Wow. You should've been interviewed for "Room 237," because that "theory" would've fit right in with the other desperate logical leaps.
Critical theory is sorta interesting to me to a point, but at the tipping point sh*t gets silly awfully quick. The OP mentions that literature is often subjected to the same overanalysis, and I remember this happening in a lit class I took in college. I had a prof who was an authority on Willa Cather and insisted that all kinds of hidden, vague meanings were there. They weren't, but wasn't it pretty to think so?
I love "The Shining," but I tend to default back to thinking summarized well by Ebert's line: "If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.” That's a tad oversimplistic, as of course some symbolism in film is obvious to those with the right education and/or experience, but the point stands. My acceptance of meaningful symbolism, suggestion, and/or hidden meaning in film stops well short of that of the "Room 237" interviewees or yours. A filmmaker making a statement so vague that one in 10,000,000 people will comprehend doesn't count as a statement.
Or, maybe he put it there just for you! If you look hard, maybe you'll see your own face in the clouds above the Overlook!
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I have meddled with the primal forces of nature and I will atone.
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trek79
11 years ago
You are probably right, people have estimated the I.Q of Kubrick up around 210, so a lot of people will presume he would leave symbolism that is only acknowledgeable to people of a certain intellectual calibre, and it would make people, in a primal egocentric sense, make them feel somewhat superior if they could make such interpretations. That is basically what I'd chalk it down to.
But having said that; I don't think Kubrick was a holocaust denier, nor am I, but if anything he would have been acknowledging that it wasn't only the Nazis who were using propaganda to inspire the war effort, certain factors were likely over dramatized by the allies also.
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SloppyJ30
11 years ago
I don't know what kind of sense of humor Kubrick had, but I have to wonder if he inserted some of the little inconsistencies or "continuity errors" in The Shining just to mess with people. He was no doubt aware that he had some rabid fans who would comb through the movie for hidden meaning. I've read that Bunuel did this on occasion. "Hey, let's throw an emu into this scene for no reason. People will soil themselves coming up with interpretations."
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I have meddled with the primal forces of nature and I will atone.
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trek79
11 years ago
That is the thing with genius on the level of Kubrick, you can look to Leonardo Da Vinci as a template; people think a genius is confined to an absolute perfection of one particular area of expertise, but Da Vinci was a scientist, inventor, philosopher, artist, creative and logical, but what they omit is he was a psychological master also; he was a master of socialisation, a master of humour, a master practical joker.
An example is The Shroud of Turin; the Vatican accepted this as the burial shroud of Jesus Christ for centuries, but it turns out it was an experiment Da Vinci did with pioneer photography, it is actually a photo of himself. This is the kind of hoaxes Da Vinci engineered, and you can also look to "The Da Vinci Code" for verification.
Genius on the level of Kubrick would no doubt be no different; he would have left brain puzzles behind, more hoax than credible.
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