Sometime back in 2016 and 2017, I found myself following the Pizzagate conspiracy story as it unfolded across the web. I was intrigued by it, but also deeply disturbed by its narrative and implications. What particularly caught my attention was the way the story seemed to resurface in connection with a seemingly random series of events: the John Podesta email leak, the failure of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the deaths of musicians Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington, and the emergence of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, which would later culminate in his controversial death while in custody.
But the imagery and ideas surrounding this subject were not entirely new to me. Years earlier, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut had already left a strong impression on me. Released in 1999, the film was Kubrick’s adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (Dream Story), and explored a hidden world of secret societies, ritual, privilege, sexuality and power existing beneath the surface of respectable society.
There was something particularly haunting about the film’s suggestion that what we see on the surface may conceal something very different underneath. Kubrick himself died just six days after presenting what was reportedly his final cut of the film to Warner Bros. The circumstances surrounding his death, together with the enduring speculation that the version eventually released may not have been entirely faithful to his intended final edit, have only added to the mythology surrounding the film. Although such claims remain disputed, they became part of the mystery that surrounded Eyes Wide Shut for me.
So when, more than a decade later, I began encountering the Pizzagate story and the increasingly disturbing narratives surrounding elite networks, secrecy and the exploitation of the vulnerable, some of the imagery and themes from Kubrick’s film inevitably came back to mind. Whether these connections represented anything more than coincidence, interpretation or the power of suggestion, I found myself drawn into a disturbing web of associations that was difficult to ignore.
Then came a series of films, documentaries and independent investigations that seemed to reinforce some of the same themes. One of these was You Were Never Really Here, starring Joaquin Phoenix, in which his character attempts to rescue a young girl from a wealthy trafficking network. Others included the 2020 documentary Out of Shadows, created by former Hollywood stuntman Mike Smith, and Sound of Freedom, the 2023 thriller directed and co-written by Alejandro Monteverde and starring Jim Caviezel, Bill Camp and Mira Sorvino, with Mel Gibson among its executive producers.
It is an undeniably dark subject, and certainly not one that I am particularly drawn to. Yet, at some point, I felt the need to get it out. Not only out of my mind, but out of my subconscious and, in some way, out of my system.
That impulse became this print.
I took an image of what appears to be a gathering of secret-society members and transformed each figure by giving them a frightening mask. They became symbolic representations of those I imagined as perpetrators of such inhumane acts of violence. At their feet lie dismembered baby dolls, representing the innocence and vulnerability of the alleged victims. Behind them, a nuclear explosion fills the landscape, serving as a metaphor for the ultimate karmic judgement I would wish upon those responsible for such crimes.
The title of the print was taken from the end credits of the Looney Tunes cartoons I grew up watching; a strangely playful reference juxtaposed against an exceptionally dark subject.
As Charles Baudelaire wrote in his 1864 work Le Joueur Généreux: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled is to convince the world he didn’t exist.”
Perhaps, maybe, he was onto something…