An Album of the Inconclusive
Like an iceberg, the interwoven semiotic labyrinth that lies beneath the deceptively straightforward narrative of Eyes Wide Shut is much larger than what can be casually gleaned from the surface. It is a daunting maze that spans in all directions, seemingly endlessly. Some of its paths connect up with each other, while others are cul-de-sacs which simply point in the direction of an intertextual reference or thematic notion as a rewarding easter-egg for the observant viewer.
Many times an idea or concept will continue to resurface in a way that is obviously deliberate. Sometimes it’s meaning is discernible, but not always immediately. It will often refuse to make sense until another key reference has been identified.
This page is for cataloguing these links in the film that so far resist definitive explanation. If there are other mysteries that you feel should be added to this page, or if you believe you have found a probable solution to any of them, please contact me at 33degreesofeyeswideshut@gmail.com.
The Weird Insignia
There is an insignia painted on the corner of the hardware store in the street where Domino first approaches Bill. The same insignia can later be seen on an advert board outside Gillespie’s diner, both times that Bill passes by it.
It appears that the insignia may possibly represent a directional compass, although there is little indication as to exactly why that might be.
One Light Out
There are multiple scenes in the film where, in a series of lights that are turned on, there is one that is out.
Perhaps the first of these can be seen in Lou Nathanson’s room, which contains five table lamps with one of them being off.
When Bill is being driven to Somerton, we see “HAPPY HOLIDAY” spelt in lights, and a section of the second “H” is out.
Later, when Bill is followed by the stalker, we see that the streetlights are lit except one:
Then, in the establishing shot of the hospital, we see a floor of rooms, lit except for one:
Then, in the toy store at the end, we can see that one of the bulbs lining the display booth has gone out:
Is there a thread that ties these together?
Venice
In the corner of the late Lou Nathanson’s room, we can see a framed print showing a portion of Canaletto’s ‘The Bacino di San Marco on Ascension Day‘, showing a scene from the San Marco basin in Venice. It depicts the tradition known as “The Marriage of the Sea”, wherein a ring is ceremonially cast into the sea to make it “one” with Venice.
Later, when Bill is with Domino, we see interspersed shots of Alice watching TV in the Harford’s kitchen. She watches two separate movies on the TV: Blume in Love (1973) and To Forget Venice (1979). Both of these are relationship dramas set in Venice.
Later still, Bill arrives at the masked ball, where the guests are wearing Venetian masks.
There are some possible explanations for this phenomena. In the Nathanson apartment, which with it’s doppelgangers parallels Bills own marital situation, Bill is taking the role of the naval officer. The maritime nature of the “marriage of Venice to the sea” could be a thematic reinforcement of this role.
Another thing that could be getting referenced here is Thomas Mann’s famous novella Death in Venice, a tale of sexual obsession not wholly dissimilar to Eyes Wide Shut. Not only does the first Venetian reference appear in the room of a dead man, but the protagonist of Death in Venice dies slowly of cholera, matching the presumable HIV-related fate of Domino (during whose scene we see Alice watching the TV).
Mandy’s deathly fate is also ostensibly sealed during the ritual scene with the Venetian masks.
Are the cross-references to Venice just an aesthetic/thematic touch? Or is there something else going on here?
Mandy, Doubling & The Long Island Rail Road
This thread is really interesting and I think it might provide great context for some key elements of the movie.
First, have a look at the story visible on the left and top-middle of the page when Bill is discovering Mandy’s death in the newspaper:
[Note: the complete details of the newspaper story are not visible in releases of the film which have been transferred out of its native 4:3 aspect ratio. In these versions, much detail from the top and bottom portions of the screen has been unfortunately cropped out.]
The story details the real-life apprehension of Anthony Norman, a bank robber who took commuters hostage at gunpoint on the Long Island Rail Road in order to evade arrest after police officers had boarded the train. Pay attention to this part in particular, within the boxed section titled “Drama Reopens McCarthy’s Pain”:
“Long Island Rep. elect Carolyn McCarthy got a shocking reminder of her own tragedy–the Long Island Rail Road massacre three years ago– when she heard about the latest terror train ride.
McCarthy, who attended a memorial service Saturday for her husband and the other passengers killed in the 1993 massacre, said it reminded her once again “just how fragile we are and how much violence is with us.”“
The events as described are true. Carolyn McCarthy really was a member of the U.S House of Representatives whose husband really was killed in the Long Island Rail road massacre of 1993: a mass shooting committed by one Colin Ferguson onboard a train where six of the victims were killed.
