Watching The Shining

The bloody vision seen by Danny when he "shines" about the psychic past of the hotel.  This shot was used as part of the advertising campaign for the film.

“There’s something inherently wrong with the human personality.  There’s an evil side to it.  One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious: we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly.  Also, ghost stories appeal to our craving for immortality.  If you can be afraid of a ghost, then you have to believe that a ghost may exist, and if a ghost exists, then oblivion might not be the end.” (Stanley Kubrick quoted by LoBrutto, page 412)

Stanley Kubrick had reason to become somewhat more "mainstream" following his artistically brilliant but financially lackluster Barry Lyndon.  That film did not live up to expectations about “the Stanley Kubrick brand” when compared with the financial success of Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and even the initially X-rated A Clockwork Orange.  His decision to purchase the rights to Stephen King's The Shining made sense on a lot of levels.

“In choosing The Shining, he may have felt an understandable need to get back in touch with popular taste.  Barry Lyndon was by no means the commercial failure some alleged.  An usual film, to be sure, and a disappointment in America, yes; but it found its audience, and eventually its profit, in Europe.  With The Shining, Kubrick assumed the obligation that came with a subject presold on its author’s reputation: namely, to give people what they expected – yet to surprise them nonetheless.  It was the first time that a mass audience would know in advance – or think it did – what ‘a Stanley Kubrick film’ would be about.” (Walker, Taylor, Ruchti, page 275)

Kubrick would enjoy the automatic buzz-recognition that King's popular horror novel would bring to his next film.  The choice of this material would also entice Jack Nicholson, at the zenith of his career, to play the lead role.  Plus, a treatment of the horror genre in general would guarantee a dedicated young audience that would lead to financial success.  Although, like 2001 initially, The Shining disappointed most critics, the movie was popular and is yet another example of a Kubrick film that has gotten better with age.

Being a Kubrick film, the picture defies the expectations of those who want to watch a traditional horror movie.  Instead of scares and blood and gore (although those elements are certainly present) The Shining focuses more on realism and upon psychological elements of fear and madness.  The result is a uniquely frightful film, with a slow intense build, that is satisfying in the Kubrickian sense even if it disappointed Stephen King and among other horror movie fans.  (King said the movie was "a Cadillac without an engine.")

King's displeasure was fundamentally over a shift in the emphasis of the narrative.  “Nicholson was attracted to the family crisis in the Torrance family.  For Stephen King it was the backdrop to set off sparks in a haunted hotel.  For Kubrick and Nicholson, Jack Torrance’s personal demons and the fury he inflicted on his family were the true horror of the film.” (LoBrutto, page 431)

Danny talks to his 'psychic' imaginary friend 'Tony' about the hotel.  Tony doesn't want to go there but he won't tell Danny why.

The Overlook Hotel.  Its isolation is matched by its immense interior, forming a perfect metaphor for Jack's psychological struggle.

The first hour of the film splendidly establishes a sense of mystery and disorientation.  From the beginning, the horror is internalized.  We see this most prominently in Danny's (Danny Lloyd) interaction with his psychic friend 'Tony'.  It is an innocent enough childish pastime; an imaginary character to keep the lonely boy company.  But, there is a sinister quality to it.  Danny's voice is anything but playful when Tony speaks to him.  Tony is able to show (shine) Danny glimpses of the past and the future in relation to his family's off-season stay as caretakers of the Overlook Hotel.

Danny's father, Jack (Jack Nicholson – it is an interesting coincidence that the actors portraying Jack and Danny have the same first names as their roles), seems 'normal' enough at first, but he has a troubling background of drinking and possible child abuse, and a frustrating teaching career that grates on his nerves.  As soon as the family moves into the hotel, Jack feels strangely at ease and comfortable in the cavernous empty lodge with all its many past stories of crime, debauchery, and mayhem.   Living in the hotel works on Jack's psyche, a degeneration which takes place at a believable, gradually accelerating pace over the final two-thirds of the film.

Jack's wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), is the most difficult role in the film.  She has to be the 'normal' one, the foundation upon which the terror of everything is grounded, the one who has to exhibit the pathetic consequences of the hotel's effects upon her husband and son.  Kubrick was famous for handling Duvall roughly during the shoot.  He was more brutal with her than he had perhaps ever been with any other actor.  

Wendy is near hysteria over what is happening in the hotel.  Kubrick manipulated Shelley Duvall's performance with endless criticism and takes.  In this particular shot she truly is in a state of exhaustion.  This 'realism' helps 'sell' the movie to the audience.  A really strong performance.

