Stanley Kubrick’s labyrinth

Think you know The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of the Stephen King horror novel?

Well, you don’t know Jack until you’ve seen Room 237, director Rodney Ascher’s recent documentary which gathers together nine often-bizarre interpretations of Kubrick’s horror film.

“Being an Inquiry into The Shining in 9 Parts” is the film’s subtitle, as it gathers the viewpoints of fans and scholars — some serious, some obsessive, some totally bananas — who have pored over every frame of the film that made instant catchphrases out of “Red rum!”, “Here’s Johnny!” and “Give me the bat, Wendy!”

One thing I remember about watching The Shining my first time (in 1983) was that it wasn’t particularly scary. I expected a really spine-chilling masterpiece from the great Kubrick, and instead I got Jack Nicholson leering and arching his eyebrows, and Shelley Duvall bugging out her eyes. I felt like it was a parody of a horror movie, rather than a sincere attempt to scare the audience.

Well, like the people featured in Room 237, I found myself drawn to watching The Shining again. And again. And again, until it raised its profile in Kubrick’s oeuvre up to minor classic (right behind Strangelove, 2001 and Clockwork Orange). I came to appreciate the structure and design of The Shining, and even eventually found it truly frightening.

Room 237 shows us how simple props like Tang and Calumet Baking Soda have hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic.

Well, the people in Room 237 seem to have a sixth sense when sniffing out Kubrick‘s real intentions behind the movie. They, indeed, see dead people… and NASA conspiracies… and genocidal clues galore. Kubrick’s image-laden horror film is said to contain clues to the mysteries of the universe by these people.

While none of the participants in Room 237 are shown onscreen, their voiceover claims accompany clips from the movie, along with blown-up still shots, scenes rewound and looped over and over again (the mesmerizing ‘80s synth score by Jonathan Snipes adds to the feel). It’s like the Zapruder film in JFK for these people, and they’re as obsessive as Oliver Stone ever was.

Take Bill Blakemore, a foreign journalist who became convinced that the movie “was about the genocide of the American Indians.” His clues? A few shots of baking powder cans shown in the background during certain scenes bearing the image of a Native-American in profile and the name Calumet, which means “peace pipe.” He also mentions the Navajo-type rugs lying around the creepy Overlook Hotel and several framed portraits of Indian chiefs on the walls. Blakemore believes the subtext of The Shining to be the destruction of Native Americans during pioneer days.

And you know what? He’s right. Kubrick’s script does make reference to the Overlook being built on “an old Indian burial ground” (that old horror movie cliché) so it’s plausible to see signs of Indian decimation “overlooking” the hotel.

Yet the conspiracy grows wider — and weirder — in Room 237. Viewer Geoffrey Cocks, a historian, sees it as a metaphor for the Holocaust. His clues? A German-made typewriter on which Nicholson/Jack Torrance obsessively writes his “masterpiece.” And the number 42, which corresponds to the year that Hitler ordered the destruction of the Jewish people, and which he finds everywhere — on little Danny’s sweatshirt, even in the product of the numbers contained in the movie’s famed “spooky” room (2 x 3 x 7 = 42). He also finds eagles everywhere in The Shining — in the name of the typewriter, Adler, which means “eagle” in German; on Nicholson’s T-shirt in one scene; or the eagle statuette lurking in the background of another. Eagles, of course, are associated with Nazi Germany, but also with the United States. “Kubrick generally uses eagles to symbolize state power,” Cocks notes. (Kubrick was, in fact, trying to make a Holocaust movie of his own for over a decade but eventually gave up after Schindler’s List came out.)

Perhaps the most intriguing conspiracy theory involves Kubrick’s alleged involvement in “faking” the moon landing for NASA in 1969. (This subject, an urban myth to some, gospel truth to others, also turned up in a “mockumentary” from 2011 called Dark Side of the Moon).

It’s viewer Jay Weidner — who says he had a “religious experience” while watching 2001 when it came out — who sees clues dropped by Kubrick to reveal his involvement in the alleged NASA conspiracy. “I’m not saying we didn’t go to the moon,” Weidner intones, “I’m just saying that what we saw was faked, and that it was faked by Stanley Kubrick.”

He adds: “I knew I’d nailed it when, 58 minutes into The Shining, Danny stands up and he’s wearing an ‘Apollo 11’ sweater.” Not only that, but the presence of Tang — the breakfast drink touted as “what the astronauts drank” — is shown in another scene in the Overlook food storeroom. Spooky! 

You don’t have to be crazy to see endless patterns and symbols in The Shining… but it helps!

Okay, if this kind of stuff gives you chills, then feel free to grab your own copy of The Shining and watch it obsessively on super slo-mo, over and over again. After a while, any pattern or possibility will start to make perfect sense.

But after about 30 minutes of viewing Room 237, you may start to believe that some of these people are a few Spicy Wings short of a KFC Bucket.

I will add my own dime-store thoughts on The Shining and its “true” meaning. On one level, I think it explores the destruction of the American family, mainly through the implosion of the patriarchal structure — Jack Torrance turning against his wife and son, driven by guilt and frustration at not being able to “do the job.” (Recall an early scene while driving to the Overlook where Jack and family cheerily discuss the 1847 Donner Pass tragedy — in which snow-stranded families were forced to eat dead bodies, and even family members, to survive a brutal winter. That’s the nuclear family consuming itself, right there.)

On another level, it could refer to the American Indian genocide, with Native American motifs sprinkled throughout. On an even wider scale, it’s a metaphor for colonial subjugation of various non-white peoples by whites and Europeans (“White man’s burden,” Jack chuckles to bartender Lloyd at one point while drinking his imaginary scotch). It may thus refer to the Holocaust, among other atrocities.

But what’s also interesting is the structure of the Overlook Hotel itself, its receding hallways and recurring passageways (which Danny is frequently shown Big Wheeling around); the motif of the topiary maze, and the distinctive geometric carpeting of the hallways which echoes that maze: all of this suggests the idea of feeling confined, trapped within a complex system of self-contained symbols and mysteries. Critics were right in saying that the Overlook itself is the main character in the movie. Maybe that’s the mood that Kubrick was going for in The Shining. And maybe that’s the thing that keeps these conspiracy nuts drawn back inside its irresistible labyrinth.