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STAN'S LABYRINTH: ROOM 237 (2012)
When I first saw Stanley Kubrick’s film of The Shining back
in the summer of 1980, one of the many questions swirling around in my head as
I stumbled out of the theater into the midday sun was, Why would Kubrick change
the number of the sinister hotel room from 217 (as it was in Stephen King’s
book) to 237? It seemed like such a random choice, but it gnawed at me, right
along with the many reservations I had about the movie itself. My own efforts
to contemplate Kubrick’s motivation never moved beyond the rudimentarily
mathematical, not to mention the absurdly inconsequential—“Is the director
saying his movie is better than King’s book by, um, 20?”— before I gave up
altogether.
It’s been 32 years
since the movie came out, and over the course of subsequent summers the
movie—which got very mixed reaction from critics and audiences at the time—has
been embraced by many as yet another Kubrick masterpiece. But it turns out some
people never gave up wondering about that room number, and scores of other
mysteries apparently buried within the text of the movie’s visual and aural
design. Rodney Ascher’s delightful, nimbly directed, perplexing but never
condescending Room 237 allows that freeform wonderment a postmodern sort
of forum, charting the conspiratorial
theories of five people who have poked at the carcass of The Shining for
decades, each unearthing wildly divergent, improbable, thought-provoking and,
of course, conflicting conclusions.
The movie, blessedly
talking heads-free, uses plenty of fair-use justified clips from Kubrick’s
movie as a sort of an illustrative guide, functioning as an exhibit of evidence
to support the various claims made by its multiple narrators, alongside scores
of found footage and clips from other films, some directed by Kubrick, some not.
If Room 237 never allows the viewer the luxury of “getting to know” the folks
who have submersed themselves so profoundly into Kubrick’s methods, then the
very nature of their obsessions provides clues for further psychological
archaeology. One man claims the movie as a treatise on the genocide of the
American Indian, another on the Holocaust. There’s a woman who tracks with
three-dimensional precision the lay of the Overlook Hotel (Ascher cleverly
places us inside her maps) and the meaning taken on as the various characters
move through it. And two different observers focus on how Kubrick apparently
used the nascent trend of technological manipulation of imagery (originated in
the groundbreaking effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey) to his own end-- one
weaving an elaborate theory involving that changed room number and Kubrick’s
involvement in the faking of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the other postulating
that the simplest answer to why the movie is so packed with seemingly random
information might be the most reliable—Kubrick was bored.
Room 237 has been criticized for elevating the nitpicking
mania of marginalized viewers to the level of film criticism, and it is true
that there’s a certain similarity between what goes on here and the sort of
geeky-smart exegesis found in modern video essays, ones produced by reliably
intelligent writers as well as the kookier fringes of the fanboy brigade. But
what Ascher does here hardly negates 32 years of serious consideration of a movie
that by no means holds a consensus of quality either among critics or the
public. Some of the defensive railings against the film from reputable critics
imply a presumption that Ascher lends credulity to either the notion that the
theories in his film belong on the same platform as traditional film criticism,
or to the veracity of the ideas themselves. But what makes Ascher’s approach
admirable is his refusal to editorialize about his subjects, to use his movie
to demonstrate a hipster’s directorial aloofness, a constant invitation to
chortle at the plausibility of what’s being offered. The invitation is not to
award these theorists the credibility of seasoned film critics but instead to
allow the audience the luxury of deciding for themselves how to process the
wildly conflicting information, a method strangely similar, if the interviewees
are to be believed, to the one which Kubrick employs in his own film.
Ascher’s clever and illuminating movie ends up offering a
road map into the consciousness of obsession not only of those have plumbed The Shining for its secrets, but also into that of any cinephile who has ever found
a measure of passionate derangement in whatever their cinematic obsession might
be, film critics included. To a certain degree it is to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining what Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams is to Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, a
demented wrinkle on the traditional “making of” promotional documentary, with a
particularly obsessed and gesticulating portion of the audience taking up the
mantle of a notoriously reclusive director who is in death only marginally more
reluctant to pontificate on his motivations than he would be if he were alive
to see Room 237 for himself.
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