This Horrific Life: Patterns Within Patterns
Room 237 explores ‘The Shining’ and proves you can see anything if you stare long enough
There is a great scene in Pi, Darren Aronofsky’s movie of obsession and self-destruction, in which the mathematician Sol attempts to reason with his former pupil, Max.
You want to find the number 216 in the world, you will be able to find it everywhere. 216 steps from a mere street corner to your front door. 216 seconds you spend riding on the elevator. When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will filter everything else out and find that thing everywhere.
Sage advice for the seekers of hidden meanings.
If you look through enough “Greatest Horror Movies of All Time” lists, you get used to seeing Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining near the top, usually duking it out with The Exorcist or Jaws.
It is a beautifully shot film full of unsettling imagery, but its legacy owes more to a tantalizing photograph in the final frame than it does to its straight forward ghost story. The photograph shows Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), who the audience last saw freezing to death in the 1980s, at a formal dress Fourth of July party in 1921.
How is that possible? Did the Overlook Hotel somehow absorb Jack into the past? Is he a supernaturally reincarnated agent of murder and madness? Coming up with an answer to that is half the fun of The Shining.
I was thinking of the mystery of the photograph when I sat down to watch Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237 which, the NetFlix summary promised, would reveal the hidden secrets of The Shining. That was a lie.
The first voice heard in the movie is former ABC News journalist Bill Blakemore and he is explaining how The Shining is really a movie about the genocide of the American Indians. A few minutes later, film historian Geoffrey Cocks explains how it is a metaphor for the Holocaust. Juli Kearns obsesses over imagery of labyrinths and minotaurs. Jay Weidner thinks the whole thing is Kubrick’s apology for faking the Apollo 11 moon landing footage. What?
Room 237 isn’t about The Shining at all. Room 237 is about an endless rabbit hole of obsession with The Shining.
Room 237 reminded me of another movie, the short documentary called The S From Hell. And for good reason - it turns out Rodney Ascher directed that one, too.
The S From Hell concerns people being terrified by the Screen Gems logo that appeared at the end of shows like The Flintstones and Bewitched beginning in 1964. The combination of the bold yellow and red colors, the trilling synthesizer and the logo’s final eye-like appearance seem to be a unique recipe for fear in some people.
Screen Gems isn’t the only nightmare fueling logo. A quick search of YouTube turns up accounts of everything from the BBC to Boston’s public broadcasting station WGBH logos giving kids the willies. The phenomenon is perplexing. None of the logos are frightening in any kind of traditional sense. The only commonality is their brevity and their over-reliance on Moog jingles. Perhaps the synthesizer is too grating an instrument for young ears?
Judging from his documentaries, it seems Ascher is a collector of people with strong and unusual reactions to media.
The Shining is the story of Jack Torrance, an alcoholic writer who takes a job as the off-season caretaker of a haunted Colorado hotel. It is also the story of his wife Wendy, a woman by turns submissive and hysterical. Finally, it is also the story of their son Danny, who possesses a telepathic ability along with the psychological scars of abuse from his father.
None of these people are stable or reliable. Therefore, nothing we see during the course of the movie can be counted on as objective truth. The audience can’t be sure the ghosts are real - they could just be hallucinations brought on by the mania of cabin fever. It is a telling detail that in every scene Jack sees a ghost, there is a mirror in the room.
Likewise, there is no way to know what was actually on Jack’s manuscript pages. We only see what Wendy sees, which might be what she wants to see. The case can be made that Jack isn’t even there at all - a deleted hospital scene at the end seems to imply this is the case.
These ambiguities, coupled with Kubrick’s famous attention to detail, make The Shining ripe for interpretation. Even the name of the hotel, Overlook, is a taunt, encouraging sleuths to dig deeper.
How deep is too deep?
All of the subjects of Room 237 are quick to accuse Kubrick of endless genius, even guile, but in doing so, they only pave the way to insert themselves and their interests into his intentions.
Geoffrey Cocks believes that The Shining is an extended metaphor for the Holocaust, but he is a scholar of the Holocaust. Jay Weidner sees an apology for faking the moon landing, but he is a self-described conspiracy hunter. By claiming to have solved the puzzle, they are actually claiming to have found a profound insight into the mind of a great filmmaker, one who can no longer speak for himself. They set themselves up as mediums and try to steal a bit of his glamor.
The fifth subject of Room 237, John Fell Ryan, is the man behind The Shining Forwards and Backwards. Thanks to Kubrick’s formal framing of the movie, the experiment results in some interesting visual juxtapositions, but like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon synching with The Wizard of Oz, does it mean anything? In his essay “I Look at the Shining and it Shows Me Things,” he says:
The mysterious thing is that they do sync - they sync inside your head…the most important aspect of superimposition isn’t author’s intention;it’s watching something familiar in a new way - or ways, seeing two points of view simultaneously and continuously. It’s a dance, beautiful and social.
Or self-cannibalizing and incoherent.
The Shining is a horror movie populated with ghosts that examines madness, obsession and the dissolution of family. Its power comes from its refusal to be pinned down. By design, it can’t have a universal solution. Like the spacious Overlook Hotel, there needs to be room for everyone to find their particular dread. The fine details are of your own making because horror is a broad brush with which to paint - and its color is always dark, dark red.
Both of Ascher’s documentaries are well worth your time but beware when searching the internet for additional theories on The Shining - that lake is as deep as it is wide and you might find yourself drowning.
This Horrific Life is an exploration of horror, covering movies new and old (and half-watched), games, comics, music and anything else even vaguely spooky. Follow the collection to make sure you don’t miss a single installment.
