The Shining (1980)
Maybe I’m crackers for finding The Shining convivial and cozy, but in parallel with Jaws, it’s morphed from a once petrifying picture into a movie that induces a somewhat trance-like state, where the horror is neatly neutered. It slowly became a seductively snug watch—washing over me like a secure, creepily-comforting nightmare. Yet instead of an uproariously joyous venture aboard the Orca, it’s more akin to a smooth stroll through a never ending, brightly-lit art gallery—encountering far out, confounding visions around every corner. With each twist and turn of Danny’s trike, its macabre comedy, and wacky Jack theatrics, I can’t help but feel at home at the Overlook. I wish I could stay there forever… and ever… and ever.
As 2025’s heavy winter weather snowed me in for an unprecedented twelve days off work, all that remained to do was binge The Shining. In late January, I belatedly received the astonishing new Unkrich-Rinzler book, which fuelled my obsession further—gently nudging me in the direction of the film, Vivian Kubrick’s enduringly candid making of, the hit and miss pretension-precipice, Room 237, the Filmworker documentary dutifully honouring Stanley’s loyal assistant, Leon Vitali, and then tumbling down a YouTube rabbit hole of endless, overambitious videos, both worthy of your time, and otherwise.
I was hesitant to write about the movie at all, with many of the The Shining’s affected analyses being either ridiculed or labelled as ostentatious overreaching, or overthought pretension—as seen in prominent speculative Internet hot takes often resembling the kind of hypothetical hogwash I’d be forced to endure from faux intellectual trip heads during my eight years studying film. This, however, does not include the new Taschen publication, which is beautifully assembled, thoroughly researched, cites all its sources, and has been fact checked to the nines.
I sought out every incarnation of Kubrick’s film I could—from rare, leaked open matte versions, to the initial, first print, 1999, 1.33:1 full-frame DVDs, and the fresh and sparkling new 4K transfers, hoping fact-spilling commentary tracks and candid behind the scenes footage would top up my mind to a degree that I could spew out something worth sharing. The goal, I suppose—if anything, is to condense the vast materials I’ve attempted to absorb into a palatable piece (“puff” or “think”—you decide). After all, what remains to be said about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining?
The advent of DVD was really my key introduction to filmmaking. The behind the scenes documentaries and audio commentary extras crammed onto those initial, early noughties discs nudged me nearer to a world that was once so far removed. The Shining was one of the very first I owned, in its cardboard, plastic-clasped, European version. The bit in Viv’s documentary—to this day my favorite ever making of, where Kubrick uses “the tube”—not a typical director’s viewfinder, but a unique device made specifically by Arriflex, allowing Stanley to attach any lens of his choosing, and compose images precisely as they would appear in the finished film to frame up Jack in the larder was enough to fuel years of my own artsy filmmaking setups. Interestingly enough, lens connoisseurs, Kubrick favored the 18mm on The Shining, which subtly deformed the actors’ faces, and helped render them grotesque and drained—as opposed to the thespian’s preferred 50mm or 70mm, which they begged him to use to spare their silver screen vanity.
I’ve managed to pinpoint seeing Stanley lying flat on his back, filming up at Jack as the first moment I ever witnessed a filmmaker conceiving of a shot, setting a frame whilst rehearsing with an actor, finessing the blocking, and then capturing it and having it look magnificent in the context of a wider movie—and solving a pesky compositional dilemma on the spot, in almost real time, no less. I must’ve seen stills of Steven Spielberg peering through a Panaflex Platinum viewfinder in my Making of Jurassic Park book, but never like this. I found it ingenious; so smart; so impressive—such a clever, creative decision, born of logic and a keen, proficient photographic eye. Decades later, I would discover Spielberg worked precisely the same way—dreaming up shots during run-throughs, and spontaneously blocking actors in the spur-of-the-moment to execute equally enduring slices of cinema.
Jack Torrance, like the Muppet, Sam—all eagle-owl-eyebrowed, brazenly scopes the hot young gals of the hotel’s staff—most likely employees, as they’re in the staff wing of the Overlook on closing day—who, now that I think of them, all seem comfortably familiar, or intriguingly aware of Mr. Ullman—two pairs of ’em, in fact. Perhaps the presidential, Kennedy-esque rug isn’t the only thing he had in common with JFK. He, no doubt, frequented the Gold Room bar of an evening, and who knows where else. In Pauline Kael’s pin-sharp as ever piece, which she titled “Devolution,” the critic branded The Shining’s performers “puppets,” and Kubrick the “God-like puppet master, denying them free will,” as he would reportedly demand his leads flit from catatonia to hysteria, typically over the course of 40-odd takes or more.
Jack resents Wendy. It’s obvious, and evident from the very first moment they’re on screen together—driving to the Overlook, his patience is already shot to hell. He is interminably mean when he chastises Wendy for breaking his concentration, and interrupting his writing. Again, it’s explicitly stated later in their bedroom where he intimidatingly barks, “I’ve let you fuck up my life so far, but I will not let you fuck this up!” and again during the bat-swinging duel, where Jack gleefully mocks her by spitefully spouting, “You’ve had your whole fucking life to think things over! What good’s a few more minutes gonna do you now?” He’s unerringly, unbelievably vile in that moment, but it’s also perceptible in Duvall’s inane but endearing mundanities that, for those privy to the pediatrician’s probing visit, she can only thinly veil her marital woes as they all stride through the impressive Colorado Lounge for the first time, and then there’s the cringey beat where Wendy no doubt embarrasses Jack a little as she jigs about in reference to throwing parties when they reach the palatial Gold Room.
These very same banal pleasantries occupy the entire first section of the picture, and actually, in my experience, feel more realistic, believable, and more human than the majority of general movie dialogue, in spite of it being an initial criticism of The Shining that Kubrick and company went way over the top. In particular, Jack’s “Perfect for a child,” and, “Cozy,” remarks are accurately reflective of a phony; a man masking his true self—keeping the dangerous drunk at bay, for the time being. Puzzlingly, Nicholson momentarily “flashes” the camera like Groucho Marx on twelve or more occasions; looking dead into the lens for split-seconds at a time as if inviting us into his crackpot portrayal. Typically a cardinal sin on a movie set, it’s consciously modified by Kubrick here to inject a sinister edge to the proceedings. Jack Torrance is a legitimate movie monster by the climactic pursuit—as instructed by Stanley, Cagney-esque, or “Lon Chaney big,” to pinch a piece of D’Onofrio direction from Full Metal Jacket—wailing indecipherable threats; howling incoherently, regressed back to the dawn of man like a 2001 prologue ape, or perhaps more accurately the soon to be slain Minotaur at the centre of a discombobulating maze.
From the bandit firing directly into the camera lens in 1903’s The Great Train Robbery, to the Nouvelle Vague’s Vivre Sa Vie, Pierrot Le Fou, and The 400 Blows indelible denouement, and done so satisfyingly surreal in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, the fourth wall break wasn’t a new technique by any stretch, but this particular application of it was both original and striking, and so imperceptible—almost subliminal, that it remained unnoticed for years. Are Nicholson’s intentional, Brechtian, evanescent Oliver Hardyisms Jack feeling our unwelcome gaze upon him, and glancing back with knowing menace? Is Stanley’s Arri BL acting as the hotel’s revenants—watching through walls, and pursuing Danny down corridors? Why are we; the audience, the embodiment of Kubrick’s camera for these few fleeting frames at a time? Was Stanley not only taking us on a trip throughout human history using the Overlook as his device, but also walking us through the cinematic landscape, and beyond—into the future, with one of the primary pictures—along with Rocky and Rocky II, to employ Garrett Brown’s miraculous Steadicam? Is it sycophantic, or a cop out to suggest The Shining is somehow a film about everything?
