The "Magic Circle" game that appears to the left of the shot above appears in the final scene of Eyes Wide Shut, when the Harfords are Christmas shopping at a toy store. The red color clearly relates to the red carpet at Somerton (third from top), and the red felt of the pool table at Ziegler's mansion (not pictured), while magic alludes to the sinister and the occult.
A brief investigation of the fictional board game by scholar Julie Kearns is mentioned in a post on the Somerton Tumblr (dedicated to Kubrick), as well as on her website, Idyllopus Press. Kearns speculates that the board game is a sign of misdirection in the plot, as magic itself is about misdirection (and, I would add, deception). Is Bill finally facing reality with his eyes open?
The intractable ambiguities of Eyes Wide Shut (EWS) prevent us from making any one conclusion: I think EWS is the most difficult of Kubrick's films to categorize or even to analyze. Countless scenes, and details within scenes, can be read multiple ways - change one fact and you have to change all the others, lest you accept a paradoxical conclusion. Which, again, I think is the point - the relativity of any one conclusion.
Regardless, I will offer some marginalia on the inclusion of the "Magic Circle" board game and any significance it may offer to the film Eyes Wide Shut. For example, beginning with the observation that the Magic Circle is in fact a real magic club founded in London in 1905, Kearns mentions a certain Martin Chapender, a magician whose expertise involved billiard balls. Chapender died of meningitis at 25 (or 26). When Bill visits Ziegler in the billiards room, Ziegler pours a few glasses of scotch, and remarks that it's a twenty-five year old (scotch). He tells Bill he'll send him over a case. Bill has just come from the morgue. Mandy, the dead woman whose identity he wants to confirm, was thirty years old. A "twenty-five year old" in a "case" sounds eerily like the thirty-year old on the slab.
Is Eyes Wide Shut a meditation on the morbid? Of course. But only as much as it is a meditation on fantasy and dreams. One interesting thing to consider: when people call Eyes Wide Shut a "vampire movie" it isn't an un-warranted criticism. Consider matching the fantastical with the morbid - what would we arrive at if not the notion of vampires? Folklore from Eastern Europe describes the vampire as an un-dead being who drinks blood. The vampire may attack living people, or, feast on recently deceased people or animals. We see Bill’s face come disturbingly close to the dead, naked body of Mandy in the morgue. A key detail: her eyes are open. Only in death do we see clearly? Perhaps. The scene is a somewhat overt hint at vampirism, followed by the orgy, which was more than a little sinister.
Additionally, the older man, Sandor Szavost, who dances with Alice at Ziegler's ball is Hungarian. Milich, the owner of the Rainbow costume store, has an accent that could generally be called Eastern European. The name "Milich" is common among Slavs in the Balkans. Traumnovelle is a product of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and takes place in Vienna. Not far to the east lies Romania, where Vlad the Impaler hailed from. Dracula is largely based on Vlad, whose cruel military defense tactics in Medieval times immortalized and mythologized him as the embodiment of a real vampire. Dracula, the 1897 Gothic horror novel by Bram Stoker, is the "ur-text" for modern Dracula/vampire fantasy and horror. In fact, Dracula's Death, a 1921 Hungarian silent horror film, is thought to be the first film featuring a Count Dracula character. It opened in Vienna. In Eyes Wide Shut, composer Jocelyn Pook's "Masked Ball" piece relies in part upon Orthodox Chants sung in Romanian; the chilling "magic" of Pook's work is the careful reversing of the recording, a gesture which in no subtle way invokes the idea of unholy incantations.
As to whether Eyes Wide Shut is more pessimistic or more optimistic, we, like Bill, are presented with two conflicting ideas: that Mandy simply overdosed, or, that something like a sacrifice is what actually took place. Ziegler pushes the former explanation; the entire orgy, he would have Bill believe, was staged, a sort of theatrical show. Does the vampire theme hold up, then? Yes and no: again, Bill visits the morgue. Perhaps he is grappling with the secret organization's extreme objectification of women and life in general; how could they be so careless?
The death of Martin Chapender marked the beginning of the Magic Circle; in fact, the name was chosen partly to commemorate Chapender via the initials, "MC." Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (Dream Story), which was published in 1926, came twenty-one years after 1905. Numbers like 21, 25, 26, and 30, all point to youth. Bill is modeled after the character Fridolin, who we're told is 35 - arguably a transitional age that is too old to be young, and too young to be considered old - another example of ambiguity.
There is a Blue Plaque for the Magic Circle located at Pinoli's restaurant in Soho, London, where the group was supposedly founded in 1905. Pinoli's was an Italian restaurant located at 17 Wardour Street, London, until it closed in 1949. “Pinoli” is the Italian word for “pine nut,” a small nut which is harvested from the cones of certain species of pine trees for a myriad uses in Italian cooking. Note the Verona Restaurant and Caffe de Emilio Bill passes which both point to Italy. Also, the presence of pine trees at Somerton.
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