The Shining

THE SHINING
(1980)
Overall: THE BEST

Well it is October and that means two things; pumpkin spice horseshit is unfathomably everywhere and yay horror movies!  Now for me, the month that Halloween is in holds no substantially greater weight than any other month for watching horror films.  I will only bust out A Christmas Story or Die Hard during December generally, but Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary's Baby, or anything with Bela Lugosi in it pretty much hits the same spot no matter what time of year it is.  As is basically the case for any horror dork such as myself.

Now The Shining is a film which I have seen many, many times over the course of many, many years and in many, many different months.  Yet it is also the most appropriate to single out and analyze for a festive blog entry this time of year.  It is the absolute best horror movie ever made and if not for 2001: A Space Odyssey, I would go as far as to say it is the best film the best filmmaker Stanley Kubrick ever made as well.

Pretty hard to fuck with this shit right here.

Kubrick's meticulous and methodical process to making movies is well documented by film historians and experts everywhere.  Each project he took on would take longer and longer to complete, as he garnished more and more control over his work and therefor, more and more patience was at his disposal to see his vision through.  Very few filmmakers are granted such a luxury of near limitless resources, funds, and time to see their undertakings come to life and the results Kubrick routinely attained are matchless in his field.

The seeds were planted for The Shining to become a movie when after filming the brilliant yet commercially inaccessible Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick decided he wanted his next project to have a wider appeal.  So he set about a journey to find a novel to adapt what would keep him as artistically fulfilled as ever at the same time.  Having never made a horror movie, Kubrick was intrigued with basically how he could achieve something in a genre often stifled with cliches, but also one that connected profoundly to a dark human element that was universal.  After getting embittered with a stack of books that were not what he was looking for, Stephen King's The Shining stood out and ultimately became the victor for adaptation.

Here he is literally bursting with joy after reading it.

Now King's condemnation with Kubrick's finished product has also long been a topic of discussion and made very public by the author.  I for one find it humorous and certainly in later years, it seems that King at the very least accepts what was cinematically done with his novel, if not necessarily agreeing with it.  Because really, they are two differing angles to tell the same story and the contrasts between them are many.  Even at its core, both the film and the book tell very different tales, simply because the focus of protagonist is not the same.

The book is about Danny Torrence.  The film is very much about Jack Torrence.  In the book, Jack is a recovering alcoholic who is genuinely struggling with his dependence in a sincere, benevolent way.  The movie Jack has an off-kilter and troubling menace to him from scene one.  Which calls to mind  King's problem with the casting of Jack Nicholson.  This is because King's Jack Torrence is not the kind of guy who is crazy to begin with, but instead is the type of guy who unwillingly succumbs to supernatural forces that feed off his own internal, conflicting struggles as a husband and a father.  Kubrick's Jack Torrence on the other hand is meant to be a little wacky all along and Nicholson embodies that unease in his physical appearance and mannerisms alone, not to mention the fact that The Shining went underway not long after the actor was hot off his success in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next, playing an insane asylum inmate.  So going in, the audience knows that seeing Nicholson on the screen as this character plants the seeds subliminally that something is awry before it becomes blatantly so.

"Something is Awry" - The Jack Nicholson Story

To me, this is a brilliant piece of casting by Kubrick, truly showing that the director conceivably thinks of everything before shooting a single frame.  Often times it is more believable for a movie to have a cast of unknowns so we are not going "Oh look, that's Tom Cruise pretending to be somebody else up there", but Kubrick was so deliberately sure of himself that casting an A-lister like Nicholson worked entirely in favor for the response he was going for.  This brings us to Shelly Duvall who was tormented to the point of losing her hair, having full blown panic attacks, and a nervous breakdown due to the arduous shooting schedule and Kubrick's tyrannical direction approach with his actors.  Whether admitted or not though, the ends justified the means depending on how big of an art fan you are because Duvall's performance is outstanding.  It could not be more "real" than if she really was defending herself from her axe-wielding, manic husband while witnessing a bunch of ghosts perform fellatio on each other in animal costumes.

