The Shining

One of the most striking aspects of Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" is how many varied interpretations of it exist. Even more than his seminal film, "2001: A Space Odyssey," the adaptation of Stephen King's horror classic has garnered interpretations running the gamut from western imperialism, the holocaust, Kubrick's alleged faking of the moon landing, and paganism. When Kubrick made "The Shining" in 1980, he was immersed in the study of subliminal messages in advertising and the use of hypnosis and subconscious suggestion in filmmaking. The movie is festooned with imbedded imagery and a confounding sense of place, both of which add to its growing suspense. One of the many reasons why many consider this to be one of the greatest horror films ever made is that it manages to be deeply disturbing without much physical violence or gore. The terrifying aspect of "The Shining" is almost wholly psychological in nature and is reinforced by unforgettable visuals which seek to unravel our sense of safety and subvert our trust in civilization. The film has spurred so many different theories because it was intentionally made to be a mental and physical puzzle, one that continues to bewitch audiences because of the need to explain and categorize the unknowable.

The major criticism of "The Shining" is that it radically diverts from Stephen King's novel, so much so that King complained that he hated the movie. Kubrick had a very specific way of making films; he watched a genre unfold, contemplated the themes he wanted to explore, and then made one of the best films of that genre. In the film, Kubrick not only distills the essence of what scares people in horror films, but he also uses the concept of "shining," the ability to see the events that have marked locations in the past, to elucidate larger points about humanity and history. Kubrick's film is decidedly not an adaptation of King's book; it is a springboard, a scaffolding that Kubrick uses to dissect larger questions.

The driving force behind "The Shining" is the growing insanity and erratic behavior of Jack Torrance coupled with his son Danny's slow discovery of the evil past that resides in the hotel. The film is Kubrick's treatise on what he thinks constitutes true horror: the breakdown of civilization and reason. While even Kubrick describes the movie as a ghost story, the supernatural elements are more symbolic than temporal. For one, the ghosts signify the inner emotions and thoughts of the characters as they endure extended isolation and a growing uneasiness with each other. Every time Torrance talks to ghosts in the film, for example, he is actually talking into a nearby mirror. At one point, Wendy, Jack's wife, alludes to the Donner Party massacre in which western pioneers were stranded in a snowstorm and were forced to eat the dead to survive. Mention of this event is important as it foreshadows the erosion of familial relations that will occur in the ensuing weeks. As the family becomes more aware of the other's brutal intentions, they themselves become violent and devour each other. In an ironic statement about the Donner Party, the manager, Dick Hollorann tells the family about the abundant amount of food they will have for the winter: "You folks can eat up here a whole year and never have the same menu twice"

The movie opens with a signature helicopter shot of Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson) riding in a car to the Overlook Hotel in Colorado, where Jack has landed a caretaker job during the winter. The car is dwarfed by massive mountain ranges and dense miles of forest. We are left by a profound sense of isolation, an exit from the protection of civilization and immersion into the savage wilderness. In a directorial motif throughout the film, the camera follows the action like a floating apparition. When Jack drives to the Overlook Hotel in the opening scene, and when the entire family makes the trek later, there is a sense that they are running away from the camera and from the audible shrieks in the background. The family is, indeed, escaping a bit of harshness back home; Jack is a recovering alcoholic who "accidentally" pulled on his son Danny's arm and subluxed his elbow (a common childhood injury). This incident prompted Jack to quit drinking and make amends to his family by taking the hotel job in order to spend more time with them. Jack's descent into madness is a slow one that starts with mild annoyance and ends with full blown homicidal rage. In contrast to "2001: A Space Odyssey," which depicts the evolution of apes to human beings, "The Shining" shows a devolution of a human being to a groaning, violent ape. One of Kubrick's overarching themes in all of his films is that despite any progress or degeneration exhibited by humans, the qualities of civilization and barbarism are imbedded in all of us and can exist at the same time, one justifying the other.  

The fundamental unit of civilization is the family, and "The Shining" depicts a man who is driven mad by the confines imposed by that very unit. Jack Nicholson's performance is so over the top that it is at once funny and deeply disturbing. He carries himself with such overwhelming energy that it emanates from him and permeates the air around him, adding to the overall creepiness of the hotel. Jack Torrance comes to the Overlook Hotel with both physical and figurative baggage. The first issue damaging the integrity of the family is his history of alcoholism and that he injured Danny. While the family is on the mend, Jack still lives in the shadow of his guilt. This guilt comes to a head later when Jack complains to Lloyd, the bartender, that his wife will not let him forget his indiscretion against Danny. Additionally, later in the film, when Danny is beaten by the ghoulish woman in Room 237, Wendy immediately assumes that Jack did it.   

