Jasun Horsley is the author of several provocative books on movies, conspiracies, and combinations thereof. His new book The Kubrickon: The Cult of Kubrick: Attention Capture and the Inception of AI may go down in history as the best book on Stanley Kubrick ever written by an author who hates Kubrick. Since I personally rather like Kubrick and find that most of his films have redeeming social and artistic value, this interview turned into something of a debate—one that I was guaranteed to lose, since Jasun is a Kubrick expert and I’m not.
Below is full but slightly edited transcript of the interview.
Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad Audio-Visual. I'm Kevin Barrett talking with interesting folks from all over the world who have perspectives that you don't often encounter in the mainstream. But maybe you should encounter some of these perspectives. And my guest today, Jason Horsley, definitely has a very interesting perspective. And I don't think they're going to put him at the top of the headlines of the mainstream media anytime soon. He's the author of a new book on Stanley Kubrick called The Kubrickon: The Cult of Kubrick: Attention Capture and the Inception of AI. And it's probably the best book you'll ever read on Stanley Kubrick by somebody who hates Stanley Kubrick, because it's probably the only one, but it's actually pretty good. So, hey, welcome, Jason. How are you doing?
Jasun Horsley: Thanks, Kevin.
Kevin Barrett: It's a very provocative, interesting book. And I'll tell you right off the bat that I'm going to have to do a bit of a debate here. And I'm guaranteed to lose the debate. Though I'm not a fanatical Kubrick fan by any means, I'm kind of an admirer who appreciates—I don't know if enjoys would be the right word, and in many cases, it certainly wouldn't be—but I'm one of these people who's kind of a moderate pro-Kubrick type. And your book didn't fully convince me not to be. So maybe you can lay out the argument against him. I haven't seen most of his movies recently. In fact, there's a couple of them I haven't ever seen. And so you're at a great advantage and you should be able to totally mop the floor with me.
Jasun Horsley: Well, first off, you're a moderate. I'm not really interested in trying to demolish the opinion of moderates, because moderates are not enslaved by some ideology. My truck with Kubrick began with the extremists. There's such an extreme consensus around Kubrick, even though it's maintained like perhaps many, if not most, consensuses, by a minority of academia and intelligentsia and film people—the film community. There's been a concerted effort, starting with Kubrick himself, to reify both the man and the movies. And I'd say it's been extremely successful, so much so that you don't find many moderates. You find people who may be not interested in Kubrick—or very occasionally (I don't know how rare it is actually) quite a few who just don't really like his movies. And then you have those who swear that he is the greatest thing that ever came along in the world of cinema. So that's where I begin my interrogation, if you will. Is Kubrick really such an unparalleled filmmaker, or is something else going on? And what I — I won't say conclude because I think this is more like halfway through the thesis — but what I have to acknowledge even very early on is that Kubrick is an exceptional filmmaker, that he's not like other filmmakers.
I think I have always acknowledged that. It's just in my initial period as a film critic and as a film viewer, I felt he was the most overrated and that his films were unusually cold and they didn't really have much of a human dimension, from Dr. Strangelove on, more or Less. And that's unusual. But that's not what I'm talking about here. What I explore in the book is that his films, from Dr. Strangelove, or at least from 2001: A Space Odyssey, were something other than ordinary movies — which of course is what his advocates and even his worshippers will try to convince us. But they take a position that they're somehow superior as movies. And I just simply cannot see that. So I've been looking to try and understand what it is that has captured people. And what I came upon over time was that — I'll just give the very condensed, simple version, because it is a complicated thesis. And with the proviso that whenever one creates a counter-narrative — Oliver Stone said this about JFK — one has to simplify it just to make sense of it in order to have enough leverage or enough traction to overturn the existing consensus.
So I'm keeping it very simple. Kubrick, while he was working on 2001 — there were some unusual things about that film in terms of why it was made and how it was made— and of course there's the theory about Kubrick faking the moon landing which I don't get into very much. But certainly he was he was deeply ensconced in NASA and the development of space technology that did lead to the moon landing, real or not. So Kubrick was already deeply embedded in scientific research at that time. It was the beginning of DARPA, and he was very interested in computers. I posit the possibility that because he was making a movie about artificial intelligence, he became fascinated by this challenge, and he began a parallel project to create artificial intelligence specifically in order to avoid the HAL scenario, which is is that a computer that understands the mechanics of existence and human beings in society, but doesn't actually understand what it is to be human, would eventually perceive humans as a problem, a spanner in the works that was better off just being removed entirely. I think there's a pretty robust logic to that.
Kevin Barrett: I agree completely. (As in Bill Joy's) "The Future Doesn't Need Us," the classic essay about how if we're lucky, they'll keep us as pets.
Jasun Horsley: There's even talk about that currently with the World Economic Forum. Yuri...
