Room 237 and The Shining: The Cool and the Crazy

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.