David and Tamler wander through the maze of Room 237, the great documentary by Rodney Ascher about five people and their views about what Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" is really about. When do interpretations become conspiracy theories? Why does Ascher never show us the faces of the interpreters? What is about Kubrick that invites obsessive and confident theorizing on the meaning of his movies? Sometimes a paper tray is just a paper tray. Or is it? Plus Tamler vents about the winter storm and mass power outages in Texas last week…
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[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. Welcome
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[00:23:04] and support Tamler's bottled water needs. Yes. Toilet flushing needs. Nice. So thank you everybody for all your support. Yeah, thank you. All right, let's talk about something that isn't at all related to this current situation. By the way, one of the things
[00:23:25] that I think both you and I appreciate so much about even being able to record even when it's hard is that we get to forget things for like the blissful couple hours where we're recording about just lose ourselves in something that has nothing to do
[00:23:36] with the pain of reality. Yeah, totally. It's like playing sports or something like that. But without the added benefits of exercise. Yeah, you still get the aches from being at the computer too long. Definitely do my sore in places that I can't describe. Why?
[00:23:55] Are you jerking off right now? If you're asking, I have an ergonomic chair that does wonders for my back, but it hurts my ass a lot. So I do feel like not only do you fuck me regularly with the things that you say, but I feel fucked regularly.
[00:24:14] Sounds like you have a very tender ass. It's this, it's this. You look back behind him and of course you can see very clearly because Kubrick was the master of depth of field. He kept everything in focus so he would have lots of space
[00:24:29] in which to put things that he wanted you to notice. And then the first shot behind Jack sitting at his typewriter, back against a wall behind him probably 10 or 12 or 15 feet is a chair. And then there's a switch to a one shot of Wendy saying something.
[00:24:47] Hey, where the forecast said it's gonna snow tonight? And then the camera switches back to Jack and the chair is gone. All right, so room two, three, seven directed by the documentary filmmaker Rodney Asher. It's a, this movie kind of zigzags through the theories and interpretations
[00:25:15] of five people who are obsessed with Stanley Kubrick's film, The Shining. The people are Bill Blakemore, Jeffrey Cox, Julie Kearns, John Fel Ryan, and Jay Weedner. The theories range from pretty plausible. In fact, like some of them I'm like totally on board with
[00:25:35] to the totally wacky, almost paranoid but they all have, all of them have these kernels of insight. And honestly, sometimes it's hard to tell them apart. Who's talking? Is that the same person? Sometimes you hear somebody who says something really smart. That's the same person who thinks Kubrick
[00:25:52] faked the moon landing and The Shining is confessing his faking the moon landing. I don't know, but I think Rodney Asher the director here, the documentary and makes the choice never to show their faces. And so he wants us to be kind of confused about that.
[00:26:08] And he also never explicitly tips his hand about what he thinks of these interpretations. And he certainly doesn't fact check any of them. Like there were a couple of times I was like, can you fact check what he's saying? I don't think that's right, but it might be.
[00:26:22] So you end up with this kind of collage of ideas and possibilities and personalities. And it's definitely about The Shining because there's a lot of cool footage of The Shining and details that I didn't notice. But it's also this movie about conspiracies in general
[00:26:41] and also art and interpretation. It's about authorial intent and dangerous kind of obsession. And I think this is a really, I don't think it was one of the first but it was an early in the genre of like video essays on films.
[00:26:56] And I was wondering whether that has become an art form of its own. But before we get to any of that, I just need to know, Dave, which of these theories on The Shining did you find to be the most plausible?
[00:27:11] You know, I was thinking that as I was watching. First of all, I love this movie. I think you're really right to point out that it is a video essay and something like this might. It's good that this got a release as a movie.
[00:27:25] I think it deserves a release as a movie not to poo poo YouTube. But I feel like that's where it would go now as we were talking before, like the budget was like slightly over $5,000. I feel like there are YouTubers who spend a lot of money on it.
[00:27:40] But I'm glad it got a release. And I love, I really love this movie for maybe different reasons than you but you asked me the question, which one am I most likely to believe? And you're much more sympathetic to the, on the face of it, plausibility
[00:27:56] that these people are right. I will agree with you that there are, there's a lot of insight despite the craziness. But if I have to pick, it's probably the one, some sort of combination of the Native American and the Holocaust one where, where Gubrick might be saying something
[00:28:16] more broadly about the way humans treat each other in society and uses, maybe uses imagery to communicate that has something to do with it. Yeah, and that, this is the way, like as someone says, this is the way states are built by through this kind of genocide
[00:28:37] and whether it's the Native Americans or the Holocaust, like I think it might be both of those. But that's what I was thinking especially the Native American one that seems right, like part of it anyway is, it is absolutely about that. There's a line in the movie
[00:28:51] that I don't even think they talk about in room 237, but having just watched the shining because we did these back to back in my family back in the before time the long, long ago. But like there's a line where he's taking,
[00:29:06] he's touring the Torrance family through the hotel and he says this was built on a Native American burial ground which you know is a standard horror movie trope. And then he says, and yeah, and there are reports that Native Americans, they even had to fight them off
[00:29:21] they were attacking because we were doing that while they were building the hotel. And he says that as if like fun fact, like fun fact about this hotel. We had to fight off like Native Americans who were pissed that we were building this hotel
[00:29:34] on like the bodies of their ancestors. As a matter of fact, the bathroom is actually 30% native blood. We use the like congealed blood like the piping. I mean, there definitely is a lot of imagery, but I mean, look, it is like a sort of a hotel
[00:30:00] that's decorated in that way that you're gonna find in Colorado or wherever. So the reason that I am even more dismissive of the overall theory is sort of because it's built so strongly on the presence of one like baking powder can being strategically located.
[00:30:24] Like the Calamette baking powder. Which has like that. The peace pipe that's clearly between Danny and Halloran. Yeah, yeah. It's in the background of the, which by the way, the background of the dry goods room is just fodder for stuff because you know, the moon landing person
[00:30:43] has they point to the tang. What's there to. But you know, so one of the things that everybody points to, I think literally every single theorist points to this is that Kubrick was so precise about everything. Like nothing is arbitrary with Kubrick.
[00:31:01] So the fact that there was a Calamette baking soda can that was a different color than all the other ones or tang that's there, it's like they can't, it's like it gives them license to fit that into their interpretation. This is what I want to talk about broadly
[00:31:19] before even diving into the content of the conspiracy theories of by the way, which my favorite one is the demons fucking humans. I love that one too. Again, I totally like, I don't buy, but that one has a wacky little part of it too, but yeah. Yeah.
