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Home , Danny Lloyd, Dick Hallorann, Flying Padre, Garrett Brown, Misery (novel), Room 237

March 30, 2010 (XX:11) , (1980, 146 min)

Directed by Jules Dassin Directed by Stanley Kubrick Based on the novel by Original Music by and Rachel Elkind Cinematography by John Alcott Steadycam operator…Garrett Brown

Jack Nicholson... ... ... ... Barry Nelson...Stuart Ullman Joe Turkel...Lloyd the Bartender Lia Beldam…young woman in bath Billie Gibson…old woman in bath Anne Jackson…doctor

STANLEY KUBRICK (26 July 1928, City, New York, USA—7 March 1999, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England, UK, natural causes) directed 16, wrote 12, produced 11 and shot 5 films: (1999), (1987), The Shining Lyndon (1976); Nominated Oscar: Best Writing, Screenplay Based (1980), (1975), A Clockwork Orange (1971), 2001: A on Material from Another Medium- Full Metal Jacket (1988). Space Odyssey (1968), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Lolita (1962), Spartacus STEPHEN KING (21 September 1947, Portland, Maine) is a hugely (1960), (1957), The Killing (1956), Killer's Kiss prolific writer of fiction. Some of his books are Salem's Lot (1974), (1955), (1953), (1953), Day of the (2001), (1974), (1983), The Dark Fight (1951), : An RKO-Pathe Screenliner (1951). Half (1989), (2003), Dark Tower: The Song of Won Oscar: Best Effects, Special Visual Effects- 2001: A Space Susannah (2003), The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three Odyssey (1969); Nominated Oscar: Best Writing, Screenplay Based (2003), The Dark Tower: (2003), The Dark Tower: on Material from Another Medium- Dr. Strangelove or: How I The Waste Lands (2003), The Dark Tower: Wizard and Glass Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1965); Nominated (2003), The Dark Tower: Wolves of the Calla (2002), Dead Zone, Oscar: Best Picture- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop The (1979), (1995), (1992), Worrying and Love the Bomb (1965); Nominated Oscar: Best (1980), : The Complete Serial Novel, Director- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and (1999), (1993), (1987), The Shining (1976), and Love the Bomb (1965); Nominated Oscar: Best Writing, Story and (1987). Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969); Nominated Oscar: Best Director- 2001: A Space JOHN ALCOT (1931, London, England, UK ) was the Odyssey (1969); Nominated Oscar: Best Writing, Screenplay Based cinematographer for 20 films, some of which were, No Way Out on Material from Another Medium- A Clockwork Orange (1972); (1987), White Water Summer (1987), Miracles (1986), Baby: Secret Nominated Oscar: Best Picture- A Clockwork Orange (1972); of the Lost Legend (1985), Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord Nominated Oscar: Best Director- A Clockwork Orange (1972); of the Apes (1984), Under Fire (1983), The Beastmaster (1982), Nominated Oscar: Best Writing, Screenplay Adapted From Other Vice Squad (1982), Triumphs of a Man Called Horse (1982), Fort Material- Barry Lyndon (1976); Nominated Oscar: Best Picture- Apache the Bronx (1981), Fangio - Una vita a 300 all'ora (1981), Barry Lyndon (1976); Nominated Oscar: Best Director- Barry Terror Train (1980), The Shining (1980), Who Is Killing the Great Kubrick—THE SHINING—2

Chefs of Europe? (1978), The Disappearance (1977), March or Die SCATMAN CROTHERS (23 May 1910, Terre Haute, Indiana) (1977), Barry Lyndon (1975) (photographed by), Overlord (1975) appeared in 114 films and tv series, some of which were (photographed by), Little Malcolm (1974), and A Clockwork "Morningstar/Eveningstar" (7 episodes, 1986), "Transformers" (34 Orange (1971) (lighting cameraman). episodes, 1984-1986), The Journey of Natty Gann (1985), "" (2 episodes, 1978-1984), "Hill Street Blues" (1 episode, GARRETT BROWN (from IMdB): Garrett Brown invented the 1984), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) (Segment #2), Zapped! Oscar-winning camera stabilizer and used to shoot (1982), "One of the Boys" (10 episodes, 1982), Bronco Billy over a hundred movies beginning with (1976). He holds 50 (1980), The Shining (1980), "The Super Globetrotters" (13 patents worldwide for camera devices including: Steadicam JR for episodes, 1979), "Charlie's Angels" (1 episode, 1978), "Chico and camcorders; Skycam, which flies on wires over sporting events: and the Man" (65 episodes, 1974-1978), The Cheap Detective (1978), Mobycam, the underwater camera that chases the swimmers at the Mean Dog Blues (1978), "" (2 episodes, 1977), Silver Streak Olympics. These were recently joined by the vertiginous, Emmy- (1976), The Shootist (1976), Stay Hungry (1976), One Flew Over award-winning Divecam and the ultra-light aerial film camera the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), The Fortune (1975), Linda Lovelace for called SuperFlyCam. President (1975), "McMillan & Wife" (1 episode, 1974), "" (1 episode, 1973), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), The King of Marvin (22 April 1937, Neptune, New Jersey) has Gardens (1972), Chandler (1971), The Great White Hope (1970), appeared in 75 films and tv series, some of which were How Do Bloody Mama (1970), Hello, Dolly! (1969), "" (1 episode, You Know (2010), The Bucket List (2007), The Departed (2006), 1961), The Sins of Rachel Cade (1961), Walking My Baby Back Something's Gotta Give (2003), Anger Management (2003), About Home (1953), and Meet Me at the Fair (1953. Schmidt (2002), The Pledge (2001), As Good as It Gets (1997), Mars Attacks! (1996), The Evening Star (1996), Blood and Wine JOE TURKEL (15 July 1927, Brooklyn, New York) has appeared in (1996), The Crossing Guard (1995), Wolf (1994), Hoffa (1992), A 132 films and tv series, some of which were The Dark Side of the Few Good Men (1992), Man Trouble (1992), The Two Jakes Moon (1990), "Miami Vice" (1 episode, 1988), "Tales from the (1990), Batman (1989), Ironweed (1987), Broadcast News (1987), Darkside" (1 episode, 1985), Blade Runner (1982), "Fantasy Island" The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Heartburn (1986), Elephant's (1 episode, 1980), The Shining (1980), Which Way Is Up? (1977), Child (1986) (TV), Prizzi's Honor (1985), Terms of Endearment "Kojak" (1 episode, 1977), "Police Story" (1 episode, 1976), The (1983), The Border (1982), Reds (1981), Ragtime (1981), The Hindenburg (1975), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), Wild in Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), The Shining (1980), Goin' the Sky (1972), The Animals (1970), "Ironside" (1 episode, 1968), South (1978), The Last Tycoon (1976), The Missouri Breaks (1976), "Bonanza" (3 episodes, 1961-1968), The St. Valentine's Day One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), The Fortune (1975), Massacre (1967) The Sand Pebbles (1966), King Rat (1965), "Ben (1975), Professione: reporter/ The Passenger (1975), Casey" (1 episode, 1964), "The Untouchables" (5 episodes, 