by David Mikics
Kubrick and Johnson struggled over the end of The Shining. At one point they pictured Hallorann becoming “murderous,” “an appalling figure of savagery” who kills the entire Torrance family and then shoots himself. Another “Ending idea: Danny and maybe cook left alone,” or Danny “saved by cook.”14 But Hallorann turned out to be expendable. By contrast, King makes him Wendy’s new boyfriend, and a kindly father substitute for Danny, after Jack’s death.
Both Psycho and The Shining tease us with their endings. Frozen Jack in the labyrinth, like grinning Jack in the 1921 photo that concludes the movie, reminds us of Hitchcock’s final close-up of Norman, with Mother’s skeletal teeth shining through his smile. In both views the men are possessed by something that America loves: mother, work. But the two men are quite different. Norman is just a dutiful son, with no particular ambition. Jack by contrast imagines he is a writer who needs his solitude, but in fact he creates nothing. By freezing Jack, Kubrick thwarts the romantic selfhood so basic to American fantasies.
The maze’s “snow” was fine, powdery dairy salt; the lights were bright orange, later passed through a blue filter. As in the ballroom scene, oil smoke was used to cloud the air. The temperatures neared a hundred degrees. The crew got lost in the maze, the smoky “orange hell,” as Brown called it. “It wasn’t much use to call out ‘Stanley!’ ” Brown said, “as his laughter seemed to come from everywhere.”15 Kubrick was the absent sarcastic god ruling over the labyrinth, this big boy’s play set. Kubrick repeatedly measured the height of the fake snow, making sure it was between eight and ten inches high—essential if the footprints were to look real. Like a fairy tale ogre, Jack chases his son with an axe, itching to commit bloody murder. He howls like a beast into the snowy void. “Danny, I’m coming for you,” Jack bellows, a pathetic wounded animal.
Even though Jack the monster has frozen to death in the Overlook’s maze, he lurks forever in the photograph from 1921. The movie’s magical Borges-like ending was originally followed by a sequence shown when The Shining premiered in May 1980 in New York and Los Angeles. Leon Vitali described the added scene to an interviewer:
[Wendy is] in bed, and Danny’s in the corridor in his dressing gown reading comic books. Then Ullman, the manager that we saw at the beginning, turns up coming in all the way from Florida to see if they’re okay. He says to her you mustn’t worry, these things . . . What’ll be great is I’ll invite you to my house, and it’s warm, there’s fresh air, and the sea. Danny can run around. Then she breaks down and cries in gratitude and relief. And he walks out into the corridor and sees Danny there on his way out, and he says, “oh Danny, I’ve got something for you.” Then he throws out a yellow tennis ball which he had in his pocket, which Danny catches.
In the final shot of this scene we realize that the hotel manager was clued into the Overlook’s diabolic power all along. “There was a Hitchcockian side to this resolution, and you know that Kubrick was crazy about Hitchcock,” said Shelley Duvall, who liked this first ending.16 In his final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick would use Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) as such a Hitchcockian figure of mastery. But in The Shining he preferred something more perplexing. The epilogue, Kubrick must have realized, was too shadowy-conspiratorial, with its hint that Ullman was the master of the sinister hotel that waited like a spider for its next victim.
Julian Senior remembers that Kubrick asked him “Whadda ya think?” about this first version of The Shining’s end:
I said, you know Stanley, for me the most extraordinary shot of the whole movie is the track into the photograph—that’s it. The stuff at the hospital room, the tennis ball, the kid . . .
He stopped fifteen paces behind with a face like thunder. And Stanley had dark brown eyes with no pupils, it was like looking into an abyss. And there was a pause and he said “Don’t you ever tell me how to direct a movie.”17
But Kubrick agreed with Senior, as it turned out, and cut the hospital room scene. Like the Dr. Strangelove pie fight, the sequence seems to have disappeared: no one I know has seen it since The Shining’s 1980 opening.
