The Shining, The VW Beetle, The Murdered Astronauts, and Sarah Koenig’s Dad

There has been much discussion about Jack’s yellow VW Beetle in The Shining. In the book by Stephen King, the car was red and many have speculated that Kubrick changed it as a message to the author. Later on in the film we do see a red VW Beetle that’s been crushed by a semi trailer. It’s as if Kubrick’s saying to King – I smashed your little story and made it my own. That’s a perfectly valid analysis but I’m here to offer a much juicier interpretation that involves Julian Koenig, Sarah Koenig’s dad. Sarah Koenig was the presenter of the wildly successful podcast, Serial.

Fair warning, this is gonna get a little esoteric. I’m going to be drawing a long bow – about visual semantics and Kubrick’s love of hiding cryptic messages in his films. And while a film like The Shining seems to defy systematic analysis, Christiane Kubrick has said that it is “about horror on many levels.”

Firstly, we must acknowledge Kubrick’s fascination with cryptic codes, clues and symbols. Starting his career as a photographer, he quickly learned the power of images. At age 16, his photo of a newspaper salesman on the day of Roosevelt’s death was published in Look magazine. He soon became one of their staff photographers.

Kubrick was purportedly very interested in advertising and the shorthand way that advertisements could convey meaning in just a few words and pictures. He is also claimed to have believed that The Codebreakers The Story of Secret Writing by David Kahn is one of the most important books ever written.

With that in mind – the VW Beetle. This iconic car is steeped in lore. From sordid Nazi roots involving claims of slavery and murder to world domination in mere decades. Perhaps the most well loved car of all time. One of the most important markets for the VW was the US. North Americans traditionally loved big cars and selling the diminutive Beetle in 1959 wasn’t going to be easy. To do it, three men came up with what AdAge called “The Ad Campaign of the Twentieth Century”. They practically rewrote advertising. Of course, I’m referring to the famous Think Small and Lemon ad campaign, written by Julian Koenig (Sarah’s dad) and art directed by Helmut Krone.

The Lemon ad labels the car as bad but then goes on to explain how VW’s rigorous quality checking means you always get a good one. The quiet confidence of the ads made a car with seemingly irreconcilable Nazi roots palatable to a new counter-culture generation. They might have been able to overlook it’s evil beginnings but Kubrick didn’t forget that this little lemon was really a Nazi. Even though the ad is in black and white and the car is obviously a dark colour, the lemon/yellow reference got stored away somewhere in his huge vault of a brain as a symbol of “terror in a cutesy disguise” and, I suggest, informed the colour of psychopathic killer Jack Torrance’s Beetle in The Shining.

In the opening scenes of The Shining, Jack Torrance’s yellow beetle drives toward The Overlook Hotel on “Going to the Sun” road

But what’s that got to do with anything, I hear you ask? OK, here come the astronauts. Now this might be a stretch for some but you’ve really gotta believe that Kubrick was involved or at the very least knew some inside information about the Apollo moon missions. Either that, or he knows that’s what a lot of folks think, so he’s having a laugh at our expense. No matter how vociferously some people want to claim that The Shining does not refer to the moon landings, Danny is wearing that damn Apollo 11 sweater on his fateful trip to room 237, arguably the most pivotal and infamous point in the movie. Kubrick’s involvement with NASA is well documented. Two of his other movies, 2001 and Barry Lyndon, were made with the help of the space agency (cameras, lenses, funding etc.) The opening scenes of Jack in the Lemon/Yellow (Nazi designed) Beetle just happen to be shot on “Going to the Sun road”. Coincidentally (or not), Apollo is god of the sun. NASA and its Apollo space program grew out of the ashes of the Nazi rocket program. The U.S.’s Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) and special agents of the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) brought Wernher Von Braun and other Nazi scientists into America, under Operation Paperclip, supposedly to help hasten the ending of the war against Japan. Von Braun, whose avuncular portrayal in government-sponsored media belied his Nazi past, developed the Saturn 5 rocket engines that took U.S. astronauts to the moon aboard Apollo 11. This was a huge psychological blow against the Russians and gave America the ascendency in The Cold War.

Before the Apollo program, however, there was another NASA program called Gemini. Fans of The Shining may see some thematic synergy with the Gemini and Grady twins. The Gemini program did not end well. Some people have called it murder (or REDRUM, if you prefer). Astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger Chaffey were burned alive when a fire broke out in their test module (say like, if someone burns toast). Grissom’s family have long held that Gemini Astronauts were “taken out” by elements within the U.S. government (stacked neatly in the West Wing?) Grissom, in particular, had been a difficult character for the U.S. space agency to deal with. He’d previously been blamed for sinking the Liberty Bell 7 space capsule when he supposedly opened the hatch incorrectly – an incident he always denied and that was made famous by author Tom Wolfe when he claimed Grissom had “Screwed the Pooch” in his book The Right Stuff. Again, Shining fans may infer a reference to screwing the pooch in The Shining’s dog/bear fellatio scene. But here’s where it gets interesting – in the days prior to his death, Grissom, who was touted as being the first man on the moon, had been vocal that Apollo would never make it to the moon, saying they were ten years away from anything of the sort. He claimed the rockets they had were no good. He said Apollo 1 was a lemon. In fact, he reportedly hung a real lemon on the Apollo training module.