1960- Chinatown (1974), The Last Detail (1973), The King of Marvin 1963), Portrait of a Mobster (1961), "Bat Masterson" (2 episodes, Gardens (1972), A Safe Place (1971), Carnal Knowledge (1971), 1958-1960), Visit to a Small Planet (1960), Warlock (1959) Five Easy Pieces (1970), On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (uncredited), "Dragnet" (1 episode, 1958), Paths of Glory (1957), (1970), The Rebel Rousers (1970), Easy Rider (1969), Head (1968), Jeanne Eagels (1957), "The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin" (2 Psych-Out (1968), Hells Angels on Wheels (1967), The Shooting episodes, 1957), Friendly Persuasion (1956), "The Lone Ranger" (2 (1967), "Dr. Kildare" (4 episodes, 1966), Ride in the Whirlwind episodes, 1955), Duffy of San Quentin (1954), and City Across the (1965), Ensign Pulver (1964), The Terror (1963), The Raven River (1949). (1963), Studs Lonigan (1960), The Wild Ride (1960), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Too Soon to Love (1960), and The Cry from Conversations with Wilder. Cameron Crowe. Knopf, NY, Baby Killer (1958). 1999.

SHELLEY DUVALL (7 July 1949, Houston, Texas) has appeared in “He [Kubrick] has never made a bad picture. Each picture he 48 films and tv series, some of which were Manna from Heaven trumps the trump.” (2002), Big Monster on Campus (2000), Dreams in the Attic (2000) "The Hughleys" (1 episode, 1999), The 4th Floor (1999), Tale of from World Film the Mummy (1998), Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), Changing Directors V. II. Ed. John Habits (1997), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Mother Goose Rock Wakeman. The H.H. 'n' Rhyme (1990) (TV) Roxanne (1987), "Tall Tales & Legends" (3 Wilson Co. NY 1988 episodes, 1985-1986), "Faerie Tale Theatre" (10 episodes, 1982- entry by Adrian Turner 1986), Frankenweenie (1984), Time Bandits (1981), Popeye (1980), The Shining (1980), Annie Hall (1977), 3 Women (1977), Buffalo American director, Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976), producer, and scenarist, Nashville (1975), Thieves Like Us (1974), McCabe & Mrs. Miller was born the Bronx, New (1971), Brewster McCloud (1970) York, the son of Jacques and Gertrude Kubrick. His Danny Lloyd (1 January 1973, Chicago, Illinois) appeared in two father was a physician, the son of Polish and Romanian Jews. films, which were Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy Kubrick attended the William Howard Taft High School. He was (1982, TV) and The Shining (1980). not a successful student but an ardent chess payer and photographer. His father, also a photographer, had bought him a 35mm still camera, and Kubrick’s first break came in April 1945 when a Kubrick—THE SHINING—3 chance picture of a newsdealer on the day of Roosevelt’s death was seeking his way to an understanding of himself and life around him. bought by Look magazine. At the age of seventeen Kubrick was He is further imperiled on his odyssey by an unseen but deadly hired by Look as a staff photographer. enemy that surrounds him; but an enemy who, upon scrutiny, seems During his four years there, Kubrick received the higher to be almost shaped from the same mold. It will, probably, mean education he wanted by enrolling as a nonmatriculating student at many things to different people, and it ought to.” Kubrick might Columbia University. As Alexander Walker noted, “Dropping out have been describing any one of his films, especially 2001: A of school made him into a lifelong student.” At the same time, Space Odyssey (1968) and The Shining, since the letter alludes to Kubrick was attending screenings at the Museum of Modern Art: “I his fondness for ambiguity and metaphor, evoking the Kubrickian was aware that I didn’t know anything about making films, but I universe of entrapment and immortality: man does not progress but believed I couldn’t make them any worse than the majority of films merely perpetuates ancient, instinctive evils….Fear and Desire was I was seeing. Bad films gave me the courage to try making a financed privately, as was Kubrick’s next feature, Killer’s Kiss movie.” (1955). Again, Kubrick was a virtual one-man crew and co-wrote Kubrick’s first effort was (1951), a the script with Sackler. The film was bought by United Artists, the documentary about the boxer Walter Cartier, whom Kubrick had most progressive Hollywood distributor of the 1950s…. photographed for Look. The 16-minute, 35mm film was sold to Beginning his study of Kubrick, Alexander Walker wrote RKO for a tiny profit and an advance on another short, Flying that “only a few directors possess a conceptual talent–that is, a Padre (1951), about a priest in New Mexico who tours his parish of talent to crystallize every film they make into a cinematic concept. 4,000 square miles by small plane. While It transcends the need to find a good story. An Flying Padre is conventional program-filler absorbing story. . . .It is the talent to construct a material, Day of the Fight is a very striking form that will exhibit the maker’s vision in an piece of work, a profile couched in the style of unexpected way. It is this conceptual talent that film noir with a highly dramatic commentary most distinguishes Stanley Kubrick.” (a device Kubrick would repeatedly use in his Early signs of this talent in Killer’s features) and a vivid, nightmarish sense of Kiss did not go unnoticed by contemporary entrapment as Cartier waits in his dressing reviewers. “The story is conventional,” wrote room for the evening’s fight, along with his Gavin Lambert, “but within this identical twin Vincent, a lawyer who acts as framework...[Kubrick] has done some his manager. Richard Combs, reassessing the interesting things.”... film in 1980, wrote that “the timelock After this, Kubrick joined forces with structure of course anticipates—and in a way James B. Harris to form Harris-Kubrick bests—The Killing; the deserted, early Productions. Their first film together was morning streets are as haunted as the similarly another genre movie, The Killing (1956), used locations in Killer’s Kiss. But the film’s produced by Harris and distributed by United most extraordinary visual trouvaille is also its Artists. This time Kubrick had a viable budget most mundane. The glum-faced Cartier twins, of $320,000, which allowed him to hire Lucien waking in the same bed in the morning, Ballard as his cinematographer and a good cast walking to communion, sharing the anxieties of Hollywood actors. Kubrick’s wife served as and (reputedly) the physical pain of the art director, and the film was scored by Gerald fight….” Fried, who had supplied the music for After seeing his first films released, Kubrick resigned from Kubrick’s two earlier features as well.... Look. He made a third short, The Seafarers (1953), about the There was nothing unassuming about Paths of Glory Seafarers’ International Union, then embarked on his first feature, (1957), adapted by Kubrick, Calder