In the end Kubrick let the forces that inhabit Jack remain invisible. The finished movie ends with a slow zoom in on Jack in black tie, dapper and ready, at the Overlook’s July 4 party, 1921.18 Kubrick insisted on July 4 because Jack began with a declaration of independence, his ferocious plea that he is a writer, and therefore bound to go it alone. Jack chained to the typewriter, tapping out the same awful sentence hour after hour, was desperate to be released from work. Play was what Jack so badly needed, and the high-stepping 1920s is a supreme American image of play. But the twenties Jack Torrance, like most of the self-invented Gatsbys that pepper American history, is really just an image, not a lived reality. In Jack’s end is his beginning: he will happen again and again, an empty shell coming round for his latest incarnation. We’ll meet again, Jack Torrance, the next time we watch the movie. Cinema, like the Overlook, promises a ghostly immortality.
Yet Danny rather than Jack might be the real center of The Shining. The embattled child, who, like the boy Kubrick, perseveres into self-reliant strength despite the threats coming from authority (whether the father’s or, in Stanley’s case, the school’s), again offers a key to his work. Here’s a Freudian fable, submitted for your approval. Imagine Danny coming up with the plot of The Shining. He has been left alone with a placating mother and a sometimes violently moody, abstracted father. He’s getting tired of the dull game he witnesses every day, in which one parent deflects the other’s frustration and disappointment. So the child turns his father into a wild man, and he makes his mother bear the brunt of the father’s bloodthirsty rampage. In the end, the father gets killed off by his own fury. By bringing out the rampant chaos within the father, Danny survives and becomes someone other than Jack, an escapee from the Oedipal bloodbath. A bit sharper-edged, no, than the Spielbergian saga of a boy trading in his parents for a gentle alien pal?
8
Make Sure It’s Big—Lon Chaney Big:
Full Metal Jacket
IN 1980, a few months before The Shining opened in New York on May 23, Kubrick moved from Abbots Mead into a very large house on 172 acres in Childwickbury, just north of St. Albans, about an hour’s drive from London. The sprawling grounds included a block of stables, two ponds, servants’ cottages, a park, a rose garden, and a cricket pitch. The manorial setup was ideal for Kubrick’s needs. The stables became offices and cutting rooms, and nearby was a gun club where he could do his target shooting.
“Childwickbury Manor wasn’t so much a big house as a collection of rooms randomly added onto a narrow Georgian building,” Kubrick’s driver, Emilio D’Alessandro, remembered. There were 129 rooms in all, and Kubrick told D’Alessandro to make four copies of each room key. “We need one for me, one for you, one for Christiane, and a spare copy, just in case all three of us lose the same key,” he said.1
Kubrick’s office was in Childwickbury Manor’s Red Room (shades of The Shining!). He liked to hole up there and devour books, wearing his usual household uniform: tennis shoes, baggy threadbare pants, and shirts with lots of pockets, some of them ink-stained. The pockets were for little notebooks that he bought by the dozens at W. H. Smith, the stationery store in St. Albans. Kubrick still dressed like the same messy Greenwich Village bohemian he had been in the fifties. When he was on set and it was cold enough, he liked to wear a military jacket and an anorak over his rumpled shirt and trousers.
Kubrick’s beard was getting shaggier, and he had become noticeably more portly. He enjoyed being something of a Jewish Santa Claus during Christmas season, welcoming the children of St. Albans, who were allowed to pick out a Christmas tree from a heap of them he had cut and ready from his grounds. “Thank you, Mr. Kubrick,” the children recited. Like many New York Jews of his generation, Kubrick loved Christmas.
Along with the Kubrick family, Childwickbury housed a collection of pet dogs and cats. Kubrick loved the animals and worried incessantly when
one of them fell sick. (“If the cat was sick he would drop everything and talk to the vet and tell him ‘We will do so-and-so,’ and argue with him,” Christiane remembered.)2 D’Alessandro, originally hired as Kubrick’s driver, became an impromptu veterinarian, as well as a handyman, technician, gardener, builder, and errand boy.
Kubrick’s employees loved him, but he was taxing to work for. “Stanley kind of ate you up,” Leon Vitali admitted.3 Like D’Alessandro, Vitali worked sixteen hours a day for Kubrick, whose demands often seemed endless. Andros Epaminondas, who was Kubrick’s assistant for ten years, quit in 1980, worn out by the pressure, so Vitali had to labor harder than ever. He fielded phone calls from Warner Bros, tussled with distributors, theater owners, and advertisers, and painstakingly supervised the prints of Kubrick’s films. Kubrick insisted that Vitali watch as many prints as he could to make sure they were as flawless as possible. When Vitali restored some of Kubrick’s movies for Blu-ray years after the director’s death, he was well prepared: he had seen them hundreds of times.
