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)

142 minutes

Directed by

• Stanley Kubrick
• Diane Johnson

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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). ↩

The Shining

By stanley kubrick, the shining essay questions.

How does The Shining address wealth and class?

Although Jack exudes confidence when we meet him during his job interview with Mr. Ullman, his professional insecurities soon shine through, revealing a man who is deeply anxious about his place in the world. We learn, for example, that he used to be a teacher and is now interviewing for a menial maintenance position at the Overlook Hotel. Despite his blue-collar background, Jack aspires to become a successful writer, an ambition that drives his decision to accept the job at the Overlook, since it will give him the time and space to write. This dream aligns Jack—a name already associated with the blue-collar "average Joe"—with the hordes of working-class American men who likewise aspired to write the "great American novel" in the mid-twentieth century, in hopes that they would transcend their class circumstances.

Much of the film's central conflict revolves around Jack as furiously protective of this goal, as he often lashes out at Wendy, whom he perceives as a threat to his lofty ambitions, for disturbing or undermining his writing time. Just before Wendy discovers Jack's typewritten manuscript, which consists of only one sentence manically repeated thousands of times, Jack accuses her of sabotaging him by forcing him to work at menial jobs; just after, he accuses her of failing to understand the meaning of a job contract. Wendy often functions as an archetype of the middle-class, aproned American housewife, and Jack is sensitive to—and resentful of—this throughout the film. When Mr. Ullman gives the Torrances their initial tour of the hotel, Wendy humbly remarks on the Colorado Room, "God, I've never seen anything like this before"; later, she says of the kitchen, "It's the biggest place I've ever seen!" Whereas Mr. Ullman emphasizes the elite nature of the hotel, mentioning the movie stars and presidents who have stayed there, Wendy plays the part of the country bumpkin, marveling at the beauty of the hotel. It is this humble, dumbfounded quality of Wendy's demeanor that irritates Jack, driving him to the brink of insanity later in the film, when he will implicitly blame Wendy for preventing their family from achieving higher social status.

Jack's delusions are often ones of imagined grandeur, allowing him to fantasize about being wealthy and important. For example, when Jack walks into the Gold Room while a lavish party is being thrown, Lloyd greets him as one would a valued regular at the bar, refusing to let Jack pay for his drinks. Moments later, Delbert Grady begs Jack to follow him to the restroom to clean his jacket, treating Jack's casual bomber jacket as if it were an expensive suit jacket like the rest of the men wear at the party. it is precisely these fantastical encounters with the upper crust that motivate Jack to take revenge on a wife and son whom he perceives as embarrassingly lower class.

Who, ultimately, is the film's protagonist? Its antagonist?

The Shining is unique in that it performs a subtle bait and switch regarding its protagonist. At the start of the film, it seems clear that Jack Torrance is the film's protagonist, since he is the first character to which we are introduced. Jack also remains the character with whom the viewer spends the most time late into the film, as we follow his attempts to settle into the creepy Overlook Hotel. For better or worse, Jack is consistently the most active character; he finds a job, moves his family to the hotel, and subsequently embarks on a mission to write. All this makes him the easiest character to follow at the start of the film. Even so, the seeds of his later antagonism are planted in his character even at the film's start, such as his tendency to lose his temper and his insecurity about his professional status.

Later, however, the film subtly transfers the power of the protagonist to Danny. Throughout the film, Danny seems mostly passive, due in part to his young age but also, perhaps, to his involuntary ability to "shine," which afflicts him with traumatic visions that he is unable to escape. This passivity at times appears to undermine Danny's identity as the protagonist. At the same time, Danny is very aware of the danger posed by Jack and the hotel, and even actively confronts it; because of this, Danny is the character through whom a great deal of foreshadowing and plot information is conveyed. For example, Danny elects to explore Room 237 and suffers for it, providing the motivation for Jack to enter the room later, when we are permitted to see what lurks there. As Jack gradually veers towards a role as the film's antagonist, Danny takes on a more active role, attempting to warn Wendy of the imminent danger present and running from Jack. In the end, it is Danny's vigilance that allows him to succeed by tricking Jack into following his footprints deeper into the hedge maze.

How does the film address themes of childhood and play?

Although The Shining contains characters of all ages—including ghosts—many of these characters seek to recover a lost youth. The first of these is Jack, who is perpetually anxious about his role as a father, husband, and provider, and thus lashes out against the pressures on him to grow up. Like Danny, he seems to want to play more than work, resorting to bouncing a tennis ball off the walls of the Colorado Room until he loses it; later, the ghosts of the Grady twins roll this ball to Danny, inviting him to play. The culmination of Jack's madness is expressed through his manifesto, which simply reads, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." This marks the start of Jack's violent romp through the hotel, an outlet for his energetic mania, serving a role similar to child's play.

Danny, however, is the primary character who suffers a loss of innocence due to the horrors of the hotel. His visions are the first and primary signal of this loss of innocence,forcing him to witness horrific scenes that would terrify any grown man. Although Danny often attempts seemingly normal childhood activities, such as watching cartoons and playing with his toys, these scenes are often interrupted by either the Grady twins or his father. In fact, the Grady twins embody the concept of stolen youth, as they were robbed of their childhood when their father murdered them. Thus, their frequent invitations to Danny function as threats to his childhood.

What could the color red symbolize in the film?

The color red permeates the memorable aesthetic of The Shining at every turn. Wendy and Danny both wear red the first time we meet them, and Danny continues to do so throughout the film. Later, the bathroom in which Delbert Grady convinces Jack to kill Wendy and Danny is painted entirely red; this room is referenced implicitly when Tony repeats REDRUM ("murder," but also "red room") as if in a trance and eventually writes the same word on his bathroom door with his mother's red lipstick. The color also appears in the patterned carpet on which Danny rides his bike through the hotel. Perhaps the film's most significant iteration of red is Danny's repeated vision of blood pouring out of the hotel's elevator bank.

On a literal level, the color symbolizes the massive bloodshed that defines the hotel as a source of terror, embodied by the image of blood rushing from the elevators. But in the Western cultural imagination, red also has figurative associations with madness, war, love, lust, and the loss of control, all of which are strong presences in The Shining . Indeed, it is precisely because red symbolizes all these elements in the film that we are able to link them to each other; for example, Jack's madness is a product of his complicated feelings of love towards his wife and child, and the war that he declares on them marks a loss of control that defines Jack's final violent romps through the hotel. It is a frenzy defined by its utter lack of reason, depending instead on a heightened state of being, a Dionysian climax embodied by the color red. In this way, red symbolizes not a singular theme, but rather the fusion of all madness, love, and anxiety that we see Jack struggling to control throughout the film.

How does the film comment on the state of the nuclear American family?

At the start of the film, the Torrances appear to be a somewhat idyllic, even classic American family. Wendy, for one, is often portrayed as a sweet, loving housewife and mother, preparing breakfast in bed for her husband and watching cartoons with her son. Jack often functions as an archetypal working-class father, as well, rueful towards his job and wife, and perpetually desperate for a beer ("I would give my goddamn soul for a beer"). Indeed, one of the central tensions of The Shining is that of the resentment that Jack harbors towards Wendy for holding him back from success. He often appears annoyed at her lack of sophistication, as he aspires to join the upper-class elite; for example, when Mr. Ullman gives the Torrances a tour of the hotel, Wendy stands in sharp contrast to Ullman's mention of the jet set, remarking that she has never seen anything as beautiful or big as the Overlook. Later, Jack refers to Wendy as "the old sperm bank," reducing her to her function as a child bearer. As this conflict intensifies, Jack grows more impatient with Wendy's frenzied, desperate demeanor, eventually threatening to kill her and Danny. This hostility derives from madness, of course, but it also suggests common marital tensions carried to the extreme.

Danny's relationship to his father is likewise rife with textbook anxieties about paternal love. This is particularly evident in the scene in which Danny tries to retrieve his toy fire engine without waking his father. When Danny finds Jack awake and staring blankly out the window, Danny asks Jack if he would ever hurt him or Wendy, to which Jack replies in the negative. Still, Danny is clearly afraid of Jack, likely due to Jack's history of violent temper tantrums. Embedded in this father-son dynamic are classic anxieties about what it means to love a child. It is likewise significant that the final chase of the film is between father and son. In this sequence, Jack is unable to connect to his son physically or emotionally, disoriented by the twists and turns of the maze, which could symbolize the twists and turns involved in raising a child. Importantly, Wendy and Danny explore the maze early in the film and are quite easily able to find their way to its center.

The Shining Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Shining is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Who, ultimately, is the film's protagonist? Its antagonist? And why?

Danny Torrance is the novel's protagonist. Torrance is the heroic character, around whom, the plot revolves.

Jack Torrance is the antagonist, the abusive, alcoholic huband and father, who emotionally and physically abuses his family.

At what point do you think Jack goes truly "bad" in this movie? Was he bad even before he got to the Overlook? Why or why not?

One of the central ambiguities of The Shining is whether Jack goes mad or is possessed by the evils of the hotel. Wendy tells the doctor who comes to see Danny after his first vision about Jack's history of alcoholism and accidental violence...

The Shining 1980 related. What does the appearance of Ullman and the bear costume wearing man indicate when Wendy finds them in one of the Hotel room

The guy in the tuxedo is not Ullman. Following along with the novel, the man in the tuxedo is Horace (or Harry, I can't remember which) Derwent, who was a previous owner of the hotel. A guest of the hotel named Roger had a crush on Derwent. In the...

Study Guide for The Shining

The Shining study guide contains a biography of Stanley Kubrick, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Shining
• The Shining Summary
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for The Shining

The Shining essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Shining by Stanley Kubrick.

• The Possibilities of Mental Illness in the Shining
• Jack’s Crisis: What Role Did Narcissistic Injury and Cultural Circumstance Play in Jack’s Breakdown?
• Exploring the Themes of Familicide and Insanity in The Shining
• Toxic Masculinity in the Films of Stanley Kubrick
• Racial Stereotypes and Cinematic Adaptation: The Shining Critical Analysis

Wikipedia Entries for The Shining

• Introduction

The Shining Analysis Essay

An analysis of Mise-en-scene and Editing in an extract from The Shining Superficially, The Shining (1980) directed by Stanley Kubrick and written by horror novelist Stephan King, is about Jack Torrance; a writer suffering from writer’s block and his family who move into the Overlook Hotel after Jack takes an off season job as caretaker. As stories unfold about the hotels previous inhabitants, Wendy and Jack’s son, Danny’s frequent psychic premonitions become vivid, paralleling Jacks deteriorating psychotic state of mind, as their stay at the hotel grows longer.

