Room 237: The Review
I was terribly excited when my friend George told me about Room 237, because George had turned me into a The Shining addict.
See, The Shining was a source of deep disappointment to me for years – it’s one of my favorite Stephen King books, but the movie version was cold, antiseptic, and not at all surprising. The whole point of the book was that you sympathized with Jack Torrance at first, and then he became a monster – with Jack Nicholson playing him, he was a lunatic from that first slimy, leery-eyed smile. All of the family love that I adored about the Shining, where dysfunctional people who really cared about each other were teased into murder by the machinations of the hotel, had completely disappeared.
And then George started sending me videos.
The video that first got me was this analysis of the Shining’s literally impossible architecture, where there’s an office with an outside window where there logically could be none – and watch how carefully Kubrick has the camera follow Jack into that office, as if he wanted to show you just how crazy this all was. There’s enough of those impossibilities that it becomes far more than your standard set-building shortcuts, and more like a subliminal effect Kubrick purposely built in:
And the more you know about Kubrick, the more you suspect he did it on purpose. The man was a genius with a 200 IQ, an obsessive Freudian, prone to thinking in abstract terms. He was meticulous about his sets, spending literally millions on 2001: A Space Odyssey to make sure that everything in the movie was space-ready and compliant with what NASA knew about space, even though no one else would care. He placed cans on sets by himself, arranging them for his own purposes. He gave Shelly Duvall a nervous breakdown during the filming of the Shining, forcing her to do a scene 200+ times until he was satisfied for reasons that nobody else on the set understood, setting a Guinness World Record for the number of takes. (He might have broken that record with Scatman Crothers, were it not for people yelling at him with concerns that the elderly Scatman couldn’t take it any more.)
So if there’s one filmmaker ever who would have scattered his film with obscure references to tell an alternate story, it is Kubrick – revered, popular, given big-budget movies and no Hollywood control.
And if you look closely at the Shining, there are some very weird things happening that don’t make sense. The architecture shifting is one thing; there’s clearly a body coming out of the elevator of blood in another. There’s something going on beneath the surface, and given that Kubrick liked his films to be rewatched, some of those details are meant to be seen.
But then you have the guy who claims that the movie is actually about the genocide of the Indians, based purely on the fact that in two scenes, there are Calumet cans of baking soda, and they’re turned different ways.
What I wanted from Room 237, which documents these various Shining conspiracy theories, was to take us on the emotional journey – set it up that reclusive, cryptic Kubrick was the kind of guy who did crazy shit like this. Show us the most obvious bits of mindfuckery so we’d go, “Oh, man, look! He really fucked us on that one, I never noticed – what else is there?” Then, bit by bit, show us increasingly dubious or arguable tricks of The Shining, stepping us further into conspiracy nutjob things, so by the time we get to the theory that The Shining is Kubrick’s encoded apology for faking the moon landing footage, we’re sitting there questioning everything we know. Was any of this planned? Was all of it? Where do you draw the line on Kubrick’s intention?
But no. The film is incompetent – just six faceless nutjobs rambling on their various theories. The film starts with the Calumet can theory, one of the most ludicrous, shooting its wad in one go. It barely touches on the legitimate reasons people think there might be a hidden message in the movie, ignores Kubrick mostly, giving no history, throwing out various weird bits of the Shining as if they’re all equal.
Now, some of my friends have liked Room 237 because it’s a look at conspiracy thinking, which I can see – the way these people obsess over crazy details, spending more time on an extra with no lines than all of Scatman Crothers’ scenes. But the movie starts by trashing the very idea that there might be any legitimacy in these theories to begin with, then letting these guys drone on for ninety minutes with no unifying theme. And they’re boring. I maintain you could have made a way more interesting film out of this even if you just wanted to use The Shining as a meditation on how crazy conspiracy theorists get.
The film’s so incompetent that at one point, a crying child interrupts one of the narrators. Do we cut this out of the film? No. We wait for fifteen seconds in silence, the film paused, while he tends to his kid. It’s like they weren’t even trying, man.
So Who Wants To Play Some Fiasco?
If you remember my review of Fiasco, the gamemaster-less RPG, you’ll recall that I liked it quite a bit. Playing desperate, Coen Brothers-style people in small towns is quite fun, and a very writerly exercise in trying to map out a story collectively.
Which is why we’ll be playing a game of Fiasco at my house this Sunday with our friends Tim and Dani. The game can support up to six players, and is very heavy on acting and conceptualization. There’s no dice rolls to hit, no hit points, just Scene and Resolution and The Turn. Witty dialogue and surprising characterization is your best bet.
