What is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining really about? The Holocaust? Injustice to Native Americans? The faking of the Moon Landing? Countless hidden sexual jokes? Room 237 is a film where a number of people with way too much time on their hands spend endless hours watching and re-watching The Shining looking for clues as to it’s real meaning.
When I grew up I pretty much liked all movies. An Abbott & Costello feature was right up there with Gone With The Wind as far as I was concerned. At some point I read a book called The Key by James N Frey in which he outlined The Hero’s Journey-a bit of business he took pretty much literally from Joseph Campbell. Having my eyes opened to this master plot, I saw it most plainly in The Matrix. I knew I liked The Matrix, but I might have never noticed the Hero’s Journey without reading Frey.
The Shining is a horror movie based loosely on the Stephen King novel. A lot of odd things happen involving ghosts or time travel or reincarnation or clairvoyance or who the hell knows what. So it’s a perfect film to spend a lot of time pondering the meaning of it all. Room 237 points out many small details that might otherwise go unnoticed, but do any of them point to the film have some deeper meaning?
I remember reading an article by Issac Asimov in which he took offense at some college professor who claimed to know the real meaning of his stories. When he complained that he didn’t intended any such thing, the professor told him-just because you wrote it doesn’t mean you understand what it means. I have much the same feeling watching Room 237, the people talking about the larger issues hidden in between the frames of The Shining clearly have no idea what they are talking about. This, of course, doesn’t mean they are wrong-but I don’t think it really means they are right either.
Continuity errors have become a pretty big deal in the age of the DVD when you can freeze frame and ultra slomo whenever you want. Almost all modern movies have things like shifting ice cubes and changing liquid levels in glasses-if you look for them. A couple of the things mentioned in Room 237 seem to be nothing more than production errors, but would the great and powerful Kubrick make such mistakes?
Room 237 was a fun film and it gives the general feeling that you can watch The Shining and find out that it’s about anything you want it to be about.