[00:31:34] But the fodder, like the ideal conditions for believing conspiracy in a movie like this really is Kubrick's reputation because Kubrick was meticulous and detailed and it is not untrue that everything would have been intentional. The difference is just that while it may have been,
[00:31:59] he very intentionally placed every single item in that drive like goods room or whatever that I don't think it was purposeful. I don't think that he was doing it to communicate anything. It's just true though, that he had like crazy, crazy control over every,
[00:32:15] you know, to the misery of the actors has been well documented. But I mean, like why do you say that he didn't do that to communicate something? Maybe it's not what they think, but I think he's trying to communicate things when he does those things.
[00:32:29] All I'm saying is that it's not a prerequisite. So for instance, his choices of lighting, which I've read about Kubrick's use of lighting, like I think probably more than any other aspects of this filmmaking were very methodical and intentional, but they're not to communicate.
[00:32:44] So like he might just be on purpose going for an aesthetic or he might be striving for realism. He might be really, really caring that this look like a real dry goods storage room in a hotel. So it being intentional isn't sufficient for it to be a message.
[00:32:59] But again, as they do multiple times, I have like a whole shitload of quotes here, but it's multiple times those people talking, they point to that because that seems like evidence. Right? And how could you not? Like I don't, you know,
[00:33:16] I mean, I feel a little sorry for some people who might, I wonder a little bit about how normal these people are in everyday life, but we're not told anything about that in the movie. Except. Which I kind of like, yeah.
[00:33:29] Except that you hear like this guy's kid in the background as he's talking to them. And you start to get the sense that, yeah, you hear this kid in the background and then you hear that this guy at the end,
[00:33:41] you hear that he's been out of work for a while and like he's moving, he's thinking of moving his family to like an isolated location. And you definitely start to get worried about the family. He's even upfront about it. He's like, am I becoming Jack Torrance?
[00:33:55] Like, you know. He is the most sort of weirdly sober. He's like, he's the one that laughs. Like he'll actually be sort of laughing. He sort of sees how crazy he might sound. And he seems to be enjoying it more than the rest of the people
[00:34:11] who are like taking this really, really seriously. But it's like a nervous laugh with him. I feel like that laugh was unnerved me. Yeah. One of the things, so you know, you pointed out that we never see any of their faces
[00:34:28] and it's hard to tie the voices to the people. And I think that you're right, this was very like purposeful in the part of the director. And I think that them, I think he wanted some degree of them blending together in our mind because what that does,
[00:34:42] it just allows us to see kind of, it morphs into one general view on a conspiracy. But then there are clear demarcations. Like clearly these people would disagree with each other about a whole lot. But then there's so much of a whole lot. Even specific scenes.
[00:34:56] Like they interpret them. Yeah, exactly. And if you feel like I do sometimes, well maybe like there, but for the grace of God, go I, like you and me interpreting up for his story. One of the things that always brings me back is like,
[00:35:10] okay, they can't all be right. Cause they are saying mutually inconsistent things. But you start to like, this is one of the really good things about this movie is like they'll say something like they're the guy who thinks like this paper tray is a penis. Which is,
[00:35:25] that one was, that is one of the best, the best ones, like just the way that he reveals. Yeah. Like as he's telling the story. And bam, there you go. Like the paper tray is a huge erection. And I'm like, what? What?
[00:35:40] A giant penis right when they shake hands. But that's the same guy who has that kind of interesting thing about the ghosts. I think it's the same guy again. Like that the ghosts are like, have our horny for humans. And like Kubrick is talking about that.
[00:36:00] But then like that will be juxtaposed with another thing in that same room and in that same scene about the impossible window. That honestly like I needed this movie when I first saw it to show me that that window couldn't be there.
[00:36:12] That there's just a hallway there behind the window. And then when they keep going through the hotel you realize, holy shit. Kubrick is not even pretending that this makes sense as a real hotel in any way. And so like, yes he's disorienting the viewer.
[00:36:31] I'm sure we've like feel that on some subliminal level but I think he also is doing it for a reason and the obsession of these people kind of reveals that to us which is very cool. I mean, you know sometimes I wonder,
[00:36:47] like I think Kubrick had been asked many times about like what he was trying to say with movies and stuff. But I wonder to what extent he would have realized like especially in pre-internet days the lengths to which people go to interpret his movies.
[00:37:06] I mean, on the one hand he'd be proud of creating something that is so open-ended but so intentional that he would cause this response. But like on the other hand, you know, like what if we found out that people were going through every episode of ours
[00:37:24] and like writing down coded messages that we were trying to send them? Well maybe you've been doing that since episode three. No, but like we're not artists. Like I think that is kind of a great feature of art which is- Speak for yourself.
[00:37:39] That, well your beats clearly are. But they're all just reverse. They're backmask satanic demonic sex messages actually. If you play his, Dave's beats forwards and backwards at the same time, you just get like I hate Jews, I hate Jews, I hate Jews, I hate Jews.
[00:37:58] I don't even love them in reverse. Like I- Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can understand why as an artist who does especially films like that you might just never, like I would want to encourage a healthy degree of that kind of discussion.
[00:38:15] I would never want to tell people what I really meant if I really meant anything. But- Right. No, I mean I think that like, somebody says in the movie that Stanley Cruebrick often ends his movies with like a little puzzle,
[00:38:28] a little thing to get people talking, you know? Like and so in The Shining, it's the fact that Jack Nicholson is in that picture from 1921 and then it's like, okay, why is he in that picture? So he's always been there and it's actually been him.
[00:38:42] Like does that mean this whole thing's been a dream? Does that mean like, no, he was reincarnated. Was he in that picture? Yeah, then was he in the picture at the beginning of the movie or did he like get reincarnated and set back in time and then like-
[00:38:55] Exactly. Appeared in the picture. And same thing with the baby in 2001 and the last scene in A Clockwork Orange where he's like I was cured. Like what does he mean by I was cured? And like the, like I think he does do that.
