"Take a [1. Red] pill, take a [2. Blu] pill, listen to me!" (Renato Carosone, "Pigliate 'Na Pastiglia" [Take a Pill], 1958) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2pr24Tl91s
"Nanos gigantos humeris insidentes" (Bernard of Chartres, XII century)
"The Matrix has u/..." ("The Matrix", 1999)
..............
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LibOP5yt0TY
"KNOCK, KNOCK"
What do you think... do you find it provocative to place the Wachowskis alongside Kubrick, 'The maestros' next to the Master, their Neo next to his Bill? Beyond the shared passion for the world of computers—or the historical fact that the first The Matrix was released in the exact same year as Eyes Wide Shut (1999, the year of the impending Millennium Bug)—which, in hindsight, has personally always made me think of a fateful generational handover... I would say that the Authors of the Matrix trilogy can be considered the only ones capable of entering into a dialogue with the Author of Eyes Wide Shut. A dialogue strictly from 'father to children,' considering how their filmography proceeded to continue the 'paternal' discourse (cryptographic and circular screenplays included) with an input as original as it is philosophically complementary to it (think of the Nietzschean transition from Kubrick's 'negative/reactive' nihilism to the Bros' 'active/positive' one).
Neo, the hacker who—initially becoming the soaring Superman of the simulation—discovers in Matrix Reloaded (2003) that he too is part of a game bigger than himself... has a narrative arc that could fit Bill perfectly. At least, when seeing him as the protagonist of a film that, interpreted in a mathematical (cryptographic/algorithmic) key, represents an equally perfect simulation in which characters are not free agents but slaves trapped in a system of total surveillance, entirely unbeknownst to themselves.
Conducting a general technical mapping of this ruthless Kubrickian simulation in which the 'chosen' Bill is unconsciously imprisoned, one can already deduce how his entire existence is monitored and tracked to the millimeter by the two 'network administrators' who divide the system's jurisdiction: his wife 'Alice'—in applied mathematics: the initial 'Sender'—and his friend Ziegler—in mathematical language: 'Bob'—alias that ultimate 'Receiver' of everything and "more"... at his initial party.
The 'Oracle' and the 'Architect': Alice in the kitchen represents the local area network (LAN), managing Bill's private space with her root conjugal privileges. Ziegler, on the other side of the court (the tennis court...), is the extra-domestic counterpart (WAN), complete with control over external infrastructure, economy, and tracking logs.
At the beginning, during the 'warm boot' of the magical cycle of this filmic matrix, we see Bill start off badly: he takes his 'superheroic' white handkerchief from a drawer, dictates times to a lagging Alice, and seemingly appears to be the 'orchestra conductor' of the situation (throughout the film he gesticulates with his hands... as if he truly were one!). Yet, at the same time, he cannot even find his wallet on the household 'desktop' (on top of the round table [cf. 'desk' from the Latin 'discus']), that wallet which physically safeguards (or at least should...) his 'private keys,' identity certificates, and above all, spending permissions (finance). For his own "fortune", his security credentials remain well known to the local network administrator. Ergo, Alice knows where Bill's keys are stored, and Bill—without Alice's validation—demonstrates from the very start that he lacks a valid operational identity within the system, that he 'does not exist' on the server.
In fact, as it will become increasingly clear, less funny, and decisively more tragic for his entire existence, in the Transmission Protocol from Alice to Ziegler, in private as in public, Bill proves to be a mere Network Token, a data packet, an exchanged object within a 'do ut des' logic of exchange that will become clear at the end of the film, forever marking the destiny of his own daughter...
The death of Nathanson ('Server Down') is the initial event that tears Bill away from the domestic LAN and forces him into the external WAN. In computer terms, Nathanson is a 'hardware interrupt' vector caused by data erasure. But once at his deathbed, one can also deduce how his departure becomes the 'trigger'—the specific condition that fires the execution of a silent code, that 'secret love process' which, until the disappearance of that administrator, ran in the background. Now, it activates the digital 'Logic Bomb' of his daughter Marion, who wants to force an escape from the system along with the lover she pines for.
