the shining movie essay

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Do people talk this way about real tragedies? Will his wife be absolutely fascinated? Does he ever tell her about it? Jack, wife Wendy ( Shelley Duvall ) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) move into the vast hotel just as workers are shutting it down for the winter; the chef, Dick Hallorann ( Scatman Crothers ) gives them a tour, with emphasis on the food storage locker ("You folks can eat up here a whole year and never have the same menu twice"). Then they're alone, and a routine begins: Jack sits at a typewriter in the great hall, pounding relentlessly at his typewriter, while Wendy and Danny put together a version of everyday life that includes breakfast cereal, toys and a lot of TV. There is no sense that the three function together as a loving family.

Danny: Is he reliable? He has an imaginary friend named Tony, who speaks in a lower register of Danny's voice. In a brief conversation before the family is left alone, Hallorann warns Danny to stay clear of Room 237, where the violence took place, and he tells Danny they share the "shining," the psychic gift of reading minds and seeing the past and future. Danny tells Dick that Tony doesn't want him to discuss such things. Who is Tony? "A little boy who lives in my mouth."

Tony seems to be Danny's device for channeling psychic input, including a shocking vision of blood spilling from around the closed doors of the hotel elevators. Danny also sees two little girls dressed in matching outfits; although we know there was a two-year age difference in the murdered children, both girls look curiously old. If Danny is a reliable witness, he is witness to specialized visions of his own that may not correspond to what is actually happening in the hotel.

That leaves Wendy, who for most of the movie has that matter-of-fact banality that Shelley Duvall also conveyed in Altman's " 3 Women ." She is a companion and playmate for Danny, and tries to cheer Jack until he tells her, suddenly and obscenely, to stop interrupting his work. Much later, she discovers the reality of that work, in one of the movie's shocking revelations. She is reliable at that moment, I believe, and again toward the end when she bolts Jack into the food locker after he turns violent.

But there is a deleted scene from "The Shining" (1980) that casts Wendy's reliability in a curious light. Near the end of the film, on a frigid night, Jack chases Danny into the labyrinth on the hotel grounds. His son escapes, and Jack, already wounded by a baseball bat, staggers, falls and is seen the next day, dead, his face frozen into a ghastly grin. He is looking up at us from under lowered brows, in an angle Kubrick uses again and again in his work. Here is the deletion, reported by the critic Tim Dirks: "A two-minute explanatory epilogue was cut shortly after the film's premiere. It was a hospital scene with Wendy talking to the hotel manager; she is told that searchers were unable to locate her husband's body."

If Jack did indeed freeze to death in the labyrinth, of course his body was found -- and sooner rather than later, since Dick Hallorann alerted the forest rangers to serious trouble at the hotel. If Jack's body was not found, what happened to it? Was it never there? Was it absorbed into the past, and does that explain Jack's presence in that final photograph of a group of hotel partygoers in 1921? Did Jack's violent pursuit of his wife and child exist entirely in Wendy's imagination, or Danny's, or theirs?

The one observer who seems trustworthy at all times is Dick Hallorann, but his usefulness ends soon after his midwinter return to the hotel. That leaves us with a closed-room mystery: In a snowbound hotel, three people descend into versions of madness or psychic terror, and we cannot depend on any of them for an objective view of what happens. It is this elusive open-endedness that makes Kubrick's film so strangely disturbing.

Yes, it is possible to understand some of the scenes of hallucination. When Jack thinks he is seeing other people, there is always a mirror present; he may be talking with himself. When Danny sees the little girls and the rivers of blood, he may be channeling the past tragedy. When Wendy thinks her husband has gone mad, she may be correct, even though her perception of what happens may be skewed by psychic input from her son, who was deeply scarred by his father's brutality a few years earlier. But what if there is no body at the end?

Kubrick was wise to remove that epilogue. It pulled one rug too many out from under the story. At some level, it is necessary for us to believe the three members of the Torrance family are actually residents in the hotel during that winter, whatever happens or whatever they think happens.

Those who have read Stephen King's original novel report that Kubrick dumped many plot elements and adapted the rest to his uses. Kubrick is telling a story with ghosts (the two girls, the former caretaker and a bartender), but it isn't a "ghost story," because the ghosts may not be present in any sense at all except as visions experienced by Jack or Danny.

The movie is not about ghosts but about madness and the energies it sets loose in an isolated situation primed to magnify them. Jack is an alcoholic and child abuser who has reportedly not had a drink for five months but is anything but a "recovering alcoholic." When he imagines he drinks with the imaginary bartender, he is as drunk as if he were really drinking, and the imaginary booze triggers all his alcoholic demons, including an erotic vision that turns into a nightmare. We believe Hallorann when he senses Danny has psychic powers, but it's clear Danny is not their master; as he picks up his father's madness and the story of the murdered girls, he conflates it into his fears of another attack by Jack. Wendy, who is terrified by her enraged husband, perhaps also receives versions of this psychic output. They all lose reality together. Yes, there are events we believe: Jack's manuscript, Jack locked in the food storage room, Jack escaping, and the famous "Here's Johnny!" as he hatchets his way through the door. But there is no way, within the film, to be sure with any confidence exactly what happens, or precisely how, or really why.

Kubrick delivers this uncertainty in a film where the actors themselves vibrate with unease. There is one take involving Scatman Crothers that Kubrick famously repeated 160 times. Was that "perfectionism," or was it a mind game designed to convince the actors they were trapped in the hotel with another madman, their director? Did Kubrick sense that their dismay would be absorbed into their performances?

"How was it, working with Kubrick?" I asked Duvall 10 years after the experience.

"Almost unbearable," she said. "Going through day after day of excruciating work, Jack Nicholson's character had to be crazy and angry all the time. And my character had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week. I was there a year and a month. After all that work, hardly anyone even criticized my performance in it, even to mention it, it seemed like. The reviews were all about Kubrick, like I wasn't there."

Like she wasn't there.

Also in Ebert's Great Movies series at rogerebert.com: Kubrick's " Paths of Glory ," " Dr. Strangelove " and "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The Shining (1980)

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The Definitives

Critical essays, histories, and appreciations of great films

The Shining

Essay by brian eggert october 27, 2019.

A metaphysical and narrative maze, The Shining has been watched like so many films by Stanley Kubrick, through waves of deliberation and reconsideration. Although initially reproached for its lack of conventional haunted house scares, the 1980 film has beckoned audiences, critics, and scholars back to the eerie void of the Overlook Hotel, as if anyone who sees the film is fated to repeat an ongoing cycle of examination and speculation. What is it that draws viewers back to the film? What secrets does it hold? What was Kubrick’s grand design for the boundless array of imagery and symbols embedded into every minor detail of the production? Kubrick refused to answer questions about his intended meaning, and in doing so, he preserved the great arcana about his work. But like so many films by the enigmatic director, The Shining is a conceptual arena that Kubrick discovered in the process of making it, thus negating many of the specific, subsequent analyses or eureka moments that claim to have figured out what Kubrick had in mind all along. More even than 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film famous for inspiring thought and questions about its intentions, The Shining lends itself to the subjective perceptions and interpretations of the viewer. Standing back and considering the macro concept instead of the micro details planted throughout, one will recognize that Kubrick’s ambition was to create the obsessive attention, maddening circularity, and fixations so commonly stimulated by the film. Rather than search for a decisive reading or interpretation of the specifics, consider instead why The Shining remains an open text, a cinematic maze to be explored again and again.

