Dispatches: On The Shining

It is the greatest scary movie and the scariest great movie there is.  From its first foreboding shots of a car on mountain roads, The Shining tends to unmoor me completely from my critical faculties.  It's a cliche that it only gets scarier with each viewing, but I'll reassert it: I am more scared and compelled when watching today, maybe for the twentieth time, than ever.  Since it's more a dreamlife than a movie, and depends on no shocks for its disturbing power, it only lodges deeper within me each time.  The problem is that in addition to being disturbing, The Shining also produces such pleasure that one has to watch it periodically anyway.  It creates a world of such photographic perfection and precise beauty that the idea of, say, a serif typeface in the credits would deface it utterly.  Yet it's really, really funny.  It's weird, but its austere beauty contributes to its scariness: if it had aged badly, it would much easier to laugh at and dismiss.  You could look away.

A number of memorable films were released in 1980: Raging Bull, The Elephant Man, Gloria, Ordinary People, The Empire Strikes Back, Private Benjamin.  The first three are great movies; seen today, however, none of them possess the strangeness of The Shining.  For example, to watch Raging Bull today is to enjoy a excellent and movingly acted biopic.  To watch The Elephant Man is to recall David Lynch in his embryonic period, with glimpses of the full-blown uncanny paranoia that emerges later.  In both cases, we are the master of our viewing experience - after several viewings, we comfortably comprehend and analyze the movies' goals and the degree of success which with they reach them.  They are movies.  Nothing like this is the case upon re-viewing The Shining today.  It doesn't even seem like a movie.  It fits into the category "films of 1980" in a much more confounding way, when it does at all.

A profound uneasiness surrounds The Shining, enveloping it so thoroughly that it seems some sort of unclassifiable formal object, so freshly does it continue to impress itself.  One way to put this would be to say that the other 1980 movies I mentioned are examples of different cinematic tones; The Shining's tone somehow stands apart and escapes the category of "movie" altogether.  This strangeness expresses itself by the camera's action as well as the actors, who seem not so much to be professionals acting as the denizens of an archetypal reality.  Both the setups and the action occur at a very deliberate speed, giving you time to register (and interpret) everything that happens, every authoritative cut and koan-like speech.  In the very first sequence, when Jack Torrance is interviewed for the job of caretaker, the manager begins to explain the case of the previous caretaker, Grady.  As he introduces the topic, he stumbles, then makes a forced laugh.  There is an inexplicably pregnant cut towards his assistant, who sits in a chair, absolutely motionless - he's wondering how the boss is going to broach this particular delicate subject.  That cut does everything to establish the mood of wrongness, yet it's unmotivated on first view, like a lot of other bits.  That's why the movie feels at an angle to the horror genre - as everyone notices, it completely eschews the usual scare tactics: sudden music cues come at the "wrong" times, our expectation of scary shocks is mostly thwarted, and the compositions are balanced and photographic instead of aslant and "weird."

An odd thing: The Shining retains its tonal freshness even though much of it has entered pop culture.  Jack chopping down the door, the two murdered girls holding hands, Danny scrawling "redrum" on the mirror, the deluge of blood from the elevator: that these are celebrated and iconic images has not dulled their talismanic power.  Seeing them again, the movie's technique of preparing you for a disturbing sight, making you anticipate it, becomes more and more terrifying.  (I'll confess here that I can't even watch the sequence in room 237 with the woman in the bathtub anymore - I worry so much for Danny I just can't watch it.)  Even many secondary moments have entered the collective memory.  I remember first watching Jurassic Park and grinning at Spielberg's allusion to The Shining as that movie's children hide in the stainless steel cabinet of a professional kitchen.   Those pursuing velociraptors, though, did nothing to dislodge from memory the far more potent scene to which they alludes, of Danny hiding from his father. 

It's Danny Lloyd's presence in the film, I think, that makes it so perfectly disturbing - any complicity the audience might have with Jack Nicholson's charismatic psychosis rebounds viciously whenever Danny is onscreen.  His face is so beautiful and his manner so painfully innocent that he personifies the vulnerability of childhood.  This splits us against ourselves, since the film has taken pains to help us identify with Jack's contemptuous antics.  If Shelly Duvall's shrill Wendy Torrance makes us want to scream in frustration with Jack (and Kubrick), Danny makes us desperately protective against our own impulses.  We cower, transfixed, when Jack sadistically explains cannibalism to his young son.  And in a quite brilliant touch, Scatman Crothers plays the hotel's head chef as the one truly loving, caring (and "shining") person in the movie.  Naturally he ends up as the victim of the film's vicious and only murder. 

