Room 237

Room 237 reminds me why my undergraduate education left me dissatisfied. I became an English major because I wanted to learn the nuts 'n bolts of what made great literature great. I wanted to learn about the craft. What I got, for the most part, were a lot of classes taught by would-be anthropologists or political theorists. They seemed more interested in trying to get me to parse George Eliot's ideology than figure out what it was that made her books great.

I went into Room 237, a documentary about The Shining, with the same hopes with which I'd enrolled as an English major. I wanted to learn some of the tricks of Kubrick's trade, discover how he created such a timelessly unsettling and horrifying motion picture. Instead, I got a bunch of people BS-ing about Kubrick's hidden conspiracy theorizing, his hidden messages about the Holocaust and the Indian Wars, and God knows what else.

I learned nothing. I learned nothing about why Kubrick chose to change key elements of Stephen King's novel in its transition to the screen. I learned nothing about why he plotted The Overlook's interior spaces as he did, or whether various impossibilities were oversights or techniques to disorient the viewer. I learned nothing about his choices in lighting, or framing, or music.

I just got a bunch of obsessives blathering about their pet interpretations for an hour and a half. I could have gotten that in any junior-level literature class in any state university in America.

Blah.