Warners wanted Jane Fonda for Wendy. Nicholson pushed for Jessica Lange—he’d eventually get her two years later in the erotic The Postman Always Rings Twice redo. However, Kubrick felt he needed Wendy to be the kind of woman who was weak enough to faithfully stay with an abusive husband and father, and instead picked Altman go-to, Shelley Duvall. Shelley is simultaneously ghoulish and skeletal, but also offers an albeit frail, yet heroic maternal mettle and moxie beyond her own mental and physical capabilities. She’s a believable protector, yet due to her deficiencies and hysterical anxieties, we periodically doubt she can fulfil her protective duties, which adds hunks of suspense.
It’s the most expensive way to shoot a movie, yet ever the contrarian, Stanley was partial to occupying the entirety of EMI-Elstree—its stages, offices, and even storage rooms where he would shoot almost completely in continuity. He’d flit from stage to stage and back again, so his crew never wrapped or struck the sets. It was always a continuous shoot with unavoidable knock-on story effects. Star Wars II aka The Empire Strikes Back was chomping at the bit, waiting for Kubrick to wrap so they could get their gear in. The Burns twins, who played the Grady sisters so iconically, recall seeing fiberglass Tauntauns and even an ominous Darth Vader helmet as they cheekily explored the studio in full costume whilst on call, but rarely sent to set.
Director of Photography, John Alcott, was described as, “A salt of the earth Brit, cup of tea and mashed potatoes kind of stoic spirit.” This is precisely what Stanley preferred—a professional who could do their job well, and most importantly would do as instructed. From the DoP to the editors, Kubrick’s crews didn’t typically question anything; they just got it done. Wendy Carlos’s own invention—a solo instrument dubbed the “Circon”—short for “circular controller,” was fashioned specifically for The Shining to simulate an electronic-sounding vocalisation which sounded somewhat like a violin. This unique sonic originality aided Kubrick’s visuals so forcefully, we often feel as if we’re experiencing a film we’ve at least never heard the likes of before—particularly when partnered with Greg MacGillivray’s tour de force helicopter tracking shots to indicate the relentless shadowing and spectral claiming of Jack.
Typically when we discuss definitive versions of films, we instinctually leap to the longer one—perhaps a director’s cut, being the best bet for consumption. Stanley would dispute that in the case of The Shining. His truncated European version in 1.85 is what he’d presumably want you to absorb. However, issues with the current streaming and 4K disc incarnations include the retimed opening title scroll, rejigged musical score placements, and above all the inaccurate colour grading, which complicates matters considerably. They say an artist never finishes—they abandon. When does a painter stop painting? After making his deadline for the Cannes Film Festival screening, and locking the American theatrical release prints, Stanley stillchose to chop bits and bobs out to make his movie more economical in its storytelling. For example, the Euro cut is cunningly, and seamlessly condensed by having Jack drink just one glass of Lloyd’s Old No. 7. rather than two—eliminating some contestably excisable chatter. After seeing the picture play with audiences, constructing the more streamlined cut was a clear case of “killing your darlings” for Kubrick. To Stanley these were improvements that rendered certain questions unanswered and improved the flow, but die hard film nuts will invariably wish to see as much as possible of this movie—often as a detriment to its pacing.
I have to confess, when the truncated cut skips over the pediatrician’s visit, and its troubling disclosure of Jack’s alcoholism and ol’ abusive tendencies, I do miss it—and the sinister, repercussive echoes of the interaction later as Jack’s wheels fully fly off. One could argue this particular slice of exposition is better suited to Jack himself during his boozy confessional, and honestly it is more effective and appropriate that way, but I nevertheless mourn the scene. Witnessing Wendy skirt over, understate, explain away, and ultimately excuse her husband’s savage outburst lends a troubling layer to their family dynamic—it renders the chaos of the Overlook an incident that could’ve—and perhaps should’ve been prevented. Again, Stanley warns us of ignoring the signs; repeating our cruel mistakes, and explicitly in the longer cut, Wendy and others are punished for their inertia.
This dual version fiasco was reminiscent of another of my top ten firm fave films—James Cameron’s Aliens, which as much as I adore it, doesn’t exist in a “perfect” cut. The same applies with The Shining, as once you’ve witnessed two different edits—one of which containing both wisely-deleted expendable scenes and also crucial expositional or characterful moments that were incorrectly eradicated, the temptation is to create a personal supercut in your mind consisting of what might’ve been. Perhaps as The Shining has been under my microscope for months, I’ve somewhat changed my purist tune, and actually actively dislike elements of each release these days—namely that one distractingly clunky, mid-sentence, mouth agog Wendy dissolve to Jack’s interview—it’s my least favourite transition; maybe even moment of the movie.
The Shining—as awkward as ever, boasts the added conundrum of which aspect ratio do we plump for. Kubrick selected 1.85:1 as his preferred ratio for The Shining, but also requested that the full 1.33:1 frame be protected for future home video releases to avoid any pan and scan butchery. As with almost every aspect of The Shining, there are myriad contradictions and differences in opinion. Some argue the loftily-framed 1.33 not only exudes a certain opulent grandness, but also amplifies the walls-closing-in claustrophobia of the Overlook. Conversely, as Wendy dashes toward Jack during his drool dream ejaculations, the movie looks almost blandly televisual in both its light of day colour timing, and its squared, boxy compositions. It’s never in doubt that the 1.85 ratio is more cinematic throughout the piece, with the exception of just a handful of setups, which benefit greatly from the taller 1.33. If I have to choose just one to recommend, I’m ultimately going wider. This is also due to the fact that 1.33 crops the image on the left and right of the frame—for example, when the Advocaat is spilled, we don’t see the gentleman at the bar on the right hand side, or Viv and her lady friend on the opposite sofa. We do, however see the enormous high ceiling of the Gold Room and its massive chandeliers in full. It’s a trade-off—neither ratio is ideal; neither covers all bases. It comes down to which we prefer—width or height.
As much as a grainy, sparkly, speckled, hairs-in-the-gate, 35mm print transfer in an open matte version floats my retro boat—and was bar none the most enlivening rewatch during my recent dip into The Shining, it may also frustrate—not in the way T2’s open matte exposed Arnie’s orange board shorts during his “Guitars, Cadillacs” Corral brawl with the bikers, or Jurassic Park’s lackadaisical boom mic appearances as John Hammond cheekily pops a champagne cork, but with the advent of 4K and beyond, it likely won’t be everyone’s completist cup of tea. I enjoy the unspoiled “height” of the open matte Shining—albeit with its slightly vignetted corners at times. The sheer majesty of the establishing shot of the Overlook, with Oregon’s vast Mt. Hood towering above, could only be accomplished in 1.33, and is especially impressive when accompanied by the original, Kubrick-approved, hissy analogue, nostalgia-tinged, compressed mono soundtrack—and correctly colour-timed to Stanley’s 1980 specifications, with its cooler palette, and his slaved-over, correctly-sequenced, exquisitely blue credits during the dizzying opening title crawl.
Generally speaking, I’d argue the 1.85:1 framing on the 4K edition is the definitive viewing experience in our future world of 2025—there’s more of a perceptible, authorial eye at work, and it has not only been widely discussed, but now proven via his own handwritten production notes that Kubrick and crew were framing for 1.85:1, and helicopter shadows and rotor blades be damned, simultaneously keeping a safe eye on the full frame, which would eventually land on home video unmasked, and fill our 4:3 screens immaculately. The cropped-in, widescreen format draws us closer to the characters, making them appear gargantuan at times—enhancing their Kabuki theatrics, and the intensity of moments such as Danny on the trike, trying the locked door of Room 237, or simpler sequences like Jack pacing over to the maze model, and gigantically peering inside.
