Kubrick's eyes wide open.There are very few directors that have imparted such a singular imprimatur on their work as Stanley Kubrick. Hitchcock and Coppola come close to Kubrick in their own way, but Hitchcock basically stayed within one genre (suspense/mystery) and Coppola dropped a few bombs which more or less bent him towards the conformity of the studios. Coppola hit his peak with "Apocalypse Now!". Notice, I didn't mention Spielberg or Lucas in the mix. Nor did I include Welles, who basically made one great movie, two very good ones, and a lot of questions marks.
Kubrick's films were almost all well received critically. Some even did well financially, all were fairly different from not another and yet, there is a them that exists throughout all of them, like a great arc against the backdrop of the latter part of the 20th Century.
Kubrick's storied career really kicks off with "The Killing" a gritty, crime drama about a heist at a racetrack, where betrayal uncoils like snake and culminates with "Eyes Wide Shut" where secrets and betrayal are the common theme, gilded over a much deeper exploration of something decidedly dark and more sinister than most people would ever dare to imagine.
There are no charts for Kubrick which include the ascendant/birth time, so we'll have to use the personal planets to uncover the mystery of Stanley Kubrick:
Kubrick was born on July 27th. 12928. He was an Earth Dragon, capable of making things happen on the material plane and quite frankly beyond. While his Sun was brightly illuminated by the sign of Leo, which is now rising in the northern hemisphere, hot on Orion's tail, it's Kubrick's Moon in Scorpio which might provide the skeleton key for understanding not just his chart, but his overall strategy and art.
Since we don't have his actual birth time, locating the degree of his Moon is not the easiest of tasks. But if we simply look at the Scorpio Moon on face value and then back engineer it's connection to the rest of the chart, we might be able to get a much clearer picture of its importance.
The Scorpio Moon is dark, deep, intense, sexual, possessive, secretive, psychic, slightly sadistic (more on this later) and deeply regenerative. People that have Scorpio Moons are privy to secrets and hold their own closely to their chests. When we look at Kubrick's career, "2001, A Space Odyssey" is the one film most associated with the director's greatness. Here, the central character of the film during it's first part, is The Moon itself. The film unfolds as a piece of classic ballet. The opening sequences are like a primordial "Rite Of Spring" where early man and his savage nature encounters something mysterious and quite possibly transforms the nature of the species itself. "2001" transitions from the thumping heat and violence of early man, to the gossamer like grace of objects floating in space, dancing between the void of The Earth and The Moon. It's important to note that the effects that Kubrick was busting out for "2001" were truly mind-blowing. Science fiction, especially space science fiction films at that time, were mostly clumsy efforts that couldn't quite capture the feeling and the esthetics of life in space. We often take such effects for granted now, especially in the light of CGI, but what Kubrick was able to accomplish was nothing short of paradigm shifting when it came to film and effects. But it's The Moon and the secrets of The Moon which sets the stage for the rest of 2001 and beyond.
My guest on FAR tonight,
Jay Weidner is an expert on the films of Kubrick and it is his contention, based on a number of factors that Kubrick was deeply involved with NASA at the time of the filming of 2001 and actually filmed the staged Moon landings of Armstrong and company. This would be in complete alignment with his Scorpio Moon and holding and revealing secrets.
Fast forward to Kubrick's last film, "Eyes Wide Shut" starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. "Eyes" literally put a dagger into the shaky marriage of Cruise and Kidman. While Kubrick was certainly banking on their star power to put fannies in the seats, I think he was much more interested in cracking ope their psyches and probing into their intimacy to expose something that was more or less like the real dynamic displayed on the film. In essence, Kubrick wanted to highlight Cruise's inherent naivete, while also exploiting his connections to Scientology, which Kubrick saw as basically a mind control technology. When you watch "Eyes" you're watching Kubrick peel back the layers of facade in the relationship of Kidman and Cruise one level. He reportedly would have them do takes on scenes hundreds of times. This is thoroughly emblematic of The Scorpio Moon. Kubrick wanted to crack their shell and he did. Not long after "Eyes" Cruise and Kidman announced their split. Surprised? Nope. But that's just one level of Kubrick's Scorpio Moon in play. Like other protagonists such as Malcolm McDowell, Ryan O'Neal, Jack Nicholson and Matthew Modine, that preceded Cruise as the leads in Kubrick's works, he uses Cruise in the title role of "Bill" to fall through a crack in reality and get lost in a rabbit hole filled with mirrors, terror, dark revelation and in most cases, destruction of self, either physically or psychically. In "Eyes" Kubrick takes the terminally gullible Cruise and drops him into a world that he is far from prepared to deal with. Cruise enters into a realm of ritualized sex, overseen by an occulted order of dark priests. The "willing" participants of the order are all fetching and seemingly unobtainable goddesses, tall. lithe and almost all, unmistakably white. One of the other themes that Kubrick is also more than just hinting at is not just ritual sex in circles of power, but also mind-controlled sex slaves as well. The sub-plot between Cruise and Kidman gives enormous clues to what Kubrick was attempting to portray and communicate to us. The descent, sex, taboo, secrecy, psychological machinations, all are apart of Kubrick's dark and Scorpionic Moon.
But The Moon takes other shapes and forms as well. Kubrick's natal Mercury in Cancer at 16 degrees is conjunct his natal Pluto in Cancer, at 17 degrees. Again, we are looking at the realm of secrecy, sexuality what's hidden beneath the surface, the power of intuition and of course the power of The Moon itself. There is also a pretty good chance that both Pluto and Mercury trined his Scorpionic Moon. In essence, it many ways, it was Kubrick's destiny to have The Moon play such a large and important role in his life on so many levels.
Please join me tonight when I connect with Jay Weidner as we
"Gaze Behind The Veil Of Stanley Kubrick" on FAR.
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