Kubrick may have been a brute that intimidated his cast and crew to the point of emotional and physical pain, but no one can deny that the effect achieved was not absolutely perfect.  I can assume that signing up to participate in a Stanley Kubrick project was to know that you were going to be played like an instrument regardless of how you felt and that an incredible amount of trust was necessary on your part to give into it.  So yes I sympathize for the amount of people Kubrick on paper tormented, (like his poor assistant who had to type out pages upon pages upon pages of Jack's wonderfully engaging novel in several different languages for real).  Yet I also very much get what Kubrick did and admit that since I was not personally thrown through the rigamarole of his sublime madness, I can simply sit back and watch his masterpiece and appreciate how magnificent of a thing he accomplished.

And you thought I was not going to post this picture after moving on from the last paragraph.  Mwa ha ha ha!

The setting for The Shining is of course the fictitious Overlook Hotel, inspired by King's actual stay at the Stanley Hotel, (which is a funny coincidence), in Estes Park, Colorado.  For the film, the Timberline Lodge in Oregon was used for some exterior shots, while nearly the bulk of the shooting was done on the then largest set ever build at EMI Elstree Studios in Britain.  Kubrick based most of the set's interiors closely off the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park.  The amount of detail put into these sets is on another level of dedication and excellence.  There has been anecdotes told as to how Kubrick insisted on all the canned food labels in the walk-in pantry being up to date, foreseeing an era past 1980 when nerds with way too much time on their hands, (cough, Room 237, cough), would pause his film in high definition and examine each and every frame looking for any hiccups.

The rest of the Overlook Hotel's rooms though look precise to a point of awe.  More importantly is what role all the painstaking minutia of the design plays in the experience.  Intentionally, the geography of the Overlook Hotel's authentic composition is never explicitly depicted.  We never quite know exactly where we are in the place and numerous, wide angle shots give it an eerie quality that only enhances the isolation of the characters.  This and the soundtrack, (like famously when Danny is riding around on his tricycle and the turbulent sound of the hardwood floors clashes with the feather soft sound of the carpeting), give us a mix of ordinary yet vibrantly contrasting noises that throw our brains off ever slightly.  "By five o'clock tonight, you'll never know anybody was ever here" is one of the most subtly creepy lines in any horror movie.  Many other scenes of essentially nothing sinister going on being shown in broad daylight as well all work on the viewers psyche that something otherworldly is existing in the Overlook itself.

Nothing sinister going on here folks.

This is one of the reasons that King deserves such admiration for the premise of The Shining alone.  Certainly influenced by Shirley Jackson's seminal The Haunting of Hill House, Kubrick sets up the Overlook as a physical place that is inherently evil and in that way, is also as alive as any "living" thing could be.  So the idea to trap a very small family inside of it under the pretense of voluntarily being there gives the setting the foolproof concept that malevolent forces can gradually overtake human beings who are cut off from any form of escape.  Furthermore, by our protagonists having all the logical excuses to willingly stay put, that "why don't you just leave?" annoyance with ghost stories does not apply.  Once again, the natural human element is tapped into of an unconscious fear of being alone and truly disconnected from the world AND having the very foundation of closeness with loved ones that are supposed to protect each other gradually begin to shift in the worst possible way in the opposite direction.

Jack Torrance works as a character in the Overlook Hotel, regardless of whether he has "always been the caretaker" or is simply at the wrong place at the wrong time and his intentions are pure and unwillingly corrupted.  One can examine each step to his breakdown and theorize as to what is "real" or chimerical.  In the opening job interview scene, it is disclosed to us that Dilbert Grady had two daughters "about eight and ten".  Danny is the only one who sees twins, (ergo, clearly not two years apart in age), who we presume to be the Grady girls, so these scenes could mean a number of things.  They could be physically manifesting themselves from Jack which is then lost in translation to Danny, the episode of Grady murdering his daughters could have been told to Danny from Jack off screen and this is how Danny or "Tony" is showing it to him, Stuart Ullman simply could have had his facts wrong, etc.