[00:39:09] And I think he does it on purpose. Like this is what he wants. I don't think he necessarily wants people abandoning their families to, but- So I wanted to see if you, there was something that was bothering me that I found all of the people had in common
[00:39:26] that I didn't realize was bothering me until, like I don't know how long into this documentary. And it was, if I wanted to distinguish what say you and I diving deep for three hours into a short story, which with details
[00:39:42] that may or may not have been communicated by the author. The difference between the way we would do it and the way these people do it is the certainty that they have. And that it rubs me the wrong way
[00:39:54] because like I actually find it to be really fun to do this, but always be like, why, you know, who knows, right? Like there's always a sort of like humility that comes with trying to interpret anything too much. And they are just completely like,
[00:40:11] they use words like, well, you may not, you know, it takes a while before you see this. Like they're referring to it as it's there and they've seen it and they're surprised other people haven't. And you know. Yes, no, totally. I totally agree. That's the difference between like
[00:40:28] good artistic interpretation and, and again, it's not that there's nothing good. There's no value in what they're doing. There's tons of value in what they're doing, but I am exactly the same way when they're like, well, so this is obviously Kubrick. Clearly like Kubrick's showing that
[00:40:45] the moon landing was fake because it's the same launch pad or whatever. Right, right. You know, like, it's like, well, it's not clearly that. Yeah. And they're like, well, Kubrick said, you know, that he chose the room 237 because there was, but he was lying. Kubrick was lying
[00:41:00] and they'll even insert like autopigurates. Did you catch like they were, they were talk about like sort of how they imagined Kubrick having read like that book on subliminal, like subliminal seduction. I had the same note. Yeah. Yeah. Like, wait, are you just making that up?
[00:41:15] And then he went and talked to advertise us. So it's like, this is what I like about the documentarian Rodney Asher not like telling us, like, is that true? Is there anything in like a Kubrick biography that supports that? Or is this guy just making it up?
[00:41:30] Like, what's the deal? Correct me if I'm wrong. So I think Asher's silence throughout is brilliant. Correct me if I'm wrong. I only heard, I heard him say one thing. Do you remember like? I think it's towards the end, right? Yeah.
[00:41:43] Like he kind of like prods the guy a bit. He says like, why would he have made the movie this complicated? I think that's it. Right. And sometimes he's like, oh, come on. Like there's this one guy, it's the subliminal guy. It's exactly that guy.
[00:41:54] He went to the advertisers to ask what their methods were and then he took them and applied to the movie. And then he says, all right, I'm only gonna give you one. Like I'm only gonna like here, I'm just gonna give you one of these.
[00:42:06] But they're, the movie is littered with them, but I'm only gonna give you one. And that was the- He doesn't want to spoil it for us. That was the paper tray. He's like, you have to be a complete fanatic like me to spot all of them.
[00:42:18] And like, I don't expect that from you. But here I'm gonna give you one. And then he says, all right, I'll give you one more. Clearly at the prodding, I think of Rodney Asher. He's like, Kubrick's face is in the clouds.
[00:42:31] And I swear to God, I looked at the clouds and I was like, this is just not there. There's nothing. Exactly. Okay, so yeah, so the director does, when the guy makes a claim about the tray being his huge erect penis, which wasn't that big.
[00:42:48] You know what I'm saying? No, it was like normal size. I assume. He shows it frame by frame. And it's the guy saying like, it's gonna be at the frame where he shakes head. So he is, as the guy's talking, Asher is showing us frame by frame movement
[00:43:03] until the culminates in the handshake. What are you saying about? He then does the same thing for us for the guy that when he says like this other one is Kubrick's face is in the clouds. And he does a frame by frame as if to be like,
[00:43:18] you thought that first one was crazy? Like, no, look, I am pausing this shit for you. Like, I dare you to find it. For that one, he's like, and this one, honestly, I think it's harder to spot.
[00:43:27] Like as if the first one is kind of obvious if you've... But yeah, but they speak of it not as interpretation as a reveal. They're like, yeah, did you spot it? Oh, you're not just telling me what you think. You're telling me that it's there.
[00:43:42] It's there like Waldo or whatever. I'm showing you Waldo now. And so, and you can do it. It's kind of brilliant. You can do it with the pay-per-tray boner, but you can't do it. Like, I couldn't really... No, no, you gotta be high on something
[00:43:56] that I wasn't high on. Exactly. And I was high on probably whatever that thing is. I still didn't see it. The other thing I wanted to say generally is, and this relates to what we're talking about, but they all kind of feel the need to explain
[00:44:12] why they were the only ones able to see the truth. That's right. There's a specialness that they each have like an origin story for like why they... They have a unique ability to have a right to this. Right, it's like, because I was covering John Paul,
[00:44:26] Pope John Paul, and so that made me think about the genocide or they have some reason why they're not... They're the ones who are... And all these really intelligent film critics and everybody missed this. What the shining was really about. What we're really about, yeah.
[00:44:46] And they talk about like, it's crazy that people haven't like, this hasn't come to be the accepted interpretation. But yeah, the one guy was like, the Native American genocide theory guy was like, you know, one reason is I was raised right outside of Chicago
[00:45:00] and I was like, what the fuck? Because apparently there's a Calamite River close to where he lived. But then so like if we can transition to the actual theories. So, you know, one of the things about this being about repressed sexuality, which people say
[00:45:17] about Kubrick all the time, often with justification but this one seemed like, no, I don't see that. But then the guy, the guy, and I think this is one of the crazy guys, shows the playgirl, you know, that he's reading. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:45:32] And then like, you know, he suggests that Danny has been sexually abused and that maybe he's trying to take revenge on his father in some way. And when you follow that one, it seems a lot more plausible, you know?
[00:45:45] It's like, is this kind of something that Danny is doing? He is the only one with real magic power, as it seems like. And so there's all this stuff, like that one, the possibility of Danny being sexually abused by his dad
[00:45:58] and the possibility of this being in part about that is something that I never would have thought of and that is a kind of interesting thread or, you know, I don't know, possibility in the movie. Yeah, you know, in preparing for this,
[00:46:16] I was reading just a little bit and I did see, somebody wrote like what I thought was a very sort of plausible take on the movie that was like, you know, this is about a family going to shit, maybe through cycles of violence.
[00:46:30] Like the father has become, you know, Jack Nicholson is an alcoholic. He's kind of like losing it and he is clearly being off, like obviously being violent toward his family. You know, they were talking about Stephen King was writing the novel, he was lapsing into alcoholism.
[00:46:44] And it's like these theories only get off the ground because this movie has themes and it is about stuff. You know, and I think that they're picking up on, so we have like the Native American stuff, it's not as if the Native American stuff
[00:47:01] and the Holocaust stuff aren't plausible themes for a movie like this. Then you have the like the faked moon landing one, which that one we can set aside. I mean, I agree that Kubrick faked the moon landing, but like I don't think this is his confession.
