Toys at 30: “We’re going to fight fire with marshmallows!”

Barry Levinson's notorious passion project is a feast for the eyes that never quite figures out its tone.

By: Peter Sobczynski

A project that director/co-writer Barry Levinson had been working on for over a decade before it emerged in theaters in 1992—at one point, it had been planned as his directorial debut before he turned to Diner (1982) instead—Toys offered viewers a mélange of holiday sentiment, strident anti-war satire and the sometimes-unholy combination of schmaltz and schtick that marked the typical Robin Williams performance of the time, all produced on a budget high enough to outstrip the GNP of actual countries. There’s no reason on Earth to think that such a bizarre combination would have worked, and Toys’ eventual critical and commercial failure would seemingly confirm that it didn’t. And yet, while I concede that the film as a whole is a mess—it is an undeniably intriguing mess with just enough moments of genuine brilliance to help get through the rougher and clumsier passages, of which there are more than a few. 

As the film opens, the staff of Zevo Toys, an elaborate toy factory that suggests what Willy Wonka’s workplace might have looked like before he decided to simplify, are staging their end-of-the-year Christmas pageant. At the same time, the benevolent owner Kenneth Zevo (Donald O’Connor), summons his estranged brother, Lt. Gen. Leland Zevo (Michael Gambon), for a talk. Kenneth is dying and fearing that neither his son, Leslie (Williams), nor daughter Alsatia (Joan Cusack), have what it takes to successfully run the company despite their evident love of toy making. Instead, Kenneth wants Leland to take over, assuming that by the time he chooses to retire, Leslie will finally be ready to take over. Before Leland can muster any objections, Kenneth’s heart gives out—and we learn that he had attached his pacemaker to the beanie hat that he wears. Why? “It’s whimsical,” Kenneth remarks before dropping dead, a moment many took to be unexpectedly prophetic, considering Toys’ eventual fate.  

The Zevo Toy Factory and its various colorful machines in Barry Levinson’s Toys from 20th Century Pictures.

A military man, Leland has zero interest in running a toy factory and essentially cedes control of the day-to-day operations to Leslie and Alsatia; however, when he gets a load of the video games and war toys manufactured by other companies (though not by Zevo), he begins to contemplate the idea of creating toy-sized military armaments that could be produced far more cheaply than human-scale gear and which could be controlled remotely through video game-like interfaces. When military leaders dismiss his ideas as nonsense, Leland, aided by his son Patrick (L.L. Cool J), himself a soldier specializing in security and covert affairs, decides to do it on his own, first asking Leslie for a small area of the factory in which to work on his own thing and then expanding it wildly, displacing other departments and their workers as a result. 

At first, the trusting Leslie is happy to let his uncle do his thing. But as Leland seizes more and more space and resources for his top-secret project and a sense of paranoia begins to hover over the once-happy factory, Leslie begins to suspect something is wrong. When he finally realizes what Leland is up to, he, Alsatia, Patrick, and Gwen (Robin Wright), a Zevo worker that Leslie is sweet on, decide that enough is enough. They sneak into the factory one night and end Leland’s takeover—leading to an over-the-top final battle in which Leland sets his array of hi-tech creations against Leslie’s army of gentler Zevo toys pressed into service to save the day. 

After a while, the film feels like an inspired sketch idea stretched well beyond its breaking point.  

After years of struggling to get the film made, Levinson finally found himself in the position where he could more or less get anything he wanted following a string of critical and commercial hits, including Tin Men (1986), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), the Oscar-winning Rain Man (1988) and Avalon (1990) and elected to bring Toys to life at last. However, the elements that probably gave studio executives pause would seem to be there. Toys’ chief flaw is that Levinson never quite figures out the tone he wants, seesawing between sentiment and dark comedy without ever figuring out how to balance them. This is especially evident during the climactic battle—in which Leslie and Leland lead their troops into action, and viewers are presumably meant to first laugh at the mayhem and then be subsequently touched and horrified as the mechanized horror unfolds. Unfortunately, since Levinson and Valerie Curtin’s screenplay largely fails to establish any real dramatic or emotional stakes, we are left with a seemingly endless sequence of expensive doo-dads smashing into each other. After a while, the film feels like an inspired sketch idea stretched well beyond its breaking point.  

