The Star of Ishtar
The eight point star is prominently on display in the house of Dr. Zeigler where the all-importantly part that opens the movie takes places. The Star of Ishtar is a symbol of fertility and sexuality and as the movie progresses, the nudity becomes more abundant and the importance of sex takes over. Rarely has Kubrick been so explicitly in forwarding his theme through symbol. Unless, of course, the Star of Ishtar is really a red herring.
The Illuminati
Anyone who so desires need only type “illuminati symbols in Eyes Wide Shut” into ANY search engine and they be…rewarded?...with literally thousands of hits that go to various lengths to ensure the reader that Kubrick’s film is either an indictment of powerful cult said to rule the world or is part of a plan by the very cult to mislead audiences from getting too close to their secret plan to rule the world. It all makes for fascinating reading…theoretically…but as to how much such symbolism actually has anything helpful to say about understanding this most abstruse of Kubrick’s films? Hard to say.
Masks
The movie ends with the placement of a mask upon a pillow. Meanwhile, every single scene (practically) is about people pretending to be something they aren’t or literally wearing masks themselves. The entire film can, in a way, be read as a mask: try to figure out what it means and you really are just taking another mask off. A viewer can literally spend hours removing masks trying to get at what Eyes Wide Shut is actually trying to say. And even then you are likely to be left, like the Harfords, just holding another mask.
Beethoven
More specifically, Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio. Eyes Wide Shut struggles mightily to endow its slight narrative with the thematic majesty of opera, but the closest it really ever gets is its symbolic importation of Fidelio. The story is about a woman sacrificing herself for her husband and somewhere within the complexity of whatever it is the film is trying to say, the film is also about a wife’s sacrifice. Or, if you prefer a more simplistic symbolism: the secret password to entire the ritualistic orgy is “Fidelio.”
