The Shining and Room 237: Inside the Labyrinth

The labyrinth might be the most appropriate symbol or image for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). He invests much of the film showing how the corridors and stairways of the Overlook Hotel lead people toward places with increasing less likelihood of finding a way out.

Danny (Danny Lloyd) rides his little bike through the hallways and around the lounges. He plays with his trucks and cars on a carpet with labyrinthine patterns. Wendy (Shelley Duvall) completes chores and brings food through the massive kitchen, the corridors, and elevators. Meanwhile, Jack (Jack Nicholson) remains at his writing table in the Colorado Lounge not unlike the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth in Knossos (Crete) built by Daedalus.

There’s a hedge maze outside the hotel, as well as a model of the maze in the hotel’s lobby. Wendy and Danny actually explore the maze and reach its center (knowledge of the maze will save Danny at film’s end) while Jack stands over the model of the maze and ultimately “sees” his wife and son walking into the center of the maze.

It should be noted that in Stephen King’s novel there was a topiary garden outside the Overlook and not a hedge maze. At a crucial moment, the hedge animals come alive in Jack’s mind. The topiary is one of many things that Kubrick excluded from the film. His explanation was that the special effects would have been too costly. However, the maze image becomes so pervasive and meaningful that there’s little doubt that he needed scary hedge animals.

It is not surprising that one of the five theorists, Juli Kearns, in the documentary Room 237 (2012), sees the entire film being about the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. For her, the trigger for the theory comes when Danny is in the Hotel games room throwing darts. She writes on her website:

On the other side of the door is the picture of the man riding the bucking bronco. One can think of it as man and animal here merged into one, complementing the skier-minotaur image [opposite the bucking bronco].

We’ve the same with the picture of the American Indian in the buffalo (bull) headdress in the hall behind the Colorado Room, under the grand staircase, a merging of human and animal spirit.

Again, with the maze imagery throughout the film, this interpretation is not far-fetched. When Jack is trapped in the maze at the end of the film, he howls like a wounded bull as he slowly succumbs to the freezing snow. She writes about Jack as Minotaur:

The temperament of the Minotaur perceived as passion unbridled by human reason, the 7th circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno housed the violent and was guarded by the Minotaur. To approach this hell, one went through a mountainous region. Through a valley below ran a river of blood.

Passion unbridled by human reason sounds very much like Jack, at least the character into which he fully transforms as the movie progresses. The mountainous region recalls the mountains in which the lodge is situated, and the river of blood recalls the river of blood which pours out of the elevators.

As the most plausible of Room 237’s five theories, it is the one given the least amount of time.

John Fell Ryan has written an ongoing visual analysis of The Shining on his website KDK12. He explores and analyzes many of the anomalies and apparent inconsistencies in the film. Our first look at the Overlook Hotel does not contain the hedge maze. The room in which Jack is interviewed for the job has a window looking out to trees; however, the layout of the hotel’s front desk and the corridor behind it make it impossible for the office to have such a view. Other problems occur during Danny’s rides around the hotel corridors. The interior geography does not add up.

Are these continuity errors or planned mistakes? Three other titillating examples:

1. The maze-like carpet where Danny plays with his toy trucks. In one shot, a tennis ball rolls up to him and the patterns face in one direction. Danny gets up and in another shot the pattern faces the opposite direction.

2. When Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) opens a food locker, we see the corridor behind it. When they leave the locker, the corridor background is completely different.

3. Jack rips out paper from his typewriter and tears it up when Wendy intrudes upon his lair. When he goes back to typing, a new piece of paper is already in the typewriter.

Ryan follows these and hundreds of other signals from the film in trying to figure out what is really happening. Is Jack imagining the entire film? Has he actually been the caretaker since the Hotel opened, as suggested by the waiter, Grady, and the picture at the end of the film showing Jack in photo from July 4, 1921? How does Jack get out of the food locker after Wendy had locked him in? Ryan suggests that the entire film seems to be constructed as gigantic puzzle for audiences to spend their entire lives to figure out – just as he seems to be doing (he gives an abrupt laugh-giggle when he says this).

His dedication goes to the extreme. Since the film itself relied on mirror imagery, he felt justified running the film forward and backward simultaneously over the other. Admittedly, he discovers some very intriguing juxtapositions. For example: Grady (Philip Stone) and Jack’s conversation in the men’s room takes place inside Danny’s head! Such an image lends itself to the idea that the film actually happens in the minds of people.

Perhaps more importantly, this double image suggests the conflict between Jack and Danny. The boy is acutely aware of his father’s malignant psyche. Danny’s first vision of the elevator pouring out blood comes exactly when Tony (his imaginary friend) tells him that his father got the job at the Overlook. It doesn’t look like Danny’s “going to have a real good time,” as his mother said earlier to cheer him up.

The labyrinth has been the symbol for the mind because it resembles the look of our brain. As Room 237 suggests, Kubrick constructed The Shining to allow many interpretations, with audiences particularly exacerbated by the open-ended last image (not dissimilar to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s ending). Many of the theorists have not realized how they have entered the film’s maze and thus, unsuspectingly, reach a section of it (the faked moon landing theory, for example) from which they can never return.

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