Caretaker Sparkle and the Selfie Side: ROOM 237

from top: "Autobiographical Nexusplation" (Erich collage), ROOM 237, THE SHINING.

ROOM 237 is a lightning crack to the head; all is illuminated, and terrifying: first because paranoid psychosis is very contagious; two because the film is terrifying in and of itself; three because it mirrors all our film deconstruction / analysis, from the ur-dry Bordwellian breakdowns (as in "before getting started, we all have to agree what we mean by a film") to the ultimately meaningless doctoral theses of nonwriters in a publish-or-perish deadlock, to the gonzo freaks like me who see what we want to see through magic glasses; four because we tend to forget that since we're a nation conditioned to 'recall' movies with an ever-dwindling series of studio-sanctioned iconic images--which in THE SHINING's case means the "Heee-rree's Johnny!" grinning Jack Torrance peering through his bathroom axe crack-- the SHINING's power is that it's just crazy enough to survive and resist any chance to dumb it down, to reduce it to a few fun quotes ("and a nice chianti"). The more we try to reduce it to grinning Jack T-shirts the less we remember the actual details of a film that seems to lose all contact with the outside world. Forget about being reduced to a simple icon, the SHINING is all about losing all connection to icons, all signifiers, until objective consensual 'meaning' vanishes into the fog of the purely subjective.

In ROOM 237 however, we get as close as we are likely to in quantifying at least some aspects of ci madness, the madness of obsessive fans, likely loners with too much time on their hands and a good education who've read too much of the world. Filmmaker Rodney Ascher has taken the kind of patient intellectual time with their paranoiac collage that Kubrick did with the source material, and so the madness of cabin fever within Kubrick's film becomes refracted into a dozen different facets of meaning. These theories are gold, especially when far too crazy to take seriously (and the editing makes even Jack Torrance roll his eyes at some of the theories), but you have to wonder at touches like the decal of Dopey from SNOW WHITE on Danny's closet that is visible on his door before his first 'shine' of the bloody torrent (torrent-torrance) but gone afterwards, reflecting, perhaps, his getting wise to what horrors are in store and taking his first steps towards his inevitable survival.

Hey, if Kubrick did put that little touch in there intentionally, how nice that it was finally recognized. I like to imagine that one day my own weird details--even if they were put there purely by unconscious 'accident' (as in the Kubrick fashionista above, for whom I added an axe silver fox shawl)-- will also be recognized. Artists do these odd touches for just such a reason, like messages in a bottle tossed seaward. Maybe it will take a hundred years, but there's a strange satisfaction, a hope, that sooner or later even the most arcane and oblique subliminal touches we leave in our art or writing will be recognized by someone, or something, and that they will recognize they are not alone in being obsessive and reading way too much into everything they see.

But the really trippy moments come when one fan plays the film backwards over the film moving forward simultaneously, so they overlap over one another (below). The effect is so perfect  -- at least in the parts they show us --- that it seems intentional on Kubrick's part. Who knows, it might be, as we learn here Kubrick had a 200 IQ and was very well read on all sorts of horrors and sought to encode a lot of subliminal information. At any rate, Ascher clearly uses the idea of subliminal strange messages to heart, so I did too, as in the many collages on here (only the below is from the film).

Backwards and forwards - makes Wendy an alert girl

Even if it's not intentional, does it really matter? In the ingenious editing schemata of ROOM 237, images we forgot from the film are taken out of context and highlighted for their otherworldly brilliance - and they connect perfectly to shots for Kubrick's other masterpieces. 2001, CLOCKWORK ORANGE, even DR. STRANGELOVE all bring home the vibe of pure murderous madness that most war footage cannot capture (1). Hence as illustrations here, some of my own collages, mixing THE SHINING with the films 2001 and CLOCKWORK which were his preceding best films, and one can argue SHINING is his last great one, unless you dare to count EYES WIDE SHUT, which in my mind is the work of a man having a nervous breakdown from trying to crack open Tom Cruise's hard nut candy shell (PS - I recently reviewed EYES with the ROOM 237 mind control enhancement vision, and if I don't quite love it any more than I used to, I am now more unnerved by it, truly).

