Even if youve never seen The Shining, you may know a few things about it. Its based on a Stephen King book. Its a Stanley Kubrick movie which automatically means its highly regarded. Jack Nicholson chases his family with an axe and says, Heeeeres Johnny.
A new documentary could reveal even more about The Shining than you ever imagined. Room 237 explores a number of theories about symbolism and hidden messages in the film, via interviews with a number of theorists, illustrated by footage from The Shining and other Kubrick films. Room 237 is the room of the Overlook Hotel where the scariest stuff happens in The Shining, but its not the only basis for theories. Theories include an image of Kubricks face airbrushed into a cloud, and an experiment running the film forwards and backwards simultaneously, superimposing the prints on top of each other to see where they line up. A lot of scenes line up quite well running backwards and forwards.
Rodney Ascher directed Room 237. Hes made a number of short films, including The S From Hell, a nine minute exploration of the notorious Screen Gems logo, which has been making the rounds on YouTube and social media recently. We spoke to Ascher by phone about 237 and all the theories about The Shining in his film, and some that werent even covered.
Suicide Girls: Which of the theories about The Shining surprised you when you were talking to these subjects?
Rodney Ascher: Well, theyre all sort of surprising. What was especially interesting to me is having read most of them online before I spoke to these people, in the interviews things got a little more personal. I was able to understand both how their experiences and their points of view affected the way they saw the film, but also vice versa. How their study and work on The Shining affected their life was always surprising to me, though it shouldnt be in hindsight, the two way relationship people seem to have with this movie.
SG: Were there any theories you found too far fetched?
RA: Well, there were some that I couldnt understand so I might not have pursued someone to that end. Far fetched is kind of a funny term to use when were talking about a symbolic analysis of a Freudian horror movie.
SG: I guess what Im getting at is do you believe Kubrick really airbrushed himself into the clouds?
RA: That is one of the harder things to see. People have asked if I can see that one myself. My answer is probably rather disappointing. I think so. Jay Weidner, who talks about that, subliminal issues and everything, describes it as being kind of hard to see, that at some point either in one of his DVDs or in his essays that hes going to use Photoshop to make that a little bit clearer. I try to slow it down so we can all have a good look and try our hardest to find it himself.
SG: I can believe a natural cloud formation coincidentally resembles Kubrick, but I dont think they had that kind of airbrushing technology back in 1980.
RA: They didnt have Photoshop but they certainly had airbrushing. Jack Nicholsons face was airbrushed into that photo at the end of the movie.
SG: A photograph is a little different than doing it on the film itself.
RA: Im totally ready to believe that Kubrick had the technology to airbrush a picture into the clouds on a single frame. All that stuff in 2001 where the astronauts are inside the windows of the spaceships were things that were done in an optical printer, though via multiple passes. Theres plenty of room to be skeptical of that or any other idea but I wouldnt hinge it on technological limitations.
SG: Right, its more like would he go to that much trouble for one frame of a cloud?
RA: Exactly, although something to that effect is the only line that I speak in the movie, where Im like, Why did he make the movie so complicated? What I loved was that John Fell Ryan was so ready with his answer. Why did James Joyce write Finnegans Wake? People have built these incredibly elaborate, symbolic paintings or books or music or what have you over the years. So there are precedents for that kind of thing.
SG: I actually got to see The Shining forwards and backwards overlayed as is discussed in the film. It made me wonder, to some extent wouldnt most movies have some foreshadowing of the final act if you laid it running forwards and backwards on top of each other?
RA: Yeah, I was thinking about what other films might work. Ive talked to, not John Fell Ryan who put the projection together, but the guy who runs the theater with that specialty equipment actually talked about trying other films as an experiment. He didnt say which ones they were but said that none of them turned into anything especially interesting. At least based on what Ive found overlapping The Shining forwards and backwards above and beyond all those juxtapositions, some of which are amazing, like when Wendy says, Well, what room was she in? And you see the number 237 in the frame. Also, thats what youre talking about, the foreshadowing of the first have, kind of blackly comic, then flashback to the second half, kind of tragic, that maybe that would work with Titanic, which is a similar movie in that you know bad stuff is coming despite the hopes of our heroes.
