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Director/Coscreenwriter: Stanley Kubrick

By Roderick Heath

A yellow Volkswagen Beetle winds its way along a vertiginous mountain road, a route that leads from the rational lowlands to the mountains of madness. We’ve already been introduced to Jack Torrance even though we haven’t seen him, a being enclosed in a tight bubble of metal, an economic and cultural refugee from the larger human world, entering a zone where his existence is viewed with implacable disinterest by the soaring, jagged peaks and silently abiding pine trees, merely waiting for winter’s hammer to fall. Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s pulsing, droning synthesiser version of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique resounds on the soundtrack. Torrance in the flesh takes the shape of Jack Nicholson, authoritative Oscar winner flashing his trademark zesty grin. But the eyes are slightly fixed, the smile a tad strained, as he speaks with the manager of the Overlook Hotel, Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson), a conversation punctuated with Ullman’s uneasy revelation that one of the previous caretakers, a man named Delbert Grady, killed his family during the long winter isolation with an axe, whilst Jack grins and responds it will be a topic of delight for his horror film addict wife. Mutually agreed subtext: Torrance is desperate for a settled job and a chance to break his writer’s block, and Ullman urgently needs someone who’ll take on a job that has a nasty history of chewing up human life.
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Like the conversation of scientists in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) who represent the urges of rational cooperation and irrational partisanship, Jack and Ullman’s exchange here manages to be at once perfectly bland, yet also conscious of standing on the edge of an adventure into the unknown where mysterious forces can already be sensed slowly gathering new strength. Down in the flatlands, where the mountains loom in the dreamy distance, wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) wait for news on Jack’s luck with the job. Wendy reads that eternal tome of the sensitively literate and rebellious, The Catcher in the Rye, whilst Danny has conversations with an invisible friend, Tony. But there’s more to Tony than simply providing a slightly detached and creative little boy’s outlet: Tony is an internal voice, a spirit guide, a doppelganger who hovers within and beside Danny, mediating his powerful psychic gifts. Danny senses Tony’s unease over the coming journey to the Overlook. When he asks Tony to show him why, the only image needed is one returned to again and again throughout the film like a pictorial leitmotif – a colossal torrent of blood spilling out of the hotel’s elevators, as if the heart of the building has stored up every drop of gore ever spilt upon the soil it stands upon.
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The story has it Stanley Kubrick, looking for a strong commercial property to film after the weak reception of Barry Lyndon (1975), sat day in and day out in his office working through piles of recently successful novels, and one day the sound of the books thudding against the wall ceased when Kubrick took up the third novel by a fast-rising horror writer named Stephen King. What’s fascinating about this vignette is how much it resembles some moments in the film, the anguished search for a story to tell, an idea worth hanging years of mental and physical effort upon, stoking the sensation that Kubrick was drawn to the book because it reproduced aspects of his own mental landscape. Then again, that’s probably true enough for any creative person. Kubrick had not tackled an outright horror movie before, although much of his earlier work had suggested some affinity, in his fascination for humans devolving into imps of the perverse, and moments measuring the precise impact of violence. Kubrick, penning the script with novelist Diane Johnson, entirely sublimated King’s story into his own sensibility, an aspect of the film that still rankles the author. What we watch when we watch The Shining is not just adaptation, but something more like translation, a tale remade through new methods of communication, and inevitable imprint of the new artisan. Kubrick’s The Shining, as King put it perfectly correctly, is cold where the novel is hot, the writer’s guilt-ridden, morbid fantasy of his own worst side unleashed by his drinking problem, transmitted via Kubrick’s contemplation of his own tendency to withdraw and struggle through endless phases of creative genesis, drifting through pentimento layers of past and present and future in contemplating civilisation and its discontents.