The Shining is a Gothic tale of domestic violence, yet Kubrick’s puzzlework inhabits the spaces between the lines of the film’s genre. Far removed from its source in Stephen King’s best-selling novel from 1977, the film opens not unlike the grand overture of 2001: A Space Odyssey , ushering the viewer into the Rocky Mountain setting with panoramic shots captured from a low-flying helicopter. These are gliding, majestic images that feel ominous beneath the doomed tones of Wendy Carlos’ synth version of “Dies Irae,” the hymn performed at requiem masses in medieval times to evoke the Day of Judgment. The music suggests the Torrances, Jack and Wendy (Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall), along with their young boy Danny (Danny Lloyd), will be judged by forces of ghostly, mythical, and historical import. Once settled into their new quarters at the Overlook Hotel, Jack, who took the job as a winter caretaker so he could outline his latest writing project, goes mad from something : cabin fever, ghostly possession, alcoholism, or perhaps all of the above. The hotel’s apparitions speak to him, compelling him to chop his family into pieces with an ax. But Danny, psychically warned of his father’s impending murder, escapes the hotel with his mother, leaving Jack behind to die, frozen in the hotel’s hedge maze. What remains is an enigma—a compendium of inadequate plotting, stirring imagery, and visual symbols that seem to conflict with Kubrick’s status as a master filmmaker who took years to refine and perfect his projects.

To adapt King’s novel, Kubrick hired Diane Johnson, an author who taught Gothic literature at Berkeley at the time. Tossing aside the elaborate backstories and themes from King’s book, Kubrick and Johnson use the skeletal frame of the original story to fulfill the director’s own conceptual curiosities. The result has all the telltale signs of a traditional Gothic yarn: a large haunted structure, family secrets, psychic abilities, and a ghostly presence. There’s no mention of the circumstances or backstory that brought Jack Torrance to Colorado, where he interviews to become the winter caretaker of the historic Overlook Hotel, nor is there mention of the long, notorious history of the Overlook. In the initial interview, the dry hotel manager, Ullman (Barry Nelson), makes a brief reference to the hotel’s construction on the site of an “Indian burial ground” and droningly shares a story about the former caretaker, named Charles Grady, who murdered his entire family over the isolated winter months. When Grady (Philip Stone) appears to Jack later in the film as an apparition of a British waiter, he goes by the name Delbert Grady, leading to speculation among viewers as to whether this is a continuity error or an intentional clue. As we will see, a lot of The Shining is like that. In any case, King’s novel embraces the traditions of Gothic writers, whereas Kubrick turns the Gothic on its head with an old dark house in which the scariest thing is your husband or father. It’s a subversive film in this way, as Kubrick diverts from the look of a conventional Gothic film such as Vampyr (1932) or The Innocents (1961), both rich in their use of shadow to strike the appropriate mood. Instead, Kubrick shoots almost entirely in well-lit spaces, prompting critic Pauline Kael to ask, “Who wants to see evil in daylight, through a wide-angle lens?”

What might be a spooky tale of a family entering the Gothic realm of a haunted house and maligned spirits gives way to a frightening domestic situation. Kubrick more readily sees the problem of Jack’s alcoholism, misogyny, and abuse as an infection of the Torrance family unit. Alternatively, King had struggled with substance abuse at the time of writing his novel and undoubtedly empathized with the corrupted paterfamilias at the story’s center. From the very beginning, Kubrick sees Jack as the destructive force he is. Watch as Jack dismisses Ullman’s disclosure about Grady, quieting any concern by referring to Wendy as a “confirmed ghost story and horror film nut,” despite no evidence later in the film that Jack ever told his family about the Overlook’s horrible past. Rather, in his interview with Ullman, Jack looks like a man desperate for a job with his accommodating grin and cheery demeanor, a sharp contrast to the often sarcastic and degrading tone he uses with Wendy and Danny. Jack is an abusive patriarch, evident from the belittling way he speaks to his wife, including his nickname for her as “the old sperm bank.” Wendy, chronically codependent, enables the behavior. When a doctor (Anne Jackson) examines Danny after a small seizure—a paranormal warning sign—down the mountain in Sidewinder, Wendy talks about Jack’s abusive behavior like a battered wife, reciting justifications and Jack’s empty promises to quell the doctor’s evident concern. Indeed, the pervasive threat in the film does not originate from an outside source, such as a specter, as many Gothic tales do, including King’s book. At the outset, the danger in the film stems from within the family. Cinematically, it’s a concept that rethinks the traditional narrative drives of horror that bring the family closer together by experiencing a shared trauma, such as The Exorcist (1973) before or Poltergeist (1982) after. In another way, The Shining follows a trajectory in horror films after Rosemary’s Baby (1968) in which a member of the family turns against their own.

Adding further context to The Shining ’s place in the horror genre, it was released after a series of films and books had tapped the idea of children with mental powers: the psychic children in Robert Mulligan’s The Other (1972) or Disney’s Escape To Witch Mountain (1975), the angry telekinetics in Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) and The Fury (1978), and the “psychoplasmic” offspring in David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979). King’s book features Danny as someone able to call out for help from Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers in the film) when needed, as well as read the minds of his parents. The Overlook, a place of psychic trauma, is awakened by Danny’s powers in the novel, and it grows to become a conscious force that corrupts Jack because it wants to feed on the boy. But Kubrick’s film does not represent Danny as having a specific talent; it avoids defining the flashes in Danny’s mind, captured with erratic subliminal editing, and never reveals whether the boy in Danny’s throat, named Tony, is really an imaginary friend or a personification of his psychic talent. Instead, it’s enough to know that Danny is an involuntary receptor of psychic images. He can make no more sense of the pictures-in-a-book than the viewer can of the Overlook Hotel or what exactly happens in the plot. Kubrick has reduced the intricate story and psychological underpinnings of King’s novel to render every aspect somehow ethereal and uncertain, leaving us in a perpetual state of unease and inquisitiveness. The result feels strategic, as though Kubrick intended to give fewer details if only to compel the viewer to make connections of their own.

Similarly, Kubrick affirms only vague allusions to the source and origins of the film’s ghosts, if that’s what they are. They have no stated ambition to acquire Danny by corrupting his father, as they do in King’s book. Their use is limited to a few apparitions, concentrated mostly on the bartender Lloyd (Joe Turkel) and the waiter named Grady. The others, mostly spied by Danny or Wendy in her frantic rush through the Overlook in the climax, consist of random and unexplained images: The murdered Grady twins tell Danny to “Come play with us… forever, and ever, and ever.” A tuxedoed man appears to Wendy with a drink in his hand, a bloody gash down the top of his head, and says, “Great party, isn’t it?” One apparition, donning an animal costume, appears to be fellating a well-dressed man. And the dreaded elevator, with its iconic ocean of blood pouring out from the slowly opening doors, has no logical place in the story—it’s a phantom image whose consequence is never acknowledged. Danny sees the elevator doors opening in his mind, and so too does Wendy, as there’s never a moment when that sanguine tide rolls over her ankles and submerges her feet in red. She seems to have a touch of “the shining,” Hallorann’s name for Danny’s extra-sensory talent. Additionally, each ghost or apparition exists outside of any established mythology embedded into the Overlook by King. They are not representative of a single force or group of spirits that must be addressed by the plot in the manner of an exorcism. Like so many elements of The Shining , the spirit world is indefinite, yet all the more haunting for its uncertainty. Whether they compel Jack to act or not remains debatable, but the threat in The Shining remains the physical presence of the ax-wielding Jack.