Kevin Barrett: Harari.
Jasun Horsley: Yeah, thank you, that's the one. I think that Kubrick was aware of this and did set his sights on something besides just making movies, and that his movies thereafter were part of a hidden project he was involved with, which was the development of artificial intelligence, and that he designed movies as a form of attention capture devices, as a means to try and capture the attention of audiences and siphon off that attention and feed it into a database. As I say, I'm very much simplifying because I don't necessarily mean this quite as literally as it sounds, but as a kind of fable. And so his movies were designed with this specific end, and therefore in this specific way, more scientifically than artistically. And there were various principles such as placing anomalies in the films, such as making them somewhat devoid of ordinary human behaviors and expressions, and various other things that I explore in the book, geared towards creating artifacts that would generate fascination and even obsession. Fascination would be the first level of obsession, which I'd say is fairly benign. We go to the movies, we want to be fascinated. Obsession is when it becomes something else. And as some of your listeners would know — I don't know if you knew before the book — there is a whole subculture in the intelligentsia and the critical community which obsessed over Kubrick in a more conventional way of worshipping and trying to raise him up to this lofty throne of artistic cinematic genius.
There's an audience of Kubrick fans (Kubraphiles) who who sift through his movies frame by frame and line by line, and try to find all these clues that they believe are in there, even to the point of counting the number of days between his birthday and this event or his death day and that event. Anything you can possibly imagine in terms of amassing and organizing data around his films. And so my point in the book is that to get human beings to work, putting information into the computer superstructure, which is the Internet — it was coming up during this time with DARPA — is a way not just to feed massive amounts of information about human beings and culture, which of course we have through all the social media now, but a particular kind of kind of hyper-subjective interpretation, some would say kooky, but it's just very, very subjective. People read all kinds of things into Kubrick movies. That was explored in the Rodney Ascher film Room 237, five different perspectives on The Shining, all totally different, essentially incompatible, and yet all quite persuasive. It's a very good documentary, but totally subjective. And yet to them it isn't, of course. They believe they've found all the clues that proves The Shining is about the Holocaust or the fake moon landing, or the destruction of Native Americans, or the the Minotaur and the labyrinth, or whatever else they come up with.
Kevin Barrett: This is just the critical interpretive game that happens with high literature in general. James Joyce's Ulysses and especially Finnegans Wake were designed (for endless interpretation). Joyce sat down and said, I'm going to surpass Shakespeare. I'm going to write something that's going to keep the critics busy for centuries. It's taken for granted in the post-religious age that hermeneutics, which used to be devoted to scripture and finding ultimate reality religiously through interpretation of Scripture, is now devoted to interpreting works of art and literature. And so there's a kind of a new church of art and literature out there in which the critics essentially rate works of art and literature in terms of how deep they are, how much they lend themselves to these kinds of endless interpretations. And a really great work of art would be one that you could have a lot of critics spend a lot of time with and keep finding new things and new interpretations, and have a reason to keep talking about it. It's got more meaning than a more simple or simplified work of art. So that work would then become part of the canon. And as Joyce said, it would keep the critics busy for centuries. It looks to me like that's part of what Kubrick was doing that led to your thesis.
Jasun Horsley: Yeah, right. So there's a — you could say it's a tradition, although I think it's relatively new. (But) I don't think the people who wrote the Bible wanted to keep critics busy for centuries. They wanted to transmit a divine revelation in such a way that other people would experience it. And of course, there are people who read Joyce who say that that happens. There are people who love Kubrick who say that they've had these profound insights. I don't believe it personally. I'm speaking as somebody who grew up ensconced in popular culture. For me, it was Marvel Comics, and then it was Clint Eastwood and Elvis and David Bowie. And all of that led to, let's say, unwholesome, even self-destructive practices, even though there was a kernel of something really profound because otherwise it wouldn't have captured my attention, something that corresponded with divine revelation, a sense truly of the numinousity of the existence of God imminent. They were culturally the corporate cultural products that have human intelligence behind them that aren't recipients of divine revelation. Now, obviously, that is a spectrum. And a true artist is, if they are true, attempting to be a vessel to transmit the divine. I'm not saying that somebody who is artistically oriented isn't potentially in service of truth and reality, but I'd say we've come quite a long way from the purity of a single human being just receiving some insight and communicating in a way that is beautiful and that will touch others. We've come a long way from that, and we're ensconced in this culture that is inherently malevolent, I would say.
Kevin Barrett: Moving from scriptural hermeneutics to literary greatness as your God is very decadent.
