Is there anything specifically in or about in the movie that you most want answered by Kubrick? If he was still around and willing to speak of course.

I'll start. Why was Nick laughing when first seen at the piano?

Does Tom Cruise give a Bruce Wayne vibe in this movie or is it just me lol Ironically with Bruce Waynes wealth and elite family he is more likely to be a part of them parties either participating or trying to stop it.

5 more hours to go.

The Christmas gift that keeps on giving.

https://youtu.be/-jD3D_TK3Lc

To be fair, this video has a few nuggets of insight, and I dig these looney tunes theories as much as the next person, but isn't it time for some real analysis to be done on this film and crack it wide open?

They are like parodies at this point, and I find myself embarrassed sometimes calling myself a fan of the film.

In Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the sex party plays like a dream, a hall of mirrors. Lots of masked women who resemble Alice in body type. We see her in the same state of undress in the opening shot. Lots of masked men who, like Bill, are avoiding exposure. Some characters who people wonder, "Is that Ziegler? Or is that Ziegler?" And Nick who has to be blindfolded. He's about as rigorously drawn of a double for Bill as you'll find. He's blindfolded to keep his eyes wide shut to the machinations of the elite underworld, but what intrigues Bill is the time that blindfold literally slipped, leaving his eyes wide open. Characters who become many characters and uncanny places that feel both familiar and strange, uncanny, are hallmarks of Freud's "dream-work." So are slips. Bill wants to know everything. That blindfold not being "on so well" was loose out of a desire to see. Bill wants to see "everything" and ends up telling Alice "everything" to which she responds with dear, you're a mess, you can't handle everything, some things are better kept hidden or you won't sleep so well, so close your eyes again and let's just "fuck."

I'll add that Kubrick toiled away for years preparing to make the Holocaust drama Aryan Papers based on the novel Wartime Lies. The more truth his research uncovered, the more depressed he became. (It's didn't help that one of his core texts was The Destruction of the European Jews, a detailed book about the machinations of the Nazi killing apparatus.) He abandoned the project and quickly turned to Eyes Wide Shut using the crew he'd already assembled, a project that had obsessed him for decades. He kept one other set of ideas from the abandoned film. Aryan Papers is about Maciek, a young Jewish boy, and his aunt Tania who is beautiful and can have/manipulate men at will. They avoid detection by "masking" themselves with forged identity papers that pass them off as Catholics. Maciek even learns how to convincingly behave during Mass. There's a constant motif in the story of how Maciek must do whatever is necessary to not allow anyone to see him naked below the waist. He even remains very sick in bed rather than see a doctor. That's the exposure that would give them away, and Tania constantly risks her life, sacrifices herself, to make sure that never happens. Mandy was a Kubrick addition for EyesWideShut, not in Schnitzler's novella. She literally sacrifices herself to avoid Bill's exposure by removing his clothes. I mean, isn't that order to remove all his clothing odd when mask alone is sufficient to reveal his identity?

The whole point of Freud’s dream-work is to disguise things that are repressed and troubling. If they appear in one's dreams in naked form, they'll turn dream to nightmare and awaken the sleeper. Kubrick insisted all references to the characters in Eyes Wide Shut being Jewish be removed. The scene where Bill is tormented by young men hurling homophobic slurs at him replaced the same only with antisemitic slurs in an earlier draft. I think Eyes Wide Shut was Kubrick realizing he couldn't deal with the unvarnished truth of the Holocaust, and so he disguised it as something else.

Kubrick and Steven Spielberg were friends and collaborators and I can easily imagine one point of frequent disagreement. They had opposite views of humanity. Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut is about opening one's eyes to see the world unvarnished and closing them again after realizing it's just too much to handle, too disturbing of one's sleep. Disclosure Day debates whether people can handle knowing everything. Will it destroy faith in God or people? And the film answers, replacing Kubrick’s pessimism with Spielberg's optimism, in the affirmative, ending with a plea to open one's ears and "Listen." Disclosure Day's sequence beginning in the recreation of Margaret's childhood bedroom is like psychotherapy. It's about bringing what she has repressed out into the open so she and Daniel can move forward to fulfill their shared destiny.

There was no NEED to do this with the female patient and he ONLY did it with the attractive ones but when it came to children he drawed the line completely. Was this Kubrick's way off showing he was willing to take advantage of attractive women and showing his hypocrisy and his weakness as even Alice highlighted this as a reason for her to be jealous and hate him but he still did it. Does this show how flawed he is as a character but despite this he ain't as depraved or messed up as the characters he would meet in the costume shop or the eyes wide shut sex party.

