Epstein Wide Shut
There was no client list for Epstein Island, or so we’ve now been told by the Department of Justice.
Maybe it’s true. Maybe Jeffrey Epstein was simply a pervert who, with billions of dollars, powerful friends, and the help of his loyal associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, indulged himself in his sickest fantasies. Or maybe, as many across the political spectrum are now speculating on X, it’s all one big coverup that stretches from the Clinton era to the heights of the second Trump administration.
Yet as Eyes Wide Shut—Stanley Kubrick’s definitive take on the existence of shadowy, elite cabals—shows us, the only healthy answer is to say: It doesn’t really matter.
Kubrick’s final film is a cautionary tale of normal people going down the rabbit hole of elite conspiracies as a cover for their own impotent boredom (which, if you look at the hysterics on X over Epstein, seems to track perfectly). Elites exist, for better or worse, and we’ll never really know how they operate unless we join the club. Even so, that doesn’t justify taking the black pill in one’s own personal life, as Tom Cruise’s Bill Harford basically comes to accept at the end.
Bill (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) have the perfect life. He’s a respected medical doctor; she is beautiful and appears to be devoted. They live in an exclusive building on New York’s Upper West Side, get invited to fancy parties, and have a darling young daughter. They’re not Epstein-rich, but they’re the embodiment of the kind of attainable success and fulfilment anyone with talent can reach in America if he or she works hard enough—at least in theory. And yet, they’re both twisted with unfulfilled desire.
The film begins with Alice admitting her lust for other men, a recurring taunt that increasingly haunts Bill despite his initial refusal to believe anything could be wrong in their lives. Bill has yearnings of his own, even if he doesn’t quite understand them. A chance encounter with an old classmate earns him the password to a party right out of a QAnon fever dream, with elites in gilded masks reveling in orgiastic ritual and the exploitation of young women and girls. He’s caught as an imposter and told to stay away or pay with his life. But the desire to know the truth of the conspiracy pulls him back and sets him on an obsessive odyssey of decadence, depravity, and murder—one that almost destroys him in the process.
Released in 1999, the film seems prescient in a way, as these paranoid visions now permeate our mainstream political discourse. Yet rather than provide a satisfying resolution, Kubrick shows Bill and Alice return to their regular lives, letting the mystery go unsolved and agreeing to work on their marriage. Was there ever really a secret cabal, or is this just a dreamlike obsession (the film was based on a novella titled Dream Story)—the kind that grabs us out of our dull, modern lives when we can no longer repress our hedonistic desires?
The ambiguity of Eyes Wide Shut has led to many interpretations over the decades. Some view it quite literally, as a coded message about the existence of elite cabals. Others view it more subversively, a subtle critique of the upper-middle striver class living out their fantasies of what real elite power is like. And while it’s hard to peg an agenda on a man as complex as Kubrick, he generally dealt with lefty-oriented social concerns, and the film seems to be mostly a critique of bourgeois sensibility. The narrow bourgeois soul, even when met with the extraordinary and inexplicable, simply cannot grapple with it for long and must eventually return to its sheltered little life or face total self-destruction. Or so Kubrick seemed to be saying.
In casting Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who were perhaps the most famous Hollywood couple at the time, Kubrick chose the quintessential sex symbols of the ‘90s—not your average affluent suburbanites. And if the pursuit of elite cabals nearly destroyed them, just think of what it’ll do to the average online poster living in his mom’s basement?
By now, you’re probably scoffing: “How could you be so blasé about real-life corruption that, if true, would unravel the biggest scandal in American history and completely discredit everything we thought we knew about a political movement we believe wholeheartedly in?”
To this I say: What other choice is there?
Kubrick’s right: Normal people, even those on the upper echelons of normal, are simply not equipped to imagine the true heights of elite power and ritual. Our lives are too boring, our experiences too narrow, and we truly are too unexceptional. We cannot inhabit the life of a Habsburg, or Rothschild, or Rockefeller any more than we can the life of an African tribesman. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Yet we’re bored because we’re told to be—because the driving pulse of American culture for the last 75 years says there’s something deeply wrong with anyone who doesn’t rebel against the dull conformity of bourgeois life.
Ironically, Eyes Wide Shut becomes an example of the very phenomenon against which it offers a critique. Kubrick might be one of the most feted directors in history, an auteur, a stylistic genius—but he’s still a middle-class man from the Bronx. Even taken as satire, his conception of elite cabals boils down to the fantastical caricatures he critiques through his characters. There is no esoteric insight beyond the thrill of sheer imagination.
So, like Bill, like Kubrick even, we imagine the worst with the Epstein case, putting ourselves and our petty little concerns at the center of elite corruption—as if they granularly care about us one way or the other. In doing so we give them the power to control everything and everyone when they prove time and again that their social calculations are obscenely wrong. Allowing our imaginations to run wild, we only damage ourselves, ceding to them a power over us in spirit they could only dream of having over us in body and mind.
The truth is, there’s probably a lot we’ll never know about Jeffrey Epstein and his “clients,” whoever they are, and there’s very little we can do to understand them, let alone alter the course of events. Ultimately, the truth is certainly far less shocking than our imaginations would have us believe. No matter what, the world will keep spinning, our lives will go on, and we can keep racking up empirical political victories they would prefer we didn’t have—unless we cave to a self-defeating fantasy and needlessly throw it all away.