Room 237 / The Shining

Room 237 Directed by Robert Ascher (2012)
The Shining Directed by Stanley Kubrick(1980)

“There’s so much in this movie that’s out of whack, none of it makes any sense,” exclaims novelist Juli Kearns towards the end of Room 237, a compendium of speculations on the truth about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

I’m inclined to sympathise with her view except that, like much of The Shining, it’s back to front. After watching this documentary the problem seems to be that there’s too much sense in there, a superfluity of meaning.

According to the obsessives lined up to put their case, the film is about the genocide of the native American. Or the Holocaust. Or sex. Or it’s Kubrick’s confession that, yes, he did fake the footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Or it’s a whole kaleidoscope of subliminal messages from a genius director who’d just got very very bored.

Some of it you go yup, that could be reference, but most of it is sheer bollocks. That’s a German typewriter, see, and those suitcases piled up (in the hotel reception) can only mean one thing. The words ‘room no’ on the key fob are nearly an anagram of ‘moon’. That letter tray that for a split second seems to be attached to the hotel manager’s groin, that has to be phallic. And up there in the clouds, can you see Kubrick’s face? You can’t? Well, not all of us can spot it.

The one about the genocide of native Americans is most convincing. But there’s a lot of explicit evidence for it. The hotel, we’re told, is built on top of an old Indian burial ground. Will these people never learn? Half the Rocky Mountains to build a hotel on, and you have to pick that spot?

Journalist Bill Blakemore notes pointedly that native Indian imagery is all over The Shining. But in the 144-minute cut, freshly released in the UK, hotel manager Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson) tells us that himself. The designs, he says, are based on Navajo and Apache motifs.

There’s a general observation to made, and it’s made by one of the Room 237 commentators (can’t remember which one), that The Shining is about how we bury the past at our peril. It’s about, in Freudian terms, the return of the repressed. As is any ghost story, when you think about it. (We are in the Overlook Hotel, too.)

This is reinforced by the 144-minute version in a quite disturbing way. Extra scenes explore little Danny Torrance’s emerging multiple personality disorder, and suggest it’s been caused by his father’s violence. Danny retreats from the trauma into his ‘imaginary friend’ Tony.

Rather than take on a big historical narrative, this domesticates the repression of emotional trauma, bringing it, literally, closer to home.

How all this plays out in The Shining, of course, presents us with a problem. How much of it is going inside Danny’s head? And for that matter, father Jack’s? Are we watching a psychological horror? Or a plain supernatural one?

That dilemma could be a strength of the film. But, ironically, Room 237 highlights for me the idea that Kubrick was not in full control of his material here. The Shining is littered with inconsistencies and continuity gaffes. Which you could take to be deliberate (I’ll buy the reversed carpet symbolising Danny being trapped), but that way madness lies.

What makes a fairly ordinary horror movie so memorable is not the bottomless interpretations but the performances. The Shining without Jack Nicholson as Torrance? Inconceiveable. And Shelley Duvall as Wendy, and Danny Lloyd as Danny, too, act out of their skins… Hm. Now that’s an interesting idea. 

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