Stanley Kubrick's The Shining Analysis: EYE SCREAM

you have this tremendous advantage of reading something for the first time which is an experience you never have again with the story i mean the first time is something which you cannot ever guess about you know so um that's the first thing then you have a reaction to it and um the subsequent readings you know are more analytical but you know you have to start with uh you know kind of you know like falling in love reaction with with the material so then it just becomes you know a matter of uh almost like a code breaking of breaking the thing down into a structure that seems to be you know still truthful not losing the you know the ideas or the content of a feeling of the book and uh trying to get it into uh the much more limited uh time frame of a movie and the criteria really always is you know is it is it truthful and is it interesting how'd you like some ice cream dark how long do you guess it would take to deconstruct the most complicated film ever constructed a minute a hundred minutes for me the magic number seems to be 23 months that's how long ago i first noticed what you're watching right now that you can play the shining backwards and forwards simultaneously with the last album ever recorded by the beatles and get hundreds of thematic subtextual and structural synchronicities big and small and i thought the breadcrumb trail would end there but i've since discovered 11 other major pillars that support kubrick's grand vision everything you're about to learn can be verified on my website where i've gone to pretty extensive lengths to source each point and you know i've debated endlessly whether it's right to release this information so i'm offering it to you and the world for two reasons one i think it's time people understood the awesome depth of kubrick's genius and two i'm a movie lover and i want there to be better movies which there might not be if people forget how to think like a in stanley end the love you take is equal to the love [Music] speaking of things i have endlessly debated where to begin perhaps the best place to start with any maze is the entrance a thing that likes to change in the shining the overlook hotel which only jack ever enters by its main entrance was heavily modeled after california's awani hotel and awani is based on a miwok word meaning mouth does that mean that symbolically as jack drives up through what indigenous people call the shining mountains he's riding straight into the open mouth of some unfathomable predator when the torrances serve themselves up as a family mouths are on everybody's mind dad yes i'm hungry hey wasn't it around here that the donner party got snowbound mean they ate each other huh they had to in order to survive the torrances do survive in these jaws for some time though so maybe they're a bit like the egyptian plovers that pick clean the teeth in the open mouths of alligators a bit like these plovers these plovers are only seen in one other instant in the film peaking out at the other side of the lobby for a split second moments before the overlook's jaws snapped shut on old dick halloran and what's the doctor asking danny on the exact opposite side of the movie she's asking about teeth can you remember what you were doing just before you started brushing your teeth talking to tony who's tell me tony's a little boy that loves my mouth if you were to open your mouth now could i see tony no why not because he hides where does he go to my stomach before we go any further down the gullet of what i have to share with you let me just say that if you're looking for a detailed brick by brick analysis of each of my theories you should probably skip over to my 27 part series decoding the shining or to my website ice cream this video was designed and can only serve as an introduction what's more it might be a bewildering one since half of what i'm about to impart involves ways of looking at film that you might never have considered before in an earlier version of this doc i explained how the love of my life who i call the scully to my molder was quite bewildered herself and insisted that a scientific methodology would have to be devised if the theories were to be taken seriously what i neglected to mention is that the methods i came up with didn't do much to shake her arch skepticism however accurate and interesting she's found the more concrete analyses to be our debates have been rigorous and passionate and for my money have made the work a hundred times better but over time i noticed that the most recurring element in her critiques was we don't have a written confession from kubrick so how can we ever know the reply i eventually devised is one that has stumped her ever since so if you are one such skeptical mind see what you think imagine that i made a cartoon version of the shining so that every shot has the same framing every sequence is the same length and we get all the same art objects on all the walls and tables throughout the film and then i confess to everything you're about to learn about my findings what would be the difference between that and my findings as they are wouldn't the only question that remains then be how good a job i'd done at burying all these patterns in fact there is one thing to be said about that which is that i said that over a year ago before i had unearthed four more giant patterns i hadn't noticed before and there remain around 30 art pieces throughout the film that haven't been properly identified so insofar as all the ones that have been id'd have a big story to tell no one could claim to understand every one of the shining's mysteries yet but even if you're not as dubious as perhaps you want to be you've probably never watched a film forwards and backwards before this came from the infamous 2012 documentary room 237 and was the part of that film that captured my imagination the most like many who saw the documentary presenting the culture of shining theorists and their proofs i was intrigued but increasingly skeptical there was a pervasive suggestion that more evidence existed than we were being presented a with paper tray on the desk and as soon as they touch hands the paper tray turns into a very large straight on hard on coming out of barry nelson yeah it's hilarious it's a joke a very serious joke but a joke by stanley and there's many of these in the film and very disturbing some of them and this will all be in my film kubrick the magician kubrick the magician never came and while i understand others in that film have kept up their own online analyses these past eight years what further revelations i found through them only seemed to expand on what room 237 had already presented eventually i thought if i'm going to get to the bottom of this maybe i just need to do my own shining study sit down live tweet any curiosities at friends and family and try not to make a fool of myself then not half an hour into my second run i notice this and this and this and finally this and i thought now hold on what does the abbey road album cover have to do with the shining turns out the name the shining comes from a john lennon song we all shine on did kubrick know that it might be faster to ask what kubrick didn't know but at the time i wondered why he would bother with the reference then i noticed this at 24 minutes 37 seconds 15 seconds before abby rhodes side 1 would end side 2 is largely about why the band broke up halloran arrives and breaks up the band this is called a fee grid and it's a way of composing film images we'll get into it more later but for now just note how cleanly divided each figure in this moment really is so is abbey road to the backwards forward shining what some think dark side of the moon is to the wizard of oz long story short [Music] the abbey road shining or what i call red rum road became the catalyst the breadcrumb trail that led to every other of my discoveries in a sense ice cream became inevitable after that well it was inevitable because i'm sort of a completist once i notice a pattern i'll follow it to any length which is a tendency that the shining only rewards let me give you my favorite example early on it occurred to me that a few of the film's visual motifs seem to be describing the tenth labor of hercules basically to make up for murdering his wife and children after the revelation of his godliness from harrah's messenger iris sends him into a familicidal rage herc must perform 10 great feats for the ruler of the day in his final feat herc steals some red cattle from garion a beast of many forms but always with a human face he then voyages into the atlantic ocean clubs girion's two-headed guard dog to death shoots girion through the head with a poisoned arrow and walks the cattle back to the king for sacrificing on his way back a giant named caccus steals some of the cattle while hercules sleeps making them walk backwards so that they leave no trail but before all that on herc's way to first get the cattle he smashes through a mountain called atlas thereby creating what became known as the pillars of hercules greeks and romans of the day understood that this was a real place which we now call the strait of gibraltar in mythological understanding the pillars carried the phrase nay plus ultra nothing further beyond a warning to any seafarers who dreamt of discovering new lands across the waves modern science tells us that this was likely where a great flood would have occurred 5.33 million years ago to create the mediterranean sea effectively slicing apart europe and africa i had already discovered at that point that the film was laced with artifacts which speak to the way humanity or at least colonialist humanity benefited from going beyond like how the hallway outside room 237 features etchings john weber made while accompanying the voyages of captain cook or how danny wears a sweater featuring the object we all associate with homo sapiens success in escaping millions of years of earth-locked evolution also jack passes a painting on his way to the ghost ball of samson peak in alberta canada samson being christian mythology's answer to hercules alberta being the feminine form of delbert well they call you around here jeezy great is uh delbert grady uh my predecessor in this job i hired a man named charles grady is the winter caretaker grady yes sir delbert grady that's right sir the point is i thought up all that eight months before discovering that the film is actually peppered with direct references to hercules there were at least two paintings and one postcard depicting mount vesuvius the volcano that famously obliterated pompeii and a lesser-known city named herculaneum vesuvius means son of ves thus being another name for zeus and the people of the day understood that