The Great River

You cannot beat A River 

into Submission. 

You must to surrender 

to its currents... 

and use its Power 

as Your Own. 

“Mr. Hallorann — 

What IS in Room-237…?”

“Nothing. 

There ain't nothing in Room-237. 

But you ain't got No Business goin’ In There anyway — 

so STAY OUT”

“In The Sex Room, 237, 

where we see this beautiful, sexual temptress, 

who then becomes a rotting body... 

realistically depicted as a rotting body... 

the design on the rug shows basically the most... 

in geometric form with round curves... 

the act of intercourse itself, 

one after another after another after another, sort of like a picture of down through the generations of what produces Life. 

You go back out in the hallway, in the larger society, and the round curves of that very same design have become hexagons, not so nice and round, and a little bit more like 

the beehive hexagon but down the whole corridors of history. 

I think he's got an image of it there, so he's talking about 

The Family of Man, 

both in an individual nuclear family 

and in the whole course of our genetic history. 

Once Danny enters Room-237, 

like, that's... 

that kind of is, like, 

the activation of the rest of the movie. 

Like, that's what causes Jack to go insane finally. 

That's what brings Hallorann to the hotel. 

Like, the Room-237 is, like, is sort of this... 

I mean, I compare it to 

the mysterious hotel room 

at the end of 2001, 

where there's... 

It's this strange, strange place 

that somehow, like, transforms the rest of the narrative. 

The Shining takes place 

on the top of a mountain 

in kind of like a, you know, 

magical shape-shifting environment. 

And, like, travel is... traveling out of it is... 

You know, instead of 2001, where you're traveling to something, the point of The Shining is to escape, is to travel out. 

And Room-237 is, like... 

it's kind of like 

the escape pod 

of... of the hotel.