THE SHINING (1980)

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"All the best people."

Fresh from the first lukewarm response in decades both from the public and critics alike for his film "Barry Lyndon", Kubrick set his mind on finding his next project. For four years, nothing happened. He had then began adapting Stephen King's "The Shining" to the screen. The director's vision is largely reviled by Stephen King acolytes (ME!), and the author himself. King's fans hate it for not being true to the novel (But, I do love the film as a stand-alone piece of work); King hates the film because it was directed by a "cold" rationalist who "thinks too much and feels too little". I think Stephen King stumbled upon an exposed corner of the essential problem or strength (depending upon your perspective) of this innovative approach to the horror narrative: Kubrick's blurry stance between atheism and spiritualism. Kubrick was not religious and didn't believe in any traditional God or the supernatural; he was, however, vastly imaginative about the possibilities inherent in our universe and within the human mind. Science fiction is uniquely tailored to Kubrick's worldview, but the horror genre, with the exception of some slasher films, seems to be exclusively predicated on the existence of other supernatural worlds whose spirits find ways of invading and manipulating our own.

Like his exploration of intelligence and capital-I Intelligence in "2001: A Space Odyssey", Kubrick's exploration of the supernatural is deliberately ambiguous, aspiring to satisfy those who believe in ghosts and those who do not. Ultimately, the only aspect of this movie that is out-of-the-ordinary is the overt telepathy shared by Danny Torrance and Dick Halloran. Considering Kubrick's belief in the power and inevitable evolutionary ascension of the mind, I believe it wasn't so much of a stretch for the filmmaker to explore the idea of minds communicating through a psychic broadcast. The concept is still more science-fiction than horror, especially given how the telepathy is contextualized: as an inheritable trait in Dick and Danny's families-with the latter family also having inheritable mental illness. The formula for horror and suspense in this film emerges from the telepathic interaction of sick minds, which create a haunted reality.

The first appearance of a "ghost" in the film is while Jack is in the hotel bar. Jack begins talking to the spectre before we are aware of his presence, which creates the impression that Jack is probably still talking to himself in an empty bar. Later, when Wendy appears, frantic from hearing Danny's story that a woman tried to strangle him, Jack is indeed sitting at an empty bar.

For the majority of the film we are only exposed to the viuals of past hotel inhabitants and employees through Jack's perspective.

Nicholson's performance is exaggerated from the beginning of the film. This also chaffed Stephen King, although he attributed Nicholson's air of craziness in the film to having been in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", suggesting audiences would already think he's insane (nevermind that he wasn't actually crazy in "One Flew Over..."). Though Nicholson has an undeniably off-putting face, right from the start of the film his expressions are far more warped and eerie than in any of his other performances. During the scenes in which we are locked in Jack's perspective, it's hard to trust that what we're seeing is really there, just like it's hard to trust Jack really means it when he holds Danny and says with a smile, "I'd never hurt you."

During the scene where Jack is easily seduced by the nude woman of room 237, the conitguity of the scene is interrupted with a shot of Danny in his room, having one of his intense seizures, right as the hot, wet, and nude young woman turns into a wet, nude, and rotting old woman. This is directly after we've witnessed Danny shining to Halloran, so it's clear Danny has a role in what his father is witnessing. As Danny slowly dissolves into apoplectic terror later in the film, we also see Jack's visions becoming far more expansive and detailed. The more Danny sees, the more he seems incapable of looking away, until Danny isn't there anymore and his alter-ego Tony emerges, whose motives are totally unknown.

There are two hypotheses I can envision regarding the Overlook Hotel. The first is that the hotel is inhabited by real and evil spirits that try to absorb Jack and his family into their collective. The second hypothesis, which I feel is probably the correct one, is that the hotel is, as Halloran described it, containing markings of past events and personalities which people who shine can evoke. One of the problems with the first hypothesis is that the ghosts focused all their seductive energies on Jack, and focused all their persuasive powers on him to act out violently against his family. Wouldn't these ghosts try to more actively pit the entire family against each other? Wouldn't it aid in the absorption of souls if Wendy and Danny felt the need to stay in the hotel for eternity, too?

The second hypothesis makes more sense to me in terms of how Jack, Danny, and eventually Wendy experience the hotel through shining. We've known Jack is a violent alcoholic, who is probably a classic case for anti-social personality disorder, and his desire for isolation, resentment of his family, and need for escape is prominent. This is a simple recipe for how Jack will read the historical shine-imprints in the hotel and react to cabin fever. Danny's intense telepathic abilities, and his own psychological ills, cause him to send for help from Halloran and attempt to scare his father into leaving the hotel by exposing him to the embrace of a decaying old woman. Danny's reaction to the hotel is one of fear because he is perceiving (far before his mother) how his father is reacting to the hotel and ultimately what will result from it.

