Eyes Wide Shut: facts and fantasy about cult trafficking

Plus, a hostile takeover bid for Lykos...with MAPS’ support

Kubrick’s last film is having a moment in the era of Epstein, Diddy, Tate and other celebrity trafficking cases. Is it an unacknowledged classic, or just stoking conspiratorial occult fantasies? Before we get to that, a bit about today’s hot psychedelic news…

The hot news in the psychedelic industry today, by way of a scoop in the FT, is a hostile takeover bid for Lykos (the MDMA therapy company launched by MAPS) led by investor Antonio Gracias. Gracias is a friend of Elon Musk and an early investor in Tesla and SpaceX, which has made him several billion dollars. Musk credits him with helping to save Tesla when it almost went bust in 2008. In 2023, Gracias gave $16 million to Harvard to support its psychedelic humanities programme.

According to the FT, Gracias has made a $100 million hostile takeover bid (30% equity, 70% debt) for a controlling stake in Lykos, with the support of biotech Paragon Life Sciences and, apparently, the support of MAPS and Rick Doblin. If successful, Gracias would get control of Lykos and three board seats, and MAPS - including, one presumes, Doblin - would apparently get two of those seats. Helena Partners, which led the previous equity investment into Lykos and wants it to separate entirely from MAPS, is coming up with an alternative plan to provide a bridge loan of $20-30 million, according to the FT. The Lykos board is meeting on this today, apparently.

This is basically a fight for the control of Lykos right at the heart of the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative - the small group of wealthy US philanthropists and investors who fund a lot of the psychedelic ecosystem and which has funded both MAPS and Lykos. I guess the argument boils down to this question - does Lykos need to totally reform and separate itself from MAPS to get FDA approval, as Helena Partners thinks? Or maybe it doesn’t in the Trump-Musk-RFK era, if Musk allies have such control over HHS, FDA, and so on - that, presumably, is Gracias’ thinking. If Gracias and co are successful, are they going to make Doblin CEO of Lykos? As Psychedelic Alpha notes, Doblin has become increasingly frustrated with Lykos as it was taken from its control and turned from a public benefit corporation to more of a traditional biotech. This would be a spectacular return - but how would MAPS feel about a MAGA alliance?

It’s all quite a fever dream - much like tonight’s main feature: Eyes Wide Shut. Popcorn ready?

Ecstatic Integration explores how modern cultures re-integrate ecstatic experiences after centuries of dismissing or pathologizing such experiences. And cinema is one of the ways that modern, secular humans seek enchantment, wonder, awe, horror, and a transporting ecstasy beyond the mundane grind of their week-day lives. People have reported having full-blown transcendent experiences in the cinema, for example while watching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey.

There’s also a whole sub-genre of ‘psychedelics and cinema’, which films were inspired by psychedelics, which films are best watched on psychedelics…Harvard hosted a film series on this, funded by Antonio Gracias, the billionaire now trying to take over Lykos.

My own favourite three directors are Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch - they’re all in a line of influence and tradition that stretches back to Surrealism and the works of Dali and Bunuel. You could say they’re the American Surrealist Tradition. Like the European Surrealists, these directors use the arts to explore and evoke altered states - dreams, hypnosis, madness, ecstasy, the uncanny. Here is a dream sequence from Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound, which was made in collaboration with Salvador Dali.

When I was at school I was obsessed with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, I mean obsessed - I had the VHS tapes, the soundtrack, I even bought Laura Palmer’s Diary. I think in some ways Twin Peaks played a role in my spiritual awakening. Like the X-Files, Twin Peaks tapped into 1990s conspiracy thinking - there is a hidden order behind ordinary reality, perhaps involving incest, elite sex clubs, secret societies, occult symbols, UFOs, owls, maybe even angels and demons. I was experimenting with psychedelics at the time and both fed into this idea - there is a secret behind ordinary reality, sometimes beautiful and sometimes terrible, and just like Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks or Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, I can discover it. Here’s an essay I wrote on Twin Peaks and enchantment.

A decade ago, I got obsessed with The Shining, Kubrick’s masterpiece. It’s brilliant at evoking what Freud called ‘the Uncanny’ - a feeling of nightmarish dread provoked through literary devices like mirrors, doubles, dolls that come to life, numbers and symbols that seem to have tremendous significance but it’s not quite clear what it is. Here’s an essay I wrote on The Shining and Freud’s concept of the Uncanny.

Like many of Kubrick’s films, The Shining is polysemic, open to multiple interpretations. There’s even a documentary, Room 237, about all the conspiracy theories that fans have crafted about the film’s secret, hidden meaning - it’s ‘about’ the genocide of the Native Americans, it’s ‘about’ the Nazi Holocaust, it’s about the Federal Reserve, it’s about how Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landings… (Here’s a clip, it’s really a fantastic documentary).

My own theory is that the film is ‘about’ elite ancestral violence and corruption, and the dumb stooges like Jack who do the elites’ bloody work. But in the end, maybe the Overlook Hotel (or cinema itself) is simply a vessel for our projections, and our labyrintine search for clues, meaning, a hidden symbolic order, after the loss of a shared religious framework.

Eyes Wide Shut and elite trafficking

So what about Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick’s final movie, which was released in 1999 a few months after his death?

After the paywall, fact and fantasy in the world of elite trafficking. Plus, right at the end of the piece…is Peter Thiel’s clique behind the drive for the US to takeover Greenland, to turn in into a libertarian ‘tradhumanist’ utopia?