Frame 237 to Room 237, from The Shining to Westworld

Frame 237. November 22, 1963.

Besides the 35th President of the USA John F. Kennedy, two other notables died on November 22, 1963: Aldous Huxley, English novelist and philosopher (b. 1894) and C. S. Lewis, Irish-English author, poet, and critic (b. 1898).

On Nov. 21, 1963, film critics were planning to catch a special preview of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove the next day. But when the news came from Dallas on Nov. 22, those plans changed.

"NEVER HELD ... THE DAY KENNEDY WAS SHOT," one guest scribbled on an invitation that resurfaced Friday on Reddit and other social media (see below), with many identifying the handwriting as Kubrick's own. Los Angeles Times, November 22, 2013. 

A photograph from a JFK meeting at NASA, allegedly in 1961, is attended by individuals who seem reflected in characters appearing in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 Dr. Strangelove.

One of the subtle but significant characters in The Shining (1980) is Stuart Ullman. Ullmann is a German surname also associated with Jewish Europeans. It means "man from Ulm." 

Ulm is a city in the federal German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the River Danube. The Battle of Ulm on October 16-19,1805 was a series of skirmishes, at the end of the Ulm Campaign, which allowed Napoleon I to trap an entire Austrian army under the command of Karl Freiherr Mack von Leiberich with minimal losses and to force its surrender near Ulm in the Electorate of Bavaria.

Most people who identified as Jewish were wiped out in Ulm during World War II.

In The Shining, Barry Nelson wore a toupee which made him look like JFK at a desk with the U.S. flag. Nelson was the first actor to play James Bond, in Casino Royale in 1954 on television, eight years before Sean Connery got the nod for the Bond movie role in Dr. No. His last major film character was as Stuart Ullman in 1980, in The Shining. His last movie appearance (uncredited) was as an "actor on television" in the 1982's Poltergeist. Barry Nelson died on April 7, 2007, while traveling in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, nine days before his 90th birthday. The cause of his death was unknown.

Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is a historically strange location - known for "ringing rocks" and Thunderbird sightings. The following films are linked to Bucks County: M. Night Shyamalan's 2002 film Signs was entirely set and shot there; Stephen King's The Stand has one scene set there; all of The Last Broadcast (except the NJ footage) was shot in Bucks County; and one of Steven Spielberg's earliest films, Something Evil, is set in Bucks County.

Scatman Crothers played Dick Hallorann in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). Here he is killed by Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson). In the real world, Crothers died on November 22, 1986, on the 23rd anniversary of President John "Jack" Kennedy's assassination.

Stephen King's home state telephone area code is 207. Area code 217 is central Illinois.

JFK's Apollo takeoff for the moon makes an appearance in The Shining.

Stephen King's book versus Stanley Kubrick's film.

The Maze from HBO's 2016 Westworld first appears, most clearly, via a skullcap.

Noted by Alex Fulton: from Westworld, "Anomaly Detected" at 23:07.

Oli Dunlop writes, "It emphasis the characters internal conflict, a choice - 93 (confirm) 42 (cancel) - two different paths."

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Campaign 2016 memes with The Shining themes make the rounds.

Folkore, fake news, or fakelore? The Cruz family is alleged to be involved with Lee Harvey Oswald without any firm evidence, apparently by Trump campaign operatives.

In The Shining, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) becomes winter caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel in Colorado, hoping to cure his writer's block. He settles in along with his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and his son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), who is plagued by psychic premonitions.

In real life, it has been nearly 15 years since the 67-year-old actress Shelley Duvall has starred in a film. She struggles with mental illness. November 2016 articles note that Stanley Kubrick’s daughter, Vivian Kubrick, has started a GoFundMe campaign to help out The Shining actress Shelley Duvall.

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Fakelore and Fake News: Have You Heard The One About Anti-Trump Protesters Blocking The Ambulance?

Paul Bunyan is a clear example of fakelore. Fakelore is described as "inauthentic, manufactured folklore" presented as if it were genuinely traditional.

The term fakelore was coined in 1950 by American folklorist Richard M. Dorson. Dorson's examples included the fictional cowboy Pecos Bill, who was presented as a folk hero of the American West but was actually invented by the writer Edward S. O'Reilly in 1923. 

Dorson also regarded Paul Bunyan as fakelore. Although the number one fakelore hero, Paul Bunyan originated as a character in traditional tales told by loggers in the Great Lakes region of North America, James Stevens, an ad writer working for the Red River Lumber Company in Minnesota, is said to have invented many of the stories about him that are known today. Others say the character originated in the oral tradition of North American loggers, and was later popularized by freelance writer William B. Laughead (1882–1958) in a 1916 promotional pamphlet for the same previously mentioned Red River Lumber Company. According to Dorson, advertisers and popularizers turned Bunyan into a "pseudo folk hero of twentieth-century mass culture" who bore little resemblance to the original.

Research does not demonstrate

whether Bunyan actually lived or was wholly mythical. [Researchers] have noted, however, that some of the older lumberjacks whom they interviewed claimed to have known him or members of his crew, and the supposed location of his grave was actually pointed out in northern Minnesota. In this regard, it should be noted that Bunyan's extreme gigantism was a later invention, and that early stories either do not mention it or, as in [one research] paper, refer to him as being about seven feet tall. Source.

Fakelore, at some level, develops from "fake news," i.e. local or regional stories that are untrue but many people are convinced what they have heard or read in social media is "real."

Fake news has been in the news of late, as the realization settles on the mainstream media, Facebook executives, and Twitter readers that much of what they read has little to do with reality.

Headline stories this week speak volumes about what is occurring:

"Trump's fake-news presidency," Washington Post, November 18, 2016.

"Obama, With Angela Merkel in Berlin, Assails Spread of Fake News," New York Times, November 17, 2016.

"I fooled America with fake news stories and got Trump elected," New York Post, November 17, 2016.

"7 signs the news you're sharing is fake," Mashable, November 17, 2016.

"Here are all the fake 'news' sites to watch out for on Facebook," The Daily Dot, November 16, 2016.

Let's look at one "fake news" story that has greatly circulated in the wake of Donald Trump's election and the anti-Trump demonstrations. It is the alleged story of anti-Trump protesters blocking an ambulance with the father of a 4-year-old girl dying. It's false, fake, and a hoax, but it's become fakelore extraordinary.

There are a half million hits on the Internet where you can read versions of the story, with most mentions of them presenting the "news" as "real."

The only problem with the "news item" is that there are no names, no locations (although various ones do pop up before another one is mentioned), no sources, and not too surprisingly, there is a short history of the same tale showing up down through the years.

Earlier in 2016, a variant on the story was tied to Black Lives Matter protestors on a bridge with a "suffering child" in an ambulance being blocked by their march. The child was reported to have died.

ABC News, on July 11, 2016, debunked that story:

A rumor swirled on Facebook that a young girl died as a result of the "Black Lives Matter" protest Sunday night. That rumor is not true.
Early during Sunday's protest that stopped traffic on the Interstate 40 bridge, a car trying to take a child to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital got stuck in the traffic jam. Police worked with protesters, who let the car go through. Source.

The debunking site Snopes examined the post-Election Day fake news of the father dying because of the blocked ambulance, and 

found no corresponding news reports of any such death occurring (in conjunction with anti-Trump protests or otherwise) in the United States since the 8 November 2016 election. Source.

But the protesters-blocking-ambulances fake news continues to spread, and is now part of current urban fakelore.

Could you have seen us being here, ten years ago? This is the era of post-truth.