Jack has lost it.  He threatens to 'bash' Wendy's head in.

The famous 'Redrum' scene.  It's murder spelled backwards.

Another wonderful job of acting by Duvall as Jack takes an axe to the locked bathroom door.  This, too, required bountiful takes.  60 doors were demolished while shooting this scene.

“Often Kubrick would whine.  ‘Shelley, that’s not it.  How long do we have to wait for you to get it right?’

“Kubrick maintained a psychological advantage over Shelley Duvall by making her feel she wasn’t giving him what he wanted – that she was holding everyone up.  Kubrick wanted Duvall to use this harassment for her role as Wendy, but the gentle-natured actress had an idiosyncratic style that didn’t flourish under personal pressure.  Kubrick felt Duvall was overreacting in the scene when she hides in the bathroom while Jack threatens to ax the door down.  ‘Shelley, the only part clearly wrong was at the end when you said ‘We’ve got to get him out of here.’  You got strong at the end and I think it has to be a last desperate begging and I still think you shouldn’t jump on every emphatic line.  It looks fake.  It really does.  Shelley, I’m telling you, it’s too many times, every time he speaks emphatically you’re jumping and it looks phoney.’ Duvall tried to have an impact on the lines, changing them to suit her interpretation of the character. ‘I honestly don’t think the lines are going to make an awful lot of difference if you get the right attitude,’ Kubrick told Duvall.  ‘I think you’re worrying about the wrong thing.’ Kubrick continued to work on the attitude by maintaining pressure on the actress to portray true nervousness and fear in her situation.” (LoBrutto, page 441) 

Part of this was because Kubrick held such high expectations for Duvall's performance.  Part of it was because he needed that performance to sell the film to the audience.  If Wendy's existential crisis doesn't feel real then the entire film will collapse on itself.

But The Shining does not collapse, quite the opposite.  Duvall's performance becomes stronger and more relatable as the film unfolds.  In fact, I would argue that the performances delivered by the three primary actors, as well as several extras including Scatman Crothers, represent the best direction of acting in Kubrick's multifaceted catalog.  This high quality acting allows the film to develop on a strong intellectual foundation before it gradually disintegrates into the chaos and, ultimately, into violent insanity.

To capture the performances he needed and to experiment with a range of emotional responses from each actor, Kubrick often shot a ridiculous number of takes; often 30-40 for each scene, sometimes over 100 takes, as many as 148 of one scene(!).

Jack meets Grady, a psychic aberration of the former caretaker, in a wonderful scene shot inside a red bathroom.

Scatman Crothers and Danny Lloyd in an important scene where 'shining' is explained.  Kubrick shot an unbelievable 148 takes of this one! 

“The large take ratio allowed Kubrick to create a library of character reactions and emotions for any given shot.  As the takes stacked up, Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall began to move through a range of emotions from catatonia to hysteria.  Kubrick earned the power to make films the way he wanted to make them.  The way Stanley Kubrick made films gave him a myriad of choices all during the process until he signed off the release print to Warner Brothers distribution.

“A day’s output could be one scene of one shot.  Extensive lighting tests were done before Kubrick would even begin shooting.  Kubrick persisted until he felt he had gotten everything out of a scene that was there to get.  He didn’t begin with a preconceived idea but found what he was searching for in a series of methodical steps and inquiries as he pursued the shot.” (LoBrutto, page 424)

“Kubrick’s method of shooting take after take took its toll on the sixty-nine-year-old Scatman Crothers.  On particular shot of the scene in the kitchen between Danny and Halloran discussing the shining ran up to 148 takes.  This was one camera position and didn’t include the extensive coverage and high take ratio that Kubrick got on other angles of the same scenes.  The single shot ran for seven minutes and Kubrick printed every single take.” (LoBrutto, page 430)

“’Kubrick likes to do many takes.  Jack Nicholson told me that on The Shining, Stanley sometimes did seventy or eighty takes on a set-up.’ John Boorman wrote in The Emerald Forest Diary.  ‘When I saw the film I could see what Kubrick had been up to.  He was trying to get performances that came out of extremity, exhaustion.’” (LoBrutto, page 431)

Whereas in his novel, King used a traditional horror genre technique of storytelling (paranormal spirits expressing themselves through inanimate objects, for example), Kubrick relied upon the development of psychological tension, both in his actors and with his audience.  The Shining is far more mentally disorienting and intense than it is scary.  The horror in The Shining is not so much an immediate scare (although there are a couple of those) as it is a build-up in the viewer's psyche that will be difficult to shake off after watching the movie.  

