Bonus: JUDGE MOVIES 04 – EYES WIDE SHUT

It's not exactly an allusion or reference, we were talking in those terms before David Bowie released BLACKSTAR and then died, but Bowie helped give it some structure – the dark star or black star is the inverse of the Sun, primarily in a cosmological sense. I'm no great fan of the Sun, this is well established, but in this case, think of that Sun as the possibility of life itself, the Sun as a self-aware creator of all that is, but with the certainty that it will eventually kill everything it created. The Black Star is the opposite: it necessitates a negative theology, because you can't assert anything about it, you can merely describe what it does (or appears to do). The Black Star is something like a black hole, but it is NOT a void or lack, it is a positive entity unto itself ("positive" in the sense of positivism, not like "good"). It is the real and final star. We have allowed ourselves to think of a star, i.e. the Sun, as something "friendly" and "benevolent"; the Black Star is the violent abolition of such sentiments, but not in order merely to replace them with their opposites. It's not "evil" as such, partly because our relationship with the Sun (both the relationship and the Sun itself) is perverse blasphemy; the Black Star can't precisely be "evil," because its existence is the constant reminder that applying "good" and "evil" to stars is insane behavior. Stars are the basic biological element of the known cosmos. To judge them "morally" is both meaningless and deleterious to one's entire mental faculties. Wyndham Lewis on stars, c. 1915: "Throats iron eternities, drinking heavy radiance, limbs towers of blatant light, the stars poised, immensely distant, with their metal sides, pantheistic machines." The star is god. Or god is the star. Or the plural lower-case gods are all from the stars and still live there, save the occasions upon which they must show themselves clearly to human beings. The stars are where they come down from. In Haitian vodou, every one of the Loa (who are the more pagan, theme-specific gods, and who live under the much more Catholic central deity, Bondye, the transcendent unknowable Allfather) has a sign that's variously spelled "vever," "veve, "vévé," etc., and the vévé is a cipher hieroglyph that tells you where a specific Loa lives in the stars, usually among constellations that also show you what the Loa does, how he or she likes to be recognized and summon, what purpose he or she accomplishes, et al. In vodou, the death god isn't evil, there simply has to be a death god, and in vodou he's called Baron Samedi (extreme bonus points if you know the album S.F. SORROW by the Pretty Things, because "Baron Saturday" is the literal translation of "Baron Samedi"); you know him because he's tall, gaunt, sometimes in white facepaint, wearing a suit that was nice when the "died" the first time but is now all rumpled and stained and slowly falling to pieces, because he's worn it to an infinite number of his own funerals, and he's spent an infinite amount of time being dead-but-awake inside the Earth. Other than blunt social context and the aesthetic conventions that any society develops, have you ever heard why ziggurats and pyramids are different? Architecturally, obviously, whole other thing, but that's not the point: the top of a ziggurat is flat, because it was a place to go meet a god. The meeting may be miraculous or confusing or enraged, you can't know in advance, but the tops of ziggurats are flat so they would work as the highest possible "stage set" for the highest possible purpose. That was the Sumerian equivalent of, say, the proscenium arch in a traditional theater: it distinguished the stage as something complete unto itself, not just part of a room. The Egyptians, much earlier but also much more advanced (and the more you learn about Egypt, the more you get wigged the fuck out, because they knew SO much, SO early), didn't fuck with the ziggurat, because that would've been a half-measure. That's just setting up one encounter with one god at a time. It's practically a party trick. So the Egyptians instead built pyramids with points on top, because the apex of the pyramid was an aperture and a projector. The souls of the dead would rise slowly through the pyramid until reaching the apex, and then they would be projected back up into the stars, the real home of everything, including the gods. Like the Haitian Loa, the Egyptian gods could be present in many many places for many many reasons, all at the time same, but part of them always stayed up in the stars. This is part of why the peaks of the great pyramids are lined up with certain star cycles and astronomical repetitions: they were giving themselves the best chance to return to the stars, and specifically to stars that they knew would reliably reappear. You probably know this, but the pharaonic Egyptians considered every human being the vessel for a number of souls – not ghosts or possessions, no past-lives-type shit, but the idea (and it's true as anything I've ever heard about "the soul") that the complexity of a human life couldn't be contained by a single soul. You had souls for several major components of being a person, and I can't remember which one is the star soul, but it was very important to make sure you got that soul back to the parts. (Hence, partly, the fact that most of the big pyramids belonged to royalty or rich aristocratic families; they were the ones with the money and influence to think "I'm not about to die in some dumb graveyard where I can't send the star-soul back home" and then do something about it.) Which is to say that the stars are everything, they are a voiceprint codec for the entirety of the cosmos, and among them, a star like the Sun must be counterweighted by the Black Star, which devours time and light and growth. The Black Star is the hole in the sky where everything eventually disappears. Pure divine terror without any of the rationalism or anthropic attribution of "symbolism." It will be the final star when it cannibalizes all the others, and then it, and the universe, will be a single photo of the blue-white corona around the Black Star, and that picture will have been photocopied and xerographed so many times over, through so may phases of generation loss, that if there were anyone left to see it, that person would never know what it was a picture of, or whether it was a picture at all

