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Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?


2013-04-23 ~ 12:31 a.m.

Weekend was supposed to be studying, but I managed to watch a couple of films. And procrastinate a fair bit. I am getting towards a draft of part one, at least. But, films.

Room 237 is a recent documentary about various people's odd theories about what Kubrick's film of The Shining means. Certainly, The Shining is puzzling. Why did Kubrick follow up his increasingly strange films of the 60s and 70s with a horror film based on a Stephen King novel, especially since he played down some of the odder elements of King's book in favour of straightforward haunted-house horror? Did he do it for the money? Or was he attracted by the idea of Mad Jack Torrance stuck in a hotel failing to write a novel? It's certainly an appealing idea, particularly for the creative professional.

But the main theories in Room 237 are as follows. 1. It's about the genocide of native Americans, as is shown by the hotel being built on an Indian burial ground. 2. It's about the Holocaust, as is indicated by Jack's German typewriter and the number 42. 3. It's a secret confession that Kubrick was employed by NASA to fake film footage of the moon landings and forced to lie to his wife about it, as is shown by the boy wearing a jumper with an Apollo rocket on the front and Jack lying to his wife about not being a homicidal maniac. 4. Kubrick is playing with the audience through deliberate nonsense, as is shown by the impossible windows in several of the rooms that actually back onto other parts of the hotel. 5. Something even vaguer.

There is a lot of play about curious continuity errors. In one amazing instance, there's a scene where the boy is sitting in a patterned carpet, playing with his toys. A mysterious ball rolls along the floor towards him. The ball follows the line of the pattern in the carpet which runs towards the circle in which he sits. In the next shot, the pattern on the carpet has suddenly reversed: the line that the ball travelled along has vanished, and the boy sits hemmed in by the reversed pattern. 42 or 237 may be important: he changed the room number from 217 in the book, while 42 is important in the novel Lolita, which Kubrick also filmed, and 2*3*7=42.

Worth watching for Shining fans, but not if you want to know what the hell actually happened to Jack Torrance or how he ended up in that photograph on the wall.


The other film I watched also involves people stuck in a house in the middle of nowhere, with inclement weather outside. The Spiral Staircase was made in 1946 for RKO by former German Expressionist filmmaker Robert Siodmak. There's a small town in New England, a big old house, a storm outside, a serial killer preying on vulnerable women, an attractive young woman who's mute as a result of childhood trauma, a creepy old woman who clearly knowns more than she's letting on about, her playboy son, her scientist step-son, and a few other oddballs. Plus a constable and an idealistic doctor who come and go.

The film is a wonderful piece of suspenseful filmmaking, the tension almost unbearable, full of dark shadows, sinister reflections, banging noises, bad weather, figures in the shadows. Against the classic horror and suspense elements, there's the modern idea of the psychological traumatised mute woman. The cast is excellent, with Dorothy McGuire - Mary in The Greatest Story Ever Told - as the mute heroine, George Brent - Bette Davis's usual leading man - as the unctuous gentleman scientist, Elsa Lanchester - a comedy archetype - as the alcoholic maid, and Ethel Barrymore Oscar-nominated as the cranky old woman. And it starts with people watching a silent film.

But it's impossible to explain the interest of the film without giving away the ending. Here be spoilers:

Most serial killer films blame women or effeminate men - Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, Santa Sangre, Dressed to Kill, While the City Sleeps... However in this film, the killer is doing it to impress his father; in reality serial killers with troubled upbringings are just as likely to have had problems with fathers, but films typically blame it on women. The Spiral Staircase actually has a string of interesting female characters, notably Ethel Barrymore as the bedridden mother. Post-Psycho, it's easy to assume she's behind the killings, but while she certainly knows something, it's not her or the spoilt womanising mummy's boy who did it. And, as for McGuire, whereas in a film like Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground the heroine's disability exists only to illustrate the hero's sensitivity, here she's allowed to actually be cured - without even the agency of a man. The film is also astonishingly obviously an allegory of Nazism, as the villain tries to rid the world of physically or mentally imperfect women. It's not revealed what the specialism of the professor is, but I'd guess it's eugenics.


For later in my thesis I'm pondering some in-depth study of Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger's Sex and Character, described by one writer as "perhaps the most misogynistic book written in any language in the history of the world". And also big on the anti-semitism, despite the author coming from a Jewish background (he converted to Protestantism). Ludwig Wittgenstein, being more intellectual, dissed it thus: "roughly speaking, if you just add a '~' to the whole book it says an important truth." Which means, it's all false. Philosophically, Weininger argued against Hume, Mach, and the founders of experimental psychology, and wanted to preserve the idea of a unified human personality and spirit.

He was fundamentally opposed to women in general, whom he viewed as stupid, base, and devoid of any personality, genius or spirit, and he opposed romantic love, sex, and eroticism. He reportedly never had sex, and advocated voluntary self-extinction of the human race. Even Freud thought he was nuts. Yet he was still popular with quite a lot of people in the early 20th century, like Joyce, Strindberg, Kafka, and George Grosz. Grosz simultaneously believed in the free-sex ideas of dissident Freudian psychoanalyst Otto Gross, so George must have been rather confused each night when he went home to his wife.

Sex and Character is available on archive.org.

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notes

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