This is a long post and it sounds crazy at first, but finish reading it and it will pay off.
While standing on the shoulders of giants, I’ve found that there are at least a few people who have a similar perception to mine. There are those who put dots on paper, there are those who connect them, and then there are some who do both. Stanley Kubrick happens to be capable of both. I haven’t seen every movie he’s made, but of the ones I have seen, it is absolutely impossible to soak in all of the thick symbolism he has painted over the narratives. There was a point where I could not sit through an entire movie of his, but you can’t blame me for being born in the generation I was born in. 99% of the movies that have come out in my lifetime are summer blockbuster popcorn movies, which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad. Excluding some of Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese, Cameron, Scott, and now Nolan’s work, most movies since the 80s don’t have much to say, but being a human being of the male sex born on Earth and specifically in America, I instinctively like to watch shit blow up. I’ve read comic books off and on since I was 10ish, so the difference between good and bad pacing is ingrained in my head. I understood the concept of symbolism, but never paid much attention to it. I was the same way with the Beatles, meaning I didn’t get it at all, then one day it dawned on me. I’ve been looking for it in everything I see now, and have been for the last 4 years or so. Kubrick was the master of symbolism, in the same vein as Lennon/McCartney and Shakespeare. Ever since I got on this subtext kick, looking for what is hidden in plain view, I’ve purposely avoided Kubrick, because I knew when the time came I wouldn’t be able to see things the same way again. Like the moment where you stop listening to The Beatles, and start understanding The Beatles, the step between Revolver and Sgt. Pepper. The moment where you stop admiring the pretty pictures and are given access to the Rosetta Stone. My friend Chris got me to meet him at his recording studio, because he had something to show me. I got there and sat down, then he started playing Sgt. Pepper through the monitors, in order, and explained key points in the lyrics, structure, and recording, down to the sound effects between song transitions. When I left I was not capable of seeing The Beatles the way I had before. An Obi Wan Kenobi has Luke Skywalker cover his eyes with a helmet, to use the force to sense where the floating objects were moment. I just had another one of those moments, through the work of a scholar named Jay Weidner, an “authority on the hermetic and alchemical traditions,” and “erudite conspiracy hunter,”. His analysis of Stanley Kubrick is almost beyond human comprehension. You could never see it, but how could you ever miss it? Kubrick was the only filmmaker capable of pulling off such a paradoxical message. (as I’m writing this, someone drove past my house blaring “Fixing a Hole”)
While standing on the shoulders of giants, I’ve found that there are at least a few people who have a similar perception to mine. There are those who put dots on paper, there are those who connect them, and then there are some who do both. Stanley Kubrick happens to be capable of both. I haven’t seen every movie he’s made, but of the ones I have seen, it is absolutely impossible to soak in all of the thick symbolism he has painted over the narratives. There was a point where I could not sit through an entire movie of his, but you can’t blame me for being born in the generation I was born in. 99% of the movies that have come out in my lifetime are summer blockbuster popcorn movies, which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad. Excluding some of Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese, Cameron, Scott, and now Nolan’s work, most movies since the 80s don’t have much to say, but being a human being of the male sex born on Earth and specifically in America, I instinctively like to watch shit blow up. I’ve read comic books off and on since I was 10ish, so the difference between good and bad pacing is ingrained in my head. I understood the concept of symbolism, but never paid much attention to it. I was the same way with the Beatles, meaning I didn’t get it at all, then one day it dawned on me. I’ve been looking for it in everything I see now, and have been for the last 4 years or so. Kubrick was the master of symbolism, in the same vein as Lennon/McCartney and Shakespeare. Ever since I got on this subtext kick, looking for what is hidden in plain view, I’ve purposely avoided Kubrick, because I knew when the time came I wouldn’t be able to see things the same way again. Like the moment where you stop listening to The Beatles, and start understanding The Beatles, the step between Revolver and Sgt. Pepper. The moment where you stop admiring the pretty pictures and are given access to the Rosetta Stone. My friend Chris got me to meet him at his recording studio, because he had something to show me. I got there and sat down, then he started playing Sgt. Pepper through the monitors, in order, and explained key points in the lyrics, structure, and recording, down to the sound effects between song transitions. When I left I was not capable of seeing The Beatles the way I had before. An Obi Wan Kenobi has Luke Skywalker cover his eyes with a helmet, to use the force to sense where the floating objects were moment. I just had another one of those moments, through the work of a scholar named Jay Weidner, an “authority on the hermetic and alchemical traditions,” and “erudite conspiracy hunter,”. His analysis of Stanley Kubrick is almost beyond human comprehension. You could never see it, but how could you ever miss it? Kubrick was the only filmmaker capable of pulling off such a paradoxical message. (as I’m writing this, someone drove past my house blaring “Fixing a Hole”)
