View With a Room

I recently spent an evening watching an extremely low budget documentary called Room 237. There must be something about movies with "Room" in the title. Because not since Tommy Wiseau's impossibly bad The Room have I seen watched a movie that I would call predominately "bad," and yet simultaneously find so watchable -- even recommendable.

Room 237 is an examination of Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining. In an interlaced series of interviews, five different enthusiasts of the film share their theories on subliminal imagery and hidden meanings they believe the notoriously controlling and meticulous director placed within the movie... and each conspiracy is more outlandish than the last.

I should say that I myself am no fan of The Shining. I find the movie over-the-top to a point where it's often more silly than scary, and filled with ridiculous performances. So I was coming to this documentary not as a Shining fan, but for this movie in and of itself, having read a glowing review in Entertainment Weekly magazine, which provocatively proclaimed: "even more than The Shining itself, it places you right inside the logic of how an insane person thinks."

From that perspective, Room 237 is pretty amazing. In the course of the documentary, Kubrick fans argue forcefully (though unconvincingly), that the movie is a metaphor for the genocide of Native Americans, or a way to personalize the horrors of the Holocaust. They "unmask" how the movie is steeped top to bottom in subliminal imagery, either of a predominately sexual nature or referencing the myth of the minotaur, depending on who you ask. There's a guy who geeks out over what happens when you simultaneously run the movie forward and backward at the same time, superimposing the two images over one another on the same screen. And there's my personal favorite, the man who swears The Shining is Kubrick's secret confession to having directed all the fake Apollo moon landing footage.

In essence, Room 237 is a case study of film criticism and deconstruction taken to the nth degree, past the point where it can spark any meaningful conversation. But entertaining as that is for a while, it does feel like there comes a point where you realize there is no point. I'm unsure if the documentary is trying to say anything, or if it's just inviting us to point at the weirdos and laugh. Which, I confess, I certainly did. Or maybe that's the point? Maybe the documentary is probing for the line between healthy geek passion and crazed whack-a-doodle obsession?

But I'm inclined to think that, like the enthusiasts interviewed in the film itself, I'm probably reading too much into a movie. For one thing, Room 237 is made so on the cheap, I think I could have done it myself... on my dying laptop that doesn't even function right or take a battery charge anymore. Not a single one of the interview subjects is shown on camera in the film. Instead, each is recorded (sometimes quite poorly) by telephone, their comments edited in rather amateur fashion over spliced together footage from a raft of movies -- mostly The Shining, largely other Kubrick films, but ultimately I gather any random movie they could get the rights to show a clip of. The result is a movie so shoddily made that it's hard to take it seriously... though I suppose once you start hearing some of the ravings of the theorists within, there would have been little chance of that anyway.

In the end, the movie is so poorly assembled that I can only give it a C-. That said, there are plenty of people I'd probably still have to recommend it to: if you love film criticism, or enjoy a good laugh at an outrageous conspiracy theory... or, of course, if you're a fan of The Shining. To all of you, I'd say that -- warts and all -- this might just be a "must see."