Come Together – Round 3

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REDRUM ROAD – ROUND THREE – 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 TWO START ⎔ SPECIAL: STORY ROOM

Just as radiokiller backward Jack turned off the office lights at the end of round 1, forward radiokiller Jack is turning them on the very first bar of round 3.
Post-crazy face backward Jack, typing up the All Work pages in the lounge here, appears on the very first note. This feels like an appropriate beginning of the end.
Forward Jack committing his first murder, and backward Jack doing possibly the first bit of All Work. I think it’s more likely that Jack was doing All Work the whole time (I did a test page myself, and it took a crazy length of time, something like 15 minutes, to do just one. And he’s supposed to have done hundreds in ten days. Do the math.)

“Here come ol’ flattop he come” – In round 2 we saw backward Wendy enter Ullman’s during Come Together, there was no name placard on Ullman’s desk, like there is now (with its perfect reflection in the tabletop). That scene occurred between the interview, and here. So Ullman’s name plate disappeared and reappeared. Wendy’s top was flatter than Jack’s? In the song, flattop is Lennon joking about himself. Ullman = Lennon. So perhaps Wendy can see the true nature of this place better than Jack.
In fact, Come Together and The End played the first and last times (the only times) round 2 Wendy was in here. The same configuration goes for round 1 Jack. So perhaps this is a comment on how Ullman’s plot works on Jack, but not on Wendy. She didn’t, after all, sign the Red Book.
SATURDAY appears on “come”. Saturn was a god of time and death/rebirth. So if “flattop” associates to Satan, and Saturday associates to Saturn, we got a whole lotta “Sat”-based death going on here. In fact, the Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are, as it relates to the plot of that show, and the phrase Come Together, as it relates to the Beatles, are both deeply ironic expressions, given the way things played out. I doubt that was lost on Kubrick.

“He got juju eyeball” – On “got” we start seeing backward Jack’s creepy stare out the window. And with that, all the “juju eyeball” references are acquainted with three different creepy stares. Photo Jack, Tony/Danny, and THURSDAY Jack–all backward shots in their moments.

On “Got to be a joker/He just do what he please” the shot of backward Jack starts to zoom out, and Jack unscrews the radio top and tosses it aside to rip some guts out.

The next “shoot me” refrains start with this cut to Jack pulling out the first plug. In round 1 this was photo Jack fading into the larger group photo. I’ve wondered if Kubrick was interpreting “shoot me” (a kind of suicidal phrase for Lennon) in a slightly more abstract way for Jack. Jack is basically asking the Overlook to put him down, and it does (though he was probably hoping for transcendence more than imprisonment). How it ultimately does so is by “shooting” him into the 1921 photograph. What’s happening here? Backward Jack is standing in front of a bunch of photographs. What’s happening in round 2? Wendy is walking straight away from the spot where Jack’s photo will forever hang.

“One thing I can tell you is you got to be free” – Plays perfectly over the placard for THURSDAY. The day associated with Thor and therefore Danny (in the sense that Odin (WEDNESDAY) refers to Jack and Tiw (TUESDAY) refers to Tony). This plays well with the theme of sons rejecting the patriarchy. Actually, round 2 of this moment is backward Tony telling that Danny’s not here, and round 1 features a helicopter shot heading straight for the peninsula that leads to Wild Goose Island, which, in the opening shot of the movie, seems to correlate to Danny, given all his bird imagery.
Although, on “free” we get the cut to Jack at the typewriter on TUESDAY, being grumpy Jack.

There’s a couple nice cuts in the next “shoot me” section. The second “shoot me” happens when we cut to the below shot of mirror Wendy walking back, and this pairs with the moment SHELLEY DUVALL leaves the top of the screen in round 1. Round 2 features Wendy trying to get through to Tony/Danny and the bashful ranger.
The 8am placard appears at the same moment as DANNY LLOYD appears in the round 1 credits, and we know that this 8am correlates to another Thursday, and again, Thor correlates to Danny. Round 2 Tony/Danny is screaming REDRUM here, which has a kind of twin relationship to the All Work pages, which is what backward Jack has just started typing here.

“He bad production” – This placard was one of the scenes deleted for the much shorter version of the film that Kubrick cut for European audiences. My theory is that the European version was edited so that Brits, who would be more likely to pick up on all the Beatles references, wouldn’t be able to figure out Redrum Road if they tried, or if they cleaved to the 119-minute version he made for them as the “true” version. Time has told that audiences prefer the original. Then again, perhaps that shorter version contains a much different structural logic. It’s possible. I haven’t seen it or studied it. If you feel like taking that on, let me know what you find.
Actually, one more thing on that. I hadn’t actually read that list of scenes extracted from the 144-minute version before, but I just noticed that one of the scenes taken out is the scene I associate with famine in my four horsemen analysis. I mean, taking out any one of these scenes would throw off huge swathes of my analysis, but that one literally makes the four horsemen impossible to notice.

“He got walrus gumboot” – Wendy happens to be wearing gumboots inside. Though they’re a bright red, which I can’t seem to make an I Am the Walrus connection to. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough. Or maybe that’s not what this particular Lennon-Walrus connection is all about. Or maybe it’s just about pointing out Wendy’s red boot.