"Pull it Togetherless"  (note phallus fingers)

The mission of Acidemic - inherent in the title - stems from the original phrase of Aldous Huxley, "if the doors of perception were cleansed everything, would appear as it really is, infinite."  I mention this because cleansing the doors of cinematic perception is Kubrick's task in all his films, though in this case he's using beauty and formal design to shine light on the darker truths we'd prefer on some level to keep hidden (and perhaps when we find his films boring it is because our subconsious is doing just that, refusing to recognize itself in the mirror), but for better or worse or much, much worser, the dark heart is in there. The obelisk in 2001 teaches apes how to use tools, not to build bridges but to crush their enemies skulls.  so they--the chosen, the apes who dared touch it--can vanquish and destroy those who refused this knowledge, who listened to God and didn't eat from the forbidden tree. We as humans are evil murderers, it is who we are, our genes, the mighty procreate and endure, the weak die on the roadside. We can discuss the evil of the Nazis all we want, but what makes America 'great' is that we did what they did and got away with it.  We were massacring a people with no relatives in the legal profession, or with friends in high places.

And above all, there were no video cameras. No Twitter. No UN.

"We're going to make a new rule" 

That kind of genocide seems barbaric now, to us, but part of that is because it is so far away, or so it seems. Kubrick is maybe telling us those trees and mountains may have taken pictures as durable as any Panaflex. At any rate, it may feel that way to Kurbick, for if he studied history what other determination could he arrive at? The Gandhis are few and far between and they suffer well but hardly cinematically. A Kubrick hunger strike film would be unbearable. We want to see the crimes behind our fortunes, what outside/alien force, its technology 'indistinguishable from magic' - gave our parents the evil cajones to pay for our schooling and grad present Jaguar.

In Kubrick this 'help' is revealed in all its terrifying ambivalence, the behavioral modification techniques as in CLOCKWORK and FULL METAL JACKET are about a dehumanizing conditioning process that has backfired; and then the last minute rescue of Tom Cruise in EYES as if some patient girl plucked the ape's hand from that obelisk at the last minute, keeping us, as it were, blind forever. But better blind than to be able to 'see' and not be afraid (the last words of JACKET's narration) at the cost of... what? Of blood-free hands? Through evil parents a child has the luxury to be good. The ape-like violence may be what holds us back, keeps us in a continual loop of paranoia and hostility, but it fuels our drive forward into the unknown (such as going to space, or writing a novel). Where would our moon landing be without the Russians for example (as in Floyd's stonewalling the Russian science writers in 2001) or war without a divided self? Jack is told he must kill his family because the boy has contacted an 'outside party' (while Jack has made contact with the 'inside party'), in other words, the boy has 'talked' to those socialist science writers; he's betrayed the trust of the big other...  

"Maisie Squared" 

Hence I made the collages in this post from images taken not only from THE SHINING but 2001 and CLOCKWORK ORANGE, to tie them all in together the better perhaps to illuminate continuing themes on the nature of perception, the manipulation of consciousness for external purposes, and the dawning of madness almost as a stage of advanced hyper-evolution.

"He went and did a very silly thing" 

Even ROOM 237 seems to be snickering at some of thsee more loco ideas, such as, the singing of The 3 Little Pigs wolf call as a link to the Holocaust. The Onion in its snarky surmise spoke to Kubrick's assistant on the film to see if the insane theories on the film were 'correct:'

"the suggestions that Kubrick was commenting on the Holocaust by having Jack Nicholson echo an old, anti-Semitic Disney cartoon by reciting “Three Little Pigs” (it was improvised in the moment) or do his writing on a German Adler typewriter (it was Kubrick’s and it looked good). Or the theory that briefly glimpsed cans of Calumet baking powder are supposed to be reminiscent of the Native American genocide (the cans had pretty colors). Or that Kubrick was actually retelling Greek myth by featuring a poster of a Minotaur (“It’s a downhill skier,” Vitali says. “It’s not a Minotaur”). Or that Kubrick was admitting complicity in faking the moon landing by having Danny wear an Apollo 11 sweater (a friend of the costume designer knitted it, and Kubrick wanted something handmade (more)