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Kubrick had already stepped back and forth through the Ages of Man from the horizon of human time to the gilded pretence of a recent past and on to a gleaming technocratic future, evolving somehow towards both divine perfection and primal resurgence all at once, the benign indifference of the Star Child and the savage grins of Dr. Strangelove and Alex De Large the Janus faces of evolution and poor old Barry Lyndon the beaten and curtailed by-product. Kubrick knew very well the human race’s capacity to put on its best face whilst committing its worst crimes, his singular, most obsessive theme. All found a logical terminus in the Overlook, a place where past and present join and twist and the present dissolves like white sky into snow. The Overlook Hotel. The description King’s idol Shirley Jackson gave to her Hill House could describe it just as well – “Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone…and whatever walked there, walked alone.” An outpost of affluent white civilisation, a bustling hive of activity when filled with staff. Imposed upon the crown of the American landscape, so offensive to the dispersed and decimated native inhabitants they even tried to stop its construction upon a burial ground. The Shining is the contemporary nightmare rising out of the dream of ’70s shambling westerns like Little Big Man (1970) and Jeremiah Johnson (1972). The mountaintop burial place whose invasion stirs the massacre of Jeremiah’s family in the latter film is the unavoidable touchstone. Folk cultural remnants decorate the hotel walls, whilst the art deco interiors quietly mimic and refine the simple, jagged geometries of the Indian artefacts. A common motif in late ’70s horror, of course – the Amityville house was also perched upon an Indian burial ground. A hedge maze adjacent, a feature strayed over from one of the Enlightenment gardens of Barry Lyndon, the orderly compression of space and time into a devious sprawl of false hope.
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Jack’s already simmering instability is merely stoked rather than imposed by the Overlook, his fantasies of godlike control over his mental world meshing with a locale that serves as the last stop on the psychic river flowing through a land won in harsh contest. Danny’s reassurance of his parents that he knows all about cannibalism from watching TV stirs a most unnervingly strained and lunatic grin from Torrance as he repeats his son’s words, testifying to a mind already frayed by being long outpaced by other modes of media communication even in the process of shaping his son’s mind. Methods of communication are a secret plane of warfare in The Shining. Jack’s inability to communicate meaningfully, represented by his writing or failure therein, is matched to his urging Danny to suppresses his psychic gifts, perhaps out of concern for the way people will think of him and perhaps jealous of them. Some vital mechanism in Jack has broken down, perhaps from the same process, of having to contour himself and his expectations into a workaday world, or perhaps from suppressing the gift in himself – if the two processes can be extricated at all. Jack hopes to dislodge the clog to his ambitions in the Overlook. Wendy, meanwhile, cute and gawky and ever so chipper, wears her identity like a baggy sack dress, the woman with a shrivelled sense of self-esteem who convinced herself she married a genius.
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The Overlook provides the struggling writer and his family with a little kingdom with a brief illusion of possession, reminiscent on one level of the similar smorgasbord of consumer delight George Romero sent his heroes careening through in Dawn of the Dead (1978), albeit slightly more upmarket. Head chef Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) gives Wendy and Danny a tour of the hotel’s larder, stocked for a long winter and a veritable horn of plenty, a wonderland of space and illusory wealth backed up by an authentic aura of history. The Torrances settle into life in the Overlook, but after initial celebration of their new world, nothing goes right. Jack becomes increasingly tetchy and offensive. Danny keeps seeing strange and terrible things in the hotel corridors, and finally, fatefully ventures into Room 237, where something leaves him bedraggled and traumatised. This assault sparks suspicion and diverging responses of concern and infuriated frustration in his parents. Nature conspires to force a crisis. A terrible snowstorm falls upon the Colorado Rockies. Jack displays increasing signs of falling into a cabin-fever-driven frenzy with dangerous intentions. Soon Jack will also destroy the radio and snowmobile that offer the chance of rescue or escape.
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The horror artist’s imaginative landscape is transposed onto the locale, filling up space with illustrations of events gruesome and strange, the many crimes and lost histories straying out of their boxes into the halls and corridors. Trauma clings to the place like a subtle stink of rot, particularly infecting the notorious Room 237, a space Hallorann detests so absolutely Danny can sense it in him, obliging the chef to warn him away from it at all costs. Danny and Hallorann find instant accord, for Hallorann has the psychic gift too, and he seems to be the first other psychic Danny has encountered. Hallorann calls their shared gift “shining,” and gives nostalgic account of his ability to communicate with his mother without moving their mouths. There’s a hint here that Jack probably has the shining too, but has suppressed it so deeply he becomes a mere conduit for the psychic evil in the hotel rather than a bulwark against it, as Hallorann and Danny are. It’s also suggested that the building’s latent evil is often sparked by the intrusion of such preternaturally super-conscious people into its zone. Grady’s slaughter of his family was occasioned by the attempts of one his daughters to burn the place down in her awareness of what it is.