Willingham, and Jim Fear and Desire (1953). Kubrick told Joseph Gelmis, “I was the Thompson from Humphrey Cobb’s novel of World War I. As an camera operator and director and just about everything else. The indictment of war, it has been compared both with Lewis film was shot in 35mm without a soundtrack. The dubbing was a Milestone’s All’s Quiet on the Western Front and Jean Renoir’s La big mistake on my part; the actual shooting cost was $9000, but Grande Illusion. It shows how a suicidal assault on an impregnable because I didn’t know what I was doing with the soundtrack it cost German position, the Ant Hill, is ordered by two ruthlessly me another $30,000. Fear and Desire played the art house circuits, ambitious French generals (Adolph Menjou and George Macready). and some of the reviews were amazingly good, but it’s not a film I The attack is a lethal fiasco, and three scapegoats are tried and remember with any pride, except for the fact it was finished.” executed to save the generals’ careers. The film was only financed The script was written by Kubrick’s friend Howard by United Artists after Kirk Douglas agreed to star as Colonel Dax, Sackler (who later wrote The Great White Hope) and resumed the the humanitarian field commander appointed to defend the theme of “twins” or doubles already adumbrated in Day of the scapegoats at their rigged courtmartial. He cannot save his men but Fight. Two American soldiers, lost in some wilderness, confront does manage to ruin one of the generals. ... two enemy soldiers who are, however, played by the same actors. “In spite of the tremendous critical acclaim for Paths of The intellectual Lieutenant Corby (Kenneth Harp) symbolically Glory,” wrote Alexander Walker, “Kubrick found his career destroys himself by killing his double; the more primitive Mae stalemated by nonevents.” In Hollywood, Kubrick and Harris (Frank Silvera), drifting downstream on a raft, manages to struggle developed several projects, none of them realized. Then Kubrick through to psychic wholeness. was hired by Marlon Brando to direct a Western, One-Eyed Jacks In a letter to the film’s distributor, Joseph Burstyn, (1961). The script was by the then unknown Sam Peckinpah but Kubrick described the film thus: “Its structure: allegorical. Its Kubrick insisted on rewriting it with Calder Willingham, who had conception: poetic. A drama of ‘man’ lost in a hostile world, Kubrick—THE SHINING—4 worked on Paths of Glory. After six months Kubrick left the mad, and the maddest of all is Dr. Strangelove himself, a former project, leaving Brando to direct himself. Nazi scientist now employed by the Pentagon, a paraplegic with Shortly afterward Kubrick was contacted by Kirk Douglas, dark glasses and a mechanical arm constantly snapping into whose production of Spartacus (1960) had run into trouble. uncontrollable Sieg Heils. He is marvelously realized by Peter Accounts differ widely as to how much—and precisely which— Sellers, who also plays a clipped RAF group captain and the footage was shot by the original director, Anthony Mann, who had President of the United States.... been hired by Universal against the wishes of Douglas, the [The other films in the trilogy about humanity in a executive producer. Mann was fired from Spartacus, and at the age technological age were 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A of thirty-one Kubrick found himself directing what was then the Clockwork Orange (1971).] most expensive film ever made in America. In the Dawn of Man, the opening sequence of 2001: A Spartacus, about the gladiator who Space Odyssey (1968), an apeman discovers led a slaves’ rebellion against Roman power in that the bone he has learned to use as a tool can 73 B.C., fits uncomfortably into Kubrick’s also kill, in a shot that, as Walker wrote, oeuvre. His most committed admirers have “vividly crystallizes Kubrick’s view of man as little to say about the film, reflecting a risen ape, rather than Rousseau’s sentimental Kubrick’s own disavowals of it, such as the characterization of him as a fallen angel.” The one he gave Michel Ciment: “I tried with apeman tosses his killing bone exultantly into limited success to make the film as real as the sky, and we follow its four million-year possible but I was up against a pretty dumb trajectory until, in one of the most famous script which was rarely to what was match cuts in cinema, is becomes a spaceship known about Spartacus. If I ever needed of the twenty-first century. This vehicle is convincing of the limits of persuasion a carrying scientists to the moon to investigate a director can have on a film where someone strange slab of black stone discovered there— else is the producer and he is merely the one that closely resembles the monolith which highest paid member of the crew, Spartacus had presided over the apeman’s military provided proof to last a lifetime.” breakthrough. Critics did praise the visual aspects The third section of 2001 begins of the film: Kubrick’s fluid handling of the aboard another spaceship, Discovery, Super-Technirama-70 format and his commanded by Dr. David Bowman (Keir depiction of Roman cruelty. Thomas Allen Nelson writes “the epic Dullea). The only member of the Discovery’s crew who shows any panorama of battle and armies is well done and reflects Kubrick’s real human quirkiness is the computer HAL9000, who alone knows skill at showing what he has referred to as the ‘weird disparity’ the true purpose of their mission. HAL becomes increasingly between the aesthetics of warfare and its human consequences.” rebellious and power-hungry and eventually “terminates” the entire This “disparity” is a consistent theme of Kubrick’s: the surreal crew apart from Bowman, who manages to dismantle the machine’s dummies in Killer’s Kiss; the human cut-outs used for target deranged intelligence. practice in The Killing; the reduction of men to dying ants in Paths Bowman discovers that the real purpose of the mission is of Glory…. to identify the extraterrestrial origin and purpose of the mysterious While Spartacus was in production, Kubrick and Harris monolith. Traveling alone in a small pod into deep space, he is were already at work on their next project, an adaptation by drawn to follow a similar monolith through a disorienting galaxy of Vladimir Nabokov of his controversial 1955 novel Lolita, about a dazzling special effects. It leads him to an elegant suite of rooms university professor who marries a widow because he is sexually furnished like an earth dwelling of the eighteenth century. Bowman obsessed by her barely adolescent daughter Lolita. Because of ages and dies, but is reborn as a “Star Child,” ready to journey back censorship problems and funds locked in Britain, Kubrick made the to earth to lead a further evolutionary phase. Michel Ciment called film in London, which has been his base ever since…. the film’s final shot “perhaps the only really peaceful image created Kubrick’s