ROOM 237 review
By Lucas Testro (Twitter: @lucastestro)
There’s this word, ‘pareidolia’. It refers to our tendency to find patterns where
they don’t actually exist. It’s a word that often came to mind as I watched Rodney
Ascher’s documentary Room 237. The film intricately presents various theories
about the ‘real’ meaning of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but whether these
reveal the secret messages of a master symbolist or just the wild imagination of
obsessive fans is up to you to decide.
Unusually, the film is constructed almost entirely from clips from other movies –
most of them Kubrick’s – which form visuals echoing the anecdotes told to us by
the interviewees. So, as Room 237 opens with one person recollecting first
coming across the poster for The Shining, Ascher presents a scene from Eyes
Wide Shut of Tom Cruise staring at that same poster outside a cinema. It’s an odd
technique that plays with the idea Kubrick is talking to us in his films, but it also
deliberately distances us from the interviewees - we never see them nor find out
much about their backgrounds, so all we can focus on is their ideas without any
personal context. The immersive atmosphere created by the technique also
suggests, as admitted by one interviewee, that the film has become a labyrinth in
which they have lost themselves.
The theories presented range from plausible film analysis to outlandish
conspiracy theories. One interviewee explains how The Shining is really about
the genocide of the American Indians. For another, it’s about the Holocaust. A
third commentator explains it’s actually Kubrick’s memoir of his experiences
faking the Apollo moon landing (yes, you read that correctly).
Evidence is presented purporting to prove all of these as well as revealing other
easter eggs allegedly hidden by Kubrick. Some of this is just baffling, such as one
claim that Kubrick’s face is airbrushed into the clouds in the movie’s opening
titles – something even Ascher can’t seem to find as he crawls with us through
the sequence frame by frame.
But even as a skeptic, there’s no denying you find yourself occasionally being
tantalised by some of the hidden symbols the interviewees present, such as the
proponent of the Holocaust theory who demonstrates how, in the film’s final
dissolve to a close up of Jack Torrance’s face, Jack Nicholson’s hairline
momentarily transforms into a Hitler moustache. Or the moon landing
conspiracist who points to Danny wearing an Apollo 11 sweater in the film, and
the room number “237” at the heart of the hotel’s mysteries being a reference to
the moon’s average distance from the earth: 237,000 miles. A convincing
coincidence, until you do a quick google search and discover the correct distance
is actually 238,857 miles - something which Rodney Ascher disconcertingly
doesn’t bother to point out in his film.
So where does the filmmaker stand in all of this? It’s hard to say but, perhaps
tellingly, the only moment in the film where we hear what is presumably his
voice comes towards the end, when an unidentified questioner asks one
interviewee “But why would he go to so much trouble to make things so
complicated?”.
Maybe some of these meanings are indeed there to be discovered in The Shining.
Maybe they’re not. Maybe it doesn’t matter, and the viewer’s act of investigation
and self-reflection is in itself what’s important - a quest for greater selfunderstanding motivated by a good story, irrespective of the creator’s intent.
Maybe that’s part of the allure of cinema that draws us back again and again. In
the end, Ascher leaves you to take what you want from the theories he’s
presented, without casting any authorial judgment.
If nothing else, the wealth of footage from Kubrick’s films used throughout Room
237 will at least remind you what a master of composition, blocking and colour
he was, giving you a reason to go back and rewatch the work of one of our
greatest filmmakers.