Rodney Ascher’s film is about what Henry James called the figure in the carpet, the mysterious meaning hidden in plain sight. It’s an essay in interpretive heresy and critical dissent. The subject is Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, based on the 1977 novel by Stephen King. Ascher declines to approach it in terms of the conventional consensus established by reviewers and pundits. Instead, he talks to fanatical Shining obsessives who have developed outlandish theories and found sensational occult clues in the tiny, subliminally glimpsed details, in the strange perspectives, continuity errors and Escher-like physical inconsistencies in the layout of the Overlook Hotel. Kubrick was himself a detail obsessive, and that fact makes these theories very seductive. The ideas about The Shining as a meditation on historical guilt and the return of the repressed are powerful. And there is, literally, a strange figure in the carpet. The movie’s flaw is that it is sometimes unclear if it really is about The Shining – or merely about cracked and delusional interpreters. But it raises very interesting ideas about how we view a film, about what happens if we take the act of viewing down to a deeper, molecular level, and about how a movie’s significance and effect need not be those intentionally willed by the director.
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Über Frank
Seit 1996 bin ich freier Mitarbeiter der Salzgitter-Zeitung, als Experte für das Geschehen im hiesigen Kreisfußball. Daneben sind meine Kolumnen seit 2005 fester Bestandteil im Lokalteil der Salzgitter-Zeitung. Zusammen mit Frau und Tochter sowie zwei gefräßigen wie faulen Stubentigern versuche ich das zu meistern, was das Leben, das Universum und der ganze Rest an Absurditäten für uns bereithalten.
