Decoder Ring | Was "Eyes Wide Shut" a Warning?

Summary

Decoder Ring | Was "Eyes Wide Shut" a Warning?
Slate Podcasts | March 11, 2026
Host: Willa Paskin | Guest: Lane Brown

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Episode Overview

This episode investigates the resurgence of conspiracy theories surrounding Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). After being largely dismissed or misunderstood at its release, the film gained a second life in internet culture, particularly after the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, with some claiming it was a coded warning about elite sex trafficking rings. Feature writer Lane Brown (New York Magazine) retraces the origins of the theory, examines Kubrick's methods, and ultimately debunks the conspiratorial claims by speaking directly to people involved in the making of the film.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Eyes Wide Shut: Misunderstood on Release

• Expectations versus Reality

  • Anticipated as a sexually explicit, sensational film due to rumors and tabloid coverage; the trailer itself was cut by Kubrick and leaned heavily into this aspect (16:43).
  • Ultimately delivered something different: “an erotic thriller that’s not especially erotic or even thrilling. It’s a slow, almost meditative movie... not so much about sex as about marriage and masculinity.” (Willa, 04:47)

• Kubrick’s Working Methods and Perfectionism

  • Kubrick obsessed over source material (Traumnovelle, 1926), took over 30 years to make the film (11:07), and the shoot became “the longest continuous film shoot in history” (Lane, 13:30), with 400 days of filming and another 400 of editing.
  • Kubrick was “famous for being exacting in a way that sometimes crossed the line into being unreasonable.” (Lane, 10:39)

• After Kubrick’s Death

  • Kubrick died just days after submitting his cut (14:52), leading to speculation about the film’s completion and intent.
  • Changes to the orgy scene were required to achieve an R rating, resulting in digital edits to obscure nudity rather than cutting footage.

    “They actually had to add these CGI digital figures in front of the... bits that would have got this movie an NC-17 rating.” (Lane, 16:07)

2. The Re-Emergence of Eyes Wide Shut Amid Epstein and Internet Conspiracies

• Rise of Elite Sex Cult Theories

  • As the Epstein case broke and QAnon and other conspiracy communities grew in the 2010s, Eyes Wide Shut was retroactively viewed as prophetic or revelatory (24:47; 25:18).

  • Social media forums, especially Reddit and YouTube, fueled theories that Kubrick was warning the public about real sex trafficking rings among the elite.

    “My feed started coughing up video after video, Reddit post after Reddit post, all espousing this crackpot theory about how the movie had been made by Stanley Kubrick explicitly to warn the world...” (Lane, 06:36)

  • Theories include:

    • The sex cult depicted is a real secret society (Freemasons, Illuminati, etc.)
    • Visual clues supposedly referencing child trafficking, such as the toy store scene at the end (30:25).
    • The claim that Kubrick was murdered to prevent revelations and that the film was censored afterward (32:30).

• Conspiracist Logic and Viral Anecdotes

  • The theory’s foundation: absence of evidence is itself proof of a cover-up.

    “Sure, the movie may contain only scant concrete evidence of a conspiracy, but that’s because of the conspiracy.” (Willa, 34:02)

  • A viral story from the Joe Rogan Experience populates the theory further, with Roger Avary recounting unsubstantiated tales of Kubrick screaming at executives and being found dead days later (34:25; 46:05).

3. Investigating and Systematically Debunking the Theories

• Lane Brown’s Reporting Process

  • Lane spoke with key members of the cast and crew:

    • Editor, producer/brother-in-law, Kubrick’s assistant, the co-writer Frederick Raphael, and the now-adult actress who played the daughter Helena.
    • All denied any secret knowledge, cover-ups, or editing that removed “elite” clues from the film (42:52–45:22).
    • The actress who played Helena:

      "Stanley never told me to go stand near these two creepy bald men... that I was being kidnapped by them.” (Lane, 45:13)

  • Documents logistical and historical impossibilities in the theory:

    • Kubrick began working on the project decades before the Epstein case.
    • The plot is a faithful adaptation of a 1926 novella, Traumnovelle, predating both Epstein and modern sex trafficking fears (41:21).
    • There’s no evidence of any cut “revelatory” 23 minutes; digital edits were open and done for MPAA compliance, not to suppress content.

  • On the Joe Rogan rumor:

    • Timeline and attendance of screenings were carefully reconstructed. Kubrick was not present at U.S. or U.K. corporate screenings and died alone, ill at home, without altercation or drama (46:13; 47:16).

• Why These Theories Persist

  • The urge to find meaning and patterns in complex art, coupled with real instances of powerful men abusing their status (as with Epstein), fuels these theories.
  • Kubrick’s reputation for detail invites “treasure map” thinking—similar to conspiracies around The Shining (37:57–40:17).

    “The reason we are still watching these movies... is because they're filled with ideas. Not all of them are pointing in the same direction...” (Lane, 40:45)

• What’s Lost and Gained by the Conspiracy

  • Conspiracists collapse the film’s ambiguity and richness into a single, all-consuming “message,” diminishing its artistic legacy (48:46–50:20).

