The idea that Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landings is so incredibly absurd it practically makes anything this guy say irrelevant.

BUT...

I believe his interpretation of the film is mostly correct. He makes a pretty compelling case that Kubrick altered elements of the source material to make way for a symbolic commentery on the popular myth that was circulating at the time.

Obviously, this doesn't prove the moon landings WERE actually faked by Stanley Kubrick. It's funny how otherwise smart people can put on logic blinders when it comes to certain things. Practically every conspiracy theory ever proposed breaks down entirely once you apply cold logic to the situations.

But anyway, this is more likely an example of Kubrick having fun and teasing the audience. It probably amused him that a small segment of conspiracy theorists believed he helped fake the moon landing. So he put these elements in his film as a riff on that. It strikes me as similar to the likely scenario of how the Beatles started playing on the Paul-is-Dead theory, which of course conspiracy nuts took to prove the theory was true instead of the more reasonable answer that the Beatles were playing into it for fun.

But anyway, this guy has a good eye for detail. I thought some of his analyses were reaching at first but the more connections he points out the more it seems to make sense. I don't think this is why Kubrick made the film, but he does seem to have used the opportunity to put these references in there. Some of them, like the hotel symbolizing America, might actually be unrelated to the lunar subtext though. And some of his other ideas are a bit off, like some of his cold war references. But stuff like Danny wearing an Apollo 11 shirt and travelling to room 237 (in thousands, the number of miles to the moon) to witness things that aren't real is probably spot on.

Must ... resist ... from making ... jab ... that Kubrick ... was ... pretentious.

It is all so very entertaining. The hoax data, the NASA data...

Having lived in Florida, I have seen the launch and landing of the shuttle. 

I am just so entertained by it all. 

I've seen this theory before and wasn't sure what to make of it. On the face, I recognize the ridiculousness of it.

But the idea has been bumping around inside my head for several years now, and I can't completely dismiss it. There are just so many references that back this up, that it's hard for me to see it as simply coincidence.

Warbler said:

zombie84 said:. It strikes me as similar to the likely scenario of how the Beatles started playing on the Paul-is-Dead theory

I just dead a quick internet search to find out what the Paul-is-Dead theory was.   I had never heard of it before.    So let me get this straight,  some people actually believe that Paul McCartney died in 1967 and a look-a-like has been posing as McCartney ever since?    So they believe that the guy performing at Olympics opening ceremony was not Paul McCartney, but a look-a-like?   My god, people are crazy. 

I never knew anyone who truly believed this, but I know that is was fun to find the clues on the albums and in the songs when I was a kid.  I think it was more about whether the Beatles would pull this type of joke/stunt just to tease their fans. Was it a real planed joke, or just a series of obscure symbolism put together by some crazy American Disc Jockey? 

My opinion is that it started off as coincidence, and then when the Beatles learned of it they started deliberately playing into it for the lols.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mefEKqzq8cg

FanFiltration said:

It is all so very entertaining. The hoax data, the NASA data...

Having lived in Florida, I have seen the launch and landing of the shuttle. 

I am just so entertained by it all. 

Da Da Da Da Da Da Dum.

There is also this which stars Kenneth Kendall who was also in 2001.

This is still the best Apollo 11 video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWtuTdiwJ3o

"we are on the fucking moon! Jesus Christ in a chicken basket!"

Some people believe that this cover is proof that Bruce Wayne died in China :

SilverWook said:

IIRC, there's a shot in the "Free as a Bird" music video that pokes fun at the whole Dead is Paul thing.

The equally bizarre "Is Stig Dead?" controversy has never really been settled though. ;)

http://www.rutles.org/rstig.html

No,Stig is not dead. He's just in Australia with Leggy. 

We can still stay in contact with taping the table, and postcards. 

zombie84 said:

My opinion is that it started off as coincidence, and then when the Beatles learned of it they started deliberately playing into it for the lols.

Yeah, they started putting stuff in just to screw with the people searching for clues, like John explicitely says in "Glass Onion"

"I told you bout the Walrus and me, man
you know that we're as close as can be man,

well here's another clue for you all:
the Walrus was Paul!"

...and to think that all that bollocks originated from Paul falling off his bike, chipping a tooth and scarring his upper lip. The things people will believe...

When Paul really dies, will conspiracy theorists start claiming he faked his death and went into hiding?

DominicCobb said:

Warbler said:

zombie84 said:. It strikes me as similar to the likely scenario of how the Beatles started playing on the Paul-is-Dead theory

I just did a quick internet search to find out what the Paul-is-Dead theory was.   I had never heard of it before.    So let me get this straight,  some people actually believe that Paul McCartney died in 1967 and a look-a-like has been posing as McCartney ever since?    So they believe that the guy performing at Olympics opening ceremony was not Paul McCartney, but a look-a-like?   My god, people are crazy. 

If I'm not mistaken, people don't really believe this anymore. I think it was just a side-effect of Beatlemania - some people looked for meaning in the songs, and a select few thought what they found meant that Paul was dead. I'm also pretty sure that it quickly became little more than a joke after the Beatles heard of it.

Yeah, this has faded away now, but even in the 1980s it was at least remembered seriously, even if not taken that way. In 1998, my grade 8 teacher gave us a Beatles lecture shortly before we moved on to high school. He did this with every graduating class, a bit of a tradition for him, which speaks to how much the Beatles impacted the baby boomers. And at the end of it, he would walk us through every single Paul-is-Dead easter egg that had been identified. I really doubt he believed any of it himself, but it made for an entertaining presentation, complete with "I buried Paul!" sound clips and such. I already knew about it all though. I was really into paranormal stuff and cryptozoology in the early 1990s--almost assuredly due to the X-Files being popular--and would read a lot of books relating to stuff like that at the local public library. A lot of them would go on about the Paul-is-Dead theory. So it was a pretty big part of baby boomer culture and Beatlemania history. I don't know who actually believed in it at any point, but I'm sure there were enough who at least for a time recognized it as a real possibility. With all the JFK murder theories, moon landing hoaxes, Area 51 and Rosewell, etc. circulating at the time, and with stuff like Watergate coming out and all these crazy stories about Vietnam (agent orange) and stuff like Manchurian Candidate, it wasn't so unbelieveable. Plus the Monkees were still around, so you could see how easy it was to get a Beatles substitute.

Even today there are still some people who believe Tupac is alive and there are many books proposing Kurt Cobain was murdered, just as people years ago refused to believe Elvis died, so this isn't so out of left field. I mean, a significant proportion of Americans even believe 9/11 was staged. Heck, Dave Mustain, of Megadeth, thinks Obama staged the Aurora DKR shootings to impose gun control. Dave Mustain! People will believe anything. My parents to this day still believe JFK was killed by the CIA, even though it's been shown multiple times how a single gunman inflicted the damage from that vantage point through re-creations (wasn't there a Myth Busters episode about this?). My university had an entire course about rational thinking, where the semester-long example was a total deconstruction of the JFK theory showing how implausible it really was when you consider how unlikely it was to go off without anyone blowing the whistle, aside from the physics simulations. Yet lots of Americans, and even many non-Americans, will hear nothing of it. Like I said, people will believe anything. The Paul-is-dead connections actually hold together better than most conspiracies!

This does make me remember the fantastic Hitler-in-Argentina scene from the Simpsons though.

"Eine minuten, eine minuten! Das phone ist das nuissance phone!"