Of course, every narrative element broad stroked above cannot adequately portray the uncanny effect of watching The Shining , which is more to the point of this essay. But those who watch the film and demand answers often find themselves confronted with details that could be, and in many cases probably are, continuity errors or coincidences. Is there some hidden meaning in the fact that, in Wendy’s frantic journey through the Overlook, the kitchen knife she carries alternates between her left and right hand? Why does the color of Jack’s typewriter change in the film? And what hidden purpose could the so-called impossible window in Ullman’s office serve, as it should not exist according to the floor plan of the hotel? In all likelihood, these details mean nothing; they doubtless resulted from continuity errors or practical on-set solutions and oversights that occur in the course of every film shoot. Props move, ideas from deleted scenes or rewritten story elements remain conspicuously in the frame, and the layout of the Overlook remains a constant source of confusion. While some of these factors serve as a confrontation to the rational-minded filmgoer, they also drive unjustified beliefs in the “crippled epistemology” of conspiracy theorists. In his monograph for the British Film Institute, Roger Luckhurst wrote The Shining “does to its viewers what the hotel does to its visitors—it makes them shine on things glimpsed that were perhaps never there.”

Kubrick’s reluctance to shed light on basic elements of the story, combined with what could be called mistakes in the filmmaking process, has made room for enduring questions that force the viewer to search for clues and answers. The film is a cryptograph, but the cipher exists only in Kubrick’s head, if at all. The insufficient details of the plot, the wealth of continuity errors left to be second-guessed, and the repetitive visual motifs have led to an overwhelming amount of commentary and close readings among film historians and online commentators. Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237 (2012) considers five such theories, ranging from a hypothesis that suggests Kubrick meant The Shining as a confession that he shot the first moon landing for NASA, to the theory that the placement of Calumet baking powder in the film, with its logo of a Native American in a headdress, meant to underscore the theme of genocide in America by the hands of European colonists. Although it is not the ambition of this essay to dismiss any interpretation, the theories continue and remain part of a more significant subjective process of reading film. Every moment of The Shining can be pored over, debated, and considered for what Kubrick intended, certainly more than most films released by a major Hollywood studio like Warner Bros. But the real purpose of the film seems to be less an articulated reading; instead, it acts a designer puzzle with no answer, a Rorschach test that, on its own, remains empty until the viewer fills it up.

Kubrick understood that film texts are read ; that is how they form meaning. This concept had consumed the director since he sought to tap into the audience’s subconscious mind with 2001: A Space Odyssey , and then continued to challenge filmgoers with the elusive meanings of A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975). It is the role of the spectator to interpret the film regardless of the filmmaker’s intent, and Kubrick had become increasingly interested in this concept. Theorist and critic Christian Metz argued in terms of semiotics that the spectator “ constitutes the cinema signifier,” that the viewer arrives at the film’s meaning, both in terms of the surface text and its deeper meanings, through an instant, impulsive, and sometimes an intellectual process of interpretation. The viewer, then, is an active spectator who determines the meaning of the film through their understanding of its language. To achieve this, the viewer must negotiate constant stimuli within and without the frame: the juxtapositions of one image after another in a scene or sequence through editing; the use of music; the placement of specific details within the frame; the choices of camera angle, color, plot, performance, and countless other grammatical specifics to the medium. Each of these elements of cinematic structure and syntax could hold a thousand possible meanings for the viewer. Then the individual could arrive at any number of meanings depending on their interpretation. As a film object, the text means nothing without the viewer’s readership. “A text (a book, a film, a painting) only comes into existence in the act of ‘reading’ it,” wrote scholar Patrick Phillips. “In this way the reader of the text is, in a way, simultaneously its creator.”

Filmmakers can hope to guide interpretation by employing a transparent and intentioned film grammar, based on a whole history of the ever-developing language of film and recognition of how that language has been interpreted and progressed in the past. In his formative book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema , Peter Wollen argues that both the formal elements of a film object (the signs) and its signified expression (the meaning) are inextricably connected. “There is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified,” Wollen wrote, acknowledging that, similar to the development of linguistic models, commonalities exist within the symbols of filmmaking—certain associations that most viewers, but not all, will make. The best a filmmaker can hope for, it seems, is to tap into the shared, interpreted language of the collective majority of their audience. However, the personal histories and cultural learning of each individual informs their perception. Metz argues that the “plurality of readings is associated with the plurality of codes which give form to the film.” In other words, interpretations will vary based on perception, and perception is a subjective state as multifaceted as human beings are from one another. Metz also believed “the practice of cinema is only possible through the perceptual passion: the desire to see.” As viewers, we have an innate desire to watch a film like The Shining and understand it, to extrapolate its meaning from our own experiences and interpretations. Accordingly, Kubrick’s approach to The Shining may not intend a straightforward intellectual understanding of its meaning, even as it invites readership.

The way The Shining uses film language relates to subconscious connections in the mind. It is the way that some free verse poets create associations through unconnected thoughts and words, arriving at an unconscious meaning far less straightforward than reading a series of scenes to determine what occurs in the plot. In interviews with French critic Michel Ciment and others from the period, Kubrick talked about being inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s Rhapsody: A Dream Novel from 1926, a story that follows a Viennese doctor transitioning between states of consciousness and dreams as he pursues his erotic fantasies. The director would later adapt the book into Eyes Wide Shut in 1999. Kubrick and Sigmund Freud alike have compared the experience of the cinema to dreaming, where visual impressions make connections in the mind, which is another way of expressing the cognitive process of meaning-making described by Metz, Phillips, and Wollen. Kubrick was drawn to the ambiguities of cinema, its ability to capture a state of waking dreams as an impressionist painter would capture light and form in unfocused brushstrokes. Kubrick doubtless sought to evoke this quality with The Shining , more so than any other film in his oeuvre, even his comparatively literal adaptation of Eyes Wide Shut . Though viewers and Kubrick enthusiasts will debate about the intentionality of The Shining ’s rich symbolic underpinnings, there exists an undeniable compulsion on the part of the film’s audience to read into the formal language beyond the surface text, as the film has willingly engaged the fantasies of the film-reader.

How Kubrick achieved his maze of the mind remains a matter of film history and some speculation, especially when it comes to questions about the intentionality of his continuity and logistical errors. Typical for Kubrick, it took the meticulous filmmaker several years to complete his adaptation of King’s book. He chose the material after the disappointing performance of Barry Lyndon in 1975, a film that failed to strike a chord with a larger, more commercial audience. It has been widely suggested that The Shining was Kubrick’s attempt to reach the stratosphere of popular culture, using King’s name as a launchpad, and that Jack’s repeated statement on the typed page—“All work and no play make Jack a dull boy”—somehow reflected this. Moreover, it takes no stretch of the imagination to see a parallel between Jack Torrance and Stanley Kubrick. Torrance is a blocked writer with personal demons to overcome, and he seeks a reclusive spot for the winter to regain himself and complete work on his next writing project. Similarly, Kubrick increased his reclusiveness around the same time. He had hired his extended family members and close friends to contribute to his productions; he had relocated to a remote country manor far removed from his previous home in London. Some would argue that Kubrick even resembled his first and only choice to play Torrance, Jack Nicholson, both of whom appear ragged and psychologically drained on the set of The Shining , as evidenced in Viviane Kubrick’s short documentary about its making. They both could strike an intimidating gaze, sometimes called a “death stare” or the “Kubrick Stare,” with their downturned chin, mouth creepily agape, and a prominent brow, under which eyes peer out into nothingness.

