Lolita and the Hellfire Club

I have long suspected that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, was blowing the whistle on some kind of Hellfire Club going on among the prominent and wealthy.

Revelations since about Jeffrey Epstein and P Diddy and Hillary Clinton’s Russia hoax seem to confirm this. There really has been some sort of immoral cabal at the top running much of the society. And this explains many things, like large corporations seeming to act against their own self-interest, politicians going against the popular will and fearing free speech, and, not least, Trump Derangement Syndrome.

But for how long has this been going on? Is it new, or are we only hearing about it now?

 Kubrick’s far earlier film, Lolita, 1962, might also have been a blow on the whistle. It deals with ephebophilia, which seems the dominant obsession of the Epstein cult. That is, having sex with young, but post-pubescent, women. An obvious attraction for the rich and powerful: all societies and cultures see youth and innocence as highly desirable in women. So it is reasonable to foresee this as an ideal commodity for a corrupt blackmail cult.

Kubrick filmed Lolita as his first independent production, after breaking a multi-film contract with Kirk Douglas. The two had a bitter falling out.

In the opening scene of Lolita, James Mason asks Peter Sellers, “Are you Quilty?” And Sellers responds, “I am Spartacus. Why, have you come to free the slaves, or something?”

The film is relatively sympathetic towards Mason as Humbert for his obsession with underage Lolita. It is a natural enough desire. But Quilty is the real villain. As the movie’s plot unfolds, he kidnaps the underage Lolita and takes her to a “dude ranch” full of his “weird friends.”

It sounds so much like the Epstein arrangement.

Spartacus, in Kubrick’s previous film, was played by Kirk Douglas. By saying “I am Spartacus,” Quilty/Sellers is identifying himself with Douglas. And implying Douglas in some sense kept slaves, as Quilty does. Perhaps young female slaves, as Quilty does.

In 2021, soon following his death, Douglas was accused by the family of Natalie Wood of having brutally raped her when she was a child star of sixteen. She and her family had kept silence all these years due to fear of his power and influence.

There are suspicions around another starlet, Jean Spangler. Not underage; but she disappeared. Her purse was found, with signs of a struggle, containing an unfinished note that read “Kirk: Can’t wait any longer, Going to see Dr. Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away,” She was three months pregnant. Like the pianist in Eyes Wide Shut, there has been no sign of her since.

Whatever his experiences with Douglas, as soon as he was able to get out of that contract, Kubrick decamped to England for the rest of his life, a very strange move in terms of career. Although Lolita was set in the US, Kubrick awkwardly filmed it in England, using what American or Canadian actors resident in the UK to get the accents right. As he did for all the rest of his films. Surely a striking eccentricity. As if there was something in Hollywood he feared or needed to escape.

Kubrick’s wife has said he had wanted to make Eyes Wide Shut for years, but felt he was not ready to yet. Not ready? What held him up? It was not an expensive story to film in terms of special effects, like some of the other films he made before it. It did not require great historical research, like some of the other films he made before it. And as soon as he did make it, he suddenly died. A heart attack in his sleep, age 70, six days after the film’s final cut.

Did they get to him?

Did he let go and die knowing he had finally said what needed to be said?

Did he die of the stress of possible reactions from powerful quarters?

I hope one day we know.

Is the Dam Cracking?

 

Several substantial Hollywood names have just come out against aspects of the woke agenda: Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Richard Dreyfus. They might have only publicly objected to this or that point; but that does not matter. With wokeism, you are either all in, and question nothing, or you are out, and the enemy. Ask Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, or Tulsi Gabbard.

This begins to look as though the dam might be bursting. A huge proportion of people, in Hollywood and in the wider society, have been going along not out of any conviction, but either just to get along or to avoid having their career destroyed. Artists—and these people are, in the end, artists—are rarely really ideological. They don’t care about politics, and will generally just accept and roll with what those around them say. They are highly empathetic. But they are also free spirits; they will entertain any idea, however mad, but will soon hate being restricted to it. The chameleon poet. So they could embrace the woke assertions at first, and superficially, but over time, will feel desperately constrained by them. The strengthening of the woke dam, I suggest, is why the arts have been so moribund over the past few years and decades. Hollywood more than anywhere.

