[iknownthing]

What I never understood about this movie is how it never connected the pieces. The beginning of the movie when bill was with the drunk women and they say "where the rainbow ends..." it clearly connects to the "rainbow" costume shop later where the sinister stuff with the owners child happens. Then it's learned that the women at the beginning of the movie were the same women who were at the secret society party this clearly connects the secret society to the sinister stuff at the costume shop. So the connections are clear and bill is privy to all of it yet it is never explicitly stated at the end of the movie. Perhaps Kubrick didn't actually finish it.

[baobun]

This is very much on-style both for dream movies in general (ever watched anything Lynch/Tarkovsky/Fellini?) and Kubrick. The connections are supposed to happen in your mind. Their significance is up to you.

Related Kubrick quote from TFA:

> One of the things I always find extremely difficult, when a picture's finished, is when a writer or a film reviewer asks, "Now, what is it that you were trying to say in that picture?" And without being thought too presumptuous for using this analogy, I like to remember what T.S. Eliot said to someone who had asked him—I believe it was The Waste Land—what he meant by the poem. He replied, "I meant what I said." If I could have said it any differently, I would have. ("The Odyssey Begins", 1960 Horizon interview)

Spelling everything out for the (supposedly dim-witted) audience at the close is, reversely, something that frustrates me.

[iknownthing]

I get that but it doesn't even make sense in terms of the dream logic. Bill basically has two "confession" scenes - one with Zeigler and one with his wife and seemingly doesn't mention the stuff at the costume shop in either. However he was open to confess to Zeigler that he knew about the dead woman. This seems contradictory. I think there are two possibilities 1) it was unfinished or 2) it was intentionally left out. Both of which are very interesting.

[AJRF]

The costume shop owners daughter whispers “you should get a cloak lined with ermine” suggesting she (an underage girl) knows where Bill is going (the mansion party). It feels like there’s at least one scene missing that ties that together a bit less subtly.

[freejazz]

Except they also obviously aren't. Different actresses, different voices. Yet we know that the guy who plays the red cloak is referenced as the famous photographer in the paper Bill reads that says Lucky to be Alive on the cover.