Haunted rooms, haunted minds

Rating: Null/10 (22 February 2011)

The hotel room fascinates me. When I happen to sleep in one, but especially the cinematic depiction. It's something about the air of ritual anonymity, the numbered keys exchanging hands and the nameless figures disappearing behind numbered doors, the close proximity to a system of lives played out for a few hours or days with a tacit understanding that the private and the public can be allowed to mingle gracefully, under a façade of respectability. Naturally I'm drawn to the perversion of that façade, to the strangeness I find inherent in it. But it's also the thunderous quiet of the empty hotel corridor with the thick carpet that muffles the footsteps. This explains a lot of my love for The Shining, it's an aesthetic affair for the camera that discovers around corners or behind doors, and also my affinity for what 1408 is trying to establish as a world, or borrow from the Kubrick film.
What is troubling for me here, is that the film touches on something I find important, cheapens it by an explicit mention, but is none the wiser in the end. I'm hooked by the idea that we're pretending to talk about a haunted hotel room when we're really talking about a haunted mind long before Mike's wife sits across a dinner table to tell him (and us, in case we didn't pick it up) that his experience with room 1408 was probably an experience with the subconscious. The movie deems the point important enough to explicitly mention it, we should all know, so what comes of it? In Barton Fink, a quizzical John Turturro was fighting in the hot damp Los Angeles afternoon to glue back the peeling wallpapers of his mind as he anguished for the truth of inspiration. Whatever allegory exists in the Coen film, is coming from a point of view that the mind matters, that it can master form or at least bring us close to that primordial stretch of sand washed by the cosmic waves. The sight of the woman in the bathing suit from the picture is a curious sight of relief, a kind of peace afforded by the memory of her picture.
In 1408, we see the process of that anguish, the way by which the mind is deranged. Mike's annoyance begins when he reacts within the walls of his subconscious, to a phone ringing, to an alarm clock. Bewilderment turns into terror, and the ensuing nightmare where he wrestles with inner demons, fear or remorse, where he relives the torments of the past, reveals the limitations of the mind, how it's not the keyhole from which we spy on human misery but the progenitor of it, that a way out is not assured if we dig deep enough.
Perhaps by fashioning a metaphor broad enough, 1408 has stumbled upon a fundamental tenet of Buddhist truth. We are responsible for our bad kharma, and more, we further it by reacting to it. Kubrick didn't give us this in his film for Jack Torrance, as a classicist he values thought and eschews the spiritual, but through a writing happenstance I find here a more lucid picture.
Two instances particularly fascinate me in this representation of the reality of the mind.
One is when Mike discovers his doppelganger in the building across the street and plays a game of tao, who is the mirror, who is the mirrored. The second, when the workers in the post office begin to tear down the post office to reveal the walls of the dreary hotel room now sagging with rot. This apparent reality that we walk in exists within the mind.
But if the apparent reality is a shell, what is the actual reality, what do we come back to? I try to love films despite themselves, but to an extent. Here the extent is the ending, where Mike and his wife listen to the voice of their lost daughter in that tape.
It all becomes irrelevant for me because apparently the movie deems more important the triviality of a horror plot that concludes with a twist about the afterlife than the honest representation of the present one, the haunted room more than the haunted mind. Mike was plainly exposed to the destructive machinations of the mind but is none the wiser. Eventually he concludes that "some bad memories we don't throw away" and we're back where we started, to repeat the cycle of misery.