I am not committed to the idea that the Apollo moon landings were faked yet, but some researchers make a pretty damn good case, and I’m not talking about that Fox Television joke from the late 90s. For a good portion of this post, I’m going to pretend that what we saw was faked. That does not mean that I don’t think that we went to the moon. It means that the footage we saw was not of the moon. There are a few reasons to explain that, so I’ll give you my two favorites. One is that the film would have been ruined upon return from the moon, from passing through the Van Allen radiation belt that surrounds the earth, sort of like keeping old school film out of the sun, so they had to preemptively film something just in case, because no one would believe them if they had nothing to show, and the Soviets would crank up the disinformation to 11. Two is that we went to the moon, but we didn’t get there on a Saturn V rocket. You cannot deny the existence of deep black technology far beyond the tech they use publicly (example would be the B2 stealth bomber being around 40 years before being declassified), ESPECIALLY during the height of the Cold War. The USA and USSR were deceiving each other constantly. We don’t want to show the Russians what we have, so we fake a film of the moon landing using public NASA technology.
Kubrick was in touch with the military brass at the Pentagon in the early 60s, sending them a request for access to the inside and outside of a real B-52 bomber. The Pentagon denied his request, predicting that the film would be showing the United States in a bad light. Kubrick completed the movie anyway, and successfully recreated an almost exact replica of the inside of a B-52 by pasting together partial pictures from military magazines and newspapers. The Pentagon was not happy with the way the film portrayed them, but they were beyond impressed by the special effects, which were revolutionized by Kubrick, and the near perfect replica of the bomber.
From here on out, this is where it gets hypothetical. It will seem like a long shot at first, but stick with it. You won’t be disappointed.
John F. Kennedy sets the goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. That would be a tall order, even today, but on top of that he had his brains scattered all over the back of a convertible, right out in plain view. Now we’re obligated to go to the moon, because it is what he would have wanted L. We are in the Cold War with the USSR, so there is a constant game of disinformation and psychological operations (psy-ops), including going so far as to running psy-ops on the American people, especially with topics that are on a “need to know” basis. You never show your enemy what you are capable of, and that includes how advanced your technology really is (or isn’t because there was without a doubt a ton of bluffing on both sides).
So we are going to the moon, but we don’t want to show the Commies how advanced our tech really is, and or maybe there is something we don’t think the public is ready to see yet, that was or maybe still is, on the moon. So we gotta fake a moon landing, based on primitive combustion engine technology. Show those Commies that we can compete in the space race too, using your caveman rockets no less. Your choices were between two heavy weights, the up and comer Stanley Kubrick, or the drunk/fat asshole Orson Welles. Kubrick takes the deal. He already had 2001 A Space Odyssey working around in his head, and being the genius that he was, he knew it would cost a lot. It is well known that Kubrick is a hardcore negotiator, so lets say that he takes the job, with a deal stating that he will be able to make any movie he ever wanted, with his full control over the writing, editing, producing, and directing with an unlimited budget. Since we are living in the future, we can look back and see that Kubrick did make whatever he wanted to make, and had near unlimited budgets, for making movies that everyone went to see, but no one could really understand what he was saying. There is a VERY good case made by Jay Weidner, showing the same filming techniques used by Kubrick in 2001 on the moon landings, down to the little signatures you only saw in Kubrick’s films at the time. I am not going to get into the evidence of a fake moon landing on this post, though I may in the future. I’m just going to show you the confession that Stanley gave us, through The Shining, with the proverbial Rosetta Stone provided by Jay Weidner, whose work I cannot recommend enough.
