Documentary Pick – Room 237 (2012)
The Shining is hardly thought of as one of Stanley Kubrick’s most powerful or accomplished films. It lacks the epic scope of Spartacus, the timely subversion of Dr. Strangelove, the brain-teasing puzzles of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the forward-looking satire of A Clockwork Orange. Perhaps that’s why people have clung on to The Shining as a work encoded with signs and Easter eggs for whatever themes they want to put on it. It’s hard to say what Kubrick was doing with the Stephen King-penned story, so he might as well have been talking about Greek mythology, or one of history’s greatest mass slaughters, or his own complicity in a conspiracy theory.
Room 237 runs the gamut of strange inner-meanings for The Shining. One person says it’s Kubrick’s commentary on the genocide of Native Americans, while another says its Kubrick letting off some of the depression he was experiencing while researching The Aryan Papers, the Holocaust movie he never ended up making. Then we get someone else who thinks that The Shining is Kubrick’s take on the classic story of Theseus and the Minotaur, while another theorist thinks that Kubrick is none-too-subtly saying to the audience that the rumors of his filming the Apollo 11 moon landing were not the least bit exaggerated. They’re all passionate about their respective points of view, but how deeply you read into them is entirely up to the audience.
We never see the faces of these advocates, all their points are made through narration and archival footage. It’s also not as if each case is given its own time to be made, as the various points all ebb and flow into one and other. In one instance the enigmatic Bill Watson, the Overlook’s summer caretaker, with his obvious (?) darker skin tone is a stand-in for the Native American, but in another instance, his dour appearance, and silent demeanor can be taken as a stand-in for the American intelligence apparatus like the CIA or the NSA. And by the way, did you know that if you superimpose The Shining playing backwards overtop of it playing forward that you’ll get interesting juxtapositions of different shots? Of course, a lot of movies probably work like that, but it holds at least as much validity for meaning as the purposefully continuity error of the missing chair.
The interesting thing about Room 237 though is that you can read into its intentions in almost as many different ways as its interview subjects read The Shining. Is it a literal kind of metaphor for modern society’s obsession with popular culture? Is it a commentary on our desperate search for meaning? Is it a way for cinephiles to turn a lesser-work by one of the masters into a misunderstood gem? Or maybe director Rodney Ascher just wants to say that we all have too much time on our hands? As Sigmund Freud, another master of his field was once reputed to say, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But of course, that was loaded with meaning too.