    “Believing even something as disturbing as the conspiracy about Eyes Wide Shut is more comforting than the reality, which is that so many people knew and said nothing.” (Willa, 50:20)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• "Eyes Wide Shut is an erotic thriller that’s not especially erotic or even thrilling." – Willa Paskin (04:47)
• “He shot 127 takes of the scene where Jack Nicholson barges into the bathroom in The Shining... Here's Johnny.” – Lane Brown (10:39)
• "The world was sort of promised basically pornography. And it ends up being this cold, inert meditation on marriage with this weird abstract masked cult..." – Lane Brown (20:59)
• “[The theory is] that Stanley Kubrick was murdered when, I guess, the elite sex traffickers found out what he’d done. I am not just going to dismiss the weird timing of Kubrick's death.” – Lane Brown (06:36)
• “In 2019, after Epstein dies, the movie Eyes Wide Shut suddenly gets a brand new reputation. People think, wait a second, this movie was actually sort of predictive of a lot of things that really wouldn't come into view until 20 something years later.” – Lane Brown (26:43)
• “I talked to a lot of people, and it did not seem like they had coordinated their stories and were sort of in on some secret conspiracy. They all had, you know, slightly different memories... But the one thing they all agreed on was that Kubrick was not, you know, warning the world explicitly about any real life sex cult.” – Lane Brown (43:09)
• "He was 70 years old and looked about 120. He was very stressed, and producing that movie was enough to kill him. Nobody needed to hire anyone to do it." – Frederick Raphael, relayed by Lane Brown (47:46)
• “A lot of this is kind of unnecessary. It’s like you can really sort of give Kubrick credit for basically anticipating something that... the rest of us didn’t know existed until years later. You don’t really need to fall down the conspiracy hole.” – Lane Brown (50:00)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Start of content: 03:28
• Kubrick’s process, secrecy, and death: 09:00 – 15:25
• Release and misreading of Eyes Wide Shut: 16:43 – 22:05
• Conspiracy theory emergence post-Epstein: 24:10 – 34:02
• Debunking the conspiracy, Lane's investigation: 35:31 – 47:46
• Reflections on art interpretation and conspiracy thinking: 48:46 – 50:20

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Memorable Moments

• The examination of how Eyes Wide Shut’s final scene (Helena in the toy store) became the linchpin of a vast internet theory—despite being an accidental background detail (30:25; 45:13).
• The “Joe Rogan Experience” anecdote, and how easily second-hand, unverifiable stories light up the online imagination (34:25; 46:05).
• Lane’s methodical process of tracking down the actual production story—contrasting the messy reality with the “clean” logic of the conspiracy.

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Episode Tone and Conclusion

There's a combination of wry humor, patience, and gravitas throughout the discussion. Host Willa Paskin and Lane Brown treat both Kubrick’s artistry and the sensitivities behind abuse scandals with seriousness, but address the feverish corners of internet theory with measured skepticism.

The conclusion: Eyes Wide Shut did anticipate certain real-world horrors—but not through any suppressed exposé or secret-message mission. Instead, its layered and ambiguous nature enables people to read into it what they wish—a testament to both Kubrick’s complexity and society’s need for answers, even in the places least likely to contain them.

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For more:
Read Lane Brown’s article in New York Magazine (Dec 2025): “The Eyes Wide Shut Conspiracy.”
Have a cultural mystery? Email [e-mail].

Transcript

[Lane Brown]

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[Willa Paskin]

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[Willa Paskin]

Hi, it's Willa. Before we get to today's episode, I wanted to let you know that we've just released the next installment of the new feature we're calling Decoder Rings Back. On Decoder rings back, I call up a listener and try my best to satisfactorily answer a question they've shared with us. This week, I spoke with our listener, Abner Gordon about a spice mix that has become ubiquitous.

[Lane Brown]

I feel like in my lifetime, there has been a meteoric rise in. In the desire for want of purchasing of everything. Bagel seasoning. I see it everywhere. It's at Walmart, it's at Target, it's at Costco, it's at Whole Food. Everywhere you could possibly buy. Food has everything. Bagel seasoning. And I'm just curious how we got here because, like, it's not found in nature.

[Willa Paskin]

This episode of Decoder Rings Back is out right now, but it's only available for Decoder Ring plus members. If you're not a plus member yet, you can become one by going to the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or or Spotify or visiting Slate.com decoder ring becoming a member instrumentally supports the work that we do. You also get to listen to our show and all of Slate Podcasts without any ads. And you'll get to hear if we happen to ring you back for a future episode. So please sign up now. On with the show. Before we begin, this episode contains adult language and content. In the summer of 1999, Lane Brown was a budding film buff eager to see one movie in particular.

[Lane Brown]

I must have been 16 or 17 years old. I had a subscription to Premiere magazine and I understood that this movie was going to be a very big deal.

[Willa Paskin]

The movie was called Eyes Wide Shut.

[Lane Brown]

I have seen one or two things in my life, but never, never anything like this.

[Willa Paskin]

Eyes Wide Shut was the last completed film of the director Stanley Kubrick, one of the titans of 20th century cinema.

[Lane Brown]

And so I could really tell my parents, oh, this very important film is coming to our local theater and I have to see it as a cinephile.

[Willa Paskin]

But teenage Lane had another, less elevated interest in the movie. It was rumored to be full of sex.

[Lane Brown]

You know, there are all these news articles about how dirty it was.

[Willa Paskin]

Basically, it starred the then married celebrity couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and was said to have an extensive orgy scene so graphic the movie had almost been raided.

[Lane Brown]

NC17 I was excited about the filmmaking,

[Willa Paskin]

of course, of course, of course.

[Lane Brown]

But this is like, you know, the pre pornhub world. And so we took what we could get back then.

[Willa Paskin]

And then Lane, full of horny expectations, actually saw the movie.

[Lane Brown]

I thought, okay, this is not at all what I was expecting. This is much stranger, way less dirty than I kind of anticipated.

[Willa Paskin]

Eyes Wide Shut is an erotic thriller that's not especially erotic or even thrilling. It's a slow, almost meditative movie in which Tom Cruise mostly mopes around New York City. It does have that much hyped orgy with nudity and simulated sex acts organized in the film by a cabal of rich and powerful men who prey on young women. But it's removed, cold, creepy, and ultimately the film is not so much about sex as about marriage and masculinity.

[Lane Brown]

I do remember seeing it and my first reaction Wasn't like, I'm dismissing this or whatever. I felt like, clearly this movie tried to tell me something that I was not ready for. And so I can't wait to go see it again. And I think I did see it again in the theater.

[Willa Paskin]

Lane had been expecting a skin flick, but he'd actually gotten a piece of cinema. It's one he's returned to many times

[Lane Brown]

as an adult, more times than I think I would care to admit.