[00:47:19] Well, that's actually the hardest part to believe about this is that if somebody who faked the moon landing would be right, it like would be doing a, I'm gonna tell people, but I can't, here's what I'll do. I wanna tell people like what I went through
[00:47:31] as I was like confessing it to my wife. I'm gonna butcher a Stephen King plot. Man, I'm gonna say fuck you Stephen King. I am going to put, I loved that. That was my favorite. That was my favorite like- The Volkswagen?
[00:47:46] The red Volkswagen, like this is my vehicle and here's what I'm doing to your vehicle. It's getting crushed by like an 18 wheeler. That's, that one was, I was watching this one with Nikki and she was like, this is insane.
[00:48:00] And I was like, that one actually convinced me more than that little piece of detail that convinced me more than anything else. So that the Ketman, Scurrothers, I don't remember his name in the show. Scutman, oh, Scurrothers. Halloran, yeah. Dick Halloran.
[00:48:18] He's trying to get back to the hotel and he comes across like a semi that's crushed a car and it's a red Volkswagen. And in the Stephen King story, apparently the main character drove a red Volkswagen but Kubrick makes it a yellow Volkswagen.
[00:48:32] And so he was like, basically killing off Stephen King's character. And I was like, yeah, that's like the best little tidbit that I've seen in the movie so far. Yeah, I mean, and I totally buy that he was saying like, fuck you Stephen King. You know, like-
[00:48:48] Shots fired. I'm gonna take what you did which is kind of schlocky and bullshit and some like little thing about alcoholism. It's like, ooh, it's a horror movie but it's about, I'm gonna make it like this like masterpiece and you're gonna bitch about it but too bad.
[00:49:03] This is you, you're the red Volkswagen. Okay, so we have the subliminal and that stuff that's subliminal advertising stuff. That was a wave of moral panic that hit in the 70s which was this belief that there was like all this subliminal advertising
[00:49:22] and it's not as if there aren't actual instances of advertisers trying to sneak in imagery. What's clear now is that like especially clear now given that we can't replicate lots of social primings that is is that that stuff doesn't do anything.
[00:49:37] But that was like, you know, people thought when you went to the movie theater that you were getting flashed like the word thirsty so that you would go buy Coke. Coke, right, right, right, yeah. And then Joe Campbell's nose was a big cock. Right, and you seem,
[00:49:53] you are so much more skeptical about these theories. Yeah, I am. It's so clear. When I was watching it, I was like, oh man, Tamler's gonna like say he might agree with this. So like all the continuity errors that you probably think that's what they are
[00:50:09] like the vanishing chair or the fact that the the store room, the like really important store room just looks completely different going in than it does going out. That means something. It's not like Kubrick missed that. So they're right about the fact that Kubrick,
[00:50:24] he may not, again, he may not be doing it for the reason they say that he is. He definitely isn't doing it for all of the reasons that they say they are, but he's doing it for a reason. Unless he's that brilliant.
[00:50:35] Right, which somebody, I wanna talk about this. I thought that was really interesting like that he's this mega brain trying to find the universal global patterns of like human behavior. Yeah. Very cool actually, but the, but he's doing it for some reason, right?
[00:50:50] So like you don't deny that. I don't at all. Yeah, I know enough about Kubrick to agree with them that what you see is something that he intentionally did. And the really blatant continuity error, you just know that if that would have happened
[00:51:06] by mistake Kubrick would have like sacrificed three of the stage people and like done the scene 12 more times and then 18 more times, killed Shelley Duvall and resurrected her and made her do the scene again. So I don't have like,
[00:51:22] but even then the people didn't have a good reason. Those were like stretches for them to tie into their theory if I recall correctly, but I do think that it's plausible that in telling a supernatural story where by like first on first glance
[00:51:39] there's not a whole lot supernatural that's going on. I think Kubrick is being purposefully disorienting like you were saying about the design of the hotel. The hotel, which is an impossible design if you follow the clues of the movie where it's like, well, yeah, I think
[00:52:01] when the little kid is riding around in his big wheel it's extra disorienting to not know where he's going. Right, and then he can just jump floors. Yeah, jump floors. That he can just go to... That's why I thought one of the really interesting stuff
[00:52:17] was Danny exploring the heads spaces of his parents. And so when he goes to two, three, seven that's like his dad's headspace and then the twins are like his mom's headspace who has the same color dress. Like this is cool shit right there.
[00:52:33] And that idea that that's what he's doing it may not fit into his larger more certain theory but he's picking up on something that I think Kubrick is intentionally doing. And the thing with the storeroom, like as the guy says, there's one thing that you can't explain naturalistically.
[00:52:52] So like everything else, it could be like this guy going completely crazy and every time you see him talking to Lloyd the bartender or Grady or whatever, that's like his imagination but there's one thing that isn't like that and it's him being locked in the storeroom
[00:53:10] and then Grady the ghost gets him out and like that's one thing that couldn't have happened that he couldn't have imagined himself. And so this guy says that points that out. That's like everybody who watches The Shining kind of knows that who likes the movie
[00:53:26] but then his idea is that Danny let him out because like that's this, he Danny is trying to kill him. That's kind of interesting, you know? Yeah, yeah, that Danny has some control. I mean, what I remember the first time I watched The Shining out,
[00:53:41] I was very confused as to what Danny's powers were and like what was going on there in that dynamic and I mean, I haven't never read the book. Cause it's a weird power. It's like you can kind of sense things and communicate them with Halloran
[00:53:53] but nothing too specific and yeah, that whole thing is very strange. It's like an extra little add-on. Right, so here, let me try this thought out. One of the mistakes I think these people are making is and I don't mean to be patronizing here
[00:54:12] because these people obviously have thought a lot about this and know what art is but it seems to me that one fundamental misfire that they're having is what an artist is trying to convey with art which is I think much more an emotional tale
[00:54:28] like they wanna give you this set of feelings and that can be like a coherent set of feelings but these people think that Kubrick was like trying to write an essay and like give them like detailed information about the Native American Holocaust
[00:54:45] and it's like what would be the point of an artist to try to like be like, you know the, I mean the Native American genocide was terrible. The Holocaust was terrible and if you didn't know that, here's a German typewriter cause I need you to know it, right?