hercules actually infused this mountain with his spirit or his genius as they called it in the exact same way as tony infuses danny what mr halloran said it's just like pictures in the book candy it isn't real so the genius of hercules genocided the people of hercules town i think he did it to himself but yes much to the chagrin of my better half when i see a pattern i will chase that lead to the ends of the earth like how there's this poster possibly commemorating the 1912 denver flood behind the pillar-esque grady twins and how john lennon once explained that the scream that syncs up with this moment [Music] represents the feeling of drowning in yoko ono's love setting before myself this task of analyzing redrum road i realized increasingly i couldn't have done a decent analysis without tripping over every other interlocking interweaving logic contained by kubrick's masterpiece and that's what ice cream meant to me at first trying to map all these seemingly self-multiplying patterns and symbols and themes right down to the cellular level i wanted to see if i could code break the mind of a genius and the more i uncovered the more those codes coalesced the more it seemed i didn't know and remembering what i could from having read king's novel as a child i began to wonder just how much of what i was finding was kubrick's pure invention answer almost none of it it wasn't until the world went into lockdown that i finally made the time to investigate which if any of the following hidden techniques might derive from the craft work of the notoriously fleet-fingered stephen king i'm now of the opinion that everything i'm about to show you has some antecedent some origin in king's novel but since we've barely scratched the surface of kubrick's methods most of what i could tell you wouldn't make sense yet so for now just know this the film is practically beside itself with references to 237s this staircase has a 23-step flight and a seven-step flight a pattern that is repeated in the aerial view of the real labyrinth or there's this rug with its two half diamonds by three half diamonds with seven whole diamonds in the middle or right before that this moment of jack being angry with a shelf of wine goblets two deep three high and seven across and there are things that are impossible to notice like how the second third and seventh shot of the film form an x against all the other shots taken in glacier national park in fact it's during this seventh shot that the film hits the time code two minutes 37 seconds right as jack is driving toward this mountain named for an indigenous chief chief heavy runner who was shot dead while racing towards some genocidal colonialists waving his safe conduct papers meanwhile 237 seconds into the film is the exact last second of jack arriving for his interview and the last moment of him not having the caretaker job this sequence is called the interview but the very next line of dialogue in it is bill i'd like you to meet jack torrance how do you do bill how do you do nice to meet you pleasure to meet you grab it share bell joint jack is uh going to take care of the overlook for us this winter i'd like you to take him around and play soon as we're through fine 2370 seconds into the film happens to be the last second of this shot which happens to be the end of what i was already calling jack's last sane moment since everything he's done on screen before this looks basically like a normal enough abusive jerk going through the motions of a workless existence his exact next appearance is the beginning of his real work don't be so grouchy i'm not being grouchy i just wanna finish my work so yes two three sevens generally equal evil things like work and murder but there's also what i call jumbles of 237 appearing at key moments with their own associations to evil things like how the song that plays over this terrifying sequence polymorphia a greek word meaning many forms plays for exactly 732 seconds or how jack's entire experience inside room 237 plays for 273 seconds [Music] well in king's novel danny enters the book's evilest room room 217 on page 217 the first shot inside the movie's evilest room is at 71.50 which is like the redrum version of 217. on page 172 danny stands outside room 217 being attacked by an evil fire hose and as that happens he's reminded of one of his favorite tv shows the 1972 series emergency and what's on movie danny's lunchbox at 12 17 emergency is that because the work of daniel anthony torrence is destined to be doctoring aboard such a fire engine in fact that show was about squad 51 of the la county fire department and at 51 minutes 51 seconds dany turns to wendy and asks [Music] on page 127 danny is zoned out in his overlooked bathroom receiving a vision from tony kubrick put this event in boulder and showed the vision which ends at 12 minutes and seven seconds which leaves 271 here jack finds himself standing in a dream back within room 217 only it's not lorraine massey in the bathtub but george hatfield the student who slashed the tires on jack's beetle provoking his rage and sealing his fate as an employee of the overlook i admit i used to think of kubrick a bit like mozart rewriting salieri before his eyes in 1984's amadeus shouldn't it be a bit more [Music] or this this yes better what do you think and the film does distinguish itself in many ways but king's novel is jam-packed with cultural references that make their own constellations across the books 447 pages none of which seem to have been treated lightly in the adaptation once you notice the high volume of references to the animal kingdom and to human history either writer is making you get to thinking were they trying to say everything about everything but no the shining is not noah's ark and it is not wikipedia though it may have a lot to say about well [Music] both as discussed only too briefly in room 237 theorist john phil ryan had the idea inspired by theorist mastermind to superimpose a backwards-running version of the shining over a forwards running version of the film they called it the red rum edition i call it the mirror form part 1 is an exhaustive survey of ways in which the two halves of the film reveal thematic stylistic and structural similarities what's revealed is a story in constant conversation with itself [Music] in part two i look at what i call interlocks and piggybacks interlocks are when sequences line up perfectly with each other as in the case of almost every kitchen sequence lining up back to back for 10 and a half straight minutes halloran's tour of the pantry fits almost perfectly between the two sequences of jack being stuck in the pantry let's watch [Music] because [Music] eureka [Music] slowly melting [Music] [Music] here [Music] the sun it's all right also as wendy heads out to find the murdered snow cat we've got the 732 seconds of polymorphia remember that word means many forms and might be a reference to jack transforming into one of the hotel's many forms this song switches with one called on the nature of sound right as she steps outside polymorphia returns 24 seconds later when wendy sees the murdered snow cat playing over top on the nature of sound [Applause] what's happening on the other side of the movie during these exact 24 seconds you got a dozen drugs black molasses we got 60 boxes of dried milk [Music] and just in case you think that's a miraculous coincidence like some of my very favorite people this exact technique happens a second time polymorphia plays for 10 seconds almost impossible to hear as jack stalks from killing halloran overlapping with a song called utrenian it stops as jack begins to pace upon danny and stays stopped the entire time wendy is climbing what i call the conquest well starting up again almost the second she reaches the top can you guess what's happening in the mirror form [Music] [Music] me [Music] i'll never make you don't ever leave me [Music] oh danny only receives two lengthy friendly shines in the film both of which obliterate the polymorphia happening on the other side [Music] [Music] piggybacks are when more general themes or subjects seem to interlock across vast swaths of story none of these are easy to show briefly but take the two labyrinths in the film everyone remembers the famous hedge maze but there's also a large model of the same labyrinth in the hotel lobby so if we think of all lobby scenes as labyrinth scenes by extension and if we then go looking for things that connect the lobby to other rooms in the hotel like how forward jack is noticing the baseball bat that backward wendy is holding virtually the entire mirror form film is connected to the labyrinth for instance as forward jack is on his way to the interview glancing over at the model labyrinth for the first time backward jack is defeated in the actual labyrinth with the model labyrinth crushing down upon him like a trapping cage now some might say imagining these images streaming by in real time well how is anybody supposed to get that to which i say yeah you're right it would take a genius way beyond even kubrick's to watch the film unspool live and still get all of what i and others have discovered in the mirror form you'd be lucky to glean one out of every 10 of maya and others findings that way but kubrick wasn't just a filmmaker he was also a photographer who prized the value of the still image and who decried the idea that a failed director is another name for a photographer without going frame by frame without treating the film as a massive daisy chain of photographs you will miss these hundreds and thousands of gorgeous contextual [Music] symmetries mrs barrett do you realize you're going up the down staircase in a nutshell this is the process of taking every element of your story in this case the likes of family violence alcoholism isolation and considering it at its most general and at its most specific implications its macro and its micro most good stories will focus on the micro but at some point during the winter he must have suffered some kind of a complete mental breakdown he ran a muck and killed his family with an axe adding only dashes of the macro to nudge the audience in the intended direction police uh i thought that it was what the old timers used to call cabin fever kind of claustrophobic reaction which can occur when people are shut in together over long periods of time so while the torrences are going to be isolated in a hotel all winter in the rockies wendy remembers hey wasn't it around here that the donner party got snowbound famously resorting to cannibalism to survive from there a small explosion of other connections emerges mean they ate each other little pigs little pigs let me come in these moments of familial mastication occur exactly across from each other