Under the surface however Kubrick uses mise en scene and editing in The Shining to display hypocrisy and inability of Americans to admit the mass Native American Indian genocide, and to help explore these ideas exposing the viewer to horrific scenarios of slaughter, which act as a metaphor for the catastrophic murder of an entire race, and- on an even wider scale- man’s inhumanity towards man throughout ages.

To begin with, Danny is seen riding through the clinically clean hotel hallways on his vibrant red bigwheel; the use of costume as a component of mise en scene is particularly effective in this shot as it enhances the suggestion of foreshadowing as the colours parallel the colours the two girls are wearing in a later shot. His costume consists of a blood red jumper and a denim lumberjack jumpsuit; creating a sharp contrast with the cold blue, green tones of the walls making him appear vulnerable and prone to danger, as he’s miniscule within the framing.

The setting, consisting of basic, bleak, blue, green colours has been used to foreshadow the ending of the film, imitating the scene where Danny is being chased in the maze by his psychotic Dad. The way he circles the similar-looking hallways indicating he’s going round in circles suggests to the audience that he’s lost and unaware he’s reiterating his path. Moreover, the use of juxtaposition in the calmness and emptiness of the hallways with the climatic tension in the maze has been used to emphasize that Danny is oblivious to the events that will be unraveled in the near future.

Alternatively, the shot of Danny circling the hotel hallways mimics the start of the film and the Torrance’s car going through the mountains as they approach the hotel; this symbolic use of repetition has been used by Kubrick to indicate the violence of the past will be repeated, allowing the audience to link this to current events including wars and ongoing tragedies in modern day. In terms of editing, Kubrick alters space and time in order to fragment the viewer’s perspective of where Danny is heading.

At first the audience believes that continuity editing has been used to linearly follow Danny through the hallways. However when we look deeper we realize that the straight cuts within the editing transport us to different locations and therefore highlights the oddity surrounding the hotel, emphasizing how everything looks identical, again linking with the theme of repetition. The first cut happens when Danny maneuvers into the left side of the frame as he turns a corner.

However, when he does this it appears that he’s on a different floor, altering the location and adding to the abnormality of the hotel. Perhaps, he uses editing to blur spatial and geographical lines so it’s unknown how much time has passed implying that Danny has the ability- as someone who shines- to exist outside the confines of linear space and time. Kubrick could have also done this to explore America’s avoidance of the repressed history of the Native American genocide, which parallels with the changing locations as it could represent a passage of time throughout the existence of man.

Furthermore, Kubrick has used the editing of sound to create tension and emotion in the scene. As we see a tracking shot of Danny turning the corner of the corridor, an action match is used when the flamboyant diegetic sound of a gong is heard. However the sound enters a second too early releasing the tension that Kubrick has built up before we’re exposed to the view of the girls.

This release has been used by Kubrick to imply that the tense contrapuntal sound of high pitched violins coming gradually to a crescendo in a minor key has been used purposely to lead up to this moment, making the audience feel personally victimized by the two girls that are stood silently in the hallway as their innocent outlook juxtaposes the score that’s being played. Additionally the use of body language is used successfully to create a sense of imagery for the audience.

Kubrick presents the twin girls holding hands in the centre of the hallway, which emphasizes how indistinguishable they are alongside their costumes and hairstyles. This strips away any personality and emphasises the sense of mystery, suspense and lifelessness. They may have been purposely placed mirroring each other by Kubrick to create a reflected effect, which has been frequent throughout the film previously. Kubrick may have done this to highlight the dehumanized nature of the girls as they’re stood expressionless with empty sullen eyes making it hard for the ce to understand how the characters feel and how they should react to them.

Their inexpressive faces create a sense of anxiety for the audience, as we’re unaware of what they might do to Danny. The use of mirroring could suggest that the two girls are actually one person, and perhaps Kubrick has done this to imply the girls are a representation of Danny’s future. His vision showing them inhumanly murdered could foreshadow upcoming events at the end of the film, which is further supported by the axe prop that has been placed in the bottom third of the shot.

As we know at the end of the film, Danny is chased by his father who attempts to murder him with an axe, paralleling the death of the two girls. Additionally, the axe symbolism could signify the tool used by Native Americans before their genocide and the imagery of a westerner using an axe to murder could be used by Kubrick to imply that the lifestyles and morals of the American Indians were stolen from them alongside with their land. Kubrick purposely repeats elements of costume design to link the characters together.

For example, the colours Danny is wearing match the pastel blue dresses the girls wear, connoting purity and innocence. However, in a shot shortly after the audience is exposed to the girls brutally murdered in the hallway, their dresses covered with blood that also stains the blue walls creating a shocking resemblance to Danny’s costume. Perhaps Kubrick is trying to create broad symbolism of the mass murder of the Native Indians, implying to the audience that it still lies in the hands of the Americans, indicating that they will be forever guilty of genocide, which will haunt them.

Then again, Danny’s costume could have been used by Kubrick to enhance the theme of repetition, implying that westerners have never stopped killing since the first major extermination of a race. exaggerating that the past is doomed to repeat itself. His costume bares a similarity to his fathers which may have been used to suggest that Danny will grow up to become comparable to his psychotic father; this could infer that throughout generations the American mindset hasn’t changed.

The younger generation will duplicate the generation before them like an ongoing cycle; unable and unwilling to accept the disturbing truth of the people that they have murdered. In addition, the two girls have a strange similarity to Wendy who Danny has a close relationship with. During the start of the film Wendy wears a blue dress with red tights which mimics the costume the girls are wearing.

This could have been used to imply that the characters all have links and that Danny’s psychic premonitions are influenced by the past therefore emphasizing the symbolic se of repetition that runs throughout the film-Wendy also dresses much like a native Indian squaw throughout the film. Following on from this, another effective element of mise en scene are the props. A brown wooden chair turned over drastically on the floor is used on the first vertical third of the shot implying a sense of struggle before the murder took place. This makes the audience feel sympathetic towards them but also horribly disturbed at the same time.

Also the chair seems abnormal in the visually pleasing shot of the lifeless girls placed mirroring each other, lying perfectly horizontally across the hallway, their heads on either side of each wall. The chair doesn’t fit at all in the shot creating a sharp contrast in the surrounding location. Finally, a shot reverse shot of Danny’s face expressing a horrified expression while he quivers with fear as the two girls repeat the words ‘forever and ever’ makes the audience sympathize with Danny’s horror. This may have been used by Kubrick to suggest that Danny can’t escape from the constant premonitions he’s having.

Shortly after, the music is cut off leaving us to see a close up of Danny slowly removing his hands from his face and when he does the girls are gone. This could have been done by Kubrick to imply that Danny, with his face covered, represents the Americans unable to acknowledge the mistakes they have made, who will only come out when the problem is no longer discussed. This might show the audience how cowardly they’re being, not facing up to the truth, making them feel guilty about not facing their fears and, on a larger scale, accepting the horrors that were inflicted on innocent people in their past.

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The Shining: How the Film Scares Us with Cinematography and Tension

Long before the blood and ghosts show up, The Shining has us trembling from the tone alone. Here's how Kubrick builds tension.

The Shining (1980) is a horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick and photographed by John Alcott. Depicting the all-American Torrance family's gradual slip into madness as they inhabit an empty hotel for the winter, the movie is one of the most iconic and genuinely disquieting horror films of all time - and while there are plenty of ghastly spectacles throughout, the terror the audience leaves the theater with is a result of Kubrick's command over tone, tension, and the uncanny.

Much has been written about what The Shining "means" - is it an allegory for the genocide of America's indigenous peoples? A metaphor for the Holocaust? Is it a deconstruction of the nuclear family? Of white male rage in a culture that is (slowly) becoming less unequal? Is it nothing more than a descent into madness? There are enough overt thematic indicators to get an idea of what this film is "really" about - the fixation on familial dynamics, wedded with references to American history/iconography reveal Kubrick's interest in the American family (and its inherent horrors) - but any attempt to consolidate its many pieces into a cohesive message is impossible (and a popular activity for fans ).

Whatever secrets lay buried in The Shining 's subtext, they are sought so fervently for one main reason: in formal terms, divorced from any abstract meaning, The Shining is a masterpiece. If it weren't superb on a sensory level, no one would care what it meant. Without relying on jump scares and gore, The Shining raises the heartbeat and makes the mind race with dread: what's coming?

When the horror finally arrives, that dread bursts into a rush of adrenaline. But if it weren't for the two hours preceding it, would Jack Nicholson yelling "Here's Johnny!" be particularly scary? Would the chase through the hedge maze get the adrenaline pumping with such ferocity? Would the image of Jack frozen and scowling be anything but ridiculous? The power of these moments comes from long-building tension. The Shining is (forgive the pun) a shining example of the Slow Burn Horror: a film that makes the audience wait for the scares, based on the principle that the long-lasting tension will make whatever follows more impactful. Remove the build-up from the final act, and the scares are loud, shocking, and a little disturbing - but hardly terrifying. So how does that tension build? How do Kubrick and Alcott make the movie feel scary, even when "nothing" is happening?

Related: The Best Cinematography in Horror Movies From the 1980s

Camera Movement

The Shining is claustrophobic and merciless, portrayed in deliberate and unsettling images. The majority of the story is captured in steady shots, either locked off, slow-moving, or photographed from a distance. This creates the impression of a supernatural presence bearing down on the main characters. Kubrick famously employed the newly developed steadicam tech to follow Danny (the youngest member of the Torrance clan) as he rides his tricycle through the labyrinthine corridors of the hotel. The steadiness of the camera and its relentless pursuit clues the audience into the terror that follows him, either as a literal supernatural force or the horrors that await. With each rounded corner we hold our breath, knowing that something horrible will be there - and when nothing happens, we aren't relieved: we know the worst is yet to come - we cannot relax. This technique is brought to a blood-curdling conclusion when Danny rounds a corner, and he - along with the camera - finally comes to a stop. In front of him, two identical ghost girls wait. This is the first overt moment of horror in the movie, and the camerawork contributes to its effectiveness: after spending so much time creeping towards an unknown destination of doom, the camera comes to a halt, letting us know that we have arrived at something truly horrible.

If the steady tracking shots come to represent a sneaking sense of dread, the calm before the storm, Alcott and Kubrick switch to a raw, hand-held style in the film's final act: once Jack succumbs completely to insanity and attempts to murder his family, everything becomes fast-paced, a controlled chaos in sharp contrast to the unyielding stasis that has come before. This taps into the viewer's primal sensations: when we suspect danger, we become still, and observant. When that danger reveals itself, we run like mad and hope our legs are fast enough to deliver us to safety.

