In both 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut Kubrick uses the music of Ligeti in a very
specific way - it is the music which is played when facing a fact which is
transformative - a fact which once seen transforms to the point were it is
impossible to go over to the other side.  This is not the same as his use
of Richard Strauss which is the "dawn" motif in 2001.

In Eyes Wide Shut we are first given Ligeti's music near the end of the
film, but it occurs during the orgy scene.  It is this scene which marks
the shift of Bill Harford's world from the temptations and interactions
that he knows, into a realisaiotion he does not know the world, and which
becomes the obsession of the reaminder of the film.  At moments where that
obsession resurfaces, the music is played again and again.  Not the whole
piece, but merely its opening moments.

Ligeti's music is most forcefully used in 2001 in two places:  the
discovery of the monolith, and the voyage through the stargate.  The first
divides humanity from knowing we are alone, to knowing we were visited.
The second destroys an semblence of being able to believe that thi is an
Odyssey through normal space towards normal ends.  These are the facts,
says the music.

The difference in the two films is also seen by the difference in the use
of the music.  For Kubrick Space exploraiton is liberating, and fear is
constricting.  Human beings acting out of fear nearly destroy their own
effort to reach the stars.  It is fear, after all, that causes them to
build an AI that can lie, lie about the very purpose of the mission.

In Eyes Wide Shut, many people expected a film about how a sexual odyssey
would be liberating.  In the 1990's sex has consumed the roles of almost
all other liberating forces, and stands alone as the single thing which pop
culture presents as being able to create the sense of ex-stasis.  Kubrick
takes out to slash this iew in his film, and he presents us with a series
of sexual temptations, which are increasingly perverse, but which are empty
of the florid technicolor liberating lust that many people wanted to have
portrayed.  Hence instead of the object which transforms being space
travel, or the gateway to a nwe and better world, it curls in on itself.
Instead of the music being played once and then leading into a larger urge
forward - it is repeated, in its opening measures, over and over again like
a wincing pain that harps on the nerves.

Stirling Newberry <[log in to unmask]>