SG: Were there more theories that you left out of the film?
RA: Oh, theres a ton more. The funny thing is new ones are still popping up all the time. Both John Fell Ryan and Juli Kearns had new entries that we reposted on the 237 Facebook page. Other people are continuing their work. Not only is there more stuff happening with these people, but these folks that we didnt get to talk to like The Mastermind or Rob Ager in England who has a site Collative Learning which has some amazing, mind blowing stuff about The Shining. Early on we had to sort of make peace with the fact that we werent going to be able to get everything in. I think I might have been surprised with how much more was going to continue to appear while we were working on it and throughout. Again, when Tim Kirk, the producer, who we researched all this stuff together for a long time, one of the things that we were struck by was that the majority of things we were looking at were written about and figured out in the last couple of years. The Shining may have been released in 1980 but the bulk of this kind of deep, symbolic analysis didnt happen until the 21st century, with the exception of Bill Blakemore who got the ball rolling with his Native American thing back in 1987.
SG: Does this all hinge on The Shining being a movie that people want to watch in the first place?
RA: Exactly, right? Theres a ton of challenging art films that are more clearly symbolic and you dont need to go as deep as the Cremaster series, things that were never released in regular theaters, but most of them arent as much fun to watch as The Shining. That might be another reason. Come for the horror movie and stay for the symbolism.
SG: You never show the talking heads in the interviews. Its all illustrated with footage from the film. Are talking heads a pet peeve of yours in documentaries?
RA: Sometimes. There are a couple of people who are able to do interesting things with them. Certainly Errol Morris with his interrotron has gotten some incredibly vivid shots and a really interesting direct connection. Sometimes they can look kind of mundane and you just see a regular person sitting in their office under florescent lights. It tends to drag to go back to that stuff and I liked staying in the world of the history of cinema, which is kind of where all these ideas are swarming around, and to try to keep it in a more dreamlike place.
SG: How hard was the clip licensing? I guess most of the films are Warner Bros.
RA: It was complicated but I think most any documentary these days, I think theres a kind of similar strategy. They license and get different clips cleared from different places in different ways. Luckily for us, after the rough cut stage, a couple of executive producers came on, P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes, who had just finished their documentary about Patty Schemel, the drummer from Hole. That was a real complicated clearance project too because theres a lot of popular music from the 90s and clips from MTV and things so they had just kind of gone to clearance boot camp and were able to hold our hands through the process.
SG: Did the amount of footage from The Shining you were using play a factor?
RA: Just in the length of the process. When youre working on those clearances, you wind up with this sort of Excel spreadsheet with every shot of the movie and each one you have to check off one at a time and our list was longer than most.
SG: Some of the scenes are repeated, but about how much of The Shining do you think youve played in Room 237?
RA: I dont know offhand. It might be less than you think because a lot of it is slowed down, and again, repeated. And the repeated thing was something important to me because I was teaching a film editing class at the time and we spent a lot of time talking about the Kuleshov Effect, which is the Russian film theory idea that the same shot in a different context can have a different meaning. So finding ways to demonstrate that was just kind of a personal interest of mine, and seeing the same shot from The Shining through the eyes of different people, therefore its playing somehow differently, was a really interesting thing. Then also sometimes finding ways to let the character on screen be a surrogate for a different person off screen to see how malleable those images could be and how far the audience could stretch that relationship.
SG: What do you make of Stephen Kings dissatisfaction with the movie and his preference for the TV miniseries version?
