Red Cloak's Identity In Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick’s posthumous masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut enchanted audiences upon its launch in 1999, rising as one of many greatest swan songs in directorial history. Amongst Eyes Huge Shut’s many iconic characters—together with Victor, Invoice, and the latter’s craving spouse, Alice—one determine stands out because the paradigm of the movie’s most closely-guarded secrets and techniques—the enigmatic cult chief recognized merely as “Purple Cloak.”

Whereas Kubrick purposely saved the id of Purple Cloak and his devotees a thriller, the movie offers a number of hints as to the cult chief’s true persona. Although these clues have befuddled followers for years—much like other Kubrick films, such as The Shining—their inclusion reveals a a lot bigger conspiracy at play that blurs the road between desires and actuality.

Purple Cloak’s Identification Is Hinted At By A Newspaper That Invoice Reads

A powerful trace towards Purple Cloak’s true id comes within the latter half of the movie when Invoice (Tom Cruise) stops in a restaurant and picks up a newspaper, discovering that an ex-beauty queen—who’s later revealed by Victor (Sydney Pollack) to be the lady that sacrificed herself for Invoice—has died of a drug overdose in a lodge room.

Nonetheless, what’s fascinating about this text is the connection it reveals that the ex-beauty queen—aka “Mandy” (Julienne Davis)—had with London clothier “Leon Vitali,” who, based on the article, allegedly turned enamored together with her “not for the way she wore his beautiful garments in public, however for the way she wowed him by taking them off in personal, seductive solo performances.”

For these unaware, Leon Vitali is the true identify of Kubrick’s longtime collaborator, who performs Purple Cloak in Eyes Huge Shut, strongly implying that the style designer is the person behind the crimson robes and golden masks. Moreover, this revelation additionally strains up with Purple Cloak’s sinister English accent, making it additional believable that Vitali is the mysterious cult chief.

Leon Vitali additionally starred in Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 movie Barry Lyndon because the conceited and privileged “Lord Bullingdon.”

Who Else Purple Cloak Might Be In Eyes Huge Shut

Victor Ziegler and Bill Harford in Eyes Wide Shut

Leon Vitali is just not the one believable character behind Purple Cloak’s masks. One other possible determine is Invoice’s rich affected person Victor, who’s proven early on within the movie to carry the identical sexual proclivities because the masked cultists and brazenly admits to Invoice that he was on the mansion on the night time the curious physician trespassed on the erotic ritual.

As to why Victor is one other possible candidate for Purple Cloak’s true id, three clues stand out. One, Victor is already proven to have a relationship with Mandy, very practically witnessing her overdose throughout the movie’s opening Christmas social gathering. Seeing as Mandy is proven to carry authority inside the secret society, this affiliation possible is not a coincidence.

Two, there may be the query of Victor’s threatening demeanor throughout the scene by which he divulges his attendance on the mansion, whereby he very passively aggressively asserts to Invoice that “any person died—it occurs on a regular basis.” Lastly, in stated scene, Victor habitually faucets a billiard ball in a trend paying homage to Purple Cloak’s ritualistic twin strikes of his workers.

Why Eyes Huge Shut By no means Explicitly Reveals Purple Cloak’s Identification

Whereas Victor and Vitali are each prime candidates for Purple Cloak, the movie goes out of its method to depart his id—and the identities of these within the secret society—wholly inconclusive. This falls according to a lot of Kubrick’s filmography, as the director famously believed that ambiguity higher promotes a narrative’s metaphysical meanings and thereby appeals additional to the unconscious.

Moreover, by leaving the identities of Purple Cloak and the key society ambiguous, the risk in opposition to Invoice turns into more and more extra sinister resulting from each the worry of the unknown and the concept that the character of the enigmatic in storytelling creates the phantasm of far larger and extra ubiquitous powers being at play in an in any other case finite world and narrative.

Lastly, the movie’s standing as a dreamlike narrative is likewise an argument for its ambiguous nature, as its ritual displays each Invoice’s recurring visions of Alice’s (Nicole Kidman) fantasy with the naval officer and—much more so—Alice’s dream later within the movie, which each enigmatically parallels her husband’s expertise on the mansion and additional exemplifies the paranoid nature of the unconscious.

Why Eyes Huge Shut Nonetheless Resonates With Audiences Right this moment

Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut — Tom Cruise in Eyes Huge Shut

Other than its powerfully sexualized nature, what separates Eyes Huge Shut from the remainder of Kubrick’s filmography is its depiction of energy and the implications of pursuing infidelity—a theme that resonates 26 years later in a society that—whereas maybe not dominated so monoculturally because the mainstream sexualized panorama of the late ’90s—is however pervaded by algorithms that mass-promote sexual imagery.

Eyes Huge Shut is predicated on Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella “Rhapsody: A Dream Novel.”

Thus, the mystique, surrealism, and nervousness surrounding Kubrick’s final undertaking stay a testomony to the humanity’s interminable cycles of temptation and want, with the elusive nature of Purple Cloak and his cult of masked followers serving as a dire warning to these looking for adultery and a shadowy reflection of our species’ most innate and suppressed sexual wishes—whether or not actual or dreamed.