Now, this newspaper gives us a good indication of when the events of Eyes Wide Shut took place, since the standoff with Anthony Norman occurred on December 10, 1996. In fact, Stanley Kubrick’s notorious attention to minute details further confirms the timeframe for us. In the scene where Bill buys the newspaper, we can see that the displayed magazines are all, indeed, December 1996 issues:
Now, here’s where things start to get freaky.
During the scene where Bill confronts Ziegler in the rumpus room, have a look at when Bill fishes the newspaper from his coat pocket:
This sequence has been filmed so that the newspaper exactly eclipses the small table next to Bill.
“Yeah, so what?”, you might be thinking to yourself. “There’s nothing noteworthy about that; it’s just a random detail of the shot composition. Right?”
Wrong.
Seconds earlier, when Bill is going to sit down in the chair, we get a look at what’s on top of the small table:
If we zoom in, we can identify the top object as the December 20, 1993 issue of Time magazine… and the cover story of that magazine is…
…the homicidal exploits of none other than Colin Ferguson, the chronological first of the two Long Island Rail Road aggressors that are referenced in the newspaper heralding Mandy’s death!
This is obviously a purposeful inclusion. But to what end?
In attempting to answer this question, I want to focus in on something noted by many viewers, quite a few of whom have wondered whether it’s a production goof in the film. The newspaper article detailing Mandy’s death features what appear to be printing errors, where parts of it are each repeated twice. The repeated sections read: “…Hotel by security personnel after her agent asked them to check on her be-…“, “…her at the time she ingested the drugs.” and “She has many important friends in the fashion and entertainment worlds…“
I believe these repetitions have been made on purpose, because there are many other examples of doubling which are peripheral to the character of Mandy. Have a read even of the first time her name is mentioned in Ziegler’s bathroom, where it is said twice in a row, consecutively, by both Bill and Ziegler:
BILL: What’s her name?
ZIEGLER: Uh, Mandy. Mandy.
BILL: Mandy. Mandy? Can you hear me, Mandy?
Let’s list the examples of doubling surrounding Mandy: The repetition of her name. Mandy being played by two different actresses; similar to how Bill Harford and Carl Thomas are doppelgangers played by different actors. Portions of Mandy’s obituary being duplicated. Plus, two very comparable acts of aggression on the Long Island Rail Road which are effectively doubles for each other.
Clearly, the at-the-time 3 year old Time magazine issue in Ziegler’s rumpus room and the instances of doubling have been included to evoke some kind of meaning. I think I can present a decent argument for what’s going on here, for which I can draw strong support from one of Kubrick’s earlier films: The Shining.
From it’s more literal-leaning interpretations to it’s sub-textual readings revolving around child sexual abuse and the genocide of the Native Americans, there is one premise that seemingly all analyses of The Shining agree on: that, on every level, it is a film about the recurrent, cyclical heritage of violence and trauma, or “history repeating itself”. This is perhaps most summarily encapsulated by the reveal at the end of the film, wherein it is implied that the perpetually reincarnated Jack Torrance has “always been the caretaker”.
Less ambiguous than the interpretive side of The Shining is it’s visually self-evident use of mirroring, symmetry and doubling. This can be demonstrated in many respects, such as: The two homicidal caretaker Gradys, Delbert and Charles. The two murdered identical twin Grady daughters. The frequent use of mirrors in the film as both mise-en-scene and a plot device (“REDRUM“). The symmetrical geometry of shot compositions and iconic carpet patterns. The prevalent number-play revolving around the numbers 12, 21, & 42 (which are mirrors and doubles of one another).
I don’t think it is enough to say that the perpetual legacy of abuse and mirror-image doubling are themes of The Shining— they are the themes of The Shining; the translative matrix through which every part of the film can be made clear sense of.
While a more in-depth dissection of The Shining is not especially relevant to this analysis, I think it is worth making this brief comparison across the span of Kubrick’s filmography to identify the concepts that he evidently had a heightened interest in and continually returned to. Through this, we can understand what could be termed a sort of film lexicon or visual/thematic language which is particular to Kubrick. Perhaps I will offer my own broader coverage of this lexicon at some point in future– in any case, The Shining is one the more enduring movies in collective popular culture, and it’s plumbed symbolic depths have been well commentated for many years, if you care to read about them elsewhere.
