by Pineapple » Tue Mar 03, 2009 7:44 pm
I’ve been a regular reader of RI for about a year and a half, but never posted on here before. This is just a transcription (with post-additions) of the notes I took while watching EWS the last time. It’s a hodgepodge of my interpretations, personal associations and reflections, and symbological analyses.
- Unless she put on panties during some off-camera moment, Alice apparently goes commando to the party if we are to believe the first shot of the film. (The implication here is that she must be ready for sex at all times since that is her “purpose” as a slave.)
- Helena wants to stay up to watch The Nutcracker on TV. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find nutcrackers a bit scary. After the last time I saw The Nutcracker (about 6 years ago), I had a nightmare about these nutcracker ghosts chasing me through a haunted house. I’m sure that’s not what Kubrick had in mind, but that’s what I associate it with.
- Alice: “Why do you think Ziegler invites us to these things every year?” […] Bill: “This is what you get for making house calls.” Of course, as someone else has mentioned, Bill is there to be the “party doctor” to help out in case of drug overdoses and other ailments that the elite prefer not to go to the emergency room for. They’re not there because they’re social equals, but because they (or Bill anyway) provide a service. Also, the phrase “making house calls” has a double meaning and could also refer to prostitution.
- Right after that last line of Bill’s, the shot cuts to Nick Nightingale gazing at Bill. This is an interesting avenue which I don’t think anyone has mentioned yet in this post or anywhere else. Maybe I have sensitive gaydar, but I picked up on something more than friendly between Nick and Bill the first time I watched EWS. The way Bill’s eyes light up when he sees him is similar to the way Alice’s eyes light up when she catches a glimpse of Bill across the room later in the scene when she is dancing with the Hungarian. I hypothesize that in med school, Bill and Nick had some sort of sexual tryst that ended whenever Nick dropped out (and apparently disappeared to Seattle.) I believe this explains the otherwise somewhat odd dialogue that follows when Bill goes over to talk to him. Bill leans in close while talking to Nick, and then puts his arm around him as they walk.
Bill: “I see you’ve become a pianist.” (“Pianist” sounds a little like “penis”, and come to think of it, “Nick” sounds a bit like “Dick”.)
Nick: “Yes, my friends call me that.” And which “friends” would those be? Does he mean that his friends call him a pianist, but his handlers know how he really makes his money and call him something else? (Ziegler, in the red pool table scene, calls Nick “that little cocksucker.”) Or does he mean that his friends (meaning his handlers or those “in the know”) call him “the pianist” because he’s talented at music and also at -other- things?
[…]
Bill: “I never did understand why you walked away.” From med school, or from Bill? He sounds more like a disappointed lover than anything else.
Nick: “It’s a nice feeling; I do it a lot.” Assuming that my proposed scenario of the relationship between Nick and Bill is true, then this line means that he often walks away from people he’s had sex with. Is this because he has a hankering for casual sex while he’s away from home for long stretches, or because he’s being used?
Bill: “Cheers.” A seemingly odd thing to say considering the subtext of what they said before. Obviously, Bill has his “eyes wide shut” at this point and Nick’s double entendres are going over his head.
(They clink glasses together, and a man interrupts them.)
Unknown guy: “Excuse me, Nick, I need you a minute.” For what exactly?
Nick: “Be right with you.” (Unknown guy disappears.) “Listen, I gotta go do something…” It seems like Nick already knows what he has to go do, even though his only ostensible function at the party is to play the piano. Obviously there’s more to his job description than meets the eye.
- Someone in this post said that Mandy is wearing a huge diamond ring. In fact, it looks like she is wearing a huge PEARL ring. Since this is the only thing she’s wearing (I think) in this scene, it makes it especially significant (like the blue diamond necklace in the nude drawing scene in Titanic.) There is also a part where Bill is walking down the street and passes a store with a sign that says “Pearl Co.” I looked up “Pearl” in The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols and here are the relevant parts:
“The consistency of meanings applied to this lunar symbol, linked to water and woman, is as remarkable as their universality, as the varied writings of Mircea Eliade and other ethnologists go to show.
