Today we return to deal with great cinema and to decode the messages put in a bottle by the masters of storytelling. And when talking about codes, symbols, and inconvenient truths, one figure stands above all: Stanley Kubrick.

We will venture through the deserted hallways of the Overlook Hotel from the movie The Shining, but not to talk about a simple ghost story. The Shining is not a conventional horror film; The Shining is a ruthless anatomy of power and betrayal. A betrayal against humanity, the clues of which were scattered by Kubrick throughout the entire film The Shining.

So, what is The Shining really about? On a first level, the film shows us the violence of the American Empire. The Overlook is built on an ancient Native American burial ground, erected upon the ashes of an extermination. References to the power of the United States and the violence of war are scattered throughout the movie. A power that betrays the human bond, just as Jack Torrance ultimately betrays the bond with his closest family members.

But among the weaves of historical betrayals — wars of extermination, wartime carnage — an even more disturbing hypothesis emerges: the betrayal of collective trust through staging and media manipulation.

This is where the controversial theory of the Apollo missions comes in. There is an iconic scene in the movie: little Danny is playing on the hotel's hexagonal carpet. At a certain point, out of nowhere, a ball rolls toward him. Danny stands up wearing the famous sweater that says "Apollo 11" with a embroidered rocket taking off.

But look closely at that ball, because in Stephen King's original novel, the ball Jack plays with, or that appears in the visions, was red. Kubrick, with his well-known obsessive attention to every detail, decides to change its color, making it yellow. But why a yellow tennis ball?

In the English language and in American culture, the term "lemon" (yellow in color) metaphorically indicates a dud, a scam, a ripoff... a dud disguised as a deal. This connection is no coincidence. Before the tragic events of Apollo 1 in 1967, astronaut Gus Grissom, frustrated by the flight simulator's malfunctions, picked a lemon from a tree near his house and hung it on the simulator. It might have been a protest against the engineers to get them to keep up, but over the years it has also been interpreted as wanting to tell everyone without speaking: "This mission is a scam, it's a dud".

So, Kubrick picks up that signal and changes Jack Torrance's car, changing it from a red car to a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. A Beetle made famous in the US by the legendary ad campaign titled "Lemon". And he rolls the yellow ball, the lemon, toward Danny, thrown by a ghost to lure him into Room 237.

In the scene, which is a visual metaphor for the launch of the lunar mission, Danny is positioned right in the center of the hexagonal pattern of the carpet, which many have considered to resemble the outline of the Cape Canaveral launch pad. And when the yellow tennis ball rolls toward him, Danny stands up vertically, and this action visually symbolizes the takeoff of the Saturn V rocket from its launch pad, heading toward Room 237, which recalls the 237,000-mile average distance between the Earth and the Moon. The average distance is actually not 237,000 miles, but around 238,800. It is possible that Kubrick took the 237,000-mile figure from popular science books and school textbooks from the 1960s.

So, assuming these hypotheses are valid, at this point we are not surprised if, playing with the letters of the words "ROOM NUMBER 237" — and it is not strictly an anagram — words like "MOON ROOM" or even "NO MOON ROOM" can be formed.

In the film, Room 237 is the ultimate place of fraud and illusion. In one scene of the film, Jack enters Room 237, sees a beautiful woman, kisses her, and suddenly finds himself embracing a rotting corpse: the perfect metaphor for a grand, fascinating lie hiding a hideous reality.

We must acknowledge that Kubrick, in a film scattered with elements regarding the violence of power and the betrayal of citizens by those in power, actually included strong references to the Apollo mission, which is disturbing. Not because I want to claim that Kubrick directed the footage of the moon landing — I find that hypothesis absurd —, but because perhaps Kubrick knew secrets that could not, and still cannot, be spoken of today. Secrets that Kubrick nevertheless wanted to record on film, representing them without stating them explicitly, just as Dante might have done in the Divine Comedy to avoid being burned at the stake as a heretic. Like Dante, Kubrick may have responded to the urgent need to speak without speaking, to show while hiding, to provide the viewer with an unseen "overlook", a "eyes wide shut" vision.

Among the signals scattered by Kubrick in the movie that evoke the Apollo missions, we have already mentioned Danny's sweater and the hexagonal geometric patterns of the Overlook Hotel carpet, but there is more. In analyses by researchers, such as those presented in the documentary Room 237, it was highlighted that in the yellow ball scene, around Danny on the carpet are several toy cars and vehicles (trucks, tractors), which are compatible with the service vehicles on the launch pad. Among these, a Formula 1 model stands out, which, according to analysts, subliminally recalls the F-1 engines designed by Wernher von Braun specifically for the Saturn V rocket.

