About 25 minutes into Rodney Ascher’s Room 237, one of Ascher’s interview subjects, John Fell Ryan, delivers a rambling, detailed description of a tracking shot in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Ascher plays the shot on screen in slow motion while Ryan talks, but Ryan becomes distracted when an infant can be heard crying in the background. “Can you hear that? My boy, yelling?” Ryan asks, before leaving to take care of his son. As he leaves, Ascher dutifully pauses the on screen tracking shot, anticipating Ryan’s return.
It’s a moment of pure happenstance–Ryan’s son just happened to start crying at that time–but the sound of John Fell Ryan Jr.’s cries will now forever be a part of Ascher’s film, which is something that neither he nor Ryan had foreseen. This moment is particularly ironic in the context of the film, which often finds its subjects inquiring about Kubrick’s artistic intentions in The Shining, even when the answer is probably unknowable and possibly coincidental.
The Shining, as most readers are aware, is a haunted house movie about a writer (Jack Nicholson) and his family (Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd) agreeing to act as caretakers of a massive hotel over the course of a winter. Unable to communicate with the outside world, the writer goes mad an attempts to kill his family, but not without a lot of narrative distractions and allusions to supernatural phenomena at the hotel.
Room 237, which opens at the TIFF Bell Lightbox this Friday, “stars” five different interviewees, each of whom attempts to explain his or her interpretation of Kubrick’s masterpiece, whether they think it’s a metaphor for the Holocaust, a film about the genocide of Native Americans, or (at its most conspiratorial) Kubrick’s attempt to inform his audience that he helped fake the Apollo 11 Moon landing.
Often, these theories play into the mythologized figure of Stanley Kubrick as a dictatorial perfectionist. This illusion of perfection allows Ascher’s subjects to find meaning in The Shining from scenarios that most would write off as arbitrary coincidences. Some of the theories have already been countered by one of Kubrick’s aides, Leon Vitali, who suggests that many of the creative decisions on set had more to do with pragmatism than any overarching design. Cocks suggests that Kubrick chose to have Torrance to write on a German “Adler” typewriter to suggest an association with the bureaucracy behind Hitler’s genocide of the Jews. Vitali’s response is much simpler and more probable: “That was Stanley’s typewriter.”
Despite the absurdity of (some of) these theories (particularly regarding the moon landing) and the likelihood that all interviewees are misinterpreting the film to some degree, Room 237 is never anything less than enthralling. Rodney Ascher’s stroke of genius is to let the film double as a close reading of The Shining. The audience never sees the faces of his subjects; instead, Ascher uses the visual space of the screen to provide slowed down frame-by-frame shots of the film, comparisons to other films by Kubrick, behind-the-scenes footage, and even diagrams of Danny Torrance’s Big Wheel rides through the Overlook Hotel.
A talking head version of Room 237 would be a movie about eccentrics and their eccentric ideas, a gabfest in which various outgoing personalities smile at the camera and embarrass themselves with their outré theories. By giving credence to the interviewees and demonstrating their interpretations to his own audience, Ascher has instead made a film about the mystery of filmmaking.
A few weeks after Inception made waves at the box office, an acquaintance of mine (and not someone who had studied or written about film), showed me a notebook full of observations and logical trains of thought pulled from Christopher Nolan’s opus. I don’t personally see anything all that complex in the final moments of Inception (the spinning top is far too obvious to be anything but a clever trick, yet the ambiguity of that last shot drove people crazy). The idea that the film is a puzzle–that if one sits down and tinkers with it enough, then one can figure it out–is alluring and central to its popularity.
If Inception is a grab-bag of evocative aesthetic mysteries, then The Shining is a treasure chest with its myriad of narrative red herrings that never come to a resolution. Whether or not the subjects of Room 237 are “right” in their interpretations, they are informative. As the film progresses, the voices of each subject begin to blend together. Instead of coming across a collection of idiosyncratic opinions, their observations almost become a collaborative project to understand this monolith of a film.
Their objective may be futile, but from Ascher’s perspective, their pursuit is both noble and particularly human. Even if the conclusions are far-fetched, their observations are often thought-provoking. Why does Danny Torrance wear that Apollo 11 sweatshirt? Surely, most filmmakers would have considered that design too “busy” or too distracting. The rocket is certainly phallic; how does that correspond with John Fell Ryan’s suggestion that The Shining is about sexual abuse or Jay Weidner’s assertion that it’s full of subliminal images. If the movie deals with genocide, as both Bill Blakemore and Geoffrey Cocks suggest, then what do we take from Jack Torrance’s complaint about the “white man’s burden” or the manner in which the film’s sole black character, Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers), is so suddenly murdered?
There are no definitive answers to these questions, and there is no way of knowing Kubrick’s artistic intentions. But, as Cocks says at the end of the film, “Author intent is only part of the story of any work of art, and those meanings are there regardless of whether the creator of the work was conscious of them.” (Whether or not those meanings exist for anyone but Cocks is a whole other epistemological quagmire.) Some might say these enthusiasts are running a fool’s errand, searching for answers when they should be satisfied by the film’s artistic design, but The Shining is far too grand and mysterious to go unquestioned and unexplored.
Those familiar with The Shining know that Room 237 takes its title from the mysterious room in the Overlook Hotel in which a beautiful naked woman lies in a bathtub. After getting out of the tub and embracing Jack, she turns into an old woman, covered in rotting flesh. The scene is one of many mysteries in the film, and, like the others, is never explained. What is in Room 237? We don’t know. It could explain everything or it could explain nothing. Even if there’s no answer, it’s still a question worth exploring.
____
Alan Jones writes about film for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @alanjonesxxxv.
For more, follow us on Twitter at @torontostandard and subscribe to our Newsletter.