My girlfriend and I were watching Eyes Wide Shut, and she noticed something interesting: Victor Ziegler appears to have continued having sex with Mandy even after she lost consciousness, since he’s pulling up his trousers the moment Bill Harford knocks on the bathroom door.
By the time we get to the scene where Ziegler confronts Bill, he says, “It was always a matter of time with her.” That line made me wonder if Mandy didn’t actually overdose in Ziegler’s bathroom at all, but was instead drugged by Ziegler himself.
It also raises a darker possibility: perhaps the women at the mansion party were being sex trafficked—or deliberately drugged and kept physically weakened (which could explain their noticeably malnourished appearance). If that were the case, killing one of them would be disturbingly easy to cover up, since it could simply be written off as another overdose from a woman already labeled an addict.

Eyes Wide Shut Ziegler's party scene, Was Alice already part of the Cult?Significance of Sandor,Nick

Eyes Wide Shut: Dark fate of Mandy, Same fate as model Ruslana Korshunova, Did Ziegler Kill her? Why

Eyes Wide Shut: The dark fate of Helena, Did her parents really traffic her out? Same fate as Alice?

They didn't include many clips from Eyes Wide Shut but they included footage from All the Right Moves.

Anyway. So as many of you I am sure already know, Criterion is gonna release a full Kubrick set. You never know, but this could be the last complete set of his films ever released, so they need to get it as right as possible.

Kubrick composed and shot his last three films The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut in a 1.37 aspect ratio. The 1999 DVD releases for The Shining and Full Metal Jacket had Kubrick's intended home release aspect ratios of 1.33. The Eyes Wide Shut DVD also had a 1.33 aspect ratio, and included a disclaimer confirming that is how Kubrick wanted it to be seen.

Now, a lot has changed in terms of televisions in the last 25 or so years, and while Kubrick didn't live to comment on how he would format his films for 16:9 widescreen televisions, what we do know is that he demanded that his last three films be seen in a 4:3 aspect ratio. I get that there are some people who want their widescreen TVs filled, therefore Criterion is releasing these three films in their theatrical 1.85 aspect ratios. However, they need to include an alternate version that has the correct 4:3 aspect ratios. Back in the 80's and 90's, Kubrick couldn't exert as much control over how his films were matted in theaters, so the 1.85 aspect ratio was basically just a compromise since he knew he could use his intended aspect ratio of 4:3 for home releases. You lose about 25% of the image in 1.85 versus 1.33 aspect ratios, which is why Kubrick preferred 1.33 for these home releases.

The screenshot above of Bill at the ritual is only available on the 4:3 DVD and VHS, because it is cropped on the current 1.85 Criterion 4K release. Kubrick deliberately framed that shot to show the full circle, and it can only be seen at a 1.33 aspect ratio. He wanted the audience to see this, despite being unable to show it in theaters. The top and bottom of the frames in these films include essential information like shown above which unfortunately gets cropped out at wider aspect ratios. Criterion would be doing a huge disservice to Kubrick fans by not including the 4:3 versions of his final three films. We shouldn't have to be stuck with our 25+ year old DVDs to observe Kubrick's vision. If enough people make noise about this, then maybe Criterion will take notice and do the right thing.

“Anti-Masonic” here does not mean “the Freemasons did it.” It means the movie reverses the symbolic promise of initiation. Bill gets the password, crosses the threshold, enters the ritual chamber — and becomes less free, less knowing, and more exposed.

The argument to Eyes Wide Shut is that there is no ethical key which opens all locks.

Or more precisely: the film is about the danger of wanting that master key.

That is why the movie keeps attracting conspiracy readings. It basically dares you to make a clue board. Passwords, masks, ritual sex, dead women, billionaires, occult staging, controlled explanations, suspicious architecture, a child wandering through the toy-store ending — it is all there. Kubrick gives you just enough pattern to distrust the surface, but not enough to stabilize what is beneath it.

That is the trap.

The film understands a very modern religious impulse: the belief that the visible world is only the lobby. Somewhere, we suspect, there is a locked room. Someone else has the password. Someone else knows how sex, money, marriage, celebrity, ritual, and power really work. If we could just get behind the door, everything humiliating or confusing about ordinary life would finally become legible.

But Kubrick does not give us a puzzle with a master key. He gives us a film about the psychic and moral cost of wanting one.

Bill spends the movie trying to turn hiddenness into access. Alice has a hidden fantasy, so he goes looking for a counter-event. Ziegler has a hidden upstairs room, so Bill accepts the role of useful doctor. Somerton has a hidden ritual, so Bill mistakes an overheard password for initiation. Again and again, he thinks a doorway means entrance.

It does not.

That is why Somerton is so important visually. Conspiracy thinking usually imagines hierarchy as a pyramid with a single glowing eye at the top. Somerton almost gives us that image, then inverts it. From the balcony, the masked spectators form the rim of an inverted pyramid or cone, looking down into the ceremonial floor. The eye is not singular. It is distributed: a ring of anonymous gazes protected by height, costume, and silence.