[Willa Paskin]

I love it, but Lane's in rare company. When it was released, Eyes Wide Shut got a lot of critical attention and made some money. But then it languished for years. It was a movie dear to Lane's heart and not that many other people's. And then in the late 2000 and tens, another story about a cabal of rich and powerful men who prey on young women came to widespread public attention. Only this was happening in the real world.

[Lane Brown]

A wealthy businessman with ties to two US Presidents may appear in court today

[Willa Paskin]

to face federal charges linked to alleged sex trafficking. As this news story stayed squarely in the headlines, Lane began to notice it having a surprising impact on Eyes Wide Shut. People were suddenly seeing a connection between the two.

[Lane Brown]

My feed started coughing up video after video, Reddit post after Reddit post, all espousing this sort of, like, crackpot theory about how the movie had been made by Stanley Kubrick explicitly to warn the world about real life elite sex trafficking. Eyes Wide Shut is real. Stanley Kubrick's final film might not have been fiction, but but instead a warning. And that Stanley Kubrick was murdered When, I guess the elite sex traffickers found out what he'd done. I am not just going to dismiss the weird timing of Kubrick's death. Was Kubrick's death part of a cover up?

[Willa Paskin]

In the three decades since Lane had first encountered this film, in the half a dozen times he'd watched it, nothing like this had ever occurred to him. Had he missed something? This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. In the late 2000 and tens, as news stories about a real life conspiracy to abuse women and girls became inescapable, a theory about Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut began to take off on the Internet. It involves Hollywood executives, secret societies, hidden messages, and murder. And when Lane Brown, a features writer at New York Magazine, learned about it, he became curious. Could any of it be true? And if it wasn't true, could he prove it? As Lane investigated, he learned a lot about one of his favorite films. But he also learned how far people will go in the face of terrible truths to make things make sense, even if they end up making no sense themselves in the process. So today on Decoder Ring, what happens when fact is even crazier than fiction? Stanley Kubrick is the kind of director movie lovers adore. An auteur with a deep catalog of distinctive films brimming with big ideas and precise details.

[Lane Brown]

A lot of people think he was the greatest filmmaker of all time. But even for people who wouldn't go that far, he's probably. Probably the best, clearest example of what a movie director is supposed to be. Somebody with a huge, ambitious vision that is relentless about translating that vision into everything you see on a screen.

[Willa Paskin]

Kubrick directed 13 films, including classics like 2001 A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove.

[Lane Brown]

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room.

[Willa Paskin]

He also directed A Clockwork Orange, Lolita, Barry Lyndon and Full Metal Jacket.

[Lane Brown]

From now on, you will speak only when spoken to and the first and last words out of your filthy sewers will be, sir. Do you maggots understand that

[Willa Paskin]

these movies remain essential, challenging, debated alive decades after they were released? In them, Kubra created images that are still instantly recognizable. Think of The Monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Or the twin girls in light blue dresses staring down a hotel hallway in the Shining.

[Lane Brown]

Come play with us.

[Willa Paskin]

Kubrick achieved these powerful, lasting images through an obsessive attention to detail.

[Lane Brown]

He cared about everything. The lighting, the furniture, every line, every prop.

[Willa Paskin]

His perfectionism was the stuff of legend. He reportedly futzed for days with the shape and shininess of the table in Dr. Strangelove, the opacity of the milk in A Clockwork Orange. He shot the 18th century epic Barry Lyndon using exclusively natural light and candlelight. He also placed extraordinarily high demands on his cast and crew.

[Lane Brown]

He was famous for being exacting in a way that sometimes crossed the line into being unreasonable. He shot 127 takes of the scene where Jack Nicholson barges into the bathroom in the Shining, like chops the door open with an axe. Here's Johnny.

[Willa Paskin]

He brought all of this intensity and rigor to his final film, Eyes Wide Shut.

[Lane Brown]

This is a very long gestating project.

[Willa Paskin]

Kubrick had his eyes on the source material for almost 30 years before he actually made the movie.

[Lane Brown]

After he made 2001 in 1968, he's sort of on the hunt for his next film. And so he comes across this book, Traumnovelle, or Dream Story Traumnovelle, by the

[Willa Paskin]

Austrian modernist Arthur Schnitzler was Originally published in 1926. It's a Dark and dreamlike work about the nocturnal wanderings of a doctor in turn of the century Vienna.

[Lane Brown]

Kubrick reads it, shows it to a few people, and then kind of obsesses over it for decades, really. And he finally, in the mid-90s, he says, okay, this is going to be my next film.

[Willa Paskin]

Before anyone had seen a frame of the movie, the public was unusually interested in it. It had been more than a decade since Kubrick's last film and the word got out that his new one had to do with scene, sex, lots of sex. And some of the people having that sex would presumably be the film stars. The most famous married couple on the

[Lane Brown]

planet, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman met on the set of Days of Thunder. The racing bug bit them, and then

[Willa Paskin]

they fell in love. Get a wire.

[Lane Brown]

I'll call the police.

[Willa Paskin]

What?

[Lane Brown]

You heard me.

[Willa Paskin]

Okay, call the police.

[Lane Brown]

But I'm not leaving till you talk. I got nothing to say. Well, I do.

[Willa Paskin]

Kubrick and Kidman and Cruz and sex. That was basically all anybody knew about Eyes Wide Shut.

[Lane Brown]

For years, Kubrick was really secretive about what this thing was. I don't think people actually knew what it was based on. Nobody had any idea what to expect.

[Willa Paskin]

So the tabloids spun into a frenzy.

[Lane Brown]

There was this idea that they were actually going to be having sex in this movie. There were rumors that they didn't know how to have sex with each other because their whole marriage was a sham or something. And so they brought a sex instructor to come and, like, show them how to do it.

[Willa Paskin]

Adding to the sense of hot house intrigue around the film was that it would be made far from Hollywood. Kubrick was born in the Bronx, but he lived in England and hadn't been back to the US since the early 1970s.

