A lot of people seem to think that Room 237 is a movie that endorses a number of outlandish theories regarding the meaning of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, that it takes the analyses of its contributors as seriously as they do. I didn’t get that sense at all. What I saw was a movie that explores the breadth of interpretations a beloved and somewhat perplexing movie can inspire, particularly when the filmmaker behind is surrounded by the kind of mythology that surrounds Kubrick.
I love Room 237 because it reveals that at least one some level, all film criticism is bullshit. Someone can applaud The Shining as an utter masterpiece, one of the greatest films ever made, but if their reasons for believing this include that Kubrick was referring to the faked moon landing, does that invalidate that evaluation of the movie? I’m not sure it does. To some degree, the quality of the movie itself has spoken to the viewer, even if their interpretation of the movie’s significance is batshit crazy. And the fact that a movie like The Shining has had such a profound effect on so many people who have derived these insane meanings from it seems to cement its status as a rich and mysterious work of art. To me, this effect, as it develops over a significant period of time, is the closest thing to an objective evaluator of movies we can look to, and all that indicates is that most movie criticisms are deeply subjective. In a good way though!
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