Movie Review: The Nightmare

The Nightmare
Directed by: Rodney Ascher.

Rodney Ascher’s last film, Room 237, was a brilliant documentary about a number of people obsessed with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. That film plunges us into their minds – as the entire film is just them talking over clips from the movie, and contains perspective outside the people who are describing what they believe The Shining is “really” about. Some (including Stephen King, and many associated with Kubrick) seem to have misunderstood the film – as Ascher wasn’t advocating any of the crazy theories on display, but instead was making a movie about the obsession the viewers have with The Shining – and the dangers of overanalyzing something.

His new documentary, The Nightmare, tries something similar. This is a documentary about “sleep paralysis”, a condition where people awake paralyzed in their bed. To make matters worse, they experience visions – surprisingly consistent – of dark, shadowy figures who, according to those interviewed – may just scare them, although one woman says she was raped one of these shadowy figures. Ascher interviews several people who suffer from the illness – shooting them at often odd angles, and then recreating the nightmarish visions they had. Once again, Ascher doesn’t provide any outside narration in the film – no doctors explaining the condition. Just several of sufferers themselves, telling their stories. What you make of them is up to you.

If nothing else, The Nightmare proves that Ascher could direct a great horror movie if he wanted to. The recreations of the nightmarish visions the subjects of the documentary have are its best part – atmospheric and scary. They brought to mind last year’s brilliant The Babadook – which isn’t a bad thing. Even the interviews themselves help to create the atmosphere of the movie. Ascher doesn’t shoot them in standard documentary style – instead using oft-kilter angles and strange camera placement. Ascher isn’t interested in making a typical documentary with The Nightmare – and at its best he succeeds. What Ascher – who has suffered from sleep paralysis himself – really wants to do, is place the audience in the headspace of the people who suffer from this – to make them realize how terrifying it really can be. In that, he succeeds.

Yet, in other areas, The Nightmare doesn’t really work that well at all. For one things, the film is awfully repetitive – as not only do the individual’s visions often repeat themselves, they are very similar to everyone else’s visions as well. For another, pretty much everyone in the documentary dismisses all possibility that the condition is psychological – or at least not purely so – and talk about something larger. Yes, I know that providing some expert narration on what we know about this condition goes against Ascher`s style – but in this, I really think it could have helped. By the end of The Nightmare, I feel I know a lot about what it’s like to suffer from sleep paralysis, but no idea what actually causes it – or really, what it is.

Room 237 was a great doc, and The Nightmare is not – yet it still clearly shows why Ascher is one of the documentary filmmaker working right know to keep an eye on. He is an interesting documentary filmmaker – one of the few who really does think of style as much as content – and he has an interesting strategy, of placing the audience in the headspace of someone they really do not want to be inside. The Nightmare is a passable doc – not much more – but it’s been made in a style that makes up for its shortcomings.

The Films of Stanley Kubrick (Offshoot): Room 237 (2012)

Room 237 (2012)
Directed by: Rodney Ascher.
Featuring: Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan, Jay Weidner.

The five people who speak during Rodney Ascher's brilliant, hilarious documentary Room 237 are people who cannot see the forest for the trees. During the course of the film, they will give their various interpretations of Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining – arguing that the film isn’t really about what it seems to be about. To one, it is about the Holocaust. To another, it’s about the Genocide of the Native Americans. To another, its Kubrick’s confession for faking the moon landing footage (he wants everyone to know that he does believe that Apollo 11 actually did land on the moon – it was just the footage that was faked – he isn’t crazy or anything). The other two aren’t nearly as clear about their interpretations – but they simply look very deeply, and make a lot out of what they think they have discovered in the film.

In a way, Room 237 is a film about film criticism – film critic’s job is to analyze films, of course, and to find the meaning of the film, and the subtext in them. But what the five people in Room 237 do is far beyond what film critics do. They barely even deal with the surface of the film – things like plot, or characters, or performances or music, or shot selection, or anything else that actually make up the whole of the film. To them, everything is The Shining is just a stand in for some larger meaning that Kubrick was trying to get viewers to notice. A missing chair is not a simple continuity error – but Kubrick playing with genre conventions to get the audience to look deeper. Similarly, a missing sticker of Dopey is not a continuity error – but a sign from Kubrick that Danny is no longer a dope. A German typewriter is a symbol of the Holocaust, because the Germans went about the elimination of the Jews in a bureaucratic way. A can of Calamut baking powder is a symbol of Native Americans – and when later in the film, more than one is behind Nicholson’s head, in a disorganized way, that’s a symbol of broken treaties with the Native Americans. Kubrick changed the room number from Stephen Kings novel not because the hotel it was based on requested it (like Kubrick said) but because the moon is 237,000 miles from earth. And perhaps my favorite, one dissolve near the end of the film momentarily gives Nicholson a Hitler mustache.

