Golden Slumbers – Round 2

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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

“Once there was a way/To get back homeward” – Danny runs backward into the room with Summer of ’42 playing. The one connection between this room and the Boulder apartment that I can see is that Wendy has a can of Coke here, and there was a can on Coke in the fridge in Boulder. Fairly tenuous connection, but a connection all the same. I suppose you could observe how Wendy and Danny watch TV together three times. Once at “home”, once here, in the new home, to ill effect (the movie she’s showing him is rated R), and once in Suite 3, where the set-up reeks of the urge to have back what they had in Boulder. In fact, round 1 of this moment played over that scene (if backward). Oh my god, the round 3 version of this moment is the first breakfast backward. So the three instances of Wendy and Danny watching TV together are perfect album lengths apart. I shouldn’t still be this impressed by Redrum Road, but what can I say? That’s the power of Kubrick’s genius. After the better part of a year staring at this beast, it still has the power to floor me.
Summer of ’42 is about a woman anticipating the return of her fighter pilot husband, who (spoiler alert) eventually gets killed overseas. In the wake of this news she makes love to the young boy in the scene with her here, Hermie, while playing a record that was significant between the woman and her former husband. In the present scene (which happens to start 24 minutes into that movie) Hermie is boasting that he’ll be old enough to become a pilot soon too, and that his brother is a paratrooper. Dorothy cautions him not to be in too big a hurry to grow up. So the weight of the You Can’t Go Home Again theme of Golden Slumbers, as discussed in the first round of this track, is present all throughout Summer of ’42.
The last song that plays overtop Grady and Jack in the bathroom is called Home, and it’s by Henry Hall and the Gleneagles. It’s a wistful, nostalgic tune about the urge to return home at the end of the day. That song starts about 15 seconds from now, during the n-word conversation. So we get one refrain of “Once there was a way/To get back homeward” during It’s All Forgotten Now, and one during Home. So Jack has found a way to get back homeward, or at least, that’s the idea the hotel is trying to subliminally message him with. In fact, the way they’re about to bandy the n-word about, that also suggests a certain regression, and in a sense, that’s what going “home” is. It’s where we’re comfortable enough to let our hair down, and shrug off the sometimes tedious advancements that society demands we exhibit. And for some people, that means getting to be racist again.

This is kind of obscure, but just as McCartney starts singing “Golden slumbers”, the woman in the movie, Dorothy, says, “Marvelous donuts”. I’ve wondered if Kubrick saw the donut as a symbol of cycles (not in Summer of ’42, but in The Shining by way of Summer of ’42). If so, and if golden slumber is a reference to golden spirals somehow, these make a perfect oblique pair of metaphors for expressing one of the film’s core studies: cycles vs. progressions.
Way more surface level, Wendy is here cautioning Danny that Jack only went to sleep “a few hours ago”.
Oh, also, note that Grady and Jack are bandying about the n-word here, and the last time we heard this song, Hallorann was tirelessly driving to Danny’s rescue. There’s actually the idea of colour at every level of this moment. Hermie in the movie is about to tell Dorothy that he takes his coffee black (with a note of pride in his voice), Jack and Grady are judging a man by the colour of his skin, and the song is singing about gold. Fun fact: Maxwell’s Silver Hammer was pretty close to being on the opposite side from this moment, but it’s not.

“Once there was a way/To get back homeward” – Everything I just said, over again. But also, this push in on the movie seems like an apt way to emphasize the message.

“Once there was a way/To get back home” – On “home” we get the MONDAY placard. Recall that last time we were hearing this song, Danny was trying to get into room 237, the “moon room”. And here, Monday = moon day. Also, Jack is here attesting to Danny’s status as a willful person. And willful persons go into 237s. It’s the law.