By Keri O’Shea
The Shining is a personal favourite of mine, and remains one of the strongest horror films I’ve seen – a film which retains its impact, even after many viewings. It’s safe to say I’m not on my own in that respect, as the presence of the documentary film Room 237 attests. However, straightforward behind-the-scenes documentary this is not. What we have here instead is something of a Da Vinci Code for a horror classic. Proceed with a healthy pinch of salt at hand.
The makers of Room 237 have interviewed five film writers – if you would care to Google them, they are Jay Weidner, John Fell Ryan, Juli Kearns, Geoffrey Cocks and Bill Blakemore – each with certain levels of eccentricity, who each hold certain beliefs about the significance of The Shining, and details which form part of the film. We don’t see them, we only hear them, as they expound their theories over the relevant scenes (and scenes from a host of other films, television and newsreel, including a hell of a lot of shots from Demons because, you know, a cinema.) What I will say for Room 237 is that it strikes out on its own in terms of its format, and carries a certain level of engagement because of this novelty. It has an oddly-distancing vibe, though, this effect of a voice putting forward a theory, over soft music and turned-down scenes from the film. High-octane it ain’t. Where the gentle tone of the film meets its match, though, is in the theories being expounded here.
Did you realise that The Shining is actually all about the ill-treatment of the Native Americans? Or an examination of the Holocaust? Or a treatise on the general evil of, and I quote, “white folk”? You’ll also find out that Stanley Kubrick’s face appears in the clouds during the aerial scene at the start of the film, and that Kubrick himself was essentially a seer who knew everything about humanity, because The Shining has something to say about, and again I quote, “everything that exists”. Oh, fuck, I forgot that it’s also a template for the faked moon landings. I find myself genuinely at a loss as to whether the filmmakers are teasing us, or teasing their interviewees, but I will say this: I found myself howling with laughter in places, though never feeling quite sure if I was supposed to be laughing. But then again – why not re-record the audio on one of the sections where a young child interrupts his dad’s discussion? Is that because money was tight, or out of a sense of wickedness? The jury’s out on that one.
The head-scratching moments here are many. There are, to be sure, some genuinely interesting examples of mirroring and similarities, particularly between The Shining and other Kubrick films, and the commentators drew my attention to little visual tics which I had not noticed before, even during all of the times I’ve seen the film. At some points, there’s also evidence that at least some of these visual tics were put there intentionally by Kubrick. However, ultimately this slow-mo po-mo documentary works on the po-mo premise that, even if the author of a creative work did not mean to say something, theorists can prove they said it anyway. After years of seeing my favourite novels reclaimed and dissected by queer theorists and radical feminism, to name but two of the worst culprits, I have acutely limited patience with this approach. What I can say for sure about Room 237 is that it’s introduced me to a group of people who plain do not watch films in the same way as me, or most of us.
More than that, in places I felt like I was being made privy to a complex, cogent but warped version of reality as built up by someone delusional. The level of extrapolation which followed from noticing Danny had the number 42 on his shirt sleeve, for instance, led on to a slightly worrying fanaticism with tracing the number in different places through the film and then showing that this related to 1942 and thus to the Holocaust. The problem is that so much of this stuff can be knocked down as easily as it’s built up: it all depends on a tremendous narrowness of vision, noticing the things which suit you in huge detail but overlooking hundreds of other details which might compromise what you think. Also – and I’m no theorist, to be sure, but – if something’s subliminal, how in the hell do you know it’s there?
Essentially then, Room 237 is an at-times intriguing piece of film, though as much for its window into the mind of a certain type of film analyst as for anything else it does. It at least goes to show that The Shining continues to exert a massive hold over its admirers. Still, you have to wonder how people can be willing to read so much into the film, and yet be completely unwilling to accept it’s a horror movie…
Room 237 will be released by Metrodome on February 11th 2013.
UPDATE: The release date has now been changed to 11th March.