"A few extra foot-pounds of energy per second" 

This is of course imbecilic When a baseball flies at your head out of nowhere do you call your assistant and let him know you plan to duck? No, then how can you say you really ducked the baseball? Our unconscious is where real art comes from, without it all you have is cold, dead craftsmanship. And, while the craft is solid in THE SHINING, if any film can be said to exist almost entirely in the unconscious it's this one. The Onion article backtracks on that to point out that Of course, all of Vitali’s protests ignore the separating of authorial intent that is key to any deconstruction of a work of art, as well as the fact that Nazis are still clearly watching Vitali from their secret, Indian blood-powered moon base. So take this all with a grain of salt. Yeah but which part? Using the phrase 'grain of salt' to describe both your inane moon vest anecdote AND Vitali's assertions is very slippery... in the end, the only one who looks untrustworthy is.... you, ONION!

That'll teach you to ignore my letters!

"Forever and ever and ever"

 Call the lunatic critics in ROOM 237 paranoid, overreaching, seeing too deeply, perhaps paranoid schizophrenics on some level, but at least they know how to look properly, and the lunatic is, in the end, merely one who really sees just how awfully close death and blood and pain is to the surface at every given moment. He goes crazy because he can't shut it out of his mind, it doesn't go away after eight hours like it does for the humble tripper. Maybe our teeth really are used by someone as crystal sets to receive our thoughts... stranger things are used for stranger purposes every day. It's only madness when you lack the self awareness necessary to distrust your senses.

PART II: THE RIGHT MADNESS FOR AN OVERSANE WORLD

Shelly Duvall's stretchy face used to really bother me as Wendy, I'll confess, until ROOM 237 'corrected' my perceptions. Now I know why their mouth gets as wide and long as the Munch figure when they're confronted with the horrors and that this isn't a film about fighting back and acting logically and shouting at the screen hey don't do that, it's 'the mind' or 'the Munch' ---the sheer overwhelming horror that is the only 'sane' response to an insane world. Apparently one of his quickest shoots was CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which came out a mere four years after 2001, happened largely because of Malcolm McDowell, who once answered the question what was it like to work with Kubrick that it was great, "if he trusted you." If he doesn't trust you, as he didn't trust Shelly Duvall or Scatman Cruthers, it is a living hell, with torturous exercises like filming one walk from a car into a hotel like 40 times over and over, for no other real reason than to maybe to 'achieve madness" the hard way or maybe to just be a sadist or maybe because Kubrick actually was looking for something he couldn't explain. Hitchcock apparently did this when his hot ice queens invariably spurned his grubby advances, such as forcing Tippi Hedren into that bird-filled room over and over for two straight days, or making Kim Novak jump into the freezing San Francisco bay over and over after getting his take in the first shot. Are the great artists of our time all just naturally screwed up bully sociopaths? Is that all art is?

Hitchcock certainly got his insanity out of Hedren in that climactic final bird scene, and to my mind that's what Kubrick is trying to do with Duvall, because by film's climax Wendy doesn't even look human anymore, she's just giant eyes on a stalk of crazy fear. Malcolm seems to tap into that madness no problem for CLOCKWORK, as does Nicholson, both of whom  apparently got favorite treatment. No wonder Kubrick was so contemptuous of Stephen King's claims that Jack's Jack starts out crazy so has nowhere to go, crazy-wise (I paraphrase). For Kubrick there is always farther to go crazy-wise. Starting out at a Nicholson-smarm level crazy is as far sane as Kubrick wants to ever get. 

In EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) it's clear that the one with the effortless crazy, the 'caretaker sparkle' is Nicole Kidman. Kubrick's first genuine female character. She likes to have sex and Tom Cruise only likes to imagine himself having sex, so he can ogle his own perfect body; Cruise is a cipher trying to break into a dimension that sees through his facility in ways he cannot. Even driven by jealousy into the mire of sexual perversion and high strangeness he still is never able, except maybe by the very end, to see the world except in reverse angle, the 'selfie side' of the camera app; he's trying to see, rather than be seen seeing himself seeing.

