THE SHINING is the first film I watched as a kid that forced me into my parent’s bed at night wishing I had never seen it. It was the nightmare to end all nightmares for my seven year old brain. Couldn’t get the images of Room 237 outta my head. That eerie green bathroom. That hazy figure drawing back the curtain. The way everything feels ultra slowed down and moody as the nude woman steps from the bathtub, advances towards Jack, and kisses him before freakishly transforming into that cackling, decomposed hag, while another corpse rises from the tub. That scene man. Still gives me the jitters after all these years and remains one of the most unsettling scenes in the history of cinema. To be honest, a part of me doesn’t want to analyze this film. Criticism feels counterintuitive for how complex, mysterious and menacing the vibe is, as if putting words and meaning to its images and sounds would spoil the horror I feel. And yet, year and year, I’m drawn back to the film’s maddening maze-like logic hoping to find my way to the center of its malevolent secrets. It’s a film that requires many viewings before those secrets begin to spill, though mysteries always still abound. 

First, a word about Kubrick’s adaptation from the Stephen King novel. King crafted a world in the 1977 novel that really gives form and definition to Jack’s troubled history and descent into madness. King has never been an author known for subtlety, and so the world depicted in the book is really a world of blunt characterization, characters whose motivations are explained, characters we empathize with, and characters who live in a fleshed out world teeming with backstory and strong narrative sense. Little wonder, then, why King hated Kubrick’s adaptation. Kubrick, a master of suggestive storytelling, challenges virtually all of the narrative logic of the King novel, subordinating conventional linear surfaces for surrealist fascination, ambiguous subjectivity, and confounding mindfuckery. It mocks King’s narrative desire for temporal sense and rational form. Kubrick’s film risks confusion and invites deranged, crackpot theories from the weirdest of fans, as confirmed by the brilliant Rodney Ascher documentary, ROOM 237. This might frustrate viewers who require hard fast logic, but as our good friend Adam reminds us, “Sometimes, something not making sense is a really good thing.” It’s the only Kubrick film that reaches similar nebulous heights as 2001 and EYES WIDE SHUT, as it complicates the narrative logic of the book by challenging the viewer to “shine” by interpreting the intentional dots and dashes left unconnected.

I’ve been thinking A LOT about those unconnected threads over the last week and how they connect to Kubrick’s larger themes and preoccupations. One thing about watching a director’s work in chronological order is that you begin to see shapes and patterns emerge that you otherwise might not see. After watching this film a gazillion times, I have to say this most recent watch was probably my favorite watch yet. I saw THE SHINING, for the first time, not as the standalone horror masterpiece that it is, but as an interconnected work of art that is deeply wedded to the same unconscious fears that curse Kubrick’s other major films. Like many others before it, only never realized with such terrifying power, THE SHINING expresses Kubrick’s magnum nihilistic vision of humanity’s ever-destructive capacity for violence, madness, and the cyclical renewal of history “forever and ever” repeating itself. Let’s break it down.

The narrative structure of the film involves a journey from an organized, rational world of cause-and-effect realism, to a world that confuses this understanding by descending into the disorders of self-regression, madness, and surrealism. Things start somewhat normal at the Overlook Hotel. The Torrance family accepts their stewardship as the new caretakers of the place, they go on a tour, they meet friendly faces, and begin to acclimate to their new surroundings. The lingering spirit of quiet menace is always present from the start, boasted by an incredibly creepy score and surreal landscape photography, but the overall temporal structure of the film is initially presented to us in a realistic, matter-of-fact style. The banal setup is important for securing a sense of normalcy. It carves a space for eerie premonitions of the grotesque to threaten the collapse of the film’s rational dualities of normal to abnormal, sane to insane, real to surreal, man to monster. These dualities play into the film’s larger psychological use of doubles, alter egos, and doppelgängers, all of which feed into the Hotel’s larger repeating history of violence.

To see how these conscious-unconscious dualities collapse over the course of the film, consider what it means to “shine.” All three characters — Jack, Danny and Wendy — have the ability to “shine” in varying degrees, whether that means reading people’s thoughts, locating missing objects, or psychically “seeing” things from the past, present, or future. From the opening interview, Stuart Ullman, the Overlook’s manager, sets up a grisly ghost story about the Hotel’s horrific past, which in turn provides a literal and symbolic conduit for each character to access their inner “shining.” The ghost story goes like this: Delbert Grady, the previous winter caretaker in the 1970s, went Grady-crazy in the hotel, ended up hacking his wife and two daughters to pieces with an ax, and “stacked their bodies neatly in one of the rooms in the west wing.” Jack seems to take immediate interest in the story, as if recalling one of his own nightmares, or perhaps dislodging a distant memory that’s been stuffed away in his unconscious. If this represents a moment of “shining” for Jack, it is neither obvious to him or the viewer (except in hindsight). 

Danny, on the other hand, Jack’s 5-year old son, “shines” most intensely through a series of visual horrors that seem directly tied to the Grady ghost story and the Hotel’s collective, repeating memory. Whether it’s an elevator of cascading blood, the two Grady girls chopped up in a hallway, or REDRUM written on a door, Danny’s gift for “shining” shows him terrifying visions he can hardly understand. To glimpse the meaning of these visions, he creates an alter-ego named “Tony” who not only “tells” and “shows” him things about the Hotel’s demonic past, but who also implicitly links him to Jack’s rising unconscious. Which is to say what we visually “see” in the corridor’s of Danny’s mind is really the subjective interior of Jack’s regressive awakening into a life in the hotel he’s lived before. Jack says he feels “as though I’ve been here before,” that he’s previously lived a life in the Overlook Hotel, and that he’d like to stay in the Hotel “forever and ever and ever.” Danny hears the same words “forever and ever and ever” when confronting the ghostly Grady twins in a hallway. It’s as though the Hotel itself, hungering after a host, has its own power to “shine” and resurrect its violent past through an eternal feedback loop of vulnerable humans willing to execute its sinister wishes. The longer Jack stays in the Hotel, the more susceptible he becomes to its violent past and the Overlook’s next evil reincarnation. 

Jack’s regression into madness comes full circle when he “shines” — that is, comes face to face — with the ghost of Delbert Grady. In a totally beguiling red bathroom conversation, Jack, like a mirror, faces his doppelgänger, the deceased Delbert Grady, who not only denies his role of ever having been the Overlook’s caretaker, but who chillingly tells Jack a truth about THEIR own nature. “I beg to differ with you, [Jack], but you are the caretaker, you have always been the caretaker.” It’s one of the best mindfuck moments in cinematic history. A trippy, metaphysical moment that combines the Hotel’s psychic history with the current guest’s collapsing mind, making the two entities become one. The Jack-Grady duality presupposes a ton of freaky theories about the cyclical awakening of Jack’s darker self, none of which are affirmed in conclusive terms, but all of which collapse the dualities of normal to abnormal, sane to insane, real to surreal, man to monster. If Jack has always been the caretaker, who is Delbert Grady? Is he an unconscious doppelgänger from Jack’s mind? A symbol of the Hotel’s rebirth in Jack? Which would make Jack now primally, psychically, murderously ready to take Grady’s place? Is Grady just the previous host and victim of the Hotel’s cycle of violent reincarnation? Was there another Grady-like butcher before him? And then before him? Does Grady have a contract with the Hotel that can only be fulfilled by inspiring Jack to follow in his murderous footsteps? If Jack follows and kills Wendy and Danny, does he become Grady in the next life and assume the role of butler, only to meet another Jack in the red bathroom? How long has this cycle been going on? “Forever and ever and ever”? Is the Overlook Hotel just an evil place where history repeats itself, trapping its victims in a repetitive sequence of time like the infinite string of words, “All work and no plays makes Jack a dull boy”? Will the carnage ever end?

What I find so frightening about THE SHINING is that it represents the most nihilistic vision of the Star Child’s infinite rebirths since DR. STRANGELOVE, only here, rather than decimating humanity in a plume of ash, history leans into the blade of an ax by endlessly butchering itself “forever and ever and ever.” A part of me wonders now if I was too hasty in calling DR. STRANGELOVE Kubrick’s “most pessimistic” work, because it makes you wonder, what’s worse: Atomic annihilation that wipes everything away quickly? Or a gradual descent into madness that ends in a repeating cycle of slow-cooked slaughter? True to Kubrickian form, time not only moves in reverse in THE SHINING from the gaze of the Star Child, but it depicts a world wherein primitive regression occurs at the precise moment when normal outside communication breaks down, leaving the Torrance family trapped in a snowstorm and cut off from human contact for several months. On this point regarding the inability to communicate, Kubrick states:

“One of the ironies in The Shining is that you have people who can see the past and future, and have telepathic contact, but the telephone and the short-wave radio don’t work, and the snowbound mountain roads are impassable. Failure of communication is a theme which runs through a number of my films.”