The Shining is a Stephen King novel, but the movie is not the novel. The novel is the vessel used by Kubrick to send his confession, and possibly a half-hearted apology. It isn’t hard to imagine that making a deal like that would mean that if you ever talked, or even looked remotely like you were about to talk, you would be killed. Luckily for us, Kubrick is, was, and always will be the master of subtext. Here is the initial abridged version of the Rosetta Stone. More will be deeply explained later on in the post.
ROSETTA STONE FOR THE SHINING
Jack Torrance = Stanley Kubrick’s grown up side who wants to be a great and important artist, willing to do anything to attain it. Practical and pragmatic.
Danny Torrance = Stanley Kubrick’s child like side, the real artist, innocent, semi psychic in the sense that he can see what others do not see.
The Overlook Hotel = The United States of America
THE CONFESSION
The two main characters are Jack and Danny Torrance. Jack is taking his family to the Overlook Hotel, to be the caretaker for the winter months. Jack walks in, and heads to the managers office. If you didn’t notice, besides Jack, the Manager, Danny, and Jack’s wife Wendy all wear red, white, and blue for the first hour of the film. In the Manager’s office, above his right shoulder sits an eagle statue, the American symbol, as well as an American flag on his desk.
The eagle symbolizes the power behind the manager, and is also the name of the lunar module. The deal is that as long as Jack (Kubrick) takes care of the Overlook (America), he can write (create) as much as he wants. The manager then reluctantly reveals that the previous caretaker hacked his twin daughters to death, after being driven crazy. In the novel, the previous caretaker only had one daughter, this change will make sense later on. Jack takes the deal anyway. If you needed anymore symbolic evidence to be convinced that the Overlook is America, look no further! Besides all of the blatant Native American artwork all over the place, the manager just outright tells Jack that, “the hotel was built on the graves of Indians”. Another little tidbit of information is that the actor playing the manager, Barry Nelson, was wearing a toupee…
A toupee that made him look suspiciously like someone who had a management position, who stated that America needed to go to the moon, not because it was easy, but because it was hard.
Here is a quote from Jay Weidner about Kubrick’s symbolism, “if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a symbol is worth a thousand pictures. For it will be through the use of symbol that the real story of The Shining can be revealed.“
All Jack’s job requires is that he makes sure the hotel does not look like it is decaying. While Jack and the Manager are talking, Danny meets Dick Halorann, who discovers that Danny has the same ability as him. He calls it the Shining. He can see Danny for who he is and who he will be (if you look deeper into the book, the entity that Danny is communicating with telepathically is actually himself from the future, warning him). Halorann warns Danny to keep away from room 237, another revision from the book, where the number was 217, but this comes into play later as well.
The winter storms have begun, and the family is settling in to the Overlook. The change is taking place in Jack, shown by his inability to sleep, and then later shown by the scene of him in his “work room”, throwing a tennis ball at the wall, until he throws it one time and the ball doesn’t come back, but Jack doesn’t seem to notice, and walks off. Pay close attention to what is on the wall…
Native American artwork that looks suspiciously like rockets… you know, those things that NASA uses to hurl stuff into space. He then walks over to the miniature mock maze on a table in the room, where he sees Wendy and Danny in the center of it, like rats in a maze, oblivious to the deal that has been made, the deal that is beginning to wear on Jack. Remember that Jack and Danny BOTH represent Kubrick, with one being the practical pragmatist artist, and the other being the child like savant true artist.
