Monday, July 16, 2012

The Shining: Mr. Halloran, what IS in Room 237?

In all the times I have watched The Shining, there is one part that I always wonder about..Room 237, and what it's role really is as intended by Kubrick..Yes, this is indeed one of the reasons why I love this movie so much because the genius of Kubrick's minimalism is that you keep coming back for more and asking more and more questions. I have seen the film so many times I have lost count, yet I still have questions, much like with Kubrick's other films....But back to room 237..early on in the film we see Danny in the bathroom mirror (still at the Torrance's apartment) while Jack is at the Overlook Hotel for his interview...We hear the haunting music begin, and we know something is about to happen. Danny asks his alter-ego "Tony" why he doesn't want to go to the hotel, and "Tony" resists telling Danny, but eventually we see Danny's horrible vision of the hotel with blood pouring out of elevators and a brief flash of the twin girls, (presumably the dead caretaker Grady's daughters). Danny obviously has terrible premonitions about the danger of going to the hotel...Later in the film, while Jack and Wendy are being shown around by the manager, Ullman, Danny is having ice cream with the head cook, Halloran, who also shares Danny's ability to "shine" or see things that ordinary people can't see...He tells Danny that the "shining" is more common than not. Danny apparently reads Halloran's mind about fearing room 237 in the hotel, and asks about it...Halloran blows off the question, warning Danny to stay out of the room....Kubrick probably intends us to think that Halloran had some frightening experience in room 237 at some point, but what exactly he saw remains unclear...At any rate, Halloran clearly is worried that Danny should avoid that room...Later in the film, the staff have all gone, and the Torrances are all alone at the hotel....We see in one scene Danny riding his scooter on the second floor through the deserted halls, and he comes upon room 237, no doubt remembering what Halloran said or what he himself feels about the room....Danny gets off his scooter and slowly approaches the room's closed double doors..He tries to open the door, but it is locked...As he does this, he sees a brief vision of the twin girls, who seem to warn him to stay away...Danny quickly backs up from the door and rides away on his scooter...Later on, the Overlook Hotel is completely snowbound, and Danny is again on the second floor, this time playing with his toys on the carpet...A ball rolls towards him mysteriously...We hear the same dreaded music on the soundtrack, as if to portend some kind of evil intent..Danny calls out for his mom, wondering if maybe she is teasing him by rolling the ball to him....But there is noone there...The dreaded music continues playing...Danny slowly walks down the hall, seeing the door to room 237 open..He again calls out to his mom, asking if she is in there....We of course know she is not....The scene cuts out just as Danny enters room 237, and we see Wendy in the boiler room checking the gauges. At this same time, Jack is having a terrible nightmare, and calls out. Wendy runs to him, and Jack says he dreamed he killed Wendy and Danny, cutting them up into "little pieces". Perhaps Jack had this dream while Danny was in room 237 because it was the hotel's way of getting into his head. Soon after, Danny comes out and has bruises on his neck, and has clearly met with some kind of physical/emotional trauma, as he cannot talk...Curiously, we never see what happened to Danny in room 237, but we can guess that some terrible physical manifestation probably occurred.....

Later on, Wendy finds Jack  in the Colorado Lounge (after  earlier accusing him of hurting Danny) and tells him that Danny told her that some "crazy woman" in one of the rooms tried to strangle Danny. Jack asks her which room, intending to investigate..Jack by this time is seriously unstable, and the hotel has nearly possessed him entirely...The next scene we see is Halloran laying on his bed in Miami, watching tv...At first nothing seems amiss...But soon, he enters what can only be called a trance, his eyes open wide with an expression of sheer terror, and he starts trembling....We again hear the dreaded music and also, this time, a strange heartbeat on the soundtrack....As Halloran is "shining", we also see that Danny is in the same state, drooling and trembling, in a trance....Then, the camera cuts to the open door of room 237, and the camera leads us inside, the music and heartbeat sound very consistent...The room appears fairly unremarkable, with a garish 1970s decor, and a living room, and to the left, up a stair, a bedroom...We see at the back of the bedroom a door slightly ajar, the camera continues moving us closer to this door...The heartbeat and dreadful music continue....We see a hand come from behind the camera, pushing the door open, revealing a large bathroom, in green and yellow....Then, we see that in fact Jack has entered room 237 to investigate what Wendy had told him about Danny seeing a woman in there.....Jack looks to the back of the bathroom, and there is clearly someone or something behind the shower curtain in the tub...Jack initially looks scared, but then a hand draws the curtain back, revealing an attractive, nude, blonde woman. Jack appears to relax, and smiles a devilish smile....But we know instinctively that this is very wrong and that something evil is in this room...The woman slowly stands up, and steps out of the bathtub, walking to center of the bathroom....She then pauses, as if to beckon Jack closer...Jack walks to her, and she caresses him......During all this, the dreadful music and heartbeat (which began when we saw Halloran enter his trance) continues.....The woman in room 237 embraces Jack and they kiss....But then, we see a closeup of Jack's face as he sees an adjacent mirror, and a terrible sight appears....What was a beautiful young woman is now a rotten, ugly old hag, who begins laughing at Jack, and Jack, appalled, backs out of the room, as she follows him out, laughing all the while...As she does this, the camera pans to the bath, and we see another rotten, toothless old woman rise out of the tub, even as the other figure chases Jack out.....Then, the camera cuts to Danny briefly, still in a trance, trembling, and salivating, perhaps recalling his experience in room 237 earlier....Jack makes it out of the room, closing the door and locking the door, we still hear the woman cackling from inside....

