Fear and Dissembling

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The ConjuringLast year, when The Conjuring was released, it quickly became one of the (if not the) top earning horror films of all time at the box office. Based on a “true case” of Ed and Lorraine Warren—real life paranormal investigators—the film is a demonic possession movie that ties in the Warren’s most notorious case of a haunted (or possessed) doll, with a haunting of the Perron family of Rhode Island. (The Warrens were also known as the investigators behind the Lutz family in the case of the “Amityville Horror,” showing their pedigree in the field.) Given that Halloween has been in the air, I decided to give it a viewing. As with most horror movies, the events have to be dramatized in order to fit cinematographic expectations. Apparently the Warrens did believe the Perron house was possessed by a witch. In the film this became somewhat personal as the dialogue tied her in with Mary Eastey, who was hanged as a witch at Salem (and who was a great-great (and a few more greats) aunt of my wife). Bringing this cheap shot into the film immediately made the remainder of it seem like fiction of a baser sort.

Witches may be standard Halloween fare, but when innocent women executed for the religious imagination are brought into it, justice demands separating fact from fiction. Writers of all sorts have toyed with the idea of real witches in Salem—it was a trope H. P. Lovecraft explored freely—but there is no pretense of misappropriation here. Lovecraft did not believe in witchcraft and made no attempt to present those tragically murdered as what the religious imagination made them out to be. The Conjuring could have done better here. It reminds me of Mr. Ullman having to drop the line about the Overlook Hotel being built on an Indian burial ground. Was that really necessary? (Well, Room 237 has those who suggest it is, in all fairness.) The actual past of oppressed peoples is scary enough without putting it behind horror entertainment.

A doctoral student in sociology interviewed me while I was at Boston University. She’d put an ad in the paper (there was no public internet those days) for students who watched horror movies. I was a bit surprised when I realized that I did. I had avoided the demonic ones, but I had been in the theatre the opening week of A Nightmare on Elm Street (on a date, no less) and things had grown from there. I recall my answer to her question of why I thought I did it: it is better to feel scared than to feel nothing at all. Thinking over the oppressed groups that have lived in fear, in reality, I have been reassessing that statement. What do you really know when you’re a student? As I’ve watched horror movies over the years, I have come to realize that the fantasy world they represent is an escape from a reality which, if viewed directly, may be far more scary than conjured ghosts.

Room for One More

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Room_237_(2012_film)

Conspiracy theories have a definite attraction. In a world where governments are more known for keeping secrets than for carrying out the will of the people, they are often easy enough to believe. Elected officials are, of course, human. Humans have recourse to prevarication from time to time, but we do expect that a corporation that takes its secular tithe from our income should be honest about its doings. So it is that I find Room 237 endlessly fascinating. Room 237 is a documentary about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Winter is also an appropriate season to watch The Shining, so I took the ersatz experience of Room 237. This documentary, besides featuring some interesting conspiracies, also shows how religions may come to be.

Stanley Kubrick, as common knowledge goes, was a genius. In a day when movies are often pure escapism, much of it brainless, it might be surprising to consider a film-maker a literal genius, but anyone who’s watched one of Kubrick’s mature films is left in no doubt. The Shining, although based on the Stephen King novel, takes the story in very different directions, and there is much more going on in the film than first meets the eye. Room 237 interviews true Shining affectionados who find the “real” story line to be the genocide of Native Americans, the holocaust, a retelling of the minotaur myth, the faking of the filming of the moon landing, and a variety of other perceptions beyond the norm. Kubrick, known for the care he took in arranging every shot, clearly put subtexts into this film. What really caught my attention, however, was when one of the commentators said that he had his first real religious experience while watching 2001: A Space Odyssey.

2001 has always been one of my favorite movies. Simple and sometimes psychedelic, even with the novelization it is almost impossible to understand. With that haunting monolith, so like an outgrown iPhone, I found myself as a child believing in the evolution Kubrick suggested as a higher power led from ape to space in the instant of a bone toss. The majesty of that film that never lets humanity claim any true superiority still has the power to conjure nightmares that The Shining can’t. With the grand soundtrack of the opening of Also Sprach Zarathustra (himself the founder of a religion), I can understand how this might be a numinous experience. Movies function as modern myths, and, I contend, that is one reason that religious themes emerge so readily in great films. In Room 237 none of those interviewed considered any religious elements for The Shining, but no doubt, if an ape can walk on the moon, they’re there.

Let It Shine

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Stanley Kubrick was not the most prolific of movie makers, yet his efforts often create striking impressions. I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey at a young age, and it has remained one of my favorite films ever since. Although I’ve watched horror movies since my college years, I shied away from The Shining until about five years ago. By that point I’d seen enough clips and parodies to kind of know what to expect. Since finally viewing the original, it has become one of my most admired movies as well. Kubrick films may not be easily slotted into a genre, and The Shining is not a typical horror movie. There always seems to be something more going on in addition to the growing menace of Jack Torrance’s insanity. I’ve been hearing about Room 237 for a few months now, and I’m eager to see it. Room 237 is admittedly a movie about a movie, an exploration of how The Shining has inspired multiple interpretations of what most consider to be one of the scariest movies of all time.

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An article by Jay Kirk in the June edition of Harper’s Magazine examines this movie of a movie. Kirk is the cousin of Tim Kirk, the producer of Room 237, and offers a personal introspective of a mind under the spell of Kubrickian influence. The article, “The Shining Path: Room 237 and the Kubrick cult,” not surprisingly, keeps turning back to religion. It may be fallout from the Kirk cousins both being children of clergy, or it may be that effective horror films are, as I’ve maintained before, inherently religious. Even the meeting of the Kirk cousins takes place at Gaudi’s Sacred Family cathedral in Barcelona. It seems that there’s no way to get at The Shining without involving religion. Not that it’s a religious movie, but it may take some religion to understand it.

No doubt Stanley Kubrick was a deep man. Even those who try to interpret his movies end up adding a kind of hidden message of their own to the plethora of ideas he eloquently shot. I know nothing of Kubrick’s religious convictions, if any. Any film with the gravitas to inspire continuing hermeneutics over three decades after its release, however, will surely open itself to a kind of sanctification. The penultimate section of Kirk’s introspective focuses on Proverbs 3.5-8, a passage underlined in his grandmother’s Bible. To understand the genius behind The Shining, it seems, religion will have to be part of the discussion.