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THE SHINING
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick is known for making films that are cold and distant, with compositions that are so completely controlled that they can almost be called sterile. It is fitting that in his horror opus there is very little blood. Rather, he relies on music, eerie cinematography, and a slow, focused pace to set the mood of what is possibly the creepiest film ever made.
This plot is simple. Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson, in a brilliant performance mixing subtle restraint and over the top madness), his wife Wendy (Shelly Duvall), and their son Danny move into the Overlook Hotel as caretakers for the winter. Danny, blessed or cursed (which one, I do not know) with a psychic gift, a "shining," sees terrible visions such as blood flowing from and opening elevator and a terrifying pair of twin girls. Jack starts to see apparitions of a former caretaker of the hotel who murdered his family and killed himself, a bartender, and a group of others. He goes insane and, in the culmination of the film’s terror, tries to hill his family with an ax.
But is Jack really as insane as we think? Are these "ghosts" he sees really just apparitions, or are they real? The film is ambiguous on both counts, especially about the "ghosts." There is a scene where Danny enters one of the hotel’s rooms, a room he was warned not to enter. Although we do not see what is in the room from his point of view, we it its after effects upon him. He stumbles into his parent’s presence with bruises on his neck. When Jack later investigates this room, in the most unsettling scene in the film, he sees a woman we can only assume is on of his imagined ghosts. But if it is imagined, how could it have physically harmed Danny? This blurring or sanity and insanity, real and unreal, is absolutely chilling.
Every tactic Kubrick uses to set the creepy mood works perfectly. The film’s score, sometimes a thumping beat, sometimes a series of shrill high notes was enough to make the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up. In the film’s opening moments there is a series of overhead shots of Jack driving to the Overlook Hotel for an interview. One of these shots swoops down towards his car, but before it reaches the car it veers off of the road, giving us a feeling that we ourselves have just driven a car off of the road. This one shot startled me, but it was only the introduction to the eerie cinematography present here. The majority of the film is composed of long tracking shots, laying down a slow, deliberate pace. All of these elements give the film an overwhelming sense of dread and a suspense that, as it amounts, becomes nearly unbearable.
Getting past my initial reaction to how effective the film was at shattering my nerves, I have to look at its themes. I cannot help but think that Kubrick set out to criticize the racist views andracially violent tendancies held by some white Americans, especially towards Native Americans. As the man who interviews Jack in the beginning of the film states, the Overlook Hotel is builtupon a Native American burial ground, and when it was being built "they had to fight off the Indians" who were fighting for their stolen land. "White man’s burden," Jack says as he sips hisliquor. Anyone familiar with Rudyard Kipling’s poem of that title will know how utterly horrifying this line is (It is basically a call for white men to convert and modernize the non white"savages"). A line in the poem refers to non-whites as "Half devil and half child." This could be a snide joke Kubrick makes against this poem, since the hotel is a hell of sorts, built on a burial ground of the "half devils, half children." The "haunted Indian burial ground" is quite a cliché, but I felt that it was used in a more original way: to mock racism. In addition to this, there is a scene where a black man is referred to, by one of the "apparitions," by using a vile racial slur. Since this is said by a "ghost" that is mostly likely a figment of Jacks mind, racism is associated with the thoughts of an insane man.
In just about all of Kubrick’s films, a common theme of dehumanization can be found. In THE SHINING I feel that Kubrick speaks about the dehumanization that comes from cutting oneself off from humanity. Jack isolates himself off from everyone besides his family, and there is no doubt that he looked less than human wielding an ax meant to kill his family. Another minor theme visited in the film is a criticism of horror films, and more specifically, the enjoyment we get out of watching people being killed. In a wonderful essay on the film, Kian Bergstrom states "Kubrick again and again asks us to look at why we came to THE SHINING and to feel ashamed. How small, how petty we are, to expect to be entertained by watching an abusive alcoholic terrorize his enabling and confused wife and disturbed son. How pathetic of us that we would imagine spooks and spirits to be scarier than a man who attacks his wife with an ax." And he is right. How terrible of us to want to enjoy watching people being terrorized and killed. This is, of course, not to say that it does not work as a terrifying horror film.
My Rating: Masterpiece
Review by Jared Mills
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