With my new Netflix
account (gift card), I've now had the chance to watch Room 237,
right on the heels of what was probably my twentieth viewing of
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
The most telling
moment in the documentary comes when one of the half-dozen or so
narrators remarks that it's possible to see Kubrick's face in the
clouds during the eerie opening credit sequence. If any one thing
sums up much of the theorizing surrounding The Shining,
that's it. Just like seeing rabbits and dragons in marching columns
of clouds, people project onto the film what they want to see, or,
more accurately, whatever happens to be going occupying their minds
at the time—and if we're talking about the voices who make up much
of the audio track of Room 237, it's stuff that's been
swimming around untamed and unmanaged in their streams of
consciousness for years.
One person seems
to believe that World War II was faked, that maybe most of history
was faked, and that Kubrick was hip this chronic artificiality hidden
form the public at large (if only they would pay attention!)
Another more infamously thinks Kubrick was admitting to his role in
helping to fake the moon landings (oddly, this same person at one and
the same time believes the landings were faked but that we still
actually went to the moon—what's the point of faking anything if
you're really going to do it? The psychic dissonance this man
experiences daily must start to sting after a while). More rational
theories touch on the Holocaust, the genocide of American Indians,
and the legacy of corruption and brutality in the United States.
I agree with some
of the things said, or at the very least I don't think they sound
like complete bullshit. It's obvious Kubrick held King's novel in
some degree of contempt—he tossed most of the book out and added a
lot of new stuff. (In fairness to Kubrick, he was going to leave a
little more in: the living hedge animals from the book were going to
be included, but Kubrick didn't think the special effects looked
realistic enough.) Most of what remains of King's work is a skeleton
that has been picked utterly clean, leaving a framework on which
Kubrick could hang the story he was more interested in
telling. Not a ghost story in the strictest sense—Kubrick didn't
believe in the supernatural, and he was about more than just yelling
“Boo!” at his audience, though he does an admirable job where it
counts. What he's saying appears to be, seems to be,
about family dysfunction primarily and perhaps, secondarily, about
how violent impulses in the family unit lead to violence on a broader
scale.
It works as a
drama, too, without reading much into it. The last third is frantic,
weird, and primal, and grips your attention like a vice,
demonstrating Kubrick was as great at filming action (Full
Metal Jacket and Clockwork Orange
being two other good examples—and hell, let's throw in Spartacus)
as he was at slow, stately, highly composed shots. It contrasts with
the stilted line readings and deliberate pace of the first act, done
that way, I believe, to emphasize the false fronts people put up in
public to hide the turmoil going on underneath. Kubrick was often
accused of being a cold, clinical filmmaker, but the raw emotional
power that comes through toward the end of The Shining,
thanks mainly to Nicholson's manic performance and Duvall's screaming
hysterics, shows that he knew exactly when to let things fly out of
control—in a very controlled way, of course.
But let me steer
things back to Room 237. The problem with many of the
theories different people have about The Shining is
that conspiracy theorists—and I really wish there was another way
of describing them, because those are two words that get way
too much mileage—tend to be very literal-minded, in their loopy
kind of way. Those who insist that there is a “code” to The
Shining, a “right” way of looking at it, don't seem to understand
art very well. Most artists, if they're good, and Kubrick was great,
leave their work wide open to interpretation, which goes a long way
toward explaining why the content to a movie like Room 237
exists in the first place. There's no key that unlocks the whole
mystery, because any creative person worth their salt knows that
mystery is half the fun.
I suppose it's
possible Kubrick really did make epic cinematic puzzle boxes, and
everything that shows up in frame, every piece of furniture and
Disney decal, every can of baking powder and pile of luggage, is a
fractal in that larger puzzle that, when all are fitted together,
provides an unadulterated view into the mind of an indisputable
filmmaking genius.
The genius part is
what creates some of the difficulty. Just because someone is
brilliant doesn't mean they never make mistakes, or that they know
everything, or they control everything about their work with the
skill of a necromancer. It doesn't even mean they're rational—Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, for all his obvious brilliance, sincerely
believed in fairies and the claims of spiritual mediums. It also
doesn't mean The Shining doesn't have bona fide gaffes—note the
shadow of the helicopter shooting the footage for the opening credits
(unless you think that's a reference to the Vietnam war—Jesus
Christ) Diehards might say, “Why did he leave it in,
then?”, to which I'd answer, “Maybe they only had the helicopter
for one day and couldn't go back to reshoot the footage once they'd
noticed the mistake.” It's a mesmerizing set of images, and it's
very possible Kubrick figured people wouldn't notice. Home video
wasn't a thing when The Shining came out—how could he have guessed
that some people would obsess over every frame like fucking maniacs
in the comfort of their own darkened living rooms? Who does that?
Heavy meaning is
also placed in things that might just as easily be gags. The chair
behind Jack Nicholson that disappears between shots? That could be a
joke, the kind a filmmaker might get a kick out of playing on an
audience. The fact that Nicholson is reading a copy of Playgirl in
one scene? Definitely a joke, though I'll allow that its inclusion
might have had thematic significance as well (I'm referring to the
incest article mentioned on the cover—text the audience could have
no hope of reading, by the way).