As the movie progresses, Jack gets more and more disenchanted with his family life. He views his marriage as an impediment to his career success. After Wendy interrupts his typing, for example, Jack boils over and yells "Whenever you come in here and interrupt me, you're breaking my concentration. You're distracting me." All of this drives Jack back into alcoholism, or at least imagined alcoholism, the prototypical vice that breaks up families. Jack also experiences temptations outside his marriage in the form of a beautiful woman who turns out to be dead. He is fully ready to cheat on his wife at the expense of his family. All of the above themes and frustrations percolating within Jack finally surface in one of the best scenes of the film. Jack finally subverts a healthy, loving relationship by sarcastically juxtaposing love and hate in one sentence: "Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said, I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in!"       

The subtext behind "The Shining" is humanity's coming to terms with the mass genocide perpetrated against the Native Americans during American western expansion. Through his gift to shine, Danny progressively becomes aware not only of the hostility brewing in the household, but the long history of violence that has taken place at the Overlook Hotel. His visions begin with the famous scene of blood spilling out of an elevator, conveying that a massive amount of killing has occurred there. Danny rides his big wheel through the lowest floor of the hotel, and later, when he ascends the second floor, he sees the terrifying massacre of twin girls that was perpetrated by the previous caretaker. It's as if Danny is rising in his consciousness both literally and figuratively. His curiosity peaks as he passes Room 237, a place in which he obviously senses some sort of evil or disturbance. After he finally investigates, he returns damaged with the knowledge of what he has seen. Danny is not the moral compass of the film, but more a moral medium who is tortured by images of the past. 

Kubrick does not limit this violent history to just the Overlook Hotel; he uses the brutality exhibited on the familial level to gain insight to killing on a grander, genocidal scale. In typical horror films, fear stems from a lack of safety in a confined space (a house, a car, a town, etc). In "The Shining," there is no safety wherever human beings exist. In the beginning of the film, the hotel manger tells Jack that the hotel was constructed on an Indian burial ground in Colorado, as if to say that the hotel, signifying civilization, was built on the bodies of indigenous peoples. Moreover, when talking with Lloyd the bartender, Jack describes his familial frustrations as "White man's burden, Lloyd, my man, white man's burden."

At the end of the film, in a shot that has confused many, the camera focuses on a group picture at the hotel on July 4, 1921 that inexplicably includes Jack Torrance even though he wasn't born yet. The date is crucial here. July 4 is, of course, the birthday of the United States while 1921 was the year the hotel was completed. In other words, using the hotel as a metaphor, the picture commemorates the beginning of American western expansion, a decorated victory of civilization over barbarism. As Mr. Grady tells Jack in the bathroom, "But you are the caretaker. You've always been the caretaker. I should know sir - I've always been here." Grady tells of a continuing battle of violent civilizing forces, a notion that is again reflected near the end when Wendy sees a ballroom of aristocratic skeletons. 

Jack is anachronistically in the picture because he represents a pervasive human attribute: the perpetration of "justified" violence and the subsequent almost necessary forgetting of it. One key aspect of the characters in "The Shining" is that they have no recollection of their brutal past. Grady does not recall brutally murdering his twin girls; Jack justifies injuring Danny to the bartender: "But it was an accident, completely unintentional. Could have happened to anybody, and it was three god-damned years ago! The little fucker had thrown all my papers all over the floor. All I tried to do was pull him up – a momentary loss of muscular coordination, all right? A few extra foot-pounds of energy per second." The film brings up the concept of a "convenient forgetting" in American history of those who perpetrate evil and then move on as if it never happened. The Overlook Hotel is a spiritual receptacle for a lost, brutal history.

"The Shining" is filled with examples of duality and mirror images: the female twins, the bifurcation of Danny's personality into Danny and Tony, people looking into mirrors, the coupling of Jack and the previous caretaker, who has two names: Grady and Delbert as well as many props that are conspicuously doubled: refrigerators, elevator doors, and others. All of this doubling represents a duality in man, or more specifically how man can compartmentalize atrocities and replace them with justifications, creating a dual interpretation of all actions. On a small scale, we see Jack and Grady justify the beating or killing of their children as discipline, or as Grady called it, "correcting them." On a large scale, we can see violent American western expansion and the destruction of Native American culture under the guise of civilizing or "correcting them.". Depending on the perspective, a concept that is always muddied in "The Shining," the civilizing forces of history are either pure evil or a necessary justification for progress. In the film, all of the characters, and even the audience, are forced to witness the horrors of history. A cathartic moment is when Danny, shrieking the confounding word "redrum," points to a mirror and reveals the true nature of what's going on: murder.

