What struck me the most the last time I watched The Shining was a scene a few minutes in, where the Torrance family where Stuart Ullman is giving them a final tour of the hotel before it closes for the winter. Wendy Torrence (Shelley Duvall) asks Ullman when the hotel was built to which Ullman replies âConstruction started in 1907. It was finished in 1909. The site is supposed to be located on an Indian burial ground, and I believe they actually had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it.â
The theories behind the significance of Indian imagery in The Shining were nothing new to me, burned into my memory by the late-night glare of Geocities webpages I came across while feverishly searching for info about the film as a kid. What struck me on this viewing is how casual this whole exchange is. A few moments earlier, Ullman tells Jack the story of the previous caretaker murdering his wife and two daughters before putting âboth barrels of a shotgun in his mouth.â This scene is so tense, so full of euphemisms, rolled out so slowly by Ullman; the brilliance of it is that itâs difficult to tell whether Ullman is terrified of Jack turning down the job (like other candidates, presumably) or whether, even with almost a decadeâs distance, heâs still terrified of the incident.
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The Shining is a powerful film. I donât mean that the way people talk about a film that moved them, like Schindlerâs List or something. In my head, it is something like an occult object, a puzzle that begs to be solved while clearly having no real solution, a film so hopelessly wrapped up in late night childhood memories that Iâm still sorting out what I think it actually is.
My first encounter with The Shining came as my dad was flipping through channels. The film was in one of the scenes where the camera follows closely behind Danny as he tricycles around the hotel, which is one of the most striking images in the film. I donât think thereâs anything like it. My dad said something about having seen it before, what a cool movie it was, but my mom forcefully insisted that he change the channel, which he did.
I donât think my mom had ever seen The Shining; she probably knew it was a horror movie, and she very much disliked those (still does). But this image that was left of a mysterious rolling shot of a boy in an empty space all alone mixed with this thought that this must be a terrifying, reprehensible film for my mom to have reacted that way. For months, I waited up late in our living room, catching bits of it on Showtime at 3AM, always afraid of being caught watching this awful thing; eventually, I saw the whole thing.
The Shining is a film of unusual power because its weirdness has barely lessoned after repeated viewings, after the thrill of being a kid and watching something you shouldnât be watching has receded into the past. Plenty of films have lost that weirdness; I donât find, say, Childâs Play 2 or Tom Saviniâs Night of the Living Dead remake, two other horror films found in late-night premium cable spelunking, as awe-inspiring as I used to. But The Shining is, if anything, more perplexing after each viewing, its subtleties always just out of reach, its horror all the more potent for it.
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Room 237 is a fascinating movie if only for the reactions it gets. To some viewers, its probably just as perplexing as The Shining when it first released. Steven King, himself a noted critic of Kubrickâs adaptation, called it âacademic bullshitâ. Itâs a weird but kind of understandable misreading of the film, the idea that is a blanket endorsement of (often competing) interpretations of a horror film from the 1980s. Room 237 is a film about interpretation at its most frayed, where the part of yourself that you bring to interpretation is the thing that shows the most, where youâre probably talking more about yourself than anything else.
Someone in the film states (pretty earnestly) that the The Shining was Kubrickâs attempt to bring the entirety of human conflict and history into a single work. On a surface level, you could easily dismiss that as outlandish. But itâs also an extremely comforting idea. Kubrick is presented by the interview subjects as a genius-level IQ savant/control freak, the kind of person who, if anyone, could be capable of intentionally creating the film these people believe they have seen. If interpreting literature is a way to understand the world, then the idea of creating the world in a work of art in such a way is an act of reassurance. It implies there exists both a coherent vision of the world to build such a thing off of and the human ability to do so. Likewise, the âsuccessfulâ interpretation of this work is letting yourself in on the secret, putting yourself on the level of the creator, reaffirming the comprehensiblity of the world.
Itâs also a comforting idea that, ironically, pushes against Kubrickâs own work. I donât buy that heâs a misanthrope or whatever it was Pauline Kael thought of him, but I do think he was fascinated by the incompleteness of the world, my mutual unintelligibility. A Clockwork Orangeâs Alex is criminal whose happiness is incompatible with the world around him; Lolita is the story of an avowed sexual predator who is so easy to find human. Itâs easy to see why Kubrick was drawn to collaborate with Jim Thompson, another chronicler of lowlives and weirdos whose portrayals of such arenât so much âdignifiedâ as they are fascinated.
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The Shiningâs power is that no single shot goes by that does not feel deeply sinister, concealing darker truths. The camerawork is no doubt a huge part of this: its incredible depth of focus captures the hotel in a way that always communicates its deliberately impossible, skewed nature (take, for example, Stuart Ullmanâs office in the middle of the hotel and its âimpossible windowâ to the outside). We feel this, even if we donât recognize it.
Kubrick used close-ups, too. Jacques Tati said he disliked close-ups because they were crude, preferring to capture his vision of modern Paris in primarily wide-angle shots in his masterpiece Playtime. In The Shining, close-ups are a terrifying, exhilarating jolt from the shots that make up most of the film. Take the scene in the ballroom where Jack first encounters Lloyd, the bartender. We see Jackâs face as he sits at the bar, his face undergoing a transformation as he removes his hands from his face, smiles, and begins a conversation. The camera cuts mid-laugh to a shot of Lloyd, someone who wasnât there only a moment ago in the wider shot. These close-ups conceal more than they illuminate. When we are close, we feel that we are too close.
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Ullmanâs quip about the Indian burial ground is treated as innocuous but couched in the sinister. The scene of the Torrances being given a tour are intercut with shots of Danny wandering alone in the hotel before being visited briefly by a vision of the Grady twins, and followed by a scene in which Dick Hallorann, the cook, tries to delicately explain to Danny that he has a âgiftâ (one of the few explicit acknowledgements of the supernatural in the film). The tour itself takes place on the backdrop of the hotel emptying out for the winter, leaving the Torrances alone in a place we have already grasped as sinister.
Thereâs no Rosetta Stone to The Shining, but its labyrinthian openings fascinate in a way few films do. We know it is hiding so much, just out of sight. The burial ground comment still haunts me. Is it so casual because Kubrick simply didnât think of it as much more than window dressing for a ghost film? Or is just another strange, terrifying opening into a labyrinth with no exits?