I don't mean to raise the ur-scenario of the isolated nuclear family as a suffocating nightmare above others, though.  But the fact remains that The Shining often seems to be an allegory for something without quite enough clues as to its meaning.  The massacre of Native Americans, the numerological significance of the number 12, the doctrine of eternal recurrence, the perils of alcoholism, the sense of human social life as a pathetic delusion, all of these can be supported by the right observer.  What can we glean from this excess of possibility?  Maybe this: the dream, not the real, is the state to which the film aspires, which is why it includes so many irregularities and "mistakes."  Watch the famous scene of Jack chopping down the bathroom door behind which Wendy cowers.  He chops through the right pane of the door, then sticks his hand through, which Wendy slices with her carving knife.  We cut back to Jack's face, then to a shot of him in front of the door, where the right pane is splintered, but the left pane is now completely and cleanly removed.  It's plainly absurd.  This in a film that took a year(!) to edit, with forty or more takes of each shot. 

Perhaps the most lauded innovation of the film is its use of long Steadicam (an apparatus that allows an operator to walk and run with the camera without shaking) shots that track various characters around the hotel.  Among its many vivid employments, you probably particularly remember Danny riding his tricycle through the halls of the Overlook, his wheels alternately humming over the wood floor and being muted over the carpet.  These shots, along with the model of the hedge maze that Jack looks into, give us a clear and masterful spatial knowledge of the hotel's layout, allying us with the maleficent authority of "the house," implicating us in the desire to kill.  ("Your money's no good here, Mr. Torrance.  Orders from the house.")  As we haunt the hotel, so does Jack in his accelerating derangement.  Kubrick even mirrors this acceleration by speeding up the intertitles, from "ONE MONTH LATER" to "THURSDAY" to "8PM."  The steadicam, the titles, the pace - these devices combine to remove the film from everyday life.  When you see Vivian Kubrick's documentary on the movie's making, the humdrum randomness of life on set (Jack mugging, Shelly whining, Danny running by with... it's Leon Vitali! "Bullingdon," from Barry Lyndon!) seems totally bizarre - by contrast, the film itself feels implacable, like it has no wayward elements.  It didn't include any of the normality it didn't want.  It never could have been any other way. 

And that, I believe, is the secret to The Shining: the perfect autonomy of its execution.  Shooting fifty takes of Danny running through the maze to get that perfect one starts to make sense: the film is stripped of any inner timeliness, any traces of the reality of 1980.  It's other-world hangs together so immanently, with such formal unity.  But such unity turns out to be suspect.  At the movie's center is Jack's typewriter and the outrageous moment when Wendy discovers what his work consists of: ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY typed thousands of times, as I hardly need to repeat.  The most chilling of the suggestions the movie makes might be the idea that authorship, and maybe auteurship, are forms of psychosis.  To desire to create and escape into one's one world is to risk succeeding to a sociopathic detachment.  You get the sense here of an autocritique: after all, it's Kubrick who so clearly delights in the tiniest of details, like the little toy ax and American flag on the hotel manager's desk, and it's us who cheer him on.  Among all filmmakers, the sense of a pure aesthetic, a fully controlled formal world, is never greater than with Kubrick.  But it's just this escapist impulse that The Shining suggests is murderous, and you can't escape it if it's in you too.

See the rest of Dispatches.

Comments

[Jonathan]

Interesting piece Asad, but oh the academic love affair with Stanley Kubrick! The Shining always struck me as wonderful and horrible at once. It is extraordinarily slick, beautiful to watch, and to listen to. It manages to feel tremendously ominous. But the form suffocates the narrative:

1) Jack's psychological detioration is underplayed and undeveloped. He's strange from start to finish.

2) Scatman Crothers shows up at the end only to die, thus giving Jack a real victim while sparing the wife and child.

3) The ghost story is cheezy. Homosexual hi-jinx, racist butlers.

4) The "you've always been the caretaker" cop-out ending, with Jack's picture on the wall.

Don't get me wrong. At some level I like the Shining... or I like the feel of the Shining and the living, breathing sense of the Overlook, with Danny scooting around on the big wheel. But it strikes me as the beginning of the end of Kubrick's work, the point at which his movies began to be entirely aestheticized objects with entirely conventional, conservative, and tedious plots. The upshot would be Full Metel Jacket and, worse still, Eyes Wide Shut (bleagh).

[Abbas Raza]

Hey Asad,

Your insider knowledge of filmmaking, not to mention your fairly serious (and at one time formal) study of Kubrick over the years, allows you to see layers behind the movie and even feel on its surface what is not so obvious to a non-film-junkie like me. This is good for the most part, I think, but maybe it makes you misjudge the effectiveness of the film for common viewers like me. For example, it has never seemed very scary to me. It is beautifully shot, though. I have always found much of the movie funny. Like the speech Jack gives just before going up the staircase after Wendy and gets smacked with the bat. Maybe that's just nervous giggles!

