Room 237

To be able to see this movie you have to have seen The Shining.  Actually, let’s go a step further.  You have to have seen The Shining fairly recently or many times so that you have a good handle on it.  Otherwise Room 237 is gonna seem even more ridiculous…than it already is.  You know what?  Fuck that perquisite crap.  You can see Room 237 even if you don’t have a firm grasp on The Shining.  It’s mostly bullshit anyway.  Whoops.  Did I tip my hand too soon?

So this whole thing is people theorizing what The Shining means.  One guy says it’s all about how white people massacred the Indians, another says it’s about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and someone else says it’s about faking the moon landing.  “Evidence” is shown to support each idea and they all link it back to Stanley Kubrick.  These folks say that everything you see in the picture was done on purpose, orchestrated by Kubrick.

There’s this one guy that even claims that there are dozens or hundreds of pieces of symbolic imagery inserted throughout the movie.  He says that when Jack and the manager of the hotel meet for the first time and shake hands it looks like the manager has a hard on sticking out of his pants.  He also insists that Kubrick stuck an image of his own face in the clouds after his name appears in the opening credits.  The penis thing I could kinda see but I couldn’t make out the face in the sky one.  But even if Kubrick really put that stuff in there what does any of it mean?  I have no fucking clue (and I don’t think the fella who saw all of this does either).

What people assert the film is really truly about wasn’t very interesting to me.  It was other shit that had me thinking more.  For instance, one of the most fascinating experiments someone did is they simultaneously ran The Shining forwards and backwards and superimposed them on top of each other.  So at certain points some cool things line up like when they show the two girls murdered there’s also a close up of Jack’s face or when Jack and Grady are talking in the bathroom Danny’s face appears.  It’s kinda neat and I wonder how well this technique would work with other movies.        

But you know, the weird shit that people point out that’s actually in the film for real (without camera tricks like the superimposition I mentioned above or the imagery that’s up for interpretation) is the best part of the documentary.  Like in one scene there’s a chair that you can clearly see behind Jack but when it cuts back to him a couple of seconds later the chair is gone.  Or when Danny is playing on the carpet with his toy cars the carpet is facing one way but when he goes to stand up the carpet is suddenly facing the other way.  Are these simply continuity errors or were they done on purpose?  It’s hard to say.  Kubrick was a master filmmaker and meticulous as a motherfucker so I want to say it was done on purpose to give an eerie feel.  It may have been like what Francis Ford Coppola did with his version of Dracula (you can read what I thought about that film here).  In that movie Coppola constantly used camera tricks to make the whole experience feel slightly off-putting.  A lot of times it’s not stuff that you’ll notice with one, two or even three viewings but your brain picks up on it anyway and interprets the situation as unnatural and/or creepy. 

Carpet faces on way...

...and then it faces the other way (by the way Danny's
Apollo 11 sweater is clear evidence that Kubrick was
involved with faking the moon landing)

And I think that’s part of the genius of The Shining.  For three quarters of the picture it’s not in your face horror.  It’s all about the buildup and creating tension and feelings of isolation, cabin fever, remoteness, declining mental health, diminishing will power, descent into madness, etc.  All of these continuity issues help to promote the sensation that there’s something wrong with the hotel but you can’t quite put your finger on it.  Then when Jack totally fucking snaps and the movie begins to clip along at a frantic, as well as violent, pace it has more impact.  It’s such a contrast to the slow moving and extremely methodical journey that you’ve taken up to that point.

I guess what I’m trying to say is The Shining is a masterpiece, plain and simple.  It’s just Kubrick’s take on a horror movie.  I don’t buy any of this stuff about what he was really trying to say with it.  All of the theories in here like the moon landing cover up ‘n’ shit sound so dumb.  At the end of the doc the question is asked “why make a film so complicated?”  And that’s really it.  Almost no one would go through the trouble, not even Stanley fucking Kubrick in my opinion.

It’s definitely an interesting idea for a documentary though.  Instead of doing something more traditional like “Shine On You Crazy Axe Murderer: The Making of The Shining” director Rodney Ascher decided to get some folks’ opinions on the thing and dish out some trivia as well.  Whether you agree with what’s in the doc or not it’s a unique approach and I appreciate that.      

In the end this was fairly frustrating but also really thought-provoking at times.  If you’re a fan of The Shining then I recommend it because the good stuff is worth it.  And who knows, maybe you’ll be swayed by some of these people’s arguments too.