Kubrick's Game

  Willing himself to unfreeze and relax into the force of the wind, he drops to his hands and knees on the snow bank and crawls in reverse, smoothing over his leg-prints as he moves.

  The crazed axe-toting Mascaro appears around the corner. Just as in the movie, he stops, looks around, and then moves off in another direction.

  Shawn exhales in relief.

  As he retraces the steps that should lead him out, he considers how the situation mirrors his life. Trapped in the maze of the game, Shawn and his friends veered off the correct path, chased by relentless villains. Only when they retraced their steps and got back on the right path were they able to solve the puzzle and evade the enemy.

  Mascaro, on the other hand, kept moving forward, unable to admit he was wrong. The game ended up exposing him, leading to his demise.

  A light appears at the end of a passageway. It feels warm. Shawn runs toward it and leaps through.

  There is fire in front of him. He feels constricted, as if there is a noose around his neck. He can only see out of one eye. The fire comes into focus. No, it’s not a fire. It’s a candelabra. There is chattering, smoke, and crystal ware.

  Shawn realizes that he is in an 18th century drawing room. This is the famous card scene from Barry Lyndon!

  His tight-collared shirt is what’s making him feel constricted.

  A young Redmond Barry approaches and asks if the Chevalier de Balibari is ready for the next game.

  Shawn glances at himself in the mirror and sees that he is the spitting image of Barry Lyndon’s eye-patch-wearing Chevalier. He responds in the affirmative as he sits down at the table to begin gambling against various genteel members of Prussian society.

  Redmond Barry begins to tidy up within eyeshot of Shawn’s opponent’s cards. He leans in to whisper something in Shawn’s ear and, as he does, his face morphs into that of Tony Strauss.

  The other card players become the familiar faces of Danny, Austin, Rich, and Luke. He searches his memory for details of the scene. In a dream state, the memories are difficult to access, but he forces himself to focus. He suddenly remembers the code from Barry Lyndon: if Redmond Barry wipes the table, it means the opponent is holding diamonds; if Redmond adjusts a chair, the opponent holds an ace-king; and if Redmond Barry offers wine, it means that the opponent is holding hearts.

  As Shawn starts to play, he notices that Redmond/Tony has begun to wipe the table. His opponent must have diamonds. He bets appropriately. On the next hand, Redmond/Tony offers wine to the guests. Shawn bets and wins.

  Danny and Austin rise from the table and shout, “He’s cheating!”

  Rich and Luke growl with anger and draw pistols from under their seats.

  Tony appears at his side, only now he is in the form of A Clockwork Orange’s wheelchair-bound writer. He calms Luke and Rich down, and encourages Shawn to “Try the wine.”

  His opponent holds hearts.

  Shawn places a weak bet and his opponent takes the hand.

  Redmond becomes angered and morphs into the form of elderly David Bowman from 2001. He adjusts his chair.

  Shawn realizes his opponent holds an ace-king. He looks down to see that he has the winning hand, but instead decides to fold. Tony bids both Shawn and the opponent to retire to the outside patio.

  Rich, Luke, Austin, and Danny, wearing foppish costumes, embrace Shawn and offer him a castle and a title. Shawn understands—more can be gained through friendship than winning at all costs. He accepts the offer.

  Laughing, they walk back into the drawing room.

  As he passes through the door, he finds himself in the cockpit of a B-52 bomber. The warplane is in free fall.

  Stephen Spielberg, dressed in Air Force fatigues, yells to Shawn, “Major Kong, we’ve been hit. You have to unlock the CRM-114 to regain control of the plane!”

  The plane continues to plummet.

  Shawn notices that the CRM-114 has a note taped to it. The note is in Kubrick’s handwriting. It says:

  9 will unlock CRM-114.

  Realizing that there is not enough time before the B-52 impacts, Shawn dials into the machine. It requires a three-letter code. He tries the code from the movie: OPE. Nothing.

  Wait a second.... OPE is a Caesar shift for NOD!

  He presses N...O...D. The plane is still falling.

