Stanley Kubrick

by David Mikics

  “We are falling into the movie,” writes David Thomson, a “cool and premeditated” plunge. The Shining is full of smooth, vertiginous forward motion from its first moment, an implacably level helicopter shot swooping across a rocky western landscape. The shot shows an island surrounded by blue water, fitting emblem for a movie about being marooned in a lonely stronghold called the Overlook Hotel. The island seems to be moving toward the viewer, a frequent effect in Kubrick’s inexorable-seeming tracking shots (as well as the Stargate sequence in 2001). Urged by Kubrick, two cameramen, Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman, had developed a new way of doing helicopter shots, from the front rather than the side door of the helicopter, to produce a forward-sweeping effect similar to the Steadicam’s.6

  The smoothness of The Shining hypnotizes the viewer a little. Like Jack, we space out, ready to be taken in. We feel open, empty, before this film, Kubrick’s shiny monolith. In the movie’s only trick shot, Jack in the Colorado Lounge, out of ideas as usual, looks down on a model of the maze and sees a tiny Wendy and Danny running through it. We then observe in medium shot a menacing, vacant-headed Jack, mouth slightly open, eyes tilting upward, ready to submit to some invisible power. Having failed as an author, poor Jack waits to be possessed.

  When we think of The Shining we remember Nicholson venting his world-consuming rage at the trembling Duvall. But the movie also relies on an equally familiar male strategy, repression. Being interviewed by Ullman (Barry Nelson), the hotel manager, early in the movie, Jack dutifully keeps his answers as dull as possible. How will his wife and son take to the isolation of the vast, deserted hotel in winter? We wait a beat while Jack composes his most compliant face, and then: “They’ll love it.” When Ullman, with a nervous chuckle, tells Jack the story of Charles Grady, the caretaker who a few winters earlier went mad and “killed his family with an axe,” Jack responds with a leaden, impassive face. Superbly, this reaction shot of Jack is held just a few seconds too long, enough for us to get uncomfortable. Then Jack, cracking a polite, measured grin, says, “That is, uh, quite a story.”

  Jack at the movie’s beginning has the job applicant’s steady blankness, the false self you need to get ahead. Just as bland is Danny’s interview with a child psychologist (Anne Jackson): Danny, like his father, is good at concealment. Jack, we have to assume, fails to tell Wendy about the Grady murders, the primal trauma in the Overlook Hotel. Instead, he says to Wendy that he just loves the place, and does a spooky, parodic whoo-ooh.

  The Shining’s scenes are replete with clichés. Wendy tells Jack, “It’s just a matter of settling back into the habit of writing every day.” Hallorann reminds Wendy of the dried prunes in the storeroom: “I tell you, Mrs. Torrance, you got to be regular if you want to be happy.” While he drives through a snowstorm, Hallorann’s car radio announces, “We have what you call your bad weather out there . . . get the cows in the barn.” Such platitudes are the American way, defending us against all manner of disasters. You got to be regular if you want to be happy.

  Keeping things normal and repressing trauma, via clichés if need be, is an American tradition. But then the blood starts to gush out, as in a fairy tale, and it doesn’t stop. “They ate each other up?” Danny asks Jack about the Donner party, with a little boy’s winning accent. “They had to,” Jack confirms with satisfaction. This family will eat itself up when its ferocious energies come out, coaxed by the Overlook. Jack and Wendy are a perfect pair, her cringing submissiveness and his masculine torrent echoing against each other forever and ever.

  Jack’s real target, though, is his son, not his wife. Danny is Jack’s competition: he has the creative gift that the hollow Jack lacks. This kid would be eager, curious, and innocent in a Spielberg movie, his senses wide open and wondering. Kubrick’s universe is far darker. In The Shining, Danny glimpses blood and disorder, a confused image of what lies beyond childhood.

  Danny tells himself that the Overlook’s flood of gore and the Grady twins, now holding hands like Diane Arbus’s famous pair and now lying hatcheted in a hallway, are like pictures in a book. And Jack pretends the hotel’s frights are safely fictional, like a horror movie designed to thrill and chill us. In The Shining the vicarious becomes real, a prime fantasy of the movies. The frights Jack invoked in fun take him over: they are the only inspiration this failed writer ever finds.

