Surell

Well, Cleopatra is the stated subject of the song - her name is repeated multiple times and the first half is a story actually told in Egypt - so that part wasn't exactly any guesswork on my part. The idea is probably that she took that as her erotic name, as those in erotic industries are want to do, but I don't see the point in spending ten minutes on the broad if there isn't something deeper than her stripping and dying.

Thanks for the comments fellas! I don't feel right writing in here until I get the next entry(s) out, so I'll be sure to be hasty, and I'll keep in mind a little more work on Jazz and Big band.

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Surell

The only reason i changed my avatar and possibly gender is because I thought i finally let the guilt of an unfinished list off my shoulders, but it turns out technology failed me, much like I imagined a "perfect" entity that can't even enjoy a day at the beach would, so now I'm going to present the last four albums with the brevity of a twitter post, which surely is a signal to declining times. More detail later perhaps.



2. Shields - Grizzly Bear

An icy glimpse into a hero's journey, betrayal eke dissapointment wynd down to self empowerment, either preceding or succeeding apocalypse.



3. Sorrow and Extinction - Pallbearer

Five songs represent the five grieving stages for the earth's imminent doom, placed on the grand stage of proggy trad sorrow metal for all.



4. Centipede Hz - Animal Collective

Alien eyes observe daily human activity as they perform it, interrupting the everyday with the assembly and destruction of industrial parks.



5. Psychedelic Pill - Neil Young

Nostalgia point revisits pains and joys of his own past to soberly find right and wrong over stormy, meditative jams straight from his mind.

HONORABLE MENTION:



UNEVEN COMPROMISE - LIL UGLY MANE

Our protagonist realizes apocalyptics visions, is oppressed by masonic overlords; now jumpcut to the savage nature of man, our true downfall

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Surell

Though it isn't talking about music, I think it fits with the idea of the journal, and it's interesting to me and something I wrote. It's a draft I just wrote for most of today, I hope it's not too bad. It was for a class where we analyze films based on a theme, here obsession, usually along with a great work of fiction (obsession had Heart of Darkness but it doesn't come up here because I suck).

When you watch the Oscars, one can tell right away the dedication it takes to be a filmmaker with the regard of an artist by the fact that the categories branch not into genre, but technical departments. Films are comprised of various components manned by countless workers, to whom a great director has to have great interest devoted. For a true visionary, every project is a concise statement: You see it in Francis Ford Coppola, who in his finest cinema explores the alienation of man from his environment and even himself; or with Martin Scorcese, in his quest to pose human reality at its most naked to the audience; or in Paul Thomas Anderson’s portrayal of families as the form, disintegrate, and reform themselves to evolve; even Christopher Nolan, a grandiose magician of the screen, with his truly metaphysical conceits, pushes the audience to question their understand of the reality of his films, how that pertains to them, and then how they have to question their own realities; and then in a more subversive light, there is David Lynch, narrating the most repressed, unexplored impressions of American culture with an eerie innocence like that of 1950s America. But the almost inarguable apex of filmmaking, a man leaping from idea to idea, synthesizing the most disparate elements of storytelling, boiling his communications down to the most essential symbols, and still maintaining one of the most distinct, inimitable styles in the field, is Stanley Kubrick.

From the midcentury, a renaissance in filmmaking, until the turn of the millennium, Kubrick consistently release jaw-dropping, paradigm shifting films, influencing contemporaries and successors alike. He was a man of genius IQ, an obsessive chess player, and likewise an obsessive artist. His films are so deeply contemplated, so painstakingly developed, that it has left some with the conclusion that his films have no mistakes, no room for any shot containing misinformation or error. And this may especially pertain to symbolism, since among his many great qualities, the most distinct might be his cinematography, the composition of his shots and how they’re captured by the camera. This is so prominent, in fact, that for his longtime misunderstood horror The Shining, a movie has been dedicated to the many theories of fans on what Kubrick’s intent was for making the film, called Room 237.