RA: Yeah, well I mean, he wrote and produced the TV miniseries so its closer to his original vision. It makes total sense to me because you watch the miniseries version while listening to the commentary, he talks about what a personal, autobiographical story it was for him. He stayed in a hotel like that, The Stanley Hotel on its last day before closing in the winter, and he was battling alcoholism and he thought he saw ghosts. It was just the beginning of his career where maybe he had only recently stopped being a teacher. So when you have a story thats so personal, to see it changed as radically as it will when someone makes it into a movie, might be a lot harder than when you just write a piece of fiction that you hope will be entertaining.
SG: Yeah. Not everyone gets to see Stanley Kubricks version of their story though.
RA: Its funny because Stephen King is fighting for his interpretation of what The Shining means and The Shining means something different to a lot of people. Stephen King was first in with his understanding of what it was about and the rest of us came in later.
SG: Why didnt Danny Lloyd work again? He did one other role in a movie after The Shining and that was it.
RA: I dont know too much about his history. He certainly is so amazing and so natural in The Shining, youd think that the momentum wouldve just taken him to a half dozen other movies. Maybe he just decided he wanted to do something different with his life. Maybe he was smart enough to take a step back, look at the trajectory of other child stars.
SG: Did you ever see the comedy trailer someone cut for The Shining?
RA: Yeah, thats amazing and I think it speaks really powerfully for, again, something we were kind of experimenting with, the maleability of these images and how they play differently in different contexts. It also speaks really about the power of music, because when that Peter Gabriel Solsbury Hill plays over that first shot, it is almost the entirely opposite feeling that Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkinds The Shining theme playing over that. Stanley Kubrick, you probably cant overstate how popular and well regarded he is, but even so, he might not get enough credit for how good his taste in music selection was.
SG: Even the way they could take certain soundbites out of context in that trailer was amazing.
RA: Yeah, I know. It says as much about film language and that shots in some ways are equal to words. You can rearrange them and get something very different from the same building blocks.
SG: If someone has never seen The Shining, should they see it before Room 237? Or would it be good as a study guide to see Room 237 and then The Shining for the first time?
RA: Well, if theyve never seen The Shining, it would probably be a pretty baffling project for them. But if youve seen The Shining years ago, as long as youve got a basic familiarity with it, I would recommend going to see 237 first and then watch The Shining again and see for yourself how this stuff adds up.
SG: Youd made a lot of short films. What made this the right project for your first feature?
RA: When I started, it wasnt necessarily going to be a feature. Me and Tim were researching everything we could about The Shining. We got sort of obsessed in this world of symbolic analysis of the film. It might just be how much material we found. My first interview with Bill Blakemore was over 3 1/2 hours long and it killed me to cut anything out. I was like, This might be a long piece. Once you sort of approach the hour mark, you may as well make it a feature just for where and how its going to be seen. A 52 minute movie is just a difficult thing to exhibit, although that really wasnt a problem with this thing. There was so much material, it could easily have gone to three or four hours. There was a point where we kind of made this choice not to cover everything that people say about The Shining but give each of these people a couple of meaty passages where they get to dive deep into their theories, but structured in a weird kind of three act way, even if its a very loose stream of consciousness kind of structure. Their first experience, what they do, how they figure it out and how this stuff has affected them.
SG: Why were you researching The Shining in the first place?
RA: Well, Tim just posted one of theses theories on my Facebook page and instantly, after the last short I did which is definitely in a similar style, instantly that was something that I wanted to turn into a video. I didnt immediately know what shape or form it would have, but very quickly taking that theory and juxtaposing it with a couple of others when dealing with it, theres sort of an interesting problem that arises when you have multiple analyses that are all persuasive and all interesting but all contradict each other. How do you resolve that? Seemed like an interesting juicy enough project to keep us busy for a while.
SG: Whats next for you then?
RA: Theres two documentaries that weve kind of started picking away at, that Ive done a couple interviews for. Theyre pretty different from one another. Weve got an audio project that I worked on with different people that should be coming out over the summer that hopefully will be announced soon. Just a grab bag of stuff. Nothing has turned into a 16 hour a day obsession like Room 237 has yet.
SG: Are they also film related documentaries?