[Lane Brown]

Kubrick was sort of a recluse and wouldn't get on a plane, really, only liked to work close to home.

[Willa Paskin]

So Tom and Nicole and the rest of the company were holed up at Pinewood Studios in London where Kubrick had built a fanatically detailed replica of New York City's Greenwich Village. And they were stuck there for an enormously long time. When cameras rolled In November of 1996, the shoot was supposed to be done in three months. Instead, it was more than a year. 400 days to be exact.

[Lane Brown]

This was the longest continuous film shoot, I believe, in history.

[Willa Paskin]

Cruise and Kidman and the film's other actors had to turn down and push back other projects as the shoot Stretched on and on. Taking all that time was Kubrick's perfectionism. He worked nonstop. I'd get faxes from him 3, 4 in the morning, sometimes I'd look at it.

[Lane Brown]

The next morning, he rewrote, rewrote, rewrote, rewrote.

[Willa Paskin]

He shot dozens of takes, sometimes more. For one scene, he had Tom Cruise walk through a door 95 times. And often he only knew what he wanted after he saw it. I mean, the thing about Stanley was he never explained his motives. He never explained why. He would get irritated if you. You asked him, so what does this mean? Or tell me the meaning of this scene. He hated to have to explain. With 95 takes of any given scene, it would take a long time to find the movie within all that footage. So after 400 days of filming, Kubrick spent another 400 days or so editing. Add all of this up, and after 30 years of development and over three years of active production, Stanley Kubrick finally had a complete version of the film. The cut was screened for Warner brothers in early March 1999. And then four days later, the director

[Lane Brown]

Stanley Kubrick, one of film's greatest yet most controversial figures, died today. He was 70.

[Willa Paskin]

On March 7, Kubrick suffered a fatal heart attack in his sleep.

[Lane Brown]

Stanley Kubrick's movies were usually profound, often masterpieces, and challenging, if not a little puzzling. At first. He left us one more movie just

[Willa Paskin]

finished due out this summer. But the summer was still a few months away. Despite having turned in a cut to the studio, it's likely that Kubrick, a famous tinkerer, was not finished with it.

[Lane Brown]

Almost everybody agrees that he probably would have fussed over the movie until it was actually released. He had a reputation for fussing with movies until the very last possible minute. And this wasn't quite the last possible minute.

[Willa Paskin]

No one could know exactly what he would have done. So in his absence, his collaborators tried to stick as closely as possible to the version he had turned in. But they had to make at least one big change.

[Lane Brown]

He had promised the studio that he was going to deliver an R rated movie.

[Willa Paskin]

But when the body that determined movie ratings, the mpaa, saw the film after Kubrick's death, they decided Eyes Wide Shut should be rated NC17. NC17 would have been a kiss of death for the box office.

[Lane Brown]

The MPA insisted. You've got to cut these, like, five frames or whatever of thrusting or I think it was pubic hair was supposedly a contentious issue with this. And so because his editors didn't want to actually, like, cut frames from the movie they were too afraid of that. They actually had to add these, like, CGI digital figures in front of the dirty bits that would have gotten this movie an NC17 rating.

[Willa Paskin]

The headlines about a scene too graphic to be shown uncensored, plus the years of rumors about Tom and Nicole all set people up to expect a certain kind of movie, including a teenaged Lane Brown.

[Lane Brown]

And then the marketing of the movie didn't really do it very many favors, because if you watch the original trailer for the movie, which was actually cut by Kubrick himself, it basically looks like it's going to be Basic Instinct or something. Baby did a bad, bad thing they

[Willa Paskin]

did a bad, bad thing Anticipation was high. And then In July of 1999, Eyes Wide Shut opened and revealed itself to be something else entirely. Eyes Wide Shut takes place over a couple of days in the lives of a well to do Manhattan doctor named Bill and his wife Alice. You've been trying to pick a fight

[Lane Brown]

with me and now you're trying to make me jealous.

[Willa Paskin]

But you're not the jealous type, are you?

[Lane Brown]

No, I'm not.

[Willa Paskin]

The action begins when Alice makes a confession to Bill she once considered cheating on him with a young naval officer.

[Lane Brown]

And I thought if he wanted me,

[Willa Paskin]

I was ready to give up everything.

[Lane Brown]

This sort of throws him into this total spiral and he freaks out. And he kind of wanders around Manhattan looking for her, but never quite having sex.

[Willa Paskin]

He gets propositioned by the daughter of one of his patients. He goes home with a sex worker, but nothing happens. And then finally comes the scene everybody had been talking about, the centerpiece of the movie.

[Lane Brown]

He winds up at a Long island mansion where there's an orgy being thrown by the sort of elite cult.

[Willa Paskin]

The orgy sequence lasts 18 minutes. The participants wear black robes and Venetian carnival masks and are presided over by a mysterious figure in a hooded red cloak. The orgy is not exactly a free for all. There are instead eight statuesque women whose naked bodies are ritualistically unveiled and offered to the crowd of men. Bill wanders from room to room where he finds a few people having sex and many others watching them. It's all very solemn and stagy. One of the masked naked women somehow climbing clocks Bill as an interloper and warns him to leave. You are in great danger and you must get away while there's still a chance. Instead, Bill is dragged before the red cloak to be publicly humiliated and maybe worse.

[Lane Brown]

Remove your clothes, or would you like us to do it for you? Stop.

[Willa Paskin]

The woman reappears and seems to sacrifice herself to save Bill's life.

[Lane Brown]

Take me.

[Willa Paskin]

I am ready to redeem him. The next day, she turns up dead. The friend who first told Bill about the party is disappeared. And Bill gets a strong warning to stop asking questions about the powerful people behind the masks.

[Lane Brown]

Listen, Bill, I don't think you realize what kind of trouble you were in last night. Who do you think those people were? Those were not just ordinary people there. If I told you their names. I'm not going to tell you their names, but if I did, I don't think you'd sleep so well.