in the mirror form but they aren't even the only references to cannibalism yeah this whole place is such an enormous maze i feel like i'll have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs every time i come in hansel and gretel the famous grim fairy tale wendy's invoking here may have its roots in the great famine of 1315-1317 a period in which people who weren't committing manifest destiny also resorted to cannibalism to survive [Music] now danny can you remember what you were doing just before you started brushing your teeth [Music] there's a creative maxim i've noticed kubrick's state in several interviews is it true and is it interesting no story can contain everything but when there's a sense of the personal and the global effects of any given reality it feels more true and what would make one adaptation of the shining more true or more interesting than another the truth of the shining as a phrase and as a phenomenon is that stephen king dreamt it up thanks at least in part to john lennon's first post beatles album think about that why would king draw our attention to that fact when he dedicated the book to his son joe who shines on why are the grady girls murdered during the winter in 1970 okay so so why is the whole story about a family on the verge of collapse and a man trying to spin the straw of isolation into the gold of artistic greatness [Applause] [Music] oh darling [Music] please don't think i'm saying king was consciously forging a beatles implosion parable but i think kubrick saw that a big part of its truth the truth of this novel was in how the death of the beatles specifically and the horrors and heartache of the 20th century's major events generally influenced the conceit and the writing and became a major component of its truth redrum road wouldn't work if the songs didn't seem to be speaking to the events on screen and while you do have to become a bit of an abbey road expert to see how that's so or how consistently so it is once you get to that point the two become almost inseparable that's how true kubrick was able to craft this film like okay here we have octopus's garden written by ringo starr the song is basically about how badly ringo wanted out of the beatles wendy plays ringo in the abbey road tour so during the opening bars in round two wendy is under the sea of elevator blood while inspecting dany's neck bruises the ancillary effect of red rum road is as it divides the film into three perfect thirds it gives you a reason to watch the entire mirror form in full like you can watch the red rum edition from the start to the middle or from the middle to the end and have seen the full movie right although you could miss out on the fun of things like watching jack tumble backwards up the staircase [Music] [Music] [Music] but also it draws our attention to how each third of the film plays out with some very eerie stylistic similarities as though it were the same story three times over so for instance in maxwell's silver hammer when paul mccartney sings [Music] we get three instances of there being exactly 50 of something on screen in allman's office it's the american flag with its 50 stars on the way to the gold room bathroom it's the wall rug with its double helix pattern showing 5 rows by 10 columns and this one should be obvious but if you want numbers there you go there's your numbers this doesn't happen for every lyric of every song but there's dozens if not hundreds of major instances to observe many of which would be true with or without abbey road like these sets of fifty but i can't stress how beautifully redrum road gives you the reason to look and something to find now i probably should have mentioned this earlier but if redrum road sounds ludicrous to you would it help to know that there's another album that synchronizes with the film and that this one appears in it this is one by one by stomu yumashta's east wind and if you played this album over the film track one the title track one by one ends at the exact moment that the album appears in the film it's the soundtrack to a 1975 racing documentary called one by one which was released two short months after the king family's trip to the stanley hotel which inspired the novel the dock was reissued in 1978 as the quick and the dead hence my nickname the rum and the red and as you can see clearly by the film's poster this doc goes beyond the ultimate trip it concerns the formula one races of 1973 one of the deadliest years in racing history i'll spare you the brutally disturbing extended footage of men burning alive in their wrecked vehicles but i'm guessing that once kubrick noticed the reference in king's novel he figured it had something to do with how film has this shining style power to capture and proliferate not just our wildest fantasies but our most horrific realities see it's okay you saw it on the television but the album's eight minutes 21 seconds too short to fit inside the film three times and three minutes 27 seconds too long to fit four times which means it ends right as wendy and danny hit the dead end in the maze and danny says dead end like the quick and the dead end that made me wonder where the quick end would be as it happens only two people say quick in the film wendy says it here and almond says it here well in view of all the ground we have to cover today i suggest we go have a quick look at your apartment and then get started straight away these two moments are exactly two mere four minutes apart and the midpoint of those is exactly when you would flip the record over at the end of track four so that side two starts at 1907 the year of the overlooks origin when the place was built in 1907 there was very little interest in winter sports and this site was chosen for its seclusion and scenic beauty is this the quick end if so it's probably worth pointing out that it's only 1907 when you take out the opening 14 second warner brothers logo otherwise it would be 1921. the year jack transports back to after meeting his not so quick and debatably dead end [Music] there's also the doc's original name one by one jack says one by one to lloyd in the line you set him up and i'll knock him back lord one by one if you only play the album once from the beginning it won't stretch far enough to cover this moment even in the mirror form but if you start the album again from the exact middle of the movie he says it during track one one by one and you know what that means well to be fair you might not know what that means because you might not think of the mirror form yet the way i do when you only watch the one half of the mirror form you're basically watching a movie folded in half so why couldn't you fold the middle back to the beginning to get four simultaneous layers of story one by one is our reason to do that and create what i call the twice full now the dead end includes this moment of jack almost dying at wendy's hands and the quick end includes this moment of one of kubrick's favorite films summer 42 center screen while opposite side grady is saying your son has a very great talent i don't think you are aware how great it is but he is attempting to use that very talent against your will these years also happen to be significant years in the life of adolf hitler 1942 i'm sure you know but you might not realize that this was a time when delbert grady himself was advising the strongman dictator what are you implying this is 1973's hitler the last 10 days which co-starred oscar-nominated actor diane chalento whose novel the manipulator appears in boulder she dedicated the book to her second husband sean connery whose first appearance as james bond was in the film dr no that film was parodied by the ted mark novel dr nyet which appears a few books down and fun fact barry nelson the man who knows so much about herculean family murderers was the very first james bond ever so kubrick seems to be considering the lives of all kinds of strong man figures must insist that there are no grounds for such an accusation and 1921 was the year he ascended to his ultimate position of in fact it was in june of this year that a mutiny broke out in the fledgling nazi party causing hitler to resign one week after the date in this photo only to be granted absolute power two weeks after that jack's soul has been transported then to a seemingly guiltless moment when one of the worst traumas in human history was but a twinkle in a maniac's eye incidentally the song playing here was sung by the south african al boley who was killed by hitler's war in 1941 when a german luftwaffe parachute mine exploded outside his london apartment blowing the door off its hinges crushing bully the last song he ever recorded was the satirical anti-hitler ballad when that man is dead and gone 1907 was the year he was first rejected from the academy of fine arts vienna and many have wondered whether had hitler simply been a slightly better painter could the worst atrocity of the 20th century being avoided altogether well there happened to be two paintings in the film referencing artists who graduated from this exact art school one with a connection to hercules as we've seen and one depicting the kaiser mountains in hitler's home country austria and kaiser the german word for emperor comes from the word caesar and julius caesar the man for whom this month is named is referenced all over the film never as prominently as right here while the doctor learns about jack's propensity for child abuse but okay what does any of that have to do with formula one racing i think it's as simple as this people like to be number one at things you put into the pits in first place and half a minute later you drive out far behind and we're willing to risk death to get there at its most benign this impulse sometimes involves risking our own lives through arbitrary sports and arts and sometimes science at its most malignant it's expressed through the strongman dictator impulse my girl sir they didn't care for the overlook at first one of them actually stole a pack of matches and tried to burn it down but i corrected themselves and when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty i corrected her unlike abbey road the album barely has any lyrics just one track about how stupidly dangerous it is to be an f1 raiser [Music] and one about how badass it is [Music] so while there are many cool moments of sound and image flowing perfectly together like some kubrickian fantasia [Music] the synchronicities come less from the context of words and more from the structure of time [Music] this was how i finally realized the significance of these these are sewing cards little slips of paper with holes kids can pass thread through to silhouette a famous cartoon character or to simply learn how to make a cool web of