If you’re not a pixel person, I’d perhaps nix the original DVDs, or go rogue as I did and track down a 35mm scan online, which had astonishingly clarity, and somehow transformed my living room into a late seventies picture house for a few hours. Lazy mice amongst you will receive no flack for cuing up the current 4K/streaming equivalent, but if you’re feeling saucy, this 1.18:1 open matte—transferred from an original 35mm print, is a tad taller still compared to the full-frame 1.33—adding to the lofty majesty of certain compositions like the dizzying tracking shots of the opening title sequence—most notably the commanding Overlook exterior. The boxy—vertiginous in its height, fullscreen compositions lend other shots an unparalleled, soaring splendor—perhaps even more beguiling than in glorious widescreen. The grandness of Garrett Brown’s floaty Steadicamming into the Colorado Lounge as Jack is busily bashing away his “dullboys” on the typewriter, for one.
In terms of home video recommendations, any incarnation of The Shining will likely knock you sideways in one way or another, but if my arm was twisted, I’d push the current 4K/streaming release. In spite of the crude tinkering with the grade, it still looks gorgeously pristine, and any alterations—unless sandwiched side by side with the original, will be totally untraceable to the layman’s naked eye. Simply put, certain frames catchy the eye in fullscreen; others look marvellous wide. It’s another apt contradiction, of which this picture is packed—even down to its duelling cuts, varying aspect ratios, conflicting sound mixes, and diverging colour timings. From its knotty technical quandaries to its serpentine narrative mysteries, the entire piece is a conundrum, designed to be cracked by cunning audiences.
My personal favourite of the wider ratios may well be the 1.78:1—as seen in The Shining’s Blu-ray releases (although falsely advertised on the sleeves as Kubrick’s preferred 1.85:1). Surprise, surprise, posthumous gaffes again—it’s not exactly what Kubrick wanted, or composed for, or what Leon Vitali worked unremittingly after Stanley’s death to preserve. Kubrick instructed the top and bottom of the frame to be matted out slightly more, as they did theatrically to get to 1.85, but these Blus crop ever so slightly higher, and reveal a sliver more of the image than the director designed.
If I can hop onto my Speaker’s Corner soapbox, and go on a bit of a mad rant for two minutes—as anyone who’s read my Exorcist essay, or my May the 4th be with You piece knows by now, one of my cinematic bugbears; pet peeves; total intolerances, is the fact that original colour-timed edits and sound mixes of classic films are being willfully; consciously erased from public view, whether it be the original Star Wars trilogy without its 1997 digital embellishments, or insane, inferior cuts of William Friedkin’s former masterpiece, The Exorcist, with equally stupid, inane graphics implanted later; lobbed in like hand grenades by senile filmmakers, or hired hand digital dummies; altered and retimed for Blu-ray and 4K.
We are being failed as film fans. These prominent pictures should be respected, restored, and remain accessible in their initial forms—accessible worldwide without having to sift through fan edits to track down a properly graded print of the version audiences were fortunate enough to witness—back in 1980, as The Shining’s case may be. Agreed, the 4K is spectacular, but anyone who watches The Shining via streaming in 2025 is not witnessing the picture as intended by Kubrick. The grungy green grading is way off at times—veering away wildly from lighting cameraman, John Alcott’s clean autumnal palette to whatever any Tom Dick or Harry with DaVinci Resolve’s interpretation of how this timeless horror film should actually look—muddying the pop of Alcott’s original Eggleston-esque prints, and the absent vintage vibrancy of Wendy’s matching red boots, lips, and jacket.
When I discovered an open matte version of The Shining transferred from an original 35mm print, it was drenched in dancing, hopping scratches, particularly the first reel—presumably as it had been handled more over time. The sound crackled and popped like Dick Hallorann’s Rice Crispies as the ghostly skittering, stuttering voices whined over the untouched, beautiful baby blue-hued text scrawl that Stanley himself fussed over. This coveted open matte scan is warm, authentic, and once the dialogue began, was so pin-droppingly crisp—from Jack’s clinking cup and saucer in the interview, to the water in Danny’s sink. Jack’s inhalations and lipsmacking during the Torrance family’s drive to the Overlook are also noticeably clear. It may seem finicky or persnickety, but it’s incredibly important that these details be carried over to each new re-release, or so-called “restoration,” as we’re in fact straying further and further away from the native presentation.
This last month or so we’ve seen controversy surrounding Fincher’s 4K of Se7en, which is disturbingly pulling cloaked images out of the shadows—things that were never supposed to be seen. Elements of shots are intended to drift off into complete blackness. An alarming realisation is that these 4K, AI-enhanced bastardizations may very well become the forever versions of classic works of cinema, and the way in which future generations see our favourite films for the first time. How hard would it be to include the original mono as an additional audio track on the 4K of The Exorcist, or The Shining? At the very least, provide us with a choice. The absence of Kubrick’s approved monaural mix here, and especially with The Exorcist, with its Oscar-winning audio also being altered and abandoned is truly objectionable, and I will reassert that any film screwed with after winning an Academy Award should be stripped of its honors as it’s evidently no longer the same piece of work— sometimes subtly or imperceptibly so, sometimes egregiously—periodically, they’re rendered inferior and tragically unrecognisable in the case of the 1997 Star Wars Special Editions.
What the eye don’t see, the chef gets away with, Mr. Fawlty, but a multitude of sins are being propagated out of the view of the movie-loving public—we’re just none the wiser unless they’re viewed side-by-side. You wouldn’t go to a gallery and brag about seeing a doctored version of The Kiss—I imagine you’d prefer to see Klimt’s actual colours and textures for yourself. If these colour grades were important enough for Kubrick and Alcott, or Friedkin and Roizman to stress and agonize over, they’re to be protected. Film is the art form of the 20th century, and if the original versions of cinema classics don’t belong in a museum, I don’t know what does.
Stanley’s scares don’t always startle there and then—although I’d personally posit the Grady girls, Jack’s sudden bloodthirsty axe to Hallorann, and the slow burn dread of Room 237 and its lumbering, cackling hag are all bracing and frightening in their own right. If not palpably in the moment, The Shining’s images and scenes unequivocally resonate in the mind long after the credits roll. Kubrick toys with the established, expected conventions of horror—whether it be ancient Indian burial ground foundations, skeletal remains draped in creepy cobwebs, or 1921’s The Phantom Carriage-aping familiarly familial door-hacking axe pursuit—in which, a drunken abusive ne’er-do-well is forced by ghosts to reflect on his selfish, wasted life, and also features soul-collection and New Year’s Eve, not to mention the reincarnated dead returning, and a protective mother with babe in arms. Stanley worked within the genre’s constrictions and tropes—box-ticking, if you like, but with a greater aim than to scare—he sought to deliver a more profound message.
The Shining was predominantly shot fully lit, as broad daylight with wide angle lenses. There are very few shadows Jack, Michael Myers, or any other ’80s slasher antagonist could potentially hide in, and even if there were, Kubrick would probably have nixed the idea on account of its generic, albeit effective obviousness. This is a horror in concept; a horror in its thematic ideas. As Kael beautifully put it, “Perhaps Kubrick likes the idea of waking into a nightmare as opposed to falling asleep into one.” She also described Stanley as, “A deadly serious meta-physician,” which again, doesn’t always lend itself to great fear, nasty effects, and visceral jump scares—he has bigger, cerebral fish to fry.
