The Shining: Family feud
The Shining is so full of iconic images and moments that, even if you haven’t seen it before, you know some of what’s coming. There’s Jack Nicholson poking his face through the hole in a door and snarling, “Heeeeere’s Johnny.” There’s little moppet Danny riding around an empty hotel on his trike until he comes upon twin girls and an elevator spilling blood. There’s Room 237, Tony the imaginary friend, a colossal hedge maze, and the revelatory phrase, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” It’s fitting to know these images, because The Shining refers to visions of what lies ahead.
Nicholson marvelously looms over the film as struggling writer and recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance, hired to oversee a deserted hotel for its off season. He’s hoping to use that time to work on a writing project, despite the hotel’s shady history: one of his predecessors suffered a psychotic break, murdering his daughters and wife before shooting himself. Meanwhile his son Danny receives frightening premonitions of the hotel from his imaginary friend Tony, the aforementioned visions of horrible murders and a torrent of blood.
But The Shining is no mere ghost story. It’s a disturbing domestic drama about festering marital discontent, the hotel forcing the family to confront the effects of Jack’s alcoholism. Jack rattles on about the weight of his responsibilities, and he never misses a chance to profane wife Wendy. She in turn suppresses her unhappiness, Shelley Duvall’s face constantly betraying fear. And Danny retreats to his own world. At one point, Danny stumbles upon his father staring out a window, upon which Jack makes Danny sit on his lap, caresses his hair, kisses his head, and tells him how much he loves him. Danny is visibly uncomfortable the whole time, the unwitting, violated recipient of a drunk’s well-meant advances. It might be the scariest scene in the movie, Kubrick slyly illustrating that alcoholism is not some hysterical melodrama like The Lost Weekend but a horror story.
As a work of horror, The Shining is magnificent right down to the chase-through-a-haunted-house climax and the spirits that reveal themselves to each of the Torrances. Wendy is iconoclastic in her resourcefulness, and unlike the typical slasher prey, she’s willing to use her weapon. With its Resnais-influenced gliding camerawork and its Argento-inspired pattern carpets, the look of the film is unsettling even at its most mundane. The score reliably sets the mood, with a bold, blaring opening (augmented by background wailing) and a chanting finale, excitedly urging Jack on to his fate. There’s violence, and the gore is restrained, but what’s most frightening are the sudden cuts or surprise percussion. You’ll jump when Jack tears paper from his typewriter, and even the title cards grow intimidating by the end.
It doesn’t exactly make sense, certain touches deliberately contradictory in order to disorient the audience, but Stanley Kubrick is infamously meticulous, and every frame of The Shining rewards attention. For instance, when we first tour the Overlook Hotel, Jack’s wife and son in tow, we move in one tracking shot from the right to the left, director Stanley Kubrick subtly taking them back into the past. During the Torrance’s drive to the Overlook, I swear one of the hillside shots quotes the opening of Aguirre, the Wrath of God and its reverberating Popol Vuh score, another somewhat apocalyptic cabin fever flick anchored by a manic lead performance. And what does the film literally become outside in the hedge maze? Following in footsteps.
There’s a lot going on in The Shining, even if it’s impossible to fit all the pieces together, and while it’s spectacularly fun, it’s also intensely scary. When that final day begins, Kubrick places Shelley Duvall with her back to us and off to the side as she fends off her attacker. Every time she swings a bat, the effect is that of a first-person shooter, only The Shining is a first-person nightmare.
MSC Aggie Cinema presents The Shining at Rudder 302 on April 16 at 8:00 PM.