Isolation, Kubrick suggests, which is the antithesis of communication, is where humanity’s capacity for self-destruction begins. Ripper cuts off all telephonic communication with the outside world in order to create a Doomsday cloud of smoke around his enemies. HAL cuts off communication with Earth in order destroy those who would unplug him. Alice and Bill experience communication breakdown in the marital sphere, destroying the distinction between objective reality and private fantasy. Jack (or maybe Grady?) cuts off radio communication with the outside world as a way to butcher his family and fulfill the Overlook’s twisted destiny. In each case, methods of progress and communication revert to weapons of destruction and descent. Isolation and alienation swells into blinkered obsession, forcing time to move backwards. Language breaks down and characters revert to primitivism. Insanity breaks loose from the restraints of rationalism, causing these godlike characters, at the height of their arrogance, to retreat into fantasy, death and annihilation. Can you hear Kubrick laughing from his grave as the modern world, with all its great technology, touts itself as more progressive than its primitive ancestors? Jack, in a long line of failed star children, is just another primordial man (monkey) with an ax (bone), lost in a monolithic maze with a mad craving for immortality (survival). His desire to join the other immortals of the Overlook Hotel in some way feels no different than Strangelove’s obsession with the “perfection” of the Doomsday Machine, or HAL’s obsession with machine “infallibility.” These would-be gods represent the false authorities of the Kubrickian universe who breed monsters and machines over intelligible, forward-thinking men and women. 

As THE SHINING is a film about Jack’s fever dream for immortality through an endless cycle of violence, death, and reincarnation, it opens up a unique perspective of how Kubrick uses genre to reflect upon, in godlike ways, the very things that threaten to destroy humanity. He states: “Ghost stories appeal to our craving for immortality. If you can be afraid of a ghost, then you have to believe that a ghost may exist. And if a ghost exists then oblivion might not be the end.” Applying these ideas to the film, there’s a fascinating moment when Jack, like Kubrick himself, “shines” over a hedge maze model and reflects upon, in godlike contemplation, his desire to control the center of the maze. The center of the maze, if it can ever be found, suggestively holds the elixir to immortality. That elixir is key for escaping the apocalyptic bottleneck — the cycles of destruction — that strangles all of Kubrick’s characters. Now remember, the entirety of THE SHINING is based on the pattern of a maze. The Overlook’s floor design (and carpet itself) is patterned like a maze with various paths and choices, twists and turns. This production design mirrors the mind-maze of the Overlook’s human host, Jack/Grady, both of whom get repeatedly lost in the cyclical maze of self-destruction, as if frozen somewhere in the hedge before ever locating the center. Jack muses over the maze-model and begins to “shine,” that is, he visualizes tiny creature-like figures of Wendy and Danny arriving in the center of the “real” hedge maze outside. Just as Jack “shines” for control over the maze’s immortal center, so does Kubrick, throughout his career, “shine” from above his creations like a god musing over the way his characters always lean into the endless cycles of immortal rebirth and self-destruction. 

The concept of the maze has always been thematically and aesthetically tied to Kubrick’s work. There’s the maze of the racetrack infrastructure in THE KILLING that links to Johnny’s foolproof bank robbery plan. There’s the zigzagging trench warfare mazes of smoke, debris, and death in PATHS OF GLORY that Dax and his men seek to survive. There’s the symbolic mazes of 2001 that test and challenge our ability to solve the secrets of the monolith; the bureaucratic mazes of diplomacy in the face of nuclear annihilation from DR. STRANGELOVE; the peerage and etiquette mazes of the decadent aristocracy in BARRY LYNDON; the structural mazes of order and chaos from FULL METAL JACK; to finally the maze of the collective unconscious in THE SHINING. Mazes are everywhere in Kubrick’s work. And the logic of the maze, as I interpret it, serves a conceptual purpose in his films. People, for Kubrick, as they grow towards enlightened ideals of reason, liberty, control, and self-mastery, always reach a point when they lose their way in the maze of their own nature. Something goes wrong somewhere. People regress to crude, primitive versions of themselves. The seeds of evil get planted and left behind for the next generation to solve. It’s like when Dick Hallorann tells Danny, “When something happens it can leaves traces behind.” Those traces can affect the living. They affected Jack and his ability to locate the center of the maze. And being lost in the maze of immortal repetition, frozen as it were in the annals of time, is to be reduced to a primal figure, like a Ripper, Alex, Barry, Jack or gorilla. Kubrick has made many films about the human predicament caught in an endless cycle of death and rebirth, but THE SHINING is his first film that really gets under your skin and shows how primally terrifying the predicament really is.

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