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REDRUM ROAD – ROUND ONE – 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 TWO START ⎔ ROUND THREE START ⎔ SPECIAL: STORY ROOM
- This moment needs to be observed because it’s what I like to call the “hinge-point” of Abbey Road. That is to say, the exact middle of the album, taken in raw seconds (so, it happens a little before the end of I Want You (She’s So Heavy)). I’ve sometimes wondered if it’s proper to take out the 20-second secret track at the end of the record, and I think this clinches it. Why? Well, it’s complicated.
- First off, this is also the exact second that backward Jack appears on screen, replacing Hallorann’s snowcat. Second, where is Jack? The storeroom. And what’s so crazy about the storeroom…?
- …well, a lot. I made this graphic (when I thought the site would have a very different layout design) to show all the things that move and shift between shots. And I’m sorry, the current site design isn’t ideal. I’ll have to break it up, to give you a better look.
- So, all I’m really trying to tell you about here (check out my section on absurdities for full detail) is what you can see indicated by the purple lines. Which is that the Sysco boxes from Jack’s imprisonment were originally behind Wendy and Hallorann during the tour. And they’ve been replaced in the later world (as you can see in the bottom left box), by Libby’s and Golden Rey boxes. Now, is it impossible that Wendy or Jack went into the storeroom at some point and inverted everything? Not at all. But read on.
- As we can see here, there’s two huge deep freeze lockers (one of which we were just inside, second on the left) that burrow directly into where the storeroom should be. It’s only about five feet from the first of the lockers to Dick’s left to the edge of the corner. And as you can see in the above images, the store room is long enough to drag in about two Jack Nicholson’s or more. So there’s two things about the storeroom that we can say for sure: 1) it’s impossible, and 2) it seems to reverse itself. Well, one more thing.
- When Dick opens the door, his dialogue is “Now, this is the storeroom.” There’s a bit of trivia about Scatman Crothers being terrible at remembering his dialogue, and every take needing numerous retakes, some over a 100 times. As he says “storeroom” there’s a loud clangour of the door handle unbolting, or something, and the word comes out like “store-re-room”. It’s difficult to make out, but when I first noticed this, and searched my memory of this scene, I realized I would’ve made the same sound if I’d been impersonating him. Unfortunately, you’ll have to find and watch your own copy to hear what I mean. But on closer inspection, I realized what it sounded more like was “storyroom”. So this impossible, inverting room is like our film’s story. And every scene in or near it (with two brief exceptions, equidistant from it) happens in one big blob of time: 10:30. And on this side of the movie, it all starts at the exact middle of Abbey Road. And on the other side of the movie, it (obviously) ends at the exact middle of Abbey Road. Pretty cool, eh?
- Oh, I should mention as well that the two songs which play over the large majority of the sequences inside the actual storeroom are Here Comes the Sun and Because. Why is that significant? Well, these were the two songs after side one of the record but before the medley. And if you think of those two chunks of music as…chunks of music, these two act as an apt little bridging couplet. They’re both extremely basic (if not plain-spoken) songs about nature, and planets and stars and the sky. The one is about the sun, and the other was inspired by the Moonlight Sonata. As elsewhere discussed, there’s two ways of dividing up the record: Side one/Side two, and medley/non-medley. The first gives us almost perfect halves, and the second gives us almost perfect Fibonacci. These two tracks are the difference. The “sun” and the “moon”.
Click here to continue on to Redrum Road: Here Comes the Sun – Round 1
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 