Wendy says to Danny, in a childlike competitive nature, in a race out of the maze, “last one out has to keep America clean”. Starting to get the symbolic reference yet? Hotel = America. The next shot is them running to the door, to get inside, with a major white winter storm blowing around them.
The heavy white winter storm represents the Cold War.
Another Cold War reference would be all the teddy bears seen throughout the movie, a constant reminder that the deal is much bigger than just deceiving America, which in itself probably made Kubrick uncomfortable, and could be the reason why he moved to London, and rarely, if ever, came back to America. I believe that we have highly advanced technology, made evident by the UFO phenomena seen since WW2, technology that you want to keep secret. If this is the case with the moon landings, I’d have reason to believe that Kubrick wasn’t privy to why he was faking them. His only job was to fake them. Compartmentalization, on a need to know basis.
The next important part is the classic steady cam shot of Danny riding his tricycle down the halls, making a corner, and coming up to the twin daughters saying, “come play with us Danny”.
Don’t forget that Danny is one part of Kubrick, making this scene a representation of his subconscious realization that he may have made a deal with the devil, per say, and hoping that just covering his eyes will make it go away, which it does temporarily. He shows Danny using that childlike psychic ability that people lose once they are put through school, where they can see things for what they are, instead of being told what they should be, a trait that Kubrick never lost, made self evident in his movies. Also remember that the previous caretaker in the book did not have twins, so this is an alteration made by Kubrick for a very important reason. The next scene is where you will start to get the pay off from reading this post.
Danny is in the hallway playing with his trucks on a very 70s looking carpet, with typical 70s geometrical designs. As Danny is playing, the ball that Jack didn’t notice was swallowed up by the Overlook earlier makes it’s way to Danny, rolling up to him perfectly symmetrical down a line.
The ball that the practical Jack (adult part of Kubrick) was throwing, that got swallowed up by the Overlook, has rolled up to Danny, the savant innocent true artist, symbolizing the Overlook (America) now needs to tap into the childlike brilliant artist part of Kubrick. That carpet design looks sort of familiar…
You may know it as Cape Canaveral. Rockets shoot out of it. So what? It’s just a coincidence. Kids play with toy trucks, and sometimes they use the geometrical designs provided by the carpets they play on. Big deal. No rocket. Debunked. Our government would never fake anythi…
( this song goes perfectly with the next picture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWnmCu3U09w&feature=related )
Look at Danny’s sweater. It is a crudely sewn Apollo 11 USA. Lifting off of Cape Canaveral. In the narrative of the story, he is standing up to see where the ball was rolled from, thinking it was his dad. He slowly walks towards a room with the door slightly open.
The door happens to be room 237. The very room Dick Halorann warned Danny to stay away from. So why would Kubrick change the number of the room in the story, from 217 to 237? Danny, symbolizing Apollo 11, is making his way towards room 237. 237,000 miles happens to be the average distance between the Earth and the Moon. You can debate the decimal point all you want, but at the time of the Apollo missions, and also the making of this movie later on in 1980, all textbooks said the Moon was 237,000 miles away from Earth. Danny hesitantly walks into the room looking for Jack. We do not get to see what happens, meaning that we do not get to see how the artist created his works. Also on the key chain is the word “ROOM” and the letter “N”. This is a long shot, but you can rearrange the letters to spell, doubling some, to “Moon Room”.
The next scene is Jack telling Wendy the dream he had, where he hacked them into little pieces, and as he is speaking Danny slowly walks in traumatized, sucking his thumb. Wendy begins to think that Jack hurt Danny. Jack heads to the Gold Room to cool off, which is the bar of the Overlook, completely devoid of any people or alcohol. Under his breath, he mentions something along the lines of selling his soul for a drink, when Lloyd pops into existence, along with a fully stocked bar.
Given how he looks, the color of his jacket, the lighting, and the manner that he appeared, you can assume that Lloyd represents the devil. By taking the job, Kubrick would have had access to the elite of the world, but given the nature of the job, Kubrick really had no one to talk to about it, definitely not his wife, who could obviously see signs of damage in his psyche (represented by Danny in the movie). Lloyd is the only person Jack has access to talk to given his situation. In the middle of the conversation and glass of scotch, Wendy comes running in.
She suspects someone is in the hotel will them, asking Jack to go check room 237. Jack goes, and like Danny, he hesitantly opens the door to look around. He sees a beautiful woman in the bathtub who gets up and walks up to him, they begin to kiss, but through the mirror Jack begins to see that she isn’t a beautiful young woman, but is a decrepit old hag, with her skin rotting off. The scene shows that nothing real ever happens in room 237. Room 237 represents the sound stage where Kubrick staged the moon landings. Some more evidence that you should note is that when Jack finds Wendy he tells her that no one is in that room, even though he had just seen someone in there. Lies are not real. Lies come from room 237. In real life, Kubrick had to lie to his wife, even though she saw the effects of something weighing heavily on him.
Jack heads back to the Gold Room bar, but now it is filled with people in 1920s garb. He had just lied to his wife, after having the earlier conversation with Lloyd, the only person he could talk to about the project. Because he lied, he is now initiated and he can see all of the people in the Gold Room, the elite of the world. Remember earlier in the film the Manager tells Jack and Wendy, “all the best people stay here”. He sits at the bar and Lloyd gives him a drink. He begins to feel relief, now he feels like a part of them, so he gets up to walk around, but just before he gets to walk among them a waiter spills something all over his shirt, forcing Jack back to reality, reminding him that he is just the hired help. He will never truly be one of them, and this fact is reinforced in the bathroom by Grady, the last caretaker, the one who hacked his twins the pieces. Now it parallels between Stanley Kubrick and Jack Torrance begin to get interesting…
{EDIT May 26} This just dawned on me. Jack goes into room 237. He sees the young woman. They kiss. She turns out to be rotting corpse. Could that mean that on the moon they found remains of a civilization? Her being young at first could be the naivety of the people running the real space program, not NASA. It’s the moon, it’s a new place, with new discoveries. They get there and find out that maybe we had been there before, thousands of years earlier, or that another civilization had lived there, or maybe still does, so the old lady could symbolize the age of the civilization? Like I had earlier in the post, one of my favorite reasons for them possibly being forced to fake the moon landings was because there are things up there, lots of them, be it derelict infrastructure or even living beings actually walking around, things that our society is not mature enough to come to grips with yet, since a good portion of the planet still relies on faith based belief systems that really equal to an abuser/abused relationship between a deity and it’s playthings. The realization that there is intelligent life beyond us could potentially put a huge hole in the pockets of the oil cartels. Assuming that the crazier exotic UFOs are actually intelligently controlled non terrestrials, by noticing they don’t make noise, can make 90-180 degree turns at 20 thousand mph, and can seem to blip in and out of sight, it might be safe to assume they are running on something other than gasoline, and most likely far beyond using simple Newtonian physics to make the machinery work, if it is even machinery at all. Look up Jacque Vallee. He can make what I said sound good. {END EDIT}
Jack heads back to the Gold Room bar, but now it is filled with people in 1920s garb. He had just lied to his wife, after having the earlier conversation with Lloyd, the only person he could talk to about the project. Because he lied, he is now initiated and he can see all of the people in the Gold Room, the elite of the world. Remember earlier in the film the Manager tells Jack and Wendy, “all the best people stay here”. He sits at the bar and Lloyd gives him a drink. He begins to feel relief, now he feels like a part of them, so he gets up to walk around, but just before he gets to walk among them a waiter spills something all over his shirt, forcing Jack back to reality, reminding him that he is just the hired help. He will never truly be one of them, and this fact is reinforced in the bathroom by Grady, the last caretaker, the one who hacked his twins the pieces. Now it parallels between Stanley Kubrick and Jack Torrance begin to get interesting…
Jack begins to start losing it. He starts to look disheveled.
Before the filming of 2001 A Space Odyssey, Stanly Kubrick was still a young vibrant director, but on double duty, he began to look like he was falling apart.
Notice that Jack Nicholson and Stanley Kubrick are the same height, same size, same hairline, same facial hair, and nearly the same age. Even notice the tilt of Jack’s head in the photo above, and the position he is holding his eyebrows in, compared to Kubrick’s eyebrows.
Jack is able to start writing again, after he seems to have sold his soul completely. The beginning of the film is Kubrick’s dancing with the deal in his head, represented by Jack trying to write, but being stuck bouncing a ball off of the wall, contemplating if it would be a good idea. The Danny scenes, especially the hallway to room 237, is Kubrick’s artistic side figuring out how he is going to pull it off. The initial Gold Room scene with Lloyd is Kubrick working out the particulars. The event in room 237, and the lie to his wife after, is the signing of the contract. The spilling of what looks like hollandaise sauce on his Jack’s jacket is the realization that he may be rubbing elbows with them, but he will never be them, but he will always be their servant. This is made clear in the bathroom scene with Grady.
Wendy (Kubrick’s wife obviously) wants to see what he is writing (working on). When she asks Jack if she can see it, he blows up in her face. She leaves the room, but sneaks back in later to see what he is writing, and who could forget,
“all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. All. Apollo 11. “A11” represents Apollo 11. Stanley Kubrick, a known stickler, pays attention to detail. He has two major productions going on at the same exact time, 2001 and the Apollo moon landings. All work and no play was not in the book.
Wendy becomes frightened, thumbing through hundreds of pages of one line. Jack appears behind her and begins to get infuriated. This could represent when Mrs. Kubrick accidentally found out what Stanley was working on. Wendy asks him to stop, and he responds with something along the lines of “I MADE AN AGREEMENT WITH MY EMPLOYERS AND I INTEND TO SEE IT THROUGH”. If you made a secret deal with a government that isn’t afraid to get it’s hands bloody and someone asked you to give it up, what choice would you really have?
Earlier in the story, Danny called out to Halorann for help, with the Shining (psychic ability).
On his way in, through the snow, on the side of the road you can see a large truck lying on top of a red Volkswagen Beetle. In the beginning of the movie the family drove to the hotel in a yellow Beetle, but in the novel it was red. The crushed red Beetle is a message to Stephen King directly, as if he didn’t see already that Kubrick had changed the story. It was a message to King saying that he purposely crushed King’s vehicle. King has made it pretty clear that he wasn’t happy with the film after. Kubrick was always beyond worried about what people would think of his movies, and this message, along with other blatant ones, was maybe Kubrick saying to King that if this movie was hated the blame could be put solely on Kubrick.
The twins were a big alteration in between the novel and film, but a critical one. Not only are they iconic in the history of film, but also in the history of NASA. Why would Kubrick give Grady twins instead of one daughter? The NASA program before Apollo was Gemini. In Greek mythology Gemini were twins, Castor and Pollux.
Here are 6 crates of 7up. There were 7 missions to land on the moon, only 6 of them “landed”.
Behind Jack in this picture are boxes that say 39,000. The Apollo missions took off from launch pad 39. Other boxes say Golden Rey. The Sun God Apollo shoots golden rays.
Behind Jack here are some cans of Tang, supposedly the favorite drink of the moon landing astronauts.
Final shot of the Shining. Jack is finally initiated in the elites party, but now it is for eternity, and he regrets it. He is trying to tell us something by showing us the note in his hand, but the man behind him is trying to push his hand down so that the note isn’t shown. Guess what’s in the note.
- Leland Dupuy