interconnection you can check my website for details but basically thanks to the twice fold these appear on and off screen at these exact moments from the first four tracks of the album side one so that got me thinking are the sewing cards making a sewing card out of the shining right when wendy is passing the album right between track one and two here's the dialogue from the movie playing behind her carson city that's got it hello mr sean i'm going to send you a wire tonight we'll be punching through you in a couple days that's not all you've been punching lately no what else have we been punching lately holes for thread what would be the thread it's true wendy did just walk away from this ball of thread which just so happens to be dangling down past this image that looks like edgar allan poe but never mind that for now i'm more interested in this giant hole shaped painting up here this is alex colville's woman interior a painting that wendy and danny will imitate right after he leaves room 237 this piece he called his madonna and child and this madonna and child by leonardo da vinci was famously owned by the father of the woman who painted the first painting we see inside room 237 nadia benoit and she was the mother of the only actor kubrick ever directed to oscar gold peter yusunov who played slave owner batitus in 1960s spartacus how easily impressed you are a man the da vinci had been thought lost for hundreds of years until the benoit family revealed it to the public in 1907 but as commentators have pointed out what madonna and child type paintings tend to do is overwhelm the significance of the dominant mother figure with a much smaller but much more dramatically significant child figure the son of god if all this is meant to tell us that we're to pay attention to the gaps between songs is there something that unifies these eight moments basically someone is always passing through the lobby except during the seventh gap which features one of dany's visions of the bloodfall that means that the painting red maple by canadian group of seven painter ay jackson is either in the room or on screen as each song trades hands with the next because that painting has inexplicably jumped along with two of its friends from the lobby over to here it's possible all three of these were meant to count for this phenomenon but i prefer to think it's jackson we're highlighting why because as we'll soon see the shining borrows its plot structure from william shakespeare's julius caesar beware the eyes of march what man is that a soothsayer bid you beware the ides of march set him before me let me see his face fellow come from the throng look upon caesar beware the eyes he is a dreamer is tony the one that tells you things yes how does he tell me things it's like i go to sleep and he shows me things but when i wake up i can't remember everything there's a copy of the complete life and works of william shakespeare in russian sitting on the suite 3 bookshelf which means it's right beside jack the entire time caesar is growing out of the doctor's head on the other side to include shakespeare's life works could be a reference to the tempest which inspired edgar allan poes the mask of the red death and we will get to that later on but i prefer to think it's the caesar play kubrick had on his mind tell me can you see your face no cassius for the eye sees not itself but by reflection the play is notorious for the way it causes the audience to question who the main character really is is it caesar he dies halfway through is it marcus brutus he's the jerk who killed caesar is it one of the seven other conspirators they give great speeches but none are as central to our focus the shining has a similar problem where we're either seeing ourselves in the one who tries to kill his family the one who waffles and cowers and shrieks or the one who goes mute 58 minutes in seemingly possessed by who knows what and he's not here mrs torrance but what this ay jackson might be showing us is that this is jack's son's story in a film with hundreds of art objects making it the contextual sewing card of all time danny is the thread that runs through everything now if by some astronomical coincidence red rum road and the rum and the red were entirely unintentional the film would still be awash in references to art some more hidden than others in the part of the website called come together right now over me i'll guide you through the histories and behaviors of the over 300 works of art sprinkled throughout the film what do i mean by behaviors well we've seen that paintings move from room to room and that songs will often play for very specific lengths of time but books are also shared between the torrance and halloran libraries none more significant perhaps than the mary roberts reinhardt novel the door which is an early example of a mystery genre called had i but known i tend to think of this as one of the best proofs of the mirror form since you can tell a had i but known by the way a character will say at the beginning had i but known abc i never would have xyz i mean we all have moments of deja vu but this was ridiculous it was almost as though i knew what was going to be around every corner and halloran's copy appears exactly seven and then two seconds from the exact middle second of the movie so this novel about beginnings does appear near the beginning but really appears at this alternate beginning of the mirror form and it speaks to the function of these two characters had wendy only known that her husband had a propensity for violence she never would have agreed to isolate with him for six months and had dick only known that the hotel preys upon the shiners of the world he never would have allowed them to do it and fun fact as the door appears for the first time jack is stalking through the lobby to kill halloran and passes this door which is the door behind which danny is hiding behind a steel door that won't fully close so had jack only but had any shining power at all or had the hotel actually wanted to kill dany more than it wanted dick halloran these doors would have made a flimsy defense wendy runs right through them when the hotel sends her a shine in this very same spot then there's the way the wall photos behave which is so complex it'll need an entire section of its own but the other general thing these networks of references let us know is how the shining was influenced by the plot structures and story details of other stories these include but are not limited to snow white slave in the magic mirror come from the father's space through wind and darkness i summon thee let me see thy face what would thou know my queen hi lloyd a little slow tonight isn't it [Laughter] yes it is mr torrence what will it be william shakespeare's julius caesar and that i am he let me a little show it even in this but i am constant simba should be banished and constant to remain to keep himself oh caesars will lift up olympus [Music] for me [Music] god give me anything for a drink my goddamn soul just a glass of beer and a little-known british tv movie called come out come out wherever you are wherever you are the main cast of which seems to be sitting around the hotel as jack first enters there's quite a few contextual clues about this obscure tv movie that punctuate the shining subtext but let's just watch a short snippet and see if you can appreciate how much the general aesthetic crosses over you're satisfied hmm am i going crazy what's our first assumption is no no oh jane was here right here i saw her use her she signed this red oh what have you done to her where is she jane jane oh what have you done stop it we're going to leave this hotel now be no charge but you're going to get into your car and leave no charge leave it yes we don't want any trouble you mean just leave the hotel i can't leave not without jane there wasn't any jane you went into the room danny said to 237 yes i did and you didn't see anything at all absolutely nothing you understand me why you think i'm crazy but i think you're lying oh we'll just let the police decide look i can just as easily oh from someplace else no answer no i promised you you were drinking yes yes i know i was trickier i wasn't drunk though exactly what i was doing her cousin was never here mr grady you were the caretaker here i'm sorry to differ with you sir but you are the caretaker you've always been the caretaker generally speaking while no magazine or game or song fails to link up with the film's hidden superstructure of meaning you also begin to notice once you start to research the methods these artists use to create their works how helpful the methods would have been to support kubrick's grand vision like even if everything you've seen and heard so far doesn't sound utterly bananas to you you're probably still wondering how anyone could keep all these details straight and then time each shot of each sequence just right so that the right moment would appear on the opposite side whether it's the geometry alex colville used in his paintings five of which are in the film [Music] or the graphic notation christophe penderecki used to compose his songs seven of which are in the film [Music] you start to get an idea of kubrick using techniques like these to frame his shots or time his sequences as for the mirror form itself people have theorized that dostoyevsky's crime and punishment 1866 and lewis carroll's alice's adventures in wonderland 1865 are what i would call mirror form stories in fact murder is the hinge around which the six parts of crime and punishment swing and this could be the most spectacular coincidence but the main character of that story is named rhodion which is pronounced hredien by native speakers and as we saw we have this russian shakespeare here well this backwards d and r in red rum are proper letters in the cyrillic alphabet which would cause a native speaker to pronounce this word redium and sure enough at one point in the mirror form we have two very alice looking young ladies appearing in the same place on screen as this and this [Music] i had this theory that of the four photos closest to jack this one represented heaven since it looms over his shoulder in every shot of the interview this one is hell since it appears at key moments in the lounge this one represents play since it only repeats inside the game's room and this one is for work since it only repeats in the lounge i'm not being grouchy i just want to finish my work but i'd never actually gone through each of the 37 shots in the film where one of these photos appears and made sure that my claims were defensible i had noticed the other 16 repeating i just didn't know what it meant if the shining is a giant maze of meaning what do you usually find at the