Deddum

Room 237

Crit

I confess: for the first hour or so, I thought this was just five loonies explicating their loony theories about the subtexts hidden by Stanley Kubrick in The Shining: revelation of his role in faking the Apollo 11 moon landing; sexual dysfunction; Minotaurs; and two holocausts, both Hitler's and the U.S. government's against Native Americans.

Then, suddenly, I realized: every interviewee used both the word "and" and the word "a"! And what key sentence in the film uses those exact same words? "All work AND no play makes Jack A dull boy"!!!!! Coincidence????

Fall semester 1972, first session of a course in Renaissance and Elizabethan literature. John Schleppenbach, brand new Ph.D., tells us that he believes in all mythologies. From which I deduce that his meaning is that all is the only alternative to none. Or at least I deduce that 40 years later and a thousand miles away, and no way of asking him to confirm or deny. OK, that's not true: I could email him. But the point is, I remember what he said. Or the point is that he made a straightforward statement that could be spun into a variety of meanings without having to bother with what he actually meant.

Going into this, I thought I'd have infinite capacity to be amused by ingenious silliness, but it turns out that it got old for me pretty quickly, and the 102 minutes dragged.