In the hotel lobby, the gigantic Native American paintings evoke the geometric shape of Saturn missiles ready to launch. Then there is a scene where Wendy performs rigorous checks on the hotel's equipment, holding a manual as if she were in the Houston control room. Furthermore, in the pantry, cans of Tang orange drink — the official sponsor of the Gemini and Apollo missions — strategically stand out.

In the scene where Wendy discovers repeated sentences on the typewriter pages, there appear to be further references to the lunar plot. The phrase repeated on the typewritten pages is: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", an old proverb that Kubrick inserts into the typewriter and which is not found in Stephen King's book. The word "Jack" could be associated with JFK, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was affectionately called Jack both by his family and the press at the time. Besides, the main character of the story is named John Daniel Torrance, known as Jack. JFK is the president who in 1961 signed the "promissory note" of the space race, promising before the nation and the world to put a man on the Moon before the decade was out.

Reading the phrase through this lens, it becomes a sort of epitaph or subliminal accusation: the lunar program and the absence of real play (thus, the pretense) turn Jack/JFK's promise into a dead end. If we accept the theory that "A11", in the typewriter font, should be read as "A11" (Apollo 11), the sentence takes on this meaning literally as well.

Kubrick was an obsessive perfectionist: every single page was planned in its geometric layout. If there are typos like "DULL BOG" or "DULL BOT", they are deliberate. "Bog" in English means swamp, marsh; "bot" evokes the automaton following higher orders devoid of willpower.

The ultimate nugget is that the typewriter is an Adler Universal. In German, the word "Adler" means eagle (Eagle). What is the name of the Apollo 11 lunar module that landed on the moon's surface? Exactly, it's named Eagle.

The film would thus be scattered with references to the deception of power, the immorality of power, as well as the violence of power. An idea of power, the one provided to us by Kubrick in The Shining, that is truly disturbing. And Kubrick puts this disturbing intolerability of power right in front of us: starting from the river of blood, passing through human perversions, and ending with the beautiful, seductive woman who is a decrepit corpse. Immorality, the loss of all ethics, scandalizes Kubrick, and he makes this clear from his very first film.

To understand the way Kubrick talks about power, we can trace back to his very first feature film from 1953, Fear and Desire. In that film, four soldiers who have precipitously fallen behind enemy lines find themselves wandering in a forest devoid of geographical or temporal coordinates, overwhelmed by madness and the survival instinct. It is no coincidence that scholars and critics have noticed a very clear parallel: that forest is the cinematic transposition of Dante's dark wood. That forest, too, represents moral lostness, and this common thread born in 1953 finds its ultimate consecration 27 years later, in 1980, within the walls and snow of the Overlook Hotel.

There, in the Overlook Hotel, the journey that had begun in the dark wood reaches the lowest point of the infernal pit, reaching the frozen lake of Cocytus, where the gravest sins man can commit are punished: the sins of betrayal. The lowest point of hell, "an all-time low" to quote David Bowie, where total cold and immobilizing freezing reign supreme. Lucifer at the base of the infernal pit, at the lowest point of hell, is the perfect inverted representation of God: while God from the highest point of the heavens radiates love that imparts movement, heat, and life to the entire cosmos, Lucifer, at the absolute bottom of hell, in a place dominated by the absence of love, radiates an absolute cold from the beating of his wings—a frost that freezes everything, immobilizing everything in a frozen state, in ice that photographically immortalizes.

In the ending of The Shining, in the frost where the damned Jack Torrance ends up and in his photographic frozen state that immortalizes him in the photo closing the film, we find an evidently Dantesque signature. And I am even more convinced of this Dantesque inspiration when I consider that in the film's ending, Kubrick structurally and radically changes what was narrated in the literary source. In Stephen King's novel, the Overlook Hotel ends up destroyed by flames: the boiler in the basement explodes, and the fire purifies and devastates everything; evil burns. Kubrick categorically rejects this epilogue, erases the fire, and relies on the frost of the darkest bottom of Dante's Inferno.