Toys’ unfocused nature extends to its performances. As one of the many manic man-children that he would play throughout his career, Leslie allows Williams to indulge in his usual bag of tricks: riffing and scatting to his heart’s content, pausing only to deliver the occasional sentimental moment with the subtlety of a telethon host who wants to get serious for a moment. In his first significant role since his breakthrough in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), Gambon is a little better but never quite finds the right tone, at times too blustery and others too silly. As Leslie’s love interest, Wright is stuck with an ill-defined role that offers her little to do other than warmly beam at Leslie’s antics. Except for the delightful cameo from O’Connor (in what would be his final film), the best performance comes from Cusack, though one has to watch the entirety of Toys to understand why this is. 

The elaborate Zevo Toys factory floor in Barry Levinson’s Toys from 20th Century Pictures.

Despite these and other flaws, I still have a stubborn fondness for Toys’ goofball glory. For starters, it is a stunner visually—with an evidently unlimited budget and a style that pays homage throughout to the art of Rene Magritte, Modernism, and Dadaism, legendary production designer Fernando Scarfotti creates a look so striking and memorable that one could turn off the soundtrack and just revel in the eye-popping treats. While big set pieces like the climactic battle don’t quite land, several smaller jokes throughout earn some nice laughs—I’m especially fond of a bit where Leslie demonstrates an all-too-literal smoking jacket. The offbeat opening sequence juxtaposing the meeting of the brothers with the incredibly elaborate holiday pageant—especially its deployment of “The Closing of the Year,” a song featuring the vocals of former Revolution members Wendy & Lisa that is lovely enough that it might have gone on to be a holiday perennial if the film had not bombed so badly—is similarly striking. 

For all of Toys’ messiness and clumsiness, it has a weirdo charm that one rarely sees in films of this magnitude. It’s a charm that has endured over the three decades since its original release. Toys‘ may ultimately be only a movie of moments but the best of those moments are so glorious to behold that they will stick in the minds of those who see them for a long time afterward.

Toys Trailer:

Repo Man Forum: punk, consumerism, identity, and L.A.

by Keith Phipps, Scott Tobias, Tasha Robinson, Nathan Rabin, Noel Murray, and Matt Singer

EACH WEEK, THE DISSOLVE DESIGNATES A MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR STAFFERS AND READERS TO WATCH AND DISCUSS, WITH A LEADOFF ESSAY ON MONDAY, A ROUNDTABLE-STYLE FORUM ON TUESDAY, AND OTHER RELATED FEATURES TO FOLLOW. FEEL FREE TO PITCH IN OR SUGGEST YOUR OWN DISCUSSION POINTS.

PUNK

Keith: Repo Man is a punk movie: It’s set in the middle of the L.A. punk scene of the 1980s, and it features punk music and characters who profess to be, and dress the part of, punks. But it’s also about the punk ethos, and it questions whether there really is a punk ethos by showing character after character falling short of it, just as they violate the Repo Code that Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) lays out. Repo Man is deeply concerned with selling out—and in this film, everyone sells out. Often cheaply and easily. The disgust Otto (Emilio Estevez) expresses at the thought of working as a repo man disappears when he’s handed a stack of bills for his efforts. His appearance gets a little more conservative with each subsequent scene. He’s still punk enough, at least in his mind, to get turned off when the Circle Jerks show up to do an easy-on-the-ears version of “When The Shit Hits The Fan,” but not self-conscious enough to recognize they’re both working for The Man now.

Then again, who isn’t? In one early scene, Otto wanders through a group of L.A. punks. Though they’re in what appears to be the heart of the punk scene, they just look like a bunch of knuckleheads acting aggressively without any cause. One wears a Sid Vicious T-shirt, a perfect example of how, to paraphrase the Clash, rebellion gets turned into money. (Director Alex Cox went on to co-write and direct the Vicious biopic Sid And Nancy.) Otto’s friends turn to crime driven by greed: They have the look, but they’re closer to the “punk” criminals who terrorize city streets in cheap movies and beat ’em up videogamesthan those drawn to the scene out of a love for its music or professed politics. Does punk mean anything to them? When Otto loses his girlfriend and wanders the streets in dejection, he recites the words to Black Flag’s “TV Party” as mindlessly as his friend spouts the 7-Up jingle in an earlier scene. The movie doesn’t necessarily answer the question, but continually questioning what punk means makes it feel pretty punk to me.

