The Overlooked Οἰκονομία of Aeschylus' Agamemnon And

CHAPTER 22 The Overlooked οἰκονομία of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Geoffrey Bakewell Introduction Formidable barriers of time and place, language and culture separate Aeschylus’ Agamemnon from Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining (1980). Yet, the two works are so uncannily linked by shared elements and themes that a detailed com- parison is mutually illuminating.1 Each piece is a visually sumptuous work of horror, built around a haunted house. Each focuses on acts of savagery among kin, including the sacrificial murder of children. And each features a clairvoy- ant attuned to phantoms arising from an eerie commingling of past, present, and future. Moreover, both Aeschylus and Kubrick ground their violence in the corrupting effects of wealth,2 which ripple across temporal and social divides. This transcendent nature of evil leads the directors to personify their potent locales: the palace of the Atreidae and the Overlook Hotel ultimately possess the individuals who inhabit and maintain them. Both play and film begin by emphasizing the most important character in each: a physical structure. Agamemnon’s performance in 458 BCE opened with something new at center stage, namely the skene.3 This simple wooden building 1 I do not argue here for the direct influence of Aeschylus on Kubrick, despite the latter’s repu- tation as a self-taught polymath interested in “archetypes of the unconscious” (quoted in LoBrutto 1997, 411). Diane Johnson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kubrick, noted that he “ha[d] a strong literary sense” and “[thought] like a novelist.” Among the authors they discussed were Lovecraft, Bettelheim, and Freud. For details on the development of the script see LoBrutto 1997, 412–3. On The Shining’s relationship to “the Uncanny” and fairy tales see Hoile 1984. 2 On wealth, see also Seaford this volume. 3 On the likelihood that this was the first play to use the skene see Taplin 1979, 452–9. Seaford 2012, 337–9, argues by contrast that a skene was perhaps present in Aeschylus’ earlier Persians (472) and Suppliant Women (ca. 463), and in his Seven Against Thebes (467). The evidence is not conclusive; even if Seaford is correct, the structure remains an unobtrusive, underused, and inanimate backdrop in the plays prior to Agamemnon. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��8 | doi ��.��63/97890043488�0_0�4 The Overlooked Oikonomia of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 529 represented the house of the sons of Atreus; it was a tangible expression of identity and history, a marker of place and wealth. The poet’s words, together with the imaginations of the audience, turned an unprepossessing wall, pierced by a single door4 and covered by a primitive roof, into a palace. As Padel notes, “when Athenian theater began using the skene, Western tragedy acquired an inner chamber, a place of potent concealment, and a vital passageway to that interior, the channel which makes and unmakes the relationship between seen and unseen.”5 In Agamemnon, Aeschylus uses innovative dramaturgy to make the house of Atreus into a visible sign of persistent, yet initially invisible, evil. The Shining begins in a similar way. As the opening credits roll, a long he- licopter shot follows a car climbing a winding mountain road; as it rounds a bend, the Overlook Hotel heaves majestically into view. Kubrick had already begun his use of collage scores relying on “classical repertoire … to activate a rich field of musical reference, allusion, and counterpoint.”6 Here, inspired by Berlioz’ Requiem,7 he uses a version of Dies Irae mixed with animal cries and Native American chants to create an ominous mood. The musically ignorant sense that the natural splendor of the mountain West and the opulent exte- rior of the hotel conceal something older and brooding, while those who rec- ognize the auditory intertexts know that we have reached a time and a place of reckoning.8 Stephen King, who wrote the original novel, envisioned the Overlook as “a huge storage battery charged with an evil powerful enough to corrupt all those who come in contact with it.”9 Kubrick’s film captures this at the outset. In Aeschylus’ play, the watchman quickly draws our attention to the nature of the palace. Perched atop its roof,10 he states that the house has fallen on troubled times, resorting to personification (36–9): 4 Based on Libation Bearers and Aristophanic comedy, Garvie 1986, xlvii–lii argues that the tragic skene generally had two doors. In Agamemnon, however, no stage action or textual evidence requires a second door. 5 1990, 354. 6 Kuperski 2012, 11. For instance, the Nietzschean intertext of Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” haunts 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). 7 See LoBrutto 1997, 447–8. 8 Kuperski 2012, 143. 9 Duvall 1999, 36. 10 Thus Taplin 1977, 277..

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