We thus see the snowstorm, the icy maze, and we see Jack Torrance dying frozen, solid on the snow and frozen immortalized in the final photo. It is clear why Kubrick did not end the plot of The Shining in fire. It is clear why this metaphor of power and betrayal ends with Jack Torrance frozen by the cold and frozen immortalized in a photograph. If we think, as I mentioned, of Dante Alighieri, everything falls into place: at the bottom of Dante's Inferno, in the ninth circle, there are no flames; there is Cocytus, a vast lake of perpetual ice fed by the wind of Lucifer's wings. It is there that Dante places the punishment for the most abject sinners: the traitors. Traitors to kin, traitors to country, traitors to guests, traitors to benefactors.

Jack Torrance is the traitor par excellence: he succumbs to the allurements of the hotel's power, becoming part of that immoral and treacherous power that betrayed the bonds of human solidarity and loyalty, that betrayed peace treaties with peoples who ended up exterminated. Jack turns his back even on his own flesh and blood, attempting to slaughter his wife and son. And as punishment for his betrayal, Kubrick does not grant him the catharsis of fire, but plunges him into the ice of Cocytus. Jack appears as a damned soul frozen in Cocytus and at the same time becomes a frozen Minotaur or Minos: that Minotaur recalling the brutal violence of power and the brutal violence manifested by Jack Torrance himself; that Minotaur whom Dante indeed placed as guardian of Hell in the circle of the violent. Or, if we think of Jack's role in the hotel, we could associate that frozen maze with Minos, the actual owner of the labyrinth—Minos to whom Dante assigned a bureaucratic-mechanical role at the entrance to Hell, not sparing him grotesque, monstrous, beastly features.

Minotauro or Minos, whichever he may be, we find Jack frozen, trapped forever in the maze outside the hotel — an hotel that is itself a labyrinth — and we find him immortalized forever in the photograph that closes the film.

In the film's closing, Kubrick strikes his final and unsettling parting blow. The final shot of the film does not leave us in the snow: the camera glides slowly along the hotel walls until it zooms in on a vintage photograph. In the center of an elegant gala ball, smiling in formal wear, is Jack Torrance. The caption at the bottom reads: "Overlook Hotel - July 4th Ball 1921".

"Frozen" in English means icy, but also immortalized in a snapshot, frozen in time. It is an effective correspondence, a temporal short circuit. Jack Torrance, damned, frozen in time, frozen immortalized in that year 1921.

And now let's conclude with the choice of this year 1921. To be honest: 1921 is a year that gives no clue to hypothetical references to power, wars, or betrayals. If we try to look for numerological connections, nothing comes of it: let's try subtracting the year of American independence (a concept recalled by that July 4th) from 1921, so 1921 - 1776 = 145, a number that cannot be linked to anything significant. The year 1921 is not randomly connected to anything we have discussed so far.

Yet, it is nonetheless a correspondence dense with symbolic meaning, because in 1921, the prototype of that Jack Torrance who smashes... breaks down the door in a scene from The Shining was immortalized in a film, recorded on motion picture film—that scene which has remained immortal and has been the iconic image of the movie ever since its release. Yes, because 1921 is precisely the release year of the Swedish silent cinema masterpiece The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen) by director Victor Sjöström. And the plot of this 1921 film tells of a violent, alcoholic man who dies at midnight on New Year's Eve and is condemned by a supernatural contract to drive the cart of death to collect souls.

Why did I tell you that the year 1921, or rather this 1921 film, is linked to the prototype of Jack Torrance? I told you because in that 1921 film, there is the sequence in which the violent husband and father takes an axe and chops the wooden door to pieces to attack his wife and children. Kubrick literally cloned that scene in The Shining.

By choosing the date 1921 in the final photo, the master may have left his definitive signature: a philological tribute to the origins of cinema and a confession at the same time. The confession of the Faustian, diabolical contract that power (and anyone who tangles with power) has signed with the devil, and which inexorably binds one to a mechanical, executive role of driving a phantom carriage that collects poor souls.

Among those who agree to compromise with power, can we also include director Kubrick? Or is Kubrick merely warning us? And what if he were confessing to us that, as a successful director, he is condemned to convey messages? After all, what is that piece of paper held in the hand of Jack immortalized in the photo? Messages that claim victims, victims who would be casualties of power and its lying, treacherous propaganda?

When Wendy proposes to Jack that they leave the hotel because they are going crazy, he explodes in a furious rage, something terrifying, and screams at her: "Do you have the slightest idea what a contract is? Do you have any idea of the responsibilities I've taken on or the obligations to my employers?".

Which leaves us with one last unanswered question: is Kubrick merely revealing the hideous, decrepit face of power to us, or is he also making a confession?