  Hold on, the note said 9 will unlock it. That’s A Clockwork Orange, but that film doesn’t have any reference to CRM-114 except for the Serum No. 114 that was injected into Alex.

  Shawn quickly scans his memory of the scene after Alex is injected with Serum No. 114. Alex is strapped to a chair and forced to watch as a malchick is tolchocked by a droogie until the red, red kroovy begins to flow.

  Spielberg shouts, “Impact in ten seconds, sir!”

  Shawn prepares for impact, but then conjures an image of a three-letter word behind the attacking droogie’s head—something not accessible to his conscious mind, but buried within his subconscious. Written on the wall is a single three-letter word: NOE.

  That must be why Serum No. 114 was placed in the A Clockwork Orange scene! It’s a marker that the three-letter code would reveal itself during the dream sequence.

  Shawn enters NOE into the CRM-114 device. The plane pulls up, avoiding impact with the ground.

  Spielberg cheers. “Inspired decisions under extreme pressure—now that’s the mark of a great director!”

  The plane jerks upward and Shawn is thrown back. When he lands, he is no longer in the plane. He is face down on a cold hard floor. The wind has been knocked out of him.

  He hears the voice of a drill sergeant screaming, “On your feet, you maggot. Do you think you’re Mickey Spillane? Do you think you’re some kind of writer?”

  Shawn picks himself off the ground and stands eye-to-eye with a drill sergeant. Except it’s not R. Lee Ermey’s dreaded Sgt. Hartman from Full Metal Jacket. It’s his father.

  Shawn answers, “Sir, yes, sir!”

  “Do you love your father, Private Joker?”

  Shawn screams, “Sir, negative, sir!”

  The drill sergeant smacks him across the face. “Private Joker, are you trying to offend me?”

  Remembering the no-win situation from Full Metal Jacket, Shawn screams, “Sir, negative, sir! Sir, the private believes any answer that he gives will be wrong and the senior drill instructor will beat him harder if he reverses himself, sir!”

  “You are nothing, Private Joker, but a sniveling cockroach who would destroy his own family if it meant not having his precious TV. Are you going to run off and cry to your mommy?”

  Shawn feels himself drawing back into his shell as his father continues his tirade. All around him, his fellow soldiers are high school and college classmates laughing at him, doing nothing to help.

  “You will never amount to anything! Do you hear me? How can you when everybody you’ve ever met hates your guts?”

  From somewhere deep inside, Shawn feels decades of anger rise through him like a volcanic eruption.

  He yells, “Shut up!” then punches his father in the face.

  His father staggers back, stunned. Blood pours from his nose and he cries like a baby.

  Shawn feels hands grab him from behind and pull him down.

  No longer in the barracks at boot camp, he is in the futuristic England of A Clockwork Orange.

  Lying on the ground, he is being beaten by Alex’s gang. “Well well well! Look what we have here!”

  As the droogies beat him, they transform into Wilson and Sami.

  Shawn gets up and runs toward his flat at municipal flat block 18-A Linear North.

  His friends chase after him in pursuit.

  He bursts into his building, races up the stairs. and finds his room, but he can’t get in because there is a combination lock. Shawn remembers Alex’s combination: 17-34-89.

  It won’t open.

  “How did we get ourselves in such bad trouble?”

  He turns and sees Gigolo Joe standing beside him. His f
ace morphs into Malcolm McDowell wearing Gigolo Joe makeup.

  In the film, Alex mistreats his droogies, his sworn brothers, thinking it makes him a strong leader, but it leads to mutiny and betrayal.

  “I mistreated my friends,” Shawn says to McDowell. “I thought I was better than them, that I didn’t need them.”

  “The line between friend and enemy is a thin one,” says McDowell, doing a dance step. “A thin line is not easy to dance on, but the dance must be done nonetheless.”

  Sami and Wilson enter the house and charge furiously up the stairs.

  “Try, try again,” says McDowell.

  Shawn tries the combination again. This time it works.

  Wilson and Sami grab McDowell/Gigolo Joe and pull him down the stairs.

