I am never going to understand conspiracy theorists.

Room 237 was a documentary about people who have watched Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and have become convinced that it’s about anything but a remote, haunted hotel that twists a man’s mind and makes him want to kill his wife and son.

One person watched the film and saw that it was about the genocide of American Indians.

One person said it was about the holocaust.

One person said it was about the myth of the Minotaur.

None of these people explained why Kubrick would decide to make a movie about genocide, or a Minotaur, and then devise an obscure patchwork of code to hide that movie behind a movie about a haunted hotel.

One person said it was Kubrick’s admission that he helped the government fake the video of the moon landing. That one sort of made sense, from the point of view that Kubrick had a message that had to be hidden, although this conspiracy theorist, like the rest, hung his entire premise on just one thing.

• The guy who thought the movie was about the genocide of American Indians started from a scene in which he spotted a can of Calumet baking powder in the background. That was it. Can of baking powder equals genocide of American Indians. A rock-solid theory, really. Don’t see how I could dispute that.
• The guy who said it was about the holocaust started with the number 42, based on the idea that 1942 was the year that the Nazis decided on the ‘final solution.’ I just love theories based on numerology because they never make any sense at all. If it was about the holocaust, and the year 1942 was the key, then wouldn’t you expect to see the number ‘1942’ everywhere?
• The gal who claimed it was about a Minotaur got that from one scene where a poster of a skier in a classic bent-knee pose looked a little like a bull, if you stared at it for hours and hours, or you were drunk.
• The guy who said it was about the moon landing based his theory on one scene where Danny was wearing a sweater that had a rocket and the words ‘Apollo 11’ across the front. The movie came out in 1970, the year after the landing. Every kid had a sweater like that.

What makes conspiracy theories so hard to swallow, though, is that they’re not convincing. At all. The theorists could babble for hours and hours, I’m sure, but all they were doing was babbling. Not one of them made a coherent argument. I’m always interested in hearing a good moon landing hoax theory, but that guy’s was the least convincing theory I’ve ever heard. And Minotaurs? What the hell has that got to do with anything?

So, yeah. Weird film.