Room 237
Directed by Rodney Ascher
2012
The release of the uncut original of The Shining (the full-length didn’t do so well at first in the USA, so Stanley Kubrickchopped off nearly half an hour for the global release) has been given a nice accompaniment in this light-hearted collection of five fan theories of what the iconic horror film is really about. If you’ve seen The Shining more than twice you’ll probably have developed your own ideas on the film, through necessity more than anything else; there is an awful lot of sinister gazing into space and non-linear descent-into-madness editing, so you naturally have to make assumptions. Listening to the five obsessives here (harsh, but true: each of them has gone through it frame by frame multiple times), I’ve only been convinced of one thing, which is that there is no big unifying metaphor.
To give all due credit to the contributors, this is at least in part due to more than one of them pointing out some interesting details. Cataloguing the errors in a film is a noble if massively geeky tradition, but anyone who knows anything about Kubrick’s working methods will understand that it’s difficult to accept that he wouldn’t have noticed something as glaring as the shadow from the helicopter in the famous opening shots, or the way the hotel’s carpet changes underneath Danny Torrance after a tennis ball rolls out of nowhere. As such the abundance of presumably deliberate moving furniture and other inconsistencies is intriguing, as are many (though certainly not all) of the proposed visual references. In the end though it’s the very act of trying to pin down a specific message that destroys the theories, because it automatically creates an atmosphere in which only one of them can be right, yet none of them are permeating enough to convince.
Of the ideas that do make an impact, pretty much all of them can be assumed into generally accepted, less esoteric readings to do with past crimes leaving an ex-temporal stink, and the Overlook Hotel functioning as both the haunted house and the monster of the piece, in which case the inconsistencies are basically the building messing with the Torrance family. I’d put money on Kubrick intending it to be disorientating, nothing more. Then, of course, there’s some total bullshit, which is at least good for a laugh. Jack Nicholson has a “minotaur-like" expression, anyone? Or there's the priceless moment when a voiceover tries to point out the director’s face in a stubbornly abstract cloud formation. Almost as uninspiring is the regurgitation of fanboy myths, such as Kubrick having an IQ of 200 (no he didn’t, and, for the record, measurement of IQ past the 150 mark becomes exponentially vaguer than it already is, and, also for the record, the stories of him ruining everyone he played at chess are more entertaining), or faking the Apollo 11 moon landing footage for NASA. The guy working that theory has apparently seen a mockumentary called Dark Side of the Moon, and taken it seriously. He then proceeds to reveal himself as a total paranoiac. If – if – the moon landings were faked, or the footage was faked, or whatever, then the US government and NASA have clearly adopted the sensible policy of ignoring those claiming they did so as though it weren’t worth responding. Nobody’s monitoring you because of your less-than-radical ideas.
These are just cheap criticisms of harmless fan theories, though, and Rodney Ascher himself isn’t trying to convince anyone of anything. Rather, as Peter Bradshaw points out in The Guardian, Room 237 is a look at the very act of viewing a film. Slowing down a film and watching it frame by frame might seem weird, but if you have a real interest in how a film shot works it actually is a fascinating thing to do (I've done it for individual scenes, never an entire movie). The laborious detail in which Kubrick’s film is analysed reinforces its technical brilliance, and demonstrates just how much there is to look out for in cinema generally, conspiracy theories or no, good film or poor. To tell the truth, even though I didn't take the theories themselves seriously, I did find it quite inspiring. There are literally scores of films with various theories swirling around them, and a near-identical documentary could have been made about any one of them. The form this one takes, nothing but voiceovers interweaving over footage and photographs, gets a little incoherent at times, but the visuals are never dull and frequently witty. It certainly made me want to watch The Shining again, which is obviously the strategy behind releasing it alongside the re-release.
Tom
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