Wendy is probably the most wretched and abused character in the whole film. She's cruelly dominated by Jack all throughout the first half of the film, and as her husband goes completely insane she transforms into nothing but a bundle of raw nerves, draining sinuses, and quivering flesh desperately trying to save her child. She sees the hotel's ghosts only after her son is lost and her murderous husband is loose in the hotel hunting him. By this time, I think I'd start seeing ghosts in unlit halls, even without the help of my son shining them at me.

There are only two events in the movie that run against the grain of this second hypothesis. One is Danny's injury after going inside room 237, which was inexplicably unlocked. The second is Jack's escape from the food locker. Jack gives us a startlingly plausible explanation for Danny's wounds: "Maybe he did it to himself." Indeed, it's possible, though we don't particularly want to believe anything coming from Jack. The fact remains that Kubrick deliberately never showed ghosts interacting in the hotel environment and emphasized large passages of time in the family's stay there, where we have absolutely no idea what may have transpired. When Jack is freed from the locker, we only hear it being opened, and we only hear the voice of Grady. When we next see Danny, he's been up and about, repeating "REDRUM!" over and over. Danny is still in his Tony personality, and we really have no idea what he's capable of in that state. Regardless, there are many alternative explanations available for these two unexplained events, each as unlikely as the existence of ghosts. Perhaps that is what makes the whole movie so eerie, that reality is never fully giving in to the complete irrational governance of the supernatural, yet never adding up to a remotely satisfyingly rational narrative-too many pieces are missing, too many perspectives have been tainted by insanity and distress.

NOTE: Go to Youtube and look up Rob Ager's 3 part analysis of "The Shining" in which he gives his interpretation of the aforementioned events. Look up his other videos while you're at it. The man will change the way you'll look at classic films such as "2001" and "The Exorcist".

I've always found The Shining's strength is in the extreme craft involved in how it was filmed. The story itself is rife with frustrating ambiguities, its characters all seem as partially skewed from reality as their situation, and the film concludes like a fall down a mineshaft. Still, images and sounds linger. You can't help being absorbed into the scene where Danny is followed in a long steadicam shot through the halls of the massive Overlook, the sound of his tricycle wheels alternating from riding atop carpet and hardwood floors. The lengthy close-ups on all the characters faces, especially Jack's, sink into some deep iconographic stores in our minds, and have successfully invaded and endured in popculture. The movie's power is in these scenes, not in its whole-it's through the actual experience you have while watching it. I dare you to bring up this movie in a conversation and limit yourself only to discussing it abstractly. It's impossible. You have to talk about the hedge-maze: how your eyes widened watching Jack lumber after Danny like a wounded, rabid animal, and the tightness you felt in your gut watching Danny carefully walk backwards in his footprints as his father murderously wailed for him. And have you ever seen a creepier set of twin girls in your life?

Kubrick relied completely upon atmosphere and image to bring about tension and fear, which is probably why the movie works more and more on me during repeat viewings. The more familiar these images get, the closer you want to look at them, and the more haunting they become--and considering the outrageous order of takes that Kubrick placed on virtually every scene, I should hope so.

Finally, a discussion of the last shot of the film, which has always troubled me. It is the only shot completely untethered from any character's perspective in the movie, excluding the shot right before it of Jack's frozen corpse (though he still seems somehow "there" in that shot). As a consequence of the shot's lone omniscience, I'm tempted to interpret it symbolically, rather than literally. If taken literally, then Jack was absorbed into the Overlook and has had his adult image imprinted in a photograph dating back before he was born. Surely this means the ghosts existed after all, and thank God Kubrick cleared up all that uncomfortable ambiguity in a final, cheap, and anticlimactic shot.

I tend to think of it as a playful symbolic representation of Jack becoming, as Halloran would put it, another picture in a book. Jack has left his imprint in the hotel, and anyone capable of shining will be able to reconstructively conjure "him". If the idea of a "ghost" is the notion of a spirit trapped in this world but incapable of acting in it, then what better way to represent it than as the memories and markings we left the world with while we were here? Our spirit then lingers only as the aftermath of our most memorable actions. Even if we knew who Jack was during his career as a teacher, during his early romance with Wendy, and his alcoholic years, could we remember him as anything other than the man who went crazy at the Overlook and nearly killed his family? I doubt it. It certainly wasn't the case with Grady.