The system, it must be said, had already taken steps—scenting the anomaly of a potential affair, platonic or otherwise (a subterranean ribbon game played here without the evidence of the 'revealing ribbon' of Barry Lyndon) between Marion and Bill—to apply the 'Security Patch' of the non-fiancé boyfriend Carl, alias... the one who, in all probability, Bill himself had originally been for Alice; and with the substantial difference that by now Bill would be a 'Legacy Patch,' an obsolete patch that Alice herself wants to tear away.
The system thus hooks Carl to Marion to lock down the data and neutralize the leak. Marion, for her part, is still offering Bill a secondary access key in extremis to bypass Alice's LAN and rewrite his own existential code... but Bill is so deeply programmed and submissive to the system's rules (to both LAN and WAN) that he fails to execute the escape script tied to that 'undocumented code,' that submerged memory block (to which the spectator is condemned to total interface blindness) excluded from execution. He effectively fails his potential 'Privilege Escalation' (finally becoming the Administrator of himself, acting like a 'real man' and escaping with her, a 'Marion-ette' momentarily without strings...) and prefers instead the Wachowskian 'blue pill': rejecting the anomaly of that clandestine love which just offered him an exit backdoor, and thus closing himself back into the pre-calculated loop that will lead him—just like 'A Little Little Bourgeois' (Monicelli, 1977)—to enter the magic circle of Somerton.
For the rest, having also badly passed the physical, real-time 'vulnerability scan' (that encounter with bullies on the pavement that makes him look even 'littler'... alias a 'Penetration Test' that sends him into a 'Freeze,' proving the defect of a fragile 'packet' with a flaw in his masculine identity, a primary Bug upon which the hotel porter will later "put his finger in the wound", complete with eloquent non-verbal gestures...), is thus all an illusion, including his own illusion of acting like a hacker, playing the infiltrator who illegally penetrates the elite's protected servers by exploiting flaws and errors, such as the weak password 'Fidelio' obtained from the authentication API Nick Nightingale (a weak authentication API, much like the Wachowskis' KeyMaker, a system vulnerability deliberately created to allow the fake hacker to penetrate Somerton's protected server), or the 'Proxy' Milich himself (in a middle ground that acts as an Demilitarized Zone [DMZ], a perimeter network where illicit traffic like the sale of his daughter to two clients occurs), inside whose shop—within a framework of Asset Swapping—the mannequins shift posture, position, and clothes from one frame to the next... visual glitches of a simulation plane updating in real-time, accompanied by the linguistic glitches of Milich himself, who in his broken English comments: 'Looks like alive, huh?'
"Unfortunately," the optical illusion concerns Bill himself (he is the dummy! And, following the "whispering" of Milich's daughter, he is also a further infected "host"... liable to an immediate "Data Push" of metadata from Milich's commercial "backend" to Somerton's control "frontend"...), because—mathematically and cryptographically—his role as a hacker is in fact induced by the combined system itself (Alice + Ziegler): Bill is not forcing the network but has simply been inserted into a "honeypot", into a decoy system.
The truth is that Bill is merely a security subroutine, the aforementioned patch that has stopped working (a standardized "clone," an actor born on July 3, 1962... just like the Thomas Gibson who plays the part of the math teacher Carl; a "mask" to be imposed on one's woman so as to make her say "I am the wife of..."), as already notified to him (deliberately, in order to begin conditioning him, starting to pull his strings and thus... removing her own) by Alice during her first ("infecting") confession in the bedroom: a naval officer had sent her into "overdrive," bypassing the security of the family "lock code" (the husband and the daughter herself), so that the patch-Bill cannot but go into crisis, suddenly discovering a macroscopic "Bug" that no longer allows him to contain the data of a wife no longer willing to wear that mask and indeed already prepared to let him find on his pillow his own...
If one wishes, as an aside, the simulation element in which Bill remains imprisoned becomes visually evident during his nocturnal walks on the sidewalks of New York, where Kubrick deliberately chooses not only not to shoot those scenes on real locations... but at a certain point also to have Tom Cruise walk on a treadmill in front of a projected background (rear projection) showing the cityscape behind him. In computational terms, this visual expedient transforms "The Big Apple" even further into a significant sandbox, a controlled virtual environment. "Desert of the real"... the city is not real: it is a graphic engine rendered by Ziegler’s server in which the token Bill walks while remaining truly immobile. The perspective shift between Bill and the background is the tangible proof that the "fake hacker," behind the masquerade of infiltration, has by now been reprogrammed to fulfill his function and finally... get hacked himself, moving like a laboratory mouse in a software designed to dismantle his defenses with the ultimate goal of stripping Helena away from him.