Jasun Horsley: Well, right, exactly. And if we look at Kubrick as an example, he was he was an atheist. He was obsessed with technology, with science, with computers and so on. So he had a certain — not just an aesthetic, but a kind of an ideology. But his relationship to existence and his perspective was such that I would say that it's inherently quite cynical and quite nihilistic. Nature abhors a vacuum and the human psyche abhors a vacuum. Maybe it's a chicken or an egg thing. But when there is a lack of a sense of the divine dimension of existence in reality, there's a natural, even inevitable tendency to try and find something to replace that. It could be science, it could be art, it could be occultism, and it could be bogus religion, even. But something is going to replace it. For Kubrick, it was a mix of science and art. And I think there is something inherently deceptive in that. And I think we can see it in our culture in general.
As I say, I wasn't immune to it. The arts and specifically movies have a tendency to evoke in us a kind of worshipful attitude, whether it's for the directors or the movie stars or the movies themselves. We feel as though they make our life meaningful. They give real meaning to our lives. And I think that's more than a double edged sword. I think it's a trap, really. I think once we start to attribute meaning to the creations of other human minds that don't lead to a an interior sense of the divine, at which point we no longer need that reference point, but rather lead to more and more consumption of these artifacts and the worship of the people that make them. That's when we have a satanic or an inverted culture. So this is the larger context that I'm exploring in Kubrick, and explored also in earlier books. And so Kubrick — you know, even if I was writing about my favorite filmmaker, I would still be looking for ways to undermine and invalidate his work. Nobody gets off from my critical eye.
Kevin Barrett: Let me throw a counter-interpretation at you here. I actually basically agree with what you're saying for the most part. But in terms of Kubrick's works, it occurs to me that the way I read them, the same stuff that you're seeing as just cold and mechanical, I'm seeing as comedy — as dark comedy. There was an famous French philosopher — I don't think it was Bergson, although he may have picked up on it — who said that comedy is essentially when the living, aware, divine-spark-imbued human being sees himself or another human being acting mechanically, like slipping on a banana peel. If somebody slips on a banana peel, why is that funny? Well, it's funny because they were sort of robotic in their walking without awareness and they lacked the awareness to miss the banana peel. And so we laugh because they become sort of an object. So I think black comedy, humour noir and absurdism, all of this does emerge from an atheistic culture — increasingly atheistic, increasingly self-aware in its atheism — that sees no meaning in existence and then finds that it's either awful or finds something almost humorous in the horror. And so I think that these (are) two kinds of comedy, (first) the humor of the human being merely mechanical that doesn't depend on atheism, and (second) that whole absurdist kind of framework (that grows out of atheism, nihilism, and meaninglessness).
But I think what Kubrick was doing was operating within that dark comedy, absurdist kind of tradition that emerged after World War II and putting out a very, very subtle and dark form of comedy. You mentioned that this new type of film that he did started with Dr. Strangelove. The ones before that are a little more conventional. Dr. Strangelove was obviously an all out black comedy in which the non-human, non-aware, non-divine robotic element, the mechanical element of human beings as they mindlessly march towards total destruction is hilarious and terrifying at the same time. And a lot of what he did after that has some of that (dark comedy). And whether it's Clockwork Orange, which is a black comedy about the mechanical nature of people being driven by desires, including sadistic and sexual desires, and then on through Barry Lyndon, who's a kind of A Clockwork Orange himself from an earlier period, and through these other films that you discussed — in many of them, very obviously in the Marine Corps one — what was that one called?
Jasun Horsley: Full Metal Jacket.
Kevin Barrett: Right. And obviously in A Clockwork Orange, too. To me, all of these films are comedies. And I remember just laughing, literally laughing like crazy, all the way through Barry Lyndon at his vision of humanity being so mindless, so robotic, so clockwork. It's liberating, because it makes us aware of that aspect of ourselves and others around us. And it reminds us that there's something else, a spark of divine consciousness in us that shouldn't be disappearing and letting us be these hilariously stupid, mindless, mechanical clockwork orange robots.
So that's the way I read his work. And I read it as a desperate attempt to provoke awareness and non-attachment. What's Alex's problem in Clockwork Orange? He's attached to his violent, sadistic, erotic impulses. And what's the problem of the characters in Dr. Strangelove? Same thing, basically. What's the problem with Barry Lyndon? Same thing, basically. They're all prisoners of their mechanical nature. And to me, Kubrick is revealing this, and that revelation is challenging us and sort of forcing us to be more than that. We laugh at all the horror of it and are liberated to know that we are supposed to be something more than that. So he's a satirist who's not championing lifeless Clockwork Orange mechanistic life. He is satirizing it and making us laugh at it and be aware of it and not participate in it.
Jasun Horsley: Well, that brought up a lot of points in my mind. Maybe the main one, the last thought I had that is the easiest to retrieve, is that the counterargument to that would be 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Kevin Barrett: Which I didn't like very much.