Back in Eyes Wide Shut, we now have the context to make some sense regarding the thematic role of Mandy and her death. To make a long story short: When Bill holds the newspaper in the foreground (the Anthony Norman story) against the Time magazine of the background (the Colin Ferguson story), we are being given a deeply veiled visual token of “history repeating itself” and the recursive legacy of violence. The warped present layered on top of the violent past, like the Overlook Hotel is layered on top of a Native American burial ground in The Shining.
Note: Reincarnation is particular focal point in the aforementioned lexicon; a concept which Kubrick has routinely revisited since it’s first major employment in 2001: A Space Odyssey. For more on Eyes Wide Shut‘s coded references to symbolic reincarnation, please see “Prelude to 2° – The Syntax of Eyes Wide Shut” on the homepage.
The Mysterious Driver
This is a bit of a strange one. There are a few times in the film where we see a car appearing to be driven by the same recurring stunt driver. Here, we can see at him as he stands in for Tom Cruise himself during an exterior shot of Bill’s Range Rover (with quite a poor resemblance to Tom):
On its face, there is nothing particularly unusual about this recurrent stuntman (“why wouldn’t the production team just re-use the same driver during filming to keep things simple?”). However, there is a point where the movie throws us a conspicuous ‘curveball’.
Less than two minutes after we see the stunt driver behind the wheel of the Range Rover, we see him again as the chauffeur who drives the menacing butler down to the long driveway to deliver the typewritten warning to Bill.
Looking closely, we can sparingly identify the driver by his unique facial quality. However, it would appear that Kubrick has gone through the effort of purposely obscuring the driver’s face at any time we might get a good look at him.
When the car pulls in to park, his face is very pointedly hidden by a bar of the gate. The shot also appears to have been positioned for the windshield reflection to confuse the details of the driver’s face, specifically.
It is very peculiar that Kubrick would orient any of the visual composition for this scene around concealing the details of this recurring driver. If he was simply worried about the driver being recognised from other appearances, he could have just put someone else behind the wheel. The oddity of this setup is compounded by the consistency with which the faces of drivers in the movie are obscured. Bill is seen taking– or trying to take– a taxi at nine separate times over the course of the film (a conspicuously high number). We only get a good look at one of the nine drivers (when Bill tears a $100 bill in half while talking to the cabbie in front of the Somerton mansion). We never properly see any of them while they are actually driving.
There is another cab-related peculiarity. The shot of the Range Rover going over the bridge is an echo of a similar shot from earlier in the film, where Bill taxis over the same bridge at night. If we look very closely at that shot, we’ll see that this cab is carrying an extra person in the front passenger seat, who by all explainable accounts should not be there.
The passing lights of the bridge can be seen illuminating the side of this third person’s head, and we can even see a quick glint of light bouncing off what appears to be their spectacles. This is more baffling than the hiding of the driver at Somerton, because there is absolutely no reason that this passenger should be there, whether as part of the narrative or as a technical requirement of filming this shot. It is a completely unnecessary inclusion.
One thing that struck me was a vague-if-not-matching similarity between the face of the recurrent driver and Kubrick’s assistant and personal driver, Emilio D’Allessandro, who makes an appearance in the film as the news vendor outside Sharky’s Café.
Interestingly, it is right next to Emilio’s newspaper stall where we see a cab (one of the aforementioned nine), out of which emerges another long-time Kubrick assistant, Leon Vitali (who also plays Red Cloak in the film). Since Leon has never confirmed his second role as this cab passenger in the movie, perhaps it is possible that Emilio has a similarly unmentioned cameo as the recurrent driver. It would make a lot of sense as a casting decision: if Kubrick was casting an estate chauffeur, why not use his own of 30 years?
Worth noting is that the sinister music (Musica Ricercata II) heard when Bill encounters Leon’s cab/Emilio’s news stand is also heard when he sees the chauffeur at the Somerton gates (not to mention when he first meets Leon as Red Cloak). In fact, as I have noted on the homepage under the section for the 27th Degree, there a quiet a few elements linking the street exterior of Sharky’s Café and Bill’s second visit to Somerton.
We have already seen the kind of lengths Eyes Wide Shut goes through to create syntactic connections through repeating elements in the movie. I think there is definitely enough going on here that our suspicions should be aroused.