Lighting and Design

Much of the lighting in the film (particularly in the hotel) is idyllic, soft, and rich. The wide frames and elegant exposure give the Overlook Hotel an aura of the sublime. This beauty is in sharp contrast to the horror lurking beneath the surface. Horror icon Jordan Peele has argued that a scary movie is most effective when placed in a beautiful location: when we are somewhere eerie, we expect terrible things. When we are somewhere that feels good , that creates a sense of comfort or serenity, we come to trust that location - and feel doubly betrayed when its evil reveals itself. This touches a deep human fear: we equate beauty with good, and when what is beautiful proves to be malevolent, we are confronted with a taboo idea - everything is bad. Beautiful surfaces harbor evils as great as any tableau of horror or disgust.

Like the last act's shift in camerawork, the lighting in The Shining becomes increasingly bleak and surreal, culminating in a fluorescent nightmare. When Jack chases Danny through the maze, the snow covered passages reflect harsh and blindingly bright light. This choice also signifies that hidden evil has broken out into the open.

Related: 15 Scariest and Most Important Horror Movies of All Time

Framing and Symmetry

Kubrick's framing is unconventional: while perfect symmetry is generally avoided in film (as it calls attention to itself and breaks the compositional rule of thirds ), Kubrick leans into it, often placing his subjects in the middle of the frame. The audience might not consciously realize it, but this makes us uncomfortable: we sense that something is off. Symmetry is commonly associated with the supernatural (the history behind this association is vague -- one explanation is that the natural is imperfect, while that which exists beyond it - the supernatural - possesses a perfection we cannot grasp). By framing so unusually, Kubrick infuses his images with the weight of relics and religious architecture.

All of these choices are formal, separate from the superb performances or rich subtext - but they create a world that allows the other elements to take on unfathomable meaning. These techniques come together to form one of the most unique horror experiences ever committed to celluloid: long before any supernatural element is introduced, we get the sense that something is deeply wrong , thanks to the meticulousness of the cinematography.

Themes and Analysis

The shining, by stephen king.

'The Shining' is a classic of the horror and psychological fiction genres. It was published in 1977 as Stephen King’s third novel.

About the Book

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

Below, readers can explore some of the many important themes and symbols, like “Redrum” and the wasps’ nest, that King used in his classic horror novel, as well as consider important events and King’s writing style.

The Shining Themes 

Family bonds.

When the Torrance family arrives at the Overlook Hotel, their bonds with one another are already shaky. Wendy is depressed and anxious about her future with her husband, and Jack is struggling to maintain his sobriety while also bringing in enough money to support his family. Danny, who loves both of his parents, is also struggling with the stress of a prospective divorce, even though he is only five years old. 

The Overlook Hotel’s disembodied evil uses these divisions to tear the family apart, making it possible for the hotel to further corrupt Jack’s mind and inspire him to turn on his wife and son.

Although the exact nature of the evil in the Overlook Hotel is never entirely revealed, it does make itself known through numerous forms. This includes the moving and violent animal topiaries outside, the ghost of Delbert Grady, the woman in Room 217, and more. These various ghostly figures and entities personify evil in various ways. Grady helps convince Jack that he needs to kill his family, and the animal topiaries attempt to kill or at least deter Dick from returning to the hotel.

Isolation 

Isolation is one of the most central themes in this novel. Without the family’s isolation at the Overlook Hotel and Jack’s isolation from his wife and son, the events of the novel would not have played out as they did. The hotel’s evil depends on divisions in family relationships. Without Jack’s alcoholism and violent tendencies, it is unlikely that the hotel would’ve been able to isolate him as it did. Plus, the fact that the family was totally alone added to the overall danger and suspense of the novel.

Analysis of Key Moments in The Shining  

• Jack accepts the job at the Overlook Hotel as the winter caretaker.
• Jack is told how important it is to remember to check the boiler in the cellar.
• The family moves into the Overlook Hotel and meets Dick Hallorann.
• Danny speaks with Dick about the “shine.”
• Jack gives Danny a supposedly empty wasps nest.
• The wasps attack Danny in the middle of the night.
• Danny gets more visions about “Redrum” from Tony.
• Wendy grows more suspicious about her husband after finding bruises on Danny’s neck.
• Jack throws away a key part of the snowmobile, preventing them from leaving the hotel.
• Danny knows that “Redrum” is going to happen on December 2nd and telepathically contacts Dick for help.
• Jack drinks at the bar and speaks with the ghost of Delbert Grady.
• Wendy finds him drunk and locks him in a pantry.
• Jack escapes, promises to kill his family, and assaults Wendy.
• Danny reminds Jack that he hasn’t checked the boiler and he runs off to do so.
• Dick, Danny, and Wendy escape from the hotel just as it explodes, taking Jack with it.

Style, Tone, and Figurative Language

King uses the omniscient third-person point of view when writing this novel. He shifts between different points of view, including Danny’s, Dick’s, and Jack’s throughout. As is common with Stephen King’s writing, he often uses the free indirect style. This means that the characters take over the narration for a period of time, distorting it through their perspectives and opinions.

Throughout, the tone is perplexing and tense. King reveals crucial information about the hotel and its past residence as the novel progresses. But, at the same time, he manages to maintain the mystery of the building. Readers are kept on their toes throughout as they deal with suspicious and suspenseful content.

Symbolism is one of the most important features of this novel. For example, the word “Redrum” that Danny sees before the family even moves to the hotel.

Analysis of Symbols 

Redrum .

“Redrum” is a word that Danny first sees prior to the family moving to the hotel. He sees it in his mind, written in various mirrors. He doesn’t know what the word means for the majority of the book. It is later revealed that the word is murder spelt backwards. It symbolizes the complete reversal of Jack’s intentions as the novel progresses. He begins with the hope of providing his family with a fresh start and ends up attempting to kill them and destroy the hotel. It also adds to the overall mysterious mood King achieves in the book.

The Wasps’ Nest 

The wasps’ nest that Jack finds and then gives to his son Danny is symbolic of unexpected dangers in the hotel. Danny was thrilled with this unusual gift from his father, but it turns out to be something quite dangerous. In the same way, Danny trusts his father, but this is a misplaced trust. This is clearly seen through Jack’s attempts to kill his wife and son at the end of the novel.

The Boiler 

In classic King fashion, the reader is provided with a great example of foreshadowing in regard to the boiler at the beginning of the novel. Jack is told how important it is to continually check the boiler’s pressure. If he doesn’t, it could explode and take his family and the entire hotel with it. This is exactly what happens at the end of the novel. The boiler is symbolic of Jack’s attachment to reality. At first, he diligently checks it. But, as the novel progresses and he loses his grip on his sanity, he forgets.

What is the theme of The Shining ?

Readers may find several different important themes in Stephen King’s classic horror novel. These include family bonds, fear, isolation, and more. Each is as important as the next. But, the corrupt nature of evil and its ability to destroy families is at the centre of the book.

What do the twins symbolize in The Shining?

In the film, the Grady twins symbolize the possible murder of Wendy Torrance, Danny’s mother. The director, Stanley Kubrick, dressed the twins in outfits that remind the reader of Wendy. They are another foreboding symbol that foreshadows future events. 

Was Jack a ghost in The Shining?

At the end of ‘ The Shining ‘, Jack Torrance dies in an explosion that destroys the hotel. In the film (which changes the book’s original ending), Kubrick includes a scene in which the camera focuses on Jack in a photo from the early 1900s. In some viewers’ minds, this suggests that from the beginning, Jack was a reincarnated version of someone who had previously stayed at the hotel.

About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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Baldwin, Emma " The Shining Themes and Analysis 📖 " Book Analysis , https://bookanalysis.com/stephen-king/the-shining/themes-analysis/ . Accessed 16 April 2024.

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GENRE THEORY AND “THE SHINING”

• March 14, 2017

Toward a Post-structural Influence in Film Genre Study: Intertextuality and The Shining

by Walter Metz

I. Introduction

In a 1977 essay, Thomas Schatz identifies what he considers to be “the structural influence” in film genre studies. Applying the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, Schatz details the “mythic function” of American film genres (95). Schatz argues, “This conception of the genre film as a unique functional structure is closely akin to the work of Claude Levi-Strauss in his structural analysis of myth” (96). In my present essay, I suggest that we ought to consider what possibilities an as yet unidentified post-structural influence might have had, or could have, on film genre studies. In her essay in this issue, Janet Staiger identifies one such post-structural influence, that of literary scholar Thomas O. Beebee. Staiger sees Beebee’s identification of the “structuring absences” of a text as a post-structural move: “A poststructuralist thesis would argue that every text inherently displays what it is not.” I cover a different terrain of post-structural theory with the intention of identifying an influence on film genre studies beyond Beebee’s attention to textual lacunae. The significance of my version of post-structural genre theory will lie in the way it illuminates the competing political identity issues such as class, gender, and race within the genre film. After defining what I mean by post-structuralism and identifying some genre critics who engage in post-structuralist reading strategies, I will detail the potential of this approach through an analysis of The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). The Shining is a timely text to choose: as I write, an ABC miniseries of the Stephen King novel is about to air. Horror fans have long waited for this new version of The Shining , as they believe Kubrick ruined the horror elements in King’s novel. 1 On the other hand, the academic film studies community tends to revere the film as apolitical critique of the American nuclear family. 2 This split in reader response occurs due to the differing framework of genre expectations. The King fans enter the film fully expecting a generically stable horror film, while the academic critics interpret The Shining as a melodrama detailing the disintegration of a middle-class American family. In this analysis, I am less interested in the actual generic status of The Shining and more interested in how the film’s generic status opens up two stable choices for readers’ interpretations of the film’s goals. Thus, my choice of The Shining does not merely forward the often made claim that the “New” Hollywood hybridizes genres, in this case the horror film and the melodrama. 3 I fully agree with Janet Staiger’s claim in this issue that the distinction between the genre hybridity of the “New” Hollywood and the genre stability of “Classical” Hollywood is merely a convenient critical fiction. I suggest that instead of arguing over the generic make-up of particular films, we ought to be examining how the presumed generic status of a film demarcates strategies for interpretation. James Naremore has suggested a similar approach to film noir in his recent essay “American Film Noir: The History of an Idea.” Naremore claims that “the Name of the Genre… functions in much the same way as the Name of the Author” (14). Drawing from Michel Foucault’s post-structuralist critique of authorship, Naremore suggests a similar critique of the stability of genre, coining the concept of “the genre function.” The genre function replaces concern with the actual generic make-up of a text and instead concentrates on the effect the perception of the genre has on the interpretation of the text. In the case of my analysis of The Shining , I am concerned with the way the genre functions of horror and melodrama serve as unifying fictions for two sets of interpretive communities to make sense of a politically polysemous and perhaps contradictory text.

