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Popular Culture Review
The combination of the two first room numbers—number 1 and 4— gives
us even more insight into Mike Enslin’s disturbed psyche, as the resulting twodigit number 14— the product of 7 x 2—stands for fusion and, consequently,
holds characteristics of both numbers. Even though number 7 has the symbolic
meaning of perfection and order, it also contains the notion of the seven capital
sins, among which we find wrath (uncontrolled anger and self denial), despair,
(sadness and unhappiness) and acedia (melancholy and depression), feelings that
rule Mike Enslin’s life. Dualism, however, is especially a characteristic of
number 2, a number that signifies unity as well as a “movement away from
unity” (Greer 494). In relation to the scenes 11 and 12, the number 2 symbolizes
unity (husband and wife), as well as division (the breaking up of his family) and
contrast (his present vs. past life). Consequently, it expresses dualism between
opposing poles, which in Mike Enslin’s case are defined by marriage and
divorce, union and separation, life and death, and the immortal and mortal.
Hence, number 14 reflects Mike Enslin’s previous life that he unconsciously
cherishes to an utmost perfection and that opposes itself to his present existence
and struggle between life and death. In this, the first two room numbers (land 4)
express change in the sense of becoming oneself without the other. The twodigit number promotes the separation from the “ghosts of the dead, but also
[from the] ghosts of the living—[...] the living when they were at a quite
different period of their lives” (Bell 823)—in our case—when they were
husband and wife.
The realization that this desired family life has elapsed leads to two other
dominant feelings of Mike’s: emptiness and nothingness—feelings that are
symbolically represented in the third room number: 0, a number that is
significantly linked to Mike Enslin’s grief, loss and depression.
Prior to the encounter with the third ghost—his deceased father in the
bathroom—he hears a baby crying, a phenomenon that relates to Mike’s own
past as a young father. When he enters the bathroom, Mike exchanges roles of
father and child. He becomes the child himself, ruled by his too vivid
imagination that takes over reality and that produces the horrifying events taking
place in room 1408. However, whereas the first two ghosts personify death as
“the supreme liberation” (Cirlot 74) from all earthly pain and anguish, his
father’s ghost relates to the folkloric belief of the spirit being earthbound until
the cause or matter of death has been clarified. In this last case, death represents
the end of life, but not of extreme suffering.
Even though we could easily assume that the novelty of the situation gives
Enslin some pleasure in the sense that he has finally found the ghosts he has
been looking for, the sudden occurrence of the supernatural entities frightens
him as they represent and remind him of his long-ruling desire for as well as fear
of de ath. In accordance with the symbolic reading of the number 3, the three
ghosts of scene 12, thus, embody “the beginning, the middle and the end” (de
Lys 472) of something he cannot yet define.