"To Where The Rainbow Ends."

TO WHERE THE RAINBOW ENDS

(Playing chess with Stanley Kubrick)

In a previous post I suggested that tax-dodging was a pursuit best worried about after one had crossed the difficult bridge of actually making taxable profit first. As one particular curmugeon friend and colleague often reminds me, the careless fashion in which the word 'profit' is swung about these days by banks, share brokers, company directors, and investors – detracts from its real and actual meaning, and rarity.

For a profit, is that amount which only comes after repayment of invested principal, cost of funding, unit production cost, contribution towards fixed capital written off – and you may want to even consider comparative competitive returns foregone, or 'opportunity cost.'

As to the occasion of the quote above, it is from Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and there are of course, too many words already written about the late Stanley Kubrick, to make much valuable new addition to common understanding of him, or of his work. And there are rather too many experts who know more than I about the movie meaning of this particular quote too.

Personally, I am a collector of books myself, some old, some rare. I used to attend dinner for awhile regularly at the Butcher's Shop (restaurant) out in the mock Venetian Square on the ground floor of the Michaelangelo Hotel in Sandton City South Africa, and ran into quite a few movie land identities, not the least of whom I suppose, was Robert de Niro, who lived in Sandton Towers in the same complex at the time. We never formally were introduced and likely as not, he will only recall me as the merry fellow (too much Thelema Estate red) surrounded by four or five (oh yes, I can and have outdone Charlie Sheen on many occasions!) rather good-looking blondes, brunettes and a redhead. I dare say he will recall one particular evening during which one of the very beautiful blondes crawled around under his table looking for, and eventually finding, a ring that had fallen from the hands of one of his own party at his nearby/next table. A lovely man, friendly and I must say, possessed of the most extraordinary good skin on his face. You can't really know this until and unless you have seen him really close up.

Anyway, back to the thing about which I wished to post some words originally – I purchased, although not from de Niro, a first edition hard copy that had once been in the private collection of Kubrick: Sax Rohmer's 'The Romance of Sorcery.'

Now I realise that everyone who is anyone will want to tell me that Eyes Wide Shut is taken from Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella 'Die Traumnovelle.' However, let me tell all you who will listen, that the earlier (1914) book by Rohmer, is what Kubrick was using to inform his treatment of the basic story. And not only so, but the book by Hollywood identity Louise Brooks 'Naked On My Goat ' played a huge role in underscoring the secret world faintly exposed in Kubrick's movie.

Nowhere in Schnitzler's book does the scene occur in which two model-types take the character played by Cruise, and offer to take him 'to where the rainbow ends.' Nowhere in that original book does the same scene detail a room filled with lights or a staircase leading up somewhere and glittering against a wall of a myriad shining tiny lights. This is all Kubrick's own complex subscript directing.

Kubrick was an intelligent, learned, and a well-read man. Versed in all the lore that goes into these kinds of tales. He knew that the word used by the Norse Bard Snorri Sturluson, 'Bifrost,' (we know it as 'the rainbow bridge') actually means 'a glittering momentary pathway...'

The roads both to heaven and to profit are glittering and momentary pathways.

I thought I'd just let you know that.

Oh, and was it not the great Julia Phillips, who had the first film treatment and was trying to sell the movie initially – and expose far far more? Before her mentor and hero Kubrick eventually made it?

Alas, Julia is dead. And thus no longer with us and able to reveal the all that was there to be revealed.

But I am here. Certainly I am short about fifty million to produce any kind of decent attempt at a theoretical Phillips version, but I could make a good go of it for little to nothing right here!! As a kind of blogspot storyboard ouvré.

The pool room scene that ended the movie, that Sydney Pollack completed for Kubrick, was just plain stupid really, not that that is meant to reflect badly on Pollack – he simply did not have the bits that Stanley Kubrick carried with him in his head and presumeably, also with him to his grave.

Frankly I should add I like Pollack from what I have heard of him, and I generally like his work in any case, so this is not meant to be a shot at him at all; he could not possibly have known what Kubrick was holding in his head if Kubrick hadn't wanted to tell him explicitly about it and I don't think he did do.

