"Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in"

Rating: 9/10 (30 November 2009)

As do most, I can clearly remember the first time I saw 'The Shining (1980).' I must have been thirteen or fourteen, and had just read Stephen King's novel. There was something cold and clinical about the film that really shook my spine; I could never quite put my finger on exactly why. Perhaps it was the drab colours, the detached camera-work, an overwhelming sense of apathy towards the characters' fate. Just recently, I took the opportunity to see 'The Shining' at the cinema (on a double-bill with 'A Clockwork Orange (1971)') and my appreciation for the film hasn't faded. An unhappily-married couple (Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall) are employed to caretake the Overlook Hotel over winter. As the long, bleak months progress, the Hotel's rich and dark history begins to manifest physically, and Jack's alcoholism and unstable psychological state begins to crumble into maniacal madness.
Jack Nicholson's grotesquely over-the-top performance is terrifying, and hilarious, and insanely watchable; Kubrick encouraged Nicholson to overplay the role to its demented maximum. Not surprisingly, his favourite actor was James Cagney, who frequently eschewed realistic method acting in favour of a broiling intensity that suggested a time- bomb on the verge of exploding. Shelley Duvall, meanwhile, does a very good imitation of a complete mental breakdown (in fact, the director himself drove her to the brink with his endless insistence on re-takes, sometimes as many as 100). The exaggerated central performances are strangely at odds with John Alcott's detached cinematography, which surveys the carnage of Jack's mental breakdown with a disquieting aloofness. However, the camera doesn't merely act as an observer; Kubrick uses it to tell the story, his peculiar use of quick zooms serving to claustrophobically constrict the viewer's field of vision and emphasise an element of interest.
Throughout the film, frequent (but irregularly-spaced) title cards signal the passage of time, as though counting down to a historical moment. Jack's plummet into insanity thus becomes set in stone, inevitable, and every preceding frame is plagued by the hand of Fate, gently nudging the man towards a predetermined end. In the film's ambiguous epilogue, Jack's image appears in a photograph dated July 4, 1921. Hence, even before we see Jack Torrance first enter the Overlook Hotel, he has already become a part of its history (just as the previous caretaker Charles Grady had formerly known the Hotel through his historical doppelganger Delbert Grady, the butler). Alternatively, these visions could be a manifestation of Jack's alcoholism – note that, in every scene featuring a ghost, there is a mirror present. It can't be mere coincidence that Jack's axe-assault on a bathroom door was clearly inspired by a sequence in Victor Sjöström's 'Körkarlen (1921),' which concerns an alcoholic husband and father.