II. An Intertextual Approach to The Shining

In his 1977 essay, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” Robin Wood calls for a re-conceptualization of genre theory. He argues that American film genres should be grouped into “families,” wherein genres are related to each other by their similar focus on ideological problems within American culture. Wood states,

One of the greatest obstacles to any fruitful theory of genre has been the tendency to treat the genres as discrete. An ideological approach might suggest why they can’t be, however hard they might appear to try: at best, they represent different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions (62).

Such a conception of families of genres allows a more precise understanding of the generic contradictions produced by readings of The Shining . The film presents both a ghost story and a horror film, a tale of the uncanny and a family melodrama. In a post-structural sense, The Shining offers a liminal narrational system caught between the horror film and the family melodrama which offers the possibility of critique unavailable to either of the genres in their “pure” state. 4 I argue that the “hesitation” between the two genres is what allows for the critical contestation over the film’s meaning. Interestingly, Wood’s essays—what I am suggesting is the first volley in a potential post-structural genre criticism—was published in 1977, the same year as Schatz’s examination of the importance of structuralism for genre studies. The continuing importance of structuralism on genre studies is indicated by the fact that the new edition of Film Genre Reader (titled Film Genre Reader II ) still contains Schatz’s essay on structuralism, but no complementary essay identifying post-structuralism’s potential for the field. However, Schatz makes many of the same claims that Wood makes in “Ideology, Genre, Auteur.” Schatz notes the interconnectedness of Hollywood genres: “When we assume this view of the genre film functions; as a form of contemporary mythic ritual, we establish a basis for examining genres not only as individual, isolated forms, but also as related systems that exhibit fundamentally similar characteristics” (97). This observation, like Wood’s about the genre-as-family, opens up genre studies to what is fundamentally a post-structural position: that intertextuality, a search for the interdependent relations among texts, overrides genre, the attempt to establish the differences among them. Schatz also makes a suggestion which leads toward the present paper’s methodology of treating genre as significant only in relation to the viewer’s interpretive position: “By assuming this mythic perspective when analyzing the genre film, we must necessarily consider the collective audience’s participation in the_studio system of production, which further substantiates the role of that production system in the contemporary mythmaking process” (97). Whereas Schatz emphasizes the audience’s relation to the text via its institutional circumstances, my post-structural approach focuses on the viewer’s activation of the film as a stable generic structure in order to render it coherent. The location of the post-structuralist method of genre studies within the theoretical tradition of structuralism is best illuminated with respect to The Shining via the exploration of Tzvetan Todorov’s work on the genre of the fantastic. In his book The Fantastic, Todorov explores this liminal genre which he sees as bridging the gap between the uncanny and the marvelous. He defines the uncanny as occurring when “[the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described,” while the marvelous occurs when “[the reader] decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena” (41). But these two genres represent for Todorov the two extremes around his true area of interest, the story which fits into the genre he coins the fantastic. He argues that in certain fictions,

There occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination— and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. (25)

The uncertainty of the reader is thus the prime factor for a work to be representative of the fantastic. The fantastic, postulates Todorov, “occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous” (25). Todorov concludes by defining the fantastic as, “that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (25). Of course, Todorov uses structuralist methods to define the marvelous and the uncanny as binary oppositions. However, my critical approach suggests that Todorov’s hesitation, the fantastic, represents a state that better fits the post-structural concept of liminality. Thus, I argue that Todorov, like critics such as Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Robin Wood, whose methods seem to be grounded in structural binary oppositions, produce criticism useful for the post-structural dismantling of such binaries. As articulated in American film history, the distinctions between the melodrama and the horror film replay this binary between the uncanny and the marvelous. The melodrama offers a generic tradition securely located in the uncanny. Critical explorations of the genre frequently return to Freud’s “The Uncanny” to argue this position. For example, in “The ‘Woman’s Film’: Possession and Address,” Mary Ann Doane uses Freud’s uncanny reading of “The Sandman” in order to explain the gothic woman’s film cycle, a set of films such as Dragonwyck and Rebecca which represent the punishment of an investigating woman. Doane argues, “Within the cinema, it is hardly surprising that the uncanny should be activated by means of dramas of seeing, of concealing and revealing” (289). Even though Doane analyzes the gothic subgenre of the melodrama, the uncanny is also applicable to the genre as a whole. Doane continues:

Freud’s rather long tracing of the linguistic deviations of the word serve finally to demonstrate that heimlich (belonging or pertaining to the home, familiar) is eventually equated with its opposite unheimlich (strange, unfamiliar, uncanny)—‘Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich .’ This sliding of signification is possible only because the word for ‘home’ is semantically overdetermined and can be situated in relation to the gaze. For the home or house connotes not only the familiar but also what is secret, concealed, hidden from sight (289).

