This afternoon I sat down and watched the completely incredible Room 237 documentary about people obsessed with the Stanley Kubrick movie The Shining. Now I don’t know that much about the movie other than I remember watching it when it first came out in the 1980’s and not thinking anymore of it. Clearly I was wrong if the contributors to Room 237 are to be believed who seem to see subliminal messages in any detail of the film. The basis for the obsession is Kubrick himself who was renowned to be obsessive about every little detail. Once this is accepted then all bets are off and you can read anything into the movie from an attack on the way that the native people of the North America were treated to the Holocaust by way of the faked moon landings.
Of course the only problem with all of these ideas is that you can do the same thing to any movie. Continuity errors were no longer errors but deliberate and you reach the point where one contributor felt he was being watched by the US government. Of course at one level he may well be right given what Edward Snowden has leaked but back in the real world it is far more likely that all the movie was just that and should be considered along with all of Kubrick’s other works. However I might be just being naive and missing the big picture. Perhaps.
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