Film: The Shining

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Genre: Drama/ Sci-fi
Source: USA (1980)
Rating: R
Location/Format: Blu-ray
Grade: A-

It's hard to separate a viewing of The Shining from all the talk around The Shining (Stephen King hated it! Kubrick practically tortured Shelley Duvall! It's about the faked moon landing! And so on and so forth!). What's apparent from my second full length viewing of the film is that it is probably not quite as terrifying as you remember (particularly if your wife refuses to watch it at night so you're watching it at 3 in the afternoon), but it is profoundly unsettling in a way that builds over the course of the film thanks to Kubrick's deliberate (as always) pacing. The section titles here speed up (A Month Later, one reads, and then a weekday countdown begins, and then we get the time on the final day) in the same way the film does, with long drawn out shots early on leading to increasing franticness by the film's end. Thus the editing of the film mimics the slow build of Jack's insanity--and the fever pitch it eventually reaches.

As in 2001, Kubrick shows himself again to be a master of sound, as from the opening shots (a leisurely drive through the mountains) the music serves as a horrifying counterpoint to what we actually see, and then eventually matches it by the films end. The horror was there all along, the sound tells us, lurking beneath the surface. We--like Danny and Wendy--were never safe, even when we thought we were.

I think it's fair to say that the film works in large part due to Jack Nicholson. He exudes menace here, and whether it's the weight of his off-screen persona or the numerous "crazies" he's played throughout his career, he always comes off as a man on the verge of cracking up, so much so that it's hard to say where exactly the crack-up began. Was it with the first appearance of the ghost at the bar? Was it when Wendy finally crossed him? Or was it before the film even began, when he dislocated Danny's shoulder? He never seems like a "well" man, and so the slide from one side of sanity to the other is almost invisible--and that makes it all the more terrifying.

I was struck this time through at the comedy of the film--and it is there, though it's a very black comedy to be sure. I found it particularly to be the case with the way Kubrick treats Dick Hallorann.  When Kubrick cuts to Hallorann in Florida, he uses two zooming out shots to show not just Dick on the bed watching tv, but Dick on the bed watching tv in a room dominated by paintings of two nude black women (one of whom as an afro as large as her torso). It struck me as deliberately comic to see Dick--presented as a kind of Wise Black Sage archetype--hanging out under these paintings. And then, with Kubrick's truly dark sense of mirth--we spend ten or twenty minutes watching his slow progress to the Overlook, only to have him dispatched immediately. There's a sense of trickster anarchy to that, because though Dick does provide the hope of safety to Danny and Wendy, he is dropped so soon after his arrival that it's a bit of brilliant irony.

Of course, this film spends a lot of time on movement and journeys--not just Dick's but Danny's movements around the hotel, the twists and turns of the maze, and so on. It is a film obsessed with navigation and space in a way that unsettles us. The steadicam (I assume) shots that follow Danny around the hotel while he rides his Big Wheel are beautiful, but they are also disturbing: we know, at some point, that something bad is going to be around one of those bends. (The sound, as he transitions from wood to carpet, again adds a lot of richness to the scene). I'm not sure exactly why Kubrick wants us to feel these journeys so much. To understand the size and sale of the Overlook is an obvious answer, but I think there's more to it. Perhaps it is about the way we each get lost and disoriented so easily--even when we think we aren't. Just as Wendy thinks Jack's abusive behavior is under control and she thinks she understands where things stand, the reality is that we're never fully on safe ground. In abusive scenarios in particular, but in all of life in general, at any moment we can turn a corner and be confronted by true horror, even in our own homes--where we should feel safest. 

That is what makes The Shining work for me. It's the normalcy-gone-wrong. Jack in the picture? Who is the woman in 237? What about the bear/dog suit man? That might all just be misdirection. The real horror could be lying in bed in the next room--or right next to us.