Shine On

Danny Lloyd plays forever and ever and ever in The Shining.

«««  Room 237.  Written and directed by Rodney Ascher. http://www.room237movie.com/.

           

Rodney Ascher's Room 237 has to be one of the strangest movies-about-movies in a long while. Not much about it makes sense. The documentary's sole subject, the manifold meanings of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, isn't exactly a live question for most people. Nor do all the interpretations proffered in Ascher's film seem plausible. Though it's about Kubrick's film, most of the visuals are clips from other movies. And yet...it casts an odd spell, in the way that obsessively processing a creepy subject that make it seem deeper and spookier than you ever thought.

          Though not universally admired when it premiered in 1980, The Shining has inspired more than its share of fanatics in the age of the internet. Ascher assembles five of these, including Kubrick biographer Geoffrey Cocks, to float their personal trial balloons. Their theories on The Shining's "hidden" meaning range from the probable (an allegorical meditation on American history, with the giant Overlook Hotel representing the wide open West), to the merely unlikely (the secular-Jewish Kubrick's veiled comment on the Nazi Holocaust), to the outright ridiculous (Kubrick's "confession" that he helped fake the footage for the US moon landings in the 1960's). "Room 237"—a place in the hotel where something awful once happened, and something weird happens to Jack Nicholson—emerges as the veritable "grassy knoll" of Shining speculation.

          Not that there isn't something strange going on in The Shining. Kubrick's attention to detail is legendary, helping to give his films a "replete" feel like no one else's. And yet there are some apparently careless discontinuities in it—such as the typewriter that changes color from one scene to the next, and the chair that vanishes from the background during a tense exchange between Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. It's hard to believe all of this was accidental. More than likely, Kubrick was trying to subtly unhinge his audience with these imperceptible changes. Indeed, he seems to dare "speculation" in the most literal sense of that word, shooting much of the film's action in mirrors.

          On the other hand, the urban legend that Kubrick was hired to fake the Apollo moon footage gets more than its worthy share of attention. Interestingly, protests from the people who actually did put astronauts on the moon in 1969 has forced some denialists to shift ground: now it was just the "footage" that was faked, not the moon landing itself. Why NASA would bother to shoot the landing in a studio when they actually had men on the moon—men who came bearing cameras—is perhaps the greatest mystery of all. But I digress.

          What's most remarkable about all these theories is not necessarily how convincing they are, but that Kubrick's movie is richly detailed enough to make them all have a ring of truth. Like study of the Koran or the Talmud, it's the process of constant re-interpretation, not the particular answers, that keep the text alive.

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro