Guest Post: Stanley Kubrick Faked the Moon Landing, and The Shining proves it (2/5/10)

The following post is a guest post written by my dear friend Rand Bellavia. Rand and I shared a room together for two years at Houghton College back in the day and we still talk about three days a week.

A dozen years ago Rand wrote a series of articles under the pseudonym Hipster Douchebag that were published on his brother David's blog. 

BTW, David's recent book Remember the Ramrods is a great book worth reading. I finished it a few days ago and highly recommend it. More information can be found about David here and here.

With Rand's permission, I am posting his Kubrick Moon Landing article here. For those looking for more information about Rand, here is his LinkedIn page and here is a page about his music career.

Enjoy the article!

Stanley Kubrick Faked the Moon Landing, and The Shining proves it (2/5/10)

On the Insanity Front: Our pal Jay Weidner recently unleashed the most delicious conspiracy theory I've ever read.  The moon landing was faked.  Okay, we've probably all heard that one before. But Weidner argues that not only did none other than Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing in 1969, but he hid proof of his complicity in his 1980 feature film The Shining.  Best of all -- and most disturbingly -- his evidence is persuasively compelling.

As a huge admirer of paranoid schizophrenia -- I'm a major Philip K. Dick fan, and if you give me twenty minutes, I will convince you that Paul McCartney died on November 9, 1966 (Wednesday morning at 5 o'clock as the day began) -- Weidner's theory has haunted me since I read it a few weeks ago. And as millions of Dan Brown readers have proven, it's fun to entertain batshit crazy theories, so long as you don't actually believe them.  That would be, well... batshit crazy.

To be clear, I'm just going to examine the aspects of Weidner's theory that amuse me. I'll skip over the boring stuff, as well as that parts that fall under the "crazy but not entertainingly so" category. If you want to read Weidner's full screed you can find it here. (Fair warning: strap in.)

Having read the Stephen King novel and seen Kubrick's film version several times, I am well aware of Kubrick's seemingly arbitrary alterations from the source material. Intriguingly, Weidner's theory explains nearly all of these changes as necessary to the larger story Kubrick is trying to tell: that he was compelled by the US Government to fake the Apollo 11 moon landing, and sworn to secrecy. It is very important to Weidner that we understand that this was a secret that the government was willing to kill to keep. The lives of Stanley Kubrick and his family were in danger. What he doesn't explain is why Kubrick would feel compelled to present this information, however carefully hidden, in his most popular film.

Perhaps the most entertaining aspect of Weidner's deconstruction of The Shining is his insistence that the single most fantastic aspect is that Kubrick managed to scatter this information so "clearly" throughout the film, and not that Stanley Kubrick Faked the Moon Landing! Throughout his piece, that little factoid is dropped as a given -- as casually as one might mention that the Pope is Catholic. "Does a bear shit in the woods?" "Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing?"

We will compile his "evidence" into two categories: Symbols and Changes.

Symbols -- These are the images scattered throughout the film that are meant to communicate the True Meaning of The Shining to its viewers. Apparently, by "viewers" here, Weidner means everyone but the US Government.

∙ When Jack Nicholson meets with the manager of the Overlook Hotel, the manager is wearing <gasp> Red, White, and Blue.  Jack's wife and child also wear these colors for the first half of the film.

∙ The manager of the Overlook has an American flag on his desk and is seated in front of an American eagle.  And what was the name of the lunar lander on the Apollo 11 mission?  That's right: The Eagle!

∙ The walls of Jack's working space are covered in Native American art that resembles rockets launching!

∙ Jack's son has a <choke> teddy bear!  Apparently, this is meant to represent the Russian Bear that forced us to fake the moon landing in the first place.  Here Weidner goes completely off the rails: "They had to fake the moon landings and cover up the real truth behind the flying saucer craft and machinery that the US government actually has created and employed since World War Two."  It should be noted that Weidner never explains nor returns to this assertion.  Neither does it seems to occur to him that if we did indeed have flying saucer technology, we wouldn't have had to fake the moon landing.  To say nothing of the fact that this flying saucer technology might have done a fine job of warding off that scary Russian Bear.  Side note on the whole bear thing: Weidner broke my heart by nattering on about bears as symbols of Russia, and then not even mentioning the, uh... BJ and The Bear scene.

