Last Full Day
It’s 8:50 am, and I’m committed to catching a 9:30 am screening of Room 237, the doc about wackjob fans of Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining, followed by a 1 pm Slamdance screening of Andrew Edison‘s Bindlestiffs. The final viewing of the day will be a 6 pm Egyptian showing of Katie Asleton‘s Black Rock.
Yesterday I wrote for half a day and then saw Shut Up and Play The Hits, Lynn Shelton‘s Your Sister’s Sister and finally California Solo. Too shagged to write about any of these late last night, and no time to get into them now.
Is Room 123 related to that Rob Anger analysis (see: http://www.collativelearning.com/the%20shining.html) that is really pretty insightful, but kind of goes too far (positing, for instance, that there are specific hidden messages in apparent production design flaws – I think this has been brought up here before), or is this bigger than that?
I prefer this one:
http://www.mstrmnd.com/log/802
Or this one:
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0089.html
Or this one:
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0098.html
On, and on, and on… Point being, Ager’s writing on the film hardly stands alone.
Ager goes overboard at times, but he’s pretty brilliant at spotting things in the movie (like the Teddy Bear eyes matching the elevator dials, or how Duvall is basically dressed like Goofy) that can’t be accidental. After reading his stuff and watching the movie again, I’m kind of convinced by his case that the “monster” in the Overlook is child abuse, likely sexual, repeated generation after generation, and that the reason there’s no clear chronology for the history of violence in the film is because Jack is simultaneously abuser and abused child himself; the Overlook is, in some sense, his own damaged psyche.
I don’t buy the genocide theory, because it has nothing to do with these characters per se, but the idea that violence is very close beneath the surface of civilization is pretty much the subject of all of Kubrick’s films, so…