If you’re in Cleveland and would like to play, hit me up via comment or email and I’ll slot you in.
Why Polyamory Has Less Drama, Then More Drama, Then More Drama, Than Monogamy.
It took us a while for Gini and I to come out as polyamorous, mainly because we were so embarrassed by the drama-hungry yahoos who identified themselves as poly. We didn’t want to stand next to them. All those constant breakups, the weird infighting, the immature dorks constantly whining about their evil exes? Most polyamory was a big stew of ugly drama, and we didn’t wanna be associated with that.
As we’ve talked to more poly couples, though, we’ve learned that polyamorous relationships actually have less drama associated with them than monogamous ones. And that’s because every fight affects not just you, but the entire web of relationships.
Which is to say that if I’m dating Margery exclusively and we have a nasty fight that lasts all night, that affects only us. The reason we’re having the fight is, presumably, because we want to keep this relationship going, and we can spend months involved in daily battles trying to figure out how to make this crumbling twosome work without it exhausting anyone but our friends. Are we compatible? Who cares? We think we could be compatible, and so we have the luxury of going at each other like cats and dogs for years! And who knows? Maybe we’ll find a way to spin our dysfunction into gold! Gini and I certainly had a rough start, but we worked it out.
But in poly, I have limited energy to spend, and how I spend that energy affects my whole web of relationships.
See, if I’m also dating Dani, then she’s going to see how strung out I am by my miserable relationship with Margery. Chances are good if it’s a really angsty relationship that we’ll have a few nice times torpedoed by Margery – maybe it’s as direct as a Margery picking a fight with me in the middle of a date with Dani, maybe it’s as subtle as me being worn out and unable to relax when we’re snuggled up because ZOMG WHAT’S GOING ON WITH MARGERY. And unless we have a handy “I don’t want to know” barrier in place, sometimes Dani will be a friend to bounce thoughts about Margery afterwards, which means too many of our conversations will turn into impromptu therapy sessions on WHY IS SHE BEING SO UNREASONABLE.
Which means if I can’t get it together with Margery, eventually it’s going to tank my relationship with Dani.
That’s a thing I haven’t seen written up a lot on in polyamory; the fact that playing nice is not just a good idea, but often a requirement for long-term multiple relationships. The saying in poly is that love is endless, but time is limited. If I only get one date a week with you, and that date has you constantly seething and distracted because of this other dude, then eventually I’m getting starved of my happiness for factors that aren’t under my control. Which becomes unfair. I’ve broken it off with people not because I didn’t think I could have worked it out with them, but because the amount of energy it would have taken to fix things between us would have stolen needed emotional resources from Gini.
So you have to play fair and be reasonable in poly relationships, or else the problem self-corrects. So many healthy polyamorous relationships hum like a fine-tuned engine, with only a couple of major blowups to get past the things that low-key talk can’t solve.
But.
But.
If you’re into drama – and many people love being the star of their own soap opera – then yeah, poly affords you an endless opportunity to entangle yourself in huge webs of villains and heroes (although today’s heros always seem to become tomorrow’s villains). You don’t have to self-improve – all you have to do is find a new partner who doesn’t know you that well! And so you’ll swing from relationship to relationship, always on the verge of a breakup, always convinced that perfection is around the corner, and became a sort of Drama Generation Unit where nothing you do is really cheating or harmful, hey, it’s poly!
It’s the 80/20 rule. 80% of the people in any given group are nice, quiet, and sane. But 20% are loud and ugly, and they account for 80% of the terrible stuff that the rest of the world overhears. So yeah, in my experience good poly is usually more low-key than good monogamy… and you never notice that because the good poly relationships are nearly invisible. But bad poly? It’s like they want to draw you in, because they need more people to take sides. And that leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths, because when you’re in a subculture, all you need is one passionately dysfunctional partner who identifies as X to make all Xs seem crazy.
Then there’s the fact that breakups are usually a little bit dramatic. Oh, there are good breakups – the ones where you both go, “It’s time” – but most breakups involve a disproportional hurt because one person’s done and the other isn’t. So even if you’re trying to be very good and noble and kind about it, there’s often going to be little spats of childishness on both sides as one person throws a tantrum because dammit why did they go, and the other sullenly says, well, I made the decision to leave, why can’t they get over it?
And maybe it’s not the biggest drama in the world – but when you have multiple relationships, you’re gonna have multiple breakups, and that leads to a little more poly drama. Maybe not a lot, if you’re good, but even a good breakup involves more angst than many are comfortable with.
