I read that he died 666 years before the beginning of the twenty-first century! What a master like him wouldn’t do to amaze us a last time! And who chose such a date?
The death of Stanley Kubrick surprised anyone as his movies had done before; it was labelled the end of the odyssey in France, and soon burst off conspiracy theories about his death, his involvement with the hidden powers, even with the false American conquest of space (in an ironic TV movie directed by William Karel). Since Spartacus and Lolita, thanks to his old foe Kirk Douglas may be, Kubrick had always achieved to fascinate the public by his controversial subjects: power, violence and sex, fake and useless apprenticing, then mind programming and mind control mainly: for what men prefer to be machines?
If you observe the Shining better than you did, you can watch porno pics on the office walls, as well than sex magazines on Nicholson’s tables. This was the deal with Kubrick; private jokes and the winks he did to himself and his invisible friends. This gives his work a great dimension of what Umberto eco has labelled opera aperta, the open work. But the works are open since we have no moral standards to evaluate them; any Christian knew in the middle age there four levels literal, symbolical, allegorical…) of interpretation to understand any poem (think of Dante) or any column in a cathedral). Once we renounce the moral rules of spirituality, we are prepared for the murders: for the world happens to be divided between those who dig and those who hold the gun; between Thracian slaves and their roman masters, Irish peasants and their English masters, sex-slaves and their modern slave-handlers, to put it in a modern way.
Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood: their thoughts [are] thoughts of iniquity; wasting and destruction [are] in their paths.
The orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut was of course very controversial: is it (think of recurrent French scandals which prevented DSK to become president there) a hint to the bad manners of the elite? Is it not obvious, too banal? Hasn’t the critic become to well-used to that kind of ceremony to denounce it? Is it like Halloween, isn’t it? Who is able in Spain to really explain the recent death of three youngsters during a nocturne and devilish festivity? Yet it speaks of sacrifice and of amusement, like Eyes Wide Shut. We have been used to think like the devil, and the media industry, of morality as a sign of stupidity; and if it was the contrary? and if it was the exact opposite? if our sins blinded our minds, if our lack of ethics meant an enormous dumbness? Read the prophets:
For our transgressions are multiplied before thee, and our sins testify against us: for our transgressions [are] with us; and [as for] our iniquities, we know them…
The greatness of last Kubrick films lies in their moralities; Shining (dealing with Indian genocide, racism, alcoholism and sexism), Full metal jacket (wars and mind programming), and Eyes Wide Shut (just a dream in Schnitzler’s short story) alludes to the main interrogations of our time: why are the masses to dumb? Whey don’t they understand what they see? In this testament, Kubrick clearly unveils some truths (or aletheia, the unveiling in Greek) and so mocks other attitudes: the vain stroll of Cruise downtown echoes our blindness. He will hang around for nothing, just to get dream-like sensations, then a fake explanation by his mentor and world-master Ziegler (constructor, in German). Read Isaiah, who gives us some light to understand Kubrick:
Who [is] blind, but my servant? or deaf, as my messenger [that] I sent? who [is] blind as [he that is] perfect, and blind as the LORD’S servant? {42:20} Seeing many things, but thou observest not; opening the ears, but he heareth not.
Fro Isaiah this would be the decline of the west, fifty years after the ritual death of Kennedy: the decline of the intelligence and the decline of the moral, labelled conspiracy theories and bigotry. Compare Spartacus to Eyes Wide Shut: in the movie Kirk Douglas (still alive) is moral and intelligent. An amoral human being is not intelligent at all. Cruise who doesn’t understand he participates in a black ritual (they’re just having fun, don’t hey?) and in a murder, who doesn’t understand his wife’s needs and who stand like a zombie, a living-dead in his daily and nightly live, illustrates wonderfully this scheme: the average man of the modernity is a jerk because he has no moral standards. He needs a spiritual father, yet he just meets cynical masters: he basically behaves like a dead soul, to put it like Gogol.
We wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, [but] we walk in darkness. {59:10} We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if [we had] no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the night; [we are] in desolate places as dead [men.
I wonder if Kubrick has that presentiment: in a world full of provocative challenges, it is impossible to make anybody understand a moral message. We have been educated to consider nothing badly; this is what western relativism considers its best achievement, this is what Christ names being slow of heart (Luke, 24, 25). And of course we have now no possibility to create a real realm of the soul, or any work of art of ambition. This would be labelled boring, out of fashion. Welcome so to the kingdom of the willingly blind.
Nicolas Bonnal