A Sneaky Piece of Semiosis in Eyes Wide Shut : r/StanleyKubrick
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r/StanleyKubrick•4 days ago
Posted by 33DOEyesWideShut
A Sneaky Piece of Semiosis in Eyes Wide Shut
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Wendy, bat in hand, approaches the typewriter. Slowly the danger of her predicament dawns on her as she shakily throws off pages, one by one; slowly at first, gaining speed as her terror rises -- each page bearing nought but repetitions of a maddening, meaningless phrase
ISOLATED SEMIOTIC NODE ISOLATED SEMIOTIC NODE ISOLATED SEMIOTIC NODE ISOLATED SEMIOTIC NODE ISOLATED SEMIOTIC NODE
Hahaha. Is there maybe a better phrase for what I'm trying to get at? Maybe just "isolated node"?
I also think Kandinsky's painting featuring at the opening of this scene (and opening of the elevator door) is a comment on how the Harfords life is structured: this sequence repeatedly cuts between Bill's formal professional life, his work as a doctor in a GP clinic, and Alice's domestic work, raising and looking after their daughter - each realm, the active public-social, the passive domestic-private, "counterweighting" each other in an ostensibly complementary way. At least, until later that night and the argument.
I think there is a case for something like this. You'll notice in Alice's confession that night, she alludes to the naval officer taking the elevator upstairs.
As far as Kubrick's prior symbolic use of elevators, the blood flooding out of the elevator in The Shining can be seen as a "return of the sins of the past"-- or, the counterbalancing opposite and equal reaction to the old horrors of the hotel/suppression of past traumas, etc.
The way I interpret this movie is that it's told by Bill's wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman).
The movie is the story that Bill tells his wife after he comes home and finds the mask in their bed. That's the last scene in the story. The short part after that is what happens after he comes "clean" with is wife.
So there are two layers between what actually happened and what we get to see. First Bill filters the events through his story to make him look good, and then Alice filters it again before we are told what Bill told her.
If you watch the movie from this perspective, a lot of things make more sense. For example the sex scene. It doesn't look like people having sex at all, but rather how someone would describe a sex party in a grotesque way.
Also, Bill is way to naive for a man of his status, but he surely would have wanted to describe himself like that in his story to his wife.
I've already detailed this elsewhere as part of a longer chain of signifiers, but I may have contextualised it too much for some to appreciate it as an isolated semiotic node. Here, we can see the placement of Wassily Kandinsky's "Counterweights" as an immediately meaningful piece of subliminal signage.
For the functional components of this timely little Easter egg, here is a shitty diagram.
By proximal visual association, the viewer as subject is primed via their own conceptual familiarity to identify a latently implanted relationship between two elements. In Kubrickian fashion, the select audience is given a rewarding sense of interiority: the film reflexively shifts the formal and semantic "activity" into the mind of the viewer, effectively blurring the line between the perceiver and the perceived, subject and object, audience and film. By having our own sense of independent thought adjoined to the film's cognitive map, the semantic network of which resembles a synaptic web of consciousness in its own right, we are psychologically absorbed as though into some eternal, Ātman-esque brain which knows no obvious distinction between itself and its environment.
The sense of a seamless psychological continuum, ambiguously comprised of subject and object, is continually reiterated by the film's ubiquitous and pointed attempts to establish (or rather, anti-establish) an ambiguous diegetic frame. See: The Metafictional Genius of Eyes Wide Shut.
The psychological unity of audience and film in EWS can be readily incorporated into concepts proposed by Professor of Philosophy Alessandro Giovannelli, who utilizes the relevant term "experiential identification" in his theory regarding the film. See: Giovannelli's Cognitive Value and Imaginative Identification: The Case of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, or Nerdwriter's great video which cites it, Eyes Wide Shut: The Game.
Perhaps Philip Kuberski summed up this aspect most efficiently in his preface to Kubrick's Total Cinema, where he wrote:
"Kubrick’s filmsthink*. [...] But by "thinking," I do not mean that his films present "arguments" or "philosophies." Rather, they work as visual, verbal, musical, and intellectual provocations to the mind and emotions."*
Well, all this is probably far too much waxing non-poetic for an elevator. Hopefully, it isn't too mundane a window into the reflexive syntax of the movie!
stigest Jack Torrance •3 days ago
Ahh you’re triggering my traumatic flashbacks of reading, rereading, and probably failing to understand Barthes’ semiotic theory
Yes, but why did he chose that colour of tie?
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