Great Party, Isn’t It?
Stanley Kubrick, the masters of universe, and their lame parties
You take a cab out to Cedar Grove, give the masked guard the password, and walk into the mystery cult’s black mass. This is your first time, yet in your bones, you feel as if you’ve been to a black mass before. Then it hits you, like an axe over the head: the Overlook Hotel’s Fourth of July ball in 1921, of course! And again in 1970. Then once more a few years later. (In fact, the party never really seems to stop repeating, at the Overlook…) The mystery cult witnessed at the Overlook has evolved since, but the structure of the ritual has remained the same. Much like how Jack Torrance is compelled to return to the ballroom, so too is Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut—the clearest warning ever transmitted to us about balls and the people who attend them. In The Shining there are no robes, no incense, no obvious signs of a black mass; but there are certain synchronicities that lead me to believe the mystery cult in both movies is one and the same.
For a Fourth of July ball, it’s notable that there are no red, white, and blue balloons, no fireworks; and any party planner would be aghast to learn that a summer party celebrating our nation’s founding was to take place indoors. I’m sure it has happened that such things have been overlooked (!) before, but it being the year 1921 you would think that there would at least be some patriotic bunting, and that they’d be drinking something other than advocaats, a drink named either by Dutch colonizers or after Dutch lawyers. The ball seems not to be one celebrating America so much as one fêting the rich and powerful—as Stuart Ullman demurringly tells us, “all the best people” have stayed at the Overlook: not just presidents, but, he seems to acknowledge at Jack’s prodding, royalty. (“Who do you think those people were? Those were not just ordinary people there. If I told you their names... I'm not gonna tell you their names... but if I did, I don't think you'd sleep so well,” Ziegler tells Bill in Eyes Wide Shut, more directly menacing in his refusal to name names.)1
Now we get to the real celebration—honored most immediately afterward in the film by a toast (“Great party, isn’t it?”), a bleeding elevator, and a bear giving head to a tuxedoed man2—of the Overlook branch of the mystery cult (and what makes possible its continued existence on this physical plane): the enactment and reenactment of the original sacrifice, an axe murder. Perhaps first perpetrated on the Native American population3 who tried to defend their burial ground, or more recently on the man with the axe gash who makes that splendid toast, followed by Delbert Grady’s family, the latest victim is now the psychic chef Dick Hallorann, murdered by Jack before Jack can get around to offing his own wife and child. Every bit of dialogue, every edit, which has brought us to this moment of ritual sacrifice feels as if it were a part of a larger conspiracy: nothing is an accident, not even (especially not!) Jack’s alcoholism. After all, someone is buying Jack’s drinks; and it’s an advocaat which Delbert Grady pours on Jack so that he can take him aside and ask him to recommit the ritual. Addiction is the ultimate conspiracy of the elite. (Recall that with Bill’s help, Mandy survived her overdose. Was this the “mistake” that her ritual murder sought to correct through reenactment?)
If The Shining is an exposé of the masters-of-the-universe mystery cult, then Eyes Wide Shut is a philosophical examination of its disturbing and uncanny nature.4 “Do you mind telling me what kind of fucking charade ends with somebody turning up dead?” Bill shouts at Ziegler in the billiard room, to which Ziegler zenly replies, “Someone died, it happens all the time.” (It’s not hard to imagine Ziegler at the Overlook looking at the woman in the bathtub, shaking his head while saying, “It happens all the time.”) While Jack is instructed by Delbert to do terrible things, such a course is only ever insinuated to Bill. (“It was always just gonna be a matter of time with her. Remember? You told her so yourself.”) We wonder where Bill was going with the two models, or where he was going with the second masked woman (after Mandy is taken away by the servant) at the black mass. To engage in compromising sex acts? To be assigned a task he must complete for the cult?5 (Other than “Fuck.” that is.) After Bill stumbles into the cult’s ritual, his further investigations into it can also be read as a test of whether he will stay quiet and eventually be invited in. Suddenly Nick Nightingale has been whisked away6, Mandy is dead (It was always a matter of time), Domino has disappeared because of an HIV diagnosis, Mr. Milich has been paid off, and Alice already “knows” where he has been. All the machinations have led him both to keep his mouth shut and return to Alice. The thing about cults is that once you’ve been humiliated you can join; when the black mass is held in East Hampton next time, Bill might just get the invite after all. (And once you join, you can never leave; it’s as if you’ve always been there, a ghost in the ballroom.)
But the point of the conspiracy wasn’t to get Bill to join a cult; it was to get Bill to save a prostitute from drugs and then sacrifice her to the same fate. It wasn’t to get Jack to join an eternally returning ghost party—it was specifically to lure a psychic Black man into a cursed axe-murder place, to be murdered with an axe.7 The conspiracy is human sacrifice. The party is just a party.8
UPDATE 10/20/22: The mystery cult may go all the way back to Barry Lyndon. Lord Wendover tells Barry: “When I take up a person, Mr. Lyndon, he or she is safe. There is no question about them any more. My friends are the best people. I don’t mean that they’re the most virtuous, or indeed the least virtuous, or the cleverest or the stupidest or the richest or the best born. But the best. In a word, people about whom there is no question.” In an indication of the deliberateness of these words, this is a quote sourced from an entirely different Thackeray novel, Vanity Fair.
Maybe the most patriotic thing about that ball.
See Bill Blakemore for more on what the axe might represent.
I must credit the lovely Isabel Murray for this observation.
There is of course the theory that in the end Helena Harford is kidnapped by two men we see at Ziegler’s Christmas party and that this sacrifice will get them the invite to the real party.
I’m glad he escaped, otherwise we would never have gotten Tár.
Yes, Danny was in on it. Tony told him to get a replacement sacrifice, and he did. Eyes wide open, people.
The party is always the same. Did you know both films include chanted fragments of the Orthodox liturgy? The Shining deploys a modern reworking of the Orthodox Easter mass by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, which is specifically played at moments of murder or near murder, including Dick Hallorann’s death. In Eyes Wide Shut, when Bill arrives at the ball, a different part of the Orthodox liturgy is played, as a component of an avant-garde piece by composer Jocelyn Pook, this time in Romanian—and backwards.
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