Review of Room 237 (2012) by Jason M — 20 Sep 2012

Part of what makes Stanley Kubrick's The Shining the horror it is that there's not much "horror" in it at all. There's a scene with some skeletons, there are some characters that are ambiguously constructed as either hallucinations or ghosts, and, of course, there's Jack Nicholson running around with an axe. Oh, and the blood flood. But that's about it, really, which is odd.

But there's something there, something that fills the film with dread, and the folks profiled in Rodney Ascher's doc Room 237 think they have The Shining all figured out. Following the theories from inception to conclusion of five avid, obsessed scholars of the film, Room 237 picks out unseen details that are tantalizingly close to cohering, like a bolt being unthrown, into a new view into Kubrick's film.

Lurid carpets clash, and inarguably shift direction in abrupt "errors" that are too deliberate to be blamed on mistakes in continuity. But do the carpets represent stacked, atomized coituses meant to represent generations through history?

References to the Apollo space program-a rocket-ship sweater, cans of tang-litter the film with something that's a little beyond normal frequency. But are they hints from a bored, gagged director who was shouting to the world that he'd been hired to shoot fake moon landing footage?

The film is full of carefully positioned eagles, and carefully positioned cans of "Calumet" brand baking powder. But which genocide is The Shining therefore about, the holocaust in Europe or the destruction of the Natives in America? Or is it both?

The rest of what makes Room 237 great is that there's no way all of their theories are wrong, and no way at all that they're right. It's a joy to come to the late realization that Kubrick's film, bereft as it relatively was of traditional horror elements, was whipping up its gripping sense of mounting dread out of impossible, disorienting details. That much Room 237 makes plain.

Windows that shouldn't be possible given the layout of the hotel, characters that enter one carefully but subtly labeled room and exit inexplicably from another: these things are singled out and enjoyably held up as evidence of Kubrick's sublime talent. They're then, often as not, used by the theorist as evidence also of Kubrick's secret intent, or intents as the case may be. The Shining, they say, isn't about ghosts, or madness. It's about manifest destiny and the destruction of the natives, unless it's actually about the NASA's duplicity, or the Jews, or sex demons. Or a combination of some of those.

Room 237 is a riot, a film that assembles the theories of dedicated viewers-some benign and clever, some clever and utterly goofy-into a meditation on what a spectacularly talent Kubrick was and an exploration of the way that film fans can use the text of a film to construct a fragile, personal narrative. One that exists for them alone. It's about how and why we watch movies, especially good ones, as much as it's about The Shining in particular.

Once one starts looking hard enough, once one wants to find something badly enough to support one's personal narrative and relationship with a film, almost anything can be found. And almost anything, of course, given Kubrick's passing and his legendary reticence when he was alive, can be found in The Shining, if one squints, or wants hard enough for it to be there, or if one should, say, decide to screen the film playing simultaneously forwards and backwards on the same screen. Room 237's a fantastic, frustrating and ultimately thrilling look at both the psychology of one of the best horror films ever made and the people who see in it ghostly things the rest of us might never be able to see.