[00:54:57] Like it's a somewhat interesting point that he's doing this at a personal level to try to get you to connect with like large numbers of people dying. You know, like just like the Paul Bloom point or whatever that you know, you can or the Stalin point but
[00:55:13] Paul Bloom or Stalin, one of those. I always get those confused too. Tomato, tomato, but no, the, and I think that's, but that's like a horror movie kind of trope is like you're symbolizing something bigger from something smaller. So that's right to a degree
[00:55:37] but the specificity of what they're talking about is where I think I totally agree with you they're going awry. Like you're not trying to get illicit for this specific atrocity and I want you to feel this specific emotion. No, that's not what they're doing.
[00:55:52] That's not what Kubrick is doing. Like that's antithetical to like what art, like you said, like that's antithetical to what art is trying to do. That's right. And it would be, it seems like it would be pigeonholing. It would be something that Kubrick is better.
[00:56:04] It's, Kubrick is a better artist than to say I wanna make a movie with a bunch of secret imagery about Native American Holocaust, like genocide because people need to know about this. He would be like Marlon Brando and just send a Native American person
[00:56:17] to accept to reject his Oscar, if he cared like that. It's a much, I think a subtler thing. And one of the thoughts I was having when I read especially when I read that apparently Kubrick made everybody watch Eraserhead and told them that he wanted this movie
[00:56:34] to have that kind of feel to it. I knew he liked Eraserhead and I didn't know that he did that. Yeah, I think I may have read that in Wikipedia. David Lynch, I don't know what do you think? Like obviously you could create any number of theories
[00:56:51] about any David Lynch movie. But it's almost like David Lynch is so open-ended that everybody knows that none of those are gonna be exactly right. Like it's less inviting to say that like I would never be tempted in a David Lynch movie to say
[00:57:10] well like that is symbolic of World War II. Like it would just be like it's evocative of war but I would never think that he was trying to communicate specific facts. He's too abstract for that, right? I think you're absolutely right about the David Lynch community
[00:57:28] and the way they respond to the art and then David Lynch as a filmmaker like you can, although I worry that we did this with Mulholland Drive, but you can't, you shouldn't. Like it's kind of clear with his movies that you shouldn't try to get too specific
[00:57:43] but there was this video, it's a four and a half hour video called something like Twin Peaks Explained and it's like an explanation for season three that literally tries to map every single thing that David Lynch did as like a metaphor for why he hates TV
[00:58:02] and why he thinks TV doesn't deal with violence properly and what was funny about it was the anger of the Twin Peaks community to that. There are certain people that loved it, there's certain people that was like, oh, this is cool but then there was all
[00:58:17] way more people that piled on the guy and was like, no you don't get it. Like you're missing the whole David Lynch point if you do this and there was a lot of stuff, I only made it through like, I don't know, 45 minutes of the thing
[00:58:32] but like there was a lot of things that he was showing that was valid like these people but he was sort of, he was mapping it on too closely and that was, that's like a sin. That's like an artistic sin almost or an artist or art interpretation sin
[00:58:47] to map it on too closely. Right, right. And a good art, like a good artist is not gonna do one-to-one mapping for you and lay it all out like that because again it seems as if like, well then he could do that in an interview.
[00:59:03] Like it seems like this is, like what's the point? And then there is the problem of, you know, it loses the power for me when I listen to somebody make a good point and then they about like what something might symbolize and then they go on and squeeze
[00:59:19] like 13 other aspects of the film into that and you're like, well now I know you're just being like a bad social psychologist, you're just like reporting to me like all of these false positives. Right, right. You are seeing what you wanna see. You're peaking the shining.
[00:59:35] You're peaking the shining. You're peaking the shining. One of them even says something that's like borders on a realization like that. You know, they'll say it once more. Oh yes, I know what you're talking about. I think I wrote that down. He says something like I was,
[00:59:53] he was like this is the mood landing guy. He was like, I, you know, now we're into it. Like I wasn't sure I was right. Like I was right for the first hour. But then, you know, Danny stands up he's wearing the Apollo 11 sweater
[01:00:06] and then I realized, okay. Yeah, but what he says, I think you're referring to before that he's like, I wasn't sure if I was confusing what I wanted to see with what's actually there. And then- And you're like, yes, hold that thought
[01:00:20] for just like a little longer, you know? A little longer, not just. But I think also here's the thing about this. I think good art also allows for these kinds of obsessives to get in there. And I think Kubrick and Lynch, both of them are aware of that.
[01:00:37] And they're like aware of their ideal art interpreter or viewer, but then they also are aware of these people who they know are also gonna like come up with some gold even if like there's gonna be a lot of whatever it's not gold.
[01:00:53] You know, it's once they have a theory and they're- Yeah, reverse engineering. Yeah, they're listing everything, you know, you can start being like, okay, maybe, but when you step back and you think like what it would take for an artist to say like, I'm going to have
[01:01:10] like just a shitty picture of a wolf so that people can remember that the wolf in the three pigs Disney cartoon was had a section where the wolf dresses up like a stereotypical Jew because that's how I want to remind people in the Holocaust.
[01:01:22] Like it's like, when you separate it out like that, you're like, wow. And we haven't talked about the woman and the Minotaur theory, but that's like one where it's kind of bad shit, but at least it's kind of in the spirit also. At least there's a maze.
[01:01:38] Like, I can believe that Kubrick thought, you know, this maze that wasn't in the book and Jack sort of being a sort of an evil center, like it's like the myth. I can buy that, you know? Like yeah. And he's thinking of the myth
[01:01:55] and the Ariadne's maze and like all of that. Like I can buy that. It's just that it gets like, I don't buy that the skier was necessarily the... If you twist your eye really right and you have cataracts, you know?
[01:02:11] But like this is why I liked the theory and I don't know which guy this was and I think he definitely got more specific but he's the patterns guy, the guy that says that Kubrick is, he just reads everything and tries to find the universal patterns.
[01:02:24] And I think it's him, but it may even be somebody else who talks about the blood coming out of the elevators but the elevators are closed and that this is the idea of we wanna repress the past and the horrors of the past
[01:02:36] but blood finds a way out and he has this really kind of eloquent thing that was just seems so right, you know? Like this idea that this blood, this blood of like on which nations are built, he says it will come out, right?
[01:02:53] Like and that image is that like whether he intended it or even if he didn't it's like that is what that image is. The fact that the elevators are closed and the blood is still getting out. That's like the ghost, the ghosts are haunting us
[01:03:08] and we wanna keep them down but they will find their way to haunt us because you can't fully move past it. And then another interesting thing, and I think it's the same guy but I'm not sure is the idea, well, you have to acknowledge it,
[01:03:23] you have to know about it but then realize that it's not present now. So he was like Kubrick has solved the problem of how you both acknowledge the horrors of your past but also like live further knowing that it happened. Like that stuff is really interesting.
