playnext.fm

Decoder Ring · Slate Podcasts

Was "Eyes Wide Shut" a Warning?

March 11, 2026·47 min·3 clips
A teenage film buff expected a scandalous sex movie from Stanley Kubrick, but got something far stranger and more profound.
The old story has a name. A scholar called it the nocturnal ritual fantasy: the claim that a conspiracy gathers at night to abuse women and children. It is ancient, and it has always been useful to someone. Romans used it against early Christians. Medieval Christian authorities turned it on Jews, witches, and heretics. The trope did not die. By the mid-2010s, fringe communities had recycled it into stories about elite trafficking. Pizzagate put the story inside a pizzeria, with believers claiming Hillary Clinton and John Podesta ran a child sex ring from a pizzeria in D.C. QAnon made the room bigger. It imagined a global cabal of Democrats, Hollywood elites, and Deep State figures committing atrocities. Then Epstein made the whole thing harder to talk about cleanly. The transcript keeps a firm line between conspiratorial fantasy and Jeffrey Epstein's actual crimes. His crimes were real. Reporting found 60 women who said Epstein molested or sexually assaulted them. His network was real too, and the episode names circles in technology, real estate, finance, entertainment, medicine, law, academia, American and international politics, and British royalty. That is the sour part. Decoder Ring seems to ask how an old paranoid script can be false in one version, then scrape against awful facts in another. The warning is uncomfortable: recognize the fantasy, but do not use it as an excuse to wave away harm.

As heard by us

A careful Decoder Ring episode about Eyes Wide Shut, conspiracy fantasy, and the documented abuse hiding in plain sight.

Decoder Ring uses Eyes Wide Shut as a doorway into a recurring cultural nightmare: the belief that powerful people gather in secret to abuse the vulnerable.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A Kubrick film, a centuries-old conspiracy myth, and Jeffrey Epstein somehow belong in the same episode.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
Listen to the show on
Apple PodcastsSpotify
Play clips from this episodeMore from Decoder Ring