Tasha: There’s so much amused contempt in Otto’s voice when Duke—the leader of those criminal friends—tries to blame his life of “doing crimes” on society, and Otto calls him on it: “That’s bullshit. You’re a white suburban punk, just like me.” Just being from the same scene, Otto is pointing out, didn’t lead them in the same direction. But Otto sold out harder, whereas with Duke and his friends, their posturing, their increasingly extreme dress throughout the film, and their apparent delight in mayhem makes me think you’re selling them short when you say they’re motivated by greed, Keith. I think they’re more motivated by their own ideals of punk as something outside, and therefore above, society. When Duke falls back on dine-and-ditch sushi as a criminal strike against The Man, it suggests that he really is too suburban to be the hardcore punk he wants to be, but he does have an image he’s trying to live up to, even if it is cartoony and as shallow as Otto’s convictions.

Nathan: Within the context of Repo Man and elsewhere, punk is a sensibility, an attitude, a musical genre, a scene, and a subculture, but it’s also fundamentally a tribe that gives the film’s directionless protagonist an initial sense of identity. In some ways, though, the repo men are more punk than Otto’s old friends will ever be. They’re outlaws who break into cars, take too much speed, inhabit a shadowy underworld unknown to straight society, and as Bud boasts in one of his big speeches, rush into the kind of tense conflicts civilians spend their lives avoiding. Yet at the same time, they’re outlaws for The Man, capitalism-enforcers who make money by making life harder for the desperate, poor, and strapped. Beneath their swagger, they’re cogs in a giant capitalist machine.

CONSUMERISM

Keith: One of the most striking features of Repo Man is the way it uses generic packaging for its consumer items. In the opening scene, Otto stocks items in a grocery store filled with blue-and-white cans and boxes labeled only “yellow cling sliced peaches” and “corn flakes.” Later, Otto eats from a can labeled “food.” That one was made for the film, but most of the packages, including the cans labeled “beer,” came straight from the California supermarket chain Ralphs. (A couple of years later, Public Image Ltd revived the gag for the 1986 LP known, in various formats, as Album, Cassette, and Compact Disc.) It makes me laugh every time, but the joke serves another purpose: By stripping consumer objects down to their essence, Repo Man foregrounds how much of our surroundings is product. It’s possible to have warm feelings about, say, the Snuggle Bear, but a bottle reading simply “fabric softener” is another story. It made me think about how much the film is about packaging and selling happiness, whether it’s the cars consumers are losing because they couldn’t make the payments, the televangelist who takes Otto’s parents for their money, or the Scientology-inspired tomeDioretix. Cox is at heart a smash-the-system type, so it’s no coincidence that the televangelists at least are in league with the government agents trying to reclaim the Chevy Malibu. It’s all part of the same system of control.

Tasha: Alex Cox has often said he used those products because he got them free, but it’s still so easy to read a larger message into how they’re foregrounded throughout the film. It reads as rebellious compared to modern films’ product placement and brand saturation. None of the characters are trying to create an image by using a specific product, or associating what they eat or drink or use with a lifestyle they want. Did anyone else get a sense that everyone using the same unlabeled products tends to highlight the lack of class distinction or identity distinction between, for instance, Otto and the repo men he’s looking to for a new identity?

Noel: It doesn’t just level out the class distinctions, Tasha; it also obliterates much of the sense of ownership that comes with purchasing a specific brand. And given that this is a movie about people who ride around and take back other people’s cars, ownership is a major driver ofRepo Man’s plot and theme. The characters differentiate themselves by what they wear, drive, and listen to, but the beer and corn flakes? Those are practically communal. “Let’s go get sushi and not pay” is one of the movie’s funniest and most-quoted lines, but without getting too pretentious about it, it’s also a joke about people choosing to help themselves to something a little fancier than generic peaches.

Matt: The generic packaging looks particularly striking when viewed alongside this summer’s crop of blockbusters and their grossly excessive product placement, from Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson playing sidekicks to Google in The Internship to Superman fighting for truth, justice, and IHOP’s Rooty Tooty Fresh ’N Fruity Breakfast in Man Of Steel. In that context, “food,” “drink,” and the rest feel like a sharp jab at the future of brand integration, which had just begun to pick up steam in the wake of E.T. and his unquenchable thirst for Reese’s Pieces. As Tasha notes, the decision to use generic packaging was born of economic necessity, but it also functions as a defiant rebuke to the early days of product placement—a very punk gesture, indeed.