  Kubrick’s Shining is a not-so-typical horror movie, but it also nods toward the western. Jack, Wendy, and Danny are a pioneer family assaulted by horrors, the VW bug their covered wagon, as they talk about the Donner party. The Overlook, Ullman tells Jack, was built “on an old Indian burial ground,” a reminder of the old West’s clash between white and Indian (and a perfunctory tip of the hat to a favorite Stephen King topos). The western often pits the man’s intransigent need to do his duty against stereotypical female concerns like the health of a child. “Let’s talk about Danny. . . . You believe his health might be at stake,” Jack sneers at Wendy in the cataclysmic staircase scene, the peak of their battle. His masculine obligation, the deal with the devilish Overlook Hotel, overrules her maternal instinct. “I have signed a letter of agreement, a contract,” Jack tells her, his hand whipping through the air. Like HAL, Jack takes on the white man’s burden, responsibility for the mission.7

  “There’s something inherently wrong with the human personality,” Kubrick said to interviewer Jack Kroll, explaining what drew him to King’s novel. “There’s an evil side to it.”8 It was just like Kubrick to describe evil as something “wrong with” humans, a kind of misfiring. In many Kubrick movies characters stumble over a malfunction, a design flaw, from Johnny Clay in The Killing to HAL in 2001. “What is your major malfunction?” Full Metal Jacket’s Drill Instructor Hartman shouts at Private Pyle, who promptly shoots him in the chest. Jack’s breakdown in The Shining is a catastrophic design flaw that comments on the American wish to live large, to express oneself with terrific power.

  In horror movies the monster is not angry; it is merely an overriding, demonic force. In The Shining, as in no other horror film I can think of, male anger itself is monstrous. Kubrick’s movie joins the mainstream of great American movies about masculine rage, from Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1951) to Ford’s The Searchers (1956) to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976).

  Jack is shouting and moaning in his sleep, head slumped on his desk in a puddle of drool. When Wendy shakes him awake he stammers out his nightmare: he murdered her and Danny, chopped them to bits. Then a frozen-looking Danny appears with a wound on his neck. Wendy, suspended between father and son, accuses Jack. This is her one moment of indignant rage: “You did this to him . . . you son of a bitch,” she yells. The next scene begins with Jack dancing furiously down the hallway to the Gold Ballroom. Jack’s walk, which required many takes to get right, shows Nicholson at his balletic height, pummeling the air as he stalks along.

  Jack approaches the ballroom’s bar, sits downs and claps his hands over his eyes, just like Danny blocking out the sight of the blood-filled elevators. “I’d give my goddamn soul for just a glass of beer.”

  And so Jack rubs his eyes open to the magic of one of Kubrick’s greatest scenes, one that required eighty-plus takes. Jack sees none other than Lloyd the Bartender, played with robotic finesse by veteran Kubrick actor Joe Turkel. A slow grin dawns on Nicholson’s face. Turkel’s jaw appears wired to a grim undead levity. The clichés that The Shining loves now come to vicious life. “Women, can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em,” Lloyd recites. In Jack’s mouth such platitudes gather a vast satiric energy: “Words of wisdom, Lloyd . . . words . . . of . . . wisdom.” Jack’s eyes gleam with manic delight. Suddenly there’s nothing more hilarious than sustaining oneself with lines like these, and Jack and the audience are in on the joke together. “A momentary loss of muscular coordination”: that’s how he dislocated Danny’s arm when he came home drunk. Just a minor malfunction: and he mimes the snapping of the arm in a way that only Jack Nicholson can, with manic bar
bed-wire delight. The more we exult in Jack’s declaration of independence from “the old sperm bank upstairs,” as he names Wendy, the more we fear him.

  Jack sells his soul for the intoxicating flavor of rebellion, cutting himself loose from the wife who keeps him down. (We can’t help but remember Kubrick’s script ideas of the 1950s, when he fantasized about walking away from the clingy Ruth Sobotka.) Yet what he gets is not freedom but “orders from the house,” as Lloyd tells him later on: he is a servant to the hotel’s endless cycle of death. The shots of bourbon that Lloyd gives Jack will convey him to the underbelly of the Overlook, Room 237: the place where trauma dwells, like the fruit cellar in Psycho (1960).