  McDowell calls out as he is being dragged away, “Shawn, when you become a real boy, remember me to the ladies!”

  Shawn steps through the bedroom door and plunges into a strange room. He takes in his surroundings. The carpet is green and purple. There are pink easy chairs.

  “Oh no,” says Shawn. “Anywhere but here.”

  He turns to the open door behind him and confirms his suspicion.

  He’s in Room 237.

  Before him is the open bathroom door where the evil spirit of temptation resides. He doesn’t want to go in there. Does he have a choice?

  Feeling panicked, Shawn breaks toward the exit door, only to find himself face-to-face with Humbert Humbert. Unlike the rest of the colorful environment, he is in black and white.

  Humbert raises his gun toward Shawn. As he does, his face morphs into Herbert Greenwald’s. “Quilty! Where are you, Quilty?”

  Shawn runs into the bathroom. When he opens the door, the ancient crone, full of putrescence and filth, is standing there.

  The crone latches onto him. The face of the hag belongs to Dean Welks. She clasps him by the neck, breathing her foul stench into his lungs.

  He manages to shove her away and make a break out the door.

  “There you are, Quilty!”

  Greenwald aims his gun, but Shawn darts past him. He can’t fail and have the gate closed to him.

  Then he sees it. Leaning against the wall of the hotel room is the Gainsborough portrait. He dives behind the painting.

  The crone creeps out of the bathroom.

  Greenwald staggers toward him drunkenly.

  Through the canvas, he can see their shadows closing in on him.

  Greenwald aims his gun at the painting.

  Shawn quickly recalls the location of each of the bullet holes in the painting. He knows where Greenwald will shoot, and positions himself as best he can.

  Greenwald fires six times. Each time, the bullet blasts through the painting and narrowly avoids him.

  Shawn looks through a bullet hole and sees the door to room 237 fly open.

  Through the door marches axe-wielding Mascaro, gun-toting Rich and Luke, and the policemen Sami and Wilson. They all charge at the painting and try to pull it away from him.

  Shawn grabs onto the sides of the frame and won’t let go. He feels like he has the strength of a hundred men.

  “Let it go!” they growl.

  Shawn refuses. He has to hold on to this thin piece of damaged art or it will literally kill him.

  “Let it go! Let it go!”

  Shawn opens his eyes. He’s not hearing the voices of the attackers anymore.

  It’s Desiree.

  “Let go of the game,” she says softly.

  He’s no longer holding the painting in his hands. Instead, he’s holding the Magic Circle board game. They are in the toy store from the end of Eyes Wide Shut.

  Shawn puts the board game down and stands.

  “What took you so long?” says Desiree.

  He doesn’t answer because he’s struck by how beautiful she looks. Instead of her usual black dreads, her hair is long and curly. Her skin shines like porcelain. She is radiant.

  “I’ve been waiting for you for hours,” she says.

  “Sorry,” said Shawn. “But remember from Inception, time works differently in a dream state. I think I was only ten or fifteen minutes behind you.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m glad you’re here now.”

  “This feels much more real than the other places.”

  “I agree, but it’s weird. Nobody will talk to me. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do.”

  “Wait,” he says, “are you actually Desiree, or am I just dreaming you?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing. Whatever you are, I guess we need to find a way out of here.”

  They walk around the toy store for what feels like an hour, not finding any doors. Eventually they stand together at the center of the store, realizing it’s a maze without an exit.

  “What do you think all this means?” asks Shawn.

  “Well,” says Desiree, “I suppose after all our wanderings and adventures, in the end, all we really have is each other.”

  “Forever?” asks Shawn.

  “Are you kidding me?” Desiree looks taken aback. “We’re still in college and you’re talking about forever?”

  “Sorry, it just... felt right to say it.”

  “We don’t need to worry about all that yet,” said Desiree. “But there is one thing we need to do as soon as possible.”

  “What’s that?”

  Shawn woke up. Desiree opened her eyes beside him, and he squeezed her hand as they gazed wordlessly into one another’s eyes. Shawn pulled her in close and kissed her.