For these critics, it is not possible that he would create this film without some greater theme or purpose for it to allegorically fit: with Dr. Strangelove, he tackled the self-destructive paranoia surrounding the Cold War and technology; Full Metal Jacket looked at the nonnegotiable brutality of war in general; and 2001: A Space Odyssey explored man’s relation to his destiny, his progress, and the surrounding universe. This consistent stream of lucid, meaningful work wouldn’t likely be interrupted by some one-off horror flick so very separated by conventional horror. Another factor that seems to give it some distinction as carrying some vital message is that it is based on a book, but so consciously deviates and even destroys the source material and builds anew on top of it. One commentator claims that the biggest clue to Kubrick’s very conscious deviation is how he swaps the book’s red VW Beetle for a yellow one, and then later shows Dick Holloran driving by a wreck on his way to the Torrance’s, a wreck involving a diesel truck flipped atop a red VW Beetle – the commentator makes a point to say that Kubrick’s “vehicle” is much more essential than King’s, in this implication. Acknowledging this break from the source seems to imply that he is using the book’s characters and set only as vehicles for Kubrick’s own tenor, trading out King’s story of his own struggle with alcoholism, writer’s block, and familial failings, for something personal to Kubrick. Many interesting propositions are thrown in, some with more expertise than others: It is a possible WWII/Holocaust portrayal, Jack being the bureaucratic overseer of the prisoners, and the spirits being past or present victims, seen in the imagery of eagles (a Nazi mascot), German typewriters, the number 42, and Kubrick’s own preoccupation with the Holocaust (he was Jewish and long wished but equally dreaded to make a movie on the event until Schindler’s List was produced); then there’s America’s own genocide, that of the Native Americans, possibly hinted at in dialogue (built on an Indian burial ground), the elevator’s blood flood (possibly brought up from the basement where Native bones are buried), Colorado’s longstanding strained relationship with Native Americans, and consistent Native imagery in the hotel (decoration, portraiture, and canned food); there is also the infamous accusation that it is Kubrick’s confession of helping fake the lunar landing footage, of how he slowly went mad keeping the secret, losing a friend and nearly losing his family, this being evidenced primarily in the number 237 (237000 miles from earth to moon) and Danny’s ascension in the Apollo 11 shirt, among other things. Some don’t entirely affirm a theory as much as attest to his master of subliming information. One man claims he was reading a book on subliminal messaging, and even went to meet with advertisers to learn their secrets in the art. Another cites a Freudian book on fairytales, which accounts for the mention of breadcrumbs and imagery of deceitful witches and Danny hiding in a kitchen. Dissolves are also noted for how they actually seem to be synchronized, lining up the exterior of the hotel with, say, a ladder, creating a sort of pyramid imagery, or a group of people being place right where a pile of suitcases were in the previous shot, seemingly alluding to the Holocaust’s dismantlement of humans and humanity.

Overall, one can ascertain even without these obsessive readings that Kubrick was very intentionally planting clues and signifiers around his film. As one woman notes, when the girls appear to Danny in the rec room, the girls are left at the bottom of the screen, surrounded by posters, above and to the side. When Jack is in the Golden Room, there is a remarkable bit equally subtle motif of deep red, from drapes on the wall to couches the people sit on to Jack’s very own coat. He leaves from this room into a shockingly red bathroom. This is where he is enticed. We see him wearing a coat of this violent hue but eased into the color externally, clueing us into the idea that he really was always a part of the hotel. The director, in his own explorations and referencing a mysterious conspirator called MSTERMIND or something of the like, claims the movie is meant to be seen “forwards and backwards,” and cross-fading the two shows a few scenes that are so eerily congruent it seems like they could have been choreographed to be so viewed. Kubrick’s blocking and plotting of action does seem almost blatant in the film, much like with the dissolves. When they first reach the hotel, and Jack is sitting in the lobby (reading a Playgirl magazine, as some have noticed), people seem to march in behind him, equally spaced in time and distance between each entering figure. The cameras, in their very Kubrickian way, also track along in very even measures. The way the hotel’s manager speaks and interacts with the family seems fairly artificial, as well as Jack’s interactions before his descent into madness. There’s just so much air in the dialogue when it’s delivered, but in the film’s tight corridors and maze-like tours with the camera you find a claustrophobic atmosphere. In this maze we might be able to get to the heart of how this film relates to the others and its own possible implications.