Nathan: Product placement is all about creating favorable distinctions between products that are pretty much the same. But the emphasis on making everything generic in Repo Man makes all products seem equally shitty and flawed, just as the film reveals pretty much all belief systems and subcultures to be shitty and flawed, so there’s a furtive philosophical component to this running gag as well.

PERSONALITY AND IDENTITY

Tasha: A good half of Repo Man is devoted to aimless, Richard Linklater-esque conversations that feel like woozy middle-of-the-night philosophizing, even when the scenes take place in broad daylight. And they’re all about self-identification—particularly, where the repo men are concerned, about the meaning of macho. All the guys have their own personal versions of manliness, from Bud with his “dress like a detective” advice and his “Repo Code” (a silly reworking of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws Of Robotics) to Lite (Sy Richardson), who fearlessly responds to gunfire by whipping out his own gun and acting like a bulletproof hero in a gritty blaxploitation movie. Everyone has lectures and lessons for Otto, and he sucks these lessons up like a sponge. “This is intense!” he gasps early on to Bud, who tells him the life of a repo man is always intense—and the movie ends by calling back to it. He also sneers that he’s seen men stabbed, he’s confronted people with guns, and it “doesn’t mean shit,” and that he hates “ordinary fucking people,” whom he considers himself above. That’s what Otto wants, and why he’s so quick to sell out to the repo crew even after telling them off: They self-identify as a bunch of elite outlaws who live a manly life of adventure, and he wants in.

One of the funniest things about Repo Man, though, is the way their reality doesn’t live up to their posturing. They’re all a bunch of poor, badly dressed schlubs making a living by sneaking around and boosting people’s unpaid cars, then boasting about it to make themselves feel important. But the film is still, on a petty level, a voyage of macho self-discovery for Otto. He starts the film cuckolded and embarrassed, as his girlfriend orders him to fetch beer, then gets naked with another guy as soon as he leaves the room; he ends it by telling his latest girlfriend to fuck off when she whines about their relationship. It’s a small, petty victory, but he’s at least learned the 1980s scrub version of self-respect and outlaw identity.

Noel: “Ordinary fuckin’ people, I hate ’em.” Tasha, you’ve just cited the one line from Repo Man that I quote more than any other—usually as a half-joking punctuation to some rant about an annoying encounter I had in a checkout line, or in traffic. That line is central to Repo Man’s pull, because it gets at why Otto’s drawn into this world. There’s an inherent appeal to secret knowledge, especially when delivered by a dude brimming with quiet self-confidence. Otto wants into that club, because he wants to know what its members know. But he also doesn’t want to be lumped in with the idiots Bud loathes, those dweebs with unexamined lives. Tasha, you say it’s funny how Otto’s idols are pathetic; for me, it’s even funnier that Otto never fully wins them over. They accept him into the fold and tell him what they know, but I’m not so sure they wouldn’t have done the same for Kevin or Duke or Archie. They’re self-mythologizing; they crave an audience more than a legacy.

Nathan: A lot of Otto’s search for identity is endemic to being a teenager, and consequently being a blank slate for other people to imprint. It’s telling that Emilio Estevez’s next big role was as a jock inThe Breakfast Club, which explores the concept of adolescent tribes from a much different, more mainstream, less angry perspective. In his youth, Estevez was a beautiful blank: Give him an earring and a sneer and he’s a punk; put him in wrestling garb and he’s a jock. Repo Man has such a presence in the culture that it felt like a career-defining role for Estevez, but it’s wasn’t, maybe because he’s so consistently, deliberately overshadowed by everything around him, especially Stanton and Tracey Walter, who plays Miller. Ultimately, Otto is just seeking a surrogate family, because his own family are zonked-out sheep who ceded their free will, agency, and money to a televangelist and the TV. 

One of the film’s key moments in exploring identity comes when Miller says John Wayne was a “fag”—or at least a transvestite, based on his own personal interaction with the man—and the other repo men are enraged. For all their macho swagger, they’re so insecure that they see an attack on his heterosexuality as an attack on their own fragile masculinity. They’re playing at being badasses, but in the end, they’re all pretenders.

