Trump, Epstein and Kubrick: A genius director died making this prophetic film

I discuss the 1999 movie "Eyes Wide Shut."

Part One: A movie predicting Trump and Epstein — by a genius who suddenly died while making it

At the time I write this article, Donald Trump’s presidency is hemorrhaging support under the weight of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Like so many other wealthy and powerful elites, Trump had a long friendship with Epstein stretching back to the 1990s. Because Epstein was ultimately convicted of pedophilia and sex trafficking, and Trump had a long history of ribald and secretive interactions with Epstein (as well as dozens of past sexual misconduct accusations), millions believe Trump is likewise a pedophile who benefited from sex trafficking.

Enter the movie “Eyes Wide Shut,” which was just inducted into the Criterion Collection. Released in 1999, this erotic thriller was directed and co-written by Stanley Kubrick, a legendary artist known for crafting cinematic classics like “Paths of Glory,” “Spartacus,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “A Clockwork Orange” and “The Shining.” Near the end of production for “Eyes Wide Shut,” Kubrick unexpectedly died, making it his final movie. Adapted from the 1926 Austrian novella “Rhapsody: A Dream Novel” by Arthur Schnitzler, “Eyes Wide Shut” tells the story of a doctor named Bill Harford (Tom Cruise, who recently snubbed Trump when the latter tried to honor him at the Kennedy Center) who becomes obsessively jealous and insecure after learning his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) once fantasized about another man. In response, Harford seeks revenge by secretly pursuing his own extramarital escapades, leading him to a secret high-society orgy involving underage women. As he uncovers a series of sinister secrets, Harford seems to put his own life and the lives of the innocent women who cross his path in terrible danger.

“Stanley Kubrick had been obsessed with the correlation between male fantasy and sexuality,” said Karen A. Ritzenhoff, Ph.D., a professor of communication at Central Connecticut State University and author of the essay "Kubrick and Feminism" in "The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick.” “Benevolent critics describe it as his passion to dismantle ‘toxic masculinity.’ I would argue that his films, especially ‘Eyes Wide Shut,’ display a continuous thread of abuse and violent assault of women.” Despite Kidman’s Alice Harford showing signs of empowerment in “Eyes Wide Shut,” Ritzenhoff argues that Kubrick has long depicted predatory male behavior (such as in his controversial 1962 movie about a child molester, “Lolita”) in ways wherein we see “teenage girls as being somewhat complicit,” meaning “the responsibility of the pedophile is deflected.”

Despite this problematic partial shifting of blame for sex abuse to the victims, “Eyes Wide Shut” is still powerful and useful precisely because it accurately captures how elites create corrupt power structures in which to act out their most depraved desires. Kubrick’s film style was that of a neutral observer, not a deliberate social critic, and this mitigated even incorrect and ethically questionable aspects of his content. As such, “Eyes Wide Shut” realistically captures a pervasive and common male mindset, one that has shaped the course of politics, economics, culture and the rest of history for millennia.

“As a 20th-Century American, of course Kubrick would have been concerned with patriarchy, sexual exploitation, class, gender, religion and philosophy—and the contradictions inherent in any system of thought or behavior,” Rodney F. Hill, Professor of Film at Hofstra University and author of an essay about "Eyes Wide Shut" in "The Stanley Kubrick Archives,” explained. “But he never clearly articulated his own viewpoints on such matters, preferring instead to stimulate thought on the part of audiences.”

Part Two: Patriarchy and Pedophilia

Tony Zierra is a director and producer who made a 2024 documentary about "Eyes Wide Shut" called “SK13.” (He also made “Filmworker,” a 2017 documentary about Kubrick’s right-hand man Leon Vitali, who has multiple cameo roles in “Eyes Wide Shut.”) For anyone who wants to dive deep into this film’s production, legacy and multiple adjacent conspiracy theories, “SK13” is second to none. Consequently Zierra is well-qualified to elaborate on exactly what Kubrick accomplished with “Eyes Wide Shut” and how it is relevant to the Trump-Epstein era.