The argument that all of them make at one point or another is that since we all know Stanley Kubrick was a perfectionist, than everything in the film had to be put there on purpose – and all of it must mean something. But continuity errors happen on nearly every film – even on those made by perfectionists. And when someone points out that during the infamous Steadicam shots of Danny on his big wheel, that you can see, in the corners, parts of rooms that shouldn’t be there, that is most likely just the reality of shooting on a set, and not a real location.

There is also a lot of seeing only what the viewers want to see to further their point in the film. Is it a coincidence that the man who specializes in German history, particularly Nazi history, sees the film as about the Holocaust? Or that the man who admits he was thinking a lot about genocide and the Native Americans see The Shining as about that. Or the man, who was already convinced Kubrick faked the moon landing, sees this as his confession. All of them take only what they want in the movie, and discard the rest.

None of this is to say that there are not deeper meanings in The Shining – or in any film for that matter. Often, directors have used genre films to comment on something larger than the surface level of the plot. But the amount of detail that these people look at in The Shining crosses the line between deep analysis into the pathological and insane. The connections they make are only in their mind – and not in the film itself.

None of this means that Room 237 isn’t a great film – it is a great film. But it’s not great in the way the five subjects of the film would probably want it to be. They didn’t succeed in convincing me of anything during the course of the movie other than the fact that they are somewhat insane. Room 237 is, in many ways, about the danger of looking too closely – so closely that you no longer even see the object you are looking at, and instead see things that are not there. And it’s also about the culture we live in today – where ambiguity is something to be questioned, where art is a puzzle simply to be solved. Not every movie is like The Usual Suspects or The Sixth Sense – where there is a moment where everything snaps into place. Sometimes, there are no answers. But there are people who do not want to see things that way – they want David Chase to tell them explicitly if Tony Soprano is alive or dead at the end of the show. They want David Lynch to explain all the mysteries of Twin Peaks or Eraserhead or Mulholland Drive.

The film is also incredibly entertaining – and at times downright hilarious. Ascher never interjects in the film, but instead just allows his subjects to talk and talk, while showing us in detail the scenes from the movie they are talking about. Sometimes, you definitely notice that what they are saying is correct – not their interpretation per se, but what is actually on screen. And sometimes, what they are saying are simply not there – no matter how closely Ascher looks for it.

The film is wonderful – and Ascher definitely picked the right film to make this documentary about. He could have done it with any number of films, but The Shining is one of those films that simply defies expectations – and contains questions that simply have no answers – at least not in the film itself. Kubrick did this intentionally – he wanted there to be different interpretations of his film. But I cannot help but think that he may well view these five as crazy as I did. Sometimes a missing chair is just a missing chair.

Movie Review: Room 237

Room 237
Directed by:  Rodney Ascher.
Featuring: Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan, Jay Weidner, Buffy Visick.

That Stanley Kubrick is one of the greatest directors in cinema history is pretty much a closed debate now. And even though his 1980 horror film The Shining wasn’t loved at the time of its release, it has also pretty much entered the canon as a masterpiece now, 33 years later. While most see it is for what lays on the surface – a tremendously scary horror movie, that slowly builds up tension throughout its two and half hour running time – a movie about the destruction of the American family (or at least, this particular American family), and a showcase for Jack Nicholson at his unhinged, delirious best, there are corners of the internet where you can go and find out what Kubrick’s The Shining was “really” about. Director Rodney Ascher assembles five Shining obsessives, and lets them tell you what The Shining really means – and backs it up showing us the scenes from the movie these people are referencing. The film pushes the boundary of fair use in terms of copyright law – Ascher has no “original” footage – just clips from The Shining, as well as most of Kubrick’s other films, and a smattering by other cinema masters (Hitchcock’s Spellbound for example). And even though most of what these obsessives say is deluded at best and downright insane at worst, Room 237 remains one of the best documentaries of its type ever. To watch it, is to enter the world of these obsessives for a couple of hours – which is an interesting place to be.

