ACT THREEA Gift for Domino. The Stalking. The Corpse.
Bill makes a late-night venture back to his office, where he sits in his chair desperately searching for some method to what he saw the previous night. Who was the woman? (Remember: at this point he didn't know it was Mandy, I guess I got ahead of myself.) Where does he go now? How can he still prove he is a man? All the questions.

"I love you I love you I love you I love you."

A-ha! Bill picks up the receiver and punches a number slowly.

A phone rings in a familiar hallway. It is Marion's apartment. Dr. Carl comes around a corner and answers it. "Hello?" Nothing. Bill is choked up and cannot say anything. Why? This is a really strange scene and it goes back to the whole "real Bill/fake Bill" thing from before. Is this the manifestation of Bill's confusion about his own identity? Bill seems to have forgotten that Carl was ever in the picture. Who is the real man here?

All those routes exhausted, Bill decides to make a visit to Domino again, and enters her building through its very RED doors. He rings Domino's doorbell, but her roommate, Sally, answers. She refers to him as "Bill? Bill from last night?" who was "so nice to Domino." Yeah, I guess I was, Bill seems to think. Bill is invited in, where he starts undoing Sally's shirt in what seems to be his most proactive (and steamy) move yet. He's actually doing the work. Sally stops him this time, to tell him that Domino tested HIV positive. This strikes Bill as disturbing in the way that he's starting to see some reason to not cheat on his beloved -- he could die. He could have died if not for Alice's intervention. Ay yi yi. Kubrick is a cruel God indeed!

Upon leaving the apartment, something starts happening that fills the audience with that old sense of anxiousness. . .two piano notes. Bill looks across the street as he walks and a very large and completely bald (see?) man is shadowing him on the other side. The man keeps following him and when Bill's attempts at hailing a cab are thwarted, Bill goes to a newsstand. The man stops and stares at him from the streetcorner, next to a sign that really IS a sign: "Stop." It has the letters CMB scrawled on it, though I don't know what that means. This is a completely terrifying scene and I have no idea why. Maybe bald people scare me. I don't know. Must be the Ligeti. Bill buys the New York Post, of all things, and the bald man simply walks away.

Bill enters a cafe called Sharky's, where a Christmassy decorative light fixture hangs above the doorway. We see this later, in Ziegler's house. It looks like a moustache made from the same junk used to make artificial Xmas trees, with two candles on top. Strange. In Sharky's, Mozart's Requiem plays. I don't know if I've commented on Mozart here, but I just noticed many similarities between this film and the excellent Amadeus, which strikes me because of the cloak and mask Salieri wore in order to fool Mozart into writing the aforementioned sonata (!). Seems odd that Kubrick would reference another movie, especially one that is admittedly fictional like Amadeus.

Anyway, this is probably the funniest part of the movie. Kubrick placed a little joke in here for all of his fans. What is it? Look hard. Look! Look at the headline on that paper. LUCKY TO BE ALIVE! it says! As Kubrick would say, yeah right. In Kubrick's world, life is probably the worst curse there is. With Gods like Kubrick, who needs Devils? The man never ceases to ruin his characters. Know what "Kubrickian" means? Sad ending. He's got a whopper in store.

Bill reads an article in this paper that talks about a beauty queen, Amanda Curran, who overdosed on drugs and is in the hospital. Could it be? he thinks. He checks it out, only to find that she's dead. He goes and sees her corpse in the morgue (in locker #10, the same as the Rainbow's address), and the most interesting thing here is. . .well the man's a doctor, after all, and yet he seems so torn up over this (he's reserved, though.) Could it be that he realizes that this woman saved his life and he cost her hers? Probably. I could also hypothesize that the corpse he sees really doesn't differ from the way he viewed her before, except of the paleness. (Of course, he could also be afraid that he might soon be residing in locker #11.) He gets really close to planting one on her, which seems like a pathetic last attempt to prove his point. However, I think there's a whole level to this death thing that I haven't even touched on, but that's for another essay.

On his way out of the hospital, Bill gets a call from one of Ziegler's people who evidently asks him to come to Ziegler's casa grande for a chat. Sure, Bill says, I'm on my way.

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