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Kanayama1119 favorited a video
(3 hours ago)
For some reason, perhaps simply by chance, the number 237 keeps popping up in movies. I'm not sure if this recurrence has any significance at all, ...
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For some reason, perhaps simply by chance, the number 237 keeps popping up in movies. I'm not sure if this recurrence has any significance at all, but if you spot the number in any other films, please let me know. I'm mainly interested in examples that seem entirely coincidental, not when they obviously make references to Kubrick's The Shining. The film clips shown here are from The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940); Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947); Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966); The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980); Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981); Stand by Me (Rob Reiner, 1986); The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994); Battlestar Galactica, Season 1, Episode 1: "33" (Michael Rymer, 2004); Capote (Bennett Miller, 2005), and Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (Zach Helm, 2007). A funny coincidence: a year ago I taught a college course in film criticism and theory. Can you guess what my classroom number was? Yep, you guessed it. P.S. Several YouTubers have already helped me with this project by letting me know about the number's appearance in Magorium, Stand by Me, Shawshank, and Battlestar Galactica, and Bedtime Stories. Thank you so much! That makes a total of ten movies and one television program! Update: I have a theory as to why the number 237 is used in each of these instances. I was telling my fiancée that I think that the number is used as a realist convention, that is, because it sounds like a "real" number, as opposed to numbers like 10, 25, 50, 100, etcetera that seem too neat and clean to be "real" in the context of a movie's fictional narrative. She agreed, noting that 2, 3, and 7 are the smallest prime numbers if you skip the number 5, which, as half of ten, seems less "realistic" than 7. So I think that we can develop a good theory about the use of this number. It is clearly chosen, like so many other formal details in a movie, to enhance the effect of reality, to make as easy as possible the suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy a movie. It is not the only number that suits this purpose, but it might be an optimal number, which would account for its seemingly coincidental recurrence. The twentieth-century French theorist Roland Barthes discusses a similar idea in S/Z, his book-length structuralist analysis of Honoré de Balzac's novella "Sarrasine." On page forty-nine of S/Z, Barthes writes, "The girl is twenty-two, the old man is one hundred. Twenty-two: this precise figure produces the effect of reality; metonymically, this precision leads us to believe that the old man is exactly one hundred years old (rather than being somewhere around one hundred)." So we might say that it is the precision of the number 237 that produces the effect of reality in each of these eight films and one television program. Thank you again to those people who have helped me so far with this project. If you wish to be credited, please send me a message letting me know how you would like to me to list your "name" at the end of the video, that is, as your YouTube moniker or whatever.
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