Let's do the time warp dance

Rating: Null/10 (1 November 2013)

Writing about a Kubrick movie is intimidating. Not just any director inspires that kind of tin-foil hat devotion. There's obviously something more going on in his anally retentive wax work movies, I've read so many obsessive dissections that I'm no longer sure what I'M even looking at when I put on one of His. These ornate puzzle flicks are like formally perfect movie Rorschach blots beyond their plots. They gradually bloom on further investigation, revealing all sorts of sweet gooey layers- kinda like real life. Wheels turning within wheels is my favorite description. You don't even have to be clued into Kubrick's brand of mind games, you just FEEL there's so much more going on underneath: everything is heavy, charged with import.
It's frustrating as hell if you're not used to it though. It leaves the virgin viewer stranded at the surface screaming from the sidelines that there's nothing spe-cial here AT All. What's all the fuss about? They just seem like big, hollow pretty movies. Nice expensive pictures flattened of any kind of vibrancy, any passion whatsoever. Sterile, lifeless. That dry pressed, left brain quality really turns some people off. It's too controlled and fussed over, there's not enough spontaneity. Everything has a sheen of painterly artifice that further enforces a chilly remove from the material; it makes people assume Kubrick just plain despises them. They reduce the great director to an aspie nerd making marble busts of a species he loathes. I know I kept watching THE SHINING convinced there was more going on beyond the stiff theatrics but blind to whatever it was. It bugged me, the surface plot was too threadbare for all the portent thrown about. it was too loaded and elaborate.
One thing I'm sure of now at least is Jack Nicholson. The criticism goes that he was wrong for the part because Jack already comes off crazy from the start, lapsing into self parody by the conclusion. That this was somehow not deliberate. No. To Kubrick people are already robots, clockwork oranges acting their parts. To stand out in the first place you need a performer with an added layer of self awareness. Enter Jack, the original king of irony. The whole world's a stage, that's Jack's thing. Those eyebrows, that sh*t eating grin- he isn't taking any of this seriously.
Jack Torrance is playing Jack Torrance but unlike the others he KNOWS he's playing Jack Torrance and the strain of having to keep up appearances while everything goes to hell has him frayed round the edges (also, Kubrick cast a guy called Jack to play a guy called Jack; that's a clue right there). Moving into the Overlook just uncorks what's already there, amplifying it out. Jack has no more authentic self, all that's behind that forced leer is a black hole, he's become the entire surface drama, shouting TV punch lines while dashing around with an axe. All he has left is to blow up what he was already doing to ludicrous proportions, to become 'Jack Nicholson/Jack Torrance' incarnate. That's what the baroque acting style is about- Jack's hilarious impression of 2001 in reverse, from man to monkey in two hours and change.
It's immaterial whether there are 'ghosts' here, the demons in Jack's head are the demons in the hotel and vice versa. Spirits you drink and spirits that drink you. There is no clear demarcation, the whole family is subject to the split; it's the same system- family/hotel, as above so below like the opening shot with the mountain range reflected in the lake. The characters are inseparable from the surroundings, the hugeness of the Hotel swallows them up. It *is* them.
Whatever meager defenses the family had before is no match for this architectural monstrosity. You're right there with the characters in this strange castle, ants isolated in a vast panorama awed at your own insignificance. This is what really freaks people out about Kubrick I think, his focus is so unflatteringly zoomed out that human beings become just more props on the stage, there and gone. 'This is how you really look' he seems to be saying. 'BEHOLD, PUNY MORTALS!'
The overwhelmingly open space is like an explosive decompression on the families' clogged septic tank- all that repressed trauma, all those bad feelings come pouring out in a noxious tidal wave. The miasma of sickness blends with the questionable history of the Overlook to take on a life of its own. King's novel was a straight supernatural scare story. To him the devil really did make Jack do it. You see King says in his book, 'they're really ARE ghosts. But what exactly, Kubrick replies by way of his movie, do we mean by 'ghosts'? The horror in THE SHINING is the horror of being trapped in the labyrinth of your own mind, projecting demons outward so that they morph and mix with the surroundings to take on a different face. Each of the trio inhabits their own special suffering zone and communicate with each other distantly if at all. Living together and a million miles away. This is the rule rather than the exception; Peoples' refusal to know themselves makes the surrounding landscape a frightening place where shadows reign. Kubrick doesn't just spin a yarn of a family going mad from cabin fever, he encodes in the very fabric of it how it feels to lose your mind, subtly undermining everything we thought to be true and on-the-level. It's a slow burn, like the gradual onset of snow blindness.
The closer you look the more uncertain things get and then Kubrick's Chinese finger trap has you, examining online maps of the Overlook and discussing the possible occult symbolism of the closing ballroom photograph at 3am with other True Believers.