No detail is too small for these five people to obsess over. Because Nicholson uses a German typewriter, and the number 42 appears several times in the movie, one argues that the film is Kubrick’s take on the Holocaust – after all, 1942 was the year the Germans decided to exterminate the Jews, and did so in a mechanical, bureaucratic way (hence the typewriter). Another obsesses over the tines of Calamut Baking Powder seen in the pantry – Calamut being a Native word for peace, and there is a giant Indian head on the tin. When the cans reappear later, you cannot read the entire word Calamut, which of course symbolizes all the broken peace treaties with the Natives. Even the tag line used in British marketing materials is a clue – “The Horror That Swept Across America Comes to Britain”, is not a reference to the movie itself, but about the genocide of Native Americans. Another thinks The Shining is Kubrick’s confession to faking the moon landing footage – after all, Danny does wear a sweater with the Apollo 11 rocket on it, and Kubrick change the key Room number from 217 to 237 – and the moon is 237,000 miles from earth (and the key to the room has the words Room No. 237, which of course means Moon Room). Another, the only woman in the group, obsesses about the geography of the hotel itself – especially an “impossible” window in the hotel manager’s office (in her defense, it does seem like that window really shouldn’t be there), and all the minotaur references in the movie (there is a maze, but her other points – a skiing poster that looks like a minotaur, and Jack Nicholson’s face appearing bull like at one point are farfetched). This theory flies completely off the rails when she starts comparing the movie to her son’s drawings. There is even a guy who claims that in the opening credits scene, you can see a picture of Kubrick’s head in the clouds (I got the movie from iTunes, and paused this moment, and try as I might, I cannot see it – then again, I was never able to get those stupid 3-D pictures to emerge out of the jumble either), and even projects the film forwards and backwards at the same time – the overlay of images suggest lots of interesting things, of course.

Do any of these theories have any merit? Probably not. They obsess over the smallest details and continuity errors and read much larger things into them than a sane person would. Some of what they point out is undeniably interesting though – the carpet pattern that in one shot is open to Danny, and in the next is closed, which may have been a continuity error, but considering that Kubrick uses the carpet pattern as a laneway for the ball that rolls to Danny from seemingly nowhere, I doubt it. But just because there are things in the movie that cannot be readily explained, it doesn’t mean what these people say it means.

So if I think that most of these theories are either misguided or batshit crazy, why did I love Room 237 so much? For one thing, I don’t think director Rodney Ascher puts too much stock in them either (he has some marvelous visual jokes – most involving Tom Cruise from Eyes Wide Shut where he seems to be almost mocking these people). But also because, as you watch the movie, you get inside the head of the people exposing their theories. At times, you almost believe what they are saying (ok, the moon landing guy was mostly laughable – especially when he says he’s not a crackpot because he isn’t saying American didn’t land on the moon – just that Kubrick faked the footage we saw of them landing on the moon). Even if you never do, you can at least have fun listening to their takes (my favorite is in the final dissolve of the movie that slowly closes in on that photograph of Nicholson where the Holocaust guy says if you look closely, for a second Nicholson has a Hitler mustache – and you know something? He does). Ascher is not arguing for any of these theories – he is not trying to convince you that one or all of these people are right. Instead, what he has done has made a movie about what it’s like to watch a movie – and become obsessed by them. Since home viewing of movies became standard, it allows us to view the same movies again and again and again, whenever we want, and how often we want. It’s only natural that some people are going to take it to an extreme level – like these guys do (if they hadn’t been able to watch the film repeatedly on home video, much of what they “see” they wouldn’t have). The film becomes an interesting commentary on the dangers of obsessive viewing – you start seeing things that are not there, or at least reading meanings into things that cannot really be supported.

It is also, it must be said, a tribute to Stanley Kubrick and The Shining itself. The film is a masterpiece – one of the greatest horror films ever made. The fact that it can support all of these crazy theories, and still be one of the great scary movies of all time is a tribute to the film and Kubrick himself. How many other films could support this much insanity? Can Ascher make a sequel to this about Lynch’s Mulholland Drive?