Screenwriters, Johnson and Kubrick were working from the perspective of a psychologically-sound fairytale. Vitali revealed, “The subtext was the last thing that ever came into it. It was a family in an isolated hotel where there’s a feeling that it’s still alive with the past spirits, and the Indian burial ground.” Stanley was delicately tiptoeing a balancing act with The Shining‘s shocks. He seemed legitimately concerned the film was lacking right up until—and immediately following the first screenings, and was constantly chasing crowd-pleasing terror tropes. It’s all rooted in gothic literature, after all. For example, originally Hallorann was struck twice in the chest—the second a more brutal puncturing with the spiked end of Jack’s axe, and go check out the stark, lurching Nosferatu shadow as Wendy reaches the top of the stairs to witnesses the ghostly, bear meets dog-man sex act, which is distinctly imposing in the towering 1.33 and 1.18 ratios. Jack even describes the light of his life as a “confirmed ghost story and horror film addict,” which is neatly evidenced by Wendy’s passing reference to the closed for the winter Overlook being, “Just like a ghost ship.” Her visions of dusty corpses are no longer a bone of contention between the rival cuts after factoring in Wendy also witnesses the split-skulled, “Great party” guest—just as she sees the phantom fellatio fella and his tuxedoed companion, and the impossible, paradoxical cascading river of blood gushing from the Overlook’s lifts—or perhaps vengefully rising up from the overlooked graves of the exhumed Indigenous American dead that rightfully remain below.
It seems to me that Kubrick embraced the idea of The Shining being an inherently otherworldly ghost tale, yet he sought to explain such a far-fetched phenomena as much as possible; to ground it in so-called plausibility, hence the admittedly slapdash focus on an Indian burial ground backstory. The Overlook’s ghosts are confirmed by Kubrick, and are evidently capable of physically interacting—take the leggy bathtub babe making out with Jack in Room 237, and to me, the only rational explanation for Jack’s larder escape is Grady’s corporeal interference, which was devised, drafted, shot with Philip Stone, and then subsequently cut from the movie at the death. There are repeated mentions of Grady freeing Jack in Kubrick’s notations, yet what kind of spooks are these? “Real” phantoms can shot stuff about, mere projections of Jack’s imagination surely cannot. Could the psychological state of a character somehow manifest an apparition which has tangible abilities? Did the Torrance family concoct these beings through their own brooding familial negativity, and grant them these paranormal powers? If this is Grady’s undertaking—to wander the Overlook in search of spiritually reincarnated souls to claim, then will Jack experience the same eventual fate? Has he in fact already suffered it; been there all along, and is plainly doing his duties as the caretaker in perpetuity? It’s enough to make us cross-eyed, but it’s concurrently fertile ground for wilfully muddied messages, and clouded actualities. The Overlook feels labyrinthine, and geographically as impenetrable as the movie’s narrative itself.
The vagaries of The Shining’s apparitions created conundrums so layered that they are still being rowed over and hotly debated to this day. I don’t buy the Danny unlocked the pantry theory, as he’s clearly catatonically REDRUM-petrified in his hotel room at the time. It’s a leap I’m personally unwilling to make without sufficient proof. I, perhaps quite simplistically, still regard the uncanny unlocking of the larder as Kubrick’s transparent attempt to underline the supernatural presence, and physical interference of the Overlook’s everlasting inhabitants. The hotel’s phantom residents were designed to be tangible—they can wipe Advocaat off your jacket, strangle you in a bathroom, or serve you a spectral yet sippable whisky on the rocks. The shrewdness of removing such certainty is that it provokes yet another question, and it’s an astute example of Kubrick removing non-ambiguity, and casting yet another unsettled fishing line into the river, where audiences will either bite down, or simply swim by at surface level—entertained and undeterred.
I do, however, concede that Danny—via his alter ego, Tony, consciously lures Jack into the maze, knowing full well he has a clear-cut chance of coaxing his dad to his demise—or at the very least buy him enough time to evade and escape. This plays out more manifestly in preliminary outlines and drafts, in which Danny would have first smashed the labyrinth’s light fixtures, and then used his (obviously already established in that non-existent version) Star Trek laser blaster toy with built-in beam to illuminate the maze, and find his way out. The final film has Danny emerging victorious from the hedge maze to embrace Wendy—and very importantly, in his regular uncroaky voice, call her “mommy,” before climbing aboard the Sno-Cat, and fleeing together—restoring a more satisfying order, of sorts, to Danny’s personality crisis before the end titles appear. It’s Jack, or Danny and Wendy that would inevitably perish, but it’s Tony who still ultimately makes that tough, yet vital call. In another filmed and deleted instance, Grady’s ghostly, yet hard light hand, would appear over a switch and turn off the maze lights at the conclusion of the film, as if his work is done, and the play is over.
It builds suspense in a sense, but did we need to sluggishly see Scatman aboard his plane ride, making phone calls repeatedly, then arduously and formulaically depict this passage of time via his uneventful journey; just so he can show up at the Overlook and promptly get the chop? This is the clunkiest storytelling Kubrick opted to include, and although Dick Hallorann cunningly calling the Torrances “unreliable assholes” to secure a last-minute Sno-Cat rental is amusing, I wondered if we could excise all that business in favour of retaining a faster flowing tension—keeping the mounting tension white hot, rather than watching an old bald bloke slowly drive through the snow for ages, and ages. As an alert audience, would we not have just gone with it if we saw the one scene of Scatman “shining”—having untold psychic visions of the Overlook, then expressing his concern with a single unsuccessful phone call? Surely we would have put two and two together, and twigged he’d made the trip based upon earlier concerns that the radio wasn’t functioning, the phone lines are down, and his veiled visions we were never privy to were horrifying enough to jet set him cross-country to gatecrash; to protect a child with the same gift as him and his grandmother.
Grady’s racist remarks directed at Hallorann also prod uncomfortably at America’s buried sins. Co-writer, Diane Johnson, recalled the overall idea of the story was about violence throughout U.S. history—Western frontier elements, photographs of railroad construction, ethnic violence, et al. Kubrick and Johnson accepted it was a regrettable, somewhat skirted over era in America’s annals, and that everyone would surely understand the implications of Hallorann being black. Although Dick didn’t always die at the close—he heroically aided in Wendy and Danny’s escape in earlier drafts. It is, however, surely a necessary escalation to kill Hallorann, as we must continuously fear for mother and son as it elevates the third act stakes. Sadly, Scatman was disheartened by such an eleventh-hour alteration, and was upsettingly quoted as saying, “I guess Stanley thought it was time to kill a nigger.”
I didn’t draw a great deal from Kubrick’s Odyssey—I found the documentary to be a somewhat amateurish endeavour, postulating speciously on both A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. It toys broadly with the admittedly fascinating subject of MKUltra, and Laurel Canyon’s populace, but failed to connect any Kubrickian dots successfully. It was a David Ickeian case of overstating—reaching too far into the unknown, and in doing so, debasing any rational, hard work and research that preceded it. Besides, to lazily label The Shining as a C.I.A. mind control program on Jack Torrance and his family—presumably with actors playing the ghosts, is unfounded and asinine to the point of being eschewed entirely.
Stanley’s brilliance is apparent in almost every aspect of the film, and yet flagrant blunders remain. Helicopter shadows and visible rotor blades, tellies play with no plugs, there’s the idiosyncratic architecture of the red and white bathroom—which didn’t correspond to any of the exhaustive hotel research, the geographically impossible windows of Ullman’s office, and the frankly outrageous vanishing chair in the Colorado Lounge. Could it be that Kubrick was so preoccupied with the coldness and perfection of his picture to such a degree that he consciously muddied it up—like ageing a pair of jeans, road wearing a brand new guitar, or intentionally defacing furniture to make it appear more “authentic?” Thought-provoking concept, but I don’t quite buy it. Far more likely, the answer to these anomalies can be found in the arbitrary nature of obsession. Neurotic, compulsive folks—Stanley included, care deeply about certain things, and are peculiarly ambivalent to others. This is not a matter of negligence, as such—although Kubrick was reportedly informed about continuity errors, and persisted regardless. In some cases, honest mistakes were made—although I wonder how. It’s more likely that Kubrick was aware of 99% of The Shining’s inconsistencies, yet found them too trivial to correct.
