horror

Eyes Wider Shut: 25 Years Later, Kubrick Shows Us the Christmas We Deserve

“A dream is never just a dream.”

In an enlightening article published a week before Christmas 2025, New York Magazine writer Lane Brown states that, “Stanley Kubrick’s movies have a habit of aging into new meanings, like monoliths that take time for us apes to figure out.” The enigmatic, maximalist director (2001, Dr. Strangelove, Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket) died in 1999, just four days after completing his final film, Eyes Wide Shut. And it is that psychological fantasy drama, starring then-married Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, that is the subject of Brown’s piece. To wit: that “Eyes Wide Shut” could be a coded warning from Kubrick about the horrors of the Jeffrey Epstein sex-ring, which was assumed to have started a few years before. (The “evidence”? There’s a guy who looks like Epstein in the background and Kubrick died right after allegedly having an argument with studio heads, etc.)

Yes, of course, it is bat-shit crazy. The general public should have learned its lesson about pop-culture conspiracy theories way back during the silly “Paul-is-Dead” affair during the latter years of the Beatles. To even assume that reclusive Kubrick, a true artist and not a feckless Reddit rumor-monger, would have had knowledge of this sordid affair and spend years making a 160-minute feature film about it, instead of calling the authorities, is mind-boggling in its inanity.

What Kubrick was aware of is the crushing effect of the misused privilege of the upper-upper classes, a theme he also explored in 1975’s “Barry Lyndon.” If the Internet time-wasters focused on this instead of their fictitious figments, it would all be for the better. Eyes Wide Shut is based on the 1926 book “Traumnovelle” (Dream Story) by Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler. It examines the uneasy marriage of upscale Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise) and his wife Alice. Schnitzler was part of European “Decadent” cultural movement, and though the setting is moved from Vienna at Mardi Gras to Christmastime in 1990s New York City, the film doesn’t take long to fit in with this epoch. First there is the ritzy and libertine Christmas party thrown by one of Bill’s super-wealthy patients, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), where the doctor is called upstairs to administer Victor’s clandestine date, an unclothed hooker who has almost OD’d on a heroin/cocaine binge. After dealing with the situation, Bill is predictably asked to keep it quiet. But a solitary speedballing prostitute is only the tip of this cold-hearted iceberg.

A key scene where the couple talk about their separate flirtations at the party is topped off by Alice revealing her obsession with a handsome naval officer she saw while on vacation, claiming she would leave Bill and their young daughter to be with him. The emotionally upended doctor is then summoned away on a house call. It leads to his all-night series of erotic but unconsummated encounters in a slightly-surreal looking Greenwich Village, and the film’s centerpiece, an elaborate ceremonial orgy scene at a secluded Long Island estate, a place where Bill shouldn’t be and where life is cheap if you’re one of the imported sex workers.

Vinessa Shaw and Tom Cruise discuss Christmas finances.

The tepid response to Kubrick’s last film is partly due to lack of clarity (and subsequent lack of viewer understanding) concerning the work’s origin in dream psychology. (It’s notable that Schnitzler was a contemporary of fellow Austrian Sigmund Freud). “Eyes Wide Shut” is a title indicating “dream awareness,” a kind of window into a deep psychic underworld, where a fantasy like Alice’s would seem to determine a marriage soon to implode. Bill’s Village wanderings, taken at somnambulistic pace, include a vaguely romantic encounter with a streetwalker (see above), interrupted when Alice call him on his cell, being accosted by the betrothed daughter of a freshly dead patient, being shoved aside and gay-baited by a gang of future MAGA assholes, and meeting the sexually promiscuous daughter of a costume-shop owner (played by a 16 year-old Leelee Sobieski).

In one of the film’s most chilling scenes, the costume-shop owner (played by Rade Serbedzija) has suddenly “come to another arrangement” and seems willing to pimp his daughter, hinting at the nefarious workings of secret societies that haunt the movie.

Though it seems like the biggest fever dream of all, Kubrick’s highly stylized orgy scene could be the most plausible aspect of the film. The horrid revelations about the late Jeffrey Epstein, his amoral imprisoned accomplice Ghisane Maxwell, and the numerous powerful men who somehow can’t resist spending time with underage girls, make the orgy seem at first like an elaborate masquerade party, despite the ominous complications caused by Bill’s crashing the scene of the country’s most rich and powerful having it all their way. But the slow-burning but riveting penultimate scene in the billiards room (below) where the untouchable Ziegler uses both tact and veiled threats to make sure to this little Upper West Side doctor will never again spoil the fun. And if someone dies gets themselves killed along the way, so be it. “Someone died, it happens all the time,” Ziegler concludes, sounding like Trump after the latest mass shooting.

At the top of the Epstein list of course, is the Orange Puke From Hell, the current president and convicted sex felon and vile authoritarian-minded degenerate—not to mention a person who built his entire political rise on mendacious conspiracy tropes and toxic social-media exchanges. He has since dragged us so far down into it with him, it feels we can’t stand up for falling down–giving our life over to grievance, rage and fear, both when it’s justified and when it’s not.

Mr. Kubrick, enjoying the holidays his way.