What makes me think there really was a separate and different ending in Kubrick's mind? Well the movie is clearly two stories; one which faithfully follows the storyline contained in Schnitzler's book (and which ends with the Cruise/Kidman and daughter scene, although absent the 'let's fuck' line!), and the other which is a modernized Goethe/Rohmer/Brooks sorcery-and-witch clan/coven subtext (which is not in Schnitzler's book) and with European semiotics and what should be the inevitable (and missing) conclusion, namely, that of a revelation as to precisely who Kubrick thinks, actually is the Otherworldly witch king and queen in the waking world of today.

I realize I am being somewhat provocative here... Well one should say there is of course, no particular 'king' and/or 'queen,' but there are ducal identities, I suppose... as it were. But then to follow this argument now, it is crucial for astute people to restrain themselves from this pop culture tendency of blindly confusing the figure of 'Satan' with things to do with Luciferian cults, and to next also throw in tropes of Witchery into the mix along the way. Kubrick is far from some simple ignorant pop culture child who does this type of illiterate mish-mash thing. He was fully aware of the signs and symbols and what specifically they related to. These things all came along in high literary culture long long before 60's paperbacks' sensationalisms dealing with vaguely possible CIA socio-psychological experiments.

It is so really very obvious what Kubrick intended to do at the end of the movie and I am surprised no one has pointed it out yet. And let's leave behind us all this Rothschild nonsense too, and Alex Jones/David Icke slander/gossip mongering far behind us; it is not helpful nor correct at all in terms of what the movie is setting out to say. If Kubrick wanted to say the movie is about politics or money, he would have. And he would have done so very directly.

The movie is about beauty, glamour and all that glitters and is bright. And dark too. It is about power and who has it. The movie is about DEATH!

There is too much more that could be said about the movie itself, isn't there? There is the fundamental effect of Kubrick's film-glamourising of the essentially libertine philosophy, and donating to it organisation – which it simply doesn't have in reality. And never has had. Well, not to the extent that is imagined in this movie.

And the irony of that part of it is that if it ever were actually institutionally organised as part of a social culture, then Nazi Germany surely must have been that real moment in history when it was - albeit in a very stilted way! And yet, even then, actual Nazism had a strict, prudish, almost Gothic-Christian surface morality, and church-Christian ideas about spousal fidelity and anti-homosexuality and so on. Unlike the kinky modern myths of under-the-surface Nazism, and the genuine libertine quantity inside the movie Eyes Wide Shut itself. It is crucial to the deepest understanding of Kubrick's likely intent here, to observe that Arthur Schnitzler was himself in fact the definitive prototypical early-Freudian, Austrian school, sex psychology thinker and writer. And that he was probably the artist most defined as 'degenerate' by Hitler himself; and using the strongest anti-semitic terms to do it. Today Schnitzler is widely historically noted as having been amongst the artists and writers most racially, that is anti-semetically, vilified by the Nazis, along with Egon Schiele – who had of course been already deceased by the time of the Nazi's zenith.

So it is impossible to suppose that Kubrick intended anything along the lines of the contemporary rather too widespread and largely underclass animus against a fictitious but often fervidly imagined, Jewish-implicated, super-wealthy elite – consisting of or including typically 'the Rothschilds,' for instance! (Which is the family name most often bandied about in this type of context). Equally, it is utterly impossible to propose, in the alternative, that he was pointing to the extreme opposite – that of an ultra-modern secretive Nazi Illuminati elite. There are absolutely no clues in the movie that he has taken either of these directions at all. And yet there is so much vivid commentary about implying one or the other of these two diametrically opposed, and logically impossible, viewpoints, is what Kubrick is propounding throughout the movie.

...But there are a lot of clues, about The Rainbow Bridge between Earth and Heaven, between dimly-aware mortal man and the numinous divine. And like the real thing itself, to grasp an understanding of it is a glittering momentary pathway opening up in your mind. It's fleeting but memorable. Kubrick's last movie was certainly not completed properly. The clues are all there to where he was heading. They are real clues and they are big clues. But he never got there. I can show you where the rainbow bridge is. I can tell you what it is. I can show you its power. But nobody responds here to these blog-posts...! Alas.

Perhaps though someday someone will.

Until that day then,

...to all a merry goodnight. At least for now anyway. (Quote, Zeigler in Eyes Wide Shut: "If you knew Bill, you might not be able to sleep so good at night.")

Calvin J. Bear

OMSF

ps. And don't forget, this blog is brought to you by the commercial website http://mind-decadence.webs.com/