Kubrick worked presently; in the moment. According to Vitali, “So what” was sometimes Stanley’s capricious attitude. Hard to believe—and impossible to comprehend for those who hold Kubrick up as an infallible cinematic God, but with remarks to the tune of, “No one will notice that,” “Oh, come on! You can overdo those things,” and “Some will notice, some won’t,” the so-called perfectionism of the man suddenly comes into question. One day, Stanley inexplicably changed the colour of Jack’s typewriter from a beige-cream to grey. When a crew member reminded him it had already been established, he simply said, “It doesn’t matter.” Invariably, the shot at hand was paramount. I have no idea why a clearly visible rotor blade was acceptable to a man who demanded the—invisible to the audience, Steadicam crosshair be centred precisely on an actor’s left nostril, but it was. Certain nutty, whimsical choices just make sense to an author; an artist, or a general. Consider the way Kubrick would allegedly select a member of the crew to hammer each day at random—focussing any pent-up vitriol on their personal performance.
Stanley once acknowledged that he’s happiest when making a film, and would often cunningly prolong the process to delay its completion. As Mathew Modine observed on Full Metal Jacket, anything halting production was an opportunity to regroup, and rethink. This goes some way to explain Kubrick’s off kilter methodology, and the head-scratching number of takes he would demand of his actors—ostensibly as many as 137 on Scatman in the kitchen, leaving the poor fella weeping, confused, and shattered. Then there’s asking the same elderly actor—now pushing seventy, to hit the deck during his death scene multiple times, resulting in Scat requiring a chiropractor afterwards. Compounding all that, the image of Crothers impacting the ground didn’t even make the final cut. Incredibly, Stanley printed every single take and shot more than 1,000,000 feet of film—inducting The Shining into a notoriously irresponsible, excessive and exclusive club with other alleged members including among others, Marlon Brando’s sole directorial effort, One-Eyed Jacks, The Thin Red Line, Magnolia, Apocalypse Now, Mrs. Doubtfire, and most recently, Tropic Thunder.
I often praise the expert geographical sense of John McTiernan’s Die Hard, as he visually instructed; outright taught us where we were at every moment, as it’s essential to that particular picture. Here, we get the gist, but everything at the Overlook Hotel is either vaguely off—be it the “impossible windows” in Ullman’s office, or the somewhat bewildering, labyrinthine hallways viewed via Danny’s trike ride laps—with unpredictable bends, and levels we can’t entirely comprehend. The eerily familiar geography of The Shining doesn’t always make sense. Its flipped colour schemes, and architectural echoes are confoundingly maze-like in their own way, and contribute valuably to the mental and physical catacombs of the movie. Some clues to the meaning of The Shining emerge not from what was incorporated into Kubrick’s picture, but what was excised from Stephen King’s manuscript. Why switch the colour of the Torrance’s car from red to yellow? Is the crushing of the red Volkswagen Beetle beneath a big lorry truly Stanley’s coded “fuck you” to King? Was Kubrick churlish enough to send a threatening, hidden dig asserting authorial superiority? If so, how many more of these clandestine messages exist throughout?
Isn’t it eerily appropriate that The Shining became a conspiracy of its own, when the film allegedly deals in such things? Whatever one draws from 2012’s Shining-centric documentary, Room 237—be it the smug, self-satisfying ridicule of preachy sermonisers and their whacked-out theories, or their half-cocked misreadings of routine continuity errors as calculated Kubrickian choices—something we still refuse to believe Stanley was capable of, yet blasphemy be damned, the same Stanley loyalists; or “Stans”—myself included will giddily point out the unmatted helicopter shadow on the Colorado Rockies stone face in the opening title sequence as one of the master’s glaring howlers. Mistakes were made—there’s no doubt about it. Based on the assumption that nothing in a Kubrick film happens by chance, his disciples enjoy shouting any mutinies down instantly as it’s typically considered to be true—be it colours, music, editing, performance, or dialogue. Stanley was no doubt a stickler—although also an arbitrary contrarian, which only muddles the issue further.
In the vein of Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, the Gold Room party guests were originally set to be decked out in glittering masks, and the band leader would brazenly announce into the microphone, “Ladies and gentlemen! The midnight hour is upon us! Unmask, and let’s fuck!” These suggestions of a surrounding sexual repression and carnal deviancy recur often. Aside from the obvious, take the scene where Jack gets the rear end of his 501 jeans spied—and perhaps even commented on by those two 1920s “flappers,” then, as he’s waltzing along with Bourbon in hand—just before ol’ Jeevsy bumps into him, another woman struts by with a rumoured upside down bloody handprint on the seat of her white gown. During the interview when Jack first meets Ullman, they eagerly shake hands as a pervily-placed, waist-high paper tray proudly juts out like his new boss just got the horn. A parallel composition occurs as Danny’s teddy bear rests beside his desired firetruck in the background as he’s watching the Road Runner cartoon with Wendy, the fire engine’s ladder placement makes it appear as if the bear has an erection. Notably, The Road Runner Show also acts as sneaky foreshadowing, with the title song lyrics, “Road Runner, the coyote’s after you, Road Runner, if he catches you you’re through” teasing the final maze pursuit where Danny—or more accurately, Tony, outsmarts Jack’s Wile E. Coyote.
Speculative; often bewildering efforts to decipher The Shining—namely Room 237’s 1969 moon landing hypothesis—based upon Danny’s wooly Apollo 11 jumper, the ROOM NO. text, approximately 237 calculated miles to the moon, and Kubrick’s deliberately-placed cans of Tang—a powdered drink mix the astronauts commercially consumed, and the film allegedly being specifically concerned with the Jewish Holocaust via its German Adler typewriter, the number ’42, the subliminal half-swastikas on the back wall of the Gold Room—which Jack appears to look directly at as they’re walking in, and via those long superimpositions, Jack’s momentary Hitler moustache, and figures slowly dissolving into luggage—now debunked by the fact Stanley didn’t like the second unit helicopter footage of the Torrance’s two-wheel trailer being towed behind their Volkswagon, and opted for the sole yellow bug instead. The there’s Wendy’s “Keep America tidy,” crying Indian-quote, and the carefully-composed Calumet cans in the larder suggesting an omnipresent theme of native American massacre. For my money, each speaker failed to definitively place the final puzzle piece to the perfect jigsaw that is The Shining.
Some stop at vivifying guesswork, intrigued by the riddle of a conspiracy—others dig deeper, to become investigatory detectives or honorary journalists, and blog their findings. Some ferret around further into tinfoil hat territory, like a daft dog with a brainless bone, and begin to construct their own realities—bending and weaving filmic fiction to fit their personal narratives. As dark as the repercussions of suspicious historical anomalies may well be, in recent years I’ve been somewhat satisfied to stop at stage one, and recoil in sheer abject terror at our collective inhumanity from George Carlin’s patented artist eye view—withdrawing in disgust (not apathy) from political vaudeville, and helplessly watching the freak show unfold from the cheap seats—still halfheartedly trying to bend my mediocre mind around the ominous mysteries and dubious abnormalities of Hitler’s Reichstag fire, Operation Northwoods, the JFK assassination, the Gulf of Tonkin, Able Danger, and 9/11.
