Kubrick, Elan Vital, and Leon Vitali

                  Detail from a painting by artist Paul Laffoley, featuring the French phrase "elan vital".

I have been looking at a lot of Paul Laffoley artwork lately, I've always been an admirer, and only recently learned he left us in 2015. The focal point in one of his text-based works jumped out at me, the words "ELAN VITAL" - because all week I've been reading about Kubrick's loyal and long-suffering assistant LEON VITALI. The sync between the two names is potent.

The 2017 documentary film "Filmworker", features candid interviews with Leon Vitali and actors from several Kubrick films. The enigmatic Vitali portrayed both Lord Bullingdon in "Barry Lyndon" and Red Cloak in "Eyes Wide Shut".

After his role in "Barry Lyndon" and before his assistant gig on 1980s "The Shining", Vitali acted in another  film, the relatively unknown Irish-Scandinavian project "Terror of Frankenstein".  There is quite a synchronicity here, as the Bergsonian concept of the ELAN VITAL , or Vitalism, was on the mind of Mary Shelley when she wrote the original "Frankenstein". Its amazing that someone named Leon Vitali would land the role of Doc Frankenstein, the mad genius obsessed with the Elan Vital. The two names are near -perfect phonetic anagrams.  Kubrick, the crypto-alchemist that he was, undoubtedly noticed the delicious "twilight language" at play here.

Also of note, Vitali and his wife at the time, Kersti, worked as costume designers on at least two films together. "Costumes" are one of the things available, along with "Fancy Dress", at the Rainbow Fashions store in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

Vitali as Red Cloak on the set of Eyes Wide Shut

Leon Vitali's name is famously inserted into the 1999 Kubrick film "Eyes Wide Shut", in the brief scene where Tom Cruise is reading a newspaper article about a very untimely drug overdose that shakes him to his core. Leon Vitali is the name of the "fashion designer" featured in the story by writer "Larry Celona". Kubrick scholars have debated for years as to what kind of meta-trickery is going on here, with Kubrick putting the name of his real-life assistant  in the film. Lately I've been wondering if Stanley was simply using Leon Vitali for his initials, L.V., which are also the initials of the famous fashion design house "Louis Vuitton", now known as the LVMH conglomerate.

The aforementioned Larry Celona, whose name can be seen as the author of the newspaper article in Eyes Wide Shut, has again  made the news this year in 2019. Bizarrely, Celona is the figure who first reported the stories of the controversial deaths of both Stanley Kubrick in 1999 and also Jeffrey Epstein in 2019.  Some sync-sleuths have noticed that Larry Celona is an anagram of Royal Lancer, a British military unit. Maybe Kubrick knew there was more than meets the eye in regards to this interesting nom-de-plume.

I enjoyed the documentary Filmworker, but couldn't help wondering at times if the project was a kind of "limited hangout" about Vitali where hard truth is mixed and blended with a bit of obfuscation to cloak key sensitivities. Vitali claims that Kubrick wasn't sending messages about the moon landing or secret projects in his films. Maybe he's right, he was there. But then again, this man is a trained actor, and there is just so much occult and  parapolitical smoke around the Kubrick films, it stands to reason that there should be a little fire in there somewhere.

Uncontrollable Ergotism - Shrooming and The Shining

Interior designer David Hicks' orange, brown and red hexagonal carpet design is instantly associated with Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining. Recent films "Room 237" and "Ready Player One" have kept Hicks' iconic motif in the forefront of the minds of Kubrickologists everywhere. But what about the other not-quite-as famous carpet design featured in The Shining? The lurid, green and purple carpet in Room 237?

A photograph of the actual fungus Claviceps Purpurea, the source of LSD. These are the fruiting bodies, small, dark purple microscopic mushrooms growing on the sclerotia of a rotting rye grain.

Several Kubrick scholars have noted the scene in The Shining where Jack Torrance requests a bourbon in the Gold Room Bar, but is given a whiskey instead. Why? Maybe rye is why.

The Jack Daniels that Jack Torrance drinks is made from 70% rye, did you catch that?

The strange ghost woman in Room 237 shows signs of gangranous ergotism during her memorable apparition. Jack's ergotism was decidedly more convulsive, for better or worse.

Kubrick may have also been paying a bit of tribute  to H.G. Wells' short story "The Purple Pileus", another tale about an isolated man in an isolated environment, over-imbibing and wreaking havoc on a small family. Mr. Coombes, the protagonist of The Purple Pileus, has a violent outburst towards his wife after consuming wild mushrooms, in a desperate bid to not be  "dull":  

"Something had happened, but he could not rightly determine what it was. Anyhow, he was no longer dull--he felt bright, cheerful. And his throat was afire. He laughed in the sudden gaiety of his heart. Had he been dull? He did not know; But at any rate he would be dull no longer."

Wendy reads about Rye