A Theological Autopsy of Kubrick’s Final Warning
**”**This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.”
John 3:19-21
Jesus Christ’ verdict of a humanities rejection of him finds its perfect cinematic analogue in Stanley Kubrick’s final and, by his own account, greatest work, Eyes Wide Shut. The film is more than a story of a troubled marriage; it is a profound and chilling distillation of a fallen world without the salvation of Christ. It presents a reality where the truth of God has been utterly inverted, and every character feverishly worships the created things - sex, power, and secret knowledge - in a desperate, fruitless attempt to fill the void left by the Creator.
“For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.”
Romans 1:25 (NASB)
Eyes Wide Shut is a two-and-a-half-hour case study of this vacuum. We follow Dr. Bill Harford on his Christmas-era odyssey as he tries to fill his own spiritual emptiness with illicit sexual encounters, the allure of elite circles, and the pursuit of forbidden knowledge. The result is not fulfillment, but a deeper, more profound despair. Kubrick, a secular master who had contemplated this story for decades, offers no reprieve, no redemption, and no savior. His film is a meticulously crafted map of a prison, but it pointedly withholds the key.
While Kubrick’s earlier film Barry Lyndon featured representations of Christ in paintings, they were consistently framed with negative connotations - as distant judges or silent witnesses to cruelty, reflecting a world where God is an absent or punitive figure. In Eyes Wide Shut, even this hollowed-out symbol is gone. In its place, we find only the glittering, demonic substitute of Santa Claus (Satan in anagram) - whose omnipresent image during the Christmas season underscores the film’s true theme: a celebration of Saturnalia, a godless festival of debauchery and inversion.
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This study will move from having our Eyes Wide Shut to having them Wide Open. It will decode the film’s dense symbology - from Freemasonry and Satanic rituals to the real-world names like Rockefeller - to argue that Kubrick was not merely making art, but issuing a coded, prophetic warning. He exposes a world where the elite operate as a satanic counter-church, where marriage and family are under siege, and where every path of transgression leads not to enlightenment, but to a devastating, hopeless end. By holding Kubrick’s bleak vision against the light of Scripture, we will not only understand his diagnosis of the disease but will also discover why the cure he could never offer is found only in the redemptive work of Christ, the true light that the darkness of Somerton can never overcome.