[Willa Paskin]

When Bill goes home, he tells his wife Alice, everything he's done and witnessed that night. Does this mean the end of their marriage? Or will they go on as if it was all just a dream? The important thing is we're awake now. And you know,

[Lane Brown]

there is something very

[Willa Paskin]

important that we need to do as soon as possible.

[Lane Brown]

What's that?

[Willa Paskin]

Fuck. Fade to black.

[Lane Brown]

The world was sort of promised basically pornography. And it ends up being this like cold, inert, sort of like meditation on marriage with this like, weird abstract masked cult. And so in 1999, it was a letdown.

[Willa Paskin]

Nearly everything the public was told about this movie is wrong. The film is not erotic and it is not even about sex.

[Lane Brown]

Instead of sending the Cruise character on a sexual odyssey, which is kind of what we expected from the advanced rumors, it sends him on a voyeuristic journey. You don't know, I mean, who he is and what he wants out of it. And you don't care whether they get back together again or not.

[Willa Paskin]

There are many of you out there who only want to see more of Tom and Nicole. Bring your binoculars. Thanks to the star power and the looky loos, Eyes Wide Shut still did reasonably well at the box office. But a lot of people just didn't

[Lane Brown]

get was sort of seen as like Kubrick's like under baked rough draft of a final movie. And yeah, it was kind of forgotten about for a couple of decades.

[Willa Paskin]

And then what happened?

[Lane Brown]

Lo and behold, you know, it turns out he was actually kind of spot on.

[Willa Paskin]

When we come back, the world opens its eyes anew to Eyes Wide Shut.

[Lane Brown]

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[Willa Paskin]

The notion of a conspiracy that meets at night to ritually abuse women and children is very, very old. It recurs so often throughout history that one scholar came up with a name for it, the nocturnal ritual fantasy. The Romans claimed that early Christians did it. Medieval Christian authorities in turn claimed that Jews, witches and heretics did it. The trope has never entirely gone away. But in the mid-2010s, the nocturnal ritual fantasy started to make a big comeback.

[Lane Brown]

People really on the fringes were sort of obsessed with this idea of elite trafficking. There was Pizzagate.

[Willa Paskin]

People actually believe a conspiracy theory that

[Lane Brown]

Hillary Clinton and her former campaign manager John Podesta ran a child sex ring at a pizzeria in DC. There was QAnon, their core belief, a

[Willa Paskin]

global cabal including Democrats, Hollywood elites and members of what they called the Deep State control much of our lives. The cabal commits atrocities including pedophilia, Satan worship and cannibalizing children.

[Lane Brown]

And then Jeffrey Epstein happens.

[Willa Paskin]

A year long investigation. The Miami Herald says it has located 60 women who say they were molested or sexually assaulted by multimillionaire and Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein allegedly abused dozens of minors at his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida. And we are learning so much about the huge network Epstein had with powerful and important men in Technology, real estate, finance, entertainment, medicine, the law, academia, American and international politics, and yes, British royalty. Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, an extensive network. These are not a conspiracy theory. They are not the figment of some fringe imagination. They are real. An honest to God conspiracy at the very center of our culture. But though there is much damning documented evidence about the connections between Epstein and powerful figures throughout the American elite, it's also true that some detailed information about these connections has been withheld from the public. Into this space between what we know for sure and what we can still only see glimpses of has flooded an enormous amount of speculation, sometimes speculation about unusual things, including in the months immediately after Epstein's death by an apparent but widely questioned suicide, a certain Stanley Kubrick film.

[Lane Brown]

Really quickly, in 2019, after Epstein dies, the movie Eyes Wide Shut suddenly gets a brand new reputation. People think, wait a second, this movie was actually sort of predictive of a lot of things that really wouldn't come into view until 20 something years later. Like the sex cult that was just this abstract, like, kind of ridiculous, like, silly thing. It may have actually been something that was real and we are just now finding out about it.

[Willa Paskin]

The idea here was not that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut happened to be thematically relevant again. It was that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut was concretely relevant. Far from being a piece of fiction. And it was a warning meant to expose a real sex cult. As someone fascinated by both Eyes Wide Shut and conspiratorial thinking, Lane Brown found that he could not escape this emerging theory about the film.

[Lane Brown]

I'm opening the Reddit app, or I'm opening, I guess X. You know, when I sit down in front of my laptop, I'll open YouTube.com and it's gonna just always there waiting for me.

[Willa Paskin]

Across all these blogs and threads and videos, Lane found variations on the same basic story.

[Lane Brown]

So the idea is that Kubrick supposedly had come across some information that there were rich people who were trafficking children, and he decided to spend years, decades even of his life making a movie about it. He finally made it, and then once he showed it to the studio, Warner Brothers, he was murdered to kind of prevent this information from reaching the masses. And then the sex cult somehow had the movie edited before it was released into theaters to scrub out of all of the most incriminating details.

[Willa Paskin]

So there's quite a lot going on here. I want to break it down and I want to start with the movie itself. What evidence is there for any of this in Eyes Wide Shut? Lets begin with the underground elite sex cult right there on the surface. Eyes Wide Shut is about a powerful secret society that organizes elaborate sex parties and threatens violence to anyone who might expose them.

[Lane Brown]

Those were not just ordinary people there. If I told you their names. I'm not gonna tell you their names, but if I did, I don't think you'd sleep so well.

[Willa Paskin]

But espousers of this theory believe that society is not make believe. They have scoured the film for images and details that they say suggest links to specific organizations, including the Freemasons, Bohemian Grove Satanists, and Jeffrey Epstein himself. Take your pick.

[Lane Brown]

The mass, the rituals, the gatherings, they're not just symbols, but a blueprint. The film is steeped in Illuminati symbolism, and the rabbit hole gets deeper and deeper with each viewing.

[Willa Paskin]

The ritual scene in the movie was filmed at Mentmore Towers and guess who

[Lane Brown]

used to own it.