next three films, made with ever increasing by an artist more at ease in nightmare.” deliberation and secrecy, comprise a trilogy on humanity in the 2001 was based on a short story, “The Sentinel,” by the technological age. It begins with Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned scientist and science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who labored to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963), scripted by Kubrick, with Kubrick through many versions of the script. If Dr. Terry Southern, and Peter George from the latter’s novel Red Alert. Strangelove used what Michel Ciment called “verbal delirium” to Originally conceived as a “serious treatment of the problem of demonstrate the impotence of language, 2001 makes the same point accidental war,” like the novel, it modulated into satire when with scarcely any dialogue at all, barring the exchange of banalities. Kubrick found the theme too blackly absurd to be treated in any During four years of preparation and production, much of the time other way. taken up with the still unrivaled special effects, the film became, in Nuclear catastrophe is unleashed by Air Force General Kubrick’s words, “a nonverbal experience.” As such it bewildered Jack D. Ripper, who believes that his sexual impotence is due to a many reviewers who might have accommodated a nonlinear Communist conspiracy to pollute “his precious bodily fluids.” narrative from a Resnais or a Bergman, but not from MGM, nor in Despite the efforts of a decent but ineffectual President to placate Cinerama. Many found the film too long and too slow. For once, the Russians, despite all the technical fail-safe procedures and however, uncomprehending and condescending reviews did not mechanisms, lunacy triumphs and Major “King” Kong (Slim deter audiences. 2001 became a slow but steady money-earner, and Pickens) gleefully rides his great phallic bomb to the apocalypse. the pace quickened in the early 1970s when the film with its , Sterling Hayden as the impotent Ripper, sustained bombardment of visual stimuli established itself as the George C. Scott as the virile Pentagon hawk Turgidson: they are all ultimate drug-trip movie. By 1976 this “$10,500,000 underground Kubrick—THE SHINING—5 film” had grossed $90 million. The critics went back for another exteriors) took a year, editing another, and then The Shining opened look and several, including Joseph Gelmis and Andrew Sarris, in America to poor reviews and erratic business. Kubrick cut the had the grace to revise their opinions. final sequence, then another twenty-five minutes, trying to find that Kubrick’s visual achievements in 2001 were matched by ground between masterpiece and failure. To be sure, Kubrick had his use of existing music—“The Blue Danube to accompany the cut an epilogue from Dr. Strangelove days before its final preview voyage to the moon, passages from Khachaturian and Ligeti and, and trimmed nineteen minutes from 2001 after it had opened, but above all of course, Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra for this major surgery on The Shining, his tempering with its carefully the “evolutionary” sequences. The soundtrack itself became a best- engineered rhythms, was a bewildering contradiction of Kubrick’s selling LP. Critics have continued to debate the film’s more potent legendary auteurism, showing perhaps how seclusion can rob an riddles, like the monoliths which are present in all of its four artist of objectivity and spontaneity. symphonic movements, nudging men on to the next stage of On paper, The Shining is the ultimate Kubrick film: an evolution, and the provenance of the suite of period rooms at the American family becomes the caretakers of the Overlook when it end. Kubrick himself, in a Playboy interview (September 1968) said closes for the icy winter. He (Jack Nicholson) is a frustrated writer; that he had tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses she (Shelley Duvall) is amiably neurotic; their son (Danny Lloyd) is verbalized pigeon-holing and directly penetrates the subconscious psychic, as is his father. The Overlook is an “old dark house” full of with an emotional and philosophic content…, just as music ghosts from the past and future, and Jack, abandoning his novel, does….You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical sets out to do their evil bidding by attempting to murder his family. and allegorical meaning.” “In many respects,” wrote Michel Ciment, “The Shining is The significance of 2001 goes beyond its own one of ...[Kubrick’s] most intimate works. Isolated, hemmed in, achievements as a film. It confirmed the temporary shift of power beset by siege mentality, an intellectual sees himself as an artist but from the studios to the directors; it demonstrated how formally cannot create. By choosing an artist for the first time as the flexible the commercial film might be; and it showed how protagonist and making him a failure, Kubrick exorcises his own audiences could discover a film for themselves, in spite of demons and demonstrated—by default, as it were—the exalting reviewers. Some regard it as the most significant Hollywood supremacy of artistic creation.” … breakthrough since Citizen Kane in 1941, and Kubrick has been Yet the coldness that is attributed to Kubrick was blamed compared with Orson Welles (who in 1964 remarked that “amongst for the film’s lack of tension, its lack of terror. Unlike other horror the younger generation Kubrick is a giant”). Like The Graduate films made at the same time, The Shining is conspicuously (1967), Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), the film bloodless, a track into a void or an intellectual’s concept of what a owed its success primarily to the youth market, indicating a major should be. But the film’s themes are uniquely Kubrick’s shift in audience patterns. own, as if he were deliberately contradicting 2001’s evolutionary Kubrick’s plans for an ambitious optimism with a tale of regression. As film about Napoleon fell victim to the Pauline Kael noted, “the bone that was cutbacks of the late 1960s. Instead he high in the air has turned into Jack’s ax, turned to a novel that had greatly excited held aloft, and Jack crouched over., him, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork making wild inarticulate sounds as he Orange, and wrote his own staggers in the maze, has become the adaptation….The debate about the film ape.” Richard Combs has suggested that centered not so much on the question of Kubrick has come full circle: “The free will as on Kubrick’s presentation of Shining is an iceberg that may in time violence. His personal style is here at its prove to be one of the great Kubricks most extreme with wide-angled (with Paths of Glory, Lolita and Barry photography and incongruous music— Lyndon), or may be the start of a whole synthesized Beethoven, Rossini’s “The new Kubrick.” Thieving Magpie and Gene Kelly’s Kubrick’s latest