This fundamental change in tone and focus from straight paranormal horror to psychotic terror distressed King and many of his followers.  As I mentioned before, they had expectations that the film would follow the novel.  But, as usual with Kubrick, the director took a different path, throwing out conventions about the novel and genre, in order to explore the terrifying aspects of how madness works.  This exploration was edited down, again like 2001, after the initial premieres, further eroding aspects of the novel.

“Such reductivism transformed King’s horror story into Kubrick philosophical fantasy and displaced the principal interest from man’s extinction to man’s immortality….Kubrick eventually shortened the 146-minute running time of its New York premiere by twenty-seven minutes.  He had two minutes removed during the first weeks of the U.S. run, and a further twenty-five minutes before the London opening.  These cuts reveal his mode of working and thinking, testing, twisting, and transmogrifying King’s horror story to reflect his own stylistic and enigmatic preoccupations.” (Walker, Taylor, Ruchti, page 281)

Jack and Wendy shot from underneath the writing desk.  Jack tells her he thinks he is losing his mind.

Jack is 'working' for weeks on his typewriter before Wendy discovers that he is simply typing the same line over and over and over in different spacing and margin variations.  This scene is surprisingly effective when watching the film. 

“…no allusions to his background, or his failure as a teacher, nor any mention of the ‘accursed’ hotel’s long, ill-omened history other than the incident of the murders by the former caretaker, survived Kubrick’s postrelease cuts.  He retained only a single reference to the hotel’s being built on scared Native American burial ground, preparing us for acts of justifiable vengeance by ethical spirits, and conforming to Stephen King’s preference for imbuing inanimate objects with a malign life of their own.  In the film, however, this proves a false trail, leading nowhere.  Originally, Torrance was to stumble upon a scrapbook chronicling decades of ‘evil’ at the Overlook – newspaper clippings about mishaps and catastrophes great and small: fires, murders, suicides, sexual and financial scandals.  This, too, was eliminated, though the scrapbook can still be seen on Torrance’s table where he sits, a blocked writer, crazily typing and retyping ad infinitum the same one line maxim: ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’” (Walker, Taylor, Ruchti, page 284)

“In almost every respect, Kubrick’s The Shining challenges both an audience’s expectations and its conceptual understanding of narrative events in ways that King’s novel rarely does.  In the early scenes, Kubrick develops Jack’s character from a deceptively ‘objective’ point of view, except for the moment when Jack ‘shines’ over a model in the reception area of the hedge maze and the camera (from Jack’s perspective) slowly zooms down upon the tiny figures of Wendy and Danny arriving in the center of the ‘real’ hedge maze outside.  Before his first conversation with Lloyd that bartender (Joe Turkle), Jack’s interiority remains largely a mystery (in marked contrast to the novel’s method), as the film requires the audience to ‘shine’ by interpreting his character either through Danny’s subjectivity or other visual details.” (Nelson, page 202)

One of the many prominent themes in The Shining involves the hedge labyrinth on the hotel grounds.  “In The Shining, the maze concept encompasses the film thematically and aesthetically (i.e., both within the film itself and with respect to the audience watching it).  It not only helps explain Jack’s madness (this is, the unconscious labyrinth in which the conscious self gets lost) but inspires the Overlook’s floor plan and décor (for instance, the maze pattern in the carpet outside room 237), as well as the events that occur there.  In addition, the film contains a maze-within-a-maze (the model inside the hotel) that doubles with the ‘real’ maze outside.  Significantly, Jack wants to stay inside the hotel’s maze rather than explore the surroundings (after closing day, he is not seen outside until the final chase through the snow into the hedge maze), to control its center (the Colorado Lounge) like a madly inspired God writing his book of creation….Within the maze-like designs of The Shining, Kubrick develops a series of doubling/mirroring effects that go far beyond anything found in King’s novel.” (Nelson, pp. 204-205)

When Jack first meets Lloyd the bartender the large hotel lounge is empty.

Later the lounge is filled with people, music and activity from the 1920's, reflecting Jack's further descent into madness and the psychic past of the hotel. 