But instead, let’s look into the deeper meanings of what comes across our radar every day, instead of letting everything be a conspiracy or a grievance. And as Stanley Kubrick noted, our dream world is as instructive as the waking one and leads to a reconciliation of this film’s couple (while also acknowledging that “a dream is never just a dream”). The societal reconciliation that would lead all sides to finally come down on the side of stemming the unchecked power of the 1% still seems very far off. So, in the meantime, like in Greg Lake’s famous holiday song, “the Christmas we get we deserve,” meaning the biggest lump of coal that can fit into Santa’s sleigh.

Edgar Allan Poe: The American We Need Now

He warned the world about global warming in the 1840s. He had the foresight to know that the application of science and technology without the balancing spirit of poetry would yield a “rectangular obscenity.” He decried the myriad media hoaxes of the middle 19th century and concocted a few of his own as a warning to the gullible. Oh yeah, and he wrote some nifty horror stories as well.

Meet the other Edgar Allan Poe. Everyone knows about the haunted, hard-drinking author of such psychological terror tales as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” that all but invented the modern Goth aesthetic. Most are familiar with the rigorous poet behind the famous verses of “The Raven” and “Anabel Lee.” But far fewer are aware of Poe the inspired cosmologist, the young man who studied engineering and mathematics at West Point, and who, as America’s first de facto science reporter, cast a very skeptical eye on the era’s centralization of power in that growing field.

In the extraordinary 2021 book, “The Reason for the Darkness of the Night,” author John Tresch goes a long way into giving this iconic American figure his full due. The fourth and fifth decades of the 19th century saw significant advances in industrialism and science, which had only recently graduated from its previous incarnation as “natural philosophy.”

It was also an age of chicanery, of dubious pseudo-sciences like phrenology, which could be used for racial profiling in an age when the conflict between slavery and abolition were headed to a boiling point. According to Tresch, Poe’s writing (in both fiction and reportage) “dramatized the act of inquiry and the struggles, fears, hopes, and delusions of the human undertaking.”

Foremost in the struggle was Poe’s conflicted feelings regarding the dawning Industrial Revolution. He wrote his “Sonnet to Science” early on (while still in the service), asking this new field “Why prey’st thus upon the poet’s heart/Vulture! Whose wings are dull realities!” and later asking “Hast thou not dragg’d Diana from her car?” In other words, are we now destined to only see the Moon as Earth’s cratered satellite and not perceive the lunar patroness riding her celestial chariot? As both an exceptional book-learner and an amateur astronomer since his youth, Poe could appreciate both.

Poe’s enduring popularity even extends to speculation about his childhood, in this personal favorite of cartoonist Harry Bliss.

Around the same time Poe, in a letter, declared “I am a poet… if deep worship of all beauty can make me one.” His deep reverence for—and uneasy awe at the power of—the natural world oozes out of his lesser-known fantasy stories like “The Domain of Arnhiem” and “Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” Oftentimes, Poe depicted a desolate or decayed landscape (read the stark opening of “The Fall of the House of Usher”) a background to what he may have felt in the newly industrializing cities of his East Coast haunts from Boston down to Richmond. A smoke and/or fog blankets many of his tales and while he was no Luddite, the growth of polluting factories free from regulation was indicative to Poe of the at-any-cost mindset when business, science and government were centralized without popular input.

Poe famously had a tough life. His mother, foster mother, brother and wife all died of TB (then called consumption) which he memorably personified in “Masque of the Red Death.” His wealthy rat-fink foster father all but disowned him, undermining his enrollment at the Univ. of Virginia and cutting Poe out of will while providing for several illegitimate children. Poe lived the life of a penurious journeyman writer, struggling to get published and drifting in and out of the employ of various journals and newspapers. Despite fleeting fame for the hugely popular “The Raven,” widespread acclaim avoided Poe in his lifetime.

From 2015, the excellent animated anthology “Extraordinary Tales” is also highly recommended.

But despite (or because) the morbidity of his circumstances and the flavor of his best-known work, Edgar Allan Poe is an enormously popular figure. At his core a man of the people, he’s the guy we need right now. His instinctive opposition to giving great power to those who excel only in a technical sense. One need only look at the barely recognizable human “qualities” of a Mark Zuckerberg or the unstable rantings of an Elon Musk to see where the problem lies into giving such people nearly limitless agency. And that’s not to mention the scourge of the Orange Grotesquerie, whose appeal to grievance and hatred in the pursuit of power is a horror even the master himself would maybe be challenged to depict.

I don’t want to speculate too much on a man that’s been dead for 175 years, but I think Poe today would provide a refreshing antidote to modern society’s pitfalls. Despite his personal tragedies and epic binge drinking, our man Edgar was at heart an idealist. Never afraid to mix it up in the court of public opinion, he would probably be a social media sensation, and a modest Go Fund campaign might alleviate his persistent money problems. A year before his death, he wrote and lectured on his cosmological treatise “Eureka” part of which positioned us all as part of a universal brotherhood united by our common inheritance of a single unitary effect at the beginning of time (Poe was an early proponent of the Big Bang Theory). Tresch begins “The Reason for the Darkness of the Night” with Poe’s last stand, reading “Eureka” before a small but rapt audience in New York City. The author thought that this manifesto would be his defining work, though it was not to be. But still, (in Tresch’s words, “Poe’s work embodies the defining tensions” of both his age and ours: “between popular diffusion and elite control, between empathy and detachment, between inspired enthusiasm and icy materialism.” While we don’t have the Poe we need today, Tresch’s illuminating book and a deep dive into his subject’s lesser-known but still invaluable works, is recommended, if not essential.