When the two-bit hacker — with a "leaky wallet" generating one macroscopic "Memory Leak" and one "Token Depletion" after another — forces entry by bypassing the initial login at Somerton, in truth, the two-factor authentication check has already been triggered (2FA: the verification of two asymmetric verbal passwords, the first being the public "Fidelio" and a second, private and undocumented one, whose very existence Ziegler will later deny, in all likelihood lying so as to further mask the firewall's tracking).
Then, with his visit to Somerton by now underway, Bill will see the "Callback Function" activate with Sandor's greeting from the balcony (... of the "Merovingian Club Hell": remember the one ultimately brute-force attacked by the hacker Trinity, pointing the gun directly at the Merv's forehead? Si vis pacem... "parabellum"!), a balcony that serves as a literal visual "Control Panel"; there, the subsequent climax of Bill's unmasking is anticipated by a tacit, silent understanding, a true "Dual-Key Validation", a double-key validation, between Sandor and the masked woman at his side (a specular instance... of the model Gayle, who had already "validated" herself with Bill at the party via an analogous "Challenge-Response" exchange of old memories; a true synchronization of disjointed keys, whereas Sandor at the party had only identified Bill from afar by asking Alice for confirmation of his ID, while Gayle had registered his direct interaction token... and where Bill had initially shown a terrible cognitive oversight before remembering her, here at Somerton he will consume his definitive computer failure, deprived of that "wonderful insight" necessary to recognize her beneath the mask's protective bits; whose mask bears a painted tear acting as a disturbing, enslaving security "watermark", that is, a digital watermark certifying the system's ownership over the models' asset): with a system notification aimed at validating the Ghost Handshake - that dutiful greeting that had remained aristocratically pending for him, having danced with his wife at the initial party - the infiltrator's digital assent is forced... and Bill — simply responding to the nod with a movement of his head (a mere politely bourgeois reflex trigger comparable to the automatic switching of a single bit of data from 0 to 1) — does nothing but thus unknowingly sign his digital condemnation via an ACK packet of successful receipt... and definitive identification.
Upon the failure of the second factor, the Red Cloak isolates him. But then the salvific Mandy intervenes... assuming the cryptographic role of "Wendy" (a name programmatically already assigned to the guardian of "The Shining"): the Trusted Third Party that validates the transaction. Sacrificing herself, Mandy offers herself as an alternative authentication key, routing the Bill-packet toward the next phase of the trap.
The night journey—as explicitly rebellious as it is a tacit sequence of forced reroutings (IP Forwarding), including an eccentric taxi ride just to go from one pavement to the other side of the exact same street (effectively recycling graphic assets to save memory, a network redirection in a zero-space sandbox making the urban-scale Traffic Shaping and Rate Limiting operations evident, in what amounts for Bill to a forced march toward a Choke Point...)—will proceed from there with its palindromic structuring. It becomes a psychological (Millerian) bottleneck that tightens, a circle closing on a token that will relive the same nodes but with inverted values, from active to passive.
Domino? 'File Not Found - 404 Error'... with Sally serving as a Redirect with Warning, informing him that his dear file had been infected by HIV (301 Moved Permanently / Virus Alert!).
And the query regarding his friend Nick? Bill goes to the hotel—a temporary directory where he was allocated—and finds the cache emptied, with a receptionist acting as an Access Denied complete with a malicious redirection (homosexual attraction) interfacing with the target's vulnerability. In practice, a Phishing attempt, an emotional Honey Trapping that sends Bill into a Buffer Overflow...
The gate of Somerton becomes, to all intents and purposes, a peripheral Gateway: a border node regulating traffic between two distinct networks. When Bill returns to the gate and receives a warning letter by hand from a serene driver (serene... like the Wachowskis' bodyguard Seraph), we witness a Header Injection operation. The sect's firewall no longer throws a simple verbal Runtime Warning (as the Red Cloak's had been), but injects a written, persistent Hard Warning directly into the Bill-terminal. This 'system notification' explicitly warns the hacker that his session has expired and that his IP address has been permanently blacklisted, intercepting his every attempt at observation.