[Willa Paskin]

That's right. It was part of the Rothschild Estate until 1977. There's more. Though the young women in the ritual orgy scene in the film all appear to be adults, close watchers point to a few other scenes that they say demonstrate that Kubrick was trying to expose a real life organization that trafficked not only in women, but but also in children. As proof, they offer up a subplot about the owner of a costume shop who seems to be happily prostituting his own teenage daughter to older men.

[Lane Brown]

If the good doctor himself should ever want anything again, anything at all, it needn't be a costume.

[Willa Paskin]

And they also particularly point to the final scene of the film.

[Lane Brown]

The biggest evidence, the biggest clue, according to these people who believe this, is that in the final scene you have Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman walking their young daughter, their 8 year old daughter Helena, through this toy store, which I guess is supposed to be FAA Schwartz.

[Willa Paskin]

I hope Santa Claus gets me one

[Lane Brown]

of these for Christmas.

[Willa Paskin]

You do?

[Lane Brown]

You see the daughter Helena kind of rounding a corner into an aisle and you see her following two male extras.

[Willa Paskin]

These two men, the theorists claim can be seen earlier in the film and they returned here at the end to take the girl away.

[Lane Brown]

I guess the idea is supposed to be that they are members of the cult and Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman have basically sacrificed their daughter to the cult. Very subtly, Kidman's character pushes her child towards two older men and she walks off. They sold their child away. Helena will be indoctrinated, brainwashed and tortured into an MKULTRA sex slave just like her mother. In exchange, she will become a member of this elite World, it's over and done with in less than one second. Really. You blink and you miss it. But this is the thing that people hold up as the, you know, definitive proof that this theory is real.

[Willa Paskin]

Now, if all of this seems as thin to you as it does to me, the truthers will tell you there's a reason for that. According to them, all of this is just the trace of. Of what was originally in the movie. Just a trace of far more overt and irrefutable evidence that Stanley Kubrick was trying to sound the alarm about a real sex trafficking ring. But they say we never got to see that because the movie itself was tampered with after Kubrick's death, or as they claim, after he was murdered. That's right. In this theory, Kubrick was killed because he made Eyes Wide Shut. This is where we move from not all that convincing textual analysis into full blown conspiracy theory. And the believers say the proof of this conspiracy starts with the suspicious timing of Kubrick's death.

[Lane Brown]

Stanley finished with his life less than a week after he finished with his movie. If you'd stood back and written it, people would have laughed. So the idea is that after Warner Brothers sees the movie, I guess the elite pedophilia cult is just on speed dial here. And so I guess someone calls them up and says, you're not gonna believe what Stanley has done this time. Tells them, you know, what this movie is, and then they freak out, and then they have him killed.

[Willa Paskin]

Once he was out of the way, the powerful trafficking ring that murdered him set about destroying the evidence. They cut some 23 minutes from the film, radically altering the movie's orgy scene to protect themselves.

[Lane Brown]

Yes, Supposedly he was gonna sort of break the fourth wall in this movie and tell people who the actual traffickers were. Tom Cruise, like, goes into a room and then, like, people pull off their masks and it's like, I don't know, Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates. Who knows? We don't know.

[Willa Paskin]

But in re editing the movie, the conspirators failed to remove a handful of clues from the film. The ones we've already talked about. Visual references to specific organizations. And the final sequence where Bill and Alice perhaps send their daughter off with two strange men.

[Lane Brown]

If you buy into this idea that Kubrick was murdered, and if you believe that basically the. The movie was edited to sort of remove the most incriminating specific parts, I think, you know, the. The idea is that he had, like, so expertly kind of embroidered his movie with these clues that some of Them survived the meddling and, and, you know, made it into the movie for the eagle eyed redditors who cared to find them.

[Willa Paskin]

There's a kind of irrefutable logic at play here. Sure, the movie may contain only scant concrete evidence of a conspiracy, but that's because of the conspiracy. You could imagine wanting a little more evidence. And then in 2024, a Hollywood insider provided a version of that on the most popular podcast in the world.

[Lane Brown]

Kubrick was such an odd one. Like, his films are so different. Yeah, he's a weird guy, but he was also, I think, thinking three steps ahead of everybody at any kind of given moment. Roger Avery, who is the director of Rules of Attraction and the co writer of Pulp Fiction, goes on the Joe Rogan experience. And he and Joe Rogan start talking about Stanley Kubrick. And Roger Avery says, let me tell you something about Eyes Wide Shut up. When they first screened the movie in England, there were people who were outside of the theater who could hear inside of the theater, Kubrick yelling at all the executives and saying, it's my movie, you can't cut it, I can't cut my film.

[Willa Paskin]

Blah, blah, blah, blah.

[Lane Brown]

Big argument going on. Then he dies like four days later.

[Willa Paskin]

Oh, Jesus.

[Lane Brown]

So somebody went in and finished the movie, but I think when they finished the movie, they hid the film. The. The movie got changed into something else.

[Willa Paskin]

Roger Avery admits that he heard this story secondhand from a William Morris agent who has since died. It's clearly scuttlebutt, but it was the most enticing, faux plausible scuttlebutt yet.

[Lane Brown]

And that basically pours gasoline on the fire of this whole thing.

[Willa Paskin]

And it was finally at this point that Lane was like, okay, this has gotten out of hand.

[Lane Brown]

To be clear. Of course I believe that Kubrick, you know, was overloading his movie with symbolism. And God bless him, we love it. That's why he's Stanley Kubrick. I don't think he was actually warning the world about any real sex cults.

[Willa Paskin]

And so he thought, maybe I need to write something about this.

[Lane Brown]

Could I investigate this and talk to people who worked with Kubrick on the movie and see if I, you know, maybe can I debunk this theory? Could I talk to enough people who would actually know the truth?

[Willa Paskin]

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[Lane Brown]

Because he was so famously obsessed with such tiny details, a lot of people kind of wonder if basically every detail in his movie maybe has some hidden meaning.

[Willa Paskin]

The best example of this is Kubrick's film the Shining, liberally adapted from a novel by Stephen King.