After all, what is conspiracy theory, really? Without tarring all of these—some perfectly logical conundrums with the same dismissive brush, to many, it’s merely humanity’s desperate attempt to configure the randomness of life’s inexplicable events, and to impose an often more comfortable narrative that can be processed. How could events so tragic, senseless, and cruel as terrorism, war, and genocide be random and meaningless? Why do people kill, and be killed seemingly on a whim? Could it be the case that Stanley himself became the focus of conspiracy theorists as his work, much like life, hangs in a kind of grey area; an often morally ambiguous, unresolved, chaotic series of incidents that we must afterwards—in a Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning sense, add our own substance to. The psychological depth of The Shining may stem from the fact that it mirrors life so closely. We must make sense of the events of our past in order to learn; to move forward logically and cautiously, and chiefly to not repeat our past mistakes.
My own snowed-in, comfy-blanketed, repeated re-watches continued to soothe me into February—never eliciting such piercing panic as The Exorcist continues to, for example, nor keeping me awake at night, searching shadows, or deciphering strange noises as potential supernatural threats as with other; more stereotypically effective horror movies. Psychologically though, one could argue, The Shining’s concepts and themes are nothing short of petrifying. Having said that, there’s really nothing in the picture to parallel Texas Chainsaw, or the Exorcist’s palpable, visceral ’70s scares. As Pauline Kael astutely observed, Kubrick’s prowess, and love of technological cinematic techniques can distance us from any down and dirty horror that emerges. When we do witness the gush of a river of elevator blood, or the deathly crimson corpses of hacked-up twins, it’s a disturbing, lingering image—but there’s something about The Shining that admittedly fails to frighten in a traditional sense. Perhaps for a man like Stanley that would be all too easy.
Hearing my favourite stand-up comedian of all time, Louis C.K. dissect not only one of my favourite films, but also the guy I perceive to be the greatest director of all time, was enthralling. His unfettered guest appearance on the Joe and Raanan Talk Movies podcast was such an enlightening, liberating listen as Louie—not for the first, or last time, acutely articulated many of my own dormant feelings about Kubrick’s film with his trademark out of the box perception and natural, everyman analysis. His notion that “Stephen King has nothing to do with The Shining (movie),” was a revelation. King’s 1997 three-episode miniseries of The Shining was, of course, laughable with our accident-prone mate, Steven Weber from Children of the Corn—stumbling around with the ludicrous wooden mallet from the novel in preposterous Michael Jackson Thriller makeup, surrounded by daft CG opticals, and the silly topiary animals literally everyone but King and director, Mick Garris, had the good sense to eliminate entirely.
Whilst prepping to shoot Raiders of the Lost Arkat Elstree, Steven Spielberg met, and was given a Shining tour by Stanley. One of Steven’s initial critiques of the finished picture was he felt Jack should have suddenly appeared over Wendy’s shoulder as she was frantically leafing through the, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” draft—a crude jump scare, if you will. When challenging Kubrick as to why he chose not to include such a thing, Stanley simply stated, because that’s what everyone would expect. The overall pacing, and length of Kubrick’s shots feels sedate. To me, it’s anything but arduous to experience, but Kael is correct in stating the archetypal frights remain absent. However, for select scenes, such as the axe to Hallorran’s chest when Jack lurches out from beyond the final red pillar—I tend to forget which one he hides behind, but now I’m so fluent in the film, I unwaveringly eye the exact area Jack is about to spring from. It’s a fearful moment, but it peculiarly doesn’t elicit a run of the mill skip of a heartbeat. Trivia fans out there, Scatman buys the farm under the only lit chandelier, and was originally struck twice—the second time being much bloodier with the spiked end of Jack’s axe. When poked and prodded further about his thoughts on the finished film, famously—and I’m sure quite hesitantly, Spielberg confessed to Stanley he felt Jack’s performance was reminiscent of Kabuki—a classical, heavily-stylized form of Japanese theatre, characterised by elaborate costumes and dramatic makeup. “You mean you think Jack went over the top?” replied Stanley. Kubrick’s defensive retort proclaimed the notoriously fiery and dynamic lead, James Cagney, to be one of the five best actors of all time, and that, in his eyes, is why Jack’s performance is a great one.
I’m commonly in awe and admiration at the depth in which audiences will go to vivisect the art they adore—personalising it; self-mythologizing with undue, unerring certainty—even when it reaches an annoying or preposterous degree. All this extensive analysis does is illustrate the effect the work had on them. Many of these YouTube fruitcakes periodically profess to having solved The Shining—from the puzzling duality of Grady’s Christian names—earlier Charles, and later Delbert, the mismatched ages and period costume dresses of the Grady girls, the indistinct mass or perhaps “body” in the cascade of blood that drops down during the Kensington Gore elevator deluge, and the carpet pattern flipping and inverting as Danny prepares to enter Room 237, to the sticker of the Disney dwarf, Dopey, vanishing from Danny’s door, and the game room poster depicting an alleged satanic skiing Minotaur. “It’s all a dreamstate visualisation of Jack’s novel in progress,” some’ll fervently preach—all taking place in his creatively-ignited mind; inspired by the Overlook’s hand me down scrap book, pulling in his inspirational surroundings to spin his own fabulist tale. Others prophesize that Jack never really escaped the larder, and the frozen maze finale is a surrealistic wintry representation of his eternally trapped demise.
Call me a dull boy, but in spite of what Joe Girard—in his analytical to a fault, Eye Scream YouTube video postmortem of The Shining pleasingly called, “Gorgeous, contextual symmetries,” which pop up when playing the film both backwards and forwards—simultaneously superimposed, I can’t subscribe to this level of obsessive conjecture, nor the film’s supposedly intended numerology—beyond the number 42 that is. However, when we take in a film, I do concede our subconscious is constantly at work, and play—contextualizing and echoing back previous images. The other strand that aids this absorbing yet reaching take on The Shining in terms of these uncanny superimposition-compositions is Stanley’s meticulously central, one-point perspective, symmetrical framing, which renders the exercise eternally complimentary no matter which duo of shots you chuck at it. Some will eat up this brand of pretentious analytical posturing; others will immediately become infuriated, and tune out. I’m somewhere in between, as I was subjected to years of tedious cinematic speculation throughout Joseph Campbell, Syd Field and Robert McKee-cannibalising, regurgitative BTEC Media lectures, artsy A-level Film Theory discussions, and to a lesser degree, my more practical degrees in Film and Moving Image Production—showing off, and have become desensitised to what George Harrison would call, “avant-garde-a-clue” nonsense, and yet find certain cinematic theories fascinating, occasionally legitimately illuminating, but more often than not, frustrating—and sometimes even irreparably damaging to a film’s legacy.
Having directed a handful of short independent films myself on a far more trivial scale and budget, many of these compelling presuppositions do tend to creep in. Some are deliberate; authorial, but anyone who’s put a film together knows that so much is out of your control that this manner of analysis is presumptuous, problematic, and overly analytical to the point of being wildly misleading. Yet, to throw another spanner in the works, Kubrick’s control was exacting, and certain folks find his films acceptably dissection-worthy when it comes to this kind of exhaustive critical thinking, and believe this gives them license to go far and beyond the rational in order to make sense of them, see things that aren’t there, and imprint their own psychosis onto his pictures—an indulgence Stanley was more than happy to fuel, as the kind of mystique he sought could only be achieved by tightly buttoning his lip about his movie motivations, and rarely giving interviews—admittedly with a handful of revealing exceptions. Compounding this, I believe Kubrick knew by 1980 that his films would be both anatomised to death—and long after his own, so he actively leant into it. He knew that—as the French composer, Claude Debussy said, “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them.” You can’t have loud without quiet, you can’t have light without dark, and Stanley purposely; intentionally, left us with some work to do in order to prolong the lives of his films.
