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Bill Harford...one of the 9.9% serving the 1%


The characters of Bill Harford in "Eyes Wide Shut" and Redmond Barry from "Barry Lyndon" are examples of the 9.9%-ers who serve the 1%-ers. Jack Torrance from "The Shining" is a wannabe 9.9%-er, so he fits to into this category to some extent too. Anyway, I've posted a link to this article in The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/

This excerpt is telling and germane to many of Kubrick's films, and certainly to the themes of The Shining in general and Jack Torrance in particular, especially the part in bold:

"No one is born resentful. As mass phenomena, racism, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, narcissism, irrationalism, and all other variants of resentment are as expensive to produce as they are deadly to democratic politics. Only long hours of television programming, intelligently manipulated social-media feeds, and expensively sustained information bubbles can actualize the unhappy dispositions of humanity to the point where they may be fruitfully manipulated for political gain. Racism in particular is not just a legacy of the past, as many Americans would like to believe; it also must be constantly reinvented for the present. Mass incarceration, fearmongering, and segregation are not just the results of prejudice, but also the means of reproducing it."

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Awesome article, thanks! Almost all of Kubrick's films share this "9.9%er" and the 1% theme. Beginning with, most classically, Paths Of Glory with it's French soldiers used and abused by their elite General staff. I like how Kubrick observes the facets of the Human condition under power structures; whether it be Military, The State, class systems or even the unkmown.

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