What
Is Hiding
In
“Room 237”?
Reviewed
by Shirrel Rhoades
Of all the rooms in the Overlook Hotel, Jack Torrance’s
young son Danny is warned to stay away from No. 237. Why?
All you horror fans out there know we’re talking about
Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” the 1980
make-you-pee-in-your-pants frightfest based on Stephen King’s
bestselling book.
Aside from those folks who wear tin-foil hats and talk
about the fake moon landing, there are a number of other conspiracy
theorists who see secret messages in books and movies. Many of them
study Kubrick’s “The Shining,” looking for concealed truths.
Nine of these weird interpretations are examined in a new documentary
called (you guessed it) “Room 237.”
The late Stanley Kubrick gave us such masterpieces as
“2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Spartacus,” “Dr. Strangelove,”
“Lolita,” and “A Clockwork Orange.” “The Shining” was his
redheaded stepchild, earning him only a Razzie nomination as Worst
Director.
It’s no secret that author Stephen King hated the
movie. He felt his novel’s main themes (the
disintegration of the family, the dangers of alcoholism) were largely
ignored by Kubrick. The two men had vastly
different interpretations. As King wrote, “Kubrick
just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of The Overlook Hotel.
So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film
into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones.”
He described Kubrick as “a man who thinks too much and
feels too little.” King has been described as having the opposite
problem.
While “The Shining” opened to mixed reviews, it has
since grown in cult status. “Just as the ghostly apparitions of the
film’s fictional Overlook Hotel would play tricks on the mind of
poor Jack Torrance, so too has the passage of time changed the
perception of ‘The Shining’
itself. Many of the same reviewers who lambasted the film for ‘not
being scary’ enough back in 1980 now rank it among the most
effective horror films ever made,” writes horror film critic Peter
Bracke.
“The Shining” is now considered “an enigmatic and
literally labyrinthine masterwork that contains multitudes (of hidden
meanings).”
There are many different theories about its coded
messages, ranging from a reworking of the myth of Theseus and the
Minotaur, a commentary about the genocide of Native Americans, an
examination of the Holocaust, a reference to sexual demonology, even
an apology for that moon landing some claim Kubrick helped NASA fake.
Go figure. I’ve seen the film dozens of times and
didn’t get any of that.
Now cinematic documentarian Rodney Ascher comes along to
help me sort it out. While Ascher doesn’t take sides, he does
carefully lay out nine different theories about Kubrick’s hidden
meanings within “The Shining.” And he uses an amazing amount of
footage from the original movie to make each theory’s points.
“My personal take on it is, for one, I don’t think
its nearly as visionary as any one of these folks have found,” says
Ascher. “I just see it as sort of a story about juggling the
responsibilities of your career and family and as cautionary tale of
what may happen if you make the wrong choice.”
That aside, if you’re a fan of “The Shining,”
you’ll want to see this illuminating film that’s currently
spooking moviegoers at the Tropic Cinema.
Other films occasionally have attracted decoders who
examine their supposed “symbolic or subterranean meanings,” among
them “Donny Darko,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Inception,” and
“Prometheus.” However, “The Shining” stands out, inspiring
this cinematic examination found in “Room 237,” one that would
impress a real-life Robert Langdon.
srhoades@aol.com
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