I’ll keep processing for a while, and as always reserve the rights both to contradict myself and to be stupid at length.
Few thoughts for now: many of the robed figures at the “mass” were likely women, likely wives. They participated by watching. The whole thing had little to do with sex, and everything to do with social solidarity.
The funny thing about psychology is that when you choose to transgress some line in your self, in your soul, you are driven almost inexorably to rationalize it, to justify it.
Doris Lessing talks in one of her books about the process of breaking a woman to become a prostitute. The idea is simple: persistently, over a period of time, take her over a line she has drawn, then pull her back. Force her to go farther than she wanted or intended, then reintegrate her. Then do it again.
Over time, the boundaries and lines disappear, and she decides it doesn’t matter. This is how children are “seasoned”–I believe the term is–for pedophiles. Many are apparently very meticulous about it.
This raises the interesting question: is participation in these rituals voluntary? Can you be given an invitation and refuse? Certainly even if one rejects the idea that violence was an ordinary part of the process–that Mandy did in fact overdose, and that the mask was actually found and placed on the pillow by Alice, as apparently was explicitly the case in the book upon which this movie was based–would there not still be cultural and social and political and business sanctions?
So, in important ways, it seems to me these people were also “. . . just prisoners here, of our own device”, as the relevant song Hotel California puts it.
Power constricts, too. It is unfree.
The other point I wanted to make is that the only place in the movie where I felt real tenderness was with the prostitute, Domino. In the midst of all this sex, where was there solace, genuine commitment, genuine peace? Nicole Kidman wants to fuck at the end, but as I think about it, it almost feels like a way for her to express anger at Tom Cruise while simultaneously pulling in as far as she is willing to. She feels gratitude they pulled back from the precipice, but the word “forever” doesn’t feel right. It looks like it is giving her a headache.
The phrase “loveless fascination”, from a song by the Church I have always liked, comes to mind.
What is the purpose of life, besides rutting, besides what we might call “goatism”? In what way does Kubrick’s vision grant new hope, new dispensation? As critics at the time apparently objected to, his sex is not even very sexual, it is not even animalian. It is perfunctory, ritualized, as one assumes the sex between Kidman and Cruise will be when they get home.
It is worth keeping in mind Kubrick was an atheist. He died five days after the completed film was delivered. Some have seen in this conspiracy, but my final conclusions are both that that scene was nothing to kill anyone over; and even if it were, the time was before the film was done, not after.
No, I think he watched his completed movie several times over, watched his completed vision, looked at life as he saw it, realized that his creative work was done, and his life energy just left him.
For a vision of a more spiritual sexuality, watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev”, where such sexuality is attacked by a Christianity obsessed with pain, suffering, and self denial, likely all in direct contradictions to Christ’s actual teaching. There is a scene in there with a naked woman swimming strongly across a river crossing paths with a boat filled with monks that is among my favorite visuals in any movie. She is unstoppable and innocent.