Remembering Stanley Kubrick in the time of the Epstein files

Stanley Kubrick, one of the 20th century’s greatest film directors, died perhaps because he knew too much. In fact, it is alleged that Kubrick’s mysterious death was not only an outcome of what he knew, but also because he decided to talk about what he knew and what most people didn’t know: the secret lives of the super-rich, lives that we now have a peek into, thanks to the Epstein files.

Born in New York, Kubrick died in UK on March 7, 1999, four days after he screened his final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, after spending the previous two years of his life rigorously creating his final movie, frame by meticulous frame, in the secrecy of closed sets and confidentiality pacts.

In fact, Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella titled Dream Story, from which Eyes Wide Shut was adapted, centred on a Viennese doctor named Fridolin and dwelt on themes such as desire, jealousy, and the secret lives of husbands and wives of the European city of early 20th century. A genius, Kubrick cleverly transplanted the novel to New York of the 1990s, cast Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, without revealing anything about what he was going to make, until the first screening shocked the world.

The main protagonist in Eyes Wide Shut is Bill Harford, a doctor who is successful, well-networked and comfortable in the upper echelons of Manhattan society, who finds himself during a long, single night inside a small stratum of the world he did not ever know existed. He is admitted – by chance or perhaps not – into a gathering at an estate where eminent guests wear masks and perform rituals. The resemblance of the film’s narrative with news stories that came out slowly before and quickly now after the release of the Epstein files confirm that Kubrick’s insight into how the rich live and revel had more than a grain of truth.

Through Harford’s eyes, we glimpse into a world that operates on its own terms, where laws are different from those written for others in penal codes and constitutions of countries. It is a world where the usual rules of accountability and morality do not apply. At the same time, it is a world that coexists secretly alongside the ordinary world of non-elites.

The doctor is found out and warned by a friend the next morning: Bill, I don't think you realise how much trouble you got yourself into last night just by going over there. Who do you think those people were? Those were not just some ordinary people. If I told you their names... no, I'm not going to tell you their names... but if I did, I don't think you'd sleep so well at night.

Harford then wanted to know how he stood out. His well-wisher friend tells him: It didn't help you too much that those people arrived there in limos... and you showed up in a taxi. Or that when they took your coat, they found the receipt to the costume from the rental house in your pocket made out to you-know-who.

Harford goes home to his wife and his medical practice, but the problem is that the door he opened does not close again. That is the film’s true subject – not jealousy, not desire, but the moment a man who is not meant to know these things discovers that the world around him has a hidden architecture and that discovering it changes everything – and that the people who built that architecture will go to any length to protect it.

Kubrick always knew it and yet he filmed it anyway. He could have remained silent but he spoke, attracting extreme risks. Which is why he deserves our gratitude. After all, knowing is different from saying it as it is.

When the Epstein files began to surface, they revealed a world already narrated in detail in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Epstein was not an anomaly. He was one of those faces in the movie with a mask along with more important masked men and women.

Increasingly, thanks to the Epstein files, more and more people are talking about the 1999 film by a director who died four days after screening it. More and more representative images one sees in the media of the secret lives of Epstein and others and their estates are scenes from Eyes Wide Shut.

True, years ago, Eyes Wide Shut was not an easy film to watch notwithstanding the haunting music and oriental sounding chants in some scenes. It was slow and cold. But watching it after the Epstein files came to surface, Kubrick's swan song becomes something else. It is no longer a film but a portrait and the masked figures in that huge hall are not exotic symbols, but a class we can now easily recognise.

Kubrick was honest to the core and an artist who knew that not just the truth, the rot, too, will someday come out.