start of a maze you find a map and the mirror form begins with these two we'll have to come back to this one later the meaning in this map i discovered completely by accident i initially id them by color which would have told me very little when i named my files after numbers to keep them straight i began to notice familiar trends when i applied these numbers to the photos found elsewhere moments before halloran dies he passes a 2 a three and a seven and when dany emerges from two three seven the two photos in the distance add to 23 while the one beside him is a seven and when he steps in further now we have 23 33 7. as if the room's influence is growing with passing space and time this practice of adding photos together and reading the totals made me wonder what would the grand totals be for the three areas where these landscape style photos recur the lobby can you guess it's two three seven the game's room one five seven and one five seven converted to seconds is two minutes 37 seconds the total for the lounge 417 or 157 east of jax typewriter and 260 west of jack's typewriter 260 can become 237 if we subtract 23 which happens to be what the two photos furthest from the rest add up to the same two that made danny's 237 from before they also happen to be almost directly below where room 237 is upstairs but kubrick didn't have to get this wrong right if it's here and it's throwing everything off it should be here for a reason well as i said there's 37 shots in the film that contain a final 21 photo and if we count up each value that appears in each shot not counting double shots of the same photo then the grand total of each final 21 photo in the film is 2 300 and 68 what that's so close to perfect what happened well there just so happens to be appearing at exactly 2 hours 8 minutes and 37 seconds 2 seconds before jack's axe punches into dick's sternum this photo right here never before seen and cloaked in shadow it's almost impossible to id but the only f21 photo it resembles is the two value which would bring the grand total to 2370 but it would also push the lobby total to 239 unless we think of this and these as separate from these other values if you can get on board with that recall that what 237 seems to refer to is work and here it seems to be defining the area where jack does his only real work of the film killing dick halloran 157 could then be understood as play since it defines the game's room would jack's typewriter being right between them mean he's being ground up between these opposing forces then since 237 is the whole number and 157 becomes 237 as time could this work and play be rendered as space and time all space and no time makes jack a dull boy isn't that a perfect way to describe the hell of jack torrance he sold out every one and everything in his world for all the space he could ask for but it didn't buy him time there's actually several other cool codes we can extrapolate from these photos but we'll be covering those in my other series so before we move on let me just point out these two photos which i call almonds eyes these also appear throughout the hotel and if we apply a slightly different logic to them counting them for their value in whatever position they're in on whatever wall they're on they add up to 237 so the photos don't just follow you around the room they want you to do your work if that last section made your head spin as it did mine i'm sorry but this one isn't any simpler i'll try to be brief bela bartok is considered hungary's greatest composer and his music is the first thing that goes through wendy's mind on the first page after danny walks into room 217. only wrote one opera in his lifetime bluebeard's castle based on the french folk tale bluebeard and when book halloran first warns him about room 217 danny uses his memories of this dreaded bluebeard to contextualize the warning it pops back into his mind the first time he passes the evil room alone and finally along with alice in wonderland and little red riding hood as he finally enters the one room he was told to steer clear of only one bartol composition appears in the film music for strings percussion and celesta we hear it three times [Music] musicologist erno lendvai wrote a book explaining that this song was composed according to the fibonacci sequence the evidence for that is explained in this graphic which is less complicated than it looks the fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where each new number is the product of the last two add together and so on into infinity this sequence which you'll notice has that 237 going on can be used to create something called a golden spiral which when you place this spiral over natural phenomena like so frequently reveals that life seems to like the golden ratio as a way to express natural formations well it turns out that the golden spiral can also be used to compose photographs and paintings and therefore film images the thinking goes that while the commonly used rule of thirds is good for presenting a heightened sense of reality or beauty a golden spiral composition or fee grid as it's called is better for giving something a more naturalistic appearance as you can see the spiral isn't cutting off or capturing everything perfectly within the exact form of the spiral but you still get a sense of natural beauty what you're seeing looks more correct more real a proper feed grid is created when you take one golden spiral and overlap it with an opposing backwards golden spiral sort of like a mirror form this creates a small center square which means the focal point can take on a shrunken appearance allowing the eye to wander through the eight larger sections drawn you might argue by the four invisible spirals the shining uses both the fee grid and the rule of thirds to compose its shots as i'm sure many great films do it's not about one being valued over the other it's about what each means when it's being used the film is ultimately about jack wendy and danny trying to navigate between fantasy and reality what the hotel is versus what it seems to be when wendy is witnessing jack's madness for the first time she sees him along with the audience as he really is but there's something off about him when the shot reverses on wendy she's stuck in rule of thirds land in the fantasy that everything is going well that her son can wander about freely unharmed that isolation is having no effect on her husband's psychological well-being once he gives in to the urge to be insane with his wife we switch completely into rule of thirds land and the unreality the uncanny valleyness of this moment becomes total [Music] now let's go back to fibonacci for a second it hit me not long after realizing that fibonacci could have something to do with the film's nature that the movie is 143 minutes 45 seconds long including the closing credits and 144 is a fibonacci number was it possible then that the film is itself a golden spiral with clear demarcations at the 1 2 4 7 12 20 33 54 88 and 140 minute lines and then would there be cuts in between those moments what i call spiral cuts dividing them into golden ratios of their own i'm sad to say the film doesn't have what i was hoping i'd find hard cuts at all those moments dividing what felt like one major section of drama from another the opening drive to the hotel alone takes three minutes covering three sections i'm glad to say after lengthy study it seems that these moments nevertheless act as firm boundaries for dividing up the film's various dramatic and structural border crossings and that this logic extends to the mirror form let's just look at section 1 which is 60 seconds how you make a golden ratio out of 60 seconds is to have a 23 second half and a 37 second half and there just so happens to be a cut right at this moment dividing the first two shots of the film from the third and fourth you've got a shot that curves right one from directly above one from straight on and one that curves left as we'll see later with danny's escape through the maze lefts and rights are of central importance to the film's visual language so in this opening section we're given a basic tutorial on how the film thinks about space on the flip side the spiral cut divides the last two shots of the film from the third last and yes this section seems to scream something about the nature of time but it also introduces us to the film's general interest in numbers there are 143 people in this shot with jack 76 women 67 men and yeah there's 143 minutes in this movie just as there's 143 heartbeats in this long sequence 67 over mother and son 76 over murderer and murderee so just as side 1 so to speak seems to have this interest in symmetry and mirror formidy side two has its own yin-yang going on but what really struck me about this section is all the opposites flying around the forward song is day of wrath the backwards song is midnight the stars in you the forward subject is outdoors nature real living jack the backward subject is indoors people and supernaturally dead jack forward is color backward is black and white forward is mountains with easy to find names backward is all these anonymous faces in this forgotten photo forward has no art backward is only art i can go on the point is not only are there all these dualities emerging from comparing the sides against themselves they also become yin yangs for one another there are things like this to point out about all 10 of these increasing lengths of time each segmenting the action in a way that i suppose should feel natural to the viewer finally however long your feature is so long as its length is a fibonacci number the second last section becomes what i like to call the middle movie not just because it will always cross over the midpoint of the run time but because of how when you apply the mirror form this action will almost perfectly mirror back on itself so just like how the feed grid has that mini square in the center of the grid the middle movie acts or could act like a mini version of the total drama in the shining it possesses some interesting distinctions many of which are too complex to get into here but here's a fun one before the middle movie jack hasn't seen any ghosts and doesn't intend to kill his family in the middle movie danny confronts jack about the possibility of him murdering him and wendy then he has his murder nightmare meets lloyd the 237 ghost goes to the ghost ball and meets grady right as the middle movie is ending grady is saying i'm sorry to differ with you sir but you are the caretaker which begins the familiside chat so pre-middle movie equals jack's a normal enough guy being weakened by some mild supernatural forces like he can't tell that he's writing the all-work papers middle movie equals the ghosts