Jasun Horsley: All right. Well, that's the head cornerstone of his work. Anyway, I brought it up because I think it's a stretch to say that something like A Clockwork Orange is a comedy. It could have been done that way. But I don't think he did it. I do know what you're saying. I think Kubrick did have a satirical view of human beings. But I think that's inseparable from his nihilistic attitude. And I think there probably was a turning point around Dr. Strangelove, actually, because they started that as straight, and then they decided to turn it into comedy because it was too absurd. And so maybe there was a kind of giving up that happened in Kubrick at that point. That would be an interesting thing to explore.
Kevin Barrett: Giving up on the human race.
Jasun Horsley: "Let's just turn it into a joke." And I think that's dangerous, for lack of a better word. I think that's irresponsible. I'm not against black comedies by any means, but I think they should be funny, for one thing. Dr. Strangelove was quite funny, but...
Kevin Barrett: Nobody else seemed to think Barry Lyndon was funny. I was the only person laughing.
Jasun Horsley: That's an example of the subjective Kubrick experience, and I'm not going to try and take that away from anyone, because that's part of my thesis. But I just finished the point about 2001, which is A, there's nothing comic about it, it's a very serious work, whatever you think of it. And B, that film is probably the only one he's made (where) one would have to argue in a more nuanced way that it was nihilistic, because it's a film that offers hope. I consider it a deeply bogus transhumanist kind of hope. But nonetheless, it's offering the Starchild, which is the Superman, through evolution, through violence, evolutionary violence, that we will reach this endpoint through the Stargate and be reborn as this cosmic being. Did Kubrick believe that? I think we have to leave that open. But certainly that was the closest that he came to some kind of answer to the problem of humanity. The rest of the time, as you say, he just made fun of it, essentially.
But I think rather than continue on this particular track — because it's very interesting, I could go on for hours, but I just underscore that the aesthetic qualities of Kubrick's films, which are inseparable from whether you like them or not, are secondary to to what I'm writing about in The Kubrickon. Of course, I am using the films as examples, but only and as far as their aesthetic qualities and effects support or or don't support my thesis, which is that he wasn't making ordinary movies, that he was involved in something very different. And so all the qualities of his films, whether you like them or you don't, need to be looked at within through that lens.
Kevin Barrett: Let's get into your thesis. I don't fully understand the thesis, because it seems that if you were going to create AI and you wanted to have it understand human subjectivity, I'm not clear about why having a cult of Kubrick with all of these people projecting subjective interpretations of Kubrick films would help you that much. There's already a cult of Joyce, people doing exactly the same thing with Joyce, and a lot of other people (as well).
Jasun Horsley: Number one, they're not doing it on the Internet. And number two, they're not doing it with imagery. Although that's perhaps secondary. Kubrick was aware that the Internet was being developed during the mid-sixties with DARPA. The Internet itself is a very different environment, if you will, as we've seen in the last ten years with Cambridge Analytica, Brexit, Trump's election, what's being revealed about Twitter, what we already knew about Facebook. The Internet was designed as a military weapon from the start. But it's become more and more demonstrably a form of capturing attention, of gathering data on individuals, and then using that data for various ends — the most simple and basic in terms of selling stuff, and then the more sophisticated in terms of determining the outcomes of elections and even well, determining them in both senses of the word.
Kevin Barrett: And feeding big data to AI and creating an AI.
Jasun Horsley: Right. So the overarching thesis is that we're moving towards a technocratic cybernetic society where everything is regulated by some sort of presiding intelligence which can function independently of human choices and human actions, and that is essentially artificial intelligence.
Kevin Barrett: I agree with that. But where does Kubrick come in?
Jasun Horsley: According to my thesis, he was one of the pioneers who understood that in order to have an algorithm-based artificial intelligence structure or edifice regulating society, you need human input. It's not enough for the big brain scientists to create it and then start beaming the audience. The audience has to actually become participatory in it. Because where is the data going to come from? Mass observation was used in the thirties, as I wrote about in The Vice of Kings, without computers. They were just going around bars and talking to people in Britain, spies, essentially, pretending to be ordinary people, just talking to as many people as they could.
Kevin Barrett: Focus groups.
Jasun Horsley: Yeah, writing it all down and amassing it in order to understand how best to influence people and anticipate what they would do. So it goes back a long time pre-computers. But obviously the game got upped very rapidly with cybernetics. And Kubrick anticipated that with the Internet and video games there would be more and more opportunity for a participatory two-way flow between Big Brother and the masses that Big Brother is controlling. And that people's own attention could be used not just to fuel and inform the machinery, but inseparable from that too, to control them. The more you capture people's attention, the more you can influence their decisions. That's tautological, really. And at the same time you're capturing their attention in a way that's participatory. They're not just watching, they're interacting, they're putting in data. And so on the one hand, they're putting more and more of their energy and attention into the machine, the cybernetic infrastructure. But on the other hand, they're also becoming more and more engaged with it. And therefore more and more pf their choices are going to be more and more dictated by the sea of data that they're helping to to replenish.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah, the Internet's doing all this. But what's the special element that Kubrick's giving?