RA: One is. One is and one isnt and the film one, although its kind of a deep, unusual look at someones work, is not about symbolism in nearly the same way.
Room 237 is now playing in limited release.
A new documentary could reveal even more about The Shining than you ever imagined. Room 237 explores a number of theories about symbolism and hidden messages in the film, via interviews with a number of theorists, illustrated by footage from The Shining and other Kubrick films. Room 237 is the room of the Overlook Hotel where the scariest stuff happens in The Shining, but its not the only basis for theories. Theories include an image of Kubricks face airbrushed into a cloud, and an experiment running the film forwards and backwards simultaneously, superimposing the prints on top of each other to see where they line up. A lot of scenes line up quite well running backwards and forwards.
Rodney Ascher directed Room 237. Hes made a number of short films, including The S From Hell, a nine minute exploration of the notorious Screen Gems logo, which has been making the rounds on YouTube and social media recently. We spoke to Ascher by phone about 237 and all the theories about The Shining in his film, and some that werent even covered.
Suicide Girls: Which of the theories about The Shining surprised you when you were talking to these subjects?
Rodney Ascher: Well, theyre all sort of surprising. What was especially interesting to me is having read most of them online before I spoke to these people, in the interviews things got a little more personal. I was able to understand both how their experiences and their points of view affected the way they saw the film, but also vice versa. How their study and work on The Shining affected their life was always surprising to me, though it shouldnt be in hindsight, the two way relationship people seem to have with this movie.
SG: Were there any theories you found too far fetched?
RA: Well, there were some that I couldnt understand so I might not have pursued someone to that end. Far fetched is kind of a funny term to use when were talking about a symbolic analysis of a Freudian horror movie.
SG: I guess what Im getting at is do you believe Kubrick really airbrushed himself into the clouds?
RA: That is one of the harder things to see. People have asked if I can see that one myself. My answer is probably rather disappointing. I think so. Jay Weidner, who talks about that, subliminal issues and everything, describes it as being kind of hard to see, that at some point either in one of his DVDs or in his essays that hes going to use Photoshop to make that a little bit clearer. I try to slow it down so we can all have a good look and try our hardest to find it himself.
SG: I can believe a natural cloud formation coincidentally resembles Kubrick, but I dont think they had that kind of airbrushing technology back in 1980.
RA: They didnt have Photoshop but they certainly had airbrushing. Jack Nicholsons face was airbrushed into that photo at the end of the movie.
SG: A photograph is a little different than doing it on the film itself.
RA: Im totally ready to believe that Kubrick had the technology to airbrush a picture into the clouds on a single frame. All that stuff in 2001 where the astronauts are inside the windows of the spaceships were things that were done in an optical printer, though via multiple passes. Theres plenty of room to be skeptical of that or any other idea but I wouldnt hinge it on technological limitations.
SG: Right, its more like would he go to that much trouble for one frame of a cloud?
RA: Exactly, although something to that effect is the only line that I speak in the movie, where Im like, Why did he make the movie so complicated? What I loved was that John Fell Ryan was so ready with his answer. Why did James Joyce write Finnegans Wake? People have built these incredibly elaborate, symbolic paintings or books or music or what have you over the years. So there are precedents for that kind of thing.
SG: I actually got to see The Shining forwards and backwards overlayed as is discussed in the film. It made me wonder, to some extent wouldnt most movies have some foreshadowing of the final act if you laid it running forwards and backwards on top of each other?
RA: Yeah, I was thinking about what other films might work. Ive talked to, not John Fell Ryan who put the projection together, but the guy who runs the theater with that specialty equipment actually talked about trying other films as an experiment. He didnt say which ones they were but said that none of them turned into anything especially interesting. At least based on what Ive found overlapping The Shining forwards and backwards above and beyond all those juxtapositions, some of which are amazing, like when Wendy says, Well, what room was she in? And you see the number 237 in the frame. Also, thats what youre talking about, the foreshadowing of the first have, kind of blackly comic, then flashback to the second half, kind of tragic, that maybe that would work with Titanic, which is a similar movie in that you know bad stuff is coming despite the hopes of our heroes.
