Where a hedge maze becomes a hall of mirrors

Rating: Null/10 (1 June 2015)

The music, the hedge maze, the empty ballroom, the elevator doors opening to a tidal wave of blood, Nicholson's celebrated hook; in terms of cinematic iconography, The Shining is unrivalled. However, to applaud the film simply because it has cultural appeal would be a great discredit to director Stanley Kubrick's subtle use of subtext and skillful creation of a sustained atmosphere that is tense and genuinely creepy. This is one of those supposedly scary films that does chill - even if it never quite makes you jump out of your seat in terror - with Kubrick blending elements of intense, psychological horror with an almost soap-opera-like melodrama to give us a film that really goes beyond the limitations of the horror genre to create something much more substantial.
From the outset, Kubrick makes no explicit allusions to this being a horror-film in the traditional sense, since there are no creatures in the shadows, or jolts and jumps; with the shocks coming from the juxtaposition between the film's created-reality and the more outlandish spiritual elements from Stephen King's original novel. Instead of generic scare tactics, the director creates disturbing images out of the most mundane of situations, with the most lingering images including skeletons dressed for a ball, children and their toys and wounded guests that refuse to leave the party. The images come from this idea of marital collapse and the guilt of the adult protagonists filtered through everything from 20th century war atrocities, 18th century literature, Scandinavian art-films, crime scene photography and the images of Diane Arbus.
For an excellent example of this idea in full effect take a look at the scene between Jack Torrance and the women in the bathroom; which not only seems surreal on a purely superficial level, but also taps into the guilt of infidelity, crushed masculinity, death, decay and old age. Later in the film, Wendy's fear of her own husband is interpreted via implied homo-eroticism, when she stumbles across a man receiving oral sex from a spectre in a dog-costume. However, the figure in the dog-costume could easily be a woman, so perhaps this is a signifier of Wendy's own infidelity to Jack. This scene - like the rest of the film - is open to interpretation.
The ending of the film hints at spiritual-transcendence, the playing off historical coincidences and internal-mirroring. Here, the ending offers us a number of plausible narrative explanations. The most common explanation being that Jack has been driven mad by isolation, and, having heard about the previous caretaker who went mad and butchered his family, has psychosomatically descended to that exact same mental state. This leaves the final image - and the enigmatic questions that are raised - completely unanswerable. A second interpretation would be that the 'story' we believe to be real - the one taking place in the late 1970's - is actually the story being written by Jack. That he never really suffers from writers block, but instead, rather like King in reality, uses the writers block, coupled with his isolation and the pain of his inner-demons, to write the story we see unfold (The Shining).
A final possible ending, and one that proves to be the most complex and complicated, deals with the mirroring of past and present, the re-occurrence of different characters within different time-lines, such as the two incarnations of Grady and the two incarnations of Jack; who, in the words of one character, has "always been here". This ending is the most unsatisfying in terms of overall denouement, but is the most fun when it comes to re-evaluating Kubrick's subtle use of imagery, dialogue and subtext. To me however, regardless of what interpretation you choose to apply to it, The Shining is simply a great film; one that rewards with an interesting, continually fascinating plot rife with possible interpretations and Kubrick's always interesting use of cinematic composition, editing, music and performance.