[01:03:40] Yeah there's some wisdom in there and in fact the blood scene, it wasn't until room 237, the movie that I even really tied, this is supposed to be a horror movie, it's supernatural and he's tying to weaving together these elements of like ghosts from the past
[01:03:55] and I buy that the blood pouring out of the building is a direct callback to the blood that this is building has been built on. But you know, there's I think just like a very nice way in which those like, look, you put this building here
[01:04:13] but that doesn't matter how pretty make the building, the blood will have its vengeance somehow. Yeah, no you're right. That's what goes sour the guy says. They are like representations of the past that won't be denied, that you can't just ignore.
[01:04:29] Yeah, yeah and I also like that point that it's not there basically, like you have to, that's like the past, it's not there, you have to like realize that the past is no longer there. That's what Halloran says, he says like to Danny,
[01:04:42] it's like you have to know that it doesn't really exist even though it's there and it's that like tightrope that you have to walk that Kubrick is talking about and it's true, one thing that is true that I independently fact-checked
[01:04:54] is that he was working on a Holocaust movie and doing a lot of research about the Holocaust at that time. So like he's clearly thinking about that but this is why I like the broader theories where it's not about even the Native American
[01:05:09] although that's the most obvious one that seems most plausible, but just about genocides and the way nations are built in general and like how you deal with that, how you deal with the fact that these things have happened and they still, it's just something our country obviously
[01:05:24] is dealing with all the time with slavery, with the Native American genocide, all of that. And this movie is about that in a broad sense I think. Yeah, and you bring up the sort of the, this Kubrick was famously for many years
[01:05:43] trying to work on a Holocaust film and never made it and one of the primary sources of evidence for the Holocaust theory that this guy proposes is that there is a German typewriter that the famous typewriter that Jack types out that Jack's typing on, All Work No Play
[01:06:05] is a German branded typewriter. And again, it's not as if I don't think that if all this stuff was brewing in Kubrick's mind the imagery of the bureaucratic German typewriter being standing in there for some sort of evil of some sort, like I buy
[01:06:25] like it's not that I think that Kubrick wouldn't have thought about this, you know, maybe, maybe not it's almost not important to me like whether or not he was like, oh yeah, German typewriter. But the director shows some images and they talk about Spielberg showing the Germans
[01:06:43] in their bureaucrat, the diligent way in which they were exterminating Jews and the typewriter being a representative of this. And I like that. Like I don't think that's what this movie is about but I think that Kubrick will it like on purpose
[01:06:58] or not might be evoking something like that. Yeah, yeah. And also like he notes that Adler in German means eagle and that that was the sign for like the Nazis like they used eagle, but then also it's America. But see, like he takes from that almost like,
[01:07:15] oh, and by the way, that's also America but actually like what that means is like like he might be unifying those two things. I wanted to get the Holocaust guy and the Native American genocide guy together in the same room so they could find out
[01:07:29] which one it was really about. And which genocide are we talking about? And like, I'm sure there's an Armenian one that could kind of do that too. Well, I don't know if we've as a nation accepted that there was. That's true. We're still repressing that one.
[01:07:45] Yeah, so a lesser film would have had these people as talking heads, it would have had the director pushing them on the details and it may have even had them interact with each other to talk about this. And none of that is here.
[01:08:02] And I like before, like we stopped talking about this, I mentioned to you right before we started recording the segment that I saw a few of the reviews when the movie came out that seemed to think that this movie was about theories about the shining.
[01:08:23] And they were disappointed that none of the theories were that plausible to them. And I thought like, that is just such a profound miss about what this is. This movie is about the human mind and like the fucking like the way that it works
[01:08:36] and like how you can see every one of these people picking up on some very reasonable things and not being able to let it go like an obsessive mind. But this is about these characters and about the abstracted human mind as pattern recognition.
[01:08:57] And not about like who has the best theory. Yeah, right, which is why he kind of blends them together and it's also about like. That's a point that you made that I hadn't really thought of. It had bothered me a little bit that they were blended together,
[01:09:11] but then it stopped bothering me and I think it's because of what you're saying. And it bothered me too the first time I saw it. I was like, I wanna know a little bit more about how these theories are. And then like when I watched it again today,
[01:09:21] I realized, okay, that's kind of the point. Yeah, and I think your point about how they never bring them together I think also emphasizes their kind of isolation and the kind of isolation that you feel when you're like have this kind of conspiracy theory
[01:09:37] that not ever like you're shocked that like how is this not obvious to everybody? They're all like a lone voice in the wilderness. Right? Preaching the truth that has been revealed to them. And so, you know, like I think that's
[01:09:53] for one of the guys that seems totally true, you know? Like for two of the guys, there's the guy who just says I'm gonna take my wife and son to like an isolated place and I'm out of work. And then there's another guy that says
[01:10:07] like he thinks the government because he's the moon landing guy. He says the government is, I fully expect to be audited. He says, what does he say? Like I've had visitations. I don't even know what he means by that. They're definitely watching me.
[01:10:20] Yeah, like men in black, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And there's where I start to feel, you know this movie didn't present these people as instances of over mental illness. Like that part, like I'm inferring a little bit into what these people must be like
[01:10:37] but that wasn't the point of this movie. It wasn't like, you know watching a hoarder's TV show and feeling like they're suffering in their misery. But I can't imagine that these people aren't probably having some difficulties. Not all of them though. Like I disagree about all of them.
[01:10:57] Yeah, it might just be their secret passion. You might not know that about like I didn't know that you were convinced that UFOs had visited the earth and that you secretly had a stash. Well now you know that they definitely have and then I was right but whatever.
[01:11:09] I was able to tell from the play girl that I saw in the back of the frame from one of our conversations. Can we talk about play girl? Because Kubrick doesn't do anything by mistake so I can't imagine why there's a play girl. Because he's molested Danny.
[01:11:24] Because he's molested Danny. Because all gay people are child molesters. There you go. Is he gay? Are you gay if you do that? No, I mean I think that's the idea right? Like you know that Danny has been abused and this is his idea.
[01:11:40] You know Danny's been abused and now you're showing that Jack might not might have some interest. Oh and apparently according to something I don't know if this is from the movie or like the one thing I read about it but like there was something on the cover
[01:11:55] that is about pedophilia. Oh incest. It was about incest. Incest maybe, it's about incest. So that's what, so maybe that's what it, that's the idea. I mean again like why is it, Kubrick that's such an unusual thing to do.