  “I think I love you, Desiree,” he said.

  “Call me Desi,” she said.

  4:22 a.m.

  Shawn wakes up in a bed. Desiree is no longer beside him, but the memory of the night fills him with warmth before he sits up and sees that he’s in the final baroque “waiting room” at the climax of 2001. The black monolith is standing at the foot of the bed.

  A wave of clarity rushes through him and he reaches out to touch the inky surface.

  Like a black hole, it pulls Shawn from the bed and sucks him into its dark vortex. He passes through a psychedelic realm of color and sound. Scenes from his childhood and adolescence flash by.

  He lands in a chair in front of a large wooden desk, and looks up to see someone sitting across from him.

  It’s Stanley Kubrick.

  He looks as he did from the film footage they found in New York. An unkempt beard and sharply arched eyebrows accentuate his piercing eyes. His balding head of thin black hair isn’t long but needs to be combed.

  A chessboard sits in front of him.

  “Welcome,” says Stanley. “As promised, here I am.”

  Shawn is shell-shocked. “What in the world just happened?”

  “You must be dazed. In order to get here you had to travel through an area of the mind most can never pass through without highly potent drugs.”

  “Where am I?”

  “Through the course of the game, you had to dig deep into my brain. It’s only fair that I get to explore yours a little.”

  “Hold on. Are you really Stanley Kubrick or just a figment of my imagination?”

  “Of course I’m not really Stanley. He’s been dead a long time. Think of me as missing footage that’s playing on your personal projector, except instead of being bound by what’s on film, I can go off script and improvise. I’m here to answer any acceptable question before you move on.”

  Shawn is speechless, petrified of saying the wrong thing. “How about a game of chess?”

  “I’d like that,” says Stanley. He pushes a center pawn forward two spaces.

  Shawn moves a pawn forward one space. He feels relaxed. “The dream sequence you created... was it the same for Desiree as for me?”

  “Heavens no. My subliminal messaging was designed to interact with each viewer’s subconscious in an entirely personal way. While certain elements may have been similar, the tasks and challenges within each dream were certainly very different. All I could do was induce a
journey of self-discovery.”

  “Are any of these ‘how you did it’ details important?”

  “Not in the slightest.” He moves out his knight.

  Shawn moves out a bishop. “There’s one question I always wanted to ask you. How can I become a great director like you if I’m so... different?”

  Kubrick moves his rook and takes Shawn’s queen.

  Shawn responds by taking Kubrick’s queen with a knight.

  “First of all,” says Kubrick, “you will never be a great director like me. You have to be a great director like you. If you try to copy others, you’ll end up a hack who has to use other directors’ imagery to tell stories.”

  Shawn nods.

  “Not that you can’t be inspired by others’ work, but you need to listen to the voice inside you, the one that makes your vision of the world a unique one. And about your personality concerns, there’s no one mold for a director, and there’s no rule that says everybody has to like you. If you have confidence, people will follow you. Film is the greatest art form because in no other medium are so many elements out of the creator’s control. You must allow your collaborators’ talents to shine while marching toward a common goal. In the end, your vision is not only worth fighting for, it’s all that’s worth fighting for.”

  Stanley stands from his seat and walks toward the window, which is shaded by a blind. “I think we’ve had a good talk, but it’s time for you to be moving along. After all, the prize awaits.”

  “But where do I find the prize?”

  “At the end of any journey, oftentimes the hero ends up back at the beginning.”

  Their chess game ends in a draw.

  “Superb game,” says Kubrick.

  Shawn woke up.

  Desiree was already awake, putting on her clothes next to the bed.

  “I know what we have to do,” said Shawn.

  “Good morning to you too, lover,” Desiree cooed.

  “Did you talk to Stanley?”

  “Talk to Stanley?”

  “Yes. After the toy store.”

  “Toy store? Have you lost your mind?”

  “We were dreaming that we were in the toy store together. That’s where I told you that I... I mean... that’s where you told me to... you know....”