So I have all sorts of essays & podcasts to share for the Christmas season, but looking back over the things I’ve written & said, I ran into Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which starts at a Christmas party & leads to madness from there. This was Kubrick’s last movie, it came out in 1999, & seemed somehow to be a reflection on the American future, on the cusp of the millennium—a middle class family, too sophisticated for their own good, indulge in temptations that endanger the little they know of happiness.
Kubrick was by no means the only artist interested in the question & disturbed by what he was seeing, but he sounded the most disturbing warning, partly by choosing Tom Cruise & Nicole Kidman as the images of everything Americans admire, not to say adore, & showing that they do not fit in the ordinary middle class life Americans want to have for themselves. Tom Cruise, it turns out, is still in a way the American ideal—his new Top Gun movie was the biggest hit this year—& his life has become as disturbing as Kubrick’s story suggests, if in a different way. America is still somehow stuck between defending a middle-class way of life & the temptations of glamour…
I wrote about it for Law & Liberty, in relation to the Epstein scandal, the story which most resembles Kubrick’s plot. Indeed, you might be excused for taking the story to be more or less a journalistic account of that aspect of elite life. Kubrick’s interest in this corruption has to do with an exploration of nihilism—what would people do if they end up in the elite & it doesn’t really make live worth living? One possibility is to go back from glamour to the aristocracy & the Old World it represents…
I also recorded a podcast about Eyes Wide Shut:
More Titus on film here: https://lawliberty.org/the-voight-kampff-test/