There is, of course, a maze exterior to the hotel, but the building’s own structure and treatment by the spirits is very much like a labyrinth, meant to horrify and madden and sentence its occupants to death or entrapment. It is curious that he would keep two mazes in the film, and what implications it could have; more on that towards the end. It is said in Room 237 that Kubrick moved toward The Shining as a reaction against his previous work, the highly acclaimed Barry Lyndon – apparently, this film bored him. Looking to find new ground after a complete set of classics under his belt, he went to horror, which at the point of The Shining’s creation, would have been predominately filled with slasher’s and other grindhouse-style affair. In a sense, we see Kubrick escaping two labyrinths of his own design, with the mastership of a prestigious chess player: He escapes the past glories weighing down his creative future, and creates a more cerebral horror film as opposed to the basic gore of that era. Kubrick not only creates a new path for himself, but revitalizes the intelligent horror film at the same time. What’s equally interesting is that his lack of experience with the field of horror doesn’t confine his success in that field, though he does succeed with a fairly unconventional style. He understands that fundamentally what strikes horror in the audience is the pacing of the action, especially building up to a moment, combining that with a sense of inescapability and portraying this slow dread with still, striking visuals. Much like with Nosferatu, what the audience fears isn’t the Count sucking the blood, but him standing completely erect, like something inhuman; or his shadow slowly climbing the stairs, knotting the audience’s stomach with how he savors that ascent; and before that, how the protagonist hides desperately under a blanket as a fearful Danny would, while the Count lets the door creep open and appears from a massive, barely torch lit hall. All the shadows, the negative space for something to crawl out of, and the inhumanity of the antagonist, coupled with how very patient his actions are, give the audience that sense of dread, that idea that what they face is inescapable. Kubrick’s negative space becomes a maze, with countless corners for boogeymen to jump out from, and the coffin-like tightness that tells the audience that there are no moves out, there is no escape. Kubrick may have turned to horror because this was his horror, never having another creative move to play again, winding up in a personal stalemate. To expand the idea momentarily, Radiohead, facing their fate as the new Pink Floyd, something nice but still not entirely theirs, made a complete about face creatively, turning from progressive hard/alternative rock to progressive electronic/hip hop/dada inspired pop/rock, and haven’t turned back since.

There’s an extremely interesting and entirely logical point made about the hotel’s structure that stirs the audience even more and expounds on the idea of it as some horrible, supernatural labyrinth, in the fact that it has very little logical sense. The most striking evidence in this, one commentator reports, is that when you go to the office of the building, where Jack goes for the interview, you see on his way that the hallway just beside the office holds elevators and doors to a room probably behind that office; but, as she points out, when you look in the office there is a window, glaring with light and littered with sharp, leafy branches. It is impossible for that office to have an outside view. In the Wendy, Danny, and Dick’s tour of the freezer, they enter in one side, exit through the same door, but by the camera’s POV have come out at a different exit. Even before this, when they’re walking between the maze and hotel, one shot shows a different entrance side than the one succeeding it; even before they’ve entered, we can see (though that isn’t a promise that we will see) a huge though subtle deviation from physics, from the very logic of nature, that goes entirely unnoticed except to the trained eye.

With this twisting and turning of our path through the house he may be purposefully distorting our reality pertaining to the house. He’s interrupting the natural flow of events, and it is likely neither we nor the characters will even notice how off existence in that house really is. This is similar to Nolan’s frequent questionable reality, wherein due to some underlying condition we cannot truly grasp if what we’re being shown is the truth. Like with Memento, where we suffered through Leonard’s lack of memory, every now and then being presented with something new, something that may be drastically different than it was before, due to our fundamental ignorance of that very prior state. He also derails our passage through the film by his distortion of chronology, building through the middle by jumping back and forth through past and present, much like Kubrick’s distorted presentation of the setting. Then in The Prestige, we are continually jerked between betrayals by each main character, having figurative rugs pulled from under us, trap doors dropping us into some new shocking turn in one rival’s fortune, building to one final betrayal and a lingering curiosity as to if this contention might ever cease or, especially, if the inciting death was even intentional or not. Everything is obscured, as a magician would have it, and we are ultimately kept in the dark. Inception equally relies on an unstable perception, hinting throughout that perhaps our POV through Cobb, the entirety of the narrative in fact, might be some horrible construction making a flailing attempt at ejecting himself from an inescapable dream, so deep that he can’t know when he’s finally reached reality. Sharing with these films that inescapability, twisted passage through the narrative, and the consistent betrayals between characters and surroundings (that aforementioned distance in the dialogue and artificiality in presentation) may present the film as a question of reality.

