Page 169 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

he does his job as caretaker for The Overlook Hotel, he can spend as much time as he wants writing.
This parallels Stanley Kubrick’s own deal, for he worked on 2001, A Space Odyssey at the same time
he was working for NASA on the Apollo Moon missions.

Throughout the movie, Room 237 plays a significant role. An employee of the hotel tells young
Danny to never go near that room, to stay out, for he has no business there. We are made aware that
something strange, even sinister, is associated with that room. In the first shot of the room which we
see in the image above, we see a set of mirrors. Again, Stanley Kubrick pays such attention to detail
and symbolic messages that it seems right to conclude that he is telling us that this room represents
a distorted view of reality.

Jay Weidner points out that Kubrick altered the room number, for Stephen King wrote of it as Room
217. Kubrick’s alteration was intentional and symbolic, for the average distance from the Earth to
the Moon is 237,000 miles, a figure which was published in the 1960s. Also, the only letters on the
key tag are ROOM N°. If you drop the small o, the letters can be used to spell the words “Moon” and
“Room.” This is the “Moon Room.”

In one scene from the movie we see Jack Torrance, representing the calculating and businesslike side
of Kubrick, enter this room. The room is supposed to be empty, but there is a young attractive
woman who is naked in the shower. She steps out of the shower and she and Jack embrace and
engage in passionate kissing. As Jack is kissing the woman she is transformed into an old hag with
what appear to be large bed sores all over her body. Jack is repulsed and pushes her away. Kubrick
is symbolically communicating that he found the Apollo Moon program to be attractive and enticing
when it was first presented to him, but that it transformed into something hideous that he no longer
wanted to be associated with.

Throughout the movie the hotel is given personality, as if it is possessed by a malevolent
intelligence. The Overlook Hotel is itself a symbol of America. We are informed in the movie that
the hotel was built on the graves of Native American Indians, which is equally true of America as
a nation. Throughout the hotel there are Native American decorations. The largest one of them bears
a striking resemblance to a group of rockets.