The Shining was filmed on MGM’s British lot at Elstree Studios, where the interiors of the Overlook Hotel, among them a massive and functional set-piece of the Colorado Lounge, and the entire hedge maze were constructed for the production. The hotel itself is not a real-life location, though the Timberline Lodge in Oregon inspired it. Its life-size interiors and some of its exteriors were built in an entirely convincing environment on soundstages. The closed set was also a believable and livable space, housing much of the production’s cast and crew as an actual hotel would. But the soundstages did not precisely mirror the hotel as outlined in the film, which accounts for several of the breaks in layout and visual logic that appear throughout the picture—especially in scenes that follow Danny on his big wheel tricycle on the floor of Room 237, where the Colorado Lounge can be briefly glimpsed in the background. In effect, Kubrick was replicating the approach of German expressionist filmmakers from F.W. Murnau to Robert Weine, who built their sets from the ground up with cockeyed angles and dark shadows to reflect the inner corruption of their characters. The shooting spaces of The Shining , free of the distractions that would plague a production in a working hotel, allowed the director and actors to embrace what Kubrick called their “psychic energy.”

The mood on the set, eyed in Viviane Kubrick’s peek-of-a-film, reflected the dynamic of the screen story. Nicholson, well versed in roles that critiqued masculinity (see Five Easy Pieces , 1970), brings Jack Torrance layers of escalating madness and cruelty. Kubrick seemed to respond to Jack’s behavior, treating Duvall with harshness and impatience in one scene when she fails to hit her mark on cue. Even Duvall’s character had been cut down by Kubrick, reducing Wendy to a mere woman in danger instead of a three-dimensional character. Though Duvall insisted such treatment fostered a better performance, the lingering trauma of the experience remained. Still, Kubrick was constantly rewriting his scripts on the set and never published his initial drafts; no hard evidence remains to contrast what was initially intended and what appears onscreen. In the face of such widespread speculation and theorizing about The Shining ’s meaning, it is important to remember that Kubrick’s scripts were a living document, ever-changing and fluid. He was continually coming up with new ideas, making alterations at his typewriter, and adding pages to the script, just as Jack punches away at his keys to bring his manuscript to life. In the book Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis , the authors note that Kubrick’s shooting script “seems increasingly to resemble a talisman rather than a set of imperatives.” The performers, then, had to be ready to improvise, learn lines on the go, and take specific direction at a moment’s notice, outside of any preparatory effort. The six-month shoot became a collaborative effort between the director and his cast, albeit dependent on whether Kubrick could find the moment he was searching for amid his painstaking need for repeated takes. This hardly sounds like the creative environment where one filmmaker carries out his elaborate, precalculated design to achieve a singular meaning.

There were also technical hills to overtake. Shooting within a tactile hotel set-piece, which did not have detachable edifices such as walls and floors to hide cameras, presented a challenge. It would have been impossible for Kubrick to lay down tracks to shoot scenes when Danny pedals his tricycle down long corridors before arriving at the same place he started. The solution? The Steadicam, invented by Garret Brown in 1975 to supply long, fluid takes with the use of a body-mounted harness that makes the frame seem weightless. Serving as a camera operator under the guidance of cinematographer John Alcott, Brown glides the camera with a wraithlike balance rarely seen in the cinema at that point. Before The Shining ’s release, only a few films used the Steadicam—including Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory , John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man , and John G. Avildsen’s Rocky , all released in 1976. But Kubrick needed the technique to work in the limited space of the hallways and rooms of the Overlook sets, as well as the passageways of the hedge maze. Such cramped areas determined the form, inhabiting the space between his characters within their environment, such as when Jack pursues Wendy across the Colorado Lounge and up a stairway, and the camera moves with them in a shot reverse shot. More often, the Steadicam trails a character down a long, narrow passage. When Danny runs to escape his father in the snowy hedge maze climax with the camera trailing behind, and the shot looks back at Jack, the camera’s placement and movement create the sense of both moving with the characters and feeling pursued by Danny’s murderous father.

The Steadicam effect has a far more ethereal quality than the Panaglide technology employed in the POV opening of John Carpenter’s Halloween a year earlier. The camera seems to float, almost like a ghost, and engage its subject with a spooky directness. The subject of nearly every shot is centralized in the frame, using the same one-point linear perspective employed by Leonardo Da Vinci in his mural of The Last Supper . The lines of rooms, hallways, and mazes direct the eyes toward a focal point, usually the subject in the frame, imbuing it with visual emphasis that invites speculation. Kubrick’s use of perspective enhances the perceived importance of each character or object, while also drawing our attention away from smaller, possibly important and subliminal details within the frame. They are not as subliminal as the brief shots of the bloody elevator or the ghostly murdered twins inserted into Danny’s vision, but they are subliminal in the sense that they seem intentional, although they do not draw the camera’s attention. For instance, the presence of Native American motifs throughout the hotel has been read as significant to the meaning of The Shining . The Overlook is a site of imperialism and genocide, erected over a native burial grown by European colonists, who then used the motifs of the people they eradicated for interior decoration. The casualness of this atrocity should not be dismissed. Regardless, could it not be that Kubrick knew his concentration on characters in the focal point of any given scene would instantly pull the curious viewer’s gaze away from the very spot that the geometric lines of the rooms, hallways, and architecture tell us to look?

Given the on-set improvisations, constant rewriting, and how the spatial limitations of the sets dictated the form, the viewer of The Shining could not be blamed for questioning the extent of Kubrick’s grand design. The film is both less and more than what those who maintain wild theories about Kubrick’s intentions believe it to be. Less, in the sense that Kubrick’s spontaneity implies that he did not enter into the realm of The Shining with every detail prefigured, as some have argued; more, in the sense that the film-reader, whose subjectivity determines the film’s meaning, has an abundance of half-developed and uncertain contexts to search within and interpret. The film has a rich and endless string of patterns, sometimes literally so, inside of which the film-reader can lose themselves. It’s all the more paradoxical to the traditions of the genre in this respect, as long before the perpetual daylight of Midsommar (2019), Kubrick shot his horror film in the full illumination of a functioning hotel—inside the well-lit kitchen, bedrooms, hallways, and ballrooms of the Overlook, where the details were entirely visible if not conspicuously placed for us to find. But with everything illuminated, Kubrick does not tell the viewer where to look to decode his clues, if indeed they exist. Quite infuriatingly so, he demands that the viewer work at his film—and for audiences accustomed to the spoon-feeding of standard horror fare from the era, such a challenge could be maddening. Luckhurst wrote that the film is “high art and low culture, subversive yet utterly contained… seemingly destined to please no one.”