transforming him into a potential familicidal maniac post-middle movie equals jackson familicidal maniac so the middle movie gives us the full bridge of jack metamorphosing from redrum crosses me out wow that is uh quite a story to rum sounds like a good idea actually there's nothing i look forward to with greater pleasure mr grady moving on from things that are extremely difficult to prove did you realize that danny's trick rides were more than just the random swervings of a curious child that they are in fact the reason for his survival in this section we look at kubrick's numerous efforts to embed basic codes and patterns into the film like what i call dany's lessons and escapes and the two four bird keys basically danny makes a bunch of lefts and rights during his lessons that are repeated exactly during his [Music] escapes and in the same relation to each other as the four birds in 237 relate to their counterparts on his original bedroom door if you've seen part one of my decoding the shining series you know there's a richness in that pattern i could never cover briefly but let me just note here that these paintings are the work of john gould whose bird art inspired darwin's theory of evolution so to put it painfully short science and art symbolized in his ability to detect and compute patterns are why dany is a master of time and space and survives the overlook after that we'll look at what i call mirror movements when either the camera or the characters move through the same space in the same way often inviting games of spot the difference or how characters sometimes move through the same space in the opposite way next we'll look at what i call mirror phrases and echo phrases two types of dialogue that seem to emerge from jack's talks with lloyd and grady in which he attempts to midwife into his relationship with wendy what are you doing down here i just wanted to talk to you okay let's talk [Music] what do you want to talk about i i can't really remember you can't remember no i can't maybe it was about danny maybe it was about him [Music] i think we should discuss i think we should discuss what should be done what should be done with him i don't know i don't think that's true i think you have some very definite ideas about what should be done with danny and i'd like to know what they are well i i think maybe he should be taken to a doctor you think maybe he should be taken to a doctor when do you think maybe he should be taken to a doctor as soon as possible as soon as possible a mirror phrase is an exact repeat of a line of dialogue sometimes by one character mirroring the other and sometimes by one character repeating themselves words of wisdom wide words of wisdom the example that always springs to mind for me is as soon as possible as soon as possible an echo phrase takes something about the form of another bit of dialogue and twists or trims it in some necessary way it's not a perfect repeat but it's very close [Music] hi lloyd been away but now i'm back good evening mr torrence it's good to see you it's good to be back lloyd while the applications of this technique are limited only to the imagination she owes money all over town [ __ ] it's all goddamn fake man it's like lennon said you look for the person who will benefit and uh uh you know i'm the honest you know you'll uh uh you know what i'm trying to say and the walrus that's a [ __ ] [ __ ] oh yeah i am the walrus shut the [ __ ] up donny the eye lenin vladimir ilyich ulyanov what the [ __ ] is he talking about the coen brothers are masters of using them to comedic effect for instance but in the shining they speak to jack's bottomless appetite for praise and acceptance the ghosts use them to lure jack over to their side you're not too busy are i'm not busy you all and then tease him with them until he's their willing cat's paw no choice dear mr torres no charge your money's no good here [Music] orders from the house orders from the house drink up mr thomas i'm the kind of man likes to know who's buying their drinks lloyd it's not a matter that concerns you mr torrance at least not at this point anything you say lloyd anything you say [Music] during his ultimate battle of wits with wendy he throws one after another at her expecting her to return them like one of the ghosts but she's not trying to manipulate him that way and so jack talks himself into an echo chamber you are concerned about him yes and are you concerned about me of course you are ever thought about my responsibilities oh jake what are you talking about have you ever had a single moments thought about my responsibilities have you ever thought for a single solitary moment about my responsibilities to my employers has that ever occurred to you next we'll look at the phenomenon of exact twins and imperfect twins duos that appear in the film i want you to like it here i wish we could stay here forever ever ever the grady twins draw our attention to the notion of imperfect symmetry and duplication not least by the fact that almond describes them as not being twins he came up here with his wife of two little girls who think about eight and ten about eight and ten about eight and ten about eight and ten but the phenomenon doesn't end there and these duos can often tell us a lot about the film's subtext like how when wendy is on the phone with the 1952 film carson city playing behind her jack has almond and watson standing in the same formation behind the opposite shoulder the character from carson city relative to watson is named mr sharon but the way the actors in the film say it it always seems to sound like mr shine and i have reason to believe watson may be one of the film's most powerful shiners don't worry it goes beyond him looking just like bugs bunny then we'll look at all the other notable instances of repetition of which there are legion take for instance that every main character receives a kind of shine while looking in a mirror then we'll go deep on an exhaustive analysis of the film's use of fee grid shots and rule of thirds shots actually we'll mainly look at the fee shot since there's about a quarter as many but one really cool thing this study revealed is that a lot of the shots shift between the two compositional styles mid-shot which is often used to suggest the way that fantasy and reality are duking it out in this mystical place so for instance the entire time that jack is first entering the hotel everything is fee and real but as he passes through susie's office and appears before allman's impossible window there should be a hallway behind his office not the great blinding outdoors things take on a third's approach we are entering the fantasy this section is exactly as much fun as it sounds first we'll look at how seemingly random objects disappearing might be part of a network of revelations like how the disappearing artworks behind great party ghosts here might be a major clue to help us understand that this is the actual charles grady who murdered his family nine years ago you uh married man are you mr grady yes sir i have a wife and uh two daughters sir and uh where are they now oh they're somewhere around i'm not quite sure at the moment sir then he um he put both barrels of a shotgun in his mouth it's hard to pick a favorite absurdity but here's one i've never seen anyone else point out probably for a complete lack of trying as i mentioned the sweet three apartment that the torrances stay in at the hotel seems to have a bright natural light pouring in from two sides this would suggest it's a corner apartment right but when dany slides out the front the apartment is part of the long flat front face of the building whatever is shining in from the west side of the apartment here can't possibly do so so what are the torrances seeing whenever someone glances out one of these windows by packing the hotel with absurdities and references to the holocaust and indigenous genocides is that kubrick's comment on the hotel the hedge maze and life itself that because there seem to be so many things that can't be explained so many things that require absurd explanations the kitchen alone has around 20. that this is what drives us to create injustice could atrocities be avoided if we had an explanation for everything and nothing in reality could ever seem absurd is fantasy the bad guy [Music] it's all right [Music] since it's been here [Music] it's all right [Music] it seems [Music] and on that note we come to the grimmest of all sections here comes the sunken place which takes you on a tour of the film's mythological subtext from the pillars of hercules to jack's triple duty as a symbolic representation of the minotaur medusa and girion medusa's grandson wendy listen let me out of here and i'll forget the whole goddamn thing it'll be just like nothing ever happened wendy baby i think you hurt my head real bad i'm dizzy i need a doctor then we'll look at how wendy's four trials at the end are symbolic of the four horsemen of the apocalypse a subject complex enough to merit three entire episodes of my decoding the shining series and just in case you never look into my other videos this was another instance of exploring a theory for months before finding really compelling evidence for it one of the easiest paintings to id was fh varley's stormy weather which hangs in the lobby the lobby where two of wendy's four horsemen trials occur but i'd overlooked the fact that the fh in fh varley stands for i kid you not frederick horseman varley once that occurred to me i thought hold on could there be another horseman amidst the unidentified mysteries and yeah it's the last new artwork seen in the film and this blurry glary sideways look is the best we ever get of it can you imagine iding this without having thought of the first part there isn't to my knowledge a horseman in the conquest well but varley's first name is frederick remember and holleran's first question to wendy alone is mrs your husband introduced you as a winner now are you a winnie or a freddie and since we have these winnie the pooh dolls appearing throughout and this monstrosity of a wendy winnie mashup in the conquest well i'm guessing what halloran was really asking here was are you a conquest or a war famine death after that we'll study the genocides of the indigenous populations of modern day america the film opens on a series of shots of montana mountains many of which are named for people slaughtered by smallpox murdered in the pygon massacre or who survived that same massacre the film also seems to generally contain references to the meeker massacre pontiac's war and the sand creek massacre considered one of the worst instances of genocide on modern american soil but the film also contains numerous references to celebrated and venerated figures