∙ Through much of the film, Jack's son Danny is wearing a sweater with a rocket and the words "Apollo 11 USA" on it.

∙ By the end of film, Jack Nicholson looks pretty much exactly like Stanley Kubrick.  This supposedly is meant to symbolize that Jack and Stanley were in the same situation -- employed by the Overlook Hotel/US government to "oversee" a deep dark secret.  I was unaware that Stanley Kubrick owned the copyright on growing a stubbly beard and not combing his hair.  In Weidner's defense, note how Jack and Stanley have the exact same hairline in these two photos I just randomly found (and that Weidner has probably never even seen).  Ooo.  Scary.

∙ And, finally, we come to the most absurd, preposterous, overly reaching (and, of course, my personal favorite) symbol: In the film there is a shot of crates of Seven Up.  Significantly, there are six crates!  This is meant to represent that fact that while there were seven Apollo missions, only six actually landed.  Um, but I thought that none of them actually landed.  Wasn't the whole point of this that Kubrick faked the moon landing?  I'm confused.

Changes -- The following are the aforementioned alterations that Kubrick made to King's novel when adapting it to film.  (Even the most casual fan of film would recognize this as proof positive that Kubrick faked the moon landing, as we all know that film directors never change any aspect of a novel that they are adapting to film.)

∙ The Overlook Hotel was built on an Indian burial ground. See? The Overlook is the United States.  Both are built on the bodies of Indians.  Get it?

∙ In the novel, Halorann ends up being the hero of the piece, arriving just in time to save Danny and his mom.  In the film, Halorann show up just in time to get killed by Jack Nicholson.  Weider argues that this change was made to show us that someone found out about the faked moon landing, and had to die!

∙ The room that Danny is told not to enter is Room 237.  In the novel it is Room 217.  Why such a meaningless change?  Kubrick said it was because the owners of the actual hotel used in The Shining were afraid customers would avoid room 217, so he used a number that didn't correspond to an actual room.  But our intrepid Mr. Weidner called The Timberline Hotel on Mount Hood and was easily able to get a reservation for Room 237!  The Truth is that Kubrick used Room 237 because (wait for it) the average distance from the Earth to the moon is 237,000 miles.  How could we have been so blind?

∙ Those horrible twins.  In the novel, the previous caretaker of the Overlook killed his wife and daughter.  In the film, he killed his wife and twin daughters.  According to Weidner, Kubrick did this not because it provided him with the single creepiest image in the film, but rather because the NASA mission previous to Apollo was named Gemini!  Once again, the scales fall from our eyes.

∙ Jack's wife enters his work space and finds what he has been writing all this time: reams of paper all containing the sentence "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over.  Weidner "suggests" that we read the word "All" as A11 or A one one or Apollo 11.  I suggest that he kisses my A ess ess.  In one of my new favorite sentences, he writes, "May I suggest that the nickname, or the code name, for the faking of the Apollo Moon Missions was A11?"  Of course you may suggest it.  It doesn't necessarily make it so, but suggest away.  This is circular reasoning at its finest.  It's easy.  First, come up with an insane theory.  Then find a secret code hidden in something.  Lastly, randomly redefine that code to represent your insane theory.  Let's try it, shall we? 

Insane Theory: Eddie Vedder is on a mission to enslave all Canadians.

Secret Code: Pearl Jam is an anagram of "Maple Jar." 

Random Redefinition: Might I suggest that Maple is a symbol for Canada and "Maple Jar" represents Eddie Vedder's desire to place all Canadians in the "jar" of slavery?

Denouement

In his conclusion, Weidner requests that NASA commercially release Kubrick's faked moon landing footage.  Then he leaves us with this kicker, "May I also suggest that NASA use the millions of dollars made from this surely successful movie release to fund another mission to the moon?"

So much wrong with that sentence.  First of all, even if you were with him thus far, how can you trust the opinion of a man who thinks a moon mission can be funded with "millions" of dollars.  You're going to need a calculator with more than eight digits, Professor Algebra.  Secondly, what happened to the secrecy?  Remember when Halorann found out and had to die?  All those threats to Kubrick's family?  What's changed that would make the government okay with admitting that the moon landing was faked?  Lastly, I'm fascinated by Weidner's use of the phrase "another mission to the moon."  Wasn't the whole point of this diatribe that there hasn't been an actual moon landing?

Just what is Weidner hiding?