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Time quickly begins to break down once the family is ensconced in their private abode within the hotel, a space that serves as a kind of mocking simulacrum of a proper family hostel sealed off from the rest of this cavernous space. Kubrick’s deployed intertitles seem to precisely delineate the time but actually hack up the film into random shards, units of measurement without rule. Days dissolve into one-another; character actions take on a kind logarithmic variability, moving according to programs laid down by the Overlook. One of the most famous flourishes, the endless repetition of the phrase “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy,” testifies to an illusion of forward motion when in fact the some moment is repeating. Young Danny makes endless tours of the hotel corridors on his tricycle, a system that seems to depend on the same Byzantine logic as the hotel’s beloved hedge maze. The monstrosity at the heart of the labyrinth is no longer a fanciful Minotaur – it’s a suburban father. Kubrick reverse-engineers cinematic language in the course of the film, as if mimicking his time-warp theme. The stark, squared-off, rectilinear shots attune themselves to the hard blocks and angles of the decorative motifs and forms around the hotel, but also call back to early cinema and the work of Fritz Lang and other movie pioneers, their deadpan gaze upon severe and unyielding compositions. As in Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), the implacable regard of order and fate is invoked through such rigid figurations, as is the rectangular frames of the photos that in the very end prove to contain and cage the spirits of the dead in the Overlook. The eye of the camera is a mocking form of immortality, locking time in an eternal frieze.
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Part of the unique stature The Shining has acquired over recent years, which has evolved to the extent that a whole movies has been made the obsession with this one, seems rooted in just this aspect of The Shining. It’s a movie about looking, in much the same way as Blowup (1966), mediated through a master filmmaker’s eye, one whose visual style was based in his background in still photography. The very last shot reveals, unnoticed amongst the hotel’s keepsakes of a lost, glittering past a photo of a suited Jack standing before a large group of Independence Day revellers, a detail observed by Kubrick in a systematic journey in closer to the image, much like in Blowup. The truth is available if you look hard enough. Small wonder some folks scour the film in urgent hunt for details that might act like the small map of the hedge maze, a map that blends imperceptibly into the real one as Jack studies it. Jack’s own pretensions of omniscience are invoked here as he seems to see his wife and son wandering in the aisles of the maze. The shining is a way of seeing, reading, experiencing – “It’s just like pictures in a book,” Tony tells Danny in coaching him through the seemingly manifold terrors of the Overlook itself, which seems to lack sufficient power to actually hurt anyone, therefore requiring a pliable amanuensis like Jack to do it. Kubrick strips the games of look and reality down to brutalist essentials throughout, constantly hinting at unseen things. The Shining invites you to look closer but also observes the breakdown of order and logic, and the closer you get the faster this process speeds up.
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The broadest variation on this motif comes when Jack ventures into Room 237 in search of an apparent interloper who has roughed up Danny. Jack sees at first an extremely beautiful woman climbing sylphlike out a bath, encouraging Jack to embrace her, but then transforming into a garish hag covered in terrible burns and stigmata of disease. This scene mimics the forms of horror with the heartbeat-like soundtrack and steady build to grotesque revelation, but rather plays more as a smirking gag at the audience’s expense, with Jack as the frustrated avatar, inviting in with the desire to see something sexy and then give it a right good goose. In a place where time folds in on itself, beauty and ugliness coexist in one frame. There’s also a hint of in-joke to this scene, or at the very least a sort of knowing reference. Nicholson started in his career in the low-budget scifi and horror of Roger Corman, and this sequence essentially compresses one of his first starring roles, in Corman’s faux-Poe escapade The Terror (1963), into a few excruciating minutes. Poe is an inevitable touchstone for any American artist dabbling in the oneiric arts, of course, the saturnine poet who was found dying one day on a park bench after everything else in his life had slowly withered and died, lost in fantasies of a gallant past turned septic trap. Poe unwillingly but implacably observed the genteel fantasies of the southern planter class he didn’t quite belong to regressing into blood crime, psychosexual dwarfism, and lunacy. King’s approach to the Poe imprint was to use his motifs to interrogate American hierarchism – the bludgeoning effect of money, class, race, gender. Kubrick? Well, suffice to say Stanley seemed a little sceptical about everything.