“Born of Water or the Moon and found in a shell, the pearl stands for the yin principle and is the essential symbol of ‘a femininity wholly creative…The sexual symbolism of shells communicates to them all the forces involved in it; and finally the similarity between the pearl and the foetus endows it with generative and obstetrical properties…All the magic, medicinal, gynaecological and funereal properties of pearls spring from this triple symbolism of water, moon and woman.’ […]
“In the East, it is their fructifying, aphrodisiacal and talismanic properties which predominate. If pearls were arranged in a grave they ‘regenerated the dead by placing them within a cosmic rhythm which is supremely cyclic, involving (in the pattern of the moon’s phases) birth, life, death, rebirth.’ […]
“Gnostic Christianity both enriched and made pearl symbolism more complex, while developing it along its original lines. […] In the famous Gnostic ‘gospel’, the Acts of Thomas, search for the pearl symbolizes the spiritual drama of Man’s fall and redemption. It finally came to mean the mystery of the transcendent made amenable to sense-perception, the manifestation of God in the Cosmos. […]
“Pearls are rare, pure and precious. They are pure because they are regarded as being flawless and white, and this is unaffected by their being dredged from the muddy depths or taken from a clumsy shell. […] Diadochus of Photike taught that, ‘by the pearl of great price’ which the merchant bought by selling ‘all that he had’, is meant the light of the intellect within the heart, the beatific vision. Here is a hint of the pearl being ‘hidden’ in its shell, like truth and knowledge, which require effort for their attainment. […] Once this ‘pearl of great price’ has been acquired, it should not be ‘cast before swine’ (Matthew 7:6): knowledge should not be broadcast heedlessly to those unworthy of it. Pearls are symbols of speech concealed within the shell of words.
[…] “In many parts of the world a more down-to-earth view is taken of the oyster which holds the pearl – it is compared with the female sexual organs.
[…] “A symbol of similar order was provided by pearls strung on a thread, becoming a rosary or sutratma, the linked series of worlds penetrated and linked by the Universal Spirit, atman. Thus pearl necklaces symbolize the cosmic unity of the manifold, the integration of the scattered elements of a being in the oneness of personality and the establishment of a spiritual relationship between two or several individuals. The broken necklace is, however, the image of disintegration of personality, universal upheaval and the destruction of oneness.”
“The twelfth-century Persian poet Sa’di repeats in his Bustan the legend of the growth of the pearl from a drop of rain falling into the shell, which rises to the surface of the sea and opens to receive it. This drop of water, celestial semen, becomes the pearl. This legend has its origins in Persian folklore and is a commonplace of literature. […]
“In Persian literature and folklore, the unflawed pearl is regarded as a symbol of virginity […] The phrase ‘to pierce the pearl of virginity’ is used to mean the consummation of a marriage.
[…] “In the East, and especially in Persia, the pearl generally speaking is endowed with a nobility that derives from its sacrality. This is why it decorates the crowns of kings. Traces of this same characteristic are to be found in pearl jewellery, especially ear-rings decorated with rare and precious pearls which cast a shadow of this holy nobility upon their wearers.
“In oriental dream symbolism, pearls preserve these special characteristics and are generally interpreted as children or else as wives and concubines. In addition they may be regarded as symbols of knowledge and wealth.”
A “pearl necklace” can also be a sexual term. From Wikipedia: “A pearl necklace is a slang term referring to a sexual act in which a man ejaculates semen on or near the neck, chest or breast of another person. It can be done following mammary intercourse or oral sex. The result is said by some to look like a necklace of pearls because of the stringy translucent white clumps of semen that are deposited there.” It can be done by just one man, but when I hear the term “pearl necklace” I generally think of a gangbang where a
bunch of men are standing around a woman and all ejaculating on her (like Mandy’s last night alive?)