Pressure has been building up behind that dam. Now, if enough artists too big to be destroyed start speaking out, it will be like the tension being released in a deluge. The woke will suddenly go from being seemingly all-powerful to being common objects of ridicule. I think this is happening now to Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light.

More evidence that the arts may be about to flip: at a recent meeting of the League of Canadian Poets, I was encouraged to hear that they were having continuing trouble finding members for their inevitable Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee—the woke police. The chair of the Feminist Caucus declared her suspicion that one current member of that DEI committee was a mole. The Feminist Caucus is feeling vulnerable. A recent online reading provoked a high level of negative comments—it got ratioed, it seems,  in YouTube jargon. So the next time they disabled comments; and found that attendance dropped by half. In other words, half their audience seems to have been coming to jeer. 

And, while the Feminist Caucus motors on, the committee for Queer Poets is moribund--not enough members any longer to hold a meeting. This despite the fact that there are a lot of homosexual and lesbian poets. The Aboriginal Poets continue, but the chair looks less aboriginal than I do—blonde, very pale of skin, with an Anglo name. By contrast, new committees for Parenting Poets and Poets of Faith have recently formed, and are apparently growing fast.

I am hopeful that things are happening, or are about to happen, in the culture.

A Very Public Suicide

 

Like the media and big tech, Hollywood seems intent on committing suicide. Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is reputedly opening to disastrously small audiences; soon after Seth Rogan’s TV series Santa Inc. crashed and burned. Following the Star Wars franchise.

Any reasonable person should have seen this coming. Yet Hollywood is shovelling hundreds of millions of dollars into these projects.

West Side Story apparently features a fair bit of dialogue in Spanish; yet Spielberg refused to allow subtitles. As a result, he intentionally restricted his audience to those who are bilingual in English and Spanish.

He also insisted on casting, as Latinos only actors who were actually Latino. This reduced his talent pool, the film’s star power, and it is a measure rarely taken for other ethnic groups. Brad Pitt, Leonardo Di Caprio, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, for example, have all played Irish leads. The point of being an actor is that you act; you pretend to be somebody else. Of course, a Swede would have trouble being convincing as a Zulu, or an African as Anne Boleyn (ahem), but Latinos are a racially mixed group who do not look different, on average, from Southern Europeans generally.

As for Santa Inc., who could have thought that an animation criticizing the world’s most popular holiday would pull in enthusiastic family audiences at Christmastime? Do adults want to watch a Christmas animation without their kids? Who exactly is the intended audience? Did anyone think of the intended audience?

Similarly, space opera, the Star Wars genre, is most appealing to younger males. As is the concept of Ghostbusters. A great idea, then, to suffuse it with female leads and feminist messages?

The traditional news media are similarly self-immolating by violating all the standards of journalism in order to push a political agenda. And the high-tech oligarchs, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and Google, seem to be forcing customers to competing platforms with censorship of political opinions they disagree with.

What can explain this? Why are hitherto competent and successful businessmen throwing money away like this?

One possible theory is that they are terminally deluded by the postmodern fantasy that one can create one’s own reality. A lot of businessmen buy into the Power of Positive Thinking idea; this is just a few steps further.

Another possibility is that they see their power to influence, such as it is, slipping away, and they are reacting hysterically. Those who covet money are also liable to be people who covet power.

But the clearest element of it all is what looks like deliberate contempt for the possible audience; a contempt for the general public. A contempt so powerful that it cannot be restrained even by obvious self-interest.

Tuning the Fiddle While Hollywood Burns

New evidence comes daily now that we are undergoing a paradigm shift.

Sinn Fein has taken the first round of the Irish elections.

At first glance, this looks like a movement ideologically opposite to Boris Johnson’s win in Britain, or Trump’s in the US. But in Ireland, Sinn Fein was the available vehicle to register opposition to the establishment.

And not just establishment Dublin. Sinn Fein does share with Brexit and Trump a nationalistic emphasis. The name “Sinn Fein” translates “Ourselves Alone.” It looks like a vote against Brussels too. Sinn Fein means closer ties to Northern Ireland—outside the UE.

