Was "Eyes Wide Shut" a Warning?

16 snips

Mar 11, 2026

Lane Brown, features writer and lifelong Kubrick fan who investigated the Eyes Wide Shut conspiracy, joins to unpack wild theories. He recounts the film’s infamous orgy scene, Kubrick’s perfectionism and the movie’s production myths. The conversation tracks how Epstein-era revelations reignited speculation and why shadowy narratives persist.

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INSIGHT

How Epstein Renewed Eyes Wide Shut's Reputation

Eyes Wide Shut was reread after Jeffrey Epstein as a concrete warning rather than thematic resonance.
Fans claimed Kubrick encoded a real elite sex-trafficking cabal into the film, pointing to ritual imagery and alleged links to real organizations.

ANECDOTE

Lane's Early Doubts About The Warning Theory

Lane Brown noticed immediate logical problems with the conspiracy, like Kubrick considering the source novel in the 1960s long before Jeffrey Epstein existed.
He argued Kubrick would have had faster ways to expose wrongdoing than spending decades making a $60 million film.

INSIGHT

Kubrick Didn't Claim To Know A Real Cult

Multiple collaborators told Lane Kubrick wasn't encoding real-world names or secrets and often struggled to even imagine the cult he depicted.
Co-writer Frederick Raphael emphasized Kubrick didn't aim to warn the world and lacked specific knowledge.

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When Eyes Wide Shut opened in the summer of 1999, it was widely considered a disappointment. This final film from legendary director Stanley Kubrick had been sold as an erotic thriller, and potentially even a peek into the real sex lives of its then-married stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. But Eyes Wide Shut was stranger than that: a meditative art film whose much-hyped orgy scene is more creepy than sexy, run by a cabal of rich and powerful men who prey on young women.

But Eyes Wide Shut has received a burst of new attention in the last few years, amid constant revelations about a real-life cabal of rich and powerful men who prey on young women. Across the internet, cinema sleuths have been asking: is it possible Eyes Wide Shut was not fictional? Was Stanley Kubrick trying to warn the world about a real conspiracy? And if so… was he murdered for it?

In this episode of Decoder Ring, we follow Lane Brown—a lifelong Kubrick fan and features writer for New York Magazine—as he investigates this conspiracy theory and what it says about how we deal with ugly facts and murky fictions.

This episode was written and produced by Max Freedman and edited by Willa Paskin. Decoder Ring is also produced by Katie Shepherd and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281.

Sources for This Episode

Barbezat, Michael. “‘Pizzagate’ and the Nocturnal Ritual Fantasy: Imaginary Cults, Fake News, and Real Violence,” The Public Medievalist, May 4, 2017.

Brown, Lane. “The Eyes Wide Shut Conspiracy,” New York Magazine, Dec. 17, 2025.

Ebiri, Bilge. “An Oral History of an Orgy,” New York Magazine, June 27, 2019.

Nicholson, Amy. “The Year Tom Cruise Gave Not One but Two Dangerously Vulnerable Performances,” The New York Times, Aug. 27, 2024.

Raftery, Brian. “Dream Team: Cruise, Kidman, Kubrick, and the making of Eyes Wide Shut,” New York Magazine, Apr. 15, 2019.

Shapiro, Lila. “What I Learned After Watching Eyes Wide Shut 100 Times,” New York Magazine, July 1, 2019.

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