“I’m sorry to differ with you sir, but YOU are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know sir.: I’ve always been here.” – Delbert Grady, The Shining
On the short list of my favorite movies of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining ranks somewhere near the top. I can think of other films that I’ve seen as often, have as much entertainment value, or bridge the gap between high and low-art as deftly. What makes the The Shining endure is not just that it has all three of these qualities, but that it does it all in such a remarkably offbeat manner. Like the best movies, there’s an aura of mystery that makes any definitive interpretation feel out of grasp. It isn’t just the hallways drenched in the blood of the twin girls; anyone who’s ever seen the film will tell you, from the very first moment, something just feels… off.
This is the jumping point for Room 237, Rodney Ascher’s clever, absorbing, and often hilarious look at the hidden (or possibly nonexistent) symbolism of Kubrick’s classic. Breaking the mold of current documentaries by featuring minimal original footage and no talking-head cutaways, the film consists solely of five Kubrick obsessives delivering hard-thought and half-baked theories on the true meaning of The Shining.
To say that some of these ideas don’t hold water might be a bit of an understatement. There’s some intricate (if well-traveled) analysis of Kubrick’s use of foreshadowing and incongruous spatial continuity that actually counts as well-observed criticism; a take on the film as a metaphor for the genocide of Native Americans grows more convincing as it goes on; the belief that Kubrick meant the film to be a de-facto confession for faking the Apollo 11 moon-landing comes off as particularly unhinged; and no, the man on the Ski Monarch poster does not represent a minotaur.
Ascher’s first gained notoriety for the online short The S From Hell, a look at the shared childhood trauma caused by the jarring 1960s Screen Gems logo. Beneath that film’s cheeky sense of humor is a real sense of vivid recollection, how the thought of simple corporate logo can turn you into a child, cowering behind your couch in fear. It’s this playful spirit and sharp insight that keeps Room 237 from devolving into pure gobbledigook. He never wants to judge his subjects, and he is always willing to follow his subjects down the rabbit hole, illustrating their theories in great detail. This includes re-creating one subject’s experiment of simultaneously playing The Shining backward and forward (this is actually pretty mind-blowing) and a frame-by-frame breakdown of the opening interview that leads to the film’s biggest laugh.
At its most stirring, Room 237 plays almost like the movie version of a Girl Talk album – less of a documentary than a collage, The Shining remixed through the prism of pop-culture analysis. It’s film theory for the age of memes and mash-ups. This is to say that it’s only partly a film about Shining fandom; it’s mostly a film about the way we’ve come to process culture as a way of understanding our past – how seemingly minor cultural artifacts have a direct and tangible way of connecting us to a particular emotional state. At some point the intent of the creator becomes irrelevant, and what matters is the part of ourselves that we imprint.
The most powerful and persuasive argument in Room 237 comes from one fan who believes that The Shining is not a metaphor for a single event but for the past as a whole. “That’s the essence of great art,” he says, “It’s like a dream. It’s boiled everything down to an emblematic symbol that’s got all of life in it… The way Kubrick made movies was not unlike the way our brains create memories and for that matter dreams.”
I didn’t finish Room 237 convinced of any of The Shining’s hidden symbolism; the only thing I’m certain of is that it actually has symbolism. I did, however, come to an idea of why I tend to rank it so high on my list of favorite movies. To watch it is to draw a clear line through my moviegoing life – from seeing it digitally projected at age 27, back through college-dorm viewings and my high-school horror-movie obsession, all the way back to my childhood, watching a shoddy VHS copy taped off of late-night HBO. Watching it over, and over, and over…
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