Kubrick’s Shining By Richard T. Jameson in the July/August 1980 Issue of “Film Comment” The author, who expressed his gratitude to Kathleen Murphy for her contribution to this article, has taken the liberty of discussing scenes that appear throughout the film's narrative. Reader, beware: No one who has not seen The Shining will be seated during the last ten paragraphs. —ed. Camera comes in low over an immense Western lake, its destination apparently a small island at the center that seems to consist of nothing but treetops. Draw nearer, then sweep over and pass the island, skewing slightly now in search of a central focus at the juncture of lake surface and the surrounding escarpment, glowing in J.M.W. Turner sunlight. Cut to God’s-eye view of a yellow Volkswagen far below, winding up a mountain road through an infinite stand of tall pines and long, early-morning shadows; climbing for the top of the frame and gaining no ground. Subsequent cuts, angling us down nearer the horizontal trajectory of the car as it moved along the face of the mountainside. Thrilling near-lineup of camera vector and roadway, then the shot sheers off on a course all its own and a valley drops away beneath us. More cuts, more views, miles of terrain; bleak magnificence. Aerial approach to a snow-covered mountain crest and, below it, a vast resort hotel, The Overlook. Screen goes black. Did Stanley Kubrick really say that The Shining, his film of the Stephen King novel, would be the scariest horror movie of all time? He shouldn’t have. On one very important level, the remark may be true. But it isn’t the first level people are going to consider (even though it’s the level that’s right there in front of us on the movie screen). What people hear when somebody drops a catchphrase like “the scariest horror movie of all time” is: You joined the summer crowds flocking to The Amityville Horror, you writhed and jumped through Alien, you watched half of Halloween from behind your fingers, but you ain’t seen nothing yet! And a response: OK, zap me, make me flinch, gross me out. And they find that, mostly, Kubrick’s long, under populated, deliberately-placed telling of an unremarkable story with a Twilight Zone twist at the end doesn’t do it for them—although it may do a lot of other things to them while they’re waiting. So Kubrick, who is celebrated for controlling the publicity for his films as closely as the various aspects of their creation, is largely to blame for the initial, strongly negative feedback to his movie. Maybe he didn’t know, when The Shining started its way to the screen several years back, that the horror genre would be in full cry, the most marketable field in filmmaking, by the time his movie was ready for delivery. But he could have seen that, say, a year ago. And still he pressed on with the horror sales hook, counting on it—along with his own eminence—to fill theaters, and to pay off the $18-million cost of the most expensive Underground movie ever made. The action of the film can be synopsized in terms that seem to fulfill the horror-movie recipe. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson)—sometime schoolteacher, shakily ex-alcoholic, and would-be writer—signs on as caretaker of this resort hotel in the Colorado Rockies, deserted and cut off from human contact five months of the year. Sharing the vigil will be his quiet-spoken, rather simple wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their just-school-age son Danny (Danny Lloyd). Danny secretly possesses the gift of “shining”—the ability to pick up psychic vibrations from past, present, and future, long-distance or closer-up. Before he even gets to the Overlook, he gets messages from “Tony,” the make-believe playmate who is Danny’s way of accounting to himself for his special powers. The Overlook has framed its share of bad scenes since its construction in 1907, and more of the same—indeed, some of the same—seem to be in store for the Torrance family. Jack has no acknowledged powers of shining, but he appears to be in tune with the hotel in his own way. Supposedly, he plans to take advantage of his undemanding work schedule as caretaker to get into “a big writing project” he has outlined, and periodically we see or hear him typing away. But we also begin to get ample indication that he will follow in the footsteps of the previous caretaker, Grady, a steady-seeming fellow who chopped up his wife and daughters one winter’s day and then blew his brains out. This likelihood is apparent from the first. Among the prime sources of irritation to horror-zap buffs is that Kubrick (writing with novelist Diane Johnson) has thrown out most of Stephen