This is what is terrifying about The Shining. Not just Nicholson's performance, but those horrendous visions--textbook monumental horror-images one and all--it all mocks our desire for solid ground to stand on. We want a main character with a tragic arc, but we get a smirking prick on a straight shot into lunacy; we want one who fights to stay human, but we get one whose essential inhumanity appears to have been there all along waiting for its chance to escape. We want an evil we can define, in a form we can recognize, with a cause we can identify and a cure we can affect; but we get random, almost arbitrary snippets of nightmare, ranging from a river of blood and a reanimated corpse to a couple of kids and goddamn spectral "furry," interlaced with a dry drunk who falls off the wagon thanks to the help of a phantom bartender, all of which ostensibly will continue to plague visitors to the hotel site "forever and ever and ever," and all of which is "explained" in a throwaway line about Indian burial grounds that paradoxically highlights just how arbitrary the entire "explanation" is to begin with. (Actually, there's a fascinating interpretation of the film which argues that the whole thing is a metaphor for the Euro-American genocide against the American Indians--you can read all about it here. Watch the movie with this in mind and you'll see it's all there. Was this intentional and serious, or intentional and a gag, or just the equivalent of playing Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz? I think the film feels we don't deserve to know for sure.) Perhaps this is best encapsulated by the arbitrary changes to facts established earlier in the film when they're brought up later on: Wendy tells Danny's doctor that Jack dislocated Danny's shoulder five months ago, but a month later, when Jack is pouring his heart out to Lloyd the bartender, it's become two years; the hotel manager tells Jack that the former caretaker who ran amok was named Charles Grady, but when Jack speaks with Grady later on, the man calls himself Delbert. Given Kubrick's well-deserved reputation for perfectionism, I think we can safely assume this wasn't the result of the script girl having the day off--it seems to be just another way for the film to demonstrate that it's making its own rules, and the rules will always be to the detriment of normality and sanity.
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
Article comments
1 - emma
You might copy those images to another host. Only a small banner gif is shown when remotely linked it seems.
2 - Rodney Welch
I went to see The Shining at the theatre with the greatest hopes of being scared to death. I mean, it was Kubrick, right? A so-called master filmmaker who had certainly battered my senses with A Clockwork Orange. And Jack Kroll in Newsweek certainly thought it was scary. Can't fail, I thought. Unfortunately, I thought, the movie was all foreplay and no climax -- it promises, tempts, lures, and taunts you with the idea that there will be a big payoff. There isn't -- at least, not really. It's certainly not the kind of picture that makes you jump out of your seat.
And yet, over the years, I've come to appreciate it, although not the way most of it's fans do, because it didn't scare me. Instead, I appreciate it in a kind of distant, arm's-length, perhaps even academic way. I see it as a mood piece, a psychological study of a man who realizes he is nothing -- a man who wanted to succeed, as a father, a husband, and a writer, and finds he can't. Jack Torrance is a man who thinks he has writing talent and discovers that he has nothing to say, and his rage about having nothing to say, nothing to offer, nothing to give his family turns him into a violent beast; he sees them as the enemy. It's really, in its way, a study of alcoholism, told in somewhat horrific metaphoric terms; a man who can't escape his sense of failure, and who turns on the wife and child who make him feel that sense of failure just by their very existence. That, to me, is what the real story is; it's a story of a man's midlife crisis where the horror is all interior.
3 - Jim Carruthers
I re-watched "The Shining" a couple of weeks ago on the DVD re-issue (there's a really comprehensive "making-of" doc with extensive interviews with Kubrick, Nicholson and Duvall).
This was about the third or fourth time I'd seen the movie. The first was when it was first released, the second a couple of years ago at a rep theatre with a badly deteroriated and faded print.
The DVD really represented how the horror comes from beneath and within, plus how "The Shining" is one of the best adaptations of Stephen King's books. However, I should note, while I was a child, my parents spent a couple years employed as caretakers at a seasonal resort (though no where near as isolated as the Overlook).
One thing which provides an interesting contrast is the made for teevee adaptation of "The Shining" which was good, but not great.
And if you need a writer's block double feature, pair "The Shining" with the recently released DVD of "Barton Fink".
4 - Rodney Welch
Cool -- I have Barton Fink lined up to watch over the weekend. And you're right about the double DVD set; fascinating documentary of Kubrick and crew just being themselves.
5 - Eric Olsen
I find the subject of writer's block to be beyond my ken. My problem is that I alwyas have too much to say, never not enough. i am always disgorging large amounts of blather and then having to sort it out, rearrange it, eliminate a lot.
That's the main reason I have found blogging so rewarding: I can just blab on and on about whatever hops into my fevered brain all the livelong day and no one seems to mind much.
By the way, I found "Barton Fink" to be disturbing, claustrophobic and overwrought. I kept thinking, "just start writing down whatever pops into your head, one thing leads to another, it doesn't have to be perfect, that's what editing is for."
6 - Rodney Welch
I think I should have said above that Jack Torrance's interior horror becomes externalized. And I can grok the writer's block thing, because I really don't like writing badly, don't like writing sentences I know are horribly wrong -- which is not to say I don't, of course. I've always had this belief that writing is about knowing your thoughts, knowing what you want to say, having some basic grasp of your own point of view, and left to my own devices I'm not always real sure what that is; in fact, I usually don't know what I think until someone tells me what they think, and I rather immediately find myself agreeing or disagreeing strongly. I'm a shitty blogger, no question, but I'm a pretty steady responder.