Kubrick places subliminal messages throughout the film to conjure up images of the massacre of Native Americans. In the kitchen, there are several scenes in which a can of Calumet baking powder is meticulously placed next to actors. Before you call this placement random, look how the cans are perfectly placed in frame with the characters. There is no doubt that Kubrick wants the audience to see the prototypical symbol of an Indian. As a side note, there are other interesting examples of hypnotic symbols, including a plethora of eagle imagery and a typewriter that can signify Nazi Germany and the holocaust as well as imagery of Jack falling down a pyramid of stairs after he is hit with a  baseball bat that is supposed to signify the Aztecs and their period of mass human sacrifice. While these images correspond to the themes of genocide, they sit as small islands in a larger sea of imagery that seems more concerned with American history specifically.    

One viewer pointed out that Kubrick's dissolves between scenes are very precise and juxtapose the content of two scenes at once. A great example is a dissolve that shows a janitor sweeping the colorado hills, foreshadowing the theme of Native American extermination and Western expansion. Look closely. 

As the film continues, there is a loss of reason and rationality, demonstrated not only through Jack's growing madness, but also in the confusion as to what is actually happening in the hotel. Are there really ghosts? If so, who are they? One central question of the film that largely goes unanswered is who exactly has the ability to shine, and, thus, whose perspective represents reality or the reliable point of view. While it is clear that Danny and Dick Hallorann can shine, it is unclear whether Danny's parents can. After all, not only is shining a genetic trait (Hallorann said his grandmother had it too), but Jack and Wendy also see the supernatural events in the hotel by the end of the film. 

The distrust of perspective is furthered by many disorienting aspects of the film, notably the confusing setup of the hotel and the purposeful lack of continuity in shots. Like the hedge maze which plays a big visual and thematic presence in the film, the hotel itself is a labyrinth that changes in structure as the movie progresses. In fact, if you watch closely, the entrances of the actual hedge maze change drastically as the film moves forward. To add to the disorientation, Kubrick tricks the audience into thinking that they understand the surroundings. Notice how many times the audience tours the Overlook Hotel: in the beginning with the manager, when Danny rides his big wheel, and at other times when following characters. Yet, despite multiple explorations, a firm grasp of the hotel's geography is still elusive. You never quite know where you are in relation to another location. Experts have drawn maps of the hotel as portrayed in the film and have pointed out impossibilities and a changing structure, an attribute that disorients and unnerves the viewer who never feels safe. The most famous example of a geographic paradox in the hotel is the infamous "impossible window" in the front office which shows the outside despite the fact that it is completely indoors.

A lack of continuity in parts of the film, an unthinkable Kubrick faux pas, creates disorientation and a sense of dread. While some of these changes are small like a chair disappearing or Jack's typewriter changing color, others are quite striking. My favorite example is when Danny is playing in a hallway and a tennis ball (previously used by Jack to distract himself from boredom) rolls down an open section of the carpet pattern. When the scene changes, Danny's position has changed in that he is now closed off in the carpet's pattern. With this lack of continuity, the film shows the characters trapped in the labyrinth, surrounded by a growing sense of doom. Again, subconsciously, these paradoxical shots and prop changes unnerves the audience who constantly second guess what is going on.     

In the culminating scene of the film, Jack chases Danny through the hedge maze with an ax. Danny outsmarts him by retracing his steps through the snow to prevent his father from following him. He exits the maze and finds his mother, both of whom escape in a snowcat, leaving Jack to freeze in the snow. Symbolically, in order to deal with the horrors of the past, we must retrace our steps to understand our actions as a species to achieve ultimate safety, leaving our violent instincts suspended from action. Jack freezing to death also echoes what eventually happens to the Donner party; after attempting to devour one another, they freeze to death in the mountains.

"The Shining" is my favorite horror film and a tradition on Halloween. In the end, Kubrick has given us a horror film with secular ghosts that lack a theological or even supernatural quality. They are not spirits, but horrific memories of the past waiting to be uncovered and realized. Even worse, they follow humanity and continue to repeat themselves, an atheistic brand of original sin. As Jack and his family slowly turn against each other and become violent at the Overlook Hotel, they are ensconced in the screams of past victims and by an audience seeking to understand events that occurred in our shared past.