  Danny goes to Room 237 before Jack does. We see Danny responding to what he thinks is his mother’s voice inside the room. Some Freudian legend seems aprowl here. The strange woman lurking in Room 237 is the polar opposite of Wendy, with her girlish, unerotic naïveté. Instead of a mother with her comforting banalities, Danny finds a female devourer. A sign of adult sexuality run amok may have traumatized Danny, giving him the guilty mark on his neck.

  When Jack investigates, he finds in Room 237 a sallow and impassive naked young woman rising from the bathtub. This wan succubus, who has the alien sheen of a mannequin, embraces the slack-jawed, vacantly lustful Jack. She then turns into a decomposing old hag who cackles madly as Jack flees. He locks the door of 237 and backs away fearfully. (Kubrick will shrewdly rhyme this moment with Danny retracing his steps in the snowy labyrinth at the end of the movie.)

  The two women in 237 are an emblem of Vanitas, who promises fair but conceals the mortal decay that lies beneath the surface of youth. Jack, while kissing his naked muse in 237, may think he is being anointed by immortal beauty, but the hotel plays a joke on him: he finds himself “chained to a corpse” (a phrase that King repeatedly used to describe Jack’s marriage to Wendy).

  Schopenhauer supplies the best comment on the two women in Room 237. Discussing “the vanity of all endeavor,” the German philosopher gives as his example the conversion of Raymond Lull, a medieval “adventurer” who became a monk and philosopher: “Raymond Lull, who had long wooed a beautiful woman, was at last admitted to her chamber, and was looking forward to the fulfillment of all his desires, when, opening her dress, she showed him her bosom terribly eaten away with cancer. From that moment, as if he had looked into hell, he was converted.”9

  Here’s one more passage from Schopenhauer: “Most of us carry in our hearts the Jocasta, who begs Oedipus for God’s sake not to inquire further; and we give way to her, and that is the reason why philosophy stands where it does.”10 Sure enough, an inscrutable-looking Jack reports to Wendy that there was “nothing at all” in Room 237. Earlier, Dick Hallorann said the same to Danny. Both men have given way to their internal Jocasta: and so repression wins again.

  Ironically, Penderecki’s “The Awakening of Jacob” plays while Jack is in 237—“Truly the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it,” Jacob says when he rises from his dream in Genesis. Kubrick’s pitch-black humor is at work again.

  Later on in The Shining we hear Penderecki’s Polymorphia, the sound, according to the scholar Roger Luckhurst, of “a horde of insects eating their way out of the string section.”11 The film’s soundtrack is subtly layered, with heartbeats, ambient sound, and at times several music tracks at once. Penderecki and Ligeti would later be horror film staples, but Kubrick pioneered the use of these avant-gardists.

  Room 237 is the core of The Shining’s horror. Now Danny, dribbling spittle and shaking like an epileptic, feels the shock waves from what Jack sees in Room 237. So does Hallorann, transfixed on his bed in Miami like Dave Bowman in the Stargate. Lying on his bed after Jack visits 237, Danny sees REDRUM for the first time: the red room, the room of blood that ties sex to death, the place where a father tries to kill a mother and a son.

  The Shining’s tension escalates further as Kubrick gives us another unforgettable sequence. Here is Wendy rifling through Jack’s manuscript, which, she sees to her horror, contains the same sentence thousands of times over: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” (Like Sobotka, she is a “suction cup” who aggravatingly tries to help Jack with his work.) The edge of Jack’s typewriter looms like 2001’s monolith, perfectly centered in the frame beneath Shelley Duvall’s panicked face. Wendy’s husband has, indeed, been hard at work, and now, while we gaze from a distance, from Jack’s distance, at her back, the man himself enters the Colorado Lounge. Drily, softly, he says, “What are you doing down here?” Wendy jumps like a jerked marionette, and so do we. The Shining’s greatest scene has begun with an electrifying jolt.

  Earlier, Jack warned Wendy to “stay the fuck away” from his desk, in response to her chipper offer to read his writing. “That’s the one scene in the movie I wrote myself,” Nicholson said. Years earlier, when he was a young man with a wife and daughter, Nicholson was acting in a movie during the day and writing a screenplay at night. Once while he was writing, he said, “my beloved wife, Sandra, walked in on what was unbeknownst to her, this maniac.”12 That performance ended Nicholson’s marriage. But in The Shining, Wendy meekly retreats, saving her fire for the “all work and no play” sequence.