LOS ANGELES

Noel: Scott’s essay yesterday talked about Repo Man’s depiction of Los Angeles as a vast underclass wasteland. That drew me to the movie the first time I saw it, as a Nashville teen who’d never been to L.A. but enjoyed seeing it savaged, since it made me feel like I wasn’t missing anything. I’ve actually still never been to Los Angeles, though I went to San Diego for the first time last year and was impressed by how much of that stretch of Southern California looks like a movie: gorgeous scenery broken up by the kind of seedy motels where fugitive gun molls stay, and divided by deep ravines that look perfect for hiding bodies. This pivots some off the “punk” discussion, but part of what made the Los Angeles wing of American hardcore so potent was that it was a rejection of the “sun, sand, surf” image of L.A. that the 1960s rockers sold, and that the 1970s soft-rockers also traded on. In the punk scene, Los Angeles was dangerously empty, an arena for decadence and violence. Repo Manplays up that generational divide, suggesting that the beach-party L.A. had long since been vacated, left to the ravaging hordes.

Keith: It’s also notable for the amount of diversity onscreen.  There’ssome ethnic diversity to the punks in Repo Man, but even more on the soundtrack and in the broader cast. This was the look and sound of a different city—the musical landscape of 1970s L.A. was dominated by white folkies and country rockers—one that wasn’t necessarily riding high in the Reagan era, and was okay letting the world know they weren’t so happy about it.

Nathan: For me, much of what makes Repo Man a quintessential Los Angeles movie is its emphasis on cars, highways, and urban sprawl. But this isn’t the breezy, sun-and-fun car culture of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean. It’s a grubby realm of sweaty men in beat-up cars. It’s another look at the downside of life in sunny but dispiriting Southern California.

Tasha: When this topic was introduced, my first thought was “Wait, it takes place in Los Angeles?” Apart from the map of L.A. on the wall at Repo HQ, I would have guessed Detroit, or even Flint, Michigan. Going back and looking for city signifiers, I didn’t see many—there are distant glimpses of the city lights in a few scenes, but most of the film takes place amid anonymous warehouses, run-down or boarded-up storefronts, and grubby houses. It makes me wonder whether avoiding any of the usual California signifiers, or any early establishing shots, was a budgetary move on Cox’s part, or he was deliberately creating a gray, impoverished landscape as anonymous—and as relatable—as his ultra-generic beer cans and chip bags.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Tasha: One thing we haven’t touched on is Alex Cox’s use of color inRepo Man. It’s a dingy movie much of the time, taking place in a world full of gray and brown buildings and plenty of black and gray tarmac. But so many of the shots still have at least one point of bright, vibrant color. The one that most caught my eye involves Otto and Duke talking in front of a warehouse in the rain, with Otto for some reason wearing a bright purple coolie hat. Often, the bright spots are the cherry-red tail lights of a car, or the gleam of its paint job. There’s almost always something to attract the eyes.

Matt: Noel’s comments about his most quoted Repo Man line—“Ordinary fuckin’ people, I hate ’em”—got me thinking about how many other cult films share that exact sentiment. Many of the greatest cult movies are about outsiders who can’t or won’t conform to society’s norms, including Freaks, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pink Flamingos, Fight Club, The Warriors, Harold And Maude, Clerks, Office Space, and Donnie Darko, to name just a few of the most immediate, obvious examples. It’s not something I’d ever considered before, but it makes perfect sense that the movies rescued from obscurity by the pop-culture fringes would specifically extol the virtues of a life lived on society’s fringes. Cult movies like Repo Man validate the attitudes of their cults, insisting that ordinary fuckin’ people do suck, and that weirdoes of all shapes and sizes are beautiful. As Nathan notes, the punk-rock scene and later the repo-man life provide Otto with a tribe, a place where he belongs. Repo Man’s cult provided its fans with the exact same thing.

Nathan: Totally. Passionately and publicly embracing cult films are a way for fans to simultaneously join a tribe of like-minded souls and assert their individuality, just like becoming a Deadhead or a Juggalo. Cult-movie lovers are as much of a tribe as punk-rockers, and there’s considerable overlap between the two demographics. 