Anyway, I do appreciate your passionate insights, so thanks!

(I guess all I really mean by what I said ealier is that I should learn more about film!)

[timothy Don]

This is a wonderful, intriguing, counter-intuitive reading. Many thanks, Asad.

[Asad]

Jonathan, I think of the love affair with Kubrick as an obsession of filmmakers. Your objection, that he overvalues form, is usually made by critics - Pauline Kael and Vincent Canby most famously. As for the academic popularity of The Shining, I think that had to do with its being neither high nor mass culture at a moment when that distinction was a subject of debate in the academy. For me, though, it's just a terrifying, visceral, beautifully crafted pleasure to watch. But I claim no critical objectivity: my relationship to The Shining is such that after watching it, I once passed a toystore and had the idle thought, "Hey, I'll buy something for Danny."

Abbas, all you have to do is see it more times! Will you watch the movie again by yourself and report back whether it scares you? I'll lend you the DVD.

Timothy, many thanks!

I thought I'd give some examples of what I appreciate about the movie, using as a template Jonathan's list of what he doesn't like about it:

1) and 4) Actually, the movie and Jack's performance develop with clockwork precision. Jack gives his only normal line reading of the film in his very first line (asking the secretary where the manager's office is), and gets increasingly deranged from there. It's a slow but steady transformation. On the other hand, however, his immediate comfort in the hotel sets us up for his possible non-existence outside it.

Also, the supernatural presence develops subtly and effectively: we first see Danny speaking to Tony ("the little boy who lives in my mouth") very innocuously, with Wendy present and smiling at him, and we're sure of Tony's fictiveness. A little later Tony tells Danny the phone will ring, and it does. Now we trust in Tony but only as a movie device, as a "ghost." Then, in a brilliant moment, Danny asks Mr. Halloran (Scatman) about room 237, saying Tony has told him about it. Halloran clearly knows about it too - and in a sly way we've just begun to trust that Tony has access to real knowledge. Without realizing, we accept Tony's reality.

3) For a Stephen King fan, I'm surprised Jonathan objects to the cheesiness of things that come straight from his novel: gay hi-jinks as scare tactics, etc. I think exactly the opposite: King is the one who, in his novel, actually worries about the sanctity of Indian burial grounds and lectures us on the dangers of alcoholism. Kubrick is interested in why we are scared by scary things at all, even when we know they are unreal.

He also deploys these cheesy elements so well: in the movie, when we glimpse the man in the bear suit performing fellatio, it visually picks up on a much earlier shot of Danny being examined by the doctor, lying on a large stuffed bear with his knees vulnerably raised. That is an amazingly farsighted piece of design foreshadowing.

2) The death of Scatman Crothers is the culmination of a conversation the movie has with us about scare tactics themselves. In the film's first real intimation that Jack is in league with the hotel, he looks over a model of the hedge maze, and we are surprised actually to see the tiny figures of Danny and Wendy running in the maze. Now we cut to them going around corners with that ominous Steadicam, and the music builds to a crescendo, and BAM! Cut to black screen, with the title "TUESDAY." We laugh, relieved. The movie assures us several more times that it's only kidding on the scares, while the actual scary moments happen "too" slowly. When Danny first sees the Grady twins, we first zoom in on his blanched face for seconds, then cut to the twins for an awfully long time. Look at them all you want, the film says, they really are there.

When Scatman arrives at the hotel, and we get an interminable tracking shot of him entering the hallway, with pillar after pillar turning out to have nothing behind them, and we are conditioned to feel safe again. At last pillar, of course, Jack comes out, pretty slowly, yelling almost self-consciously. No quick cuts. It's shot realistically, upending our expectations, genre expectations, and the film's own pattern. That kind of thickness is characteristic of this movie.

[Jane]

Hi Jonathan, I love the ending of The Shining! Not a cop out bc it's what it's all about. Jack's on the wall bc he's always been there, just like that hitch hiker you gave a ride to has been dead for 30 yrs, etc - the movie's a ghost story about ghost stories, about the symbols and signs and elements and old standards that make up what makes us scared. I like what Asad says about the King vs. Kubrick perspectives on a lot of these elements...one sincerely employs the tropes and the other also sincerely discusses the employment. (And haha! Things like the long Steadicam shots are now standard horror film tropes, a new symbol! I like that twist.) Anyhow, just wanted to say that whether or not you like the movie, I think it's a bit unfair to label an ending that's completely consistent with the language and argument of the rest of the film a cop out.