Stanley Kubrick 1980 USA
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers, Joe Turkel, Philip Stone
Some films have such a reputation that it's almost an accepted certainty that everyone has seen them, so it may come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog that, until last night, I had never seen The Shining and I'm really not sure why. I don't know whether I felt that, due to the familiarity of some of its more notorious imagery, its power may be diminished (it's hard to imagine what the reaction to the famed 'Here's Johnny' scene would have been to audiences who didn't know it was coming) or whether I just never got around to it, with other titles taking precedence. Either way, after watching it I'm glad to say that it's brilliant, although not so much terrifying as unsettling and genuinely weird. Oddly though it wasn't any of the imagery that struck me the most, at least not at first; it was the use of sound. It's prevalent right from the opening with a panoramic sweep across the film's mountain setting interrupted by something that, to 21st century ears, sounds like the screech of a dial-up modem. The noise is of course the shining of the title, a sort of blanket term for ESP. Soon after, the film cuts to a shot of the well-known typewriter but all we hear is a repetitive thud getting ever louder, like a panicked heartbeat or a clock ticking down to an unknown event. Actually, it's just Nicholson's Jack bouncing a ball against the wall, knee-deep in writer's block. It's such a simple moment but somehow it still feels so innovative and out of the ordinary. It's the same case with the title cards that break up the timescale of the film and are reminiscent of the episodic nature of Nikolai Gogol's short story Diary Of A Madman, skipping hours, days and even months at a time as its main character grows ever more insane. The typewriter is also the first example of a foreshadowing that continues throughout, from young Danny asking for reassurance that his father would "never hurt Mommy and me" to the patterns of the carpet and the claustrophobic journey through the maze that both predict the final scenes and bring to mind the Minotaur of Greek mythology, a beast that Nicholson ends up resembling as he stalks his son (and, via the camera work, us), his voice completely replaced by the snarls and roars of an animal. Much as is the case with many other complex films how you read the narrative is really left up to the individual but such is the peculiarity of this work that it's been analysed more than most, with a separate documentary film, Room 237, being produced to explore these thoughts. Also much like other works the validity of some of these is pretty questionable. One theory states that the film is Kubrick's veiled admission of being part of the team who faked the moon landings (if indeed they did), with major clues being the Apollo 11 jumper that Danny wears (despite the film being set 11 years after the event and the character only being about 6 or 7 years old), the maze-like patterns on the carpet also resembling a launch pad, the use of the number 237 suggesting the approximate 237,000 miles from Earth to the moon, Jack haranguing his wife over the fact she doesn't understand the duty of honouring a contract (suggestive of Kubrick's feelings of isolation at keeping the secret?) and Lloyd the bartender's insistence that Jack's money "is no good here". In a previous scene Jack has had no money in his wallet when he looked, in this one he has some but doesn't know where it has come from; some see this as a metaphor of Kubrick all of a sudden having money from the alleged faking but not being able to tell anyone where it's from. Another hypothesis claims that the film is an allegory of American Imperialism and the genocide of Native Americans, pointing to the fact that the hotel is meant to have been built on a burial ground and the repeated imagery relating to the American West, even down to glimpses of Calumet Baking Powder in the kitchen scenes (a Calumet is a peace pipe) and the ever-present axe (strikingly similar to a tomahawk). Others meanwhile claim it is about the Holocaust with Nicholson's 'Big Bad Wolf' an anti-Semitic caricature and Dick (Scatman Crothers, doing a excellent line in catatonic terror) telling Danny that the ghost are simply images of the past an attempt to both acknowledge the horrors and help audiences to let go of them. There's also the idea that Stephen King, who wrote the source novel, has admitted that at the time of writing he was experiencing writer's block and alcohol and anger issues and that Jack is, to a level, him. If that's the case both the character and King are disturbing on a different level. I, however, read things differently. To me, the film carries constant allusions to domestic violence - from the talk of 'correction' to Jack's behaviour towards his wife to his anger right through to his admittance to Lloyd the bartender that he once hurt Danny unintentionally - and even to the impression that Jack has maybe killed his family at some point in the past and that the whole film is a sort of elaborate creation in his mind to deal with it. His being a writer and admitting that Wendy is a staunch fan of ghost stories would add to this as would his lack of reaction when he's initially told about the hotel's past in the same scene. As I see it he is perhaps in reality in an asylum (a large building with many locked rooms holding the dangerous within them, like the hotel) frantically writing like Dr Mabuse in the sanatorium in Fritz Lang's classic The Testament of Dr Mabuse, attempting to understand and excuse the things he has done. The moments when things don't quite seem to fit, as if someone is trying to put incorrect puzzle pieces together, support this as does Danny's encounter with the woman in room 237 - here, it's the mad woman/spirit who tried to strangle Danny, not Jack - and even Wendy's late vision of Lloyd and the bear (a possible intimation towards sexual abuse, with Jack as the bear, and more feasibly, an admittance to himself of the sheer lunacy of his fabrication). By the end he is frozen solid, forever stuck in the same state for a life sentence. But who knows, I could be wrong. If you've never watched it, or indeed if you have, take a look and make your own decision.
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