The actor with the shine in his eyes is the one who can do both: they can 'see' all right. Malcolm. Jack. Nicole. Hayden. Sellers... As Mick Jagger says in PERFORMANCE, "the only performance that truly makes it is the one that achieves madness." It's this madness Kubrick aims for, for there can be no falseness in madness. It's either there or it isn't. If it's not there, maybe 40 straight takes of the same scene will help the actor find it. 

The gold room in The Shining is where Jack experiences his relative distance even from the majority of ghosts, who ignore him as he wanders around with his drink (which he doesn't ever sip from), and has the advocaat spilled on him. Nicole Kidman's immanent desirability in Eyes Wide Shut means that she is never safe from being hit on the very minute she is alone and seems bored in the (same) gold room. This smooth talking yet vaguely sinister figure she dances with is her own private Lloyd the bartender, an animus of sexual mystery, providing the direct connection to the unconscious core of sexuality the Cruise's character lacks (i.e. her bourbon is named sex; his is named Tom Cruise).

 Kubrick gets a clinical reputation but it's only because he is going places that would collapse into complete subjection without cold mathematical logic; all of his films are about the cold break of time when one is cut off, in effect, from a consensual reality and the inner and outer merge. Even BARRY LYNDON focuses on this, via the maze of presumed identities played by Ryan O'Neal, the blank canvas of a soul whose life is never the same after winning a duel and being robbed by a highwayman. PATHS OF GLORY in the transitions between men suffering in the trenches and the pampered cluelessness of the generals in their lofty mansion toasting the glories of war amongst themselves --each side clueless about the other. The generals essentially are like the ghosts of the Overlook, Grady's urging of Jack to 'deal with' his family mirrors General Ripper's unauthorized military air strike, or the Highwayman's cold, terrifying instructions in LYNDON, and the execution of the three soldiers in PATHS. Kubrick brings this cold, clinical reason deep into the murky homicidal core of man's decision-making skills, the unconscious self-sabotaging remainder. Jack continually lets his family get away, the troops refuse to charge, HAL refuses to admit his mistake, Lyndon refuses the call to bravery, and only our isolated flying boys have what it takes to get the job done, because only Slim Pickens is high enough to see they're all just ants.

Gearing up for some lashings of the old Wendy. Gimme the bat!

Kubrick became a recluse towards the end of his life, and its easy to read that his whole career was one long planning out of reclusiveness. The stress of 'faking the moon landings' and the idea that only in deep solitude can one's inner demons really manifest in the external, that reality is only as sick as your secrets, and that when your secrets come out its usually because everyone else has gone to bed.

Writing is like that, when you get deep into your work, time stands still and then vanishes, and the best work always occurs between four AM and dawn. The real genius fiction can only occur when this deep break with conventional sanity is possible and this deep break with conventional sanity can only occur when the cops, kids, and camels have all gone to bed, as it were, and the tiresome curtain of tedious convention, the collective guise of sanity, or decency and normality, at last may part. This sanity (such as it is) is borne bravely by such long-suffering foils as Peter Sellers' Captain Mandrake and the president in STRANGELOVE, Kirk Douglas in GLORY, Shelly Duvall in THE SHINING, Alex's parents in CLOCKWORK. They all vainly struggle to carry the torch of conventional reality into the deep troughs of true madness and are suddenly made into the thing that doesn't belong. For we who are truly mad, it is the ultimate revenge-served-cold satisfaction. The sane are now the insane ones, and oh how they danced... at Stonhenge.

NOTES:
1. As one of the theorists, a photojournalist, notes: most newsreel war footage is faked after the fact

ALSO ON ACIDEMIC:

SHINING Examples: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror (from 10/11)

EYES WIDE SHUT: Paters Horribilis: Harvey, Hookers, and a Man Called Pollack (from 3/10) 

ON BRIGHT LIGHTS:

All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives: Stanley Kubrick's LOLITA