Also, if you consider each of the women/slaves in the circle around the “grand master” guy at Somerton as like a pearl, they form a kind of pearl necklace. The ritualized “kisses” link them together in a spiritual bonding, albeit of a dark and sinister nature. The orgy itself is ritualized as well: it’s not about sex, but about power and binding their slaves’ wills to their own through dark sex magic. Since Mandy wears a single pearl on her finger, it could stand for “disintegration of personality […] and the destruction of oneness”. Perhaps, her mental compartmentalization and escapist drug use that goes along with being an elite sex slave. When we see her outside the ceremonial context, she seems frightened and weak (or dead, as she is seen later), but at the masked orgy, she actually wields a considerable amount of power. Just listen to her voice when she intervenes on Bill’s behalf: “Stop! Let…him…GO.” She sounds almost regal as she stands on high above the proceedings.
-This is another weird personal connection to EWS. I wrote a short story about an 11-year-old girl whose journalist mother is suicided by the PTB. The girl ends up in an orphanage where she is brutalized and ritually abused. The girl’s name? Mandy. And interestingly, in the story her name plays a large role. Her mother was the only person who called her Mandy, and everyone else called her Amanda. The evil headmistress of the orphanage calls her Mandy even though Mandy tells her not to, trying to usurp the psychological void left by Mandy’s mother’s death and use it to control her. She says it in much the same way Bill says “Mandy” over and over to get her to open her eyes. The story was fueled by things I’d read on RI and elsewhere, but I hadn’t watched or read anything about EWS except maybe a short review.
- If one assumes that Alice is also a slave, her story about her encounter with the naval officer (psy-ops?) in Cape Cod (Kennedy connection) makes a lot more sense. First of all, Alice doesn’t seem like she actually was attracted to the officer; the way she talks about him, it’s more like she was petrified. This is underlined by the creepy, ethereal music that plays during this part. The naval officer seems to have some psychic hold on her, because after “just a glance”, she “could hardly move.” Not in a good way, but like she was being controlled; not sexual, but scary. She says that while she and Bill were making love, and then were talking about their daughter and making future plans, “at no time was HE ever out of my mind.” The way she phrases it, it sounds like he is invading her mind rather than that she just can’t stop thinking about him; he is literally in her mind. This statement also shows her mental compartmentalization, how she can be doing one thing but simultaneously doing something completely antithetical. She says that if the naval officer had told her to, she would have “give[n] up everything…you, Helena, my whole fucking future.” Apparently, this is not really a wish of her own, because “at the same time [Bill] was dearer to [her] than ever”. I get the sense that she was clinging to him in a way, wanting him to save her. Her love was “both tender and sad” because she really does love Bill, but her experiences with love and sex have been skewed and she is still enslaved to a power higher than her husband. Deep down, she wanted him to know what was happening, which is why she finally tells him, in a moment of marijuana-induced honesty. (Although, she still doesn’t tell him the whole story, perhaps because in her fragmented mind, this is the only conscious recollection she has of the events.) Her facial expression becomes weird and cold, and she next speaks with a strange smile: “I barely slept that night.” I don’t think she was necessarily daydreaming about Mr. Navy, but rather possibly being programmed remotely or something similar. In the morning she doesn’t know whether she is “afraid that he had left, or that he might still be there.” The manifest meaning of this is that she is afraid he might have left and she will never see him again, but also that he might still be there and she might have to decide whether or not to cheat on her husband (which in this case would not really be her decision at all.) The latent meaning is just simply that she is afraid of this naval officer. This is why she is “relieved” when she realizes that he has already left. (Does she know he has left psychically? Somehow she just knows he isn’t there anymore.)
- Someone mentioned how in the Nathanson’s apartment, everything is symmetrical. I checked, and it’s true. Everything is symmetrically oriented towards one end of the apartment, even in the bedroom.