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Sequences depicting Danny’s habits of charging about the hotel on his tricycle are excellent thumbnails describing Kubrick’s skill at compressing and paring back his style in order to land his effects with purified force. The director tracks the boy’s speeding advance from behind, in shots that intriguingly connect them with the same sense of headlong rushing with which he shot the B-52 bomber shooting towards apocalypse in Dr. Strangelove, or; How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963), the sounds of his tricycle’s tires alternating between hissing smoothness on carpet and thunderous, irritating sound on the bare wood. You can all but feel Danny’s heedless release in the wealth of space after a life cooped up in an apartment, but the cunning control of the sound instils forces the viewer to also empathise in the finest nerves with Jack’s frustration with trying to chase a muse with the racket a young child can make. Kubrick makes you feel this aspect of his tale, to experience it, rather than be passively fed dialogue. It also establishes a visual pattern returned to in the finale, as the roving, pursuing camera fills in for the killer pursuing Danny through the maze proper. Even when the narrative seems to be spiralling into frenetic chaos, the visual language remains unerringly concise. The little sways of the camera tracking the swing of Jack’s axe. The jolting zooms that pick out terrible details and perverse exhibitions. The increasingly intimate views of his actors’ faces as they cave in to lunacy and distress, often with dramatically unusual angles. One example of this is a shot of Nicholson as Jack converses with Wendy through a doorway, filmed from below, a shot that turns him into a caged beast and also invites the viewer into conspiracy with Jack, like one of Richard III’s monologues, as he begins to grin at Wendy’s naive and forlorn expectations of easy escape. The rhythmic interpolations of that singular vision, the torrent of blood, the flash cuts to Danny’s frightened face as he experiences nightmarish terrors with his shining.
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Jack’s invocation to the spirits of the Overlook, uttered when he’s first seen in the hotel’s colossal function area called the Gold Room, with its chintzy splendour and gleaming, inviting bar, is, “I’d do anything for a drink – I’d give my goddamn soul for a glass of beer.” This line is almost parodic in its reduction of Jack’s moral and psychological collapse and enslavement to the Overlook to this singular formula, whilst also finally starting the process of nailing down Jack’s problem, his dry-drunk’s neurosis merely starved rather actively conquered. This is when Jack first glimpses the barman Lloyd (Joe Turkel), who seems at first like a fancy of the writer’s, suave and correct in his old-school aplomb, a character invented to match Jack’s remaking of himself as a worldly gentleman. He aids Jack in delivering verbal purgation of the motives that enforced his self-exile to the Overlook, not really an attempt to find creative fulfilment but instead an attempt to escape his alcoholism, and his guilt over losing his temper with Danny. Wendy proceeds through her days with a chipper, workaday front that is both entirely admirable and enabling of Jack’s instability.
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After their drive together to the hotel, Kubrick pointedly refuses to ever offer a scene where all three characters are seen together, except for a moment in which Jack is a quivering mess after a dreadful nightmare of murdering them and Danny wanders into frame sucking his thumb in the traumatised wake of being attacked by something. Hallorann fulfils the role of father gently coaxing Danny into communication and community. One key scene here involves no overt violence or action but generates a mood of intense disquiet, depicting Jack, moving in a state of intense distraction, slovenly, unshaven, balancing his son on his knee and making weak attempts to communicate with the boy. This scene might seem queasily familiar to anyone who ever grew up with a depressive or alcoholic parent – the spectacle of a parent, supposed figure of love and protection and unquestioning commitment, drifting away in a haze whose attempts to mollify a child are desperately unconvincing. Danny’s question in response to Jack’s agonising expressions of paternal interest is “You wouldn’t ever hurt mommy and me, would ya?”