  The wife has uncovered the husband’s secret: not a concealed love affair but instead hopeless, endless writing. Jack is a mere drudge chained to this hell, the Overlook, bereft of a creative spark. Empty repetition shows the hotel’s power. Like a minor-league demon in Dante or Spenser, Jack does the same thing over and over, locked into his pact with the hotel. Here the joke is about the American male’s reliance on steady routine for his self-definition. What happens when your job gets you down, when you become a dull boy, when things get “all balled up at the head office,” as Charlie (John Goodman) puts it in the Coen brothers’ parabolic masterpiece Barton Fink (1991)? What happens is the floodgates burst: “Look upon me, I’ll show you the life of the mind,” Goodman chants, jogging murderously through his inferno, a burning hotel with rows of separate fires, one for each room.

  The Coens’ Charlie Weathers (aka Mad Man Mundt) derives from Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, but also from Jack Torrance. These killers are masters of American lingo, expert polishers of the glad-handing phrase. We saw Jack’s average Joe routine with Lloyd, at the bar. Now, with Wendy in the all-work-and-no-play scene, he lunges into snide, vicious parody: “You’re confused,” he sneers, aping her shrinking manner. Wendy is now a quivering, sobbing wreck. “You need to think things over. . . . You’ve had your whole fucking life to think things over!” he shouts, as if he were vitality incarnate, and she the ball and chain of bourgeois stupidity. Then, rather lightly, with a little smile, now savagely savoring the words: “What good’s a few more minutes gonna do you?” Poor Wendy has only a few more minutes of life left, of this Jack is sure. He is all set to whack her with that baseball bat. But—and here comes the scene’s high, impish joke—first he has to convince her to give him the bat. And she won’t. “Wendy. Light . . . of . . . my . . . life,” Jack says. (A line from Lolita!) Just for the fun of it, Jack plays the psychotic he has become: “I’m not gonna hurt you Wendy. I’m just gonna bash your brains in. Bash them right . . . the fuck . . . in.”

  “Give me the bat.” Nicholson says it straight, gazing direct, like a hypnotist willing control over his patient. Then comes his tongue flick, a small stroke of genius: “Give me the bat. Wendy. Give me. The bat.” But now the tables turn. Shaking like crazy, she lands two solid blows, first to his hand—she’ll get him again there, with her knife in the bathroom—and then to his neck, right where Danny was wounded. Swatted powerfully by his frail, jumpy wife, Jack tumbles down the staircase. Wendy proves to be no basket case but rather, as Grady (Philip Stone) notes later, surprisingly “resourceful.”

  The baseball bat scene on the Colorado Room’s staircase works in part because Kubrick enlists us on Jack’s side. A small part of us wants, with Jack, to bash the irritating Wendy’s brains in. When she bash
es Jack instead, we are not so much exultant as nervous about what comes next. Her bright idea, to drag Jack to the pantry and lock him in, ought to put him out of commission. But Grady intervenes to free Jack from his prison. Jack rampages through the hotel with his axe and, with one blow, kills Hallorann, who has just arrived in the Sno-Cat.

  When he had Jack axe-murder Hallorann, Kubrick was thinking of the killing of Arbogast in Psycho, a rapid shock to the viewer’s system that, when Hitchcock’s film first opened, caused more screams than the shower murder. Kubrick filmed Jack landing three vicious blows to Hallorann’s chest, but the next day decided that this was too brutal, too much of a play for audience reaction. In the final cut Jack axes Hallorann once, then glides up slowly like Murnau’s Nosferatu from the dead body. Kubrick’s parents, Jack and Gert, were on the set the day the death of Hallorann was filmed, and Kubrick was afraid that they would be traumatized by it. Kubrick’s worry replays the theme of the movie: a son’s concern about what will become of his parents. As it turned out, the Kubricks, not at all distressed, enjoyed the scene greatly.13

  The Shining’s staircase scene, with Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall in the foreground (Courtesy of Photofest/Warner Bros)

  Even more terrifying than Jack’s murder of Hallorann is his attack on Wendy, who cowers in the bathroom, her upraised knife shaking wildly. Jack Torrance swings his axe like a pro, with expert well-muscled heft. (Nicholson was for a time a volunteer fireman.) Heaving that axe into the bathroom door, grinning “Heeere’s Johnny,” Jack is at his most big-bad-wolfish. But the fairy tale shrewdness of his wife and son gets the better of him.