Jasun Horsley: It began with the critics and the intelligentsia writing lots of articles and books: "Kubrick is great. Kubrick is great." Just this mantra that was laying the groundwork, that kind of obsessive attention to Kubrick, and what it laid the groundwork for is this: There's a very active, very engaged cult of Kubrick out there. And their medium is the Internet. They refer to the movies. But then they take the images, they reproduce them, they create videos and they create commentaries. There are sites pages and pages long that analyze every single frame of The Shining, the different angles of the camera. It's quite surreal.
Kevin Barrett: I saw a little bit of this after your book alerted me to it. I really didn't know it had reached that point. They make the Finnegans Wake fanatics look pretty tame.
Jasun Horsley: Right. So, Kubrick himself kept files on his audience in terms of anyone who wrote to him. He always kept the letters and he kept them in a filing system. And they were organized according to different qualities and also location. And his assistant, I think it was Andrew Frewen, referred to these as "Kubrick's irregulars," after the Sherlock Holmes thing. Sherlock Holmes had this band of urchins and whatnot who he could deploy when he needed to perform a psychological operation. And so Kubrick would sometimes actually contact these fans if they lived in a town where he wanted to check on something. So if you think of (Kubrick's irregulars) extending to these thousands, perhaps maybe not hundreds of thousands, but tens of thousands of Kubrick fanatics who are working away on the Internet: they're creating websites, they're generating more and more interest and obsession around the idea that Kubrick wasn't just the greatest filmmaker ever, but he was some kind of mastermind who was communicating the secrets of the universe. All of that creates the kind of fevered intensity of consciousness that is both dependent on the machinery of the Internet, but at the same time animating it. So it's like the pod people in the Matrix or the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But the people in the pods, in the Matrix, are batteries. And it's not just the human energy that powers the Matrix, it's the consciousness. Because the Matrix couldn't create a dream world if it didn't have the sleeping people to generate the images.
Kevin Barrett: The Matrix is a good metaphor for what's really going on with the Internet and the possible development of A.I. based on the big data that's available from the Internet. Because we're all feeding our obsessions into the Internet, whatever our obsessions are, Kubrick or what have you. What I'm getting out of your argument is that it's not a literal claim that this is really going to advance an actual A.I. breakthrough, thanks to Kubrick, but rather it looks to me like what you're presenting is another metaphor: A metaphor for that kind of obsession, by way of the extremism of the Kubrick cult with their attention to detail and so on. Their extreme fanaticism for what they're interested in — like everybody else on the Internet. Some people watch cat videos. And people's particular obsessions and interests are being catalogued by the big data miners who are creating A.I. based on it. So it seems to me you're giving us a metaphor for that, rather than a literal argument that the first A.I. is going to be named the Stanley Kubrick Fan Club.
Jasun Horsley: Well, it's partly a metaphor, and then it's partly an example. Because you're right, it's happening everywhere and with everyone. But also there's the factor of intentionality, and of the early adopter, if you like, that Kubrick may have been. I keep my thesis loose in terms of the facts. I've got no smoking gun that he was actually involved in some plan to create artificial intelligence. It's all deductive.
Kevin Barrett: You're actually kind of going down the same path that you're criticizing here, like the people who were so obsessed with Kubrick staging the moon landings and stuff. You're going them one better.
Jasun Horsley: Yeah, well, that's right. I'm aware of the irony of that and that he kind of captured me, even though I was doing everything I could to resist and show other people that they'd been captured, but he'd already captured me in a certain sense...
Kevin Barrett: You're a character in the Kubrick matrix.
Jasun Horsley: "You need to get out." I think that line is in the book, the caretaker Jack. But we all are, aren't we? I mean, whether it's Kubrick or, as I said, for me it was Clint Eastwood or David Bowie. Kubrick is just the latest case study. But there's closer to a smoking gun with Kubrick. And so it's less of a metaphor. He was demonstrably interested in artificial intelligence and computers and the various things I lay out in the book. And in terms of artificial intelligence being a metaphor, I think we are seeing the emergence of artificial intelligence now. That is my point of view. In Big Mother I get into what that really means. And the short version is that I feel that artificial intelligence is is an oxymoron. There's no such thing and there never will be. But there are discarnate entities who know how to inform and influence and incarnate through technology. That's my basic thesis.
Kevin Barrett: The jinn.