[Lane Brown]

My grandmother and I could hold conversations

[Willa Paskin]

entirely without ever opening our mouths.

[Lane Brown]

She called it Shining.

[Willa Paskin]

When it was first released in 1980, the Shining was considered something of a failure. King, for one, famously hated it. But its reputation has grown over time and it's now an uncontested classic. It is also the source of so many elaborate fan theories that there is a feature length documentary called Room 237 devoted to the movie's most fervent and feverish analyzers.

[Lane Brown]

Inside the Shining are hundreds of subliminal images, objects and colors and music and anything else. There's many levels to this film. This is like three dimensional chess trying to tell us several stories that appear to be separate but actually are not.

[Willa Paskin]

Viewers have pored over every detail in the film and seen in them concrete evidence that Stanley Kubrick wasn't making a piece of art open to interpretation, but instead sending a specific message about the movie's meaning to anyone who could recognize the clues from a poster on the wall, to the pattern of the carpet, to the hotel room number.

[Lane Brown]

If you Multiply the numbers 2, 3, and 7, you get 42. And for a German historian, if you put the number 42 and a German typewriter together, you get the Holocaust.

[Willa Paskin]

Probably the most famous theory about the Shining is also the most outlandish.

[Lane Brown]

There's this theory that Kubrick faked the moon landing, like helped NASA fake the moon landing using the techniques that he developed for 2001. And then the Shining was somehow his apology for this. And the evidence for that, I guess, is that he put Danny Torrance in a Apollo 11 sweater. So Danny stands up. He's got the Apollo 11 sweater on. He begins walking down the hallway towards room 237. And the room, room 237 in the film represents the moon landing stage where he works

[Willa Paskin]

these days. So many contemporary fictions, movies, and TV shows ask their viewers to watch like this, to comb them for clues, searching for the answer that will solve some central mystery. Everything is like a treasure map pointing viewers in the direction of a solution. But when you treat every piece of art, to say nothing of the real world, like a treasure map, you can end up in some very weird and reductive places.

[Lane Brown]

The reason we are still watching these movies, you know, Kubrick's movies, like, 50 years later, is because they're filled with ideas. Not all of them are pointing in the same direction, but you can revisit these things and pick and choose which ones you want to pay attention to on that particular viewing.

[Willa Paskin]

But now Lane was seeing post after post claiming that Eyes Wide Shut wasn't a movie about a lot of things. It was just a warning about a real sex trafficking cabal.

[Lane Brown]

But Eyes Watch, it was not made with this. Paint my numbers. Easy to unlock thinking in mind, I don't think. Save it for True Detective Season four or whatever.

[Willa Paskin]

If people had turned Eyes Wide Shut into a rabbit hole, he was going to close that rabbit hole up. Eyes Wide Shut was not a treasure map. It was a movie, a great movie, a capacious movie. And he would prove it right away. He saw some obvious problems with the idea that Stanley Kubrick had made the movie to tell the world about real life sex trafficking, maybe even specifically Jeffrey Epstein. First of all, Kubrick initially considered making this movie in the late 1960s, when Jeffrey Epstein would have only been a teenager. Its plot is also very faithful, right down to the orgy scene, to an Austrian novel from the 1920s when Epstein was not alive. And even if the movie was trying to expose somebody else, that is still a very long time to sit on such serious secrets.

[Lane Brown]

If Kubrick had actually come into possession of information about a real life sex trafficking cult, I don't understand why he would, you know, spend $60 million making this movie about it. Spent 400 days shooting it, another 400 days editing it. It's like this is time going by. If there's real, you know, elite sex trafficking going on, you'd probably want to put an end to it.

[Willa Paskin]

He could have gone to the police. He could have told a journalist or taken an ad out in a newspaper, anything.

[Lane Brown]

Lots of different ways to tell the world about something bad that's going on.

[Willa Paskin]

Blaine was not content to poke holes in this conspiracy theory from the comfort of his couch. He set out to talk to everyone he could who worked on Eyes Wide Shut to find out what had really happened.

[Lane Brown]

And pretty much everybody, as soon as they picked up the phone to sort of launched into a whole explanation for why these theories were completely stupid.

[Willa Paskin]

He called up the editor of Eyes Wide Shut. He spoke with Kubrick's longtime assistant and archivist, and he also spoke with Kubrick's producer, slash brother in law.

[Lane Brown]

I talked to a lot of people, and it did not seem like they had coordinated their stories and were sort of in on some secret conspiracy. They all had, you know, slightly different memories of kind of making this movie. But the one thing they all agreed on was that Kubrick was not, you know, warning the world explicitly about any real life sex cult.

[Willa Paskin]

Still, Lane was not satisfied. He wanted to address each element of this ornate conspiracy theory one at a time. So first, did Kubrick know the secrets of some real life secret society? Had he witnessed one of their orgies and been so disturbed that he spent 30 years trying to bring the truth to light?

[Lane Brown]

Frederick Raphael, the movie's co writer, who I believe is 93 years old, he told me, I don't think Stanley gave a flying fuck about warning the world about anything.

[Willa Paskin]

Raphael told Lane, in fact, that it was a struggle for Kubrick to even imagine the elite cabal that was so crucial to his film.

[Lane Brown]

He had no idea what would motivate such an organization.

[Willa Paskin]

Lane also learned that Kubrick didn't seem to know much about orgies either. According to an expert in group sex, he tracked down who advised Kubrick on the film.

[Lane Brown]

The two of them spent like hundreds of hours on the phone because Kubrick apparently himself had never attended an actual orgy. And this guy had Been to plenty of.

[Willa Paskin]

Okay, so maybe Kubrick wasn't aware of the workings of any particular sex trafficking ring. But what about the final scene where Bill and Alice allegedly sacrificed their daughter Helena to the cult? The smoking gun that supposedly proves Kubrick was trying to encode the movie with a message about trafficking children? Yeah, it's really pretty. Well, that would be news to the child actor who played the daughter. Lane spoke with her too.

