Kubrick's Shining Letters: Overlapping Redrums and Dull Boys

"The very meaninglessness of life," the late Stanley Kubrick once said, "forces man to make his own meaning." And so it is that we again obsess over the guy's films. From Room 237,a new meditation on some of the labyrinthine subtexts bigwheeling beneath Kubrick's The Shining (1980), to that stunning, if hotly debated fan-made one-point perspective highlight reel put out last month, it's like a vigorous new life is being breathed into Kubrick's oeuvre.

Not like his work hasn't always been in a near-constant state of resurgence and fascination among scholars and garden-variety film nerds alike. But if there's ever a time for a full-blown Kubrickian bubbling over, maybe it's now. The man was freakish not only in his legendary and relentless perfectionism, but in his embrace of game-changing technologies - or as he viewed them, time savers, which Tony Frewin, Kubrick's assistant from the mid-60s until the director's passing in 1999, said he saw as "worth [their] weight in gold." Frewin offered a telling anecdote when he caught up with VICE a few years back:

In 1980 he bought us all IBM green screens. These were the first PCs that were generally available, little 12" screens. You didn't even have a hard drive, you had two floppies. And Stanley said, "This is the future, this is what we'll be using." And I told him, "No, I like to type something and take out the piece of paper and see what's on it," and he said, "No, listen, you've got to get rid of that, this is the future, it's arrived now."

Anyway, I've been hearing about the Shining Forwards and Backwards phenomenon for some time, now. It's been said that Kubrick's masterwork in horror is meant to be simultaneously viewed front-to-back and back-to-front. Our friends at Spectacle Theater here in Brooklyn did just that last year, superimposing the "right way" and the rewind. But hey, not everyone lives in Brooklyn, let alone near boutique film houses that smell like buttered mildew and that are otherwise willing to screen a special snake-eats-its-tail version of The Shining. So unless you're willing, like John Fell Ryan to copy, reverse, and then superimpose the entire film sequence over its original forward-playing version, the next best thing is to pour over stills from the overlapped cut.

Ryan's 80-something stills are definitely worth checking out in full. It's all quite visually stunning, for sure, though I'll be the first to admit that some of the accompanying commentary is a bit of a stretch. Still, some of it is eerily spot on, opening up entirely new corridors to viewing The Shining's arrows of time, mise-en-scène, and on and on, while still taking it all in with the distinct possibility that Kubrick set it all up meaninglessly in a bid to infinitely pull one over on his viewers.

But looking over some of these stills, I was immediately struck by the text that permeates the tale of Jack and the gang slowly going mad, together, at the Overlook Hotel. Here are a few. While I could've included stills with seemingly random signage (see: Durkin's garage), I've decided to limit this to just some of those overlaps with either text dropped in in post-production, or text appearing as physical artifacts critical to the yarn, like photographs and type-written text.

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h5. You are cordially invited to the mirror party. There will be fireworks

!{width:630px}http://viceland-assets-cdn.vice.com/viceblog/76057049jack.jpg!

h5. Writer's block

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h5. You're fired

!{width:630px}http://viceland-assets-cdn.vice.com/viceblog/89053839close.jpg!

h5. So get the hell out of there, Olive Oyl

!{wdith:630px}http://viceland-assets-cdn.vice.com/viceblog/67904734redrum.jpg!

h5. One of a few shots of the iconic redrum door

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h5. Another of the redrum shots

!{width:630px}http://viceland-assets-cdn.vice.com/viceblog/4385839labyrinth.jpg!

h5. Hedge mazes are to repetitive mantras are to hedge mazes. So meta

!{width:630px}http://viceland-assets-cdn.vice.com/viceblog/60459057tuesday.jpg!

h5. This is not unlike what I look like most mornings?

!{width:630px}http://viceland-assets-cdn.vice.com/viceblog/1078564wednesday.jpg!

"Here's to five miserable months on the wagon, and all the irreparable harm that it's caused me."

h5. All images via John Fell Ryan

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson