Kubrick BFI Season – The Shining (1980)

And so finally part three, my last nerd-out for at least another year. Let’s start with a gods eye, ominous drift into the tale….

A mirror to the epilogue, but we’ll come back to that. As the Warner Bros. logo dissolved into the foreboding miasma of that breath-taking aerial montage I was pleased to note that this was a screening of the longer US domestic version of the film, a cut I recognised from the blue twinge to the credits as the shorter European cut has pure white colouration – yes, I think it’s fair to say that I know this film very well in both its incarnations. Truth be told I prefer the shorter version, the scenes with Lloyd the bartender are shorter and punchier, there is less unnecessary foreshadowing on Jack’s past which is explained in a couple of excised early scenes between Wendy and a child psychologist and the final scenes have some faintly silly scenes of cobweb shrouded skeletons in the hotel lobby which are not Kubrick’s finest hour. Still, it’s always nice to replay some of the scenes (I do have a Region 1 DVD copy of the film) and seeing the film on the big screen is always quite an experience in any format. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In one of his half dozen most iconic performances Jack Nicholson is the alcoholic, frustrated writer Jack Torrance who acquires a job as the winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, an auberge nestled deep in the Colorado mountains. Moving his family including his timid wife Wendy (a distraught Shelly Duvall) and his precocious son Danny to the hotel for the winter close-down Jack sanity explosively erodes as the hotels malevolent spirits become corporal and urge him to repeat past murderous tragedies that occurred on the hotels accursed  grounds. Are these spirits stimulated into action by Danny’s ESP like gift of  ‘shining’, of being able to see past events in places ‘just like pictures in a book’? Are the supernatural events imaginations in Jack’s deranged mind? What exactly is in Room 237?

 The Shining was recently voted as the scariest film ever made and whilst I personally don’t find it ‘scary’ in any conventional sense it is certainly one of the most brilliant achievements in the horror genre. For me it much more the whole sense of foreboding and unease which is gently harnessed and developed before exploding in the films final movements that nails it for me, there are a half-dozen electrifying scenes which have entered popular culture and can therefore obfuscate any fresh analysis of the movie but lets see what we can draw together eh? As always with Kubrick there is a marriage of his unique cinematic style and imagination in The Shining, technical and structural experimentation coupled with a host of possible interpretations and historical references which elevate the film far beyond its formal generic trappings. Many critics sneered down their noses at Kubrick resorting to work in the ‘horror’ genre, slumming it with the exploitation and B-Movie side of the business but they evidently failed to recall the enormous success of the likes of The Exorcist (a project which Kubrick was allegedly offered and rejected to his subsequent dismay) and Rosemary’s Baby which achieved both critical kudos and financial returns, as I think I’ve mentioned before there was a strong vein of business acumen to the man, he fully embraced the financial possibilities of his films which is evident from his unique participation in his films marketing strategies and release patterns.

Certain things can be so subjective when it comes to the movies, I and some friends are of the opinion that this sequence isn’t in the slightest bit terrifying and maybe just a little bit naff, others find it deeply distressing and affecting. Go figure. I think we can all agree that the Twins are more than a little unsettling (more on them later) but one of the elements to The Shining I most admire is that it is an uncannily eerie horror film that is exposed in bright, beautifully composed excruciating sunlight, banishing the traditional Expressionist foundations of the Universal supernatural cycle, the ‘old dark house’ cliché inverted from the shadows into the light which makes it almost unique with viewers weaned on decades of genre trademarks. Like the scattered low-fi Bosch zombie landscapes of Romero it’s the uncanny and strange, unnerving and raw imagery on-screen that is detailed in such an exposed fashion which is why it strikes such a chord with viewers. The framing, pace and sound in the film achieve a very real aura of unearthliness, even the notoriously self cannibalizing horror genre has not matched its remarkable atmosphere – I’d welcome claims to the contrary.