a lot of kubricks films play with palindromatic structure

alright this is why I thought about deleting the Vitali part lol because of course you’re only right, that’s the next logical question, but just to clarify i’ll say it here because it seems like the way I said on the episode caused some confusion - if ANY of this is true, and again it’s completely circumstantial and baseless and just as likely not true, I don’t think Kubrick knew his friend Vitali was a pedophile for 20+ years and kept him in his inner circle - if anything it’s something he found out later in life before making EWS, and casting him as Red Cloak is perhaps a part of the guilt/confession built into EWS. That could be COMPLETELY off-base and offensive - but ofc Hollywood has been rife with pedophilia since the Charlie Chaplin days, apparently something happened with Kubrick’s daughter on the set of LYNDON, ofc Nicholson is in THE SHINING and the whole Polanski thing happened at his house - let’s just say in Hollywood the subject was definitely relevant lol, so perhaps that’s what the whole thing is. I have no idea and no evidence about Kubrick - his catalogue to me would suggest probably NOT, just because of how much his tone changed on the subject from LOLITA in 62 to EWS in 99 - something treated as a ridiculous satirical farce in LOLITA is treated with deathly grave importance in THE SHINING and EWS later in his life, after whatever happened with LYNDON and whatever he saw in Hollywood/the elite power structure - the self-awareness of the writing of EWS and SHINING, the guilt and confession built into examining the horrors underneath, to me doesn’t seem like the work of someone hiding something like that, and is DEFINITELY not someone trying to justify their own perversion the way the original script to LEON: THE PROFESSIONAL is (if you’ve never read it - don’t look it up if you don’t want to vomit) - but who knows. So I don’t know and I regret the Vitali thing lol I am very likely totally wrong about it as I said - just occurred to me as pointedly strange and noteworthy that he didn’t act for 24 years then played Red Cloak

yeah I addressed this above and before saying it stated it was baseless and circumstantial and probably offensive speculation, but just to be clear I don’t think Kubrick kept a pedophile in his inner circle for 20 years - if anything it’s perhaps something he discovered at some point before making EWS and cast Vitali as part of the guilt/confession built into this movie - but there’s no evidence for that

yeah I’ve thought about it, it CERTAINLY seems pointed that the next project Kubrick wanted to do after EWS was a story about a little robot boy being horrifically exploited and abused, then praying at the bottom of the ocean for forgiveness and salvation for 1000 years or whatever it is lol - and apparently from reading about it Spielberg’s movie follows Kubrick’s script outline for the most part beat-by-beat - would absolutely kill to have seen the Kubrick version of the scene where the kid goes into the factory and sees all the other versions of him that would have been all-time lol

lmao i am an idiot thank u i said “rook” the whole episode. at least i was honest about not being v smart up front

I don't know anything secret about it, but I'm guessing it was your standard elite power-consolidation move to buy the Obamas some Hollywood real estate, and when it became clear that we'd reached critical mass on the specific nightmare of Weinstein, they were happy to lop him off, and can now get credit for disowning him rather than suspicion for handing their daughter over to a man that they 100% knew is a monster

I live in Pittsburgh, we have a main avenue named after Forbes, Lawrenceville is right down the hill. Very much named after the same admiral, by Stephen Foster's father, William Barclay Foster, merchant and politician. Carnegie, Mellon, Frick; we hide behind steel in this city, even though collapse nearly destroyed this city. it is also home to a great many of these monsters and much of this town is built with their blood money.

wow yes 100% there’s something here and i absolutely should have included this in the show lol, i focused only on the room 237 scene in relation to the plot as far as something horrible happening to Danny there and the suggestion it was Jack, and therefore saw the alluring sexual encounter turned horrific nightmare as an incest allegory - but the shower head absolutely being way too high up and it’s shape are definitely reminiscent of gas chambers, the color scheme idea would fit w the red and white Frank Lloyd Wright bathroom later in the Grady scene, as that’s the White Man’s Burden spoken by Grady amidst a sea of red like the river of blood - add the Nazi Mickey Mouse sweater and Ina Seidel in there and you’re definitely onto something

Kinda

it is time to assume The Sickness Vocation