There’s poetry to the abstract, ambiguous, unknown mystery of movies, and when the director; the author, reveals precisely what they were trying to suggest; what they were trying to achieve, these matters can become far less interesting. However, an uncharacteristically off guard Kubrick—whilst hiding out in an undisclosed office as to not be photographed, opted to reveal more than usual to a modest Japanese journo by the name of Jun’ichi Yaoi, who was “investigating” the suspicious; potentially paranormal studio fire at Elstree for an unaired TV programme. This long lost, raw footage treasure trove contains not only Stanley’s explicit decoding of The Shining, but also a reflective elucidation relating to his cryptic, sci-fi masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There’s a Lovecraftian notion that, if the audience appreciates it, you don’t have to explain it. The Shining could be described as a wholly ambiguous movie in almost every sense—and therein lies the intrigue. The movie has legs because there’s room to manoeuvre; room to interpret. Kubrick preferred not to read what something was about, or what it meant. He liked it when an audience took in a film and wondered whether what they were thinking matched what the director intended. There’s a skill and a subtlety in allowing viewers to figure it out for themselves. As the late, great, David Lynch once wisely imparted, “When you finish a film, everyone wants you to talk about it, but… the film is the talking.”
This is where we must consider author intent and post-structuralism. Even if you’re Stanley Kubrick, not everything you intend comes to fruition—things are misconstrued; misinterpreted, and what Tolkien called “applicability” as opposed to his loathed allegory comes to the fore—Kubrick’s intentions are a mere fraction of whatever meaning The Shining potentially holds. I do believe he—as a Freudian, purposefully designed the picture within an inch of its life, but was concomitantly cognisant that for the piece to be resoundingly fearsome, and a true work of art, it must leave space for the viewer to bring Freud’s three components of the human psyche into play. True fear is in the singular mind of the individual, and there’s nothing a filmmaker can show an audience that is more unnerving than what they can privately project inside their own minds. That’s why The Shining is not The Exorcist, or The Omen—it isn’t even the unhinged, kinetic onslaught of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. All are arguably plausibly perfect horrors, but this isn’t solely a horror film.
Is Danny retracing his snowy steps in the maze Kubrick’s way of stating, sometimes we need to go back to go forwards; to understand and accept the calamities of our past, so we can proceed unerringly into a brighter future? Does the Overlook claim the souls of its victims—integrating them materially into both the hotel, and somehow simultaneously its sordid past? Is the Overlook intended to represent America—with its karma fucked, forever and ever and ever? For time immemorial, a bloodstained country founded on colonial genocide, and haunted by it to such a devastating degree it can never heal—just continue to reincarnate and regurgitate death and dread for all time, with the European Jewish Holocaust of the thirties and forties not acting as a central thesis or theme set by Kubrick—as posed by certain conspiratorial documentaries, but instead an evil echo—a sick example of a guilt-ridden historical redo—a savage samsara, yet again. Not just of an American individual such as Jack or the Grady bunch, but of a global collective.
Jack doesn’t have a snowball’s chance at the Overlook. I can’t accept he strangled Danny during their stay, and again, rather superficially, maintain the hotel’s wraiths are tactile, hard-bodied entities, who can inflict bodily damage—just as they can open a locked storage room, snog you in a bathroom, or roll a tennis ball along a carpet precisely into your purview. Kael observed the two Overlook spooks Jack has protracted tête-à-têtes with—Lloyd the bartender and Grady, are each physically-manifested representatives of his demented inner temptations—his worldly demons: authorial inadequacy and beyond, fraut familial tensions and bubbling barbaric violence, and the “poor me, poor me, pour me a drink” alcoholic urge for a ruinous bourbon—a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a little glass, and some ice—even at the cost of his eternal soul.
Do the specters act as cajoling catalysts to finally unearth the buried tensions of the Torrances? Kael suggested this particular family unit, with its arcane abilities may have conjured these malevolent apparitions as opposed to this plainly being another haunted hell hotel—after all, who among this family of three are actually capable of “shining?” A handful of pesky, puff-piece YouTubers definitively proclaim, “There are no ghosts in The Shining.” Stanley would differ, and possibly even… correct them. Kubrick clearly stated he felt this was an optimistic tale, as any work invoking an afterlife is inherently a sanguine story; a cheerful concept of sorts, as the existence of spirits presupposes life after death. Perhaps it’s glib of me, but as we’re now hip to the fact that the Grady side of the larder door was shot and eventually cut, I know Grady lets Jack out—it was just wisely excised from the finished film to perpetuate ambiguity. However, like many delving fans, I almost wish it wasn’t so simple. This enigma can be decoded with a little digging—yet I often feel the mystery is more compelling, and that buzzy-brained, baffled feeling akin to being bewildered by a tricky mathematical sum, or a profound philosophical puzzle, is a welcome addition to my viewings of The Shining. I don’t wish to solve Kubrick’s maze; I prefer being perplexed. The mind-fuck of the final image—Torrance being integrated into the July 4th photograph, is Stanley’s way of indicating that this account is legitimate; this tale really happened; it wasn’t merely an illusory figment of Jack’s imagination—or indeed Wendy’s, or Danny’s, as the now ceased to be coda controversially could have signalled more forcefully. He has been absorbed by the Overlook into its unfathomable past, and is now an omniscient figure in its history.
1975’s Barry Lyndon wasn’t a commercial triumph, losing more dosh than any other Kubrick picture to date. The Shining was an opportunity to pair what Warner Bros. hoped would be a smash horror novel with a prestige director—much like Polanski and Rosemary’s Baby, or Friedkin and The Exorcist—which Stanley spurned in favour of Lyndon. A scant 16 out of 100 moviegoers cited Kubrick as their reason to see the The Shining during early market research. Nicholson was the big kahuna, and the exacerbated executives’ concerns were that the picture was perceived to be both familiar in spirit, and altogether too similar to a bunch of preceding ’70s horrors—namely The Exorcist, The Omen, and The Amityville Horror.
I know, why pick a dog in this fight, but I forever find myself in a defensive position in favour of The Shining, in spite of remaining in total awe of an admittedly more visceral and disturbing horror picture like The Exorcist. If audiences fail to find King’s concept of an intoxicated, homicidal father chilling, I don’t understand what breed of horror they would prefer. What’s more unnerving? It’s such a verboten and forbidden fear—even today. For example, what’s more disturbing than the Chris Benoit tragedy? Or Chris Watts and American Murder: The Family Next Door? What scares you more—a disconcertingly convincing depiction of a possessed child, or the exploration of what Stanley and company called, “family hate,” with “children as receptacles of displaced hostilities.” Rage and fear within households—a father threatening his child is awfully compelling, and has terrifyingly solid, resonant psychological underpinnings as opposed to the albeit brutally accurate attempt at religious superstition incarnate that is Friedkin’s film. Lloyd’s complimentary tipples are arguably the most relatable, identifiable objects of addictive enticement—along with the adulterous tryst in Room 237 that is, for any resentful American male. They’re Jack’s weaponized vices of choice. The demon drink isn’t the lone catalyst of the chaos here, but it’s enough to ignite Jack’s incendiary touchpaper. These terrifying true themes intellectually outweigh Stephen King’s more generic and jejune underpinning frights, and as further explored in Kubrick’s penultimate picture, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining is a cloaked warning for humanity to heed.