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But the call of the Overlook is reverberating through Jack’s mind just as it rang out to Danny – come and play, forever and ever and ever. It’s a call that appeals more to a failed adult byproduct than to a wary and canny kid. Danny himself as already heard the call from the pair of twin girls, Grady’s daughters, who have appeared to him in the corridors, manifesting at the same time as the sight of their mangled and bloodied corpses. Danny’s capacity to weather such terrible glimpses depends on his ability to believe in them as mere illustrations rather than as true emanations. Jack instead interacts with them like a man stepping into private fantasies. Wendy’s stark, horrified reaction when she believes Jack might have roughed up Danny has the sorry effect of helping to drive him over the verge of the liminal as he stalks away into the depths of the hotel, arriving in the chintzy splendour of the Gold Room, where Lloyd converses with him in suave, correct old school aplomb, mollifying Jack’s fiscal anxieties and eventually appealing to his desire to be considered important. Lloyd suggests Jack is desperately important to a great project still unfolding at the Overlook. Later, re-entering the same space, Jack finds himself amidst a ritzy celebration of 1920s high life, replete with suited gentlemen and chicly clad flappers, and is bumped into by a waiter, whom Jack recognises quickly is Grady (Philip Stone). Grady protests ignorance of his real identity as Jack grills him about it in a mordantly red-painted bathroom, until the guise slips and Grady assures him with cold precision that he “corrected” his incorrigible family and encourages Jack to do the same with his, in defence of his post as the Caretaker, a role that has slipped any nominal bonds of merely earthly concern and become a post of cosmic significance within this time-space trap.
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Fittingly, considering such themes of type-casting and predestination, the casting imbues The Shining not simply with strong performances but with actors who are obliged to act out versions of parts they had before, or with whom Kubrick had history. Turkel had previously appeared in Paths of Glory (1957) playing a young and tragic soldier also sacrificed in the interests of a smooth-working machine. Stone, who had been in both A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon, had played a retainer shocked by the pathology of the Lyndon household who eventually played successful intervener. Here once more he plays major-domo to the interests of the great estate, although the role of intervener is passed on to Hallorann. Duvall had been the big-eyed, soulful lady of Robert Altman’s Americana fantasias in the previous ten years. Thrusting Nicholson, hero of 1970s naturalism, back into such the zone of his early roles has a mischievous aspect to it, especially as Kubrick picks up and amplifies the coal-black comedy and purposefully cartoonish aspects of a Corman film like The Raven (1963). Kubrick’s fascination for performances pitched right on the edge of overt stylisation reached an apogee here thanks to Nicholson and Duvall. Nicholson’s bravura incarnation of Jack has the quality of a piece of paternal play-acting Big Bad Wolf or Captain Hook constantly threatening to turn into authentically ferocious violence. The film’s moment of truth portrays exactly this pivot, as Jack slowly backs Wendy up a flight of stairs, taunting her with increasingly maniacal flourishes and threats whilst never quite losing the quality of someone enacting a great big joke. Wendy’s name, of course, sarcastically twisted to “Wendy, darling,” amplifies the pantomime connection.
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The Shining is, of course, in spite of its stature and pretensions, a haunted house tale. An old and noble adjunct of the horror genre, the haunted house tale can be both a realm of subtle, evocative frissons and outright bloodcurdling showmanship, of gently psychologised anxiety and spectacular manifestation. The Shining manages to describe the range between both these poles. In many haunted house films from earlier times, hauntings usually proved to be illusory, as in the various versions of The Cat and the Canary (1927, 1939, 1976), usually remaking this hoary trope as a vehicle for proving the antiseptic values of modernity. But a later movement, perhaps set in motion by Jack Clayton’s ponderously literate adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents (1961), saw the value of this trope as questions over the ambiguity of viewpoint became central, and the notion of a ready-made, coherent metaphor for the mind as a set of rooms never free of ghostly imprints of thought and memory. Examples of this mode came on through the 1960s and ‘70s, including Robert Wise’s take on Jackson, The Haunting (1963), Mario Bava’s Operazione Paura (1966) and Lisa e il Diavolo (1972), John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (1973), Dan Curtis’s Burnt Offerings (1976), Richard Loncraine’s Full Circle (1976), Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror, and Peter Medak’s The Changeling (1980).
