Shining Analysis

Rating: 8/10 (15 December 2013)

Shining is an American film released in 1980, screen played by Stanley Kubrick, Diane Johnson and directed by Stanley Kubrick himself.This film is based on a novel written by Stephen King, bestselling writer and master of suspense books. He has written Dead Zone, Stand By me, and Misery all three adapted to the cinema. Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind, Gyorgy Ligeti, Bela Bartok and Krzysztof Lloyd have composed the music.
In it, we can hear magnificent melody mixed with rasping noise that we rediscovered throughout the film every time that a character having "The Shining" gets a vision. We find, in this film, Jack Nicholson awe-inspiring in his madness, as well as a young Danny Lloyd demonstrating a rare maturity for a young boy. Shining is completely based on acting. The young Danny Lloyd plays a little boy with "The Shining", this gift is embody in a certain way by an imaginary friend named Tony, who lives in his mouth. Little by little Jack Nicholson let his talent came out, here to play a man with murderous madness. Role that he already played in Milo's Forman film, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's nest, in 1975. In Shining, as he write his new book, his madness progressed, and the fact that he wants to stay alone tenfold his isolation. This link between his madness and the writing is explained afterward in the film, when Wendy, his wife, discovered that he wrote one and only sentence since the beginning: "All work and no play makes jack a dull boy". New scenes are in this version of Shining, as the one when the doctor comes in the family house to see Danny after his first vision. Which let us see briefly this family's past, mainly Jack's alcohol problem that come back, later, when he moved to the Golden Room's bar of the hotel.Is this evidence in order to put us on the trail of the evolution of Jack's madness?Shining includes a very strong symbolic around the mirror and what is reflected inside, located in Jack and Wendy's bedroom, this mirror reflect an idea of parallel world where this family's story could be totally different.Danny uses this reflection to write on the bathroom door with a lipstick the word: "REDRUM", what gives "MURDER" in the mirror's reflection.This mirror is here as an eye. Several theories are possible.The first one, of a parallel world join the second one, which is the evolution of Jack's madness, saw by his son, Danny in one of his vision. "REDRUM" can let us think of "RED ROOM" which could be a reference to the bathroom of the Golden Room that is red. Where Jack met Grady (the former custodian of the hotel), who helped him awareness that he must kill his wife and his son. This parallel world joins ours when Danny is attacked in the room 237 and Grady opened the door of the room where Wendy succeeded to lock Jack.At the beginning of the film, the labyrinth located in front of the hotel is introduced as an attraction. This idea seems very charming at first, but much less at the end with the famous pursuit. Evidences sown by Kubrick throughout the film leads the viewers to this final outcome. For instance, we could linked the moment when Wendy and Danny played in the labyrinth at the beginning with the picture of Jack who is walking alone in the hotel's corridor and arriving in front of a labyrinth model which shows us the superiority of Jack's madness.
Let us return to this legendary outcome in the cinema history. Kubrick had chosen to never show us the position of Jack (relative to Danny) that increased prodigiously the suspense for the viewers. Finally, hundreds of scary films have been made but there probably just five of them that are genuinely creepy. Shining fits alongside of the Exorcist released in 1978 by William Friedkin as the best horror film of all time.