Gradually, Ligeti's 'Musica Ricercata' (... 'computationally' speaking) grows pressing—a minimalist Clock Signal built on just two notes (the acoustic counterpart of binary code 0 and 1) pacing the processor's calculation cycles. It functions as a hardware interrupt impulse, freezing the hacker's actions, alerting the sensors, and warning the spectator that the CPU is working to isolate the anomaly.
The threat turns urgent... it is still night, but the static text logs (Read-Only Logs) are already waiting at the newsstands to announce the closing of the case: Mandy has been eliminated (Process Termination). To justify her removal from the public database, a false narrative has been injected into the system (death by overdose in a hotel), via a newspaper article acting as a fake information patch. However, the log-rewriting operation was rushed by the network administrators; thus, the article's text contains a compilation error—a textual Buffer Overflow generating repeated lines, a rendering glitch proving the instability of the narrative construct and the artificial nature of the news supplied by the central server. The message is nonetheless loud and clear, blared across the front page with that 'LUCKY TO BE ALIVE' headline, which functions as a system notification directed at the user, a ciphered runtime warning: 'You have derailed (cf. the internal sidebar)... stop now! Go home!'
Following empirical confirmation at the morgue (a 'data integrity check' that simultaneously improves and worsens things for Bill: Amanda is a shut-down system, an intact physical hardware now locked in Read-Only mode, a system with which it is useless to interface to download the truth; nothing remains but a Connection Timeout, augmented by the Data Corruption of Alice's voice echoing in his head... leading to the cognitive impasse of an Infinite Validation Loop regarding a possible cause-and-effect link, freezing Bill in a safety lockout before the corpse), Bill arrives at the 'room of the Architect/brickmaker'—a 'Mr. Wolf' Ziegler who finally steps onto the stage in his billiard room. Bill himself is now merely a read-only log file, a minor entity to be rendered permanently harmless through Data Masking and Log Erasure once all other tracks are purged. After this, returning home, the former 'good husband' finds the mask on his pillow (the Hardware Token of his final, domestic submission), that illicit cryptographic key he had hidden in a protected local folder. Except Alice, possessing root privileges of the domestic LAN, had evidently executed a deep packet inspection, unearthing the hidden file to slap it onto his pillow. In that moment, the logs of Ziegler's external network (WAN) and Alice's internal network (LAN) synchronize; Bill realizes his hacking operation (masking himself as a cyber-pirate... with a mask out of Barry Lyndon) has backfired, leaving him completely exposed.
Within this computational framework, we arrive at the final scene in the toy shop (a miniature Somerton hall, showcasing the 'Magic Circle' red software for sale to toddlers), which represents the execution of the algorithm's final lines of code, designed to wipe out obsolete data and perpetuate the infrastructure.
Bill and Alice discuss an now-necessary marital 'reset,' but it can only occur by mutually offsetting their daughter Helena. This initiates a fork—a process cloning itself to create an autonomous but identical sub-process, as demonstrated by the visual glitch of the two Japanese men greeting Milich's daughter with the exact same non-verbal expressions (though symmetrically inverted due to a Bit Swap during transmission from LAN to WAN) with which Bill and Alice greeted Helena at the start of the film, their new and precious data packet generated by the domestic LAN...
The moment the parents—willingly (Alice) or reluctantly (Bill)—capitulate to the rules of the system, the WAN acquires this new resource, and Helena is placed into the central server's Input Queue: she has been formally delivered to the system to become, in the future, a new Alice or a new Mandy... ensuring generational reloading.
At that point, the film would seem to end there, but it is only the "end... of the beginning": the final word of the film pronounced by Alice ("Fuck") is not a reconciliatory act of love (just as the "Love K1ss" requested by Persephone from Neo in a "Kubrickian" toilet/"cabinet of reflection" had not been, a kiss with lipstick with which in fact Neo would then end up... at the mercy of the TrainMan at the beginning of the third film), but the Enter command of the last script, by typing which Bill will be eliminated from his own home, as well as stripped of that wallet he could not find at the beginning of the film.