Jasun Horsley: The jinn. Thank you. Exactly. So you're familiar with that? Of course, because of your own interest (in Islam). I feel we are seeing that. And so the technology is becoming more and more sentient and more and more animate and more and more involved, algorithmically and otherwise, in our decisions and in our actions. And that seems to me well worth developing a deeper awareness of. And so I was willing to go back into the Overlook and look at Kubrick and just try and lay it out in this book, knowing that it's risky. As you said, I end up getting pulled into the same trap I'm trying to free others from. Not because Kubrick is so important or his movies matter to me so much, but because what can be demonstrated, I believe, through his intentions and his methodologies, is something that is absolutely urgently present in our lives now in the form of this technological incursion into human consciousness.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah. And I think this is why you've managed to write a rather brilliantly insightful book about somebody you hate. It's rare that anyone can ever pull that off. The book opens by considering Eyes Wide Shut, which you particularly hate. I can't really blame you for that. On the other hand, I guess I was one of the majority of people who on first viewing felt somewhere between sort of mystified and stimulated to try to figure out what was it that was so interestingly strange about this film. I wasn't bored, I wasn't yawning and saying,oh, this is stupid or anything like that. I was watching and it was interestingly strange, but off in a kind of almost borderline repulsive way. And, of course, professional conspiracy theorists like me are obliged to posit the possibility that a cult, not entirely unlike the one depicted in the film, may have knocked off Kubrick shortly after he finished the film. I did interview Jay Weidner about this ten years ago or so, maybe more, actually. And Jay, of course, believed that Kubrick sat down with the producers, showed them his cut, and the producers got very, very angry.
And then a few weeks later, Kubrick was dead. So there's that conspiracy theory, quote unquote, that he was revealing something that he shouldn't have revealed. It's parallel to the conspiracy theories about Mozart, that Mozart was killed for revealing the Masonic knocks in the Magic Flute. And so in any case, I emerged from that film with those kinds of reactions and thinking that what we saw was probably not the director's cut. And I guess that's been confirmed? It was rather what the studio bosses were willing to put out after Kubrick was dead, maybe after they had killed him, or their friends in their cult killed him. So that was my take on it. But after reading your chapter, I saw the references to that French film critic who pointed out that the film is exposing Operation Monarch and that (Nicole Kidman's characther), the wife, is apparently, (according to) the subtext of the film, in a sex cult operation, a Monarch-style sex cult, and that the daughter of the couple is (at the end of the film) kidnapped by members of the cult who had been there at the cult's orgy.
That reading strikes me as very, very persuasive. And it seems to me that that's precisely what Kubrick wanted us to get out of it. And who knows what the original director's cut version would have been. But again, that would support my thesis that from Dr. Strangelove on Kubrick is exposing the horror of the way the human species is allowing itself to be ruled. And that the purpose is not so much to get everybody talking about these horrific monarch cults that run sex slavery rings with brainwashed traumatized children who are brought up throughout life to be sex slaves and drug couriers and assassins and things like that. He's provoking us to think about this and talk about it and exchange ideas obsessively on the Internet about it in order to wake us up so that we put an end to this in the same way that he's making us laugh at the mechanical nature of humans, ourselves and people around, (in a way that) is designed to wake us up so that we stop being mechanical. So that's my positive evaluation of the purpose of Eyes Wide Shut. And you're welcome to rebut it.
Jasun Horsley: Yeah. Well, there's a number of different ways that I would go about it. First off, being the film itself, which is so far from an exposé of anything depraved, in my view, that it's kind of ludicrous. Because the actual orgy is just that. It's an orgy with people in masks. And okay, there's the death of the woman, but it's not really particularly sinister. Not in the age post-Jimmy Savile and post-Jeffrey Epstein. It's pretty whitebread. So that's number one.
Kevin Barrett: Because we're supposed to slowly discover the monarch angle and then talk about it.
Jasun Horsley: Well, right. But the monarch thing is no big deal either. That stuff's been on the Internet since the seventies. There's a larger point here which I've made at various times, which doesn't necessarily have to refer to this idea of revelation of the method, which you may have heard about, which is that these secret societies actually want us to know what they're doing, incrementally, because it makes it easier for them to get away with them. Because by knowing and not resisting or objecting, we're consenting. I do think there's a measure of truth in this.
Kevin Barrett: So we always have to say we object. And I want to put it on the record that I object to Operation Monarch.
Jasun Horsley: Well, I object to cruelty to children, certainly. That's somewhere I'll definitely draw a very clear line. And I've explored that in many of my books. But there was none of that in Eyes Wide Shut. It was just consensual adults having sex or paid sex workers, basically. Completely harmless. And, you know, in the post woke age that we live in, I don't know how anyone could argue that Eyes Wide Shut....
Kevin Barrett: But he did that on purpose. That's the whole point. The whole point is that you know there's something really creepy, but you can't put your finger on what it is.
Jasun Horsley: Yeah, but the problem is that the creepiness is inseparable from bad acting, bad dialogue, really bad staging, which I do argue might have been intentional, but it doesn't seem consistent with the idea that Kubrick was trying to expose dark goings on by the elite.