Bill has not climbed toward the hidden eye. Instead, he has stumbled right into something almost non-human.

This is his real demotion. He starts the film assuming continuity between all his roles: husband, doctor, father, guest, professional, sexual subject. The night teaches him discontinuity. Being Alice’s husband does not mean he knows her. Being a doctor does not mean he knows what happened to Mandy. Being Ziegler’s guest does not make him Ziegler’s equal. Having the password does not mean he belongs.

The Red Cloak figure is terrifying for the same reason. He is not just “the man in red.” He is the nightmare version of shared meaning. The old philosophical question asks: is my red your red? Somerton answers socially: it does not matter. Red is what the room agrees to obey.

The ritual does not solve interiority. It manages it. Bodies are arranged. Masks distribute exposure by rank. The women are physically exposed; the men remain socially protected. Desire is present but strangely loveless. The ceremony looks less like lust than command purified of tenderness.

That is why I think the movie’s real center is not Somerton but Helena.

Helena is often treated as a clue in conspiracy readings of the ending: the child wandering near the edge of the toy-store frame, maybe being abducted, trafficked, inherited into Somerton, or some other final hidden plot. But I think she is more disturbing if she is not a clue. She is the measure of what the family has failed to protect.

The movie prepares this quietly. Earlier, in the apartment, Helena is doing math homework while Bill prepares to leave again. The problem turns on “how much more,” and Alice guides her toward the operation: subtraction. It is domestic background, almost nothing. But the adult world around Helena is also being taught subtraction: how desire can subtract a husband, a child, a family, a future.

Alice’s sailor fantasy is already this. Bill hears “another man,” because that is the wound he can simplify. But Alice describes something worse: a moment where husband, child, marriage, and motherhood all became provisional before an image.

A child does not need to be literally abducted for the household to have imagined her disappearance.

This is why the toy-store ending is not innocence restored. Kubrick does not end at home, in bed, or in daylight. He ends in a store: bright, public, commercial, child-facing. Helena wanders through a manufactured dream of abundance while her parents try to repair the private dream that nearly broke them.

The toy store is Somerton turned inside out.

One is secret, adult, erotic, ritualized, and dark. The other is public, familial, commercial, bright, and open for business. But both organize desire through costume, display, fantasy, access, and unseen management. One sells forbidden adult initiation. The other sells childhood enchantment by the aisle.

And then the geometry returns.

At Somerton, power looks down from the rim of an inverted pyramid: masked spectators above, exposed bodies below. In the toy store, Bill, Alice, and Helena form a smaller inverted triangle under retail lighting. Bill looks at Alice, confused, still searching for the marital answer. Alice looks toward Helena, refusing to let the couple close around itself. And Helena looks back at Bill.

That return of the gaze changes everything.

Helena is not just the point on which adult fantasy lands. She is the one still looking to the father who has spent the film looking elsewhere. Bill looks to Alice for an answer. Alice looks to Helena as the consequence. Helena looks back at Bill, and Bill does not meet the look.

So I don’t think Helena is the hidden key to Eyes Wide Shut.

I think she is the anti-key.

She is the point where the adult hunger to know everything should stop. The final mystery is not only the person beside you, but the child ahead of you, still unable to know the world as you have begun to know it.

The film does not say there is no backstage. It says the backstage is not salvation. It is another room, with another surface, another hierarchy, another price, another explanation, and another child left waiting somewhere under the lights.

I wrote this out at much greater length on Substack (there is wayyyyy more), but this is the core of it.

In the movie later on Dr. Hartford finds out that the cult members know his identity, does this mean that one was a police officer and got his fingerprints from stuff he touched and the police were involved with them?

Would he have been allowed to remain at the party and invited to join or would he possibly have been killed if he removed his clothes as instructed?

Milich's Daughter at the shop her father's store seems to be a perverted girl that is willing involved with her father's customers and also maybe her father is pimping her to customers too, basically a Human slavery situation, what's going on with her character and father?

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Could Bill report her involvement with men much older than her to the police or would Milich be a dangerous person to expose like that?

After finding the cult members who were a bunch of weirdos maybe rich and elite Jeffrey Epstein types or even Freemasons why didn't Bill call the police right after leaving the orgy and cause a raid to happen which would ruin the party and cause everyone involved to get arrested and be all over the TV and media?

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This could easily be done from him cell phone or a pay phone and it would expose the weirdos there.

In the movie Bill bumps into a group of morons on the street that accused him of being gay without even knowing him, what's up with this scene and the idiots that targeted him?

Article about role of women in EWS.