Saturday 27 October 2012

Room 237 - Being an inquiry into The Shining in 9 parts (2012)





"There ain't nothin' in Room 237. But you ain't got no business goin' in there anyway. So stay out. You understand? Stay out." - Dick Halloran, The Shining (1980).

Whether Halloran was warning young Danny Torrence or the audience; whether he was talking of the literal room, number 237, or the disturbed mind of Jack Torrence, or perhaps more likely, the ever complex mind of auteur Stanley Kubrick, his warnings went unheeded. 
Stanley Kubrick’s work has been analysed, deconstructed and scrutinised by every would-be film academic and movie buff. The amount of different, and often contradicting, theories out there are probably beyond counting. But it doesn’t stop new books and journal entries claiming to know the meaning behind each individual frame and shot from being published. This is what makes Kubrick’s work so great, almost all of these journals, books, conversations over coffee and unspoken thoughts are right. Kubrick deliberately held off from explaining the meanings so that people could debate them and draw their own conclusions. Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237 (2012) doesn’t claim to have the answers, but it allows five people to argue that they do.

It’s hard to tell if Ascher believes any of the theories he is relaying, or if he is pointing out the madness of the people who are providing these theories. What cannot be doubted is these people have done their research. They have followed shots and mapped and blueprinted the Outlook Hotel in order to confirm their suspicions of a rogue window or a metaphorical upper level. They have watched the film frame-by-frame in order to find dissolves that they believe confirm their theories. There are times when you’re left questioning if The Shining dragged these interviewees inside Room 237 and removed any notion of sanity from them - but there are also moments of pure genius when you can’t help but agree. Many of these academics and experts in their own fields will call upon the same scenes, upon the same shots. But they will draw completely different conclusions. Are any of them right? Are they all right?

Often the mis-en-scene (what is in the frame we’re seeing) is called upon to provide evidence of a theory, but even more often it seems, a continuity error is provided as evidence. Sometimes these continuity errors are so obvious that they must have been filmed deliberately. But other times we’re left questioning: Why when Kubrick makes these errors, are they evidence of genius, but when a journeyman makes the same errors, they are evidence of failure?

The reality of the documentary, is that the theories speak for themselves. This blog-post could spend thousands of words deconstructing, agreeing or disagreeing with the speculations, providing new approaches, and could fall quickly into another internet analysis of The Shining. In a world of internet blogging, these ideas  are widely available, and can be researched, torn apart or added to by other interested parties. If you googled “The Shining” along with the key words “Holocaust” or “Indian Genocide” you can find a wealth of information about these arguments. You could lose days of your life at a time just reading what people you agree or disagree with wrote. But there’s more to Room 237 than just the documentary set piece of ‘talking heads’. In fact, there are no talking heads featured in the film at all.

The interviewees are not filmed, but recorded. Ascher uses a whole host of archive footage, primarily from Kubrick’s films, to represent those talking, and those they’re talking about. A single narrater could be represented by both Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise at different moments of the film. A scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) represented a feeling felt from a scene in The Shining. Ascher really explores the method of collage and makes the most of the striking images Kubrick created.
This collage style, despite using professional shots, creates a feeling of an isolated fan film. The internet is full of fan-made homages to their favourite films and shows. As digital editing has constantly become easier, fans have re-edited famous films, or laid new soundtracks on top, to draw new meanings. These fan films aren’t generally done to make money, or find fame for the makers, but simply as something fun, a way of maybe shedding a new light on an old object. This fan film collage, despite using Kubrick’s own work, deliberately removes Kubrick, or anyone involved in the original making of The Shining from the documentary. We’re left feeling that this is a group of fans discussing their favourite film. These interviewees may be experts in their own fields, but their passion for The Shining and their theories removes any objectivity they may have once had and they are reduced from experts to fans. We’re left with the feeling that without the drive and direction the film took, it could easily have been made into an internet fan homage video, only to be found by the rogue Kubrick fan trawling the internet late at night. This isn’t a criticism at all, but the complete opposite. Whether you agree with the theorists or not, their passion is obvious. Ascher doesn’t say any of the theories are right or wrong, but his passion is proved to equal, if not surpass, that of the interviewees, by the painstakingly precise editing of the archive footage. 

Ascher doesn’t unlock the secrets to Room 237 and that was probably not his intention. That’s not to say that his interviewees were wrong, the beauty of most of Kubrick’s work is that no theory can ever really be wrong (apart from maybe that it was Kubrick’s confession of faking the Apollo 11 moon landing...). There are times when Ascher’s editing really seems to support the words the audience hears, and other times when it seems to back away from them, almost laughing at the ludicrosity of the theories. But at the same time, the documentary definitely upholds the idea that audiences have the power to read The Shining, and probably any film, any way they want to. Audiences can create their own theories on Kubrick’s work, and what this documentary seems to say, as Kubrick seemed to imply, is that they should.

Written by Edward L. Corrigan on the 27/10/2012