[01:12:10] Like it doesn't fit with the rest of the movie that he's reading a play girl that like there's no reason other than something. Right. And for any other director, I would say, well look somebody could have it on the set as a joke put a play girl there.
[01:12:28] Like for that take you know. Yeah. But I don't think it would happen here. Can I just like there are a few, again not to mock these people but like some of their statements are kind of mockable and I wanted to go through some of the details
[01:12:41] that they find in the movie that I found the least plausible. We've talked about the ones that are meaningful. So you talked about them, the poster of a skier where she's like clearly that's a Minotaur. There is a point where,
[01:12:55] you know one of them is big into the number 42 and we know this like when you buy a Toyota you see Toyotas everywhere. But at some point he points out that there are 42 cars in the parking lot and I almost paused that shit. Like I wanted,
[01:13:14] cause if there are 43 like boom falsified. He gets crazy like he's like the thing that's on July 4th 1921, 21 is a multiple of seven which is also like divisible by 42. Like you know that's. He's starting to get into some serious. Numerology. Yeah, numerology.
[01:13:36] Then the moon landing guy is who says that Kubrick was lying about why he chose room 237 is that that was the number of the sound lot or yeah the sound lot where they filmed the fake moon landing. And also he says it's the approximate,
[01:13:57] the average distance in miles in hundreds of thousands of miles between the moon and then I'm like which one is it motherfucker? Like you can't tell me that it's both of them. Totally. I had that same thought like, well that's just a coincidence.
[01:14:11] You admit that that's a coincidence right? Like that or maybe Kubrick as he was staging the moon landing was like, oh you know what would be cool is to. Number this after the yeah. There is one the dopey, still wide in the seven doors.
[01:14:30] There's like a continuity or perhaps or maybe in the movie that kid is supposed to peel it off but there is a dopey stuck, an image of dopey stuck next to kind of like where the light switch is in one scene
[01:14:41] and then the next scene it's not there and the guy is like he see he saying like we're not dopes. No Danny is not a dope. He's seen it. Yeah. But this is something about the audience too. Not being a dope. Yeah, right.
[01:14:56] Danny has seen it and now we've seen the past but that's guys I think one of them like, like that's the pattern guy that I kind of liked because of how broad his theory is and then that's too specific. Right? Yeah.
[01:15:08] It's like he has this thing about pattern recognitions about the horrors of the past and trying to acknowledge them but also not let them destroy you but then he also is like the dopey is there because is there at first
[01:15:22] but then not there to show us we're not dopes anymore or Danny's not a dope anymore and it's like, well that's too specific. Right? And like of all the ways to try to tell the audience that they're intelligent. Like you know that this is that the same guy
[01:15:37] must be who in room 237 he points out the pattern on the rugs and he's like clearly that's intercourse. Right. It's like the little sperms and then it becomes more like mechanical and once you go out to the hallway I mean it's interesting the pattern difference but yeah. Yeah.
[01:15:56] And you know, I mean Kubrick loved framing those symmetrical shots and I'm sure the patterns were, you know there is a scene where the ball comes rolling down to the kid and then the ball rolls down right down the line
[01:16:13] of one of the patterns on the carpet in that room but then the next shot he's like flipped the orientation of either the kid or the pattern so that the ball is now no longer on the side that had the line.
[01:16:25] And that actually I was like, you know that could have been an aesthetic choice. He might've been like, well for this shot I want that as the background. Like that's one of those where I, you know I could have. But I also think like he knows
[01:16:37] that that's completely impossible and he's just doing that in this movie and as the woman says like he, this is, that's all over the movie like all these impossible things. Like at first it's like the window it's like, whoa, what's the significance of the window?
[01:16:53] But then it's like, oh no, no that's like the whole movie is like impossible shit happening which is again, it's also like dreamy and there's a guy and I don't know who this is he talks about this being like a dream
[01:17:04] and he also says he has this like well here's like, I didn't realize that people understood dreams as well as he thinks people understood. I was thinking, I got to show this in my interest life classes. That every day it's like adding to find the patterns, right?
[01:17:18] And that Kubrick is. Yeah, I have that too. He's like a meg Kubrick is like a mega brain that is boiling down all of these patterns for us or something like that. Yeah, yeah, so his theory is, you know
[01:17:31] it's not too bad a summary of what some people might say but that your brain is consolidating your memories of the day and he thinks it might be integrating it with all the rest of the patterns and we are perceiving things holistically
[01:17:47] in a way that we might not notice and I think that's what Kubrick is doing. What really, the contention would only be how specifically intentional is he doing? Right, like, because I think he's described a good director, a good director is giving us patterns that are causing us
[01:18:05] to have some sort of insight but. You know, funny, I was watching like documentary about the shining like there's this very cool you can find it on YouTube like 25 minutes where you just see him filming stuff and you see him kind of being mean to Shelley DeVall
[01:18:19] but then also like her having a little bit of Stockholm syndrome about it and then you see Jack Nicholson. I may have seen that, that sounds very familiar because I remember being struck by how Shelley DeVall was acting around him. But like he's very like anytime
[01:18:37] and anybody's asking him something like he's very dismissive about the movies like it's just a ghost movie. It's like a bunch of ghosts like don't worry about it but you know that that's not how he is, right?
[01:18:47] Like so I think that he is intentional about some of it but he's also intentional about what he leaves open-ended for all the reasons we've been saying so that people can't just solve the movie like it's the usual suspects. Like that's I think very much antithetical.
[01:19:05] I think we've even said this point about like David Lynch movie but also of a Stanley Kubrick movie. Like you're not supposed to be able to just be like, oh, Kevin Spacey was Kaiser Sosei and now that movie is done. That's the way of like that's death
[01:19:22] to what I think they're both of them are trying to do but for some reason you're right Kubrick invites it more than Lynch does. Yeah he's like, he's coy with it. Yeah, I remember I was reading something and I copied this quote
[01:19:36] that is just along the lines of what you were saying. So this is his, I forget the name of Diane Johnson. Is that the co-writer maybe of the script? Yeah, yeah. She said very often crew members asked him can you explain that to me?