When The Shining debuted in 1980, it followed a lengthy promotional campaign and countless features in print about its extended production. Critics at the time had become suspicious of filmmakers indulging their whims with protracted shoots and elevated budgets. After all, 1980 was the same year as Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate , an infamous bomb that forced Hollywood to reconsider giving a proven filmmaker a blank check to make their dream project. With The Shining , critics reacted to the months of trailers that had showcased haunting imagery, such as the Overlook’s elevator doors opening to unleash a wave of blood and Kubrick’s pronouncement that he had made the scariest film ever. The critic for Sight & Sound called it a “trivial project,” and Pauline Kael complained in The New Yorker of the distancing effect found in Kubrick’s obsession with filmmaking technology and technique. After the New York premiere, Kubrick cut his 146-minute version down by more than twenty minutes: a few weeks after the film had opened in the U.S., he cut two minutes; just before the London debut, he cut another twenty-five minutes. The two minutes removed from the U.S. version consist of an alternate ending where Ullman, the hotel manager, greets Wendy in her hospital bed and informs her that her husband’s body was never found. Among the larger sections removed from the U.K. cut were the scenes with the doctor who talks to Danny after his seizure in Sidewinder, some of Jack’s misogynistic words about Wendy, and several of the supernatural elements from the latter half of the picture. Much like King, who will sometimes tinker with a single concept over several short stories, novellas, and books, Kubrick would rethink his films, sometimes after their debut.

Once again, Kubrick’s need to rethink his work, even after it was released theatrically, underscores that his designs were discovered in the process of its making, and perhaps not schematized in advance to the extent suggested by many fervent fans. Still, if there is a thematic current to The Shining , it exists in Kubrick’s desire to create a maze using imagery drawn from loaded icons—fairy tales, pop-culture, myth, history, and countless other sources discovered by the detail-oriented viewer. Consider the cultural touchpoints of a single scene, when Jack corners Wendy and Danny in their living quarters with an ax: Jack announces, “Wendy, I’m home,” in the manner of Desi Arnaz in I Love Lucy . Terrified, Wendy and Danny lock themselves in the bathroom. Jack approaches the door in character as the Big Bad Wolf. “Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in,” he says. In the next moment, he crashes through the door to deliver the line “Heeeeere’s Johnny!”—the familiar introduction from Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show . The commonplace domestic setting of these references is countered by the violent situation, creating a sense of twisted unease and familiarity. Such disorienting contrasts are evident throughout The Shining , begging the viewer to assume that Kubrick calculated their placement. With this in mind, the Overlook’s impossible floor plan could be less a result of the necessities of filmmaking and more an intentional choice to reflect the Gothic story’s need to disorient the viewer.

After these chillingly familiar yet unresolvable aspects of the film, the ambiguity of its ending leaves the viewer in a permanent state of restless confusion. In a series of slow movements and fades, the last images of The Shining display a wall of historical photographs. Jack appears in a black-and-white shot taken at the July 4th ball from 1921, echoing Delbert Grady’s fearsome line to Jack, “You are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir; I’ve always been here.” Has Jack been consumed by the Overlook and appropriated into its story by supernal means? Perhaps Jack’s mind, the mind of a depressive and alcoholic, has been emptied. Somewhere between the mental vacancy of his writer’s block and his mindless insomnia, between states of oversleeping and staying up too late, his mind is consumed by the Overlook. Maybe he finally accepts being occupied by the hotel when he remarks, “I’d give my goddamn soul for just a glass of beer.” Or is Jack caught in some nightmarish loop of fate destined to repeat itself? In the photo, Jack holds a piece of paper that the man behind him restrains him from showing. What does it say? “Help me” or “Let me out” perhaps? Any speculation may be pointless, as the ending was necessitated by a massive fire that brought the Colorado Lounge set to the ground and cost the production $2.5 million. Would Kubrick have made an ending closer to the one in King’s book—where the pressure in the neglected boilers causes the Overlook to explode—had his set not burned down? We can only speculate, as the conclusion proves as open-ended as almost every aspect of the film.

The Shining offers an enigma from which there is no escape, and with that in mind, the essential metaphor of the film becomes the hedge maze. Kubrick conceived of the maze as a necessary replacement for the silly living topiaries of King’s novel, and he even lost himself in the walls of the real maze when the film’s crew challenged him to enter. Kubrick harbored a lifelong fascination with the Minotaur of Greek mythology, the beast who stalks those who enter the Labyrinth of Crete. Jack serves as a stand-in for the Minotaur, and in one scene, he looms over the maze, looking down in a shot that transitions from a model to a bird’s eye view of the actual maze with Wendy and Danny inside. Perhaps Kubrick intended Danny as a Theseus figure, one who guides the Jack-Minotaur to his cold death inside the hedge maze. And could Danny’s ability to elude Jack be hinted in his love for Road Runner cartoons, which Danny watches more than once on television in the film? By extension, in the realm of Looney Tunes symbolism, Danny’s nickname, Doc, is a reference to Bugs Bunny’s saying, “What’s up, doc?” Of course, Bugs Bunny was an expert at evading everyone from Elmer Fudd to Daffy Duck. Just as the Road Runner avoided becoming lunch for Wile E. Coyote, Danny avoids his Minotaur-father in the maze in the finale. Then again, this line of thinking demonstrates how easily the viewer can make logical, plausible hypotheses through detail-oriented readership and stretch them into pure conjecture that, for instance, somehow encompasses both Greek mythology and Looney Tunes.

Kubrick turns the viewer of The Shining into a Jack-like figure—a filmaholic whose mind has been emptied out only to be filled with stimuli, all arranged and orchestrated by Kubrick, through which we access our subconscious film-reader. An exhaustive, and exhausting , degree of contexts and interpretable details threaten to distract from the more substantial consideration, which is the genius of Kubrick’s manipulation of his audience. He has caught the spectator of The Shining in a continuous loop, much like Jack, who both feels at home in the Overlook Hotel and like he’s been there before. “We all have moments of déjà vu,” he tells Wendy, “but this was ridiculous.” The viewer who is drawn back to The Shining every few years to reassess its secrets can relate. Kubrick’s arrangement of contexts and details does not point to a single meaning, but in stepping back and recognizing how the film functions as a maze, one will see a layering effect that makes aspects of the film familiar but elusive, and therefore frightening because their precise meaning evades any certainty or intellectual understanding. The terrifying aspect of The Shining , and its most enduring quality, is how Kubrick has trapped us in his cinematic maze to search without hope of ever discovering an adequate answer outside of our own making.

Bibliography:

Chion, Michel. Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey . British Film Institute, 2001.

Hardin, Robert. “The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism.” Political Extremism and Rationality . A. Breton et al., editors. Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 3-22.

LoBrutto, Vincent. Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. D.I. Fine Books, 1997.

Luckhurst, Roger. The Shining . BFI Film Classics. British Film Institute, 2013.

Metz, Christian. “The Imaginary Signifier.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (Third Edition). Mast, G. & Cohen, M. (Editors). Oxford University Press, 1985.

Nelson, Thomas Allen. Kubrick, Inside a Film Artist’s Maze. New and expanded ed. Indiana University Press, 2000.

Philips, Gene D., editor. Stanley Kubrick: Interviews . University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

Phillips, Patrick. “Spectator, Audience and Response.” An Introduction to Film Studies (Third Edition). Nelmes, Jill. (Editor). Routledge, 2003.

Sperb, Jason. The Kubrick Facade: Faces and Voices in the Films of Stanley Kubrick . Scarecrow Press, 2006.

Walker, Alexander, et al. Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis . Rev. and expanded. Norton, 1999.