Such a formulation explains the workings of many American melodramas. For example, in Digger Than Life , the familiar domestic problems of a suburban middle-class family (a conflict between father and son, the father’s frustrations with his job) are carried beyond the banal to reveal the hidden tensions which underlie these problems. Ed Avery cannot possibly make enough money at his elementary school teaching job to “keep up with the Joneses.” So instead, he must secretly work two jobs, which causes him to develop a painful arthritic condition, which in turn causes him to hide his drug habit from his family. The drugs cause Ed to become a psychotic maniac intent on annihilating the very family he had intended to support. This plot formulation precisely charts out the uncanny: the familiar domestic problems of the heim conceal the unheim , the darker desires of familial annihilation and horrific behavior. In contrast, the major contemporary American horror films, while opening up the possibility of the uncanny, resolve themselves according to the logic of the marvelous. For example, in Psycho , the psychiatrist’s explanation of Norman’s psychosis at the end of the film suggests the uncanny: Norman’s torment is the result of familial trauma. However, the uncanny is immediately undermined by the film’s penultimate image: Mrs. Bates’ skeleton is superimposed over Norman’s face while he sits in his padded cell. The film’s unequivocal representation of Norman’s possession by his mother’s ghost demonstrates that the psychiatrist’s rationalizations are unable to contain the supernatural. The resolution of Psycho is firmly located in the marvelous. Such is the case with most other New Hollywood horror films. Halloween , for example, posits via its opening flashback an uncanny explanation for Michael Myers’ murderous tendencies: the sexual activity of his sister. However, the end of the film produces the marvelous. After Michael Myers has fallen out of a window to his death, a cut reveals that his body has mysteriously vanished. The film posits that Michael Myers is a supernatural manifestation of evil, not just a boy driven insane by family romances. The critical reception of The Shining exhibits exactly the hesitations between the marvelous and the uncanny described by Todorov. Most critics attempt to lump the film into either the tradition of horror or the melodrama. Only one critic, Michel Ciment, sees the film as an example of the fantastic. For the critics favoring the marvelous, the scene that clinched the interpretation invariably was the one in which the ghost of Grady, the former caretaker of the hotel, apparently lets Jack out of the food locker in which his wife Wendy had imprisoned him. Stephen Snyder develops an unequivocal reading of the film as marvelous when he states, “Jack is released from the storage room by the spirit of Grady, or by the spirits of the dead to whom he is indentured” (9). Larry Caldwell and Samuel J. Umland argue that the film offers a playful game for its viewers, a game whose rules allow the supernatural: “Wendy… clobber[s] Jack over the head with a ball bat and lock[s] him in the storeroom. But the Hotel’s Players remain undaunted. To guarantee Jack’s continued participation in the game, they fully exploit Jack’s hostility towards women and children and insult his masculinity before releasing him from the storeroom” (109). However, most Stephen King fans found the marvelous components of the film to be utterly lacking. In “Understanding Kubrick: The Shining ,” F. Anthony Macklin describes the discontent of the novel’s fans with the film: ‘‘[ The Shining ] failed with most viewers for two basic reasons. It was not the same as Stephen King’s novel, and it was not terrifying in the conventional way a horror film is supposed to be. So lacking the model of the novel or the conventional horror genre, viewers became disconcerted” (93). The post-structural view of genre that I have been developing with respect to The Shining leads toward the ultimate rejection of genre as a category for identifying the semantic components of a film. Instead, I am suggesting that the post-structural concept of intertextuality be substituted as a term for organizing an individual film’s narrative and aesthetic components. Genre only interests me in the way viewers use the concept as a way of stabilizing the film’s meaning. I will pursue the usefulness of a post-structural theory of intertextuality by performing two readings of The Shining . First, I want to compare The Shining with its dominant horror film intertext, Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). This strategy positions the film with the marvelous, articulated in film as the horror of the supernatural. Then, I will construct a reading of The Shining as uncanny, linking the film to its melodramatic roots, specifically as a reworking of the family melodrama, Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956). Such a linkage between The Shining , Psycho , and Bigger Than Life —a trans-historical comparative methodology—can best be termed intertextual criticism. Seeing The Shining in dialectical relationship to the genre films which its readers activate exposes a system of similarities and differences which enable a comparative political reading of the film. In New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics , Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis review the development of intertextual criticism. The authors emphasize the way semiotics theorizes the function of art, seeing it as a discourse, not as a stable and discrete creative enterprise. As a discourse, semioticians argue, the art work responds, “not to reality but to other discourses” (203). Intertextuality is a translation of Bakhtin’s term dialogism, as presented in The Dialogic Imagination . Dialogic intertextuality probes, “the necessary relation of any utterance to other utterances” (qtd. in Stam 203). In intertextual criticism, the relationship between a text and other texts and discourses takes precedence over the relationship between a text and its author, or between a text and some stable reality which it merely serves to reinforce. I employ intertextual criticism as a way of interrogating the political differences between seeing The Shining as a horror film and seeing it as a melodrama. One of The Shining ’s, and all of contemporary horror films’, antecedents is Psycho . Robin ‘Wood states, “Since Psycho , the Hollywood cinema has implicitly recognized Horror as both American and familial” (“Introduction” 210). Carol Clover argues similarly that, “The spiritual debt of all the post-1974 slasher films to Psycho is clear, and it is a rare example that does not pay a visual tribute, however brief, to the ancestor—if not in a shower stabbing, then in a purling drain or the shadow of a knife-wielding hand” (194). Perhaps the most forthright homage The Shining makes is via its invocation of the “Terrible House.” Critic P.L. Titterington develops the relationship between the Overlook Hotel and the Bates family house most forcefully when he states, “One begins to feel that if the haunted hotel is an image of America, it is at the same time an image of Hollywood. Behind the Overlook Hotel stands the Old Dark House of American horror films, including Hitchcock’s Psycho ” (120). The similarities are quite stunning, given that the horror of both films occurs in a hotel/motel by killers who are feminized: Norman Bates by his failure to resolve his Oedipal tensions, Jack by his status as the hotel’s housekeeper. In addition to the relationship between Jack and Norman, The Shining also develops a relationship between Danny and Norman in that both characters repress their Oedipal conflict into alter egos. Norman does so with his mother’s personality, while Danny creates Tony (Perkins?) after his father dislocates his shoulder. The critics most frequently point to The Shining ’s shower scene as a quotation from Psycho. Paul Mayersberg describes this scene as a “rewrite of the shower scene in Psycho . In Psycho it is the lady in the shower who is threatened by the monster outside…. Jack is the ‘monster,’ scared by what might emerge from the shower behind the curtain” (57). Both films figure the scene as the site of failed sexuality. In Jack’s case, he starts to kiss the beautiful woman who emerges from the shower. However, she soon turns into a rotting hag, and Jack runs petrified out of the room and locks the door. Norman Bates, on the other hand, because of his Oedipal affiliations with another rotting hag (the dead Mrs. Bates in his cellar), cannot bear a sexual relationship with Marion Crane and instead resorts to killing her. Mayersberg also sees the scene between Wendy and Jack on the stairs as a reference to Psycho . In the scene, Wendy backs up the stairs, fearful that Jack will hurt her. She strikes Jack first on the hand, then on the skull with a baseball bat, and knocks him down the stairs. The scene recalls the scene in which Arbogast is murdered at the top of the stairs by a knife-wielding Norman dressed as Mrs. Bates. The reversal of figures is quite specific: in The Shining , the real mother actually commits the offense against the male protagonist; in Psycho , it is Norman as Mrs. Bates who kills the interrogating detective. Whereas most Stephen King fans examine The Shining in reference to its failure at replicating the horror conventions of a film like Psycho , academic critics emphasize its ability as a domestic melodrama to critique the structures of the American family. I intend to illuminate this reading strategy by linking The Shining to Bigger Than Life by way of melodrama criticism. In “Madness, Authority, and Ideology,” David; N. Rodowick offers a way of linking the 1950s family melodramas to The Shining . Rodowick argues that the melodrama, by using a self-consciously Oedipal structure, brings the text to the verge of collapse in realizing the failures of the system, and yet still retains rational explanations. This trajectory describes the narrative dynamic of The Shining , using the horror elements (the supernatural) as the “point of collapse” of the text. The question of whether or not there are supernatural experiences occurring keeps the narrative going, but there is always what Rodowick calls “a hermeneutic system” (the Oedipal trajectory) which draws us back away from the supernatural. This is, of course, “that hesitation” referred to by Todorov in his discussion of the tension between the uncanny and the marvelous that defines the fantastic. Rodowick continues by arguing that once the family melodrama adopts the self-conscious Oedipal structure, two options are available. Either the film “establishes a predetermined symbolic path in which the resolution to the conflict [is] measured against a successful identification with authority” (273) or “The structure could resolve itself. . . on the hermeneutic level (which accepted madness and usually self-destruction). . . but not both” (274). Rodowick concludes by defining the subversive melodrama: “Split between madness and authority, [the melodrama] could either adopt an arbitrary and purely formal resolution, or else it could let its crises of identification follow their self-destructive course (in which case the power of authority came into question)” (279). The Shining follows the latter course, in which Jack accepts madness, thereby calling into question his status as authority figure. This analysis of The Shining replicates Rodowick’s argument about the 1950s melodrama: “As a film Ukc Bigger Than Life demonstrates so well, the relationship between madness and authority was in a sense two expressions of the same term” (278). In Bigger Than Life , a middle-class American school teacher, Ed Avery, is stricken ill by a severe form of arthritis, for which his doctor prescribes the then experimental drug cortisone. As a result of his inability to control the use; of the drug, Ed begins to act irrationally and abuse his family. The disintegration of the family becomes the theme of the film. The drug is merely the means through which Ed’s delusions of grandeur surface, revealing the inherent inadequacies of the patriarchal family structure. Ed terrorizes his wife Lou, as well as his son Ritchie, primarily within the confines of their own home. At the end of the film, a friend of the family, Wally, saves Ritchie and Lou from Ed’s knife attack . The film emphasizes the bond Wally forms with Ritchie. Wally and Ritchie relate to each other, since they are both marginalized in terms of the patriarchal family, and because they are both interested in sports and physical activity such as football and camping. As a bachelor, Wally represents resistance to the patriarchy that Ed embodies. By virtue of his being outside the confines of the nuclear family structure, Wally is able to intervene and save Ed’s family from his destructive behavior. The Shining is a 1980s reworking of Bigger Than Life . In Kubrick’s film, Jack Torrance, a former schoolteacher from Vermont, moves his family from Denver, where they are currently living, to the Overlook Hotel, a remote resort in the Rocky Mountains. It is to be Jack’s job to take care of the hotel, as it is closed during the winter due to extreme weather. On closing day, October 31 (Halloween), the Torrances move into the hotel. They are given a tour around the hotel by the manager, Stuart Ullman, and by the African-American chef, Dick Hallorann. While the rest of the family and hotel staff are examining the boiler room, Dick and Jack’s son Danny sit and talk to one another. During this scene, it becomes clear that both Dick and Danny share an extrasensory perceptive gift, which Dick’s grandmother called “the shining.” He describes it as an ability to see past, present, and/or future events. Later that day, the rest of the hotel staff leave: only Jack, his wife Wendy, and Danny remain at the hotel. The rest of the film represents an intense study of the disintegration of this nuclear family, coincident with the plummet of Jack into the throes of madness. Whereas the disintegration of the family portrayed in Bigger Than Life required the narrative device of the cortisone, The Shining needs no other gimmickry than the sheer isolation of the family unit within the confines of the remote location. Danny, sensing the danger his father presents, shines to Dick to get help, who receives the message and makes the long trip from Miami to the Overlook. Dick represents the external resistance to patriarchy, the role that Wally played in the Ray film. Dick becomes the force capable of saving the wife and son from the evil father. In both films, the father is a teacher. In Bigger Than Life , Ed’s function as teacher eventually leads to his abusive treatment of his son. As Ed begins to abuse the cortisone treatments, he develops the delusion that he has solutions to the nation’s crisis in education. Ed tells his wife that he wants to get away from the family to develop and write about his pedagogical ideas. Soon, Ed fails to teach even his own son to do math properly. After a terrifying scene where he gives his son word problems and then menacingly hovers over the boy until he can come up with the correct answer, Ed decides to kill the boy and himself. In The Shining , Jack’s status as a teacher equally leads to his abuse of the family. Because Jack regards himself as a writer, his failure as a teacher in Vermont is even more acutely felt. Once at the Overlook, when Jack cannot produce any more writing than the obsessively repeated phrase, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” we get the sense that Jack’s frustrations as a teacher and writer play a large part in his slippage into insanity. The way these two films resolve is the most fruitful point of thematic difference. Whereas Wally is strong enough to overpower Ed Avery, Dick is not prepared to do battle with the now completely insane Jack. As Dick drives up to the front door of the hotel, Jack is about to murder his wife with an ax. Hearing the Sno-Cat, Jack slops this activity in order to go kill Dick, who falls as easy prey to Jack’s ax. Danny, who has been hiding in a storage cabinet in the kitchen, screams in pain as Jack kills his “shining” partner. Next, Danny runs out into the hedge maze outside the hotel in an effort to escape from Jack. As Danny is familiar with the maze and is cunning once therein, he escapes from Jack into Hallorann’s Sno-Cat where Wendy is waiting for him. Jack, lost within the maze, freezes to death in the snowstorm. As one critic puts it, “it is his [Dick’s] snowmobile that becomes the hope for mother and son after Hallorann himself has been murdered’’ (Titlerington 119). Whereas Wally was able to be both the family’s savior and live on after the incident, Dick must sacrifice his life in order that the wife and son may escape the father. Like Wally in Bigger Than Life , though, Dick does eventually save the wife and child from the patriarchal beast. But unlike Wally, Dick is not the image of the perfect desirable bachelor for the wife: he is a middle-aged black man. Since Dick unknowingly forfeits his life at the hands of the patriarch, it falls on the son Danny to rid himself and his mother of Jack’s threat to his family by luring him into the hedge maze to die. The potential of the post-structural approach to film genre that I have been delineating in this paper lies in an awareness that polysemous intertextual connections within the text produce contradictions in its meaning. I will pursue this claim by analyzing the ways in which accentuating The Shining as a horror film or a melodrama produces different approaches to the film’s stance on such political identity issues as class, gender, and race. In “A Case of Mistaken Legitimacy,” Richard DeCordova uses a reading of Freud’s “Family Romances” to understand 1950s family melodramas as critiques of the American class structure. DeCordova regards class as a structural element neglected in both melodrama criticism and in Freud’s reading of his patients’ symptoms. DeCordova argues, “The opposition between generations in the family romance proceeds quite explicitly through class” (256). In the scenario of the family romance, Freud argues that a child, recognizing his Oedipal tension within this unit, replaces his parents with others from a higher class. In The Shining , the family romance is played out, not by Danny, but by Jack himself. It is Jack who fancies he belongs to another class: as he becomes more intimate with the hotel, he imagines that he is part of the 1920s aristocracy. DeCordova concludes his reading of three 1950s family melodramas by arguing:

The bourgeois family is finally separated from this conflict and presented as a private alternative to the more public spectacle of class difference. This work of privatization as a form of resolution is astonishingly clear in the last shots of all of these films. In all, the heroes walk or drive away from the public scenes of the spectacle and disappear from the fiction into their own little worlds, as if escaping from the worst of dreams (267).

