ROOM 237
Wait a minute. Right next to the baking powder are boxes of Tang, which we all know is synonymous with NASA. Jay Weidner claims that Kubrick faked the moon-landing footage (his 2001: A Space Odyssey was a kind of dress rehearsal) and uses The Shining to illustrate his point.
Weidner finds proof of his theory in the key to the hotel’s haunted room, which reads “ROOM No 237.” When these letters are mixed up, ignoring a couple, and you have the word MOON 237. And the moon’s average distance from Earth is 238,000 miles, which is almost exactly 237 thousand miles!!!
Theories and counter-theories continue to pile up, as do one-off oddities. One guy is convinced the movie tells the story of the Holocaust. Another viewer maps out the hotel’s floor plan and finds an “impossible window” with a view to the outside, deep within the structure. Someone says The Shining is all about sex; surely, no one has thought that about a movie before.
Then there’s a guy who has watched the film backwards and forwards simultaneously, finding patterns in the overlapping images. If you’re tired of listening to Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz with the sound off (and while high), this could be your next project.
On the one hand, at least four (and possibly all five) of the theorists have to be wrong. But what emerges from Room 237 is not the denigration of conspiracies, but a type of celebration of our ability to create patterns wherein (perhaps) none exist. “Continuity error?” asks one of the Shining-ologists about a missing chair in one shot. “I don’t think so.”
Ascher never lets us see his film theorists, but instead illustrates their views with clips from The Shining and other tangentially related films by Kubrick and others. Interactive maps also explain the hotel’s maddeningly inconsistent (and madness-inducing?) topography.
In a strange way, Kubrick, who died in 1999, needs to shoulder some of the blame, just for being so intelligent. The cinematic genius had a scrupulous, even obsessive attention to detail. (In 2001,the barely glimpsed zero-G toilet instructions, for instance, are the real deal.)
A number of fans think that if Kubrick sneezed, it could indicate significance. Such attention to detail, coupled with the ability for movies to serve as mirrors does provide an explanation for why The Shining continues to captivate our imaginations.
Then again possibly Room 237 is saying something else altogether. I’m open to possible interpretations are you? It is an explanation of allegorical readings of the The Shining. In the last 6-8 months, it was researched, and because of the internet there is so much more information now. The number 237, in the book it was 217. Room 217 was used in the book, the actual hotel used a room number that does not exist in the hotel. One simple cut from Jack and the woman in the bathroom to her in the tub becomes very mysterious. Kubrick was obsessed with themes of duality; Jack in the present day to Jack in the photograph, the twin sisters, and Danny and the mother to the girls. In the scene with Grady in the bathroom, they are surrounded by mirrors and they are not quite looking at each other. A theory discussed with Bill Blakemore, there is a streak of racism, Blakemore’s theory is the film is about the genocide of American Indian.
In a manner, of speaking, Room 237 is an argument against thorough, reasonable criticism: it trots obsessive cranks out like it’s leading a public freak show and inviting us to feel superior by laughing off their conspiracies as being absurd. It is, as has been noted before, more concerned with the type of people who develop obsessive crackpot theories about horror films more than it is about the quality or content of the theories themselves and it does seem to suggest that these sorts of people are usually very unusual and weird. It is worth taking note of the theories which have been expounded upon in Room 237 and despite being researched extensively, have the intellectual rigor of a hard theoretical or academic reading.
