Why aren’t we all watching The Shining over and over again all day and coming up with theories about how it’s a metaphor for the Holocaust or Native American genocide? Why isn’t everybody looking for the number 42 to show up throughout the film, up to and including counting how many cars are in the parking lot of the hotel? Why aren’t film fans everywhere studying the walls behind Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall and seeing minotaurs and windows that shouldn’t exist? How come almost nobody ever plays the movie backwards?
Turns out that we don’t need to do any of that. A bunch of weirdos have already done it and the makers of this documentary have rounded ’em ALL up from their blogs, basements and bomb shelters so they can share their findings. This is Crackpot City and all the better for it. It’s a movie for people like me, who want every crazy caller to Coast to Coast AM to be right. We want anyone but Oswald to have shot JFK, we want aliens to have built the pyramids, we want every new US President to be the Biblical Antichrist and we want Stanley Kubrick to have secretly directed the 1969 moon landing on a Hollywood soundstage and then planted a confession under the surface of his 1980 Stephen King adaptation. Some of the theories here are even half-convincing. After all, Kubrick was as meticulous a filmmaker as ever existed. He’d shoot sixty takes of a scene if he felt it wasn’t perfect yet. He had a person type up every page of Nicholson’s manuscript that only says “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” repeatedly. Kubrick directed with microscope eyes. It’s safe to say that there’s nothing on screen, not a word, not a shadow, in a Kubrick film that he didn’t consider essential. That’s the foundation of many of the arguments here. There are no accidents in the work of Kubrick the perfectionist. Even minor continuity errors (or are they?) get interpreted as part of the master plan.
It’s a lot of fun that smartly never favors one theory over the others. It allows them to collide and contradict each other, grow over each other like wild vines. Every good film deserves the tribute of being interpreted as a minefield of subversion. I’m glad these people are out there… in both meanings of the phrase.