Room 237 Page #8

can see it.'

And this drove King crazy.

And it should have.

But what was really going on

and what is just much more

deliciously fascinating

about all of this

is that, in fact,

Kubrick was faking the making

of the Stephen King novel

in order to reveal the idea

of what he went through

to do the Apollo moon footage.

- My argument,

as far as Kubrick goes,

is that he was a

preternaturally observant child.

He read omnivorously.

He went to movies all the time.

And I think if you're going to

movies and reading in the 1930s

and the 1940s, a lot of what

you're seeing and reading

is Hitler and the Nazis

and the war.

So as a sensitive kid, he must

have been alive to these things.

And I don't think he ever forgot

anything, and this is...

which is why his films

are so rich.

- Little pigs, little pigs,

let me come in.

Not by the hair

on your chinny-chin-chin?

Then I'll huff and I'll puff...

- And I'll blow your house in!

- Well,

The Three Little Pigs,

I mean, I don't remember...

That might have been one of

the things

that Jack Nicholson

might've ad-libbed initially.

Kubrick was a great believer

in that.

But even if it was,

I think the selection

of that particular little rhyme

certainly fits in

with the time periodization

I've just been talking about,

because Kubrick

would've run across that

when he saw

The Three Little Pigs

as an Academy Award winning

cartoon in 1933.

And so it comes

out of that period.

And so the whole idea of a wolf,

which, during the 1930s,

gradually transformed itself

in popular mythology

and popular culture

from being a symbol

of want and of hunger

in the Great Depression

into a symbol of enemies;

Enemy nations,

enemy peoples,

military aggression.

And of course, this reflects

the rise of fascism

and Nazis in Europe.

But initially,

the wolf at the door

was an anti-Semitic

stereotype and caricature

that... initially the wolf

wears a disguise.

And the background music

is clearly Eastern European

sort of klezmer

or Yiddish music.

And it's a classic example

of early 1930s

Walt Disney anti-Semitism.

So I think there

are layers of meaning

in The Three Little Pigs. "

And since Kubrick

was a Freudian

and we know

that he used Freudian work

in doing the screenplay

for The Shining...

Bruno Bettelheim's

The Uses of Enchantment...

and it's a Freudian analysis

of the meaning of fairy tales.

And in The Shining,

we can see the fruits of that

when they're constantly making

references to Hansel and Gretel.

- I feel like I'll have

to leave a trail of bread crumbs

every time we come in here.

- The witch in the oven

and children being burned

and so forth,

which of course,

is also perhaps, suggestive

when it comes to the Holocaust.

- The blood

is one of the main ghosts

and perhaps

the overarching ghost,

in a certain sense,

in this movie.

We first see it when Danny,

at the beginning of the movie,

is at the sink

in the little apartment

down in Denver or Boulder

or wherever it is.

And he's talking to Danny,

"Why don't

you want to go there?"

And then suddenly

Danny shows him blood.

And as we learn

a little bit later,

the Overlook was built

on the Indian burial ground

between 1907 and 1909.

- Construction started in 1907.

It was finished in 1909.

The site

is supposed to be located

on an Indian burial ground,

and I believe they actually had

to repel a few Indian attacks

as they were building it.

- So presumably,

we can imagine the elevator

shaft sinks down into

the very bodies of the Indians,

so to speak.

And that's where

the blood is coming from;

Literal blood of the Indians.

And this movie is a movie about,

among other things,

the blood on which

nations are built;

Certainly the United States,

with the genocide

of the American Indians.

But it's not only that.

This is a complete metaphor

for what Kubrick is on about,

because the elevator's doors

remain closed.

In other words,

it's as if it's like a symbol

of the repression.

We don't want to admit to it.

But in spite of our attempting

to stay repressed about it,

blood will out,

murder will out,

as Chaucer says

in one of his tales.

And so the blood comes

squeezing out from the side

and overwhelms us.

And it keeps recurring

over and over through the movie.

And it's...

And finally Wendy, when,

at the very end of the movie,

she starts seeing ghosts.

She sees the blood.

It's the symbol

of what we all have in common.

And there's

lots of symbols in here

of what all humans

have in common.

- 42 shows up in other places.

Wendy and Danny

watch The Summer of '42

on a hotel television.

And there are

a number of other

little references

to that number.

And it's within a larger context

that Kubrick uses involving

numbers in The Shining.

And they're all

multiples of seven.

The hotel was built in 1907.

The party in which Jack

is pictured at the end of film

occurred in 1921 in July,

the seventh month of the year.

These multiples of seven,

I think,

also reflect the fact

that Kubrick was aware

of the importance

of Thomas Mann's novel of 1924,

The Magic Mountain,

which similarly concerns

a sanitarium...

though not a hotel...

high up in the mountains.

And Mann uses the number 7

there as a matter,

a symbol of

the sort of dangerous fate

that seems to have been

stalking Europe lately.

And in the novel Lolita,

Nabokov uses the number 42

as a symbol of fate

and Humbert's paranoia,

the idea that

he is constantly being tracked

and that his life is doomed.

And even though Kubrick,

in his film of Lolita,

only uses the number once,

interestingly enough

on a hotel room door,

I think at some level

of consciousness,

Kubrick was always

also drawing from Nabokov's use

of that particular number

as a symbol of danger

and malevolence and disaster.

- The opening sound

is from the great funeral mass,

Dies Irae,

which is the day of judgment,

which announces,

"This is going to be a funeral.

"This is going to be about

a judgment on the human race."

It's about the past.

But I think I remembered

that my impression

from the opening scene

in which that astonishing

helicopter shot

gives you

a totally creepy feeling.

You're looking at great,

beautiful nature,

but you know

you're following something.

You're, like, flying along

on top of this little,

tiny, insignificant car.

It's the ultimate

point of view shot

without telling you

who the point of view is.

If you want

to stop and think about it,

you think,

'This is a helicopter shot"

But for the general audience,

all you know is that

you are like a ghost.

You are like an angel.

You are like something

that flies

with supernatural abilities

across the landscape

of the planet.

And the soundtrack had

that skittering...

I can't imitate it...

but that skittering music

that sounded to me...

and I was conscious of this

the first time I saw the movie...

like the thousands

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