‘The Shining’ explained: Why did Stanley Kubrick change room 237?
Throughout his career, the cinematic icon Stanley Kubrick turned his attention to most film genres. He waged war with Full Metal Jacket, defied the historical with Spartacus, laboured in science fiction with 2001: A Space Odyssey, dabbled with the erotic on Eyes Wide Shut, and even touched on horror with The Shining.
Though Kubrick’s movies are littered with Easter eggs, The Shining contains so many that you can even make an entire film about them (and people indeed have). The 1980 movie is based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel of the same name and stars Jack Nicholson as a recovering alcoholic writer who takes a job as a winter caretaker of a haunted hotel.
Though it is clearly derived from King’s novel and certainly stays largely true to the plot of the literature it was founded in, there were notable differences of interpretation between the director and the author. Apparently, Kubrick called King to discuss the movie and simply asked him one question: “Do you believe in God?” when King replied in the affirmative, it is reported that the filmmaker simply hung up.
King believed that Torrance was inherently a good guy who was “bent one way and then the other” by various cosmic forces of evil. Kubrick masterfully blurred these conventional definitions of morality by making Torrance a psychopath. He thought the horror of humanity was much more compelling.
It would be the start of many issues King had with the movie, famously noting: “I think The Shining is a beautiful film and it looks terrific and as I’ve said before, it’s like a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it. In that sense, when it opened, a lot of the reviews weren’t very favourable, and I was one of those reviewers. I kept my mouth shut at the time, but I didn’t care for it much,” King once said.
“I feel the same because the character of Jack Torrance has no arc in that movie. Absolutely no arc at all,” he added. “When we first see Jack Nicholson, he’s in the office of Mr Ullman, the manager of the hotel, and you know, then, he’s crazy as a shit house rat. All he does is get crazier. In the book, he’s a guy who’s struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that’s a tragedy. In the movie, there’s no tragedy because there’s no real change”.
He added: “The other real difference is at the end of my book the hotel blows up, and at the end of Kubrick’s movie the hotel freezes. That’s a difference. But I met Kubrick and there’s no question he’s a terrifically smart guy.”
In a display of his intellect, Kubrick took the story into new spaces, especially with Torrance. One might go as far as to suggest that the main character of The Shining is, in fact, the Overlook Hotel itself and several of its rooms and areas play a significant part in the narrative. Take, for example, the scenes in which Danny and Wendy are caught in the maze or when Jack comes across the strange twins in the hallways.
While King might claim otherwise, Kubrick took the story into brand new places and certainly added some differences to the story.
Why did Kubrick change the room number in The Shining?
It’s hard to ignore the significance of Room 237, the guest room of the hotel that the hotel’s chef Dick Hallorann advises Jack to avoid at all costs. Of course, the very warning of Hallorann against visiting Room 237 is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy of going there and experiencing its horrors.
In Stephen King’s novel, the room number is actually 217, and after the success of the book, several of King’s fans made a pilgrimage of sorts to The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, which served as the inspiration for the setting of the iconic horror story.
In the book Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, editor Lee Unkrich explained that Kubrick had used the Timberline Lodge hotel in Clackamas Country, Oregon, to film the exteriors of his film adaptation. The manager of the Lodge fully expected there to be an influx of bookings to arrive after the movie was released.
However, the manager was also concerned that guests would not want to book into Room 217 after Kubrick’s film was screened because they might be “afraid of being chased by the bloated body of the bathtub lady”. So the manager actually requested that Kubrick change the number of the room.
He proposed that Kubrick change the room number to 237, 247, or 257 because none of those numbers were actual rooms at the Timberline Lodge. In the end, Kubrick settled on 237 because it reflected a piece of history from one of his previous films. 237 is, in fact, the number that needs to be entered into the computer in Dr. Strangelove in order to begin a nuclear holocaust. So necessity, in this instance, became an artistic expression, something that Kubrick himself was likely delighted with.