film, being “Singin’ in the Rain” to accompany Alex’s edited as this article was written, is Full night of rape and murder….Walker argued Metal Jacket (1987), based on a that the film”never sets out to explore the ferociously violent Vietnam novel The moral issue of violence; this had been a Short Timers by Gustav Hasford. Seven misleading belief that has caused the film years separate it from The Shining. Instead to be branded as ‘conscienceless’ by critics of filming in Southeast Asia, Kubrick who fail to see where Kubrick’s first chose to work in Britain, using as principal lies, namely, with the moral issue locations a derelict part of London’s of eradicating free will.” dockland and, according to rumor, the grounds of his own country Barry Lyndon (1975), Kubrick’s only real commercial estate.... failure, was regarded by many critics as a deliberate retreat from Kubrick lives very quietly and privately in rural England, controversy and as an alternative to his long-cherished Napoleon avoiding personal publicity....He directs his own advertising project.… Another three years elapsed before Kubrick announced campaigns, coordinates release patterns, and personally checks his next project. It was The Shining, based on a modern horror every first-run print and foreign-language version of each of his novel by Stephen King. Kubrick had become so reclusive that he films. Since he also writes or coauthors his scripts, and in recent decided to recreate the novel’s setting, a Rocky Mountain resort years has been his own producer, he retains a degree of control over hotel called the Overlook, at Elstree Studios near London. Shooting his work that is almost unequalled for a Hollywood director. As on his magnificent Xanadu-like set (and in America for the Philip French wrote, “there’s something about his pictures that has Kubrick—THE SHINING—6 enabled him to combine the budgets of a DeMille with the quirky noted, her novel also has certain features in with Arthur individuality of a Buñuel... Schnitzler’s Traumnovella, which later provided the basis for Eyes Ciment called him “one of the most demanding, most Wide Shut. original and most visionary filmmakers of our time.” The script Johnson and Kubrick ultimately wrote for The Shining differs from King’s novel in several respects. It dispenses with most of the family’s history before arriving at the hotel, it kills off the kindly hotel chef and it ends with the father freezing to death in a maze rather than dying in a fire that destroys the hotel. When the film was released, King publicly criticised it on the grounds that the tone was satiric and the depiction of the father almost completely unsympathetic. In an interview with Playboy magazine, he described Kubrick as ‘a very cold man’ who had ‘great difficulty conceiving, even academically, of a supernatural world,’ and who ‘couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel’. He concluded that Kubrick had ‘looked for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only a few supernatural overtones’. Leaving aside his remarks on Kubrick’s personality, his description of the film was essentially correct. The novel is, in fact, much more extravagantly supernatural and animistic, and certainly more forgiving of the doomed alcoholic father, whose last words to his son are “run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you.’ (In 1996, King produced a bad adaptation of the novel in the form of a five-hour TV miniseries that featured King in a cameo role, wearing garish make-up and conducting a ghostly orchestra in On Kubrick. James Naremore. British Film Institute, London, the hotel; it ended in sentimental fashion, with the father’s benign 2007. ghost appearing at his son’s college graduation to declare paternal love.) V. Horrorshow For all their differences, however, King and Kubrick were In 1975 Kubrick was among five directors that Warner alike in thinking that The Shining provided what King described as approached for the upcoming production of Network (1976); he ‘a chance to blur the line between the supernatural and the expressed interest, but screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who wanted psychotic’. Kubrick said much the same thing in an interview with to be the film’s auteur, rejected him….Perhaps because Barry Michel Ciment, in which he emphasised the importance of King’s Lyndon had encountered a lukewarm reception from the US press plot: and was a relative disappointment at the box office, Kubrick next “It seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the thought of something more commercial: a generic horror picture in psychological and the supernatural….This allowed you to suspend the vein of The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976), both of your doubt of the supernatural until you were so thoroughly into the which had generated huge profits and contributed to a cycle of story that you could accept it almost without noticing….The novel Hollywood pictures about grossout, supernatural terror. Given the is by no means a serious literary work, but for the most part the plot noirish tenor of his previous work, horror was certainly not an is extremely well worked out….I’ve never been able to decide unexpected theme for Kubrick to explore. He was unable to find a whether the plot [in any film] is just a way of keeping people’s suitable property, however, until Warner’s production chief, John attention while you do everything else, or whether the plot is really Calley, sent him the page proofs of Stephen King’s The Shining, more important than anything else, perhaps communicating with us which tells the story of a psychologically troubled family of three on an unconscious level which affects us in the way myths once trapped in a huge, demonic hotel during a winter storm. King’s did.” popularity was on the rise (when it was published in 1977, the novel The film maintains a balance between the psychological quickly shot to number eight on the US best-seller list), and for the and the supernatural chiefly in the way it treats two characters: Jack leading role in the film adaptation Kubrick was able to attract a Torrance (Jack Nicholson), an alcoholic, would-be writer who has major star—Jack Nicholson, whom Kubrick had at one point recently sworn off drinking and is reduced to doing menial work; considered to play Napoleon. and Jack’s son, Danny (Danny Lloyd)), a five-year-old who in the Kubrick rejected a screenplay that King himself had past has been the victim of a violent ‘accident’ at the hands of his written, choosing instead to develop a script in collaboration with drunken father. When Jack takes a job as the winter caretaker at the Diane Johnson, the author of, among other books, The Shadow luxurious Overlook Hotel, he begins to experience what appear to Knows (1974), a psychological mystery novel Kubrick had at one be hallucinations and psychotic symptoms. By the end of the point been interested in adapting. The Shadow Knows is the picture. however, we have no choice but to conclude that the ghosts alternately sad, wryly amusing and frightening story of a divorced who urge him to murder his wife and child are not simply in his mother of four who lives with her children and a nanny in a housing mind. Danny, for his part, seems at first to be a disturbed little boy project and who fears that an unknown person wants to kill her. who suffers from horrific fantasies and a split personality; but early Like The Shining, it makes the reader wonder if the central on, after he meets hotel chef Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers), we character is mentally disturbed or truly in danger (ironically, ‘The suspect that he has a gift of ‘shining’ or ESP, which enables him to Shadow Knows’ is a line of dialogue in an early chapter of The see directly into the hidden past and the traumatic future. Shining). Given its female point of view, it would have been an The is-this-happening-or-is-he-crazy quality that Kubrick unusual project for Kubrick; but as Diane Johnson herself once tried to sustain for much of the film is precisely the quality that Kubrick—THE SHINING—7

Tzvetan Todorov and other literary theorists have described as the film-makers was able to construct a mock trailer for The Shining, ‘fantastic’. According to Todorov, fantastic narrative isn’t simply a choosing clips that make the picture look like a slightly whimsical story containing supernatural occurrences, but one that challenges family comedy. the reader’s ability to explain events as either imaginary or The early sequences also invoke the Freudian uncanny, supernatural. He describes the form as follows (for the sake of which always depends upon a background of domestic realism: readability I’ve refrained from entering ‘sic’ after the masculine when Danny eats his sandwich, he speaks to ‘Mrs Torrance’ in the pronouns): gravelly voice of his apparently imaginary friend Tony, who ‘lives’ “An inexplicable phenomenon occurs; to obey his somewhere in his mouth; and when he brushes his teeth, he has a determinist mentality, the terrifying vision and an apparent reader finds himself obliged to seizure. As the plot develops, choose between two solutions: bizarre events proliferate (for most either to reduce this of the film, only Wendy seems phenomenon to known causes, immune from ghostly visitations) to the natural order, describing until we reach a point where it the unwonted events as becomes difficult to decide imaginary. or else to admit the whether or not we should suspend existence of the supernatural disbelief in the supernatural When and thereby effect a Jack walks into the Gold Ballroom modification in all the and orders a drink from the satanic representations which form his bartender, Lloyd (Joe Turkel), we image of the world. a crisis of interpretation and fantastic lasts as long as this enter the zone of the pure uncertainty lasts; once the fantastic. Somewhat later, when reader opts for one solution or Jack is set free from a food locker the other, he is in the realm of by the ghost of the former the uncanny or of the caretaker, we encounter the film’s marvelous.” first unambiguously supernatural event (unless we want to assume Todorov’s analysis suggests a continuum of effects on little evidence that Jack or somebody else is dreaming involving three different ways of handling causal explanations in everything from here until the end) and we move into the zone of fiction: first is realism (‘known causes’), then what Todorov’s Todorov’s ‘marvellous’. The climactic scenes never entirely release translator Richard Howard, terms the uncanny (psychological their hold on realism or Freud, and some of the repeated images, causes, though it should be emphasised that Todorov isn’t a such as the elevator of blood, retain an ambiguous status; but the Freudian and uses psychology in a more general sense) and, finally, film ends with a carnival of ghostly sadism and sexual decadence the marvellous (supernatural causes). Two-thirds of the way down (chiefly homosexuality and a hint of bestiality), and with several this range, at the point where the uncanny is on the verge of allusions to myths and fairy tales. becoming the marvellous, we find what Todorov names the Among the many commentators on The Shining, only fantastic ‘genre’. His exemplary text is Henry James’ ‘The Turn of Michel Ciment has noticed the degree to which the film can be the Screw’, in which the uncertainty about how to explain events is understood in terms of what he, like Todorov, calls ‘the genre of the never resolved—in other words, pace Edmund Wilson’s famous fantastic’, which for him constitutes a ‘shock between what is real interpretation of James’ story, we never know whether the ghosts and what is imaginary’ and a ‘breach in the recognized order of are real or figments of the governess-narrator’s sexually repressed things’. Ciment argues that, for this reason, The Shining belong in imagination. the same genre category as 2001, and he points out a remarkable Kubrick was always interested in grotesque combinations number of things that the two apparently unrelated films have in of the commonplace and the wildly satirical or fanciful, and he was common: they both eschew off-screen narration in favour of instinctively drawn to any kind of story—Burgess’s A Clockwork intertitles (in The Shining the titles announce events or mark the Orange and Schnitzler’s Traumnovella, for example—that blurs the passage of time in increasingly short intervals); they both use a line between reality and dream or fairy tale. One of the interesting mixture of modernist and romantic music (The Shining mingles aspects of his adaptation of The Shining, however, is that it runs the Ligeti, Penderecki and Bartok with a ‘Dies Irae’ derived from entire range of narrative possibilities described by Todorov. An Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, which is orchestrated by Wendy aura of weirdness or outright derangement haunts the film from the Carlos and Rachel Elkind); they both take place inside large man- very start, but everything is motivated by the typically realistic made structures controlled by non-human entities (the extremely situation of a ‘nuclear’ American family undergoing economic and large and fascinating sets for the two films were constructed at the psychological stress. The early scenes show us Jack’s job interview same British studio); they both tell stories of characters who are with the corporate manager of the Overlook Hotel (Barry Nelson), trapped between a hostile outside world and a murderous figure on lunch-table conversation between Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and the inside who destroys their technical equipment; and, most Danny, and a visit to Danny from a paediatrician (Anne Jackson). significantly, ‘In either film, the spectator is incapable of supplying These and