#180: Room 237

Release Date: March 29th, 2013

Format: Streaming (Tubi)

Directed by: Rodney Ascher

3.5 Stars

The 2013 documentary Room 237 serves as a sort of voiceover video essay for a handful of critics, historians, and enthusiasts (kooks?) to share their theories and analyses of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror masterpiece, The Shining. 

Their interpretations range from the film being an allegory for the genocide of Native Americas during westward colonization, or the genocide of European Jews in WWII; there’s the theory that the film is a re-telling of the story of the mythological Greek creature, the Minotaur; another supposes that The Shining is a vehicle for sado-sexual imagery and subliminal sexual messaging; and, also, that the movie is in fact a well-concealed confession from Kubrick himself that he helped the US government fake the footage of Apollo 11’s moon landing.    

The plausibility of these theories range from conceivable to highly unlikely. 

There has always been a tendency for some Kubrick fans (I’ll include myself) to sanctify the man, to attribute him the label of “genius” and regard his films as almost bottomless reservoirs for intellectual deep diving (this treatment is probably unfair to Kubrick, but as one critic in Room 237 states, a filmmaker’s intent has very little to do with post-modern film criticism; so, following this line of thought, it doesn’t matter if Kubrick made The Shining as a mea culpa for staging a fake moon landing, because if we perceive it as such, it must be so?).

But what Room 237 really is is a celebration of film, or art in general. Who cares if any of these Shining theories are true? Isn’t that the beauty of art? There it is, art, now let’s see what holds and what doesn’t when considering it in the intellectual realm.

Kudos to director Rodney Ascher, who allows a safe space for these theories to play out. I never got the sense that he’s exploiting or mocking even the most outlandish theories. He also gets to use extensive, stunning footage from Kubrick’s filmography during the critics’ voiceovers, as well as public domain footage of old American, German, and Soviet film. I gotta say, there are moments during this documentary that are genuinely scary.  Watching Jack Torrance stalk the hallways of The Overlook Hotel, intercut with black and white footage from god knows which creepy Soviet film, while a historian describes the atrocities of the Holocaust, has a terrifying cumulative effect. 

It made me flip on a lamp and make sure my front door was locked. 

Sure, Room 237 will appeal more to Kubrick aficionados than general moviegoers, but it’s an interesting essay nonetheless that shows what films can, and at their best, should be: a way for humans to connect and find meaning.