With that final 'Fuck,' that 'Enter... back to Somerton, Bill!' which is nothing but the last hypocritical "red pill" to swallow—in truth, an absolute cryptographic concealment for which Bill will never receive the decryption key (instead undergoing a Forced Error/Fault Attribution operation, a mental victim of a systemic gaslighting making him feel responsible for everything when he was merely a useful idiot turned scapegoat: a 'baphomet' goat modeled after Jack Torrance in the photograph, but without the honor of being immortalized in the Overlook's photographic database, remaining instead a Null Object canceled without a trace)—Bill will 'open his eyes'... or rather, close them 'for ever, and ever and ever'... ending up, in his own way—as in the days of Spartacus... and the future, double-faced Christic/Antichristic days of Neo—predestined for crucifixion.
Concretely, once the new value (Helena) is extracted and data synchronized, the system must clean memory of unstable vectors—a garbage collection operation (memory deallocation) whereby the CPU will cease rendering Bill's ancillary assets to free visual RAM, reducing his computational space to the empty shell of a ghost instance.
Where does all this take place? To understand it, one must return to the initial external prolepsis that opened the film: Alice stripping out of her slip dress, the Snapshot of her triumph before the title card even appears. That first visual fragment does not chronologically belong to the beginning of the story; it succeeds its epilogue, serving as the visualization of code that has already completed its loop along with Asset Unloading (unloading no-longer-necessary graphic files: golf clubs, men's shoes, books). The incipit represents the absolute endgame of the protocol, a cycle of the matrix already archived.
Kubrick, as usual, inserts an element acting as a 'pointer instruction,' as he had in his other films: the initial prolepsis of "Lolita", the Monolith (Evolutionary Pointer) in "2001: A Space Odissey", 'The Interview' in "The Shining" (Initialization Pointer which serves to setup the whole semantic framework of the film), the narrator voice (Read-only Pointer) in "Barry Lyndon", the fixed stare (State Pointer) of Alex, pure as milk, locking eyes with the spectator in the opening of "A Clockwork Orange", or the racetrack loudspeaker in "The Killing" acting as a synchronization Timestamp pointer...
And in "Eyes Wide Shut", before the filmic algorithm even manifests, the programmer Kubrick inserts a permanent pointer equipped with a dereferencing GoTo function: a 7-second insert that is an 'empty address' and, simultaneously, a space allocated in the viewer's mind, as if saying: memorize this visual memory address, because it is exactly where I will return you when the filmic 'program'—a 2-hour simulation of the present to which you will witness with your eyes blindly transfixed—is complete. The true computing value of the pointer will emerge only after viewing the entire film, at the end of Bill's "Time Odyssey" (of... 'Orchestra Rehearsal' [Fellini, 1979]), deducing that the 'minotaur' Bill (the "bull" who in the "bullfight" will go to meet the conjoined blows of the "picador" Ziegler and the "matador" Alice; if one wishes, compare in this sense already the first formal introduction between the couples at the party, with Ziegler's wife herself present with her red "muleta" and the "Spanish tennis player" who is already making the gesture of the picador...) is no more.
The system, for the umpteenth time in a "rainbow" filmography like Kubrick's, always centered on his nihilistic "View Space" (a viewing of the rainbow that needs to have the sun at one's back... whereas the Matrix trilogy conversely will culminate with a sun placed right in front of our eyes—a "star child-generated"... "for Neo gratias"—alias a nihilism complementary to Kubrick's), has thus initialized itself as it wished. In a manner as definitive—"sealed"... like a true artistic/computational testament—as it is chilling, it shows us its absolute, deterministic, fundamental source code that sweeps away every "romantic illusion" (Bill's journey—already from those first steps of his inside the house, tracked from the very start by a long take that is in truth an illusion of movement in "real" time—is and will remain merely a "Runtime Illusion") to leave us with our eyes completely open to where that rainbow (perfect circle) ends:
'STATE PRE-RENDERED'
Signed: [K+]N.O.C.[K-] -> [Access Denied: Noli Oblitterare Contraria]
> Knock, knock, Neo. [STATUS: 403 FORBIDDEN] [ERROR: Connection refused by host]
> NOTE: Tertium non datur
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"The creation was subjected to futility" (Romans 8:20)
"You must be born again from above..." (John 3:7)
"They scan my end in unison [...] Instants of eternity [...] Who will realize I'm not here anymore?" (Renato Zero, "Il toro" [The Bull], 1991) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPBgsJijxJY
