Cinema: Red Herrings and Refusals

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This is a movie of false clues and red herrings. It is a measure of Kubrick's artistry that he states his only supernatural theme, that of reincarnation, so lightly that it could be missed entirely. One has to connect the enigmatic scene involving a nude woman in Room 237 with the film's last image, of a photograph taken in 1921, in order to apprehend it. That, too, could be a false clue, since everything Nicholson does can be attributed to psychosis, to a weakened mind placed under intolerable pressure by isolation.

It is a daring thing the director has done, this bleaching out of all the cheap thrills, this dashing of all the hopes one brings to what is, after all, advertised as "a masterpiece of modern horror." Certainly he has asked much of Nicholson, who must sustain attention in a hugely unsympathetic role, and who responds with a brilliantly crazed performance.

It may be that this is a canonical work, something that only those who find Stanley Kubrick to be one of the world's great living film artists will respond to. By taking a book by an author who is at the center of the craze for the supernatural, and turning it into a refusal of and subtle comment on that loopy cultural phenomenon, Kubrick has made a movie that will have to be reckoned with on the highest level.

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