Gus Grisom reportedly hung a lemon on the Apollo 1 training module

I contend that Kubrick cleverly used a lemon yellow VW in The Shining to encode a message about the Nazi roots of the Apollo space program. It’s about how we forget – how we conveniently forgot that both the VW Beetle and the Apollo space program were born out of the murderous horrors of the barbaric Nazi regime. Kubrick reminds us of this connection by pointing out that both vehicles were famously labelled as lemons and by changing the colour of his murderous protagonist’s Beetle to yellow in homage to the famous ad campaign. Kubrick wanted us to remember that horror exists on many levels despite attempts to overwrite it with slick advertising and despite efforts to repress it by intelligence agencies wanting to advance national interests. Or maybe the yellow Beetle is just a shout out to Stephen King.

The Icarus Myth, Buzz Lightyear, and The Shining

There’s a scene in Toy Story where Buzz Lightyear realises that he can’t fly. He’d always assumed he could. There are wings on his spacesuit and everything. Having hauled himself up to the top of the stairs, Buzz launches his plastic body into the void only to come thudding back down to earth, his left arm completely broken off, in what could be argued is a straight retelling of the Icarus myth. It’s a big rug-pull moment for him because it illustrates that he’s just a toy and not a real astronaut. The scene is accompanied by a wistful Randy Newman song called ‘I will go sailing no more’. Flying is sometimes described as sailing through the air.

Moments before his ill-fated blast-off, Buzz stands atop the stair-railing and we see that the carpet on the nearby landing consists of a familiar diamond pattern previously made famous by the carpet in The Shining – in a scene that also features Danny Torrance wearing an Apollo 11 sweater. The director of Toy Story (Lee Unkrich) is a big fan of The Shining and there are many other Easter eggs throughout the Toy Story films. Here, the thematic significance of the carpet’s pattern is striking. Buzz Lightyear is an obvious reference to real life astronaut, Buzz Aldrin. Buzz Aldrin was aboard the Apollo 11 rocket depicted on Danny’s sweater. So we have the repeated elements of an astronaut named Buzz, the diamond-patterned carpet and the notion of ascending towards the heavens in flight.

In the scene in The Shining, Danny, wrapped in his Apollo 11 sweater, has a sort of symbolic Buzz launch too. He starts the scene crouched over his toys. At some point, a mysterious tennis ball is rolled towards him from off camera. He stands up and the rocket on his chest is thrust upward. Filled with trepidation, he (and, presumably, the astronauts in the ship on his sweater) venture towards the mysterious and frightening Room 237. We don’t actually see what happens to Danny in Room 237 but we see the aftermath. He appears downstairs with a large red mark on his neck. The collar of his Apollo 11 sweater is badly torn. Danny is so scarred from his experience in Room 237 that, from that point on, he becomes almost mute and is essentially replaced in the movie by his imaginary friend, Tony (“Danny’s not here, Mrs. Torrance”). This is a deeply disturbing piece of psychological horror.

Over the years, many have posited the theory that Stanley Kubrick was involved in helping NASA to create fake images and footage in support of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Whether he did or not is up to the individual and is not something I will tackle here. However, it is safe to say that, by the time Stanley made The Shining, some 10 years after the Apollo 11 moon landing, he would have known about the rumours of his involvement in the supposed space-hoax.

If, during the making of The Shining, Kubrick decided to have a little fun with these notions of faked spaceflight, he may well have included Danny’s horrific mission to Room 237 as a sort of allegory of Apollo 11’s failure which is, in itself, another retelling of the Icarus myth. And this seems to be the part of the story that Lee Unkrich has picked up on. More than just including a similar carpet pattern, Unkrich has created a scene where an Astronaut fails to fly in the way that he thought he could and is subsequently broken by the experience, just like Danny, just like Icarus.

If you think I’m drawing too long a bow, you might consider this. In 1998, during his speech in acceptance of the D.W. Griffith lifetime achievement award, Kubrick eludes to the Icarus myth and wonders whether the moral of the story should be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high’ or whether it might be better expressed as ‘forget the wax and feathers and do a better job on the wings’. Could Kubrick be giving us a clue as to his views on the veracity of the Apollo moon landings? In bemoaning the quality of the wings that failed to hold Icarus aloft, is Kubrick hinting at the failure of Apollo 11 to reach the moon? Does Danny’s terrifying proxy Apollo mission that ends in physical harm and mental breakdown talk to the same theme? Is Buzz Lightyear’s attempt at flight that results in a severed arm and complete disillusionment an example of another director developing Kubrick’s ideas?

In 1967, just 2 years before Apollo 11 apparently made its historic journey, Gemini astronaut, Gus Grissom famously labelled the craft that was supposed to ferry the astronauts to the moon, a lemon. Grissom, who was touted to be the first man to walk on the lunar surface, and his fellow astronauts Chafee and White, were killed soon after the lemon incident in a mysterious and controversial fire.