In my own thought on the film, its opaque nature seems to invite questions on the film’s reality, and how that fits with Kubrick’s consistency of thematic work. He really kind of constructs the whole thing as a sort of black hole; as mentioned, the film defies physics or logic, defies its source material, steps cautiously away from its precedence to create new ground. Like Descartes, he believes his reality must be judged entirely on his own rationale, dismissing any external material for his vision to stand on. Perhaps he even meant for the audience to misunderstand him in the time of the film’s making – Bob Dylan purposefully drew hatred to himself to escape the spotlight and focus on his personal affairs, allegedly. So, knowing that he had to disintegrate all these things to gain the distance he needed to progress, he made this horror film, completely out of step with himself and the movie market of the time, with unexplainable happenings, cliché horror effects mixed with completely innovative techniques, paired with a book that sold well and was acclaimed only to trash most of that and horrify the audience in a brand new way. But Kubrick was a perfectionist, which means not that he’d make the perfect turd, but a perfectly idiosyncratic effort, so unheard of and standoffish in its presence that it intimidates to tackle. It is a black hole, as going into it means coming either to uncertain conclusions or utter nothingness (a viewer’s hatred). Room 237 tells its story entirely through stock footage, a great majority from Kubrick’s own films, indulging Kubrick’s seeming omnipotence in film and somewhat dwelling on how few new ways there are to commit a story to film (as Paul Thomas Anderson put it, “We’re all children of Kubrick… is there anything you can do that he hasn’t?”); excusing the digression, as each initial viewing experience is recounted, the same footage of people in this 70s theatre, the projector flicking on, and the movie appearing on the screen is shown; it’s like these voyagers, out in their seats, are all entering the exact same abyss, but, being metaphysically contorted by this absolutely unknowable limbo, come out to entirely different conclusions, explore entirely different implications, almost watching entirely different films. Kubrick may have planned this, in fact; he faced an uncertainty that struck him as terrifying and hellish, and the greatest horror he could commit to screen is one where the audience comes out with that same eternal uncertainty, escaping the black hole as they left the theatre but never actually leaving it behind. He may have felt the sting of writer’s block, like King, but he had his own ghosts and demons to appease, and so he had to completely substitute that other constructed reality for his own, to finally escape that maze.

As I mentioned earlier, there are curiously two mazes in the Shining, and it is curious because Danny attempts to escape Jack by entering another possibly inescapable construction. What logic is there in that, escaping one inescapability through another? Perhaps he is here showing the two sides of himself in Danny and Jack, as mentioned in the lunar landing conspiracy, wherein Danny is Kubrick as explorative, naïve child before the fraud and Jack is the bitter, maddened man after the secret is committed. Here, however, he is just a man stuck in a place it seems like he’ll never escape, one that he was fated for and will always see as Jack was portrayed in his alleged everlasting caretaking position there, and Danny is opportunity, a reinvigorated youth that will lead Kubrick out of this sentence. When Danny covers his tracks, he is extinguishing those past glories, those affirmative criticisms, those committed fans, so that he can create a new path for himself, escaping that tormented self to begin anew. As we know, Jack dies, a babbling ape of a man, frozen in the labyrinth as well as in time, as Danny escapes back to the world; Kubrick is possibly encapsulating that past self, telling us that that man is merely a photograph, a moment in time, and that he is moving on. For the audience as well, though, he is telling us that some things are not worth dwelling on. Though he has constructed something so multifaceted and elusive, and it may present some very interesting insights, it is not necessarily the be-all end-all for his life’s project; The Shining is only a moment in time, it is with the past, and it needn’t necessarily dictate our present interpretations. Essentially, he’s asking us to progress, as he did.

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Trollheart

Unknown Soldier paid me one of the highest compliments I ever received a while back, which was to say that my review of "Downfall" was not only the best he had seen in my journal, but the best he had read on the forum. I didn't think that was the case at all, but in reading yours I have to admit my review compared to yours is like a stickman cartoon coloured in crayon as opposed to a Caravaggio.

The depth of understanding you have of this man, and his movies, and your eloquent delivery of your points, your conclusions and examples, your explanations and your observations, all make me hope that one day I will be able to review a film as well as you do here.

This week's post of the week, without any question.
Great job!

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Surell

Thank you very much Trollheart! You're not only the king of journals but a truly great writer yourself, so it's really great to hear such kind words from you, always.

I have to admit, though, I would never have had any of this insight without Room 237. Even though sometimes the commentators could be pretty out there, they were all very fascinating, and opened up my mind to how the film could be interpreted; without seeing that film, The Shining would still be extremely obscure to me, though not in a bad way, since it is one of my favorites. But without a doubt, I'd still be in the dark in how to go about analyzing it.

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Surell

Turn Up And Wild Out To Your Favorite Hits By Such Favored Acts As Lil Wayne, Bobby Shmurda, MIA, Mission Of Burma, Pavement, Riff Raff, Crystal Castles, And Many Many More !!!

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