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REDRUM ROAD – ROUND TWO – SKIP TO A PAGE
COME TOGETHER ⎔ SOMETHING ⎔ MAXWELL’S SILVER HAMMER ⎔ OH! DARLING ⎔ OCTOPUS’S GARDEN ⎔ I WANT YOU ⎔ HERE COMES THE SUN ⎔ BECAUSE ⎔ YOU NEVER GIVE ME YOUR MONEY ⎔ SUN KING ⎔ MEAN MR. MUSTARD ⎔ POLYTHENE PAM ⎔ SHE CAME IN THROUGH THE BATHROOM WINDOW ⎔ GOLDEN SLUMBERS ⎔ CARRY THAT WEIGHT ⎔ THE END
ROUND ONE START ⎔ ROUND THREE START ⎔ SPECIAL: STORY ROOM
- “Boy/Ya gonna carry that weight/Carry that weight a long time” – Grady has downgraded Danny from a willful boy to a…rather naughty boy. But it’s funny that the word “boy” gets used in the scene and music quite a bit right here.
- Also, Tony’s telling Danny the Grady girls were “just like pictures in a book”. In round 1, Jack was seen writing his magnum opus for the first time. In round 3, Jack has just entered the room with fake windows, the room with Ullman’s RED BOOK in it. This song was the Beatles telling themselves how nothing they did post-Beatles could possibly equal the impact of their band’s cultural phenomenon. Kubrick’s The Shining is basically about how Jack’s attempt at being the “American Shakespeare” (as book Wendy calls him) becomes the cross that buries him.
- Same lyrics as last time. Here Jack is saying, “It’s his mother, she, uh…interferes.” At this point in the last round of this song, Wendy was coming in to interfere with Jack’s writing by letting him know the news said it would snow later. What a jerk!
- “I never give you my pillow, I only send you my invitations” – Plays overtop of “Come play with us, Danny…forever, and ever and ever…” and Grady is telling Jack how he “corrected” his family. Which is basically him inviting Jack to do the same. It’s also an interesting metaphor for how the hotel treats Jack. It doesn’t let him sleep well, it only invites him to get fake-drunk, go insane and murder. The next time Grady interferes with Jack, it’ll be to wake him off the pillow of salt bags he’s sleeping on.
- This part of the song harkens back to You Never Give Me Your Money, in which Jack was trying to make Wendy believe Danny self-inflicted his injuries. Here, Grady is telling Jack a similar story. The women in his family brought the king’s justice down upon themselves. It wasn’t cuz he’s an axe-happy, suicidal lunatic.
- “And in the middle of the celebrations I break down” – On “middle” and “celebrations” we get the two mirror twin murder shots. It’s funny to think of the Grady twins going bloody as a “breakdown”. More likely it’s a re-literalization of Grady’s revisionism.
- “Boy(!), ya gonna carry that weight, carry that weight a long time” – On “boy” we get a great shot of Danny seeing the twins for the first time and looking transfixed. Grady is behind him. On the repeat of this line it cuts exactly to Wendy, pacing the apartment and plotting to leave the hotel without Jack. She will indeed have to carry Danny in that effort.
- Also, of the Wendy shot, for the tenth time, she’s got that Tower of Babel painting on the magazine beside her, which is Book of Genesis. And if we take the myth literally, the tower itself was quite a heavy weight, and it exacted a toll (the de-unification of the human race) which has been carried a long time. You know, going from the perspective of the song’s meaning–the Beatles writing about themselves–is a neat way to look at the Babel myth. On the one hand, it is one of the most visually compelling images from the bible, to a non-believer. Along with Noah’s ark, Jacob’s ladder, and Jesus on the cross, I would say it’s actually one of the only images from the bible that ever stood out to me. Perhaps there’s a reason for that. Maybe the bible peaks in Genesis, and never really recaptures that sense of awe and majesty that you get in the creation. Certainly The Shining isn’t preoccupied with much else about the book, by the look of it. But again, I’m no bible scholar.
- Sorry, one more thing about that: in light of my Younger Dryas Cataclysm thoughts, the Tower of Babel would make a good symbolic reference generally for the world that was, between the Ice Age and the YDC. People were probably amassing, and making tiny advancements, and getting the sense that the sky was the limit with regard to human advancement. And then a global natural disaster came (for the first time in cognizant human thought, perhaps), and made us think it was foolish to ever feel that way. But that sense of abundance, and that sense of the infinite possibility of growth for our species must’ve been intellectually satisfying in a way that would be hard to recapture after a global cataclysm. Perhaps the collapsing of the Tower of Babel (so to speak) was for all humanity what the Beatles break-up was for the four artists.
- On the final repeat of the chorus, backward Danny starts triking backwards. Wendy is also walking past Crime and Punishment here, which feels apt. Same with the reintroduction of a few riffs of the “All good children go to heaven” section, here.
- Also, the Crime and Punishment shelf is where the complete works of Shakespeare will appear much later. Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t appear during other scenes. Perhaps Kubrick didn’t want just any Redrum Road song overlaying with it. This song, for instance, would’ve given it the possible attribution of this weight carrying motif, like we’re comparing to Babel and the Beatles and Jack’s betrayal of his wife and child. Shakespeare never really had that great collapse. His genius (and its glory) sustained all throughout his pot-smoking life.
- Last time we heard this (round 1), Jack was ripping Wendy a new one in the lounge for interrupting his writing. She was telling Jack about the coming storm then, and here she’s saying, “If the weather breaks, we might just be able to get down the mountain in [the snowcat].”
Click here to continue on to Redrum Road: The End – Round 2
MAIN PAGE ⎔ SECTION PAGE ⎔ SITE MAP ⎔ GLOSSARY
OTHER MAIN PAGES FOR SHINING ANALYSIS
THE MIRRORFORM ⎔ THE BEATLES ⎔ THE RUM AND THE RED
BACKGROUND ART ⎔ OVERLOOK PHOTOGRAPHS ⎔ GOLDEN SPIRALS
PHI GRIDS ⎔ PATTERNS ⎔ VIOLENCE AND INDIGENA ⎔ ABSURDITIES
THE STORY ROOM ⎔ ANIMAL SYMBOLS ⎔ THE ANNOTATED SHINING
EYE SCREAM 