Kubrick drove Vitali and D’Alessandro hard, but he cared about them, and they stayed loyal. He couldn’t do without them, and he made sure they knew that. “He was always so kind to me that I couldn’t say no to him,” D’Alessandro said.4 Vitali’s love and appreciation for Kubrick shine through the moving documentary Filmworker, which covers Vitali’s years as the director’s assistant.
Ever the control freak, Kubrick liked to tell people both on and off the set, “Don’t touch anything until you’ve read the instructions!” The zero-gravity toilet in 2001, with its lengthy set of directions, is Kubrick’s joke about his own penchant for writing step-by-step guidelines. At the Childwickbury house he explained what to do in case of fire, for example (two solid pages, including much detail about how to rescue the animals). On the set, Kubrick the doctor’s son liked to give medical advice. “He was certain that he was a good doctor,” Christiane recalled, “and would drive people crazy telling them to take pills of one kind or another. He would explain to the women who worked on the set what to do about a difficult menstrual period—‘Don’t eat salt, eat this and this’—and would walk away, his cigarette leaving a trail of smoke.”5
Kubrick needed to have his wife and daughters close by at Childwickbury. He had traditional ideas about a father’s role, and was at times a quizzical interrogator of his daughters’ boyfriends. “You’re kidding, right?” he asked his stepdaughter Katharina after talking to one of her dates. A crisis came when Katharina decided at age thirty that she wanted to leave the house and live in London. (She was getting married to a caterer named Phil Hobbs, who later worked as a producer on Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut.) Later, Anya, who was six years younger, decided to leave as well. “Why are they doing this to me?” Kubrick asked D’Alessandro.6
Surrounded by his family, his employees, and his pets, a busy hive of activity, Kubrick was the reverse of a hermit. He liked to cook for his daughters and for guests, and could even be seen doing the laundry. And he was perpetually on the phone. Kubrick loved to talk to Warner Bros executives John Calley, Terry Semel, and Julian Senior, as well as Ken Adam, Spielberg, and other Hollywood insiders. He called his sister Barbara nearly every night. The director John Milius remarked, “Stanley had no regard for time. He’d call you in the middle of the night, whenever he felt like calling. I’d say, ‘Stanley, it’s the middle of the night.’ He’d say, ‘You’re awake, aren’t you?’ He’d never talk for less than an hour. He just had all kinds of things to discuss—everything.”7
When he wasn’t on the phone or the fax (a new favorite toy), Kubrick was trying to decide what kind of movie to make next. During the early eighties he pursued a science fiction project, an adaptation of a short story by Brian Aldiss about an android boy called “Super Toys Last All Summer Long.” In the end Kubrick, after years of work with Aldiss and other writers, passed the idea on to Steven Spielberg. It became Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), which came out after Kubrick’s death, a unique Kubrick-Spielberg hybrid.
Kubrick had another idea brewing. Early in 1980 he started talking to the writer Michael Herr about making a war movie. The conversations with Herr would eventually come to fruition in 1987’s Full Metal Jacket. Herr had gone to Vietnam as a freelance war correspondent and seen action during the Tet Offensive. He told his tales of combat in Dispatches (1977), one of the greatest books of war journalism ever written. Then Herr wrote the screenplay for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), a movie that Kubrick admired. (After making Full Metal Jacket, he said that he thought Coppola’s movie was like Wagner and his own like Mozart, precise and classical.)8
Herr and Kubrick hit it off. Like Kubrick, Herr was Jewish, and he liked Kubrick’s wit and wide scope of interests. He found that Kubrick’s voice was “very fluent, melodious even,” despite his “Bronx nasal-caustic” twang. He talked “with a pleasing and graceful Groucho-like rushing and ebbing of inflection for emphasis,” Herr said.9
Herr got to hear plenty of the Kubrick voice. The director, he soon discovered, liked to call him up and talk for hours about everything under the sun. “I once described 1980–83 as a single phone call lasting three years, with interruptions,” Herr later remarked. “Hey, Michael, didja ever read Herodotus? The Father of Lies?” Kubrick might ask, or wonder why Schopenhauer was always considered such a pessimist: “I never thought he was pessimistic, did you, Michael?”10 They also covered opera, Balzac, Hemingway, and a full range of Hollywood gossip.