Now what exactly did all this mean? Well, in my opinion, we can't take it too literally....Some may say that the woman in room 237 was the ghost of the former caretaker, Grady, who had murdered his wife and daughters at the hotel during the winter of 1970....However, I think Kubrick means for the answer to be more complex than this....I think the woman in room 237 is actually the physical manifestation of the evil presence which lives inside the Overlook Hotel....Think of the heartbeat on the soundtrack....we never hear it early in the film, only about halfway through, after the Torrances have already been at the hotel for some time, and the hotel has had time to tap into their psyche....The moment when Jack enters room 237 is truly when the evil presence in the hotel is awakened.....The "woman" in the tub was simply a manifestation to lure or appeal to Jack.....Danny might have seen something different when he entered room 237...In short, the hotel's presence is able to adopt whatever physical form it needs to to achieve its aim, which is to possess and to cause more death, which would therefore add to it's strength....After Jack has entered room 237 and had his encounter there, the old "hag" who we see in there is basically laughing and taunting him, showing that Jack has basically surrendered to the hotel and that now the hotel is in charge, as it were.....I think this is why Halloran was so worried about room 237 when he was talking to Danny early in the film, because Halloran sensed that room 237 was in fact the place in the hotel where the evil lived.....Once Jack entered room 237, and kissed the "woman" in there, the hotel basically was in charge, and that is why we hear the heartbeat on the soundtrack for basically the rest of the film.....The heartbeat is I believe Kubrick's way of showing that the hotel has "awakened" as it were, and is now breathing and has a beating heat, thanks to Jack.....In that sense, Jack's entry into room 237 and his embrace of the evil in there acted like a "cpr" to jumpstart the hotel's evil presence from it's slumber.....These are my interpretations of this particular aspect of the film.....So to sum up, I feel Kubrick intended room 237 to be far more than just a scary room, but actually the key to the entire film and the things that the Overlook Hotel causes to  happen......Yet another sign of the man's brilliance as a director......Sure, it may not follow the book very closely, but who cares....Kubrick gives us a psychological, horror, and gothic masterpiece which constantly keeps us guessing without making everything blatantly obvious!

1 comment:

  1. Watch the scene where Stuart Ullman interviews Torrance. The two girls are Charles Grady's children. The "hag" is the corpse of his wife (brought to life by the hotel). He killed them with an axe and then shot himself.

    The crazy thing about The Shining is that everybody there has the shine. Like Halloran says, some just don't know it. But that is how the place is able to show these things to the Torrances, and to manipulate Jack into doing what he does. Halloran, Danny, definitely Jack (though that's the big surprise of the movie), and probably even Wendy all can pick up on what's going on, while "normal" people like Ullman go through the season and don't pick up on it. Kubrick beguiles us by making Danny (and Dick) aware of what they're doing, so that we don't pay attention to the bait and switch when Jack also is every bit as sensitive to it. So the hotel (which we learn in Ullman's tour of the hedge maze is built on an "Indian burial ground,"--Ullman says pioneers "even had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building" the hotel) has a vengeful evil centered in it because, Hollaran tells Danny, sometimes places have something like a shine, too. All these horrible occurrences throughout its history leave a sort of psychic stain on the place, and that's what people with the shining pick up on. So it's like ghosts for people who are attuned to that particular "frequency," which is the shining.

    The photo from the ending, where Jack can be seen in the Colorado Lounge during the Roaring Twenties, shows things coming full circle. Remember that, in the bathroom, Grady tells Jack he's "always been the caretaker" (in other words, the scene of murder is both cyclical and inevitable--it is Jack's destiny). While Grady murdered his family historically, the hotel has a way of renewing this tragic cycle through the doomed souls it draws via their receptiveness to its psychological magnetism.

    In this way, my interpretation is that Room 237 is where Grady threw the bodies when he murdered his family, and possibly where he killed himself. The room is still sort of stained by the memory of that, and both Danny and Jack can see that because they shine. So that's a literal sense, and the other, more allegorical sense, is about what you discuss here; a center for the hotel to do its work, a sort of psychological cesspit of evil ghosts drawn from the trauma and horror that brought them about. It's part of Kubrick's genius that he is not obvious, but can set up a scene surrealistically as to make the meaning at once complex, subtle, and ambiguous, but can also set up a narrative in a way that gives the proper information necessary for all to make sense, and to be able to be "understood."

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