Kevin Barrett: He's exposing a society that is insane in allowing this elite (to do these things).
Jasun Horsley: Kubrick himself was an insider. This is the thing that people forget. He was the most powerful film director in history. He could have made any film he wanted. I can't possibly buy that he would get stopped, much less murdered. This guy was an insider. If he was what people claim, if he was actually trying to undermine the powers of society, corporate society, government, he would not have continued making movies. It's ridiculous.
David Icke would be a counterpoint in both points I'd like to make. One is: Does David Icke really do any good to the human race by revealing all these things, even if they're true? I honestly don't think he does. I think there's probably a few people who go from David out to a much deeper, more considered exploration and maybe get through the David Ike rabbit hole or the Alex Jones rabbit hole. The majority don't. They just become more and more conspiratainmented-out and titillated and excited and paranoid and weirded out by all this stuff, but it doesn't make any profound changes at all. And the second point about David or Alex Jones is: How come they're able to continue platforming to hundreds of thousands or millions of people if they're subversive threats? We know that governments have been killing subversive people in society who really have some kind of influence which isn't part of the program. They just take them out.
Kevin Barrett: That's if it's monolithic. But what if you have lots of powerful people and some of them are using monarch sex slaves and a few of them are actually producing those sex slaves, but a lot of them aren't. And Kubrick happens to be one who isn't. And he's just told us about the ones who are, and he's horrified by that in the same way he's horrified by the nuclear command structure in Dr. Strangelove.
Jasun Horsley: The first point remains: It doesn't make any difference if you make a movie about stuff, if it doesn't lead to a really deep understanding of these problems. And Eyes Wide Shut is never going to do that. And number two, he was Kubrick to the end. I mean, look at Julian Assange if you want to see what happens to somebody who really does rock the boat: bad things happen. They don't just carry on getting multi-million dollar deals. It's absurd.
Kevin Barrett: So you think Weidner's thesis that he was killed because of Eyes Wide Shut is absurd and it was a coincidence that he died shortly after the screening?
Jasun Horsley: Well, did he die, number one? We have to ask about Jeffrey Epstein as well. Funnily enough, I lived in Hampstead in early 2000, 2001, and there was a man that I would pass in a window every day and he would sit at his desk and he had this beard and these glasses. And my friend and I used to joke that it was Kubrick. Because it looked so much like Kubrick. But of course, we just thought it was a joke. But now I wonder. Maybe it was him.
But that was just a frivolous aside, really. But Jay Weiner's thesis: To me, that's part of the mystification of Kubrick. You can't verify it and it doesn't answer many questions about Eyes Wide Shut. The cut that we got was certainly close to Kubrick's cut, just going by the basic mainstream facts. You never really know what to believe, but there doesn't seem to be much good, solid evidence (for Weidner's thesis).
Kevin Barrett: Well, why did they withhold the director's cut? They could make a lot of money out of it.
Jasun Horsley: Well, who says they have, besides Jay Weidner?
Kevin Barrett: I thought the mainstream narrative is that, yes, this is not the director's cut, and the director's cut is unavailable. There are scenes that were taken out and they've never been made available.
Jasun Horsley: No, I don't think so. It's worth looking into for you if you're not sure. But I certainly didn't find anything suggesting that. I've got an academic book on Eyes Wide Shut.
Kevin Barrett: Maybe I was listening to Weidner too much. I should get him back on (Truth Jihad Radio) and see what he has to say, if he's still around.
Jasun Horsley: It's hard to imagine that Eyes Wide Shut could ever really be much good, no matter how much they restored missing scenes and stuff. The film that we got, I agree, is very interesting. It's very strange. It's also well edited and well put together. I mean, technically, it doesn't look like some hack (did it).
I just read recently it was Sydney Pollack (who was in the movie) who took over editing towards the end, because Kubrick hadn't finished. Well, Pollack's a respected filmmaker and was very close to Kubrick, so it seems unlikely to me that there was some conspiracy there to suppress it. And again, referring to the point about: What's so shocking in Eyes Wide Shut? There are countless other movies, admittedly not with Kubrick's name on them, that do explore these things. The Manchurian Candidate was made in 1962. There are many movies that are accessible that have exposed these things, and it just seems part of the entertainment industry and even the conspiracy (world) is to turn these things into forms of entertainment. And if I look at The X-Files, for example, that didn't further the cause of understanding the UFO problem at all. It didn't raise awareness. It just turned it into entertainment and created more and more of an audience, a class of people who believe it's true, but it's not grounded in any real personal research or deep personal self-examination. To me, that's the flaw in so much of what I call conspiratainment: These kinds of realities that are so deep and dark and destructive that you can't approach them in the way that you approach not only entertainment, but even the way you would approach mathematics or English or other kinds of study. I'm sure that you would agree with this because I know you're spiritually oriented yourself. It's a spiritual quest to save the soul. It is that and nothing else. So if it's not allowing us to become more and more aligned with reality and more and more deeply responsive and responsible to the presence of evil in our lives, then it's a trap. It's absolutely a trap. And I'd say 99.9999 of conspiracy material and conspiracy consumers have fallen into that trap.