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What distinguishes The Shining over and above most of these? Kubrick’s fastidious film language is one part of it, of course, the methodical yet remorseless intensification of mood and story that calls to mind the title of that James story – the screws are constantly tightening. But another, telling point of discursion is that in most of those films, the supernatural is an active threat. In The Shining the haunting is entirely passive, only acting through a human avatar – although The Amityville Horror also hinged upon the fright factor of a seemingly decent father turning brutal. One aspect of King’s great success as a horror writer lies in his precise refusal of ambiguities in regards to his generic devices, his monstrosities and ghouls, for whilst embracing the metaphorical meaning of his ideas, King’s realisation of them, from satanic lawnmowers to a girl’s wrathful psychic powers, are perfectly literal. Evil when it breaks out in King’s writer has punishing corporeal and moral dimensions. King liked the theme of ordinary people falling under the power of forces from without – even the hapless dog in Cujo is a victim of this – whereas Kubrick sees it as welling from within. Part of the tensions between King’s story and Kubrick’s realisation of it lies in what feels like Kubrick’s attempts to impose a level of ambiguity about whether what we’re seeing is an actual supernatural event. Much that we see here could simply be a reality created by claustrophobia, isolation, a depressive addict’s sullen fantasising, and shared neurosis of the Torrances. It doesn’t entirely fit: there are too many events in the story that seem to confirm the actuality of the supernatural’s place in the tale, including Danny’s communication with Hallorann and Jack’s escape from the freezer Wendy locks him in after successfully knocking him out with a baseball bat.
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It might be impossible to ascertain whether Kubrick ever watched Bava’s films, and yet the points of accord are hard to ignore: as in Operazione Paura and Lisa e il Diavolo, places become infected with the diseases in the minds of the people who live in them, who then find themselves doomed to act out the pathologies locked into the environs about them (Kubrick’s affinities with Bava would again resurface notably in Eyes Wide Shut, 1999). One scene cut from the film directly quoted Operazione Paura, in which Jack picks up a ball tossed his way by a ghostly presence. The deliberate replacement of tension sourced in what will happen with tension rooted in the question of when and how, blended with the theme of Jack’s temptations towards illusory fulfilment of his psycho-sexual needs whilst exterminating actual loved-ones, is similarly close to Bava’s Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970). Kubrick’s own preferred genre, if he had one, was the war film – six of his thirteen movies depict warfare to a significant degree. His fascination with martial subordination and ritualised violence is evinced here too; The Shining is a portrait of psychic warfare. It’s there in the way Jack is subordinated to the hotel’s programme in the same way the soldiers in Paths of Glory are enticed to destroy themselves and others to live up to a patriotic ideal, echoing General Mireau’s bullying-obliging his subordinate Dax to lead a hopeless and cynically motivated attack on the Ant Hill, and looking forward to the lengthy studies in indoctrination and terrorisation utilised in the training process examined in Full Metal Jacket (1987). As in Lolita (1962), The Shining is also the spectacle of a cultured and respectable being falling to pieces in the face of personal obsession. As in Barry Lyndon, it’s a portrait of a man being slowly crushed by the knowledge he has stepped into the lap of luxury whilst never quite possessing it. As in Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange, the onrush of calamity is viewed always with a cruelly comic grin, humans portrayed less as thinking, self-aware organisms than as momentary embodiments of various traits, from monstrous will to wretched decency.
