead and bloodied twins, Danny covers his eyes (top left) upon his final seeing of them (immediately after having the extremely horrified expression on his face shown earlier above); then a few moments later, when he looks again (top right), the girls are gone (above left). Next, 'Tony' tries to convince Danny that the twins weren't real (above right).
The fact that Danny (via Tony) tries to convince himself that the twins were just in his imagination, indicates that Kubrick was predicting that the men of Generation X (and the American public in general), will (wrongly) try to convince themselves that the aforementioned 'duality of Woman' is not real, or that it is nothing to worry about.
a. Jung, C.G. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 12. Princeton University Press, 1968. p. 127.
Disclaimers 1) In certain instances it has been determined that the creators of some of the productions analyzed on this blog, and/or the creators of source material(s) used in the making of these productions, may be making negative statements about certain segments of society in their productions. These statements should be taken as expressing the opinions of no one other than the creators.
2) This blog is not associated with Stanley Kubrick or the Kubrick estate, nor is it associated with any of the studios, authors, publishers, actors, writers, editors, crew, staff, agents, other filmmakers, or any other persons or entities involved at any stage in the making of any of the films or source materials that are analyzed, mentioned, or referenced herein.
3) In keeping with the policies of the filmmakers, authors, studios, writers, and publishers, that have created the productions (and their source materials) that are analyzed, mentioned, or referenced on this blog, any similarity of the characters in these films or source materials to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
