Room 237

It is end of term time and Sanae is busy writing up her students' evaluations. There is an art to this. You need to be able to select words that convey muted praise and oblique criticism of young Yuki's progress (or lack of it). Comments like "He's an awful little fecker who's heading straight for a heroin fuelled life on the mean streets of Muroran", no matter how apt, have to be foregone in favour of something won't have the parents apoplectically ringing the school. "Yuki is a child of high spirits whose ability is only matched by his inability" or some such. Anyway, the poor girl will be toiling away at this for the next week or so which means that I get to watch some movies.
Yes!
I know, I know, there should be a smidgen more loving concern for my wife's toil than those three letters, but I don't get to watch much movies any more, certainly not the thematically dark ones I prefer, so
Yes!!
Last night I watched Room 237, a documentary about Stanley Kubrick's film, The Shining. The great cinephile David Thomson, in his magisterial 'Biographical dictionary of Film', describes The Shining as "Kubrick's one great film". As this documentary makes clear, he is not alone in thinking that. Room 237 is about those who have come to see The Shining as more than just a compelling pyscho-horror story about a father gone mad. To these people the film is in fact is a repository for a whole range of concealed meanings. Thus we are treated to interpretations of The Shining as an analogy for the Holocaust, an apology by Kubrick for his part in faking TV footage of the moon landings, the genocide of Native Americans, and Minotaurs.
What links the people who hold these disparate views is their shared belief in the infallible intelligence of Stanley Kubrick, a man seemingly blessed with a sort of divine directorial genius that inherently precludes anything as mundanely human as a continuity error. There is meaning to everything that appears on the screen, even the poster of the skier in the background or the number of suitcases on the luggage trolley. In this they share Kubrick's sense of almost paranoid obsessiveness with visual exposition; in The Shining the devil, it seems, is in the details.