“Notice how the progression of events goes from months to days to hours, a process of reduction and intensification that moves toward a single moment in time when insanity breaks loose from the restraints of rational order.  As he did so often in other films, Kubrick undermines that audience’s faith in the narrative machinery of exposition – and its cause/effect logic – by, first, establishing its credibility through a realistic, matter-of-fact style (in part one), only to confuse that understanding by transforming it into a memory as faint or illusionary as Jack’s mad quest for the immortality of death.  By parts two and three, the periodic screen-titles conform to an associative or symbolic logic, to the film’s complex patterns of doubling and reversal (i.e., the every-other-day quality of “Tuesday”/ “Thursday,” etc., or the movement from ‘8 am’ to ‘4 pm’), which inevitably mock our desire for temporal sense and rational sequence.” (Nelson, pp. 208-209)

“In two key scenes, Jack’s menacing, godlike isolation inside the hotel opposes Wendy and Danny’s spirit of outside play and exploration.  In the first, he shines over the model maze as they playfully race into the hedge maze and experience its confusion (indicated to the audience by the dizzying motions of the Steadicam). In the second scene Wendy and Danny play in the snow below Jack, who, with the sand painting prominent in the background, grins and stares in a hypnotic, slack-jawed trance from the second-floor window in the Colorado Lounge.  As the snowdrifts increase outside, the Torrance family becomes more isolated inside as normal communication breaks down.  Jack sits in the empty but symmetrical ‘center’ of the Overlook, where he reads the scrapbook and translates its collective unconscious into the idiom of his private unconscious; Danny rides his Big Wheel through narrow corridors and sees bloody visions showing the monsters being reborn inside his father’s mind;  and Wendy tries, with little success, to fight off her loneliness through contacts with the outside world (she watches TV and uses her radio transmitter to say ‘hello’ to a fire-station ranger).” (Nelson, pp. 217-219)

“But, aesthetically, the maze concept requires that an audience be tested and challenged, even to the point of confusion if it fails to shine and remember not only how it got into the film (i.e. guided tours of narrative exposition) but how it got lost.  In retracing those steps, the viewer might discover that it wasn’t Kubrick’s The Shining that betrayed him, but rather all those false expectations that tyrannize audiences into believing that filmic understandings should follow straight paths into a center of meaning.” (Nelson, page 225)

The Shining was one of the first films to employ the Steadicam.  Kubrick was fascinated, of course, with the flexibility this new technology afforded.  It was used liberally throughout the film to let the viewer experience marvelous extended shots of moving through the space of the hotel, or through a specific doorway into a room, up and down stairways, or around the hedge maze.  Psychologically, these shots help immerse the viewer even further into the narrative by moving with the actors in what was a novel cinematic experience at the time.  Kubrick, as usual, was a master of the technology.  He never overuses it and when the Steadicam is employed it is always to marvelous effect.

As always, Kubrick's musical selections are superb, particularly with his use of modern classical compositions by Penderecki and Ligeti.  It is sometimes difficult to believe that what we are listening to was not composed specifically for the film but, rather, is just another brilliant musical choice made by Kubrick.  The opening titles use an original score by Wendy Carlos (who also worked with Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange) which creates some of the creepiest opening credits ever in cinema.  Carlos’ synthesized score is unsettling and foreboding and sets up a certain amount of anxious tension before anything has even happened in the film.  This, of course, is intentional.  Kubrick wants the audience to intimately experience Jack's mental volatility.  The director's masterful music choices are a gateway to the film's horror that connects the audience with the film and, more importantly, allows the film to emotionally affect the viewer. 

“The Shining was one of Kubrick’s most commercially successful films.  Despite a majority of negative reviews, the film opened strong in New York and Los Angeles over the Memorial Day weekend.  Terry Semel, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Warner Brothers…called the film ‘the biggest opening our company has ever had in New York and Los Angeles.  It’s bigger than The Exorcist, bigger than Superman.’  The ad campaign, the summer timing, and the marquee value of Jack Nicholson carried the film against a slew of bad reviews….Good box office did not help The Shining at the Academy Awards.  The film was the first Kubrick picture not to have received any Academy Award nominations in twenty-three years.  The last Kubrick film to have been snubbed by the Academy was Paths of Glory.” (LoBrutto, page 452) 

The Shining is one of Kubrick's best efforts and I feel it is probably the greatest movie of its kind ever made (also ranked highly by movie-goers).  I waver between giving it a 9 or a 10 on my scale. It is not really a horror movie as we have come to expect from the Halloween or Friday the 13th or the Saw series'.  Rather, The Shining is a unique film, a psychological drama where the internal space of the human mind is shown to be as vast as the hotel interior and as complex as the famous hedge maze on the grounds.  It effectively takes a sinister undertone, brings it to a slow boil, and then unleashes the full violence of its tension.  The film might not make you (frequently) scream or gasp, but it will haunt you in a far worse way, resonating in your mind long after you thought you were over it. 

The closing shot.  Jack is in a photo taken at the hotel in 1921.