Rewatching Repo Man, I experienced a sort of double nostalgia for the film’s 1980s Los Angeles and the cinematic era it represents, but also for my own adolescence, when movies like Repo Men were cultural touchstones every alienated, artistically inclined teenager was expected to consume as part of his or her ongoing pop-culture education. This alternate canon of weird cult movies helped define who I was and how I saw the world, even if I was ultimately just trading in one form of conformity for another: Instead of seeing all the big hits and Oscar-anointed middlebrow fare considered important by the culture at large, I was seeing all the movies every cinephile was expected to see, and Repo Man was high on that list. Like many of my peers, I defined myself by seeking out movies about how ordinary people fucking sucked, as opposed to Ordinary People. 

Noel: Alex Cox has made some interesting movies since Repo Man, but none as confident or entertaining. I’m not sure whether Cox just became too overconfident in his ability to throw a bunch of crazy ideas together and turn them into a movie, or whether he ran out of ideas that were crazy enough. Whatever the reason, it’s a damned shame, because I don’t think anyone who fell in love with Repo Man in the 1980s expected that Cox would go on to be a non-factor in the indie-film revolution that followed. In a better world, he’d have been right there with Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, and the Coen brothers, knocking out one weird classic after another.

Scott: The issue of the aliens and the contents of the trunk is one of the lingering mysteries of Repo Man for me. There’s something here about government secrets, of a nuclear and Area 51 kind, and Cox himself has talked about the film as being concerned with nuclear disaster, which would bring it closer to Kiss Me Deadly, a noir that suggests the apocalypse as Pandora’s Box. But the connections between Otto’s part of the story and the nuclear scientist’s part of the story are enigmatic, perhaps deliberately. It seems to be the license of self-styled cult movies like Repo Man to allow their eccentricities to linger, and I guess I’ll have to be comfortable resigning myself to the fact that I can’t put all the pieces together. 

Tasha: As the film’s resident philosopher-wacko says at one point, in talking about coincidental connections, “No explanation. No point in lookin’ for one, either. It’s all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.” This bit of don’t-ask-don’t-tell theater is reminiscent of the “Movies don’t make sense!” opening to Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber: It’s a direct warning that viewers shouldn’t expect all the pieces to come together neatly. It’s unclear how the alien corpses got into in J. Frank Parnell’s trunk, or what he’s planning on doing with them. All we know is that this kind of thing happens to repo men all the time, because that’s the intense kind of life they lead.

Our Movie Of The Week discussion began yesterday with the keynote essay on Repo Man’s ideas, and continues tomorrow with Noel Murray on the lure and lessons of Repo Man’s soundtrack.

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I Look At The Shining and It Shows Me Things: John Fell Ryan Gets Lost Inside the Overlook Hotel

My name is John Fell Ryan and I'm obsessed with Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

You may have known me as that guy from Excepter or The No-Neck Blues Band, but any remnants of my former identity have been completely subsumed by an overwhelming and unflinching fixation on the rooms and hallways of The Overlook Hotel-- and I'm only half kidding.

I write and edit a blog devoted to visual analyses and image cataloging of The Shining called KDK12, after the radio call number for the Overlook Hotel. Together with Akiva Saunders of Brooklyn's The Spectacle Theater, I produced screenings of The Shining Forwards and Backwards, Simultaneously, Superimposed, a digital re-edit of the film. This pop culture stunt that landed me in a documentary about Shining obsessives, Room 237, which premiered at Sundance 2012, screened at Cannes, got picked up by IFC, and is due in theaters this Fall. So from one perspective, you could say things are blowing up for me in Shining land. But from another perspective, I'm just like Jack in the film, driven insane by the spectral Hotel and trapped in its walls for all eternity.

I knew things were bad when I met a fellow Shining enthusiast in real life, and he and I were dressed similarly in flannel, jeans, boots-- dressed like Jack, stubble growing on our faces and hair unkempt. We were becoming characters in the movie. As we incorporated The Shining into our psyches, it began to shape and mould our lives.

The above image is from the The Shining Forwards And Backwards experiment. With the mirror being such a central concept to The Shining, we made a mirror of the film by overlaying two copies running against each other-- a simple way to see what kinds of symmetries The Shining could offer. We see Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrence, sitting in the Overlook Hotel bar, an alcoholic having his first drink since going sober months before. In the overlay, from a point equidistant from the film's center, is an image of Jack embracing the mysterious nude woman he finds in the taboo Room 237. Two images of ecstasy before the fall, standing across from each other in the mirror. The nightmare of surrendering to self-destruction.