[01:19:50] Johnson recalled to Entertainment Weekly and he said, I never explain anything. I don't understand it myself. It's a ghost film. Yeah right. She goes on and says you can't imagine how much fuss was made over the big golden ballroom and the big lobby and huge windows
[01:20:02] that could never have fit into the hotel based on the establishing shop from the outside. Any child can see that and Stanley's explanation was it's a ghost film, forget it. It's not a movie with a serious message. But that's just total bullshit I think
[01:20:16] from his point of view or at least that's, I don't know, I don't think he... Yeah no, I kind of agree with you. I think one, how fucking annoying would it be for your sound guy to be like asking you the deep meaning of the movie?
[01:20:28] Like what are you gonna say? Like actually. But I do think when he says it's not a movie with a serious message it's not that I agree that there this wouldn't be a serious movie. Obviously Kubrick is taking it seriously.
[01:20:44] I think Kubrick does not have a movie in him that wouldn't make people like you and I think that there was a serious message because he's a good filmmaker. He doesn't, he's not making Freddie Got Fingered for fuck's sakes. Like if a movie comes out of Kubrick
[01:20:58] I'm gonna pay attention to it. But he's also not making like the sixth sense or something like that where it can just be unlocked. Yeah, the usual suspect was the perfect, right? The minute you said that I started thinking to myself well has Kubrick, I mean the killing,
[01:21:15] I don't, I mean the killing is... And we just watched it last night actually or two nights ago. Yeah. And you know that's just a noir. It's a great noir. It's a great noir but it is so genre, you almost could not see like if you
[01:21:27] if you didn't know it was by Kubrick you wouldn't think it was by just by like a really cool like heist film that is... Yeah, but it was early. He was young. And also like, but there is these little things
[01:21:39] like that final shot of the two people coming out as he's, as William Holden is being caught and there's a bunch of tracking shots and there's a bunch of things that once you know that it's Kubrick it's like, oh okay I see it, I see it
[01:21:51] but it's also very much a genre movie that like he's always doing messing with genres but this is squarely in the genre movie. So that you would believe that it was just a guy who was trying to make a genre movie and that's it.
[01:22:07] And I believe that he probably was still putting a lot of effort into the shots and making them do 30 takes. Maybe not that early. Yeah, I mean I think he was always like this. He was definitely like this by the time
[01:22:21] of Doctor Strange Love and Lolita and stuff. He sounded like real hell to work with. Like, well, except that like, again I think it's like people also say I've learned more on his shoots than anything but then you wonder if it's Stockholm syndrome. Yeah.
[01:22:40] Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, same thing. Like they went through absolute hell and sacrificed like a year and a half of their life and careers to do it and like they're like but we got to work with Stanley Kubrick. Right. And maybe they were just miserable
[01:22:55] while they were doing it. I don't think Shelley DeVall would do. But like David Lynch is not like that. People love working with him and he's not a terrorizer so I think like it just depends. Yeah, and Kubrick, I mean it is if you obviously
[01:23:08] if you care about film you already have read more about Kubrick then but just even like the, you know Kubrick's use of lighting. Like every piece of lighting in this film I read an interview with his like lighting director and it's all practical lighting.
[01:23:25] It's all built because they could build the set. He was like, we're gonna build. So practical lighting means that there aren't big lights outside of the frame. All of the lighting in the movie is supposed to be part of the feature of the environment that you're being shown.
[01:23:39] And so that just means that they would put like, you know super powerful lights in what would otherwise not have those powerful lights but just because he wanted it all to be. And like the amount of time that it would take
[01:23:51] even when you look at like the maze, you know the beautiful shots of the maze with the lights built in there to the bottom of like snow banks. It's pretty amazing. And you know like Barry Lyndon which is the movie he made before
[01:24:06] like I think he only used natural light. Natural light, yeah quite so fucking dope. Which is amazing. And it's psychotic but it's amazing. And yeah, he did that a lot. He did them like the ballrooms scenes and it's like it looks almost a little dim because of that
[01:24:22] but that creates a kind of feel that he wants you to have. And he's like such a master at evoking those things. And the unease like the shining well before I was like a film, a self styled like cinephile, it fucked me up like it freaked me out.
[01:24:38] I can remember watching it on some shitty TV in college with Jen and like we were like, we couldn't like we could barely get through it. We were so terrified like he gets you on that primal level before you start wondering
[01:24:50] whether this is about genocide or the moon landing or whatever. I think that people were expecting in, this is end of the 70s right in 1980, they were expecting like a horror film in the stylings of what horror films were to them back then.
[01:25:09] And so like early reviews were kind of disappointed in it as that but it is freaky. And I remember, I think we've even talked about on the podcast what we show to our kids. And I remember showing Bella the psycho shower scene
[01:25:22] when she was very young and she didn't give a fuck. I showed her, I think the twins and maybe the elevator blood and she just did not forgive me for having like scarred her. She really did. And like just the scenes of like
[01:25:38] she's coming and bothering him while he's working or just not even bothering him just saying like, oh, we have a big snowstorm. And he's like, I'm trying to, just like the way he talks to her there. Do you even know what it's like to have responsibilities?
[01:25:50] Do you even, like some guy makes something about, I think it's the moon landing guy, but like just watching that, it's like, this is a guy who is terrorizing his family and who's terrorizing us as he's doing that. And then the whole Danny stuff
[01:26:04] with him talking to his hand. It's so weird. It's so fucking weird. And the big wheel, the famous big wheel yeah, steady cam shot. The hotel, those are incredible. Like it's, he's so good. He's amazing. All right, we should wrap up. Well let's wrap up.
[01:26:21] We might have a plumber coming, although we've been told that before, but. Plumber is going to come and be like, yep, yeah you got a burst pipe. We had someone who came from next door and as soon as we told him it was in the crawl, crawl space,
[01:26:36] he was like, oh, yeah. You know, I have this call. of these blue, well they all have like 50, like 50,000 people calling them so they can be a little picky about what they do. Yeah, yeah, I can't imagine. All right, well, I enjoyed the documentary. You should watch it.
[01:26:56] It's I think easily available to find. You can like on Amazon, if you sign up for IFC films, you can get it for free for a week or yeah. I'm going to say something crazy here to end, which is on some metric, which is do
[01:27:14] I want to watch the movie? I like the documentary better than The Shining. And it's because The Shining actually makes me uncomfortable enough to watch that that like there's something that deeply disturbs me. But also I don't care for Jack Nicholson as an actor that much.
[01:27:32] But that's just to say the documentary is where like you don't need to love The Shining to like enjoy this documentary. All right, don't cry. Join us next time. Join us next time for Bad Wizards.