SG: Were there more theories that you left out of the film?
RA: Oh, theres a ton more. The funny thing is new ones are still popping up all the time. Both John Fell Ryan and Juli Kearns had new entries that we reposted on the 237 Facebook page. Other people are continuing their work. Not only is there more stuff happening with these people, but these folks that we didnt get to talk to like The Mastermind or Rob Ager in England who has a site Collative Learning which has some amazing, mind blowing stuff about The Shining. Early on we had to sort of make peace with the fact that we werent going to be able to get everything in. I think I might have been surprised with how much more was going to continue to appear while we were working on it and throughout. Again, when Tim Kirk, the producer, who we researched all this stuff together for a long time, one of the things that we were struck by was that the majority of things we were looking at were written about and figured out in the last couple of years. The Shining may have been released in 1980 but the bulk of this kind of deep, symbolic analysis didnt happen until the 21st century, with the exception of Bill Blakemore who got the ball rolling with his Native American thing back in 1987.
SG: Does this all hinge on The Shining being a movie that people want to watch in the first place?
RA: Exactly, right? Theres a ton of challenging art films that are more clearly symbolic and you dont need to go as deep as the Cremaster series, things that were never released in regular theaters, but most of them arent as much fun to watch as The Shining. That might be another reason. Come for the horror movie and stay for the symbolism.
SG: You never show the talking heads in the interviews. Its all illustrated with footage from the film. Are talking heads a pet peeve of yours in documentaries?
RA: Sometimes. There are a couple of people who are able to do interesting things with them. Certainly Errol Morris with his interrotron has gotten some incredibly vivid shots and a really interesting direct connection. Sometimes they can look kind of mundane and you just see a regular person sitting in their office under florescent lights. It tends to drag to go back to that stuff and I liked staying in the world of the history of cinema, which is kind of where all these ideas are swarming around, and to try to keep it in a more dreamlike place.
SG: How hard was the clip licensing? I guess most of the films are Warner Bros.
RA: It was complicated but I think most any documentary these days, I think theres a kind of similar strategy. They license and get different clips cleared from different places in different ways. Luckily for us, after the rough cut stage, a couple of executive producers came on, P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes, who had just finished their documentary about Patty Schemel, the drummer from Hole. That was a real complicated clearance project too because theres a lot of popular music from the 90s and clips from MTV and things so they had just kind of gone to clearance boot camp and were able to hold our hands through the process.
SG: Did the amount of footage from The Shining you were using play a factor?
RA: Just in the length of the process. When youre working on those clearances, you wind up with this sort of Excel spreadsheet with every shot of the movie and each one you have to check off one at a time and our list was longer than most.
SG: Some of the scenes are repeated, but about how much of The Shining do you think youve played in Room 237?
RA: I dont know offhand. It might be less than you think because a lot of it is slowed down, and again, repeated. And the repeated thing was something important to me because I was teaching a film editing class at the time and we spent a lot of time talking about the Kuleshov Effect, which is the Russian film theory idea that the same shot in a different context can have a different meaning. So finding ways to demonstrate that was just kind of a personal interest of mine, and seeing the same shot from The Shining through the eyes of different people, therefore its playing somehow differently, was a really interesting thing. Then also sometimes finding ways to let the character on screen be a surrogate for a different person off screen to see how malleable those images could be and how far the audience could stretch that relationship.
SG: What do you make of Stephen Kings dissatisfaction with the movie and his preference for the TV miniseries version?
RA: Yeah, well I mean, he wrote and produced the TV miniseries so its closer to his original vision. It makes total sense to me because you watch the miniseries version while listening to the commentary, he talks about what a personal, autobiographical story it was for him. He stayed in a hotel like that, The Stanley Hotel on its last day before closing in the winter, and he was battling alcoholism and he thought he saw ghosts. It was just the beginning of his career where maybe he had only recently stopped being a teacher. So when you have a story thats so personal, to see it changed as radically as it will when someone makes it into a movie, might be a lot harder than when you just write a piece of fiction that you hope will be entertaining.
