Room 237 (2013)

"The Shining" is one of my favorite movies of all time. It's moody, it's superbly acted, and it's terrifying as all holy hell. Few films can match it for conveying a since of cold, bleak dread and creeping terror. The air of mystery about it in all the different layers of the story and the baffling last shot of the film only adds another level of enjoyment to it when you sit down and discuss it with other people, and hear their thoughts on what in the world is going on. Everybody seems to have their own ideas as to what's really happening, so there's always a lot to talk about.

When I heard about the documentary "Room 237," which featured several people giving their own interpretations of what the film was, ranging from plausible to outlandish, tin-foil hat theories, I was quick to check it out. The glowing critical praise heaped upon it didn't hurt my expectations. Seriously, this thing pulled a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes.

I really don't know why I still even look at that website. "Room 237" was, hands down, one of the worst documentaries I've ever seen in my life. And that's not just because of the content, but because it's so poorly put together that it's borderline incomprehensible and damn near unwatchable. This is amateur hour. This is a waste of an hour and forty minutes that could have been better spent just watching the making-of documentary on the DVD of "The Shining" rather than this pathetic heap of conspiracy laden, film school drop-out, post-modern elitist garbage.

Pictured above - Something more relevant to "The Shining."

"Room 237" is composed of a bunch of interviews of people who tell us what they believe "The Shining" to be about. Who these people are or what their credentials might be is never mentioned once, so I find myself wondering why I should be listening to them in the first place. Apparently noted film critics or professors or directors or producers or screenwriters or actors aren't the kinds of people we want to interview when we're discussing one of the most celebrated horror films of all time. No, let's get this schmuck who wrote a crackpot theory on the internet. He'll know what's up.

As advertised these crackpot theories do indeed run the gambit from "slightly plausible" to "have you lost your damn mind?" The most sane one is probably the notion that "The Shining" is a metaphor for the genocide of the American Indians, but I found even that to be a bit of a stretch. Yeah, there's that line "White man's burden, Lloyd," and there's a lot of Native American motifs in the hotel, but then again it WAS built in a region heavily populated by them. Having decor of that nature in a hotel, particularly in Colorado is hardly out of the ordinary. The only reason that theory gets something of a pass was because they say in the film that the Overlook was built on an Indian burial ground. That's a decent connection, but then again the person putting that hypothesis forward also insists that the lynchpin that proves their case is a can of Calumet baking powder behind Jack Nicholsen in the pantry. See, it's got a Native American with a headdress on it. And 'Calumet' means 'peace pipe,' and you see it when Jack is talking with the ghosts, which clearly means they're having a pow-wow, which clearly means it's all about genocide.

See?! See it behind him?! IRON. CLAD.

Yeah, it's stupid, I know. But like I said, that's the least vapid of the theories. Let's not even get into the creep who says it's all about sexual obsession as he points out penises in the carpet and objects that, were one looking for it hard enough, might slightly look like erections if you squinted and were really thinking about erections a lot. Then there was the lady who insisted it's about Greek mythology because she thought a skier on a poster clearly looked like a Minotaur (it didn't), and the hotel had a hedge maze. And of course we couldn't have an analysis of a film without the Nazis, could we? So here comes the guy insisting that "The Shining" is obviously about the Holocaust because Jack has a German brand typewriter.

And then there's the moon landing. Oh man. This was rich. Apparently Stanley Kubrick helped fake the footage of the moon landing. Not that we didn't go to the moon, because we did. But we faked the famous footage, and Kubrick was involved in that. And "The Shining" is his covert confession of having done that. You see, Danny wears an Apollo 11 sweater at one point, and the keys to Room 237 say "ROOM NO. 237," which contains the letters R, O, M and N, which can ONLY spell out "Moon Room." Can you doubt the rock solid pillar of truth this analysis stands upon?

Can I shut this off now? Please?

Each one of these lunatics retells their revelations which the same gravity as the Narrator realizing he's also Tyler Durden, all saying roughly the exact same phrase of "It just jumped out at me. It was so crystal clear. I couldn't believe it." But once again, I must ask the question of why do we care? Who are you? Why do we care what you think of "The Shining?" Are you a filmmaker? Did you know Kubrick? Do you have a degree in film? Have you ever even taken a film class? I have no answers to any of this because "Room 237" never tells us. It's bad enough that the people talking at us never EVER cite any sources whatsoever while making wild claims that really should be backed up with facts, an aspect that lends credence to my belief that these jokers have no business being listened to in the first place, but that's made worse when it becomes clear that you may as well go down to the local movie theater and ask the dude selling popcorn what the crap he thought was going on at the end of "2001: A Space Odyssey." It's unlikely you're going to get an insightful hypothesis.

Speaking of film class, that's really what "Room 237" is like. This is everyone single film theory class you had to suffer through in college, had you ever taken them. I had to take several myself, being a film minor, and the 'Nam-esque flashbacks I was getting from this were enough to send me into cold sweats. I hate post-modern deconstruction. I hate it bad, and I always have. I can't stand how everything needs a "meaning," and the thought that the intent of the creator is completely irrelevant to the "meaning" of the work, which is a hallmark of the critical process at work, always struck me as exceedingly arrogant on the part of the critic. It opens up the door for them to pour in so much subjective excess baggage that any meaning quickly devolves into the critic giving a confessional about what they see as opposed what was actually there. It turns a movie into a two hour long Rorschach test, and I find that completely obnoxious.

Yeah, you could inject meaning into the shapes of the carpet, like it appearing to trap Danny inside of it. Or see them as a bunch of penises. Or you know...maybe a cigar is just a cigar.

What baffles me is that, as stupid as the theories are, this documentary is so shoddily put together that it comes across more like a final film class project of a straight C minus student who wasn't going to do well in the class anyway and didn't really care enough to salvage his grade. Nearly all the footage is simply clips from "The Shining." There's maybe 90 seconds of original footage shot for this. At no point do we see any of the people talking, a side effect I surmise to be the result of most of the interviews probably taking place over the phone, which I picked up on due to varying degrees of quality in the audio. That's also telling when, during one point, one of the interviewees stops to check on his crying baby for a second. Then he comes back after a moment and says "Sorry. Um, where was I?" They left that in. I swear to Crom they left that in. How professional.

Not only do we never see the people talking or get their names on screen when it changes person, but the film switches back and forth between their incoherent, droning babbling so frequently that it's nearly impossible to tell who is speaking or remember what in the world they were talking about beforehand. Before long it quickly devolves to the point of not knowing what in the world anybody is even talking about because there is no consistent narrative to latch onto. Maybe if they had let one person finish their theory before going on to the next guy it would have been stupid, but at least it would have been slightly coherent.

When Jack Torrance is laughing at your craziness, you may have a problem.

"The Shining" is such an amazing movie. And it deserves a better documentary than this. The only reason it was so well reviewed by critics is because it's doing what they love to do: Making something far more complicated than it needs to be while acting superior about it. Piss off with that.

This is one of the worst trailers I've ever seen. Would you believe it was the better of the two that I found?

THE BOTTOM LINE - If you ever wanted a crash course in the most obnoxious film classes you could ever take, watch "Room 237." It's stupid to the point of being offensive, it's arrogant to the point of making your eyes roll, and it's so amateur in it's execution that I've literally seen college students make a more coherent, informative documentary. This is utter trash, more telling about obsession over a movie than the actual movie itself.