ambassador crackpot: room 237, the shining, and slacker

If you're going to make a documentary whose whole purpose and method is to analyze another movie — in this case the documentary is Room 237 and the movie it digs into is The Shining — you'd better hope it's worthy of the art it dissects. If not, it will only make people yearn for that other thing that you are commenting upon and wind up kinda awkward, like a crappy sonnet about Shakespeare's genius or a mangled portrait of Picasso.

And man, I wanted to like Room 237. I went in hoping it would give me some new takes on Stanley Kubrick's horror classic. It doesn't, though, not really: Room 237 is either a bumbling ambassador for cinephilia or an unsatisfying examination of crackpottery in general. Either way, it's not good.

In its ambassador role, it's especially bad. The theories floated range from the merely possible (yes, indeed, I do see how you could think that the genocide of Native Americans was a subtle subtext) to the plainly nonsensical (no, I don't buy that the movie is Kubrick's response to guilt and/or marital problems arising from his participation in the staging of the moon landing).

A lot of this is based on what are known as false positives in the social sciences biz. That is, if you stare at a movie long enough and look at every frame, there is so much data to sift that you can "prove" a myriad of contradictory theories, many of them actually duds. For example, you might decide that because 1942 was an important year for Germany's plan to eradicate the Jews, instances of the number 42 in the film inevitably point to a Holocaust theme. This is tenuous on its own, but it gets really bad when you start to believe that this explains why there are 42 cars parked outside the Overlook.

In this way, at least one of Room 237's theorists argues that virtually everything in a Kubrick film is loaded with meaning, on the premise that Kubrick was a genius and extraordinarily conscious of everything that went into his work. Kubrick might well have been brilliant and meticulous, but sometimes 42 cars in a parking lot are just 42 cars in a parking lot, just as the various continuity errors betray nothing so much as a bias on the side of the theorist toward seeing something in everything. If you didn't notice that a chair 15 feet behind Jack disappears after we cut briefly back and forth between him and Wendy, it's because it doesn't matter.

As you can see, a lot of Room 237 relies on the highly improbable conceit that a) Kubrick had a burning need to communicate a theme or an idea but b) he did it so obliquely that only a handful of people got the message. I mean, even if you believed this was true, wouldn't you be most fascinated not by whatever secret Kubrick had seen fit to smuggle into The Shining but by the psychological deformity that would cause him to engage in such deeply perverse, self-defeating behavior? The idea that Kubrick would spend the time and effort on the film only to bury its real significance in minor details is only appealing to the viewer who wants to be the smartest guy in the room. (Or, in the case of The Shining, the smartest guy in the pantry.)

So, anyway, having done pretty much no research into the topic, I hope this isn't the best Shiningologists have to offer. Moreover, I'm sure it isn't. An early New York Times article mentions a video analysis by Rob Ager, which in 8 minutes packed in more interesting observations than the entirety of Room 237.

I don't agree with everything Ager says, but at least he's interested in the details that aren't so marginal that they can't possibly be intentional; he grapples with the same issues most of us do. Take this as an example: At the end of the video (the first part of a trilogy, apparently), he says that "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy" really means "All work and no murder…" I don't happen to agree with this interpretation, but I have to prefer Ager's commentary to Room 237, where more attention is paid to the manufacturer of the typewriter that Jack uses to produce the nefarious phrase. (The manufacturer is German! You see where this is going!)

So I think it's safe to say this movie fails as an explication of the wonderfulness of The Shining. As an alternate possible use for Room 237, I wondered if it might be worthwhile for its depiction of obsession and half-baked theorizing. Maybe you could watch it not so much as a documentary about The Shining but a documentary about the kind of person that stages a viewing of the film projected on the screen both backward and forward simultaneously, pretty much because of "Redrum."

If it really is a movie about crackpotsville, though, it's hard to tell, and it often feels as though Room 237 is making the case for the theories presented. Oddly, you only hear and never actually see the people spinning their stories about The Shining. The visuals, meanwhile, do the work of illustration, often with graphic additions: When the movie uses a bouncy arrow or a nifty map with an interesting floating effect, it's as if the film's own narrative flow agrees with the theories we're hearing. Footage from other movies are cut in, too — often scenes that are somehow linked to what is being said. In this way, Room 237 doesn't feel as though it is only standing witness to the wild ideas of its subjects, but promoting or at least tacitly endorsing them by animating the theories to make them more stimulating and thus attractive. In other words, the film is not just dispassionately documenting the oddly formed convictions of the people you hear, but it is going along with and maybe even slicking up their theories.

The best movie I can think of about crackpots is Richard Linklater's Slacker. Watching it, you have often feel at a remove from its cavalcade of idiosyncratic folks. The camera floats around, departing one speaker's monologue to visit another one, thus undercutting both. More importantly, the film image never seems to side with anyone, probably because it's left by itself, without any graphics added, and it doesn't illustrate any of the theories or perspectives advanced by the characters.

The issue doesn't seem to be entirely about using graphics, either. Interestingly (I promise to use that word only sparingly), Linklater made a sort-of-sequel, Waking Life, which was packed with visual innovative: Shot on film that was then painted over frame-by-frame (in a process called rotoscoping), WL looks incredible but still doesn't feel as though it is manifesting or supporting the theories of its whackadoodle talking heads (a group not including Steven Soderbergh but a fair number of people in either film). The protagonist of the movie is dreaming, so the fluid shapes and colors are from his perspective — not the crackpots'.

So, in short, if Room 237 is meant to be an examination of personal obsessions (and I'm not even sure it is), I feel like it's too friendly to their points of view. And if it's an analysis of The Shining, then Room 237 fails even worse because it could have shown us some credible, well-drawn points about a smart film. I would have loved to see some graphics on that.