In any case, Danny positively needed to change his under garments after this.

Similarly, the hand-print on Danny's neck and his, (again off-screen), story that a woman choked him in room 237 is not shown to us from his perspective, but this time from Jacks.  Is Jack imagining what he thinks it to be?  Is the hotel showing him some kind of warped version of a "ghost" mixed with his own sexual frustrations and second-hand account of his son's claim as to what happened?  Danny's "shining" name-drops room 237 out of nowhere when he is talking to Dick Hallorann earlier, so is that room something random that he fabricated an entire vile presence in or is it connected to actual events from the hotel's past?  Then, is what he fabricated made "real" to Jack, just as it could have went visa versa with the twins?  These are only but two moments we can play with and debate and they work in the film because Stanley Kubrick is portraying the horror of confusion and lunacy, which is all brought to dreadful "life" by his ominous setting.

Stephen King the author though is not one for ambiguity.  That is certainly not a bad quality and in fact is one of the reasons he is so popular.  If anything, King can easily be accused of giving his readers way more information than they reasonably need.  Besides dedicating pages upon pages of exposition to nearly every speaking character or location he ever uses, he also continues on where nothing can possibly be left to anyone's imagination as to the outcome of the story.

Image unrelated.

In the book, Dick Hallorann is a far more fleshed-out character and he and Danny Torrence's initial "shining" exchange is considerably longer than what is shown in the film.  This is also true as to his eventual arrival back at the Overlook at the end, which is given an entire, suspense ridden stream of events to slam home how difficult the plight truly was.  Now this is the kind of stuff that understandably is going to get severely trimmed down when it comes time to make your movie.  Hallorann and Danny's one and only face to face encounter is wrapped up in a few brief though very important minutes.  The fat is trimmed.  Same case with his would-be rescue of the Torrances back at the Overlook.  One scene he is in Florida, the next he is on a plane, the next he is in Colorado in a gas station, the next he is in a snow cat on his commute up the mountain, and then next he is meeting Mr. Axe in the Back, (spoilers, my bad).  The full fledged and detailed account in the book was not at all necessary here though.  Hallorann really only shows up so that Danny's psychic abilities can manifest and there can be a level of tension as to whether or not he can truly remove them from harm.  Besides that, it is still the story of Jack's ambiguous place in the Overlook's malicious scheme.

So now that we are here, the ending to the two versions of The Shining in book and cinematic form could not be more unalike.  In the novel, Danny, Wendy, and an only injured Dick Hallorann escape after Danny reminds Jack to mind the boiler, which inadvertently blows the Overlook to smithereens.  There is then an epilogue that shines, (huh, huh), even more light on what really went down and has a far more pleasant air to it than a single shot does in the movie.  This wraps up the book nicely because IN the book, Jack was a tragic character and his relationship with his son is treated as such, with Hallorann comforting Danny in the following winter's aftermath.

And then comforts himself if you know what I mean.

We assume that Danny and Wendy get down the mountain to civilization after the events of the movie, but that is not shown because it is not important.  The final moments of the film are of Jack Torrence so far gone into complete and utter madness that he cannot even enunciate words.  After being physically injured and exhausted, he is a broken man in every sense and as he frays about hopelessly and wildly in the outside maze, slowing freezing to death, the severity of how inescapable his fate truly is hits us.  In a film where practically every scene is as memorable as the last, Jack's dire and disturbing dance and then the silent image of himself no longer alive and looking up in a shot that Kubrick adores using time and again is as unsettling as anything you could hope for in a horror movie.  By this point the audience is nearly on sensory overload as to how deliberately we have been lead through the goings on of the villainous forces at work in the Overlook.  Then we see just what Delbert Grady means when he says Jack has "always been the caretaker" in a moment that offers more unrest for the viewer, just as the hotel itself will remain restless still.

Mmm...trademark imagery.