And yet the people in social power seem oblivious, still holding their bejeweled Versailles promenades. Birds of Prey, apparently, is bombing at the box, after being almost universally praised by the critics. Cats bombed. Doolittle, another big Hollywood FX extravaganza, just bombed. Audiences are no longer impressed. They are no longer drinking the soma. Few go out to theatres any more; a fact for the moment masked by large new audiences in China. There is more cash transacted in video gaming, or internet-streamed TV series, or YouTube.

Yet, as if oblivious, the Oscars ceremony was a Jacuzzi soak in political correctness. Joaqin Phoenix used his acceptance speech to protest against the human enslavement of cows.

And nobody was watching.

Berating your audience is not likely to bring them back. Scolding them for drinking milk, or for clinging to their guns and religion, or as “racists,” or “deplorables,” or “dog-faced pony soldiers.”

Or pretending to the moral high ground over the corpse of Jeffrey Epstein.

The very tone-deafness of the crusty uppers whispers of desperation. Expecting to be obeyed, they are getting agitated at the rabble’s growing refusal to curtsey nicely, and so making more elaborate, even outrageous demands.

Forcing the issue.

Fatty Weinstein

Roscoe Arbuckle

I have not been following the Harvey Weinstein scandal. I try to make a point of avoiding Hollywood gossip. It is the sin of calumny. And usually cruel and unfair to the celebrities involved, who have a right to their private lives, which right is consistently violated in modern America. Nevertheless, it has been hard to miss headlines saying 35 women have now made accusations of sexual impropriety against Weinstein.

Assuming it is all true, and even if it is not, but is not disproven, might this not have a serious effect on the Hollywood culture? Especially since it conforms to a longstanding popular suspicion about “show people”? A prejudice that stretches back at least to the Middle Ages?

Since the 1960s, Hollywood movies generally have been wildly immoral in any conventional sexual terms. Lots of sex scenes. A larger message, I think, that it is simply right and proper to drop your drawers and satisfy your urges at will. Hey, doesn’t everyone? I cannot speak authoritatively on this, because for the past sixteen years or so, I have been raising kids, and my movie-going has been pretty much limited to films with family ratings. But I have to say I did not feel I was missing anything. Hollywood lost me in the 60s. I think it was 1970, and M*A*S*H that did it. It was the ugly, unsympathetic portrayal of Major Frank Burns by Robert Duvall, as a religious nut, while “Hawkeye,” a callous womanizer, was the hero we were all supposed to identify with. Then and since then, any thought of sexual morality seems to have been treated by Hollywood with contempt. 

And that was a long time ago.

When I was single, I only went to foreign, indie, and art house films. Most of which, yeah, were awful, but if there were going to be any gems, they were going to be here.

There have been indications for years that the public is fed up with this. Note, for example, the unexpected success of The Passion of the Christ. Note the sagging movie attendance over the past year, that was already news when the Weinstein thing broke.

This bubble may be bursting before out eyes. Now people will now see a sex scene on screen, and think “Ick! I wonder who she had to perform some sex act with to get this role? And I wonder what sex act it was?” And when they look at the male partner, they will see I nthe back of their minds a corpulant, grizzled Harvey Weinstein in the nude.

It kind of tarnishes the tinsel. It makes the willing suspension of disbelief seem tawdry and itself a disgusting act.

It may no longer be possible, or profitable, for Hollywood to be so casual about sex in film.

This, after all, has happened before. Fatty Arbuckle. The specific charges were not true, Arbuckle was acquitted in a court of law, but the mental image of Fatty Arbuckle crushing some starlet with his naked bulk was too powerful in the public mind. That scandal ushered in the prudish Hays Code.

And this presents a similar image.

I, for one, certainly do not lament this. Regardless of any moral issues, and there certainly are moral issues, putting an explicit sex scene, or blood and gore, in a film is just cheap thrills. Far better if the scriptwriters and directors have to invest in putting together a better story.

This is also why I believe that writing for children is almost always the best writing. You cannot fake it. The story and the characters have to be worth it on their own.