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A Dramaturgical Analysis of The Shining

The Shining is a glaring example of a film that has led to countless interpretations, favoured by its complex and enigmatic nature, sometimes leading to interpretive deliriums – as confirmed by the documentary film Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2012). It is our belief that, since the themes are intrinsic to the dramaturgy of the narrative film, the thematic interpretation is valid if it grounds itself in solid dramaturgical analysis, something that even many good studies of the film lack. In this article we offer a basic dramaturgical analysis of The Shining (in both its versions – 144’ and 119’) using a method which follows authors such as Syd Field, Christopher Vogler, and Dara Marks: we deal with both the narrative world, i.e., the characters, their relations, and the environment in which they act, and the narrative structure. This analysis aims at offering a new basis for reconsidering the thematic interpretations proposed until now, in order to test the validity of the implicit and symptomatic meanings 1 which have been made about Kubrick’s film.

In spite of being an enjoyable horror film that evokes myths and fables, The Shining does not present a rigorously canonical dramatic framework. Nevertheless, the three-act structure 2 is respected: the first act starts at the beginning and ends when Danny enters the Colorado Lounge with bruises on his neck; the second act starts when Jack enters the Gold Room in anger and ends when Grady releases him from the pantry; the third act occupies the remaining part of the film until the closing credits start. At the same time, the 12 stages and most of the archetypes of the hero’s journey as theorised by Vogler 3 are traceable in The Shining , albeit being peculiarly distributed between Jack and Danny. 4

The narrative world and the first act

The protagonist of The Shining – hence, the Hero – is Jack Torrance, since the majority of sequences describe his actions which determine for the most part the development of the plot. On a pragmatic level, Jack’s desire concerns completing his tasks, namely writing his novel, being the caretaker, and – in the third act – killing his family and Hallorann. On a psychological level, Jack’s fatal flaw pertains both to the fear of failure and – particularly in the 144’ version – to alcoholism. Thus, his need consists of achieving fulfilment, something he attempts to do in a morbid way at the expense of his family. Finally, on a relational level, he has to face his wife and his son, who seem to be an obstacle to all his tasks, and the ghosts as well – symbols of evil, power, and immortality – who want him to be part of their world. 5 Obviously, the three levels intertwine: in order to avoid the dreaded failure, Jack desires both to write the novel (though he has no inspiration) and to make a good impression on his employers. The former aim dissolves during the second act, while the latter, proper to the Ordinary World, deviates gradually to its correlative in the Special World – i.e., Jack’s duty of evil caretaker, which entails killing his family and maybe achieving immortality, as we will learn eventually. At any rate, as a character Jack has an overall fairty-tale-like quality, since the intent of the film is to emphasize his allegorical quality rather than narrating an all-around psychological development.

In the first act we have a situation of apparent balance for Jack and his family. His manifest goal or desire (writing a novel), meshes well with the offered circumstances (spending five months of peace and quiet in the isolated hotel). His wife seems to be enthusiastic about the prospect as well. Jack is not even worried about the tragedy that occurred in 1970 – but of course this functions as an omen/foreshadowing for the audience. Danny feels lonely since he has nobody to play with, and he is reluctant about going to the hotel, but he can’t oppose the project. The boy is a young Hero who looks for a sense of satisfaction.

What is unusual about The Shining is also the fact that we have a threshold crossing of sorts inside the first act, when the protagonist and his family settle in the Overlook Hotel. The hotel is a special world for them, thus they have to explore it; in a sense, Jack’s adventure is that of being the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. However, there is no actual problem yet, but only the potentiality of it because of (1) premonitions due to the tragedy of 1970 and to the images conveyed by Danny’s shining, and (2) uncanny events such as Jack staring at the hedge maze model (followed by an ambiguous high-angle shot of the model) or in the distance with a vacant stare, his use of the words “forever and ever” like the ghostly Grady twins do, and his abhorrent nightmare of murdering his wife and child. Moreover, we will discover later that the actual adventure for Jack is not that of being the caretaker of the ordinary Overlook, but rather the caretaker of the special Overlook, which does not entail running the boiler and the like so much as killing his family. Furthermore, when Jack calls Wendy to tell her that he got the job we have a sort of Call to Adventure for the family – or, in Field’s terms, an inciting incident for Danny – but this is not the adventure proper in a dramatic sense.

The Overlook Hotel is the place that houses the Torrance family for most of the narrative. It is a majestic and luxurious isolated place, with a grisly past: “On the one hand, [the isolation] serves, once again ironically, as the reverse side of communication, in a film which is all about communication, albeit extrasensory (the shining); on the other hand, it makes the Overlook Hotel […] a self-sufficient microcosmos […], a symbolic and absolute space, a home and a familiar place par excellence, where the destruction of the family is carried out.” 6 The Overlook was built on a Native American burial ground, and Native American motifs have been absorbed in the hotel in the guise of Navajo rugs on the walls and floors. This suggests that the Overlook and its ghosts are symbols of archetypical and sempiternal psychosocial issues. Moreover, the film is full of references to myths, fables, and horror literature 7 : the hotel, a haunted house of sorts, seems like “a ghost ship” to Wendy; Jack huffs and puffs like the Big Bad Wolf when he attacks his wife in the bathroom; likewise, during the tour in the kitchen – which she describes as “an enormous maze” – Wendy evokes Tom Thumb (and hence Hansel and Gretel) by stating “I feel I’ll have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs every time I come in.” This reference serves also as a setup 8 – or, a foreshadowing – both for the climax of the third act, which evokes Theseus and the Minotaur, and for the recurrent spatiotemporal disorientation that occurs in the film. Of course, Danny’s relationship with his parents recalls the Oedipal complex as well.

Jack does not have a strong inciting incident, although something similar happens when he scolds Wendy in the Colorado Lounge, asking her not to disturb him while he is working, and when – in the following short sequence – he is seen staring outside the window while Wendy and Danny are playing in the snow. We start worrying that he may be suffering from cabin fever – and, in the 144’ version, that he may become physically aggressive once again. We also have another proof that Wendy is psychologically fragile, since she is submissive to her husband. In the 144’ version, this is already perceivable when she timorously tells the paediatrician about Jack’s alcoholism and the incident that arose consequently (Jack injured Danny). Nevertheless, in the second and third act she will react strongly to her husband’s aggressions.

Jack’s nightmare of killing his family may be compared to a Call to Adventure, since it is the first explicit sign of murderous thoughts – which are going to be construed as the new desire during the adventure. Therefore, we also have the Refusal of the Call from Jack, because he recounts the nightmare in a hurtful and worried way. The Refusal of the Call is traceable in Danny as well. Differently from his parents, he does not seem to be willing to go to the Overlook, because his imaginary friend Tony does not want to. Tony, the personification of Danny’s shining, represents the Herald, the one who declares the beginning of the adventure. As a matter of fact, Tony’s communication is followed by the first manifestation of uncanny images of the Overlook Hotel, and happens in the same sequence in which Jack calls to inform that he took the job.

Both Jack and Danny have a Mentor; however, only the boy meets his own Mentor in the first act, as in the canon. Danny’s Mentor is Hallorann, an ex hero who is now old and wants to offer his wisdom and his experience to the new generation. Hallorann finds out that Danny has his own power, the shining, and thus gives him some advice: he explains that bad things happen and leave traces, though implying that these are innocuous (as when someone burns toast); he reassures him that the things he sees through the shining are just like pictures in a book. However, he forbids him from entering room 237. Danny is the first to make contact with the evil forces of the hotel. As a sort of Hero, the boy must learn how to use his power in a self-conscious manner.

