Netflix Find of the Week: Room 237

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You can always rely on Netflix to never have most of the new releases you want streaming, but damn, do they ever have documentaries on lockdown. I’d heard of Room 237 ahead of stumbling across it on the service, and the concept intrigued me.

The premise was that Stanley Kubrick buried secret clues his film adaptation of The Shining, clues that pointed to a larger purpose for the film past just a simple horror tale of a dull boy gone mad. I assumed the film would reveal new information that proved this assertion, and so I was curious to see it.

But it wasn’t one theory I found, but five, all from different fans who have studied the film obsessively for years. The film hears their points out, and dutifully zooms in and rewinds the movie according to their narration as they point out the clues all of us have missed.

Sadly, they’re all full of shit, but that’s the point of Room 237. It isn’t about some grand conspiracy concerning The Shining, it’s about the nature of conspiracy itself, and uses the film as a launching board to demonstrate the ways people try to make connections and find patterns where there are none.

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You can look at it as a form of criticism criticism, as in, a critique of every English teacher you ever had telling you that the blue drapes in the poem MEANT something, when really the author just wanted the damn drapes to be blue. But by the end, you’re really getting a sense of the nature of conspiracy as a whole, and can understand how people manage to form grand theories about the Illuminati or 9/11 being an inside job, and so on. If you go looking for connections, you will always find some.

The five theories are all different, yet each fan narrator believes them wholeheartedly. One says The Shining is about the massacre of Native Americans. Another says it’s the holocaust instead. Some just ramble incoherently about generic “symbolism” obsessing about non-connecting hallways, impossible windows and disappearing chairs. In any other film, they’d be continuity errors, but here, since Kubrick is a genius, they’re mystical symbols of a larger plan.

The most absurd theory, which somehow manages to have the most evidence to support it, is that The Shining is Kubrick’s secret confession about how he helped the US Government fake the moon landing footage. From Danny’s Apollo 11 sweater to the hexagonal “launch pad” pattern in the hallway, there’s almost enough to maybe, possibly believe it. But of course you shouldn’t.

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The film is almost a comedy, as the editing mocks the narrators who are given all the rope they need to hang themselves with. The worst is probably the only female theorist, who has tried to draw maps of the hotel to show inconsistencies (that she admits are mostly guesswork), thinks a skiing poster on a wall looks like a maze-dwelling, Jack-representing minotaur (which it absolutely doesn’t) and ends her time with a story about the “synchronicity” of her son having a dream about a man getting his head spit open with a lightning bolt, and how that that relates to the film. The documentary helpfully makes three-dimensional version of her inaccurate maps, zooms in to show the non-existent skier-minotaur and even is nice enough to animate her son’s dream. I’ve almost never seen a film be funnier through editing alone.

But it’s all sort of sad, seeing the lengths people will go to in order to find answers where there aren’t any questions. Even still, in the end you yourself will maybe consider that maybe one of these theories is maybe a little bit right, which is possibly the scariest part of the film. If you’re looking for patterns, you’ll find them, and the film can make you fall victim to the same sort of thinking.

I don’t doubt Kubrick is a genius and that The Shining may have its secrets, but to hear all of the alleged mysteries revealed, all stacked on top of each other, is pure delightful, scary absurdity. Room 237 shows that the madness isn’t in the film, but can sometimes be in our own heads.

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3 Comments

  1. Wondering if my first comment didn’t go through properly because I just started the Disqus acct. It’s not shown as waiting for moderation.

    Or, is there something I should know about Unreality’s opinion of Rob Ager?

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