Rings
Throughout the film, many key supporting characters are seen to wear different numbers of rings on different combinations of their fingers. These range from the standard (a single ring on the ring finger) to the curiously aesthetic. Some of the rings are notably particular in style. This was a through line that I didn’t really consider to be especially meaningful at first, until I noticed that one of the male participants in the Somerton orgy was wearing an unusual arrangement of rings which were featured so prominently in the shot that I figured they had to carry some unspoken connotation:
Below, I’ve charted the positions of rings worn by the characters. In this record, each digit indicates the number of rings on a given finger. Reading towards the right, the first five digits represent fingers on the left hand of each character, from pinky to thumb, and the next five digits represent the right hand, from thumb to pinky.
Bill Harford – 01000 00000
Single gold wedding band.
Alice Harford – 02000 00000
Silver anniversary/eternity band and gold wedding band
Roz, the babysitter – 00000 00010
Silver band.
Illona Ziegler – 01000 00100
Illona has a wedding band and, on her right hand, a silver ring with a black inset.
Victor Ziegler – 01000 00000
Gold Wedding band.
Nick Nightingale – 00000 00000
I wouldn’t ordinarily note that a character isn’t wearing any rings, except that Nick tells Bill that he is married. Nick not wearing his wedding ring while visiting away from his hometown would seem to tie in with the film’s “homosexual tryst” subtext.
Ziegler’s secretary – 01000 00000
Wedding band.
Sandor Szavost – 10000 00000
Gold band on pinky.
Nuala Windsor – 01000 00000
Gold wedding band. Her cohort, Gayle, is ringless.
Mandy – 00000 00010
Ring with bulbous ‘mother of pearl’ jewel. This appears to have been incorporated as piece of Masonic symbolism from the 16th Degree of the Scottish Rite (see the homepage).
Rosa, the maid – 01000 00000
Gold band.
Marion Nathanson – 00100 00110
Three ornate silver rings. Interestingly, her left ring finger is bare despite her engagement to Carl (who wears no rings).
Domino – 00110 11110
Domino sports a variety of jeweled and plain silver rings.
Mr. Milich – 10000 00000
Silver band.
Milich’s daughter – 00100 00000
Ring consists of a bulbous, translucent gold love heart. Mr. Milich can be seen holding his daughter’s hand and affectionately thumbing this ring when Bill makes his return to rainbow fashions.
Masked ball attendant, observing from lounge in first orgy room – 00000 00100
Large silver ring.
Male orgy participant – 01100 00010
Three silver bands.
Masked ball attendant, slow-dancing at the base of the staircase – 01000 00010
Bands.
Sally – 00110 01110
Mildly ornate, jewelled silver rings.
Sharky’s Cafe server – 00000 00010
Band ring. The server’s left hand is not visible on screen.
Hospital receptionist – 01010 00000
Silver bands.
Harris (aid to Ziegler) – 01000 00000
Wedding band.
Very interestingly, none of the women at the Somerton party have rings. This includes the ‘mysterious woman’ (implied to be Mandy), who was seen with a ring earlier. Naturally, Mandy’s body is also without a ring in the morgue.
There is one peculiar detail here which is perhaps our first major clue for this puzzle: not only are Domino and Sally (the roommates) the only characters to have rings on any index finger, but they each have rings on both their left and right index fingers. The likelihood of this being simply coincidental is close to nil.
Domino is also the only character to have a ring on a thumb (her right).
Can you see any emergent logic at play, here?
Coffee And Beer
This is a peculiar one for which I believe I have at least a partial answer. Throughout the film, there are repeated references to coffee and beer, with very little of a consistent through line to connect them.
The “day in the life of the Harfords” montage opens with Bill asking his secretary to arrange a coffee for him. Bill orders a coffee at Gillespie’s diner. His secretary brings him a coffee before he goes to Somerton for the second time. Sally offers him a coffee before he leaves her apartment. He orders a cappuccino at Sharky’s cafe. He passes a group of doctors drinking coffee after he views Amanda’s corpse.
Beer is also conspicuously abound throughout the film. We see beer brand adverts all over the place: Miller, Sol, Schlitz, Becks, Budweiser. The “life of the Harfords” montage closes with Bill drinking a beer while watching football on TV, bookending its opening reference to coffee. He orders a beer at the Sonata Cafe. He drinks a Budweiser on returning home from his second trip to Somerton, then again after his confrontation with Ziegler in the pool room. This last beer he has at the same breakfast table where Alice had her coffee during the “day in the life” montage.