SG: Yeah. Not everyone gets to see Stanley Kubricks version of their story though.
RA: Its funny because Stephen King is fighting for his interpretation of what The Shining means and The Shining means something different to a lot of people. Stephen King was first in with his understanding of what it was about and the rest of us came in later.
SG: Why didnt Danny Lloyd work again? He did one other role in a movie after The Shining and that was it.
RA: I dont know too much about his history. He certainly is so amazing and so natural in The Shining, youd think that the momentum wouldve just taken him to a half dozen other movies. Maybe he just decided he wanted to do something different with his life. Maybe he was smart enough to take a step back, look at the trajectory of other child stars.
SG: Did you ever see the comedy trailer someone cut for The Shining?
RA: Yeah, thats amazing and I think it speaks really powerfully for, again, something we were kind of experimenting with, the maleability of these images and how they play differently in different contexts. It also speaks really about the power of music, because when that Peter Gabriel Solsbury Hill plays over that first shot, it is almost the entirely opposite feeling that Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkinds The Shining theme playing over that. Stanley Kubrick, you probably cant overstate how popular and well regarded he is, but even so, he might not get enough credit for how good his taste in music selection was.
SG: Even the way they could take certain soundbites out of context in that trailer was amazing.
RA: Yeah, I know. It says as much about film language and that shots in some ways are equal to words. You can rearrange them and get something very different from the same building blocks.
SG: If someone has never seen The Shining, should they see it before Room 237? Or would it be good as a study guide to see Room 237 and then The Shining for the first time?
RA: Well, if theyve never seen The Shining, it would probably be a pretty baffling project for them. But if youve seen The Shining years ago, as long as youve got a basic familiarity with it, I would recommend going to see 237 first and then watch The Shining again and see for yourself how this stuff adds up.
SG: Youd made a lot of short films. What made this the right project for your first feature?
RA: When I started, it wasnt necessarily going to be a feature. Me and Tim were researching everything we could about The Shining. We got sort of obsessed in this world of symbolic analysis of the film. It might just be how much material we found. My first interview with Bill Blakemore was over 3 1/2 hours long and it killed me to cut anything out. I was like, This might be a long piece. Once you sort of approach the hour mark, you may as well make it a feature just for where and how its going to be seen. A 52 minute movie is just a difficult thing to exhibit, although that really wasnt a problem with this thing. There was so much material, it could easily have gone to three or four hours. There was a point where we kind of made this choice not to cover everything that people say about The Shining but give each of these people a couple of meaty passages where they get to dive deep into their theories, but structured in a weird kind of three act way, even if its a very loose stream of consciousness kind of structure. Their first experience, what they do, how they figure it out and how this stuff has affected them.
SG: Why were you researching The Shining in the first place?
RA: Well, Tim just posted one of theses theories on my Facebook page and instantly, after the last short I did which is definitely in a similar style, instantly that was something that I wanted to turn into a video. I didnt immediately know what shape or form it would have, but very quickly taking that theory and juxtaposing it with a couple of others when dealing with it, theres sort of an interesting problem that arises when you have multiple analyses that are all persuasive and all interesting but all contradict each other. How do you resolve that? Seemed like an interesting juicy enough project to keep us busy for a while.
SG: Whats next for you then?
RA: Theres two documentaries that weve kind of started picking away at, that Ive done a couple interviews for. Theyre pretty different from one another. Weve got an audio project that I worked on with different people that should be coming out over the summer that hopefully will be announced soon. Just a grab bag of stuff. Nothing has turned into a 16 hour a day obsession like Room 237 has yet.
SG: Are they also film related documentaries?
RA: One is. One is and one isnt and the film one, although its kind of a deep, unusual look at someones work, is not about symbolism in nearly the same way.
Room 237 is now playing in limited release.