Above is the exact center image of The Shining, about one hour and eleven minutes into the film. We see Scatman Crothers as Dick Hallorann, the head chef at The Overlook Hotel, lying in a hypnagogic state watching television, about to receive a "shining" vision of Jack entering Room 237. The center point of The Shining shows something just about to happen. The symmetry is just a little off, just as the symmetry of the above image is just a little off. The green bed points to the right, propelling the narrative force forward. Similarly, the incredible amount of different analyses of The Shining proliferating across the Internet and beyond reach no crystal conclusion: they only produce more analysis. In all my years of studying not only The Shining, but also other studies of The Shining, there seems to be no end to it; just when you've think you've seen it all, someone finds something new hidden in the labyrinth of the Hotel walls.  

Above is a short film I made, slowly zooming in on a mysterious detail pointed out to me by fellow Shining analyst and correspondent Juli Kearns. What initially appears to be a simple fire sprinkler upon closer inspection reveals itself to be a double doorknob, floating independently between the two lotus-like light fixtures. If it's just a reflection off the glossy ceiling, why don't we see a similar effect on the two lamps? A carefully placed subliminal special effect there for no other reason than to delight the kind of people who look for such things in the background of Kubrick films--people like myself, Juli, and a growing number of others. A poppy in a land of lotus eaters...  

  

I discovered Juli's work on a research trajectory extending from what I thought would be a simple, fun weekend project: making a map of the Overlook Hotel.  While sketching things out, I discovered that others online were way ahead of me already. After immersing myself in the mstrmnd's megalithic analysis, I found the blog of Rob Ager, whose lengthy analysis of The Shining included maps of most of the sets, cataloging their numerous spatial anomalies, impossible windows, hallways that lead nowhere, false doors, and other subliminal haunted house spookies: chairs that moved in between shots, disappearing furniture, and sets that had no logical connection with one another. It was on Ager's moderated forum that I met another blogger by the handle of the Wrong Way Wizard, whose analysis of The Shining ran towards wordplay, symbolism, synchronicity, and of course, magick. We had a torrent of exchanges on the forum, exploring the esoteric nature of even the most trivial scenes and characters in the film, like the manager's near-silent assistant Bill Watson, or the auto supply proprietor Larry Durkin. But all was erased when Ager decided the Wizard had gone too far on some point or another and permanently banned him, deleting not only his posts, but the entire forum.

So I moved on, continuing work on my own maps of the Hotel, establishing compass directions for each set and noticing a pattern of objects pointing north-east, magic wands, escape hatches... which I related to have something to do with the Christian mystery of INRI, the sign on the cross. Cycling around The Hotel in my head accelerated a kind of personal vision. I was dreaming about the The Hotel at night, flying around on Danny's Big Wheel. However naive, my biblical reading of The Shining found validation when I happened on Juli Kearns' massive analysis, which relates Kubrick's work to Jewish mysticism with subliminal Hebrew allusions, discursions into Gematria, and the best maps of the Hotel anywhere. She even figured out the secret location of the red hallway. If you read her analysis, you can see where we began trading notes in the vain attempt to create logical connections between the sets. Still, Juli was always one step ahead, uncovering hidden treasures in the film no one has ever seen before.

For example, Juli discovered a hidden open door across from Room 237, seen above to the right. If you're familiar with Shining lore, this kind of information is an absolute bombshell, it's like spotting Bigfoot.  

Secret doorknobs and doorways are like escape hatches from the Hotel, little details by which Kubrick is letting you know: there is a way out. I began studying the exit signs, focusing on Danny's visions for hints of deliverance. By intently studying the Games Room scene in The Shining, I noticed a pattern of shifting primacy from left hand to right hand, or translated to brain hemispheres, a shift from the "creative, primitive" right brain to the "logical, verbal" left brain. This pattern continued in studies of the appearance of Danny's magical friend Tony, who shifts from left handedness to right handedness over the course of the film. Even in Danny's bloody visions of the Twins in the hallway, there is a subliminal shift of Danny from the left side of the screen to the right; early visions see the Twins joining hands with the left hand on top, later visions with the right on top. In Wendy's series of visions, her knife switches hands from left to right, to left to right. Following right to left, I began to see red turn to blue, a Kubrick color code, a rainbox order, with the green Room 23 7 in the center. Following right to left, I began to see red turn to blue, a Kubrick color code, a rainbow order, with the green Room 237 in the center.

