I think we're coming at this from such diametrically opposed places that a consensus isn't likely. I don't find the cult in
Eyes Wide Shut absurd, nor do I find the equation the film draws to it "smug," which strikes me as projecting onto the film a judgment about the creator made before the opening credits. Rather, I find the equation despairing and frighteningly true.
Never Cursed wrote: Sun Jan 02, 2022 12:41 am
But the film has no coherent depiction of l'affaire Epstein beyond its most basic memed-to-death elements (bringing in disparate elements of a number of other conspiracy theories, including QAnon, to flesh out the details of Nekrasova's character's beliefs).
The film doesn't have a coherent depiction of the Epstein affair because there isn't one available. Really, I don't understand how you could demand that from this or any film. The staged-hanging illustrates that; it's an attempt to reconstruct an event that may not have even happened, a segment of time during which certain events transpired that the public will likely never have access to. It leads nowhere; it
can't lead anywhere. (
Eyes Wide Shut is quoted at the top of this scene as well: "The important thing... is that we're awake," before they pop pills. In Kubrick's film there's an ambiguity as to whether or not they really have reached a new level of awareness (hence the title).
Scary suggests that question itself doesn't matter; eyes open or wide shut, we're completely powerless to stop what's happening).
Perhaps you experience the world differently, but I've found life itself to be an increasingly incoherent experience in recent times, and I don't see it as a knock against the film that the film expresses that. Is it
"insightful"? I'm not sure, really. But I also don't think this film is coming from an intellectual place; rather, like Lynch's works (specifically
The Return I suppose), I think it's channeling something more individually/collectively subconscious. A line I was repeatedly reminded of while watching
Scary, from Zadie Smith's recent
Intimations:
And I know [Myron] is fond of conspiracy theories, which I have never considered anything less than an entirely rational mode of processing contemporary American reality.
I like that the character's beliefs are muddled that way, that they resemble something like what "a Bernie Sanders supporter would have after being force-fed 12-hours of InfoWars," as TraverseTown so memorably put earlier in the thread. It would've certainly been easier and more... clear, both morally and intellectually, to talk about only the "correct" or more coherent conspiracy theories. But it wouldn't be as knotty or as accurate (not to mention entertaining, your mileage may vary) a depiction of modern Internet-addled malaise. It gets at that truth in the Smith quote about
why people are so in thrall to narratives, so manic and desperate for even a fractured version of the truth. If insight is about understanding, then I'd say the film is insightful in a sense. Not many films even try to represent the Internet's effects on the human psyche, and it get points in my book for trying and coming pretty close.
As for the Ghislaine detail, a cursory search shows that the film was shot in January 2020. Maxwell wasn't arrested until July; at the time she was still at large, free to roam the streets of New York or New Hampshire. Perhaps it was an attempt to represent that nauseating idea (with a touch of impish humor, certainly).
Why the word-for-word homage in the note? Perhaps because on top of all the other things that it's about, Kubrick's film is one of the most formidable, enduring, and chilling depictions of the relationship between power, wealth, and depravity in cinema. (You obviously disagree). It's a way of calling upon a filmmaker Nekrasova obviously admires and a nod to the fact that he was onto something real about the world that he expressed in his fiction (which, it need not be said, has not always been popular consensus, and one of the things this film's existence really does hammer home is just how right Kubrick was about a certain strata of our society). And so his fiction recurs. And really, would you have found the film any better or even any less disagreeable if the note conveyed the same information but was worded differently? The worst thing I could say about it is that it's on the nose, which I can easily forgive given that the film is, after all, a debut.