Does the pattern in back of this man’s head look familiar?
In the video for “On Top of the World” by Imagine Dragons, a stylized 1960s family goes from an art gallery home to watch the moon landing. In the music video (directed by Matt Eastin and Corey Fox), the moon landing on TV is actually fake, and we see a harried director producing the action.
So: the patterned canvas behind the man’s head is a reference. But to what?
It’s actually the pattern on the carpet of the hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of horror/weirdness The Shining. So what does it have to do with the moon landing?
As detailed in the documentary Room 237, there are many theories about “hidden messages” of The Shining, and one of the popular conspiracy theories is that it’s Kubrick’s hidden confessional about faking the footage of the moon landing as part of a secret government project.
So, in the video, there he is, Stanley Kubrick, bearded and in fur-lined hoodie, begrudgingly sitting next to not-yet-disgraced President Richard M Nixon.
The painting is not the only sneaky reference:
- the red security camera watching the astronauts is labelled 0009 LAH, referring to the red-lensed character HAL 9000 in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
- the monitors in Mission Control are branded “Monolith” (like the monolith in 2001)
- The children in the family are twins, like the ghost girls in The Shining (themselves a reference to Diane Arbus)
- The Station slate pans up to show a Native American in headdress – a reference to another theory detailed in Room 237, which is that The Shining is about the genocide of the Native Americans at the hands of the white man