Welcome back to Dark Corners Lockdown, your self-isolated guide to streaming movies.
Room 237 is a documentary available on Amazon Prime about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Not dealing with the making of the film but with some of the theories of what it’s really about.
‘Kubrick is thinking about the implications of everything that exists’
This is incredibly difficult because I am reviewing the documentary, not the theories being put forward,
but that’s hard because this is wholly uncritical and without context – outside of clips from the film,
the only voices you hear are those of the interviewees, there’s no rebuttal from anyone involved with the film -
and Kubrick’s family has rejected it wholesale - there’s also no moderator.
‘Inside the Shining are hundreds of subliminal images’
To be honest that’s probably for the best because none of these people are changing their mind.
‘They’re definitely watching me for sure’
So, let’s start with the most famous of the theories,
‘Stanley Kubrick was involved in faking the Apollo Moon Landings’
Just to be clear...
‘I’m not saying we didn’t go to the moon’
just that they forgot the camera, and it’s easy to mock.
‘I wasn’t sure I was right for the first hour’
Like, unbelievably easy.
‘Except that the only capital letters on the key are R - O - O - M and N from the anachronism N-o,'
'There’s only two words you can come up with that have those letters in them and that's Room and Moon.’
Except for moor, norm, or, mono, nor, or, no, morn, and of course Moron,
which has the advantage of actually using all of the letters, but then...
'The patterns in the carpet exactly the match the launchpad 39A'
And suddenly you find yourself thinking, well that is weird.
But be cautious because...
'Then i started watching the movie with the intensity I have never watched a movie before.'
'And every line began rining true.'
You’re only focussing on the one can, there’s lots of other stuff behind him.
‘The Calumet baking powder can behind Sam’
This guy has a different theory,
‘That movie was about the genocide of the American Indian’
they can’t both be right, and of course...
‘That’s not a skier, that’s a minotaur’
You gotta really want that one,
but the point is all these theories rely on cherry picking an image here and an image there.
‘The paper tray turns into a hard on’
and ignoring everything else and you can take it to ludicrous extremes
like running the movie forwards and backwards simultaneously and seeing the images synch up,
'Right in the same position his name, his car and the photo line up for a second.'
where arguably because they’re central.
You can do this for any movie.
‘So, it’s not specific to this film’
So why The Shining?
And that actually is interesting because some stuff they’re not making up.
'Now the Hexagon is closed, it is lke he has been closed in.
'The carpet does change beneath Danny.
The chair does vanish.
'The camera switches back to Jack and the chair is gone.'
And the architecture of the Overlook is impossible.
'You have the realization that there are several hallways behind the office.'
If this was in any other film – and this sort of thing is in every other film -
we’d write it off as careless, or didn’t care, because it’s not like audiences notice.
‘It’s an actual playgirl magazine’
But it’s Kubrick, who was famously obsessive and the choices he makes are deliberate.
'Danny loops around the lounge set'
Personally, I think he made the film as disconcerting as possible because he was making a horror film
and obsessing over details ignores some great filmmaking technique.
‘He’s parodying horror films’
These theories are based on the idea that Kubrick couldn’t have been making anything as down-market as horror
so they specifically looked for something else.
‘It seemed as if I had missed something’
Which is an elitist attitude towards horror that I find very angering.
But perhaps that’s what I bring to it.
‘My special expertise is in the history of Germany’
A lot of these people have a pre-existing interest in the subject they think the movie is about.
'Now those tourists dissolve into suitcases.'
‘Now as an historian of the holocaust I find that very striking.’
Any movie you love, you bring something of yourself to it,
but that is not necessarily what the movie is about to anyone other than you.
‘How come I saw this and a lot of other people didn’t?
’Kubrick being Kubrick, there probably is more going on, but there are vast holes in all these theories,
if he was trying to say any of this, I think he’d have said it better.
'And he stands up and he is wearing the apollo 11 sweater.'
I’ve strayed from the documentary as a documentary because it has pushed my buttons.
It’s fascinating as a film about film and how we respond, about a film-maker and about human nature but,
about 45 minutes in I was tapped out.
'His skin solour is not white is sort of towards brown.'
The only contrary viewpoint we get is when they shoot themselves,
‘The elevator doors remain closed’
very clearly open. There is only so much of this you can listen to before wanting to kill someone.
'The expression on his face gets progressively bull-like.'
To end on a positive, the number 42 features heavily in a few of theories,
‘If you multiply ther numbers 2, 3, and 7 you get 42’
Room 237 is one hour and 42 minutes.
‘Now I admit perhaps I’m grasping at straws there’
I mean you’ve got to ignore the one hour, but still.
Thanks for watching. Have you seen this film? Am I doing them a injustice? Am I just too shallow
do you have any whacky theories of your own?