of indigenous history like how jack is first defeated while standing directly above a portrait of chief tatanga mani walking buffalo [Music] or how the torrances own a copy of tiger of the snows the autobiography of tenzing norgay the first man to climb mount everest and of course one of the paintings that likes to move around the hotel is by the picasso of the north copper thunderbird a survivor of canada's catholic residential school system so while kubrick does seem keen to present both sides of the war conquest issue there does seem to have been an extra dose of sympathy for indigenous peoples in the form of kubrick's apparent adherence to the indigenous philosophy known as four directions where everything in life is understood as bearing some relationship to one of the four compass directions which animals seasons element etc belongs to which quadrant depends upon which tribe you talk to depriving the general practice of a central dogma which would try to apply the same logics to all landscapes i think the inherent freedom in this approach would have appealed to kubrick though he still seems to have made most dominant the four animals which are most dominant on most four directions wheels the canine correlating to the hotel the bear correlating to wendy the hornet animal or buffalo correlating to jack and the bird correlating to dany while there are numerous other animals present in the film with their own significances tigers for tony butterflies for the gradies and murder horses for work and play rabbits for halloran and watson these remain the most abundant and with the most specific attribution to the four main figures in the film remember how i was saying the first and last shots are maps for understanding the subtext well the mountain on the right is goat mountain the one on the left is four bears mountain the island reflecting in the lake is wild goose island and almost a dog mountain is tucked just behind these out of view when kubrick wants to show what being a master of space and time looks like he's not just thorough he's literal wendy masters the four horsemen and danny masters the four directions and speaking of the human attempt to understand the vast complexity of life there's one last thing you ought to know about but it's really more like a hundred things when halloran is introducing the pantry to wendy and danny he's supposedly saying now this is the storeroom but listen closely to how he says it now this is the story does it sound to you like he's saying storeroom or story room now this is the story man now this is the story the story man the story he could just be drawing and it makes little difference to what i'm about to tell you but what i thought this meant for ages was simply that all the boxes on one side of the pantry flip to the other side later in the film so if this was the story room then perhaps we're meant to look at the story forwards and backwards i'll let the mirror form but then it hit me that of the handful of folk stories that the film openly references one is mentioned by wendy on route to this story room yeah this whole place is such an enormous maze i feel like i'll have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs every time i come in there's a thing called the arn thompson folktale motif index a collection of thousands of numbers attempting to categorize every story in human history sort of like a dewey decimal system but for folk tales i'd noticed that the code for hansel and gretel is 327a but just thought that was a 237 jumble and totally overlooked that just as halloran turns to offer danny some sweet sweet iced milk his head reveals three two seven with a four that kinda looks like an a turns out every fable referenced in the film appears either in the skew numbers of the story room or is written somewhere nearby like how the code for the three little pigs one two four appears on this box by the kitchen elevators these codes appear on every wikipedia page for the given folktale so it's not hard information to come by but i did notice this moment at 47 minutes 40 seconds where wendy passes between a painting by tom thompson and one i very much suspect to be by a lois arn egger and remember the novel the original story is 447 pages [Music] in any event there are at least four thompson paintings around the hotel and the thompson of aaron thompson had another set of more thousands of numbers he used to describe not just the main folk tales but their story elements so while 124 is the main code for three little pigs 1012 is the thompson code for when a story generally involves a flood made of bodily fluids and again this number is appearing right in front of a giant elevator there's just over 130 three and four digit combos you can make from these boxes three of which are components of hansel and gretel itself 82 is for stories where a cannibal fattens their victim 412 is for when an ogre's gingerbread house lures a child and 512 is for when an ogre is burned in their own oven or perhaps when a minotaur freezes to death in his own labyrinth when you sift through the arn thompson database the impression you come away with is this is the dna of our collective reaction to life itself we use story to shrink an unfathomable complexity down to a manageable mental framework right on the heels of that discovery came my identification of this most obscure painting of chief bearpaw he was a chief from the same clan bear's paw as the one jack has clubbed directly above on the lounge's grand stair chief walking buffalo it appears in the halls outside suite 3 which means that unlike with all the other 11 areas of the overlooked scene in the film we know exactly where this painting should hang in relation to another floor this other floor using floor plans designed by the brilliant julie kearns i was able to see that this chief bearpaw hung exactly above where jack hides to kill halloran so that's walking buffalo beneath a near murder and bearpaw above a complete murder construction started in 1907. it's finished in 1909. the site is supposed to be located on an indian burial ground and i believe they actually had to repel a few indian attacks as they were building it the layout of the overlook hotel has long been one of its great mysteries why do we never see characters pass between the 11 major areas of the hotel how could a room this tall and wide have no windows and yet fit within this narrow structure if impossible things are going to happen like halloran taking wendy and danny into a room on one side of the hall and taking them out on the other side or when jack and grady make two right turns as evidenced by the double helix rug seen here and here in the bathroom mirror to enter a room that folds back impossibly into the same room they just came from what's the point of having any continuity at all now i'm sorry for how hard this is going to be to accept without all the supporting evidence but long story short while studying kearns's maps and considering things like how the blood fall hall is the same set as the lobby's back haul or that jack doesn't notice that he just walked straight through this mirror it hit me that there's actually no reason not to think that all 11 zones of the hotel are actually one giant 7 by 11 square game board i mean we all have moments of deja vu but this was ridiculous [Music] it was almost as though i knew what was going to be around every corner okay okay before i try to make that nut easier to swallow i want to tell you a little about the short story that inspired king's novel edgar allan poe's the mask of the red death is referenced openly a dozen or more times in the novel and a lengthy passage from it stands as a kind of preface to the text in that story a prince named prospero locks himself in an abbey along with all his wealthy buddies throwing a lengthy masquerade to ride out a plague called the red death sweeping the countryside let me speak to you about the anatomy of terror the phrase red death originates in a 17th century manuscript thought to have been written by thomas decker whose poetry inspired the song golden slumbers from abbey road once there's a way to get back homework [Music] once those way to get back home sleep pretty darn do not cry and i will sing and in that story three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse or to go by the first two lines of the poem their geniuses have gathered to have an epic rap battle of sorts about who's the most badass horseman but what they're really fighting over is the number two spot after the true champion death [Music] can you look around this world and believe in the goodness of a god who rules it famine pestilence war disease and death they rule this world there is also love and life and hope very little hope i assure you impose short story the abbey of prince prospero is described as a seven chamber establishment with each room lavishly painted up to highlight its dominant colors each room connected by a series of confusing lefts and rights such that visitors might not know exactly where they are analysts have interpreted these rooms as symbolizing the seven stages of life and when a shrouded silent figure in a red cloak appears it's understood that this might not be a fellow reveler but some manifestation of the red death having somehow punched through prospero's best walls the prince flees to the final room where he unmasks the red shroud and in the 1962 film version finds that it was only himself that he was running from let me see your face [Music] your hell prince prospero and the moment of your death resulting in a fright that kills the prince and gives all the revelers the sickness they thought they could simply throw up walls and confusing passages against analysts have recommended we don't try to analyze the figure of the red death too closely lest we mistake its complexity for some trinket of a central metaphor but i wonder if this is what kubrick saw in its horror walls are only helpful when walls exist and is there a place in all of life that pestilence war famine and death can't access is human civilization simply an illusion a masquerade of borrowable doors and unscalable walls and can you lock someone in who believes that the door is open you'll give your word on that deal i give you my word [Music] all right now let's go back to the game board why a game board sure kubrick was a notorious chess master who once famously shut down production for a day to play against tony burton who surprised kubrick with his own mastery of the game and sure we've seen that characters move back and forth across the same path sort of like game pieces and there even seemed to be a couple of giant knights bookending over wendy's head here but until just last month i thought these were only the kinds