Kind’s ectoplasmic and otherwise preternatural inventions—most of the more outré ghosts, the demonic elevator, the deadly drainpipe, the sinister hedge animals (an insoluble special-effects problem)—to concentrate on the three principal characters and The Overlook as a collection of abstract spaces. He has also—an not entirely for reasons of cinematic streamlining—dispensed with virtually all of Jack Torrance’s troubled history, that his “motivations” and the degree of his complicity with whatever forces inhabit the hotel become much more elusive; neither is Torrance permitted a very traceable descent into madness—he simply arrives there. Moreover, Kubrick has decentralized Danny as psychic focus of the action and target of acquisition (because of his gift of shining) for the hotel’s master demons; encouraged Jack Nicholson in the most outrageous displays of drooling mania; and directed Shelley Duvall so grotesquely that Wendy Torrance becomes nearly as much a case for treatment as her husband. He has, in short, deprived the audience of any real opportunity for identifying with his characters in their hour (rather, 146 minutes) of menace, thereby violating conventional theory on how to bring off a jolly good scareshow. Now it can be told: The Shining is a horror movie only in the sense that all Kubrick’s mature work has been horror movies—films that constitute a Swiftian vision of inscrutable cosmic order, and of “the most pernicious race of little vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” The Stephen King origins and haunted-house conventions notwithstanding, the director is so little interested in the genre for its own sake that he hasn’t even systematically subverted it so much as displaced it with a genre all its own. And why should this come as a surprise? Who bothers to characterize Dr. Strangelove as “an antiwar film,” or sees merit in rating 2001: A Space Odyssey as “an outer- space pic,” or finds particular utility in considering Barry Lyndon as a “costume picture”? The Shining is “A Stanley Kubrick Film,” and as such it makes impeccable—if also horrific—sense. It seems, poetically apt that, at the time Stanley Kubrick was describing arabesques rounds space stations and star corridors and the history of human consciousness in Space Odyssey, Michael Snow was making Wavelength, “the Birth of a Nation in Underground films” (Manny Farber’s phrase). A forty-five-minute film “about” a loft, it consists of a single continuous zoom across eighty feet of horizontal space, beginning with a full view of the room and ending on a closeup of a photograph on the opposite wall. Actually, a dissolve is necessary to get to a second, very brief shot of the photo, which we didn’t even recognize as a photo when the shot/film began: a wave about to break on the shore. Formal pun: Optically move down the length of a room to look at a picture of a wave (the dissolve enabling specific perception and “understanding” after the comprehensive inventory of the whole space)—and the name of this moving picture is Wavelength. I’ve no doubt that Kubrick has seen Wavelength, and not just because his new film ends with a shot that moves down a corridor and into a photograph, after which we dissolve for still closer scrutiny of the photo’s elements. After all, he appropriated Jordan Belson’s visionary techniques for 2001. And maybe the avoidance of the conventional motivational analysis in his treatment of characters has its analogue in Snow’s cheeky rebuke to our susceptibility to melodrama in Wavelength, when a wounded man stumbles into the empty loft, collapses on the floor, and is summarily lost sight of – and left unexplained—as the zoom penetrates deeper into the room-space, leaving him outside the frame of visibility. To be sure, Kubrick is a track man rather than a zoom man. Indeed, his tracking—in this film, freed of all physical restraints thank to the development of the Steadycam—has long since become notorious, if not infamous, among critic types: an obscurely embarrassing fetish. (“Of course, there’s a lot of tracking—he’s Kubrick! So what else is new?) Nevertheless, the tracking in The Shining is consecrated to a good deal more than satisfying the director’s lust for technology, or providing a grand tour of a Napoleonically lavish set. It personifies space, analyzes potentiality in spatial terms, maps the conditions of expectations with a neo-Gothic environment that is finite, however imposing its scale. And if this sounds like an arid exercise to pass off as popular entertainment, consider that Kubrick twice provides the formal nudge of Roadrunner cartoons heard playing on a television offscreen somewhere.