Interviewer with crying baby

it's better they did it this way, so we could see the free associations

anyone with experience in psychoanalysis will understand right away

Didn't that guy later mention that when he watched Jack Nicholson and his actor son, he thought about his own relation with his own son?

The moment the baby cries, the image freezes. When the image freezes, you can clearly see the cover of the magazine that's about to be cited. If you're not paying close attention, as I wasn't the first time I watched Room 237, it looks like a goof. It's not. It's there so that when the CGI'd image of the magazine comes swooping up a second later, you might know, unconsciously, that it's not just CGI.

I also thought that it echoed the point that was made several times about how things that look like mistakes in The Shining aren't. To the casual viewer, the baby crying looks like a mistake. The bad audio for certain speakers sounds like a mistake.

But when you think about it, this is an ingeniously well-edited film. Think of all the visual mash-ups, like the Shining poster worked into the theatre display scene from Eyes Wide Shut. Why would such a good editor make such a mistake, if not toward some purpose?

I'm wondering how complexly the director of this piece used these seeming amateur touches to parallel the film's content.

"Therefore: there are patterns. Everywhere in nature." ~Pi

I agree. The guy who stopped to tend to his fussy kid on tape was constantly stumbling over his words, repeating himself, and used so many fillers (like, you know, um) that I found it very difficult to focus on or care about what he was saying. And WHY did the director of this doc keep all of that in? Super unprofessional.
I think it's interesting that many of you are suggesting that this is really a brilliant commentary on the imbalance of the theorists and how nutty we get sometimes in overanalyzing art. I hope you're right, but having studied and worked in theater and film for decades, I have seen enough sloppy work to know that people are sometimes just careless. I don't know enough about the director, Rodney Ascher to trust him or give him that much credit yet. Picasso painted beautifully realistic portraits before he got into cubism proving that he understood the rules of his art before deliberately breaking them. The effect this doc had on me was that I'm interested in watching The Shining again and don't take any of the interviewees (or their theories) seriously who contributed to 237.

These were obviously self-recorded home tapes. Another thing that shows just how badly produced this entire affair was.
I don't mean to impose, but I am the Ocean.

Even the fact that people are debating whether or not "the crying baby" was intentionally left in mirrors the exact same discussion of Kubrick's continuity errors and whether those were intentional or not. Doesn't seem that lazy to me if that was the case, and even if it wasn't it still works for me.

"The woman focusing on the Minotaur"

You mean the downhill skier?

Was he the same guy that explained how similar his life was to Jack's including having a son? It probably was a little happy accident that the kid made noise during the recording and left in to show the connect that is made explicit during the last section. Just a thought. Could be very wrong.