I have reasonable evidence to suggest that “coffee and beer” is here being utilized for its homophonic similarity to the words/phrase “coffin and bier”.
As noted in the section for the Fifth Degree on the homepage, the “coffin and bier” in the Book of the Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite refers to an important symbolic decoration of the Fifth Degree, naturally used to illustrate concepts pertaining to death. If this is the connotation that was intended by Kubrick, then it makes sense that Bill orders a cappuccino right before learning about Amanda’s death in the paper, and that we see the doctors with coffees right after Bill sees Amanda’s body on her bier.
There are two main parts in Eyes Wide Shut which seem to support this homophonic connection.
The first is the Beck’s Beer advertisement, which we see when Bill is knocked over by the YALE boys. Curiously, the advert employs the language of Beck’s native Germany: beer is spelt as bier.
This seems like a weirdly arbitrary production choice, given that the film is set in New York. To add on to this, the storefront above the advert reads “CAPPUCINO”, as we can confirm by looking at the reflection in the car window (which I have inverted horizontally for your convenience):
So, we have a “coffee” above a “bier”.
Another thing worth noting is that this building’s façade identifies it as Sharky’s, a double for the place where Bill later orders the cappuccino and learns of Mandy’s death:
The second part of the film that reinforces the coffee/coffin/beer/bier homophone link is in the Sonata Cafe. Just after Bill walks by the Budweiser beer light, and just before he orders a beer at his table, he delivers a pronounced cough as he passes a screen showing a football game (which he was shown watching earlier while drinking a beer in his apartment).
At this point, it is useful to include a reminder: Kubrick was frequently hyper-dictatorial even down the gestures that his actors made on screen. This cough doesn’t look like it can be simply written off as an improvisation or acting decision. The timing and placement seem too deliberate.
My guess is that the cough is being deliberately invoked for it’s semantic relationship to the actual word “cough”, which itself invokes the word “coffin” through similarity. If this is true, it supports the possibility that “coffee” and “beer” are also being used for homophonic reasons.
Further Identification of Paintings in the Nathanson Home
I have created the Intertext Glossary for cataloguing all the known works of art which appear in Eyes Wide Shut— however, the unidentified paintings in the Nathanson home are of particular interest due to their apparent relationship with the “Apartment And Its Decorations” section from the Eighth Degree in the BAASR.
The BAASR specifies the Apartment as having a “blue canopy in the east, sprinkled with stars…“
…and also states: “Over the Master there is suspended a blazing star“.
It would appear that both of the paintings corresponding to those descriptions are perhaps made by the same artist. If these paintings are somehow connected to stars, by their names or histories, then we would essentially have an answer as to why they have been included. Unfortunately, I have had no luck in tracking them down. Perhaps they are very obscure in origin.
Curiously, the painting in the blue-walled room can be seen again later, in the shop window for the Artinis Gallery as Bill approaches the Hotel Jason. It is to the right of Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s Astarte Syriaca [Reader Contribution .1].
The painting can be seen a third time when Bill enters Sharky’s Cafe… again, to the right of Astarte Syriaca!
We can also get another look at the unidentified painting in this behind-the-scenes photo from the set of Sharky’s Cafe:
It is well within reason that the multiple appearances of the painting might simply be a case of a prop being casually recycled. However, Astarte Syriaca— which depicts the goddess Venus– appears almost certainly to have been placed in Sharky’s as a piece of Scottish Rite symbolism (see the homepage). The scene in Sharky’s is matched to the 28th degree, which is the only degree out of all thirty-three to employ the symbolism of Venus into the arrangement of its lodge. Note also that the 28th degree is titled “Knight of the Sun“, and employs the sun in it’s symbolism, while “Artinis” is the name of the Urartian sun god.
Since Astarte Syriaca and the name “Artinis” seem to have been employed for significant meaning, it seems unlikely that the smaller painting would have been featured thrice for merely incidental reasons. We should therefore extend the same suspicion to include the paintings in the Nathanson apartment. In light of the apparent body of meaning which surrounds the paintings, I will classify this as an unsolved mystery until they have been properly catalogued.