- The scene with Marion makes even less sense, unless you assume that she is also a slave. She is older than the typical slave (who are usually killed at age 30 in snuff films, if you believe the stories) but perhaps she was allowed to live because of her father’s wealth. You have to wonder why she is getting married so old (she must be about 40 or so) and maybe it’s because her father was her handler and is passing along ownership of her to Carl. There is obviously something very frightening about Carl, since Marion seems deathly afraid of going with him to Michigan (a center of RA according to Cathy O’Brien.) Also, the way she kisses him is very different from how she kisses Bill; she tries to french Bill, whereas she barely pecks Carl. Something kind of funny that I noticed is that as Bill is talking to Marion and Carl, he keeps putting his hand to his mouth as if he’s trying to wipe the kiss off. As the scene ends and fades to the next one, it shows Marion’s terrified-looking face, which turns ghostly/skeletal as it fades out.
- The use of Europeans in EWS has been commented on already, but I have a possible explanation, besides the fact that they were more readily accessible to Kubrick, working in England, than real Americans. I’m sure he could have gotten Americans if he had wanted to, but maybe he wanted to make the point that white people are actually the “foreigners” in this country. White skin is found naturally in Europe, not in America – Europeans are the invaders.
- In the Sonata café, the lights on the tables are reminiscent of a crystal ball…or perhaps even a pearl?
- Nick: “You’re married?” With a hint of dismay in his voice.
Bill: “Yes. Nine years.” One year after the last time he and Nick saw each other?
Nick: “Any kids?” He seems to brighten up at the thought of children, after the thought that Bill is married. Is Nick a pedo?
[…] Nick: “You gotta go where the work is.” I find it hard to believe that he couldn’t find work anywhere but Manhattan. Perhaps it’s because he’s there on a special assignment (i.e. slave duties.) And why would Ziegler hire him, if he weren’t involved in some way? It could be that Nick performs as a gay sex slave, or that he bought some child sex videos from someone in the circle and ended up being asked to play the piano for them. Who knows.
[…] Nick: “I play blindfolded.” Repeated twice. Eyes wide shut?
[…] Nick: “I have seen some things in my life,” (like what?) “but never, never anything like this.” Is that fear in his eyes? “And never such women.” Phone rings. “Excuse me…Yes, sir.” At this part, Nick has a fairly normal look on his face when he answers the phone, but as soon as the person on the other end begins talking, he becomes very mechanical, as if that person used the “code word” to trigger his slave persona. His face goes neutral, devoid of any emotion, and his eyes dart around rapidly. He’s so in another world that he messes up when he tries to write and doesn’t seem to think to use his other hand to hold the napkin in place while holding the phone with his shoulder (what I think any person in a normal frame of mind would automatically do.) Bill reaches over and holds it for him. I’m not sure why he needs to write down the word “Fidelio” instead of just remembering it. He apparently already knows where Somerton is (“Yes, I know where that is.”) Perhaps he is unable to recall information transmitted to him in his MC-state when he is in his “regular Nick” state, unless he writes it down.
- “Nightingale” In the Disney version of Cinderella (another story of a young girl forced to live as a slave by her evil parents), the titular character sings a song called “Sing, Sweet Nightingale” (at least I assume that’s the name of the song, since those are virtually the only three words in it.) During the song, Cinderella is scrubbing the floors as bubbles swirl around her, reflecting her image in multiple copies (like the many fragments of her abused and shattered personality?) Just another association of mine.
- When Bill goes to the costume shop, Milich at first just brings him inside. After Bill asks for “a cloak with a hood and a mask”, Milich takes him to the back room, possibly representing the illicit (especially when you consider what, or rather who, they find back there.)
-When Bill arrives at Somerton, he is driven from the gate to the house in a red SUV.
- Upstairs at the orgy, at the end of the segment where Bill is walking around by himself, he’s standing in one of the rooms and a man and woman come up behind him. The man motions for the woman to go over to Bill. Is she Gayle, the model from Ziegler’s party?
- When Alice tells Bill about her dream after he gets home, she mentions the naval officer. She says, “He stared at me.” She looks intensely uncomfortable at the thought of his stare.
- Incidentally and fwiw, I watched this once with the French soundtrack going, and I have to say they did a remarkably good job in the translation and in matching the pace of the dialogue with the actors’ mouth movements. It often looked like they were really saying what they were supposed to be saying.