While I was in my Shining rainbow reverie, I was contacted by William Klaus, a multi-aliased correspondant of the Wrong Way Wizard, who informed me of a project they were working on in tandem, synching 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut with the Pink Floyd LPs Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, and The Wall. A DVD arrived in my downtown LA PO Box, wrapped in Joycean mind maps. After the screening, my viewing compatriot and I were scratching our third mind at the lack of sync for "my favorite ax,"  but something struck us about the juxtaposition of the The Shining box beneath the panorama of 2001, especially when the blackness of space would invite a more universal illusion. Our agent provocateur followed up by syncing The Shining to Pac Man, which coincidently were introduced to the world one day apart.

Once the sync-sphere is activated, it tends to keep syncing as long as the power's on ... and with super-consciously designed sync-engines such as The Shining, even when the power's off.

I began making my own sync videos, first by comparing the color green in Disney's Sleeping Beauty, Hitchcock's Vertigo and of course, The Shining:

In syncing one thing to another, one creates a gravitational pull around the points of coincidence. Cutting into The Shining was awaking the extra-sensitive. Paranoia lies like a web across the world of dark souls, and once a struggle pulls the strings, all jaws extend.

I found myself on the online forum for a certain footballer turned prophet of the lizard-skinned Illuminati shape shifters; it was a certifiable snake pit of fantastical paranoia. I was only drawn there to explore a bandwidth draw from my Vimeo account, but there discovered a user by the handle Size of Light, who had superimposed 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining with startling results. He created the image above fusing the final hallway scene of The Shining with the mystical hotel room from 2001. Size of Light disappeared from the troll-heavy forum and set all of his videos to private, but not before I had a chance to watch a few scenes from his overlay, with the climactic image of Jack wearing the moon mask of the Starchild...

Or "Moonchild", as a newly resurrected Wrong Way Wizard corrected, reminding me of the reason why he got kicked off forums with an essay he published about how Stanley Kubrick not only faked the Moon landings, but also staged the events of September 11th. We're all dead, living in a decomposing corpse reality, about to enter the stargate to a new universe... 

Why all this interest in The Shining? Why now?

On a material level, the technology is just now readily available to conduct frame-by-frame of analysis of film. My research really took off when The Shining was on Netflix streaming a year or so ago and I was able to take screenshots, put everything on a Tumblr scroll, and make close shot comparisons. Now, the easy availability of video editing software is doing the same to the moving image and sync videos are on the rise.

On a sociopolitical level, The Shining mirrors current economic struggles. The book and film came out of the 1970s, with its twin recessions, the energy crisis, etc.-- a time we are reliving now. In the story, Jack and family are under financial stress and forced into the further stress of social isolation in order to survive. 

On a psychological level, The Shining is an Oedipal story of generational conflict: father abuses then tries to kill son. As I point out in on KDK12, Danny is now, in 2012, about the same age as his father was when The Shining took place in 1980. The abused grow up to be abusers ... now is the time the archetypical spirit of Danny is on trial. Will he break out of the cycle of abuse, or succumb to the past and join his father in time-loop damnation? 

Here are two videos I made synching related scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining:

People get the wrong idea when they ask if Pink Floyd meant for Dark Side of the Moon to be synced with The Wizard of Oz. The mysterious thing is that they do sync-- they sync inside your head. I have heard complaints about The Shining Forwards and Backwards experiment-- for example, that it isn't conclusive, because it doesn't take into account the deleted hospital scene or the shorter cut shown internationally. But the most important aspect of superimposition isn't author's intention;it's watching something familiar in a new way-- or ways, seeing two points of view simultaneously and continuously. It's a dance, beautiful and social.

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I could go on and on (and do, on other channels) but I'll leave with one last gift from the Shining-sphere: a video deconstruction of the entire film sent to me by artist Tommy Bobo. He took the pixels along the four edges of the screen and stretched it across to fill the screen. So here we have at the top left corner, the top of the screen stretched down; at the top right corner, the right of the screen stretched across; at the bottom right corner, the bottom of the screen stretched up; and at the bottom left corner, the left of the screen stretched across. This reduces the narrative to color impressions, but leaves the rhythm of the edit in tact, turning The Shining into visual music ... another path up the mountain to the stars above.

Room 237 screened at Cannes just yesterday, and Excepter's STREAMS 2 is coming out this Summer on BLAST First (petite).