One of my least favorite moments in college was sitting in an intense English class and concentrating on maintaining a straight face while a classmate explained his theory of how the scene from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Morgue” in which a gorilla stuffs a victim up a chimney somehow, in his mind, represented a return-to-the-womb motif. I have no idea how he thought that related to the rest of the story at all. After the few first few sentences my mind turned to white noise in self-defense.

This evening I had flashbacks to that moment while watching Rodney Ascher’s thought-provoking new documentary Room 237, an examination of hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Shining. Whether you hated or loved either or both, few would accuse Kubrick of taking a slapdash approach to the project, regardless of the lengthy list of differences between it and the book. Room 237 is narrated by five Shining enthusiasts: ABC News war correspondent Bill Blakemore; playwright/novelist Juli Kearns; author/conspiracy theorist Jay Weidner; history professor Geoffrey Cocks; and Excepter frontman John Fell Ryan. Each one has their own interpretation of the recurring motifs and subliminal imagery buried in the mix, all adding up to a grand design on Kubrick’s part in their minds. The nature of that grand design, though, varies wildly by viewer…very wildly, in this case.

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