Regardless, it’s not a race to see which is better; it’s which you’re more comfortable with. I’m not trying to say that that monogamy is better or worse than poly. Both styles have their strengths and weaknesses – some day, I’ll write about how in my experience, good monogamy usually involves a lot less maintenance time than good polyamory. And I think if you’re fatally drama-allergic, then polyamory may be a model that you struggle in.
But that’s not my real point. The point is that if you’re in a polyamorous relationship, you have to remember that your drama spreads to touch all the other people on the web – unless they’ve specifically blocked you off for that, which leads to its own challenges in interacting. It’s not just your partner you’re having a huge uproar with, it’s everyone within your circle, and as such it’s in your best interests to be as rational, understanding, and reasonable about it. Or, as noted, the problem will self-correct.
Updates on Shaving, And Bees
Shaving News
Today, I passed a major milestone: the shave I gave myself with my straight razor was far better than I could have achieved with a disposable razor.
Floyd he straight razor’s performance has been, if you’ll pardon the phrase, neck-and-neck with my old Gillette. Trusty Floyd was closer on the flat areas like my cheeks, but turned a little treacherous when it came to the curves of my jaw, leaving me a little patchy. The Gillette was more constant, giving me a mediocre shave all around.
But I learned how to do the triple-pass – I have to shave three times to get the perfect shave – and how to angle Floyd to maneuver around the hollows of my throat. Today’s shave is cut-free and baby-smooth.
Therefore, I’ll say that it takes about two months of straight razor shaving before you get – pardon me again – the edge on the competition.
*takes off sunglasses*
YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH
Updates On Our Bees
The bees are a major draw to this blog, but we haven’t updated in a while because of this bitterly cold winter. Every day we’ve been tempted to get all up in our bees, it’s been forty degrees.
What we do know are two things:
1) The mean bees, the ones that stung us, are dead. We haven’t seen a single bee poke its head out. And we’re a little grateful for that, as we’d have had to requeen.
2) Our good bees are struggling. There’s only a handful of them flying out, and we suspect most of them died. We have been feeding them, and it’s been a slow process as they rebuild; I hope the queen is alive in there. We’re hoping to check next week, but it’s not like there’s really anything extra we can do for them at this stage, so there’s no sense opening up their insulated hive to freezing winds. (There’s predictions of snow tomorrow. SNOW.)
Current plan is to get into the dead beehive, empty out the bees, and introduce a fresh box of bees to the old home of the dead ones. A little morbid, but it means those bees will have a jump-start; they won’t need to waste their initial efforts (and food supplies!) on building comb. Which means we can hope these new bees will thrive. The old bees, well, when we get in there, I have a sneaking suspicion they may be trying to birth a new queen. We’ll see when we get in there.
The biggest hope is that after three seasons of beekeeping, we will actually get honey from a hive. No, we have yet to do this. The first year, our bees had produced enough we probably could have taken some, but we were worried that if we skimmed too much honey they might not survive the winter. Last year was a scarcer season, and the queen separator we purchased kept the bees out of the honey super entirely. So not a single drop.
This year. This year will be sweet. I can feel it in my bees.
On Finding The Terrorists: A Bleak Truth.
Here’s the scary thing no one wants to face: anyone with a grudge could be a terrorist.
That’s the only criteria. Could be a white guy, could be a brown guy. Could be a Christian, could be a Muslim. Could be left-wing, could be right-wing.
Yet we yearn in our hearts to have terrorists be a single, concrete mass. It’s why everyone wears identical jumpsuits in fictional bad guy organizations. We want to be able to look at a group of people and go, “There they are. That’s what a homicidal lunatic looks like.”
The truth? A homicidal lunatic looks pretty much like everyone else. Some of them are intense, and weird, and withdrawn…. but so are a lot of people who don’t bomb civilians. Some of them are well-liked in their neighborhood and sunny, and they have zero problem slaughtering anyone who gets in their way. Some were bullied, some are bullies. Some of are intensely religious, some atheists.
The truth is that homicidal maniacs are not a separate group, but a subset of us. They crack in different ways, for different reasons; there’s no real unifying reason that people decide to kill others. Anyone could do it, theoretically. You’d have to know them real well, perhaps better than they’d let you, to realize this shit was boiling inside of them.
The real terror is that it’s fucking hard to tell when someone’s about to snap this way. Nobody wants to think that their neighbors, their buddies, their friends’ sons would ever be capable of violence. So we keep trying to slot the latest terrorist fuckery into some category for our comfort, going, “These are the bad guys.” And then, having determined What Makes People Nuts, we can return to less-concerned lives, where once we deal with Those People we’ll have solved the problem forever and ever.
You can sleep easier once you’re absolutely certain that nobody you know would ever kill. But you have to take some shortcuts to do it.