But since we're
talking about theories, I have one of my own. I read once in a
Fangoria magazine back in the '80's that the sets for The Shining
burned down and had to be rebuilt because shooting hadn't finished.
As I understand it, movies are shot on a fairly strict schedule;
extra time means more money spent, and although Kubrick was riding
pretty high at this point in his career, it's unlikely the studio was
willing to just throw more money at the production if it ran
behind—less so in this case because they would have already blown a
lot of money having the sets rebuilt. For a serious control freak
like Kubrick, that would be incredibly frustrating. It's the kind of
situation where someone might decide to let little things slide, let
continuity errors go because hey, who's really gonna notice and who
has time to go back and fix that shit? A missing chair here and
there doesn't usually register in a viewer's consciousness during
dramatic scenes, and a man like Kubrick was the sort of person who
would understand that very well.
Such frustration
might explain a few other things, like Kubrick's inexcusable
harassment of Duvall on the set. For those who like cited sources
from the film itself, how about this: remember the scene where
Nicholson menaces Duvall like a flamboyantly rabid coyote in the
Colorado Room, backing her toward the stairs as she wields a baseball
bat? I haven't read the novel in decades, but I'm pretty sure the
scene isn't in there. And what does Nicholson say at one point?
Something along the lines of, “I have been entrusted with the care
of the Overlook Hotel until May the first. I have signed a letter of
agreement, a contract, stating that I would do so. Do you have any
idea what the word 'responsibility' means?”
Let's entertain
the idea that this is Kubrick complaining out in the open, right in
the middle of his own movie, about the fact that he was contractually
obligated to bring a film in on time and on budget despite all of the
setbacks he faced. There's also the scene in which Nicholson chews
Duvall out for bothering him while he's writing, where he complains
that interruptions break his concentration and thus require him to
take time to get back in the zone. Since I'm spitballing here, I'll
go ahead and speculate that Kubrick is referring to the major
interruption of having to stop filming because of the fire. The
frustration I'm alleging he felt might also help explain why Kubrick
didn't make another movie for the better part of a decade.
It does him a
disservice to say that every onscreen detail has a one-to-one
correlation to some very specific idea, or carries a specific
message. It implies that he was kind of simple-minded, and didn't
have the skill to create rich, complex work open to multiple
meanings. More like he was putting together a bookshelf from IKEA
than making a work of art. And to say he was meticulous and let that
justify one's insistence that every detail of the film was fully
under Kubrick's control—that he would even want everything to be so
totally under his control—and therefore error-free just doesn't cut
it. Kubrick clearly had OCD; not the neat-freak kind lots of people
claim to have but the nearly debilitating, crazy-making kind (I
should know). Doing a hundred takes of one shot and then finally
going with the first one or two? That's OCD, which pushes you to do
unnecessary things because you feel like you have to and not because
they make sense. When people with obsessive compulsive disorder are
stressed out, a lot of their symptoms can come painfully to the
surface, and what's more stressful than directing a big budget movie?
Watch the biographical documentary about Kubrick where someone
describes him handing to a housesitter forty pages of typewritten
instructions on how to look after his cats. Fuckin'-A that's some
serious OCD. So when you say he was meticulous, keep in mind that
quality owes as much to his mental instability as it does to his
genius. Some of the stuff in his movies comes from the crazy, not
from the smarts. I'd put money on it.
The first time I
saw The Shining was on ABC when I was around twelve. Network TV
doesn't let you watch R-rated movies unfiltered, but not enough was
altered by censors to lesson the impact for me. As it does for most
people, it left an indelible impression. A year or two later I taped
a broadcast and watched it many times during my junior high years. I
was a lonely, resentful outsider kind of a kid, and Nicholson as
Jack Torrence looked to me like everything I wanted to be, if that
doesn't sound too fucked up. He expressed his anger in long,
articulate tirades, he let his frustration hang out, his emotions
boiled over and there was no one to hold him back. I memorized his
more insane scenes, played them out in my head because I yearned to
go off on a tear in the same way in my own life. I was a weird
teenager.
Flash forward
twenty-eight years to just a few weeks ago when I last watched it,
after not having seen it for at least a decade. Jack Torrence is no
longer the hero; he never was, but tell that to fourteen-year-old me
with his stupid power fantasies. Instead, I see the sort of monster
that has plagued, and continues to plague, too many families. A man
set to self-destruct, and is prepared to take his wife and son with
him. My own grandfather, who I thankfully had little to do with, was
a similar individual, a drunk who was heavy-handed with his children
and thought entirely in terms of himself. What I realized Kubrick
had done was create a textbook example of a severely dysfunctional
family, a blueprint of abuse, denial, and alcoholism that is perfect
in its attention to detail and, yes, meticulous.
Two different
versions of myself, separated by decades, have two entirely different
approaches to the same film. According to some schools of criticism,
they're both right. Hell, maybe they're all right. The meaning of a
work has as much to do with what you bring to it as what the artist
intended. If you want The Shining to be about moon landings or a return to the
gold standard or whatever, have fun. I mean, you're probably not
right, but more power to you for looking at a movie analytically
instead of gaping slack-jawed at it. It's a much better time that
way.