 The sound design is amazing when you see the film on the big screen, the discordant chimes of Penderaski, Ligetti and Bartok really do jar the spirit in conjunction with the arresting images on-screen – you really need to ramp up the volume on this picture to achieve a definitive viewing experience, you can almost sense those chittering spirits gnawing on the celluloid. Whilst it wasn’t the first movie to utilise the Steadicam system is was certainly the first to use the process to such an extensive extent, it’s that simple energy of movement which generates tension whilst providing a mental landscape for the films events in the labyrinthine Overlook hotel, an observation that leads me nicely to this astonishing sequence which to this day has foxed admiring cinematographers as to how this shot was achieved in 1980 with only ‘primitive’ matte and other pre-CGI rendering methods. As always Stan the Man was on the cutting edge, constantly seeking and employing technical breakthroughs to push the medium forward.

 The classic scenes are this, this, the classic reveal and of course for my generation this, personally I’ve always found this and this (that’s Kubrick’s daughter Vivian with the bloody handprint on her posterior who causes Grady to stumble into Jack by the way) far more arresting but that’s just me, I love the extreme deep focus on the establishing cuts of those bar scenes in the Gold Room which generate an unusual visual plateau to unconsciously signal a shift in the films environment from the natural to supernatural, from the tangible to incorporeal. Also note the traditional genre under-lit yet typically Kubrickian source generated lighting in Jacks face from the bar fittings to tableau a rictous grin on his homicidal visage. Heh, that must be one of the most overwrought sentences I’ve constructed for quite a while eh?

 There are many readings of the film of which have been gleaned from many of the motifs in the film embedded by the native American mise-en-scene and its genocidal history serving as the tableau for a dissection of the nuclear family, a more direct commentary on the limits of the imagination and its stresses on the human psyche or even a simple comparison between the tortured creative Jack Torrance and Kubrick himself who had reputedly isolated himself, Prospero style in St. Albans, obsessively immersing himself in his complex and increasingly textured yet impossible projects. Regardless, the elements of myth and history that Kubrick and fellow screenwriter Diane Johnson injected into Stephen King’s source material marks The Shining as one of the most cerebral and majestic entries in the genre, a testament to Kubrick’s skill in approaching by definition a moribund genre and taking it stratospheric heights – here is the core touchstone that served as one of the films primary inspirations, and here is what I believe is the eeriest scene in film history;

I can’t remember where I picked this up but I did read a wonderful commentary on the film connecting it to the birth of cinema itself, coinciding as it did in the late 19th century with a rebirth in spiritualism, of photographing fairies, seances, ouija boards and photographing the dead which of course film does in another sense, the supernatural therefore being a natural even essential subject for cinema itself. I’m sure I’m not the only person to feel a slight unease and sense of mortality when looking at some of the older silent movies, knowing for certain that 99% of the people involved have now passed on to some other place, for want of a better metaphor. I like Kubrick’s assertion that in the final analysis The Shining is actually a feel good movie, life after death being confirmed in the films closing moments and the speculation on spirits and an existence beyond the grave providing proof that ‘However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light‘.

Quite unexpectedly I got this in the post recently, a friend had decided to play a little joke on the Mint and sent me a copy of Jack Torrance’s challenging debut novel without any card or covering note which I have to say was quite entertaining, an appropriate gesture of revenge is being considered. I did like the humorous dust-jacket blurb on the book which proclaims that the novel is a treatise on a writer ‘heroically pitting himself against the Sisyphusean sentence’, I’m about half-way through and I have to say it is a little repetitive but I’m intrigued to see how it all comes together at the end. If you’re in any way interested in further details then here is a comprehensive FAQ which should fill in any gaps, I know I said I’d write-up my experience of the final Kubrick BFI discussion event in this post but I think this entry has already become a little unwieldy so I’ll slot that into a miscellaneous post I’m compiling along with some other film material I’ve collated over the past few months. Here’s the making of documentary. Let’s close with that beautiful final shot of the film, a penetration into the foundations and history of the hotel that mirrors the movies opening sequence, bringing the film a metaphoric full circle, from the panoramic to the individual.