‘Room 237’ and How ‘The Shining’ Inspires Endless Obsession

In Charles Perrault’s 17th-century folktale “Bluebeard,” a young bride is instructed by her husband, a prosperous nobleman, to keep clear of a secret chamber in their secluded country estate. At the same time, he gifts her with a magical key that unlocks the door to the forbidden room, as if daring her to defy his authority. When she inevitably enters, she discovers that the chamber contains the decapitated corpses of Bluebeard’s previous wives. As a cautionary fable about the skeletons we all keep in our closets, Perrault’s story is grim(m)ly funny; as a metaphor about the perils of curiosity, it’s as eloquent as Pandora’s box. Sometimes, it’s better to just keep a lid on it.

“There ain’t nothing in Room 237, but you ain’t got no business going in there anyway, so stay out ... you understand, stay out!” says Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) to Danny (Danny Lloyd) early in the 1980s film adaptation of The Shining. It’s a line that riffs on the Bluebeard myth, an obvious inspiration for Stephen King’s 1977 novel, and also for Stanley Kubrick, who along with his coscreenwriter Diane Johnson drew deeply on the history and scholarship of classic fairy tales for their adaptation. In fact, it’s arguable that the cinematic incarnation of The Shining owes more to Bruno Bettelheim’s landmark literary study The Uses of Enchantment than it does to its actual bestselling source. Ever since his self-produced debut feature, Fear and Desire, Kubrick had been fascinated by the power and durability of ancient archetypes: “the Jungian thing, sir” as Private Joker explains in Full Metal Jacket. Beyond its obvious commercial potential, The Shining’s narrative provided a sturdy frame for the director’s loftier preoccupations. On the page, The Shining is propulsive and relentlessly spooky—a roller-coaster ride through a haunted house. On screen, Kubrick slowed things down to a crawl and got metaphysical, sacrificing scares in favor of a more abstract consideration of evil.

The degree to which King resented these revisions of one of his most personal (and successful) novels is the stuff of legend: He’s on the record as hating the movie and has stuck to his guns even as it’s become canonized over the years. (Back then, King was in the majority; never forget that Kubrick has been nominated for a Razzie for Worst Director.) It’s thus weirdly compelling that Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of King’s 2013 Shining sequel Doctor Sleep draws so deeply on the iconic style and design of Kubrick’s movie: The trailers suggest a full-scale re-creation of the Overlook Hotel à la Steven Spielberg’s bizarrely fetishistic homage last year in Ready Player One. That both a celebrated veteran like Spielberg and an up-and-coming genre specialist like Flanagan (Hush, Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House) would jump at the chance to reverently replicate Kubrick’s aesthetic speaks to the durability of his vision. His meditation on archetypes has become an archetype itself.

Crucially, it’s the things that Kubrick added to the material—substituting an ax for a croquet mallet; reducing the supernatural exposition; deleting sentient hedge animals and adding a hedge maze; having Jack Nicholson imitate Ed McMahon at the height of his character’s murderous rage; those twins—that have proved the most timeless. This, in turn, accounts for why King is so resentful, and why, in the first few pages of Doctor Sleep, King goes out of his way to remind the reader that the book is a follow-up to the novel, not the film. He makes reference, for instance, to the Overlook’s notorious “Room 217,” reclaiming those digits against Kubrick’s petty, apparently randomized rebranding of Room 237. It’s a futile gesture. Like all truly great films, The Shining has effectively colonized our collective cultural unconscious. It can’t be forgotten, repressed, or unseen. If anything, it tends to inspire spectatorship at the other end of the spectrum—repetitive, possessive, obsessive.

Exhibit A would be Rodney Ascher’s Room 237, a deceptively funny and deeply serious essay film about The Shining that doubles (and triples, and quadruples) as a commentary on contemporary movie fandom, the emergent role of technology in cinephilia, and the double-edged nature of auteurism, all while replicating the compulsive fascination of a particularly paranoid Reddit thread. Ascher was originally inspired by the work of a writer named Jay Weidner, whose website contains a number of deep-dive analyses of Kubrick’s films, including the theory that the director helped NASA to fake footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. While the obvious touchstone for this bit of all-American cryptomythology would seem to be 2001: A Space Odyssey—a film produced in the shadow of the space race and with the participation of various NASA scientists—Weidner saw in The Shining a veiled mea culpa on behalf of the auteur, as if Kubrick, wracked with guilt and responsibility, had decided to confess his sins obliquely through the staging, dialogue, and costume design of a horror blockbuster.