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Hallorann, a weathered and worldly black man, is the cheeriest character in The Shining, a man who knows how to entertain a kid and keep customers satisfied, and leaves behind the heart of darkness that is the Overlook to go lounge in the sun and watch TV. He initiates Danny into a new community, one that obeys different rules to the rest of society, a world without words. Hallorann calls to mind the intimacy of sharing the shine with his mother, an intimacy to which the Torrance family never aspires. King ironically edited himself out of the ideal nuclear family of the new age in killing off his own avatar and leaving Wendy and Danny with Hallorann. Kubrick concentrates more on the punishing reaction of the offended white male ego, an aspect of The Shining that was prescriptive in the climate of 1980 when Reaganism was on the advance and which today feels all but acutely prophetic. “White man’s burden,” Jack mutters to Lloyd, and soon the film reaches a zenith of deadpan black-comedy grotesquerie as Grady baits Jack, who weeks earlier was probably a good little liberal, with the news that his son is calling in “a nigger” to stymie their designs. Torrance repeats these totemic words in hyperbolic distress, indicating the degree to which he’s fallen under the spell of the old hates written into the structure of the hotel.
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Kubrick rhymes and contrasts this sublimation by Jack of the ancient communal hates encoded in the Overlook’s timbers with the amusing sight of Hallorann in his hotel in the midst of black erotica, a touch that also says something about the two men as men, as Hallorann is a bachelor off enjoying his sojourn whilst Jack is entrapped with his family. Making Hallorann somewhat older than Jack and Wendy removed any hint of sexual threat, but Hallorann is still closer to an idealised figure of paternal care. After all, he’s the sort of guy who will drop everything, fly across country, and venture into a blizzard the moment he senses Danny and Wendy are in danger. Jack’s devolution meanwhile sees him increasingly bullying and abusing Wendy for placing her concerns for Danny ahead of his anointed place and responsibility as caretaker and litterateur. Jack’s brutal murder of Hallorann as soon as he arrives is Kubrick’s starkest deviation from his source. This might well have been made to offer at judicious dash of traditional horror in the story – it’s the only actual death in the film – but it also powerfully intensifies the film’s increasingly maniacal mood and sense of exposure. Danny and Wendy must save themselves, for no white (or black) knights are on the march. But it’s also plain in this sequence, in which Jack hides behind a pillar and springs out at Halloran as if to shout “Boo!” whilst slamming his axe into his chest, that there’s still a sick element of play to Jack’s homicidal rampage.
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The darkly comic streak of The Shining might be identified as Kubrick’s signalling to the audience he feels himself above the genre on some level, except that, as well as coherent with the rest of his oeuvre, the humour entwines with the fervency with which Kubrick delves into this little imaginative universe he and his great team of collaborators fashioned. The atmosphere of extreme isolation and immersion in the subliminal is knitted together by the strength of Kubrick’s images and his music cues. The note of child’s-play-turned-murder-party is still present even as Jack is hunting his son through the hedge maze, which becomes a subzero game of hide-and-seek with a shiny axe in the mix, and of course in the most famous moment in the film, his spittle-flecked, mad-eyed mockery of television’s appeal, “Here’s Johnny!” Meanwhile Kubrick goes to town in unleashing strange and tantalising visions, as when Wendy spies someone in an animal costume fellating a hotel guest, and another guest with a bloodied wound on his brow beaming at Wendy with a hearty greeting, “Great party, isn’t it?” Yeah, it’s a real lark. Such dioramas of the inexplicable are another facet of The Shining’s mystique, evincing episodes of teeming strangeness contained within the Overlook’s embrace without ever pausing to explain and explicate them, rather suggesting that what is glimpsed and spoken of throughout is only the tip of this uncanny iceberg. Hallorann’s ill-fated dash to the rescue does at least present to Wendy and Danny the means to escape in his snow tractor, whilst Jack, injured and dissolving into babbling lunacy, sits down in the maze, unable to find either Danny or his way out, and is glimpsed next as a frigid, icicle-fringed corpse. It’s a truly pathetic end for would-be artist-god’s designs. The last shot, on top of its mordant and haunting evocation of eternal entrapment and the dissolution of meaning in the face of time’s eddies, begs a certain sympathetic question: is Jack happier this way?