Note that stars and constellations also play a large symbolic role in 28°, which would correspond with the suspected “celestial” nature of the unidentified painting(s) from the Nathanson apartment.
Ziegler’s Billiards Table
This one is really more of a tentative suspicion, but for the time being I will class it as an unsolved mystery due to a perceived strong likelihood that it bears secret meaning. Given the ubiquitous usage of colours and numbers in Eyes Wide Shut‘s code, it would be surprising if the numbered and coloured billiard balls in Ziegler’s rumpus room were simply strewn about randomly with no underlying significance.
By compositing shots in the film showing the table from different angles, as well as comparing them to some behind-the-scenes photos featured in The Stanley Kubrick Archives, we can posit that the billiard balls are arranged approximately as follows:
The top side of this diagram represents the side nearest to the rumpus room’s window. The cueball is shown in its initial position, before Ziegler picks it up during his conversation with Bill.
Worth noting is that all fifteen coloured balls are featured on the table, indicating a recent break with no balls having been sunk. If there is some puzzle here, the maximum number of balls being on display is probably somehow relevant.
Is there a pattern here?
Smoking
Throughout the film, the are multiple peculiar linkages relating to smoking.
In the day after the Somerton ritual, the references to smoking seem to be connected with the colours red and white. We can see two types of red and white “No smoking” signs in Sally’s apartment building and Rainbow Fashions. There are also red and white Marlboro signs seen throughout the movie.
At first, this seems merely incidental. However, when Bill returns to Rainbow Fashions, we can see a man outside next to the mailbox, smoking a cigarette, and wearing a red and white jacket:
We also see adverts for Camel cigarettes outside Domino’s apartment. Then, at the toy store at the end of the film, we a stuffed camel. This toy camel appears right before a tiger and pram, which also appear in the earlier scene at Domino’s apartment.
In Ziegler’s Christmas party, we see a lone plume of cigar smoke emerge from just in front of Sandor Szavost’s face, which has evidently been placed to elicit meaning. It mirrors Bill’s steaming exhalations when he is eyeing his stalker later in the film:
Of course, we also have the obvious example of Bill and Alice smoking pot before getting into the argument which kickstarts the events of the films plot. Alice is also seen smoking a cigarette when she calls Bill at Domino’s flat, and again at the end of the movie after Bill gives her his confession. Smoke is also significantly employed during the iconic “Magic Circle” ritual at the Somerton mansion, where it billows from Red Cloak’s twirling censer.
There are a couple of explanations for the smoking linkages which I can suspect.
Consider that the naval officer as described in Alice’s “Garden of Eden” dream, and by extension Sandor Szavost, is a Serpentine/Satanic character, come to lure Eve. It would then make sense that Sandor is symbolically breathing smoke like the dragons in the stories of old.
The most famous slayer of dragons is St George, who’s famous flag is red and white. This possibility of this association being referenced in Eyes Wide Shut is strengthened by another moment at the Ziegler party, when Nuala Windsor asks Bill if he wants to go “where the rainbow ends”. Clifford Mills Where the Rainbow Ends is a 1911 Christmas play (Eyes Wide Shut is set at Christmas) which stars Saint George as a central hero. Not only that, but Nuala is wearing St George cross earrings:
“That is the kind of hero I can be sometimes“, is what Bill tells Nuala and Gayle.
This inclusion may be a tie-in with the Masonic code of Eyes Wide Shut (see the homepage for more information). The mentioned “no smoking” signs, and the additional ones seen in the hospital where Bill examines Mandy’s corpse, all appear in the Council of Kadosh section (°19 – 30°). These degrees in particular make ample allegorical use of, and are largely named after, Knights.
Obviously, we’re grasping at straws here, but that is kind of the point of this particular page.
This marks the end of all “unsolved mysteries” that have been identified thus far.
If you have located another mysterious thread which you would like to see here, please gather as much evidence for your submission as possible and email it to 33degreesofeyeswideshut@gmail.com.
Please note that while experiments in creative (or even conspiratorial) thinking are highly encouraged, this page is mainly for recurrent patterns that can be definitively demonstrated without much speculation, and the potential reasons as to why these patterns have been included. Oft-cited oddities like “Larry Celona” being an anagram for “Royal Lancer“, while novel, don’t really tie in with any of the provably interconnected allusions which lace the complex fabric of Eyes Wide Shut.
Cheers,
M
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The 33 Degrees of Eyes Wide Shut 