I always thought Kubrick's movie was really about... How often do we fail to express the subtleties of our feelings toward the object of our love? We can read passionate love poems, sing serenades, play a few sensitive chords, but all this is not the same. Sometimes it seems that the true state of love cannot be expressed verbally, there is always a gap, a certain lack of agreement. Therefore, looking at a woman, a creature is completely misunderstood by a man, whatever we say to her would be a lie, especially when a woman is naga. It remains only to stick our lips to the object of our lust, to leave the unmanifested alone. Is it possible that only what is not manifested is true?
“How does the heart express itself?”
How can someone else understand you?
Will he understand what you are doing?
A thought spoken is a lie.
Here Tyutchev, although he showed his characteristic modesty, he himself uttered a fundamental truth. As Dante put it, “The arrow seen flies more slowly.” It turns out that the one on whom we expand our being, under the influence of it takes a different form, is distorted. Hence the impossibility of “objective knowledge”. All this is true, so obvious that one wonders how many centuries philosophers have been fighting over an object when the real value is the subject, because the noumenon is not outside, but inside man. Malevich famously ridiculed such "objectivists" by saying that any opinion can only be subjective, Suprematically recounting the words of Giordano Bruno: "The center of the universe is everywhere and nowhere."
But, despite all our reflections, it is very difficult to approach even such a seemingly frivolous thing as cinema, having only "my own personal point of view." One always wants to claim something more, for the thought of a subjective opinion on an object can justify any whim, any absurdity and unfair evaluation. But let this remain on the conscience of such appraisers, and we will still follow a darker path.
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is, for me, the kind of love object that you're really in awe of when you suddenly feel like you're going home watching a movie. The fact that this film has a special meaning for me can be understood from what is depicted as a welcoming screensaver in the header of the blog. Therefore, when I became aware of the documentary, revealing other subjective views on Kubrick’s film masterpiece, watching the film did not take long to wait.
Room 237 by Rodney Usher is 9 stories about the hidden meanings of the film The Shining. Some of them are so incredible that will give pleasure to all lovers of conspiracy.
For example, the first narrator recalls how it dawned on him that Kubrick's film was actually about... the genocide of the American Indians. In fact, the hotel to which Torrens and his family enter is built in an Indian cemetery, Indian angular ornaments, Calumet banks with an Indian on the label, and, of course, the famous bloody floods, symbolizing the blood of the Indians.
A similar approach is taken by another narrator, claiming that Kubrick was very concerned about his Jewish background and the film “The Shining”, they say, about the Holocaust. Here is Jack’s German typewriter and Jack’s wolf, who is represented by Jack, kicking out the bathroom door where his wife is sitting with an axe, and all the same rivers of blood. Boring.
Some storytellers so meticulously approached the work of Kubrick that literally with a magnifying glass looked at every frame of the film, watched the film frame-by-frame, backwards, drew plans for the hotel, proved, among other things, that the windows in the office of Stuart Ullman do not exist, brought a couple of interesting hidden meanings that would surprise Kubrick, broke the film into small pieces, trying to see... Stop. Aristotle teaches us that the whole has no parts. Therefore, the Freudian approach to both the person and his creations is profane in advance and will lead the seeker into a maze from which it will be more difficult for him to get out than for Jack Torrance.
However, the Freudians were given a few minutes in this film. What they brilliantly used, showing a time-lapse shot of handshake Jack and Stewart at the very beginning of the film, elegantly linking a stack of folders lying on the table and textured into the same color with Ullman’s jacket at the level of the bottom of his abdomen with ... you know what.
However, the most interesting thing for which it would be worth watching this film is a brilliant proof of one viewer who did not like Kubrick’s film until he realized that in fact (my favorite phrase in the film) the film “The Shining” is about the false flight of Apollo 11 to the moon, which was directed by Stanley Kubrick himself, but was afraid to tell about it directly. The evidence presented by the narrator is so amazing that it is a true diamond of conspiracy, ranging from ornaments on the camp of the main lobby of the hotel, ending with text in the printed “book” of Jack.
Add to this all numerology, disappearing chairs, Stalin, scenes from other films of Kubrick and not Kubrick, a close examination of the design of rooms, clothes, paintings, photographs, a complete deconstruction of the film, which by the end of the film cannot be put together and you get Room 237.
The documentary ends with the last crazy story in which the narrator explains how "The Shining" became the meaning of his life, how he dissolved into the film, turned into Jack, forever locked in a hotel and who, as we have already said, can not utter any thought that has not become a lie. Hence radicalism and madness and grasping the axe.
By the end of the film, the director, who cleverly woven the documentary film from only the stories of its viewers, ironically sums up all the subjective opinions that, like Jack, cut the film into parts, but, unlike Rodney Usher, do not know that cutting and looking for hidden meanings, they forget about the main thing: about what is not outside the film, but in its essence, which can only be as a whole.
And the last theory of the madman who stood in the place of Jack only proves once again that the main thing in any work is the viewer who sees the picture in front of him and sees several roles, including the role of the author struggling with the work. The meaning of the viewer is not to assume any particular program associated with the plot line, but to mediate between them. Rodney Asher, as a director, realized this unconsciously, showing us that all subjective opinions remain them, and masterpieces such as The Shining will live and expand forever, shining like a star, for one newly born, for another – hopelessly extinct.
Perhaps one day our opinion will be reflected by the ray of “Shining”. If at all it is possible to reflect the glow of such a dark star.