Danny’s entrance in room 237 is presented as his first real Crossing of the First Threshold, because he accesses the forbidden place, which really is a Special World. Notice that Krzysztof Penderecki’s composition The Awakening of Jacob used here was already heard during the boy’s first vision and will be heard again when Jack goes in room 237. The first plot point follows: Danny enters the Colorado Lounge with bruises on his neck after his father wakes up from his nightmare. Now we have an actual, pragmatic problem: someone hurt the boy, thus there is the possibility of being physically injured inside the hotel. Once again, Jack’s and Danny’s paths interweave: while the boy is in the Special World of room 237, his father has a nightmare; after Danny leaves room 237, Jack enters the Special World.

The second act

In the following sequence Jack goes to the Gold Room (for the first time in the 119’ version, for the second in the 144’ one). This is the Crossing of the First Threshold for Jack, since he enters the Special World inside the Overlook Hotel. The second act has begun. Penderecki’s De Natura Sonoris no. 2 , which started in the previous scene (while Danny walks inside the Colorado Lounge), is heard here and will be used once again at the beginning of the third act and at the apparent end of the third act (when Jack dies in the hedge maze).

In the Gold Room Jack meets Lloyd – the first ghost he sees – who acts as a Threshold Guardian. Moreover, Lloyd is the first Ally encountered by Jack in the Special World (Grady will follow). Thus, two parties are starting to be defined: on the one hand, Jack and obscure characters of the Special World, pertaining to the true adventure; on the other hand, Danny, Wendy and Hallorann. Lloyd strengthens Jack’s will, therefore acting as an Enemy of Danny’s. In this case the Threshold Guardian is clearly an objective correlative of an obscure part of Jack’s mind. In the 119’ version, the alcoholism problem is absent: the liquor that Jack asks Lloyd for and then drinks seems to be desired only in order to dampen his anger, with no other implications. In the 144’ we know about Jack’s former alcoholism, therefore the fact he drinks the liquor reinforces the idea of crossing the threshold on the psychological level. At any rate, this subplot is not developed, so that in both versions the liquor primarily represents a magical potion that sanctions Jack’s evil pact with Lloyd (and the Overlook through him) and therefore allows him to start the adventure in the Special World.

Overall, the ghosts who appear to Jack incarnate the Shapeshifters: they are seemingly innocuous but actually subjugate him to the hotel. The most literal Shapeshifter is the woman in room 237, who first appears as a young and attractive lady but then morphs into a repulsive decaying hag – which is herself double as it were, since we see her alternately laughing sardonically and walking toward Jack, and expressionless, emerging from the bathtub (Danny’s vision?) thanks to crosscutting. At the same time, the archetype of the Shadow can be found: it stands for the fury of the evil side, the danger which tacitly lies beneath the surface. In The Shining the Shadow is twofold. First there is the Overlook Hotel, which tries to take advantage of Jack in order to eliminate his family. Then there is Jack himself as Danny’s antagonist, representing what the boy may become if he does not accomplish his own journey.

The first Test for Jack in the Special World is the temptation of drinking liquor. This is stronger in the 144’ version, since we know about Jack’s alcoholism. The second Test is the sexual one, which occurs in room 237, when Jack encounters the shapeshifting woman. Afterwards, Jack quarrels with Wendy about his needs, and then he has a sort of Approach to the Inmost Cave. He goes back to the Gold Room, where a party is taking place: Jack is greeted, he receives liquor at no charge, and he meets his Mentor Delbert Grady. Grady is a Shapeshifter as well, because he is introduced as a jovial waiter in a ’20s-style party but then reveals himself as the unsettling 1970 caretaker. In the red bathroom, Grady subtly instructs Jack about his adventure, preparing him for the central ordeal.

The midpoint – i.e., the “point of no return” 9 – occurs during the confrontation between Jack and Wendy in the Colorado Lounge, after she reads the typewritten text. It is confirmed that Jack’s personality has changed: after having disabled the radio (and – as we will learn later – the snowcat), he seems to be willing to hurt his wife. The metaphorical gate behind his back is definitely close. 10 Jack undergoes an Ordeal: all at once, he faces his wife (now an antagonist) on a pragmatic level, and his fears and flaws in psychological terms – pertaining to the working contract, the writing project, and the relationship with his family. He seems to be failing completely, since the novel is actually the repetition of the same sentence (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”), his wife wants to think things over because she does not understand his needs, and she knocks him out and down the stairs with the baseball bat, thus preventing him from completing his tasks. Therefore, as in the best midpoints, the scene contains the symbolic death of the protagonist, who will then be left powerless and lame, locked inside the pantry.

Here, Jack undergoes a rebirth of sorts: he fully regains consciousness and makes Wendy become aware of his evil actions (regarding the radio and the snowcat). Then, while still inside the pantry, Jack receives the greatest Reward yet: Grady gives him another chance to do his job and releases him from the pantry. This is the clearest physical interaction between a ghost and ordinary reality in the film, and Jack’s escape is the second plot point of the film. From now on, the protagonist deals with his desire in the most extreme and irreversible way, since he does not come back to his senses. In other words, Jack definitely misses the chance to satisfy his real need .

The third act

In a sense, Jack takes the Road Back to the Ordinary World, as in the hero’s journey. Both in the first and in the third act he has no relationship with the ghosts; after escaping the pantry, he relates only to his family and to Hallorann. At the same time, the Special World invades the Ordinary World, since the ghosts become visible to Wendy as well – presumably because Jack is doing exactly what the hotel wanted him to do. Hallorann is killed by Jack, who now seems to be the strongest character despite having sustained injuries (the blow to the head and sprained ankle), while Danny is shell-shocked, hiding inside a cupboard after escaping the janitorial quarters’ bahtroom. But then, following Hallorann’s murder, Danny runs and makes his father follow him in the maze. Here, the stage of the Resurrection takes place. In a decisive confrontation, Jack tries to kill his gifted son. However, he does not succeed: Danny entraps him in the maze by erasing his footprints – i.e., the only possible clues in order to find the way out. While he kills his father by trapping him in the maze and letting him die of hypothermia, Danny is “resurrected” since he survives his most dangerous and almost certain meeting with death at the hands of a stronger opponent.

At the end of the hero’s journey there is the Return with the Elixir. This event is subtly implied in The Shining , and it is unclear whether it happens or not. After we see Jack frozen to death, we find him “frozen” in a 1921 photograph. This twist at the end suggests a reincarnation that can be compared to the elixir, being the implied reward for Jack’s special adventure in the Overlook Hotel. However, interpretation is unavoidable: Will the evil cycle repeat itself in the future like it did in the past? Or did Danny manage to stop the cycle of violence from repeating forever and ever? In the first case, Jack – i.e., this instantiation of the caretaker – has obtained the elixir, and will return; in the second case, he has missed the chance to get it and is forever trapped in the limbo of an irretrievable past.

Our study is intended as just a first step towards an all-encompassing dramaturgical analysis of The Shining. More research is needed in order to thoroughly examine the psychology of the characters, the progression of narrative events, the film’s relationship with the horror genre, the role of its stylistic patterning (both visual and aural) in the narrational process, and the implicit and symptomatic meanings that may be constructed. In this regard, being sophisticated and cryptic, the film has widely incited scholarly interpretation, focused on psychology (the Oedipal complex, the uncanny), philosophy (the matter of time, the nature of evil), history (the massacre of Native Americans, the Holocaust), anthropology (the coeval US culture, matters of capitalism and Western societal organization), and transtextual aspects (the reworking of tropes taken from myths, fables, and horror fiction, the film’s role in Kubrick’s poetics). 11 We hope that our analysis will offer a well-founded starting point from which to test the validity of the interpretative literature on The Shining as well as to further develop it.