“He got Ono sidebar” – Shot of the jet carrying Hallorann (Yoko).

“Hold you in his armchair/You can feel his disease” – Backward Jack freaking out at Wendy. Jack has the All Work disease.

Jack mimes playing his typewriter with the jauntiness of a ragtime piano player right before the organ sound becomes more audible (it’s still playing here, but it’s not super audible). In fact, right when he stops is when it kicks in hard.

“Right!” – For the last time, this word can sound like “Ride!” and all three moments feature a character riding something. 1) the VW Beetle, 2) Danny’s trike, heading to the twins, and 3) Hallorann riding a plane to the Rockies.
If you hear it as “Write!” backward Jack is hamming up a typist’s mime.

We hear “Come!” right before backward Jack starts ripping up his page. And the fact that this plays over Hallorann’s bored flight seems on point. Like this was the (backward) moment when we knew we needed help. It’s only Dec. 4th (35 days into their solitude), and already Jack is straining under the pressure.
This moment is also funny because backward Jack is actually putting the page back together as we hear the “Come” over and over.

After backward Jack’s lengthy freak out, which perfectly spanned the bridge, the first beat of the new section matches with the cut back to cheerful Wendy trying to make the most of Jack’s grouchiness.
This shot also contains the “He rollercoaster” lyric, and doesn’t quite have the same punch as the last two rounds, which both revealed a haunted thing we hadn’t seen before. This is the last shot of Jack writing overlaying with the first scene of him writing. And in round 2, the moment is the first (mirrorform) time Delbert Grady is seen in the film overlaying with the last time the Grady twins are seen by Danny. And in round 1, it’s the first shot of the hotel exterior overlaying with the last shot of Danny and Wendy driving past the exterior during their escape. So I guess the roller”ghost”er was about firsts and lasts for spooky nemeses.

“He got early warning” – This line could almost apply to any scene in the film, honestly; Jack’s descent into madness is so incremental. And while it applies to Wendy in obvious ways here, we’re also seeing Hallorann’s plane touch down in a blizzard. He got early warning of that on Glenn Rinker’s news show.

“He one mojo filter” – Mojo is a hoodoo good fortune charm, essentially. In round one this plays over defeated backward Jack in the labyrinth overlaying the first shot of the hotel, and in round two it plays over the bashful ranger call and backward Tony/Danny giving Wendy a hard time, and here it’s Jack starting to explode at her, while the cavalry arrives. So I feel like Hallorann’s plane landing speaks to Jack’s defeat and the ranger call; there’s a sense of hope in each of these instances that plays against the menace. The menace of the hotel, of Tony/Danny and of Jack, here. In fact, this her first bad conversation with Jack, and the Tony/Danny conversation is her last really bad one with him.

“Got to be good lookin’ cuz he’s so hard to see” – Durkin is hard to see here, and he is good lookin’.
Also, Wendy’s saying “Aw, c’mon hon. Don’t be grouchy.” And the last time we heard these lyrics (round 2), Danny was seeing the chopped up Grady twins. Some people feel the twins correlate with Wendy. I’m not so sure. But this would be a chip in that pile, perhaps.

“Come together/Right now” – I wasn’t sure this version was going to have a good “Right now” moment, but here it is: there’s numerous instances of objects shifting locations, or disappearing altogether in the film, and in this shot, the table and chair behind Jack’s left disappear for this one moment. They’re in every other applicable shot. Well, what I’ve noticed from analyzing the vanishing objects is that their vanishment tends to reveal something in the spot where they were. And what’s revealed here is the snowcat that Hallorann will rent and use to come together with the Torrances. The overlay only lasts for 8 seconds, and the snowcat is only on screen for 13 seconds, so getting this, and the hundreds (maybe thousands) of other little overlays to work the way they do required quite a lot of coming together. “Right now.”

Jack and Durkin both have a certain “Shoot me!” expression while Lennon whispers this to himself for the last time.

All the Come Together rounds feature someone walking backwards, and this round it’s Wendy. Actually, they all feature Wendy running and walking backwards.
Also, they all end while a TV is playing something. Round 1 = Roadrunner. Round 2 = Summer of ’42. Round 3 = To Itch His Own. The two cartoons involve the trouncing of a menacing predator by a superior prey species. Summer of ’42 is similar in a sense, given how the teenage Hermie has his conquest turned back on him by the grief-stricken Dorothy, and his prized desire (to lose his innocence gloriously at the hands of this bewitching older woman, and prove himself a capital-M Man) becomes something much different when she finally opens up to him. She reverse conquests him. So I think we can read the Roadrunners as Danny absorbing the lesson about his relationship to Jack, Summer of ’42 as him absorbing the lesson about his relationship to Wendy (Danny’s reverse conquest on Wendy is to reassert the parent-child relationship), and To Itch His Own is perhaps what the movie wants us to absorb about Tony. You’ll know what I mean if you go read the above link. But just so I don’t not point it out: Tony Burton (who’s playing Durkin here) played Apollo Creed’s trainer in the Rocky movies. That adds to the To Itch His Own business.

“Come together” – Just as Carry That Weight captured both of the zoom-in-on-Jack-from-behind shots like this on the other side of the movie, Come Together pulls that off on this side.