“Kubrick always questioned authority and highlighted the exploitation of others by the rich and powerful,” Zierra said. “All of his films explore hierarchy. A great artist like Kubrick observes cultural behavior and trends. Again, he’s always aware of what’s behind the mask. Sex scandals grab attention because they’re tied up with transgression, dominance and stimulation.” Even though both Schnitzler’s novella and Kubrick’s movie use these themes to advance their story, Zierra cautions viewers to not reduce their significance entirely to their more sensational aspects. This isn’t merely a story about scandal; it’s about human nature and how it shapes society.

“Kubrick knew where we were heading because he knew where we’ve been,” Zierra observed. “Remember that what’s happening today isn’t new. It’s a cycle repeating itself. It’s embedded in humanity.”

Jeremi Marek Szaniawski, an associate professor of film studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of the essay "Kubrick and Genre" in "The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick,” explicated which perennial dynamics as uncovered in this movie are reemerging in the news cycle today. To do so, he pointed to one of the story’s chief villains, an unctuous billionaire named Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) who is similar to Epstein in his lavish lifestyle, decadent dissipation and even ethnicity. (Bangor University film professor Nathan Abrams argues in “Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual” that Ziegler can be read as Jewish, like Kubrick himself.)

“It seems very clear that Pollack/Ziegler represents a dark superego that is aligned with patriarchal authority,” Szaniawski explained. “The character was invented for the needs of the film, not appearing in the source novella. It's hard, as a result, to not see this as a critique of a system which was already starting to crumble by the late 20th century when the film was produced, under the influence of a variety of factors, including feminism.”

Part Three: Capitalism and Conspiracy Theories

Zierra elaborated on the parallels between the Trump/Epstein type of elite, as represented by Ziegler, and the film’s larger observations about class and sex in the modern world.

“Ziegler embodies the arrogant, super-wealthy, entitled type of man who does use and discard others — and he feels entitled to do so,” Zierra explained. “It’s exploitation again.” Yet just like Trump and Epstein, even Ziegler is not all-powerful — and, therefore, he is also easily scared precisely because he is aware of how his villainy appears to the rest of the world.

“There is also the hint in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ that Ziegler himself is involved with people who are even more powerful than he is,” Zierra pointed out. “The women Ziegler and the others in the orgy use and abuse are seen as beneath them. But so is Dr. Bill, and Bill’s wife Alice is treated by Bill like she has less value than he does.”

Szaniawski, though qualifying his observation by noting that the film is not a perfect analogy for the Epstein scandal, drew attention to “one way” that “Eyes Wide Shut” contributes to conversations about American politics in the Trump-Epstein era.

“The film is very prosaic, pedestrian, even: the hyperclass with its pants down,” Szaniawski said, describing “Eyes Wide Shut” as a work of art about “boredom and the way in which capitalism, predicated as it is on an ideology of growth, crisis, new development/challenges, may have tapped into this ever pushing further of limits, of reinforcement of decorum, secrecy, and the like.” Citing the Marxist literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson, Szaniawski asserted that as capitalist systems become more complex, they feed into conspiratorial thinking both by perpetrators and victims.

“In a way, 'Eyes Wide Shut' is a flattening out of what Jameson hailed and critiqued as the first flawed yet necessary stage to what he called 'cognitive mapping' (i.e. this conspiratorial mindset); and the Epstein affair, some kind of narrative spinned out of control by right-wing groups, which now seems to turn against some of the main beneficiaries of the narrative,” Szaniawski said. “All this is sinister, yes, but probably far less mysterious or titillating than one assumes upon first glance. At the end of the day, it is probably only just about power and money, offer and demand, simply put.”

Szaniawski’s last point — that the deeper conspiracies which govern a capitalist world are rarely as scintillating and intriguing as the public prefers to believe, but are instead about grubby banalities like lust, power and greed — deserves repetition and emphasis. It explains why — with the dialogue around “Eyes Wide Shut” as with real life — the victims of patriarchal and capitalist exploitation often gravitate to baseless conspiracy theories rather than actual truths.

This is why, when Kubrick died four days after screening a rough cut of his film for Cruise, Kidman and two producers, the world of conspiracy theorists went nuts. They went even further aflame after learning that 21 minutes were cut by the studios, never to be retrieved; that corporate executives like Ted Turner and Mohamed Al-Fayed (the latter of whom was later accused of sexual misconduct) hated the film and tried to eviscerate its content; that Kubrick’s daughter Vivian, who worked with him on the film, had become estranged from her family because she converted to Scientology, the same controversial church of which Cruise is a member; and that co-screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who hated working with the mercurial Kubrick, was writing a tell-all blasting his former collaborator.

Zierra picks apart these conspiracy theories — the good, the bad and the ugly — in “SK13.” More importantly, he observes how these conspiracy theories occurred during similar historical points. In the Austria of 1900 (when “Rhapsody” is set) and 1926 (when the book was released), the mass of citizens suffered from an economic downturn that began with a stock market crash in 1873. In the America of 1999, when “Eyes Wide Shut” was both set and released, the mass of citizens suffered from the growing income inequality initiated by the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 and his subsequent economic policies. As people suffer more from systemic poverty and economic injustice, they become more inclined to believe the absolute worst of those oppressing them.

Their rage, though emotionally justified, can sometimes be factually misdirected. The oft-tragic consequence of all this suppressed social rage is the rise of fascists to supreme political power, be it Hitler in 1933 Germany of Trump in 2017/2025 America.

Hence why “Rhapsody” was met with a wave of anti-Semitism, as radical right-wing elements in Austria claimed the Jewish Schnitzler was trying to destroy decent Christian society with his depiction of the elites’ sadistic sexual exploits.

“They saw the hypocrisy on stage,” one narrator intones during “SK13.” “It was like holding a mirror in front of society where the fact that Schnitzler wrote about sexual problems was of course, scandalous. He was attacked by the anti-Semitic press in Vienna, in Austria, in Germany, as the typical example of the Jewish filth.” When the Nazis conquered Austria in 1938 (the so-called “Anschluss”), Schnitzler’s literary works were burned alongside the papers of physicist Albert Einstein and psychologist Sigmund Freud. Millions of the same Austrians being exploited by people just like the fictional antagonists of “Rhapsody” applauded their real-world tormentors.

For anyone seeking to understand how Trump supporters can side with him over those holding him accountable for his connections to Epstein — and, for that matter, why Kubrick scrubbed the overt references to Jewish culture from “Rhapsody” when adapting it, leaving in only Pollack’s characterization of Ziegler as a sort of ethnic cameo — one need look no further than the initial Jew-hating response to “Rhapsody.” It is quite likely that Kubrick, who long sought to make a movie about the Holocaust and spoke frequently of his Jewish background, understood that there is a fine line between asking sincere questions about elites (such as those posed by his film) and stumbling into the world of absurdities, incoherence and hate-mongering.

Part Four: Watch “Eyes Wide Shut” right now!

In his 1979 historical book “Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture,” which won the Pulitzer Prince for General Nonfiction, cultural historian Carl E. Schorske observed that "like Freud, Schnitzler felt a profound tension between his paternal inheritance of moralistic values and his modern conviction that the instinctual life demanded recognition as a fundamental determinant of human weal or woe. Again like Freud, he resolved his ambivalence by detaching the scientific outlook from its moralistic matrix and turning it boldly upon the life of instinct."

Ritzenhoff, who has explored the psychological aspects of “Eyes Wide Shut” in her previous research, illustrates how — though problematic for downplaying the voices of women — the film is still relevant to the Trump-Epstein era precisely because it ignores morality and instead peers with remorseless clarity into the instinctive psyches of the world’s worst patriarchal exploiters. It makes “Eyes Wide Shut” relevant, even if it is also sexist itself. Indeed, its very sexism underscores its relevance.

“The parallel between the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, Donald Trump and the depiction of rich elite male circles who abuse women in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ is compelling,” Ritzenhoff said. “I don’t agree that Kubrick wanted to voice a critique of toxic masculinity. He depicts abuse by focusing on the inner turmoil of his leading male character who ultimately asks for forgiveness from his wife who crudely echoes his desire to have sex at the end of the film. In this way, none of the abuse towards women truly matters. That is the same as with the Epstein scandal.”

She concluded, as will I, with a scathing observation.

“The women involved have been silenced before and will be forgotten again,” Ritzenhoff said. “It is the drama around male privilege that has the entertainment value.”

---

Back Seat Socialism

Column by Matthew Rozsa who is a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently he is writing a book for Beacon Press, "Neurosocialism," which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.