It’s Back. But What Does It Mean?
Aide to Kubrick on ‘Shining’ Scoffs at ‘Room
237’ Theories
By David Segal
March 27, 2013
Danny Lloyd in “The
Shining,” wearing an Apollo 11 sweater, which, says Leon Vitali, was not a reference
by his boss, Stanley Kubrick, to the faking of the moon landing.
Credit Warner Brothers.
Did you
watch the classic 1980 horror film “The Shining” and think it was about a man
driven to insane and murderous rage by a haunted hotel? If so, you blew it. Or
rather, you missed profound messages subtly embedded in the film by its
enigmatic director, Stanley Kubrick.
That,
at least, is the notion behind “Room 237,” a documentary by Rodney Ascher
released on Friday.
The
movie is a series of voice-overs atop scenes from Kubrick movies by a small
assortment of obsessives who have developed baroque theories about the true
meaning of “The Shining.” One believes the film is about the slaughter of
American Indians, another that it is about the Holocaust. Yet another claims it
is a kind of apology by Kubrick for the putative role he played in helping to
fake the moon landing.
And there’s more.
The
documentary could be construed as a sly tribute to “The Shining” as measured by
the startling variety of fanciful postulations and close viewings it has
inspired. But the theories are presented with such a surprising lack of irony
that it seems as though “Room 237” — the name refers to the scariest suite in
the Kubrick movie’s snowbound Overlook Hotel — just might want its audience to
take them seriously.
That
makes the theories fair game for a sober assessment. And who better to provide
one than Leon Vitali, who is listed in the closing credits of “The Shining” as
personal assistant to the director? Mr. Vitali had an acting role in Kubrick’s
1975 movie “Barry Lyndon,” went to work for him soon after and remained on his
payroll for decades. Mr. Vitali’s first task as an assistant was to fly to the
United States to cast the role of Danny, the child of Jack (Jack Nicholson) and
Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall). He was present during the 13-month filming at
sound stages near London, and throughout post-production.
Mr.
Vitali is a Briton who now lives in Los Angeles, where he works on his own and
other film projects. He was recently sent an advance copy of “Room 237,” and
not surprisingly it elicited a strong response.
A poster for the
documentary “Room 237,” in which the moon-landing reference is proposed.
“I was
falling about laughing most of the time,” he said by telephone. “There are
ideas espoused in the movie that I know to be total balderdash.”
Take,
for instance, the scene near the end of “The Shining” in which Jack Torrance is
about to chop down a door as he chases his wife and child with an ax. The
character recites a few lines of the “Three Little Pigs” story. “Little pigs,
little pigs, let me come in,” Jack huffs, mugging and grinning in pure
derangement. “Not by the hair on your chinny chin chin.”
In
“Room 237,” Geoffrey Cocks, a professor of history at Albion College in
Michigan and author of “The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the
Holocaust,” writes that Disney’s original animated version of “Three Little
Pigs” featured an anti-Semitic caricature, a wolf dressed as a Jewish peddler.
He ties that in with several supposed references to the Holocaust to suggest
that Kubrick wanted to link the fictional horror in “The Shining” with the
real-world horror of the Nazi concentration camps.
That
reading implies that Kubrick planned
to use “Three Little Pigs.” But according to Mr. Vitali, when the scene was
being filmed Kubrick brainstormed with him and Mr. Nicholson what Jack Torrance
ought to howl before swinging his ax.
“Stanley
thought the scene needed something, a few lines for Jack that would make him
sound threatening and nasty,” Mr. Vitali recalled, but lines that could, in
another context, sound soothing. “Three Little Pigs” was proposed, but nobody
was quite sure about the words. So Kubrick called the mother of Danny Lloyd,
the child actor who’d won the role of Danny Torrance.
Leon Vitali
Credit Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images.
“She
was staying in an apartment nearby and she had the words to ‘Three Little Pigs’
right there,” Mr. Vitali said.
Mr. Vitali
also cautioned against the suggestion that there might be Holocaust overtones
to the German-made Adler typewriter that Jack uses to tap out his mad loop of
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
“That was
Stanley’s typewriter,” he said. “A lot of decisions made on the set were about
pragmatism: ‘This looks good. It sits on the oak table pretty perfectly.’ Not
to mention, it’s a great typewriter. I used that typewriter for 10 years,
actually.”
Kubrick,
who died in 1999, was legendary for his perfectionism, but he also believed in
improvisation. What looks to many of the Shinologists in “Room 237” like the
result of careful planning is often mere happenstance.
There
are scenes, for instance, in which Danny wears a sweater showing the Apollo 11
rocket. This becomes part of the faked-moon-landing theory, as articulated by
Jay Weidner, an author and independent filmmaker.
Jack Nicholson in
"The Shining."
Credit Warner Brothers.
“That
was knitted by a friend of Milena Canonero,” the costume designer, Mr. Vitali
said. “Stanley wanted something that looked handmade, and Milena arrived on the
set one day and said, ‘How about this?’ It was just the sort of thing that a
kid that age would have liked.”
Likewise,
the cans of Calumet baking powder seen in the Overlook pantry were chosen not
because they featured an American Indian in headdress, thus highlighting
Kubrick’s interest in the plight of the American Indian, but because they had
bright, bold colors.
“Part
of what I did during that trip to the U.S. in 1975 was shoot larders in
hotels,” said Mr. Vitali, using the British word for pantries. “It was so that
Stanley” — who was American born but had lived in England for years by then —
“knew what one was likely to see there. And I found Calumet cans all over the
place.”
Yet
another contention is that a poster in the Overlook shows a Minotaur,
suggesting that the movie is a retelling of the Greek myth about the part man,
part bull.
“That
astonished me,” Mr. Vitali said. “I stood staring at all that stuff for weeks
while we were shooting in that room. It’s a downhill skier. It’s a downhill skier.
It’s not a Minotaur.”
Mr.
Vitali said he never spoke with Kubrick about any larger meaning in “The
Shining.” “He didn’t tell an audience what to think or how to think,” he said,
“and if everyone came out thinking something differently that was fine with
him. That said, I’m certain that he wouldn’t have wanted to listen to about 70,
or maybe 80 percent” of “Room 237.”
Why
not?
“Because
it’s pure gibberish.”
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