The day after their first conversation—about Jung, the Holocaust, Schnitzler’s Dream Story, and a few other things—Kubrick had D’Alessandro deliver two books to Herr: the Schnitzler novella and Raul Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews (1961). Lately he had been thinking of making a movie about the Holocaust. Kubrick bugged Herr every few weeks to read Hilberg, until finally Herr said, “I guess right now I just don’t want to read a book called The Destruction of the European Jews.” “No, Michael,” Kubrick replied, “The book you don’t want to read right now is The Destruction of the European Jews, Part Two.”11
Kubrick and Herr had both read a 1979 novel by Vietnam vet Gustav Hasford called The Short-Timers (Vietnam slang for soldiers whose tour of duty ends soon). Hasford, a combat journalist with the First Marine Division, got caught up in the Tet Offensive, just like Herr. While still in Vietnam he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War. After returning stateside he moved to Washington State, where he was a desk clerk in a hotel catering to loggers who, he said, had “been in fights and they’d be dragging these scrubby, extremely ugly prostitutes with them. The job gave me a lot of opportunity to read—like Nathanael West, you know. After about 3 o’clock when all the loggers had passed out.”12
Hasford eventually drifted to LA, where he stayed for a time in science fiction writer Harlan Ellison’s house and became an editor at porno magazines. As a sideline, Hasford stole books from libraries, amassing a large collection on the American West. When Kubrick, through Jan Harlan, bought the option on The Short-Timers, Hasford was working as a security guard and living in his car.
Hasford, who was paunchy and tightly wound, with an Alabama accent, ended up working a little with Herr and Kubrick on the screenplay, but his gonzo aggression didn’t go over well. Hasford’s letters to Kubrick, scabrous and funny, make entertaining reading, as Hasford by turns taunts, cajoles and butters up the director (he signs one letter “Warm regards, Fred C. Dobbs Hasford”).13
Kubrick began his relation with Hasford in his usual style: over the phone. Three or four times a week, he pumped Hasford relentlessly for information about Vietnam. Their longest conversation, Hasford said, lasted six hours. In a letter of January 1983, Hasford told a friend, “Stanley and I, after about a dozen long talks, are lobbing frags. I told Stanley he didn’t know shit from Shinola about Vietnam.” In August 1985 he was blunter: “Stanley is bullying me, threatening me.” Then, in March 1986, Hasford wrote, “I finally pried a copy of th
e shooting script out of Stanley’s famously anal-retentive fingers. It’s 99% mine.” Herr and Kubrick, he said, had simply “retyped” his book. Hasford demanded the return of a set of battlefield photographs he had lent Kubrick, and he also insisted on screenplay credit (which he got).14
No doubt a little freaked out by Hasford’s outbursts, Kubrick displayed his trademark calm in a letter that feels as if it could have been written by HAL. Remarking on “the extraordinary lack of objectivity which pervades your letter,” Kubrick wrote, “I cannot help but realize that you are very disappointed and unhappy, and I am genuinely sorry about that and wish it were otherwise. . . . I thought we were, at least, some sort of friends.”15
In The Short-Timers, the cantankerous Hasford shows an eerie eloquence that attracted Herr and Kubrick. “To carry death in your smile, that is ugly. War is ugly because the truth can be ugly and war is very sincere,” he writes.16 The novel, now out of print, tells the story of a Marine who, after going through basic training under a brutal drill instructor, is transported to “the shit”: the war in Vietnam. Hasford’s plot became the basis of Full Metal Jacket, and some of the movie’s best lines can be found in his book.
Herr and Hasford had been in the shit. Kubrick, for all his fascination with military history, most definitely had not. “I was very lucky,” Kubrick said about his lack of war experience. “I slipped through the cracks each time. I was 17 when World War II ended and was married when the Korean War began. I wouldn’t have volunteered.” Kubrick was, he admitted, a “confirmed coward.”17 On 2001’s Dawn of Man set he filmed the leopard’s attack on the apes from a cage while his actors sweated bullets inside their primate suits. (One can see Kubrick’s point: Should Admiral Nelson have shown up on deck during the battle of Trafalgar?)