Weidner is one of five interviewees in Room 237, all of whom were contacted and curated through the internet, the same methodology as Ascher’s 2010 short The S From Hell, which focused on a group of people who attest to being severely freaked out by the slightly trippy, Moog-scored Screen Gems logo that ran on local cable stations after episodes of Bewitched and The Flintstones in the ’60s and ’70s. What Ascher is interested in is the way that communities form around pop-cultural artifacts, and how the members of those communities relate to them. In The S From Hell, the creep factor is bound up in how uniform his subjects’ experiences are; in Room 237, each person perceives something different. In both films, Ascher avoids showing his subjects, not so much to protect their anonymity as to preserve the purity of their observations. They exist solely as disembodied voices, hovering over chopped-and-screwed footage of Kubrick’s movies that serves to illustrate their points—sometimes ironically, sometimes with a disarming persuasiveness. Insofar as The Shining is a movie about hallucinations, the style has been brilliantly chosen. By trapping us for the movie’s duration inside Kubrick’s Overlook, Ascher cultivates a strain of immersive stir-craziness. He makes us watch The Shining through his subjects’ eyes, and in doing so, we start to see things too: Their mania becomes contagious.

As a study of cinephilia as Stockholm syndrome, Ascher’s film is ingenious and hilarious. When his participants discuss their long-standing attachments to Kubrick’s movie (how many times they’ve seen it and where, the first time they realized what was really going on in it, etc.), they sound more like broken-down hostages than enthusiasts. When the film was released, critics—even appreciative ones—zeroed in on the eccentricity of the speakers and the unlikelihood of their interpretations as either the major source of Room 237’s entertainment value, or else as a liability; the complaint was that Ascher was laughing at his collaborators. But aside from one unfortunate edit that actually does instrumentalize footage of Nicholson to mock a particularly outlandish point (“anything you say, Lloyd”), the movie effectively places its subjects on a level playing field and grants their ruminations respect by virtue of airing them in the first place. The point is not that any one of these people is actually correct, but rather that The Shining, as a cinematic object, is spacious enough to accommodate so many different agendas and also mesmerizing enough to hold people in the thrall of their own irrational certainty for decades on end.

What makes Room 237 truly revelatory, however, has less to do with The Shining than the myth of Kubrick as a looming, monolithic master filmmaker—and the cult of auteurism in general. As wildly varied as the theories on display may be, what they have in common is the belief that Kubrick was purposefully dropping clues into his mis-en-scène with every single take: If the pattern on a hallway rug was suddenly reversed or a chair got turned around in between shots, it’s evidence of some larger plan. There’s something worshipfully devout about this level of faith in Kubrick’s—or any artist’s—ability to micromanage a massive production down to the last detail, and a fair amount of fairy-tale logic as well, as if tiny adjustments of the camera or the set dressing were bread crumbs leading us toward the “true” purpose of a scene. Or maybe Kubrick is Bluebeard, and they’re keys that can be wielded to unlock the movie as a whole—a way into Room 237 for real.

Ascher’s film doesn’t become less interesting if you reject the hypothesis that Kubrick meant any of what’s being attributed to him. In 1967, French literary critic Roland Barthes wrote his influential essay “The Death of the Author,” which argued that intention was overrated in criticism and that the meaning of a work relies instead on the impressions of the reader; without ever directly mentioning Barthes, Room 237 tests his mettle and evokes his ghost. A late passage in which Ascher presents The Shining superimposed over itself in reverse via a dual projector setup yields some astonishing yet ultimately meaningless imagery: a palimpsest that is also a Rorschach test. But the gimmick also perfectly encapsulates the filmmaker’s vision of The Shining as a movie containing multitudes, at once a monument to Kubrick’s art and a deconstruction of same.

Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid to Room 237 is that King hates it about as much as he hates Kubrick’s movie. “I watched about half of it and got impatient with it and turned it off,” he told Rolling Stone in 2014. “I’ve never had much patience for academic bullshit. It’s like Dylan says, ‘You give people a lot of knives and forks, they’ve gotta cut something.’” He’s right in that The Shining is an irresistible object for dissection, and, even if the arguments in Room 237 aren’t quite anatomically correct, they’re a testament to the pleasure of at least trying to slice through the surface to peer at what lies beneath.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.