a few later scenes are so firmly grounded in down-at- a rational explanation for what [she or he] has witnessed’. heels quotidian materials of domestic drama (the mother chain Viewed in this light, a number of scenes in The Shining smokes, the son eats a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, a TV set seem to echo 2001. For example, the aerial photography at the plays in the background) and so inflected by touches of deadpan beginning of the film bears a certain resemblance to the famous‘star humour (the ash on the mother’s cigarette keeps getting longer as gate’. Danny’s wide-angle journey into an impossible world, is not she talks with the paediatrician) that, in 2005, a clever group of unlike Dave Bowman’s climactic journey aboard the Discovery (at Kubrick—THE SHINING—8 one juncture Danny wears a sweater decorated with a NASA rocket ship). By the same token, the scene in which an ambiguously ‘subjective’ camera roams around the sickly green-and-purple in the Overlook, accompanied by the muffled sound of a heartbeat, is similar to Bowman’s exploration of a mysterious interstellar hotel suite. But when Ciment describes the two films as belonging to the same ‘genre’, he creates confusion, since we normally think of science fiction and gothic horror as distinct generic types. Fortunately, we have Rosemary Jackson’s modification of Todorov’s theory, which helps to clarify the situation. ‘Fantastic narratives,’ Jackson writes, ‘confound elements of both the marvelous and the mimetic….They pull the reader from the apparent familiarity and security of the known and everyday world...into a world whose improbabilities are closer to the realm normally associated with the marvelous.’ The key to the fantastic has less to do with generic features than with the instability of the narrative’s internal logic or rules of probability. It therefore becomes possible ‘to suggest a definition of the fantastic as a mode, which then assumes different generic forms’. To explain the specific instability of the fantastic mode, Jackson appropriates the optical term ‘paraxis’, which is a region where refracted light rays seem to converge in the formation of an image—the region inside a camera obscura, for example, or in the reflected depth of a mirror. ‘In this area,’ she remarks, ‘object and image seem to collide, but in fact neither object not reconstituted image genuinely reside there: nothing does.’ The paraxial area can serve as a metaphor for ‘the spectral region of the fantastic, whose imaginary world is neither entirely “real” (object), nor entirely “unreal” (image), but is located somewhere indeterminately between the two’. Interestingly, The Shining gives us several Roy Walker’s research into twentieth-century hotel architectures instances in which Kubrick, like many horror-movie directors across America (the men’s room in the bar is based on Frank Lloyd before him, plays with this kind of spectral ambiguity. As Mario Wright’s design for the Arizona Biltmore), but it’s also a kind of Falsetto has pointed out, there are several times in the film when we castle perched atop a mountain…. are unsure whether a shot is ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’. A similar Nearly all the modern variants of gothic horror turn their effect is created by the long tracking shot (somewhat reminiscent of haunted buildings into expressions of the characters’ mental The Killing) in which Jack walks down a hallway in the Overlook states—outward manifestations of individual isolation and and enters the Gold Ballroom, where he encounters a large party; in unconscious sexual fears. In the Stephen King novel, the Overlook a single movement, we travel from the ‘real’ into the ‘unreal’, with is both a psychological space and an organism with its own mind, no clear boundary between the two and no way to determine if both complete with topiary shrubs in the grounds that come alive to are truly ‘there’. Notice also that a dressing-table mirror in the menace the characters. Kubrick takes a more realistic approach, Torrance family bedroom is used to create a sort of confusion strongly emphasising the ways in which the building’s luxury feeds between reality and image: when Wendy serves Jack his breakfast Jack’s resentment of his family and his fantasies of becoming a in bed, much of their conversation is photographed in the mirror, playboy author in the mould of Scott Fitzgerald…. and the perspective is evident only because the writing on Jack’s T- But the Overlook isn’t simply the physical manifestation shirt is reversed; when Danny later sneaks into the bedroom to get of Jack’s desires for wealth and fame; it’s also an ironically his toy truck, we see Jack sitting on the edge of the bed in a sort of domesticated space—a terrifying ‘home’ that makes the entire trance or depression, his image doubled by the mirror; and towards Torrance family feel what the novel calls ‘cabin fever’. At this the end of the film, Wendy looks into the mirror and sees the hidden level, the film invites Freudian interpretation; and, in fact, when The meaning of REDRUM, a word Danny has written backward on the Shining was released, Diane Johnson told interviewers that, as a bathroom door. preparation for writing the screenplay, she and Kubrick had read The genre, as opposed to the mode, of The Shining is Freud’s essay, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), which attempts to explain the gothic horror. Jackson contends that this type of fiction, which sources of what Freud calls the ‘common core of feeling...in certain originated in Europe during the late eighteenth century, was things which lie within the field of what is frightening’. In his developed in reaction against a dominant rationalism; for that essay, Freud notes that the German word Unheimlich, meaning reason, she believes the gothic, like the grotesque, with which it ‘unhomely’, is akin to the English word ‘uncanny’, which has an participates, has often functioned as ‘an art of estrangement’ and a Anglo-Saxon etymology meaning ‘unknown’ or ‘unfamiliar’; he critique of ‘capitalist and patriarchal orders’. Perhaps so; The goes on, however, to argue that uncanny feelings, which we Shining can certainly be read along those lines, and has been. But as experience more strongly in art than in life, are stimulated not by Robin Wood and others have pointed out, a good many horror films strange or unearthly phenomena but by unconscious fears of a quite are ideologically reactionary…. ‘homely’ kind, originating in the family and often expressing The Overlook is a thoroughly modernist building modelled themselves as symbolic fantasies of castration at the hands of a partly on the Timberline Lodge in Oregon and partly on art director father figure. Kubrick’s film makes darkly humorous allusions to Kubrick—THE SHINING—9 this theory. When the hotel manager shows the Torrance family figments of his imagination; he’s urged to do what he already wants their humble apartment in the staff quarters of the Overlook, Jack to do. Furthermore, nearly all the ghosts who have speaking roles or looks around the place with a slightly ironic grin and says, ‘It;s very significant scenes, including the sexual revellers we see near the homey.’ Near the climax of the story, Jack bashes in the door of the end, are white males. (The exceptions are the Grady sisters, who are apartment with a fire axe and calls out, ‘Wendy? I’m home!’ the victims of their father, and the voiceless woman in the bath, Like King’s novel, the film shifts its point of view from who seems to have been a suicide.) Jack’s male and the one member of the family to another; but it mainsprings of his violence are vividly distributes the greater part of the subjective revealed in his speech to Lloyd in the Gold shots almost equally between Jack and Room—a frightening scene, but also a Danny, maintaining a balance between two parody of a bar-fly’s confession, played by apparently Freudian perspectives. On the Nicholson in a broad, squirming style. one hand, we have the father’s narcissism, Tormented by writer’s block and guilt, violent frustration and death wish; on the Jack explains that he suffers from a ‘white other, the son’s latent sexual desires and man’s burden’ caused by ‘the old sperm emotional conflicts. From the latter bank upstairs’: viewpoint, the plot seems flagrantly “Jack: I never laid a hand on him, Oedipal, dealing with a male child’s goddammit...I wouldn’t touch one hair on struggle against a castrating father who, his god damned little head. I love the little even though he is absent much of the time, sonofabitch. I’d do anything for him. Any inhabits full access to the mother…. fucking thing. That bitch! Long as I live she’ll never let me forget In the interests of giving some of these events the what happened. [Pause] I did hurt him once, okay? It was an atmosphere of a child’s imagination, Johnson and Kubrick accident! Completely unintentional. Coulda happened to anybody. supplemented their reading of Freud with Bruno Bettelheim’s The It was three god damned years ago! The little fucker had thrown all Uses of Enchantment (1973), a Freudian analysis of fairy tales, my papers over the floor. All I tried to do was pull him up! A which argues that certain kinds of grisly stories provide children momentary loss of muscular coordination!” with therapeutic ways of dealing with primal anxieties. Thus, the ...Freud seems to repress or conveniently ignore the film contains several references to fairy tales and violent cartoons incident of paternal abuse [in the Oedipus story] , but Kubrick faces such as ‘Road Runner’…. it squarely, dramatising ‘something so insistently repressed in In one of the best Western culture, the hostility of the commentaries on the film, father toward his own son’…. William Paul discusses most In addition to Theseus and of these details, but also makes Jack the Giant Killer, the film (like the important point that The the novel) alludes to Hansel and Shining uses Freud for Gretel. All three stories involve revisionist ends. The most cannibalism, a theme introduced radical and disturbing aspect early in The Shining by means of of the film is that Jack the Torrance family’s conversation Torrance isn’t, as Freudian about the Donner party. The three analysis would have it, an stories also concern children or imaginary menace or a fairy- younger men who clearly tale monster created by a manoeuvre through unfamiliar child’s projected anxieties; surrounding to defeat monstrous he’s a realistic character who antagonists, just as Danny, aided by despises his wife, who feels his mother, uses analytical skills ambivalence towards his son and exploration of the hotel and its and who actually becomes a hedge maze to defeat his crazed axe murderer. This situation is quite rare. The villain in murderous father…. horror movies is usually a stepfather, as in Night of the Hunter In interviews when the film was released (one of which (1955) and The Stepfather (1987); a mother, as in Psycho (1960) can be seen in the documentary), Nicholson and Mommie Dearest (1981); or a demonic child, as in The Exorcist recalled a conversation with Kubrick in which the director told him and The Omen. Significantly, Robin Wood’s influential that actors try too hard to make the performance ‘real’, when ‘real’ psychoanalytic theory of the horror film, which argues that the isn’t always interesting. This idea originates not with Kubrick but monster or the demonic ‘other’ represents a return of the repressed with Stanislavsky, the ultimate realist; nevertheless, it serves as an and a key to any individual film’s ideological purpose, contains not appropriate motto for the unusual effects Kubrick seems to be a single example of a motion picture in which the monster is a white trying to achieve. In film after film, his performers veer back and male patriarch. forth between realism and caricature; often the starring actor (James One of the distinctive features of Stephen King’s fiction is Mason in Lolita, Ryan O’Neal in Barry Lyndon and in that it contains several monstrous fathers or father figures. Eyes Wide Shut) is a straight man who works alongside bizarre Kubrick’s film seizes on this quality and, to a greater degree than supporting players, but sometimes the star gives a comically King, locates the propensity towards evil in a father’s psychology. stylised performance. … Jack Torrance appears to be guided and assisted by ghosts but, at At several points, Nicholson conveys a barely contained the ideological level, it hardly matters whether the ghosts are real or violence—when he throw a tennis ball against the walls of the Kubrick—THE SHINING—10

Overlook, for example—and his mouth and eyebrows work all time. If that was the case, he didn’t succeed. What he made is an overtime when Jack enters his manic phases. The expressive intellectualised, formally rigorous, genuinely disturbing satire of extremes of his performance aren’t to everyone’s taste, and his dark American paternity—a film that runs somewhat against the grain of portrait of fatherhood may be one of the reasons why The Shining, King’s novel and the horror-film cycle of its day. The satire is all after a profitable opening, never achieved the ticket sales the studio the more troubling when Jack Torrance’s misogyny, racism and expected… In the last analysis, however, his portrayal is well suited bad-boy grin are enshrined in the hotel picture gallery, haunting the to Kubrick’s absurdist stye. When the picture was released, Kubrick audience until the very end. indicated he wanted to make one of the most frightening movies of

COMING UP IN THE SPRING 2010 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XX:

Apr 6 Wolfgang Petersen, Das Boot 1981 Apr 13 Federico Fellini, Ginger & Fred, 1985 Apr 20 Michael Mann, Collateral 2004

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