Kevin Barrett: I think that's a pretty good critique. And it dovetails with your critique of Kubrick and his work and the way it's been used. It makes a good metaphor for the way the Internet steals people's souls and is is ultimately a dead end and a trap and a kind of a kind of matrix. We need something more than that to save ourselves from these negative things. Rather than just talking about them and much less making entertainment about them or even satirizing them, we need to take a step beyond that and try to actually make things better, which ultimately is going to be a matter of probably (saving) our own souls and the people that we know well. There's no magic bullet that's going to cure the situation for all of humanity. And I suppose somebody like Kubrick might have that kind of revelation with Dr. Strangelove that it's kind of hopeless trying to save the world through communicating to large numbers of people. And instead he just became a satirical artist, I guess, and ultimately that path isn't going to be saving a whole lot of souls.
Looking back at the films that I've watched in my life, the vast majority of them tended to put me to sleep, spiritually and intellectually. Kubrick's don't, they kind of wake me up. In terms of what's out there, whether it's what's out there on the internet or what's out there in cinema, I think Kubrick's work has not really been a negative. It's probably been among the experiences I've had that have led me to be spiritually engaged.
Jasun Horsley: Well, it's like that fable where one thing happens and it seems like a bad thing, but then it leads to another thing, which is a good thing. And that leads to another thing, which is a bad thing. And so this wise man just keeps saying, "Well, I don't know. I don't know if that was good or not, because we just see that evil happens, but at least there's something good. So then we think it's good and then it leads to something evil. So it depends how far back we're willing to pull to see the big picture.
I know somebody personally who said they might have signed up for the military if they hadn't seen Full Metal Jacket. I can't possibly argue with them that that film didn't have a positive impact on their lives.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah, I think I knocked on doors for the nuclear freeze partly because of Dr. Strangelove.
Jasun Horsley: But if the context is saving ourselves, which obviously is a very big phrase, but if it's a spiritual context, then it's necessary to look at all of the different elements that some supposed artifact and some supposed experience or effect is embedded in. And that's what I attempt to do with Kubrick. To say that those films are good films or that they had a profound impact by no means goes counter to my thesis at all.
I'm certainly not arguing that they're crap films, except in the case of Eyes Wide Shut. Because I'm looking at what happens if a film that is somehow demonstrably experientially bad or off, as you put it, is received as this great work of art, and how we're influenced by that. Because when the film first came out, most people, critics and ordinary audiences, saw that something was wrong and he hadn't really succeeded.
Kevin Barrett: "This can't be his final cut!"
Jasun Horsley: Yeah, right. But over time it was re-evaluated, and now it's talked about as his last masterpiece. Well, my point of view is that it's the same film that people saw the first time around, and it is a bad film and an excruciating creepily bad film, albeit perhaps intentionally so. But those of us who have changed our point of view (in favor of Eyes Wide Shut) have managed to distort our own perceptions in order to perceive something in the way that we're being influenced to perceive it. And that's propaganda derangement. We see that throughout the world in countless different ways. And so for me, that's an example of what Kubrick was involved in: distorting our own perceptual faculties, our own criteria for aesthetic judgment. (It's a form of) a cognitive impairment. I consider the oeuvre overall to have been extremely harmful to human faculties. But I don't lay that at Kubrick's door. Because I've written an 800 page book about Hollywood and the superculture. It's endemic to the art and science of motion pictures. I consider that to be a basic evil in our time. And this is somebody who grew up on them and wrote his first books about them and still to this day will watch a movie and get swept away by it. So when I say evil, that's the big picture. I'm not saying I'm not really there, but I would say from a God's eye view, God's really saying, "don't look at that stuff. Don't look at that stuff. This is the neti neti, like in the Buddhists' bardo realms. When you die, there are all of these things that will capture your attention and you have to say no.
Kevin Barrett: Well, Jasun, I wish you could have been at that Hollywoodism conference in Iran that critiqued Hollywood values. I think you would have had one of the most powerful possible critiques to present at that conference. But we hit the end of the hour for this show, and it's been great. I think we've done the best of Gene Siskel and Robert Ebert one better in arguing about Kubrick.
Jasun Horsley: Thanks.
Kevin Barrett: Keep up the great work. I look forward to seeing the next installment of the Kubrickon and to continuing to pursue your really interesting body of work. It's really good stuff.
Jasun Horsley: Great. Well, thank you. Kevin, Thank you very much.