[Lane Brown]

She was kind of shocked to find out these theories were even going around. She had no idea. And so she read, like, one of the 500,000 word blog posts that I'd sent her, and she was like, this is crazy.

[Willa Paskin]

Remember, the key to many online theories about Eyes Wide Shut is that Helena appears to go off with two older men in a toy store. The actress who played her told Lane that this was pure happenstance.

[Lane Brown]

There was never any suggestion on the set of the movie that this is what was happening. Stan Lee never told me to go stand near these, like, two creepy bald men in a way that would suggest that I'm being kidnapped by them.

[Willa Paskin]

And then there's the most incendiary claim that Kubrick was murdered so that 23 minutes of the film could be deleted before its release.

[Lane Brown]

Everybody told me there was no extra footage that was cut. He never told anybody the address of, like, real life traffickers or anything. Everybody said this was nonsense.

[Willa Paskin]

In fact, the reality was the opposite. They were reluctant to cut anything out after Kubrick's death. That was the whole reason they covered up some of the sex acts with CGI figures so they could appease the censors without having to cut a single frame from the orgy. But what about the story shared by Roger Avery on the Joe Rogan experience, that Kubrick had gotten into a screaming match with studio executives after showing them the film?

[Lane Brown]

There are people who were outside of the theater who could hear inside of the theater, Kubrick yelling at all the executives and saying, it's my movie. You can't cut it. You can't fucking cut my film.

[Willa Paskin]

Blah, blah, blah, blah.

[Lane Brown]

Big argument going on. Then he dies, like, four days later. So this. I spent weeks nailing all of this down. There was no possibility that that story was true.

[Willa Paskin]

Lane found out that there were only three screenings total of the movie before Kubrick died. The first two took place on the same day in New York. One for Tom and Nicole and one for the studio executives.

[Lane Brown]

But Kubrick was not there. He was at home in England, kind of waiting by the phone.

[Willa Paskin]

Kubrick, remember, was afraid of flying and hadn't been back to the US since the early 1970s. So that ruled out the possibility of him getting into an argument with anyone at either of the first two screenings. That left the third and final screening. Nigel Gault, the film's editor, was also the projectionist at all three screenings. He told Lane that he did fly back to England with a print of the film to show it in Stanley Kubrick's private screening room at his house. But there were no Warner Brothers executives in the room, and Kubrick wasn't there either. The only person watching was Tom Cruise's publicist.

[Lane Brown]

So I called her, and she told me what had happened. She said that he was sick, not feeling well, and she was up in his bedroom. And so she and Kubrick had a conversation by phone. And so she told them over the phone, I was mesmerized by the movie. I loved it. But there was no argument, no fighting. He never yelled, you can't cut my movie. None of that.

[Willa Paskin]

I mean, to your point, it sounds like Stanley Kubrick was not physically present for any of the three screenings of his film, right?

[Lane Brown]

Was not there to actually have a verbal altercation with anybody.

[Willa Paskin]

The very next day, after the final screening that Kubrick was too ill to attend, he died. His co writer, Frederick Raphael, put it to Lane very plainly. He was 70 years old and looked about 120. He was very stressed, and producing that movie was enough to kill him. Nobody needed to hire anyone to do it. Lane Brown's article about Eyes Wide Shut was published by New York Magazine in December of 2025. He'd written it, hoping, even expecting, to debunk the conspiracy theories swirling around one of his favorite movies to make them go away. Needless to say, it hasn't quite worked out that way.

[Lane Brown]

For, like, one afternoon, it was on Reddit, and I saw a couple of tweets about it. And then now we're just right back to this, you know, conspiracy theorizing. Like, my. My story never even happened. They want to believe, and so they keep on believing. Foreign.

[Willa Paskin]

Hitchcock famously said that on a feature film, the director is God. He's all knowing, he's all seeing. He's all powerful, and he's making a world in his image. One of the things that strikes me about all the Stanley Kubrick conspiracists is that they are not so very far from enthusiasts, scholars, and fans of Stanley Kubrick or even of any other great artist. They all attribute to these artists Godlike moviemaking powers and intentionality. They all respond to their work personally with deep thought and interpretation. It's just that the cinephiles appreciate that good work can and does contain ambiguous, ambivalent, inarticulable ideas. And the conspiracist insists that no, its value is tied to some one specific meaning, a meaning that forecloses all others. But in trying to prove that a work is about one thing, even something extraordinary, they are also insisting it doesn't mean anything else. They are forcing it, in a sense, to mean less than it really does.

[Lane Brown]

A lot of this is kind of unnecessary. It's like you can really sort of give Kubrick credit for basically anticipating something that, you know, the rest of us didn't know existed until years later. You don't really need to fall down the conspiracy hole. It is kind of amazing that he told this story almost 27 years ago at this point, and it actually sort of ended up being more like our real world than we ever could have known at the time.

[Willa Paskin]

I personally find it heartening. There are artists whose work is so layered and complex, it is able to resonate in new ways throughout time. But I can also see that this might be cold comfort to some when compared to the promise, the hope that at least somebody was shouting about Jeffrey Epstein from the rooftops or at least on 35 millimeter. Believing even something as disturbing as the conspiracy about Eyes Wide Shut is more comforting than the reality, which is that so many people knew and said nothing. But in the conspiracy, in its alternate reality, at least someone, a powerful man no less, tried to warn us. It's all a fiction, but you can understand why it might be preferable to the facts. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. Lane Brown's piece for New York magazine about all of this. The Eyes Wide Shut conspiracy is wonderful and we'll link to it on our show page. This episode was written and produced by Max Friedman. It was edited by me. Decoder Ring is also produced by Katie Shepard and Evan Chung. Our supervising producer, Merritt Jacob, is senior Technical director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decoderinglate.com or call us at 347-460-7281. We love hearing from you and we will see you in two weeks.

[Lane Brown]

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[Willa Paskin]

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