This quite literally describes the last shots of The Shining , in which Danny and Wendy dispose of the overly class conscious Jack and in the sno-cat head for their newly found independence from the oppressive patriarch. This is of course a very different resolution from those of the melodramas that DeCordova analyzes. For example, at the end of Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956), Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall form a heterosexual couple who escape into their own private world. In The Shining, it is mother and child, the two victims of the family romance, who leave behind Jack the patriarch. However, the family romance structure is not just confined to the melodramatic tradition, but also to the horror genre. In “The Terror of Pleasure,” Tania Modleski comments on the slasher film’s dismantling of the family romance: “Just as the individual and the family are dis-membered in the most gruesomely literal way in many of these films, so the novelistic as family romance is also in the process of being dismantled” (160). This observation serves as an example of how conflicting generic elements in The Shining provide a framework for a critique of the workings of the American class system, particularly in the way this class system is embedded into the patriarchal family structure. The reading of The Shining as working in the melodramatic mode centers around the way the film develops a critique of the American class structure. In The Shining and Bigger Than Life , both male protagonists are driven mad by the financial necessities of supporting their nuclear families’ middle-class lifestyles. The oppressiveness of the class structure on the Torrances is revealed when Stuart Ullman shows them the caretaker’s apartment. Thomas Allen Nelson describes the scene thus:

Jack and Wendy stand together in the white bathroom of the apartment, where [later in the film] she will be cornered by hisj madness, and both express disapproval—Jack through sardonic humor (“homey,” he calls it), and Wendy, with a look of wifely disappointment—yet neither realize that, more than likely, they now inhabit an enclosed space that once gave birth to a previous caretaker’s madness (215).

What is implicit here is that the class oppression, as figured by a rum-down apartment in the midst of a glamorous hotel, is the assumed cause of the horrors to come. Jack’s inability to keep a job (in the novel, he lost his teaching job in Vermont because he hurt a student who slashed his car tires) has led to his needing to swallow his pride and grovel before the unctuous Ullman. As the film progresses, Jack’s sensitivity to his inability to support his family is compounded by his failure as a writer. This failure translates into Jack’s delusionary plummet into the association with the hotel. Even though he is never seen doing any actual hotel maintenance (significantly, it is Wendy who is seen doing all the work), Jack begins to fancy himself as always having been the caretaker. He tells Danny at one point, “I wish we could stay here forever and ever and ever.” The class issue surfaces in this regard just when Jack’s compliance would have saved the family from its forthcoming temble ordeal. When Wendy comes to tell Jack they should take Danny down to the town to see a doctor just before the baseball bat scene on the stairs, Jack alludes to his class frustrations, “I could really write my own ticket if I went back to Boulder now, couldn’t I? Shoveling out driveways, workin’ in a car wash. Wouldn’t that appeal to you? Wendy, I have let you fuck up my life so far, but I am not going to let you fuck this up.” In this way, Jack’s refusal to help his family escape its impending doom at his own hands is figured as the way his class position has pigeonholed him into this menial job. The film also develops a class critique by exposing the American Dream as a cruel myth. This is most forcefully exposed in Jack’s failure to write the “Great American Novel,” but also in the Torrances’ almost absurd position as workers in the abandoned, palatial Overlook Hotel. As Leibowitz and Jeffress argue, “The paradox at the heart of the [American] dream is evoked by the Torrance family ensconced like royalty in the empty Overlook Hotel, enchanted by the illusion of ownership while in fact they arc merely employees, living in the shabbiest corner of the hotel” (46). Finally, The Shining develops a class critique by exposing Jack’s fantasies about his leisure class heritage. Stephen Snyder even sees this element at work at the moment of Jack’s death in the frozen- maze, “Jack dies in an bxalted monument of leisure class dreams. As Ullman notes, one needs several hours of free time just to play around in [the maze]” (10-11). If one turns from an attention to class toward a focus on gender, reading The Shining as a melodrama or a horror film produces further contradictions in the film’s political stance. Positioned as a melodrama, The Shining seems to produce a critique of the patriarchal relations inherent in the American familial structure. An often analyzed image of the melodrama concerns the woman waiting at the window. Mary Ann Doane argues that, “The window is the interface between inside and outside, the feminine space of the family and reproduction and the masculine space of production” (288). In All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955), for example, the Jane Wyman character is often framed from inside the window of her house, looking out at her yard below. In The Shining , it is Jack who is figured watching his family out the window in the scene where Wendy and Danny are playing in the snow. This shot is the first in the film which figures Jack’s plummet into insanity. The film critiques patriarchy by linking Jack with the feminine position identified by Doane’s analysis of the figure at the window. Jack is in a sense the film’s “housekeeper”: it is his job to keep up the hotel. And yet, for Jack, since his place of work is also his home, the division of spaces Doane points to between the feminine and masculine world does not hold. Since the window shot also figures Jack’s plummet into madness, Jack’s insanity can be read as the result of the gender position into which he is inserted. Jack attempts to maintain a patriarchal position of authority but is made to give up his masculine position of privilege by being forced by economic imperatives to work in a feminized sphere. Yet, taken as a contemporary horror film, the gender political implications of The Shining emerge along quite different lines. Victims in the slasher film, the contemporary version of the horror film instigated by Psycho , are frequently sexually-active females. The Shining works against the conventions of horror in this respect, as its narrative concerns only one murder, that of Dick Hallorann. However, his death is handled in very much the same way that Carol Clover describes of all male’s deaths in slasher films, “The death of a male is always swift; even if the victim grasps what is happening to him, he has no time to react or register terror. . . The death of a male is moreover more likely than the death of a female to be viewed from a distance… or indeed to happen off screen and not be viewed at all” (200-1). This is a fairly accurate description of Hallorann’s death: we see Jack strike one blow to Hallorann’s chest in long shot. Then we cut away. The next time we see Hallorann’s body, its arms have been chopped off. We never witness this dismemberment. This shift from gender to race as a focus of victimization in The Shining introduces my last investigation of the film’s identity politics. The character of Dick Hallorann, the African-American cook who works at the hotel, is crucial here because of the way his racial identity both replays and rewrites the narrative function filled by Wally in Bigger Than Life . In what ways is Dick’s being a person of color important to the overall strategies of the film? I begin with an examination of the film’s critique of racism. The scene of primary importance in this discussion is Jack’s second visit to the Gold Room, a huge ballroom, complete with a wet bar, at the Overlook Hotel. Here, Jack engages in delusional conversations with Lloyd, a composite projection of the bartenders of Jack’s alcoholic past. Jack talks with Lloyd about his problems, including calling Wendy “the old sperm bank,” and at one point sighing “white man’s burden” while being presented with a bottle of whiskey. At the bar, Jack “remembers how to express his sexist [and racist] prerogatives” (Nelson 225). This implies that these characteristics have been repressed within his psyche by the civilizing effects of society. As Jack breaks free of these restraints, he begins to express his genuine feelings towards both women and other minority groups. The next step in this progression away from the restraints of civilization occurs during Jack’s discussion with “Delbert” Grady about how his family may need a bit of “correcting.” Grady, supposedly a waiter in the Gold Room, is also one of Jack’s projections. At Jack’s job interview, Ullman tells Jack the story about Charles Grady, the former caretaker at the Overlook, who murdered his wife and twin daughters in 1970. Jack has now confused the name, and uses the Grady projection to test within his mind his fantasy of freeing himself from the burden of his cumbersome family, as well as to explore his new predilection toward sexism and racism. As Richard Jameson argues,

[Grady] introduces Jack to the quaint snobbery of his anachronistic, English-accented cultural frame: Danny has tried to bring “an outside party, a nigger, a nigger cook “into the action; and Jack repeats “A ‘nigger’?” (a superb reading by Nicholson) in a tone that suggests he is not used to considering negritude an offense, is on the verge of disbelieving laughter, and yet is also fascinated by the new ripple of self-congratulating possibility here (32).