of things a chess master would put in his movie this is scientific american volume 238 issue 3. it appears here here and here on its cover is a 16th century painting of the tower of babel and the article is about studying how this painting tells us more about the painter's awareness of the technology of his day than perhaps he really knew about book of genesis times as each layer covers the last the foundations are crumbling thanks to poor craft work the subtle implication being that the tower was brought down at least as much by bad science as a vengeful god casting down those who flew too close to the sun but it also reviews the work of raymond smallian famous for writing two books of chess puzzles where the object is simply to know the moves of chess not the strategy for somalian there's only three types of characters knights who always tell the truth i think a lot of things [Music] who always lie i should know sir i've always been here and normals who do a mixture of both uh he dislocated his shoulder how did he manage to do that well i was just one of those things you know purely an accident and when you look at the overlook as the 7 by 11 game board this copy of scientific american moves from b7 to c7 to c9 it moves like a knight and remember how sweet three in the lobby are right on top of each other well again when we just compare these two floors that means that this stairwell where two women bid almond farewell goodbye mr allman goodbye girls ought to be punching down straight into the spot where these two women who are carrying their luggage into the hotel away from the parking lot also say goodbye hi mr allman bye this is c7 which means that our truth-telling knight of a scientific american is encircling the lie of this building's construction and a famous crumbling tower just happens to be along for the ride or is it incidental because this game board is 7 by 11 squares and while genesis 7 11 is about how on the 17th day of the second month in the 600th year of noah's life all the springs of the great deep burst forth and the floodgates of the heavens were opened genesis 11 7 is god plotting against the tower of babel in the land of shinar come let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other the tower of babel gets its name from the city it was built in whose name comes from the hebrew bailal a verb meaning to jumble or to confuse is that why standing three squares east from where the tower appeared in this room climbing a 23x7 tower of her own wendy says america i just need a chance my initial placement of letters and numbers was arbitrary but it quickly occurred to me how wendy is passing through c1 when she invokes hansel and gretel and c1 is the code above the story room's door and c4 is where jack kills halloran and that's the code above the frozen meat locker door but i also always thought the elves in all work looked kinda like ones as in a11 work and no play as in apollo 11 work in this arrangement a11 can only refer to this random offshoot of hallway on dany's trike ride to first find 237 and there is something to be said for this dany's turns here are a left followed by three rights and the only thing i can find that uses this acronym officially is the laser ranging retro reflector which is a device that was placed on the moon which is how we know that the average distance between the earth and the moon is around 238 000 miles and 238 is the number of the room behind danny when he first encounters 237 and which opens its jaws behind him between shots the grand total of f-21 photos seen in conjunction with halloran is 158 points which is 2 minutes 38 seconds and you know when you're code breaking something this non-linear you start to wonder if maybe you've got it backwards if we arrange the letters and numbers like this now a11 refers to the bathroom where dany's apollo 11 sweater gets choked half to death of course we did go to the moon and i won't be suggesting otherwise but why is it so fearful to go there you're scared room 237 jack strolls up to meet lloyd for the first time on page 237 and soon says to lloyd they don't have 7-elevens around here would you believe it and i thought they had 7-elevens on the [ __ ] moon on page 327 as jack stands watching the boiler tick explosively up to 217 pounds of pressure he thinks to himself seven come eleven die the secret death and win a hundred dollars on page nineteen when watson is showing jack the boiler for the first time he says he hopes allman is here to ride the rocket when the boiler finally does explode he goes on to warn jack that if he forgets to mind the boiler he and his family will wake up on the [ __ ] moon a line jack recalls incorrectly on page 69 1969 and wasn't it on the 21st of july 1969 that neil armstrong did walk on the moon did do what all the icarus and tower of babel stories implied we would never do if i go much further i risk giving away the end of my other series sorry but i can tell you this allman describes everything in the lounge as being based mainly on navajo and uh apache motifs and that's as good as true but there's another culture who made rug designs like these the za'a whose name means the cloud people because they believed that they descended from a cloud realm where they would one day return and part of their culture involved building pyramids for their elites and pyramids are an example of something called an axis mundi a latin phrase that means hub of the world and signifies a thing that acts as a connection between heaven and earth examples include the column of smoke rising from a calumet pipe a caduceus like the one harrah's messenger iris wields when she offered heracles his own special brand of ice cream or pillars like the ones he smashed to make up for what ice cream made him do jacob's ladder which is referenced by a song that follows characters all over the hotel a yin yang as i believe these two represent but even if i'm wrong about that a palmett symbol like the one on the rump of the ghost here who spins grady off his axes to collide with jacks a cross like the one jack imitates having just walked back into the same zone where that collision occurred or an abbey like the one whose imitation breaks up right here and since stairs and ladders are given as examples i don't see why elevators wouldn't count like the one next to apollo danny here and all these axis mundy appear in the same square of each map the square that is the story room now this is the story story is what connects heaven and earth story is what the entire tower of fable orbits around like keys on a keychain story is what can trap you sets you free and really sets you free but only if you know how to spot a real trail of breadcrumbs don't let it get you down mrs taurus it's big but still ain't nothing but a kitchen in case i made it sound at the beginning like there haven't been great films since stanley's passing i should correct that there's notes of everything we just discussed in many of the greatest works of the new millennium with only a few seeming to be consciously trying to continue the conversation kubrick was having with us none more so than the twin 2010 leonardo dicaprio pictures shutter island and inception but this new wave of magicians have largely kept their secrets to themselves as all good magicians must and so the question remains for the rest of us how do you think like a stanley 1. consider the structure of your story if your story is about duality symmetry reflection consider using the mirror form but don't stop there consider how this form will impact every other of your purposes for instance if you want a famous album to fit three times inside your movie how can the mirror form strengthen that [Music] two rip apart every element of your story and consider it at its most general and at its most specific and look for ways that you can invoke the real universe whether that's our universe or the universe you create within your body of work to heighten the audience's sense of the life of what they're seeing three don't be afraid to go beyond to push your own complexities to the next level to dig back for the root of your idea and to be open about what your ideas are today and never stop asking what is the nature of your story four understand that nothing exists in a vacuum whatever you create is but a page in the great book a note in the great song a phrase in the great conversation and it pays to let your audience know in which chapter and verse to find you if you're in the business of leaving breadcrumb trails learn how to spot the breadcrumb trails of others you never know when they might help your work find its way home [Music] five while the great conversation of human art that already exists makes it exceedingly difficult to be truly original if you allow your work to not only look outward for inspiration but inward at its own patterns symmetries and cycles you may discover that the answer was inside you all along 6. except that however true the truth is however accurate the science of the day life is still a storage facility for fantasy and reality to truly know yourself is to know that there are some things you may never understand some questions you may never answer but this is no excuse to cherry-pick our understanding of life to turn a blind eye to the worst realities that do exist and can be understood once we demonize the things and people we'd rather not think about we neglect the fact that those things and those people share our reality fantasy with us and they in their lives may understand things a different way a better way than our way which if we incorporate into our thinking can enhance our lives and the lives of everyone we care about [Music] and speaking of the lives of others know that just as you and i and christopher nolan and jordan peel and quentin tarantino have contemplated the mind of kubrick he contemplated the mind of bergman who contemplated the mind of kurosawa who contemplated the mind of shakespeare and back and back if i had to summarize ice cream as one thing i would say it's this everything is connected to everything the only question is how wide are you willing to open your eyes and how much are you prepared to see so would you like to learn more there is my website where i post every new discovery as soon as i make them but i'll admit it is quite a labyrinth of information so like and subscribe and you'll be notified whenever i release a new episode of decoding the shining which attempts to properly cover everything there is to know about the most complex film of all time see you there [Music] you

Channel: Joe Girard

Views: 380,632

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Id: EMxy5zPj1m0

Length: 141min 17sec (8477 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020