See David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema , (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. ↩
See Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundation of Screenwriting , (New York: Random House, 2007). ↩
Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers , (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2007). The stages are: Ordinary World; Call to Adventure; Refusal of the Call; Meeting with the Mentor; Crossing the First Threshold (to the Special World); Tests, Allies, Enemies; Approach to the Inmost Cave; Ordeal; Reward; The Road Back; Resurrection; Return with the Elixir. The archetypes are Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Ally, Trickster. ↩
The only archetype we were not able to find in The Shining is that of the Trickster. However, the character of Stuart Ullman somehow recalls a Trickster, because (1) he remains lighthearted even when he recounts the murderous story of Charles Grady, and (2) he brings Jack Torrance down to Earth speaking about the cruelty of winters, the sense of isolation, and the cabin fever. ↩
For a methodological framework see Dara Marks, Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc , (Studio City, CA: Three Mountain Press, 2007); John Truby, The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller , (New York: Faber and Faber, 2007). ↩
Giorgio Cremonini, Stanley Kubrick. Shining , (Turin: Lindau, 1999), pp. 42-43, our translation. Kubrick himself noticed this irony: Stanley Kubrick: Interview by Michel Ciment , in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining : Studies in the Horror Film , Danel Olson, ed. (Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press, 2015), p. 481. ↩
Ruggero Eugeni, Invito al cinema di Kubrick , (Milan: Mursia, 2010), pp. 101-102; Catriona McAvoy, “The Uncanny, The Gothic and The Loner: Intertextuality in the Adaptation Process of The Shining ,” Adaptation 8.3 (2015), pp. 345-360 ↩
See Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting , (New York: Regan Books, 1997, pp. 238-239) ↩
Luca Bandirali and Enrico Terrone, Il sistema sceneggiatura. Scrivere e descrivere i film , (Turin: Lindau, 2009), p. 169, our translation. ↩
Bandirali and Terrone, Il sistema sceneggiatura , p. 125. ↩
In addition to the aforementioned sources pertaining to The Shining , see Vincent Jaunas, “Inside the interpretative maze of The Shining (1980). The search for meaning in crisis,” Essais 4 (2018), pp. 79-88; Matthew Merced, “How Narcissistic Injury May Contribute to Reactive Violence: A Case Example Using Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining ,” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 14.1 (2017), pp. 81-96; Roger Luckhurst, The Shining , (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Michele Guerra, Il meccanismo indifferente: La concezione della storia nel cinema di Stanley Kubrick , (Rome: Aracne, 2007), pp. 119-147; Geoffrey Cocks, The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, & the Holocaust , (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition , (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), pp. 135-147; Juhani Pallasmaa, Monster in the Maze. Stanley Kubrick: «The Shining» , in Id., The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema , (Helsinki: Rakennustieto, 2001). ↩

Jack (Jack Nicholson)

Character analysis, all work and no play makes jack…a sort of charming guy.

Jack Torrance might come across as a charming dude—at first. After all, he's played by Jack Nicholson, who made a career out of being the most charismatic wolf-looking man on the planet.

When Mr. Ullman from the hotel mentions that playing the caretaker might be tough, Jack is quick to jump to the challenge and say,

"I'm outlining a new writing project, and five months of peace is just what I want."

A writer, eh? Well that's pretty interesting. And even though his smile can look a little crazy at times, we probably like Jack well enough at this point in the movie. If it weren't for the ominous music trailing him around, we'd dismiss him as a kind of shabby artistic sort.

And Mr. Ullman seems to like Jack from the start. But he's also careful to warn Jack about the challenging isolation he'll feel as the caretaker of the Overlook. After all, one of Jack's predecessors did go nuts and kill his family. But Jack is still right on the ball in saying,

"Well, you can rest assured Mr. Ullman, that's not going to happen with me, and as far as my wife is concerned, I am sure she'll be absolutely fascinated when I tell her about it."

At this point in the film, Jack seems like a good family man. He's even nice enough to call Wendy when his hotel meeting runs long, saying,

"Look, I'm at the hotel and I still have an awful lot to go through. I don't think I can get home before nine or ten."

So yeah: when all is said and done, Jack seems like a cool enough guy. A young father, handsome, and a writer to boot. Looks like everything will be totally fine at the Overlook Hotel during the winter… or not.

All Work And No Play Makes Jack…Kind Of Creepy

While our first impression of Jack might be good, it doesn't take long for cracks to appear in his apparent coolness. We get a real jolt when his wife Wendy tells the story about how Jack came home one night and "accidentally" dislocated his son's shoulder. And, as Jack says later on,

"[It] was three goddam years ago. The little f***er had thrown all my papers all over the floor. All I tried to do was to pull him up. A momentary loss of muscular coordination."

Wendy agrees that the whole thing was an accident, but as an audience we are probably pretty skeptical. From this moment on, we're on the lookout for anything else suggesting that Jack is not such a great guy.

Later on in the movie, we can tell by the insane looks on his face that Jack is having a tough time keeping himself together. This suspicion turns to outright dread when Wendy wakes Jack from a nightmare and he shudders,

"I dreamed that I... that I killed you and Danny. But I didn't just kill you, I cut you up into little pieces."

Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Shmoop PSA: if you ever hear someone say that (especially if you're locked up in a remote mountain cabin), run—don't walk—to the nearest Snow Cat.

There are some things in this movie you can blame on spooky Overlook black magic. But early in the going, there is no one to blame but Jack for his moody dirtbaggery. When Wendy comes into his workroom to ask him how things are going, he angrily answers,

"[When] I am in here that means that I am working – that means don't come in. Now do you think you can handle that?"

Sure, the poor guy is under a lot of stress. But at the end of the day, he needs to suck it up and be a better husband and father… at least until the ghosts show up.

All Work And No Play Makes Jack…An All-Out Nutjob

He's cool, he's not so cool…. and then he's a total maniac.

It's not completely clear when his snap happens, but by the time Jack grabs an axe and tries to murder his wife and son, we're willing to go out on a limb and say he's the villain of this movie. When his wife Wendy pleads with him not to hurt her, he casually answers,

"I said I'm not going to hurt you... I'm just going to bash your brains in!"

It's a good thing Wendy is able to bash him before he can bash her. Her only warning that Jack had lost his mind (apart from his increasing moodiness) was the fact that he had typed the same phrase into his typewriter hundreds of thousands of times: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

If Jack's previous actions weren't villainous enough, he starts saying typical bad-guy stuff when chasing his wife and son with an axe. For example, he cackles into the night sky and yells, "You can't get away. I'm right behind you" when he's chasing his son Danny.

And when he revels in telling Wendy he's disabled the radio and the Snow Cat, he adds,

"You've got a big surprise coming to you. You're not going anywhere."

It's a shame that the hotel has turned Jack into a total murdering maniac. But when we look back over the movie, we can see signs that Jack was giving the hotel something to work with. It's not like the guy was an angel before arriving at the hotel. He always had violence in him, and it was up to the hotel to harness it.

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Critical Analysis Of The Film The Shining

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