Jack’s release from society’s control, symbolized by his easy assimilation into the world of the hotel’s upper-class and elitist past has let loose the sexism and racism that hides within us all, but which we are usually able to repress, except under extreme conditions. The criticism of the sexism and racism in the film comes from the perception of Jack and his projections as supematurally evil. Hence, what they say, how they act, and their beliefs are construed as odious. In her review of The Shining , Pauline Kael has compiled perhaps the most complete list of negative reactions to the film. Kael focuses one of her attacks at the racial implications of Dick’s murder. Ultimately, she concludes that the film’s gesture is racist: “The awful suspicion pops into the mind that since we don’t want to see Wendy or Danny hurt and there’s nobody else alive around for Jack to get at, lie’s,; given the black man” (136). In order to support this claim, Kael invokes a scene from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to imply that within The Shining , the lives of blacks are less important than the lives of whites. However, both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Shining are structured such that the racist; notions presented are critiqued throughout. Kael’s reading also critiques the way that The Shining generically fails as a horror film in presenting Hallorann’s murder: “[He] traveled all that way and we were subjected to all that laborious crosscutting (which destroyed any chance for a buildup of suspense back at the hotel) just to provide a sacrificial victim and a Sno-Cat?” (136). Here, the film’s melodramatic nature (especially its use of Griffith-like cross-cutting) overrides its horror film components, especially the creation of meaningful suspense. The cross-cutting with Hallorann serves an important melodramatic function: the accentuation of extremes. The representation of extremes is a common way for the melodrama to wring out the “truth” from the “real.” Previously, Hallorann is associated with the heat wave in Miami, contrasting starkly with the blizzard in Colorado. Now, in “all that laborious crosscutting,” we see Hallorann drive the Sno-Cat through the blizzard and up the Sidewinder (the road connecting the Overlook with the rest of civilization). Hallorann is traveling through the most brutal incarnations of nature, while the Torrances are back within the confines of the Overlook Hotel, amidst the most artificial of human constructions. Hallorann’s function in the narrative is more important than Kael allows. As the only sincere figure outside of Wendy and Danny, Hallorann offers an external resistance to the patriarchal structure, yet due to issues of race, in a vastly different way from Wally’s function in Bigger Than Life . The film locates Hallorann’s murder within a larger critique of colonialism. Jack Torrance, the embodiment of the American patriarch, has failed to achieve the success for which “The American: Dream” has coerced him into working. Instead of writing “The Great American Novel” (Leibowitz and Jeffress, 46), Jack writes the same sentence over and over again, constructing a book out of the phrase, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” This becomes symbolically the anthem of a hotel whose primary purpose is to engage the upper-class in a leisurely diversion from work. In fact, the violence in the hotel’s past that Hallorann and Danny “shine” is “associated with the history of American conquest” (Snyder 7). We learn from Stuart Ullman early in the film that the hotel has been built on an Indian burial ground. As David Cook argues, “ The Shining is less about ghosts and demonic possession than it is about the murderous system of economic exploitation which has sustained this country since, like the Overlook Hotel, it was built upon an Indian burial ground that stretched quite literally ‘From sea to shining sea’” (2). Thus, the hotel as a symbol of American success literally covers over the violence and corruption it took to build it. The name of the hotel itself takes on symbolic form in this new light, . .a secret that most Americans choose to overlook; the true horror of The Shining is the horror of living in a society which is predicated upon murder and must constantly deny the fact to itself’ (3). The Overlook Hotel becomes a symbol for the way white male Americans choose to hide their past demons in a closet while striving for a success at the: expense of others—be it Native-Americans, African-Americans, women, or children. These “Others” are clearly emphasized by the rest of the film as well. The marginalized characters of the American experience, the African-American, the woman, and the child are all present in the personae of Hallorann, Wendy, and Danny. Leibowitz and Jeffress summarize the film as, “Torrance makes his devil’s bargain… and women, children, and blacks suffer” (47). The American patriarch inflicts pain on many oppressed groups, not just Dick Hallorann, as Kadi argued. Leibowitz and Jeffress ultimately conclude that the power of the shining becomes “a kind of survival skill that helps the oppressed to defend themselves…. It should be noted that the relationships between the child, the black, and the woman are the only ones free of the self-serving motives that govern those in which Jack participates” (50). It seems that as a result of the immense pressures of the patriarchal American dream to strive for success, Jack subverts his humanity and transforms himself into a monster. The oppressed groups, in order to resist this behavior, form a community, an alternative family. This interpretation leaves one unanswered question: what do we make of the fact that Hallorann gets killed in the end by Jack? Is he a sacrificial lamb, as Kael argues, or is there something more to this? Why would a film, which has so dramatically critiqued the modes of racism, resort to racism itself to solve a problem of narrative? The answer, I think, lies in the desire to see Dick as victim of Jack’s brutality, while still preserving the Oedipal tension between Danny and Jack. The major difference between The Shining and Bigger Than Life is the insistence on an Oedipal resolution of the conflict between Danny and Jack. When Jack chases Danny into the maze with ax in hand and states, “I’m right behind you Danny,” he is predicting Danny’s future as well as attempting to scare the young boy. Jack alludes to the construction of the American Dream which constitutes Danny as well as himself. To have Dick survive and Jack die would mean the replacement of the white patriarchal father figure with the kind father Hallorann. Dick has already been characterized as being mentally complicit with Danny through their mutual ability to “shine.” In his discussion of this film as a fairy tale deriving from Bruno Bettleheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, Christopher Hoile goes as far as to call Hallorann Danny’s “magic guardian” (9). To have Hallorann survive would produce a closed narrative. The film would be left arguing that all is right with the world: the patriarch has been defeated for all time, and African-Americans, women, and children are no longer oppressed. Instead, Jack kills Danny’s “good” father figure. Then, Danny kills Jack, the patriarchal beast, but that beast is present within himself as well. The film leaves open many possibilities for the future. The film’s world is not a perfect one in which the evil father is killed and the good father lives. Instead, both are killed, and it is up to Danny to grow up and build a better world, throwing off the demons of his past but always knowing that deep inside of him, the demons that possessed Jack and all Americans are right beneath the surface. Danny has inherited Jack’s legacy. This still does not resolve the problems of the representation of African-American subjectivity raised by The Shining ’s narrative strategy. In “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” Manthia Diawara argues that American films are dominated by “the image of the punished and disciplined black man” (68). As a horror film, The Shining participates in this representational legacy. The Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968) ends similarly with the absurd killing of Ben, the African-American and the only character with whom we have been encouraged to identify. Diawara continues, “Black male characters in contemporary Hollywood films are made less threatening to whites. .. by stories in which blacks are depicted playing by the rules of white society and losing” (69). On one level, this is exactly what happens in The Shining . Hallorann is at first seen to be indoctrinated into the white patriarchal world. When he first meets the Torrances, he stands with Stuart Ullman and says, “how do you like our hotel, so far?” He thus is immediately portrayed as being part of a hotel built under the auspices of American colonial practices. At the end of the film, he tries to help Danny and Wendy, and is punished for his actions by the white patriarch. He plays by the rules of white society and loses by forfeiting his life, as Kael argues. Thus, seen in light of the tradition of the horror film, Hallorann is punished for being African-American. From the perspective of the melodramatic tradition, Hallorann serves a crucial function of helping Danny learn to resist patriarchy and racism. Thus, it is the generic complexity of The Shining which produces its dialogical political position.

III. Conclusion

In “Bringing It All Back Home,” Vivian Sobchak forwards the argument that the major contemporary American film genres— horror, science fiction, and melodrama—are all fundamentally related by their endorsement of the status quo. Sobchak argues:

The three genres have exchanged and expended their representational energy dynamically and urgently—with the “politically unconscious” aim of seeking re-solution, or at least ab-solution, for a threatened patriarchy and its besieged structure of perpetuation: the bourgeois family. In sum, their mutual project has been (and is) aggressively regressive and conservative (190).

As I have argued in this paper, a post-structural view of genre films forwards an intertextual method to expose the contradictions in a genre film’s ideological position. Contrary to Sobchak’s treatment of genres as stable and politically interchangeable, an intertextual method looks at the contradictions between generic traditions within one text. Sobchak’s survey approach allows her to make broad generalizations about the immanent meaning of genre films but fails to account for the ideological complexities of an individual film like The Shining . We need to move beyond structuralism’s binary oppositions toward the ways in which liminal, unstable states between generic traditions describe the way all genre films work. In Derrida’s sense, merely defining a genre produces its deconstruction. To name the genre produces its dissolution. However, this is not to claim that an intertextual method renders the concept of genre obsolete. Quite to the contrary, genre seems more than ever to serve as a unifying scheme for viewers to make sense of films. The approach to The Shining offered here represents a way of discussing the inadequacies of genre as a critical tool while at the same time stressing its importance. I suggest that we look at how readers’ responses to films are organized by the attribution of genre. Such an approach helps to explain why horror fans cannot wait for the new television version of The Shining to arrive in order to “fix” the atrocities Stanley Kubrick inflicted upon Stephen King’s novel, while academic critics have positioned that very same Kubrick film as one of the masterworks of the contemporary American cinema’s ability to produce cultural critique.

1 For more on this fan response, see Kate Meyers, “Frightening Strikes Twice.” 2 With the exception of Fredric Jameson, who regards the film as a Reaganite exercise in post-modern nostalgia. 3 Examples of criticism which privileges the “New” Hollywood’s special ability to hybridize genres includes John Cawelti’s “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films” and Jim Collins’ “Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity.” 4 In “The Law of Genre,” Jacques Derrida produces a post-structural genre criticism in which he argues that a “pure” genre is an impossibility. For Derrjda, the very gesture of labeling a genre immediately produces its instability. Genres are always already impure. However, I find these metaphors of impurity, especially Derrida’s choice—“contamination”-—overly derogatory, especially given my investigation of the melodrama, the most denigrated genre in film history. In this context, the implication of the metaphor would suggest that the film version of The Shining “contaminates” King’s horror with its melodrama, a critical position toward the melodrama’s status in American culture that I resolutely reject. My thanks to Chris Orr for informing me of Derrida’s work on genre.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination . Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Beebee, Thomas O. The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability . University Park: Pennsylvania State UP 1994. Bettleheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment . New York: Random House, 1975. Caldwell, Larry W. and Samuel J. Umland. ‘“Come and Play With Us’: The Play Metaphor in Kubrick’s The Shining.” Literature/ Film Quarterly . 14.2 (1986): 106- 111. Cawelti, John G. “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films.” Film Genre Reader . Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. 183-201. Ciment. Michel. “The Shining.” Kubrick . London: Collins, 1983. 135-146. Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations . 20 (Fall 1987): 187-228. Collins, Jim. “Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity.” Film Theory Goes to the Movies . Eds. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins. New York: Routledge, 1993. 242-264. Cook, David. “American Horror: The Shining.” Literature/Film Quarterly . 12.1 (1984): 2-4. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Critical Inquiry . 7.1 (1980). 55-81. Diawara, Manthia. “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance.” Screen . 29.4 (1988): 66-76. Doane, Mary Ann. “The ‘Woman’s Film’: Possession and Address.” Home is Where the Heart Is . Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: BFI, 1987. 283-298. Freud, Sigmund. “Family Romances.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Trans. James Strachey. Vol.IX . London: The Hogarth Press, 1959. 237-241. Hoile, Christopher. “The Uncanny and the Fairy Tale in Kubrick’s The Shining.” Literature/Film Quarterly . 12.1 (1984): 5-12. Jameson, R.T. “Kubrick’s Shining.” Film Comment . 16.4 (July/ August 1980): 28-32. Kael, Pauline. “Devolution.” New Yorker . 6 September 1980:136. Leibowitz, Flo and Lynn Jeffress. “The Shining.” Film Quarterly . 34 (1980-81): 45-51. Macklin, F. Anthony. “Understanding Kubrick: The Shining.” Journal of Popular Film and Television . 9.2 (Summer 1981). 93-95. Mayersberg, Paul. “The Overlook Hotel.” Sight and Sound . 50.1 (1980-81): 54-57. Meyers, Kate. “Frightening Strikes Twice.” Entertainment Weekly. 11 April 1997. 44-55. Modleski, Tania. “The Terror of Pleasure.” Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 155-166. Naremore, James. “American Film Noir: The History of an Idea.” Film Quarterly . 49.2 (Winter 1995-96). 12-28. Nelson, Thomas Allen. Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Rodowick, David N. “Madness, Authority and Ideology: The Domestic Melodrama of the 1950s.” Home is Where the Heart Is . Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: BFI, 1987. 268-282. Schatz, Thomas. “The Structural Influence: New Directions in Film Genre Study.” Film Genre Reader . Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. 91-101. Sobchak, Vivian. “Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange.” American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film . Ed. Gregory A. Waller. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. 175-194. Snyder, Stephen. “Family Life and Leisure Culture in The Shining.” Film Criticism . 7.1 (1982): 4-13. Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics . London: Routledge, 1992. Titterington, P.L. “Kubrick and The Shining.” Sight and Sound . 50.2 (Spring 1981): 119. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre . Cornell: Cornell UP, 1975. Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” Movies and Methods, Volume II . Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985. 195-219. — . “Ideology, Genre, Auteur.” Film Genre Reader . Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. 59-73.