“One of the scariest films ever made—according to some people,” snidely uttered by Kermode, who just can’t resist putting the boot in on behalf of his—now irksomely dreary, Exorcist fetish. Plug your ears, Dr. Mark, but although it may not have pus, puke, and creepy contact lenses, The Shining makes even a horror movie as mighty as The Exorcist seem almost inconsequential in comparison. It lurks somewhere beyond gross-out; beyond special makeup effects; beyond audiences who are still cut to their archaic bones by blasphemy and apostasy, and will forever regard religion as reality. The Shining’s humanistic horror dwarfs Heaven, Hell, God, and The Devil himself.
Kubrick pondered how to tackle cardinal human fears from a sound, psychological standpoint—not anything as trite as faith or Lucifer himself. When religion—as John Lennon said, “Vanishes and shrinks,” what will remain? The true terror of The Exorcist—aside from the claret-spurting arteriogram torture, lies in its viewers being, at the very least, agnostic. Absolutely, even ardent atheists can find discomfort in that picture—and it is truly a masterpiece in its own right, but it doesn’t have the Jungian Red Bookunderpinnings; Freud’s The Uncanny, or the probing rational resonance of The Shining. I concur with Kubrick that the afterlife is a reassuring—if untenable concept. However, an aspect I find deeply troubling is The Shining’s suggestion of permanence—the freaky notion that even as a phantom we have responsibilities; an everlasting job to do, and must roam a gargantuan hotel in perpetuity, coaxing other lost souls into our realm.
We look for answers and elucidations because they console us. This is where conspiracy theory begins, and more often than not, ends. I’ve become fascinated by pareidolia—seeing faces in everyday things—be it a colourful oil slick phiz on a rainy pavement, an emergency handle visage on a bus, or a curious profile crack in concrete. We’re subconsciously searching for them, and are evolutionarily-engineered to do so. When we’re first born, we understand—even discern the faces of our mother and father. Some swear they see endless skulls on the actors, the lifts, and vehicles of The Shining. We look for comfort in the abstract. We see faces in a void of nothingness, because that’s what our minds developed to do. As Leon Vitali—Stanley’s long-serving right hand man, smartly put it, “When I look at the moon, sometimes I see the image of a French poodle. I don’t really think there’s a French poodle on the moon, but that’s what I see.” That’s the documentary, Room 237. That’s just about every YouTuber’s hot take interpretation on The Shining, claiming they’ve cracked it. The mind strives to solve puzzles, and Kubrick—the brightest filmmaking scamp of all, arguably made cinema’s greatest brain-teaser with The Shining—trolling us all; gifting us the box to a million-piece jigsaw, but shrewdly pocketing one (or perhaps forty two) of the pieces, leaving us frustrated; forever curious as to what those gaps may manifest or mean.
With The Shining, the four-dimensional chess champion of cinema constructed a conundrum so impenetrable; so obscure, it will be “puzzled over, and studied, and followed, forever,” and simultaneously packed it chock-full of playfulness, accessibility, unbridled, over the top Kabuki theatricality and cutting black comedy. Its, at times, simplistic to a fault dialogue, and peculiar human interactions are so bizarrely mundane and run of the mill—facile to the degree that they wash over us and we, brows wrinkled, can only begin to imprint our own consciousness on the banal chitchat to try and decipher the mild-mannered madness. Then, as another layer to the Kubrickian cake, Stanley made The Shining one of the most beautiful-looking pieces of cinematic art ever created—colliding exquisitely-composed imagery with clunky, intentionally half-arsed, humbling errors to offset the slyly-designed, often-criticised frigidity of his detached filmmaking approach.
Certain countries—most notably the United States, were founded on mass murder and genocide, the technical advancements of these nations are articulated here in the form of a space exploration motif—a much more plausible reason for The Shining‘s cryptic Apollo moon landing allusions, and there are also Kennedy-esque presidential orders depicted with the Overlook’s cyclical reincarnation of Jack and Grady perhaps signifying negligent political parties who never learn—just dig deeper into death; further into greed with incompetence and inhumanity. Yes, as advertised, “The tide of terror that swept America is here,” but it’s the British Empire, too. Not to mention Nazi Germany, and beyond. It’s a strong argument that The Shining is a movie about widespread historic negligence and the modern, so-called humanity that was born of it. As wisely pointed out by Terry Gilliam, Kubrick’s unmade Aryan Papers—or Wartime Lies would also have been a film about precisely this matter—human failure, as opposed to Spielberg’s acclaimed Holocaust hit, Schindler’s List, which was instead, arguably myopically misleading in its dealings with one man’s success.
Perhaps the picture continues to resonate as these wise warnings are never heeded. At my current age of 42—a number that is consistently employed throughout the film—it’s emblazoned on Danny’s jersey, the movie playing on the disconnected telly is entitled, Summer of ’42, Nazi Germany conceiving of the “final solution” to exterminate European Jews in 1942 during WWII. I despair at seeing the revolving door of politics, and the same abhorrent mistakes made. Take Jack Torrance—a husband and father capable of complete corruption via deviance and dark influence to the degree he can be driven to chop up his family into little bits with an axe—or at least try. He was just following orders; the orders of the house.
Then there’s the shameless cyclical nature of cinema itself, and its regurgitated “content,” correspondingly grinding and wearing us down over decades plus. We each have an opportunity to draw our own line when it comes to The Shining. A YouTube commenter sagely stated, “The way someone analyzes and interprets The Shining is a direct representation of their own psyche.” Do you want to join the crank club, or just enjoy a masterly movie at surface level? Personally, I begin to feel quite uneasy and apprehensive when I’m adamantly informed that playing the movie backwards and forwards simultaneously via superimposition will reveal any of Kubrick’s conscious intentions. Or once definitive, unequivocal sexual abuse themes built around Danny and Jack purportedly enter the picture—although this is likely due to the fact that in addition to Nicholson’s darkly humorous suggestion to include incest-invoking Playgirl reading material as he awaits Ullman and Watson, these suppositions actually, upsettingly hold a lot of water, and once heard, we cannot unring the bell.
In terms of cracking The Shining’s oracular code, the closest anyone got, for me anyway, was the bored genius theory—what does Kubrick; a man with a rumoured IQ of 200 do with himself after conquering the cinematic landscape? What story could possibly be worth telling? Pair this with the concept that Stanley chose to make a movie about the entirety of existence—our whole history as a species; to lament the repetition of our self-destructive, historical downfalls and tragedies—both within and without the Overlook, which in The Shining acts as an allegorical (and deleted literal) scrapbook full of such things, from clandestine sexual deviancy, to ancient murder and mayhem. This of course factors in the—dismissed by doubters doc, Room 237’s somewhat wonky speculations, but reframes them in a more palatable, plausible way I can get behind.
Unfairly spurned by some as a laughable crackpot conspiracy, I’d argue Room 237 is in fact closer to the truth than many give it credit for. The vexations arise when categorical, undisputed gospel is declared, and sadly each suspiciously certain, film scholarly speaker is borderline pompous in their conspiratorial claims—all at odds with one another, attempting to outsmart, out-read, and out-decipher their competitors. What I have come to believe is The Shining is likely not about any one of these particular topics. It’s not a thesis that tackles any of them individually—it’s likely an amalgam; an incorporation, crafted to represent a broad view of mankind’s most notable miscalculations and happenings. The apparitions the Torrances encounter at the Overlook are what remains of those who have killed, and been killed—whether they lurk cobwebbed and skeletal in a haunted lobby, or are buried deep, unseen, and forgotten under a historic hotel; beneath a former screaming battleground. You want horror, Kubrick thought. I’ll give it to you, but not solely ghosts and gore—the reprehensible, repeated, unending horrors of human history.
Scarious Artists 