Room 237 Page #3

Kubrick went

to these advertisers,

and he asked them

what their methods were.

And then he took those methods

and he applied them

to The Shining.

Inside The Shining are

hundreds of subliminal images

and shot line-ups.

And what

these images are telling

is an extremely disturbing

story about sexuality.

And the subtext of the story,

besides the other subtexts

of the story,

is a story of haunted

phantoms and demons

who are sexually attracted

to humans

and are feeding off of them.

You'd have to be able to be

a complete fanatic like I am

in order to find all this,

but, you know,

I'll give you my favorite.

I'm only gonna give you one,

but I'll give you my favorite.

When Jack meets

Stewart Ullman in the office

at the very beginning

of the movie

and he reaches over to shake

Jack Nicholson's hand...

and so step through

that scene frame by frame.

And the minute,

the moment,

the frame that he

and Jack Nicholson touch hands

and right after the line

that Barry Nelson says,

which is, "Nice to see you,"

you can see

that there's a paper...

a paper tray on the desk.

And as soon as they touch hands,

the paper tray

turns into a very large

straight-on hard-on

coming out of Barry nelson.

Yeah, it's hilarious.

It's a joke... a very serious

joke... but a joke by Stanley.

And there's

many of these in the film.

And very disturbing,

some of them.

And this will all be in my film,

Kubrick the Magician.

I'll give you one more.

This one's harder to find, okay?

And you have to know what

Stanley Kubrick looked like

during the making of

The Shining to know this one.

But if you go

to the opening credits

and you pan the frame...

you... you go through the frames,

right after it says

"Directed by Stanley Kubrick,"

as soon as his name

passes off the frame,

stop and you will see that the

clouds have Stanley Kubrick

airbrushed into them,

his face...

with the beard and the wild hair

and the whole thing.

I know this one's

a little harder to find.

And I will have to...

I will have to Photoshop

this one to show people it,

but there is definitely the

photograph of Stanley Kubrick

in one frame

airbrushed into the clouds.

- In most films,

a dissolve is used

to indicate a long passage

of time between two scenes.

But in The Shining,

the dissolves go on for so long

that they create

a superimposition,

where different scenes seem to

be interacting with each other.

For example,

you have the exterior image...

a tracking shot of the lobby

of the camera

moving along the western wall

south towards the entrance.

And you see

a janitor mopping the floor,

but it looks like he's...

it looks like

a he's a giant, mopping,

like, clearing the forest

because he's mopping, like,

a vacant area in the forest.

And then the...

then the ladder lines up...

lines up with the pyramid form

of the exterior of the hotel,

which, in the exterior set,

disappears.

Like, we don't see...

we only see that

in the Timberline exteriors.

But the England movie set

exteriors of the hotel,

like, the pyramid is missing,

and it seems as if the hotel

then takes both sides

of the Timberline Hotel

and then kind of, like,

makes a composite of it.

So it's... you know,

it's a perceptual shift

of making people

look like giants,

also making the hotel look

larger or smaller than it is.

I mean, these things

kind of litter the movie.

But then the shot goes on.

We see a...

we see a janitor pushing

a folded-up bed on wheels.

And then he's followed

by another...

he's followed by another guy,

who's carrying, like, one...

like, one coffee table?

And then another... like, another

guy is carrying one chair.

Like, where are these guys going

with, like, these light loads,

you know?

Then we see Jack sitting

on a chair, eating lunch.

And the manager

and his assistant crosses paths

with two women who...

and just as he's

in the corner of the screen...

you just see it for a second.

You see one of the women

is wearing, like, a 13,

a number 13 jersey?

Can you hear that?

My boy, yelling?

Hold on one second.

I'm gonna see if I can...

I can see

if I can calm him down.

You know,

so, like, he's like,

leaning back

and eating a sandwich.

And he's got, you know,

a magazine in his lap.

And as he stands up

to greet them,

he, like, throws it down.

And if you look at"

look at...

look at it, you know,

close up,

it's an actual

Playgirl magazine.

Yeah, a Playgirl magazine

in the lobby of a hotel

right in front of his boss,

like on his first day at work.

Yeah.

Like, the cover is like, people

getting ready for New Year's.

There's an article about incest.

At the beginning of the film,

Danny's been physically abused.

But there's a suggestion

that he's been

sexually abused as well.

You know, so like,

just in that one...

one shot, there's all these,

like, you know, complex things

going on in the background,

like things

that are choreographed

to match up exactly.

Like, we see a guy...

we see a guy, carrying a...

entering the room,

carrying a rug.

And by the time

the scene is just ending,

we see him

walking up the stairs.

Like, he's crossed

the entire place,

you know, timed exactly.

I don't even...

Yeah.

- When Ullman

is leading the Torrances

out of the elevator

and into the Colorado Lounge

for the first time,

there's a pile of suitcases.

And in the dissolve

into that scene,

the scene before,

a group of tourists

are standing in the lobby.

And those tourists

dissolve into the suitcases.

Now, as an historian

of the Holocaust,

I find that

very, very striking

and certainly not accidental

'cause he's using those

sort of cross-dissolves.

Now, that could be,

along with the ladder,

where he's trying to make

substantive connections

as well as formal ones.

- Oh, the window

in Ullman's office,

it is absolutely beautiful.

The casual viewer

isn't going to see

so many things

in Kubrick's films,

although I think they may

register unconsciously.

You know, but they're not

going to, you know,

perceive

perhaps these things

because as I've said,

he presents them

as being real.

You know, it's realism.

And it's not

your typical horror...

you don't have a horror film

except for this one section

at the end,

right where Wendy walks in

and the lobby is blue

and you've got the cobwebs

all around.

And it's almost like

a Saturday morning

kind of horror film

suddenly there for a second.

And you kind of go.

"Ooh, what is this with

the skeletons and the cobwebs?"

And it's kind of cheesy.

But then, after that,

following that,

you've got her going down

the red hallway,

which...

on the big screen,

that's petrifying.

So I think the kind of

cheesiness before it

helps set up

that red hallway.

So anyway, what was I saying?

Right, the windows.

So you got... Jack has entered.

And you can see...

you are...

Kubrick shows you.

But he shows you this lobby,

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