Film Criticism 22.1 (Fall 1997) pp. 38-61

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The Shining Film Analysis: Music and Sound

Film sound analysis

• Anderson, T. (2012). Kubrick's ghosts: Music and sound in The Shining. In C. J. S. Harrington & D. D. Lomax (Eds.), Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick (pp. 169-181). New York: Gower Publishing.
• Cook, N. (2010). Analysing musical multimedia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Creed, B. (1993). Horror and the monstrous-feminine: An imaginary abjection. New York: Routledge.
• Klevan, A. (2001). Impossible images: The politics of representation in The Shining. In M. T. Carroll & J. Gibbons (Eds.), Post-theory: Reconstructing film studies (pp. 195-214). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Wierzbicki, J. (2009). The music of the Shining: Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

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The Shining: Movie Versus Book Comparison

A normal culture in the entertainment scene is the adaptation of literal works into screen productions to ride on the book’s popularity and reach out to the crowds who prefer watching to reading. It is typical of the film adaptation to stray away from the book to amplify the cinematic experience of the story (Bluestone). Similarly, the adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining into a motion picture by Stanley Kubrick perfectly captures this trend. The novel centers on the protagonist, John, who visits a desolate hotel with the company of his young wife, Wendy, and son, Danny, for a vacation. In contrast, the main character is named Jack in Stanley Kubrick’s movie. The differences between the pieces range from characters’ names, descriptions, motives and plot development. However, both the novel The Shining and the movie are masterpieces in their respective genres. A thorough review of the book and the film reveals that the input of the difference in Kubrick’s adaptation serves to amplify rather than destroy the shining of King’s story.

Firstly, the protagonist’s motives for being at the Overlook Hotel are drastically different between the book and the film. In both media, the main character is depicted as a writer struggling with writer’s block; however, the similarities end there. In the novel, John struggles with a project which he quickly abandons after getting the opportunity to caretake The Overlook for the winter season. Thus, John decides to embark on a new project writing about the history of the haunted Overlook hotel. In contrast, the film portrays Jack as a hotelier out on vacation who learns about the hotel’s haunted history during his interview for the caretaking position. As a result, John resorts to alcohol to deal with The Overlook’s ghosts, who constantly chip away at him to steal his shine. However, Jack’s turmoil is psychological in nature; hence his alcoholism in the film is unexplored. Despite the differences in the depiction of the protagonist’s motives and their way of dealing with issues, both the movie and the novel portray the main character fighting against his demons, striving to break away from self-made traps.

Secondly, the protagonist’s mental state differs greatly between the movie’s depiction and the novel. The Shinning film has Jack as a mentally disturbed individual whose grasp of reality loosens gradually as the plot develops. Thus, considering his deteriorating mental status, it is conceivable that he ends up attacking and killing his wife while injuring Danny. The protagonist’s actions are directly attributable to a mental state than supernatural causes. However, King’s John is a normal, loving husband and father. Despite his alcoholism, John cares greatly for his family. However, the ghosts haunting The Overlook possess him and drive him to attack his own family. Nonetheless, his goodwill overcomes the evil in him just in time for him to set Danny free. Therefore, Kubrick and King depict different reasons to explain the protagonist’s actions.

Additionally, John uses a roque mallet while Jack wields an axe to propagate the violence in the story. King’s protagonist employs a mallet with an oversized head to terrorize his family and Dick Hallorann. The selected weapon in the novel is appropriate to explain how the attacked characters can survive. The use of a mallet on Hallorann leads to his survival, from which he ultimately helps Wendy and Danny escape the hotel following the attempt on their lives. Similarly, the use of such a blunt tool alludes to the protagonist being driven by supernatural forces; thus, he chooses the only available weapon. On his volition, John would use a more fatal weapon. On the other hand, Kubrick’s Jack is psychotic and out to cause harm. Thus, he utilizes an axe to kill his wife and Hallorann. The axe enhances the film’s cinematic appeal as it causes more damage and gorier scenes.

Finally, John’s death differs from Jack’s death. In the movie, Jack chases Danny into the hedge maze, where he gets hopelessly lost. Consequently, he collapses in an unknown corner due to exhaustion and freezes to death because of the winter cold. Thus, his death is outside the hotel, and the hotel remains standing. In contrast, John in the novel is only violent due to the ghosts possessing him. Therefore, when he regains himself and is aware of his actions and surroundings, John remembers forgetting to dump the hotel’s boiler. Throughout the story, his duty to regulate the boiler grounds him. Thus, he stops his chase of Danny to try and relieve the pressure in the boiler; unfortunately, it’s too late. The boiler explodes in John’s face, consequently burning down The Overlook.

In conclusion, Kubrick made many alterations to King’s story in his film adaptation of The Shining. The differences include changing the protagonist’s name and causes for their violent actions. The outcomes of the protagonist’s family are also different, with Wendy and Halloran dying in the film while they survive in the novel. Despite the differences, the novel was a literary success, while the film was a Box Office hit. The changes instituted by Stanley Kubrick immensely elevated the story’s cinematic appeal. Scenes such as the twin ghost girls, conspicuously missing in the novel, cemented the film’s standing as a horror film. Thus, despite the outrage in changes made when novels are adapted for the screen, Kubrick’s alterations were necessary to provide a logical, thrilling and visually appealing story of the Torrance’s and The Overlook. The differences help celebrate Torrance’s story in a cinematic medium.

Works Cited

Bluestone, George.  Novels into film . Univ of California Press, 1968.

King, Stephen.  The Shining . New York: Doubleday, 1977. Print.

Kubrick, Stanley.  The Shining . USA: Warner Bros, 1980. film.

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Harvard Is Bringing Back Standardized Tests. Other Schools Should, Too.

Emi nietfeld didn’t have access to lacrosse or advanced placement classes, but she did have standardized tests..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions. [MUSIC PLAYING]

My name is Emi Nietfeld, and I am a journalist and the author of Acceptance, a memoir. For the last 15 years of my life, I have thought back to studying for standardized tests with this warm affection. I think that it’s important that standardized tests remain an option for students to submit, because it is one path to college when some of the other paths fail.

The Ivy League universities — they are now changing their tune on standardized testing.

During the pandemic, many colleges dropped the requirement to submit SAT or ACT scores. Then Dartmouth required standardized tests following an analysis that they did that showed that the same students coming from a lower income background who were supposed to benefit from test optional policies were actually being harmed by it.

Harvard University is planning to reinstate standardized test scores for admissions requirements, and it follows some of its peers after a pause caused by the pandemic.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When I saw the news, I was pretty surprised at first. Because I feel like the zeitgeist has been so anti-standardized tests. For example, students generally do not like taking them, parents complain about how stressful they are, and there are concerns about equity and whether these tests are really fair to students who are coming from different backgrounds, especially because a high score is associated with wealth and with racial privilege.

At the same time, I really liked these tests as a college applicant. I did not have access to a consistent school life, to teachers who could recommend me to extracurriculars that were going to impress colleges. So, really, the one thing that I did have was these standardized tests. And because of that, they were my hope for the future.

When I was nine years old, my parents separated, and that triggered pretty severe mental health issues for both of them. And it also meant that I went into therapy. And pretty quickly, I was diagnosed, I was medicated, and my life fell apart.

I had been a straight-A student. But, suddenly, I was switching between schools, in between these treatment programs. And when I was 14, I was sent to a locked facility, where we didn’t go to school, except for the classroom that was staffed by the Special Education Department.

And every afternoon, we had hours and hours of quiet time where we just had to sit alone in our rooms unless we had earned the privilege to go outside. And on one of those afternoons, I was still stuck in my room. I hadn’t been outside in weeks. And the staff went on an outing to the library.

And so I asked them, hey, could you get me a standardized test prep book? And I was so shocked when they came back, and somebody was like, here, and handed me Barron’s guide to the ACT. I just felt like this beam of light was shining down from heaven on me because, finally, I had something to do. I had a way to pass all that time. And I didn’t have to just feel like, oh, I’m stuck here, falling behind, while all these other people who are richer, and healthier, and get to live in the real world, are taking advanced placement classes and playing field hockey.

For me, and for a lot of people who are in difficult situations, having this objective score to show colleges is something that is available to us. You look at the other parts of the college application like the essay, or teacher recommendations, or even GPA. And all of that stuff is also shaped by what kind of background you’re coming from. And I did not have control over where I went to school or if I could finish out the year at a certain school, but I did have control over being able to study for and take this test.

When I was writing my personal statement, I felt like I would have to show my trauma in order to get in. I worked on drafts of my application while I was sleeping in the back seat of my rusty Toyota Corolla. I was brainstorming it from a homeless shelter, and it was just this incredible emotional weight to have to make myself so vulnerable for colleges. And at least when I was studying for standardized tests, I was able to focus on academics, and I was able to imagine myself as a scholar instead of another vulnerable teenager.

Part of why I really wanted to attend an elite university was that they offered really incredible financial aid, and that was what I got when I went to Harvard. I don’t think standardized tests should be the only metric that colleges use to evaluate applicants — not at all. But I do think that it can be a really important objective metric that can compare different students from different contexts against each other, and I would hate to see that disappear.

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By Emi Nietfeld

Produced by Kristina Samulewski

Harvard University is among the latest institutions to announce it is reversing its test-optional policy and requiring students to submit test scores in their applications. For the writer Emi Nietfeld, it’s a positive sign. Growing up homeless and in the foster care system, she didn’t have a lot of control over her education or resources that would bolster her college applications. But one thing she did have control over was studying for standardized tests. In this audio essay, Nietfeld explains how Scantron sheets helped her unlock a better life.

(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available on Monday in the audio player above.)

This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Kristina Samulewski. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — The Shining — The Shining: Book Vs Movie Analysis

The Shining: Book Vs Movie Analysis

• Categories: Film Analysis The Shining

About this sample

Words: 1729 |

Published: Dec 12, 2018

Words: 1729 | Pages: 4 | 9 min read

The Shining: King VS. Kubrick

Works cited.

• Kolker, R. (2006). The Shining. British Film Institute.
• Phillips, G. (2018). The Shining (BFI Film Classics). Bloomsbury Academic.
• Adair, G. (2001). The Making of Kubrick's 2001. Modern Library.
• Nelson, T. (Ed.). (2000). Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series). University Press of Mississippi.
• King, S. (2012). The Shining. Anchor.
• Hughes, D. (Ed.). (2007). Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives. Black Dog Publishing.
• Falsetto, M. (2015). Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis. Greenwood.
• Badley, L. (2000). Film, horror, and the body fantastic. Greenwood Publishing Group.
• Horton, A., & McDougal, S. (2014). The Routledge encyclopedia of films. Routledge.
• Gelmis, J. (1971). The Film Director as Superstar. Doubleday.

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