Room 237
A photograph of the Timberline lodge, a building on the south side of Oregon’s Mount Hood that served as the exterior for the Overlook Hotel, bearing Stanley Kubrick’s instructions to the crew of The Shining
The interview subjects, whose faces we never see, are allowed to go on and on. (Tim later told me they sent each subject a tape recorder and then conducted the interviews via Skype.) One of them, a film archivist, is just about to make a point about something Jack is doing in the lobby when the interview is interrupted by a crying child. Nicholson is left paused, halfway out of his chair, while we eavesdrop on a woman groaning in the background, “I’ve got it”; then the archivist returns and points out that the magazine in Nicholson’s hand is a Playgirl, specifically the January 1978 issue, and so we too can investigate this clue for ourselves, the cover with its headline — how your tax dollars give new identities to convicted criminals — blown up beside Nicholson. If you later google “Playgirl January 1978,” as I do, the first hit is an analysis of The Shining. This is also the case when you google the date below the photograph in the final shot of the movie: July 4, 1921. (The camera slowly pushes in on an image of a group of revelers in the hotel ballroom, and there’s Jack in the center, waving.) It’s as if all referents, whatever they may be, have been folded back into the movie. The Shining acts like a kind of cultural black hole, or maybe a bottomless elevator shaft, sucking everything in — myth, meaning, pattern, parody, context, irony, interpretation — until it’s all crushed and flattened to where one no longer needs to connect the dots because there is only one dot.
… my favorite part of Room 237 [is] the analysis of the Overlook Hotel’s uncanny architecture by the solitary female voice-over — Juli Kearns — with her exquisite diagrams.
“I mean the light coming through there is glaring,” she says of the window in the general manager’s office. “This is an impossible window . . . It is physically impossible. It cannot be there. It should not be there. There’s no place in the hotel for this window to exist.”
As she speaks, we see a series of animated schematics of the hotel, with white arrows tracing Danny’s Big Wheel circuit past room 237 and black arrows showing his earlier circuit through the Colorado Lounge, where Jack works at his altar-size writing desk. To demonstrate the impossibility of the implied layout of the hotel, Kearns talks us through the scene where Wendy moves down a corridor shakily holding a large knife while, in split screen, we see the letter “W” moving slowly down one of Kearns’s schematic halls, away from the “Office with Impossible Window” and past “Landscape on Wall in Hall Beyond Impossible Window.” After she skirts around the corner, we see the pale blue “W” pass ghostlike through a solid wall, but movie-Wendy continues unimpeded toward the elevators and the lobby, where she stumbles over Hallorann’s body.
Kearns’s analysis makes clear that the most frightening thing about The Shining is the building itself: it is alive; it has intent; it must have beliefs and its own strange interpretation of things; and everything in it is so relentlessly beautifully lit. Unlike most scary movies, which are always springing out at you from the dark, or claustrophobically pinning you to the actor’s face with close-ups, The Shining shows you everything all the time, since Kubrick lights the place up with a million watts and sets you adrift in the seemingly endless depth of field. It is wide-awake horror.
