masterpiece

Rating: Null/10 (16 November 1999)

After reading a lot of comments and critiques posted here and elsewhere, there doesn't seem to be much else left to say about The Shining, but I agree with those who see it as a masterpiece despite its flaws. In fact, it's questionable whether some `flaws' were not in fact intentional  for example, the paper reappearing in the typewriter. Either way, continuity fetishists and horror-film geeks who take the film at face value are totally missing the point.
Although he's been criticized for gutting Stephen King's novel (haven't read it), Kubrick was too original and too savvy to simply ape genre conventions. His use of stylistic genres, well-known source material, and name-brand actors seems less an end in itself than a clever means to draw people to his entertaining films (How else do you explain Tom Cruise?). Once he's distracted you, he slips you the mickey. Among other things, The Shining is about the spiral of madness - by nature and by nurture - and the pressures of social responsibility. All work and no play
The horror of The Shining operates on a different level than the usual formula. While the haunted-house scenario makes the perfect recipe, the suspense of the film comes from a deeper level than `What's around the corner?' or `Who was that?' (Most of the time we know.) Visually, the film is constantly engaging, slowly unveiling the empty hotel's eerie splendor, with the camera's cold eye lurking like a ghost behind each character. But beneath the surface, it also questions the nature of `visions' and at what point they actually become reality. (`Click') The confusion of reality and imagination leads to insanity. Ultimately, the two can't coexist, and since Jack has been seduced by the imaginary  a glittering world where he is master of his own domain, rather than a failure with a feeble wife and a strange son  reality is a bigger threat, so he sets out to destroy it.
As technically brilliant as the film is, it wouldn't function without the subtle threads that Kubrick has woven into it. The effect is mostly subliminal, weeding its way into your subconscious. There is the strange theme of a dog: Jack's line about the `hair of the dog that bit me'; Danny watching Roadrunner-who is constantly pursued by a coyote; the man in the dog suit when Wendy runs up the stairs; and in the scene where Wendy discovers what Jack has been writing all this time, the camera slowly panning across a wall of photographs and then to her back as she looks at the typewriter before Jack's profile emerges at right of the frame, looking for all the world like a lone canine stalking its prey.
And why the Doublemint twins are so disturbing seems like more than just strength in numbers: Danny, in a sense, also has a twin, and apparently - unlike us - they can see him.
The theme of the Indian burial ground  a perfect horror-film cliché  has also been seen as a clue to the film's allegory of the white man's rape of America. If that was Kubrick's intention, then it's no mistake that Jack's predecessor (Grady) was an Englishman, and his incredulous words `You've always been here' take on another meaning. It also explains why Jack (apparently departing from King's book) picks up an axe: more than just a symbol of labor (`All work'), it's a tomahawk. Not many directors could load so much into a single image, but in Kubrick's case it would be more surprising if he didn't.
A lot of comments seem to view the ending as disappointment or a failure, mostly because it doesn't make sense or resolve the conflict. The only explanation that seems to make sense is that the ending is totally symbolic, and that the central conflict all along has been whether Jack can confront his inner self and keep himself from going mad. Maybe Nicholson is too mad himself to actually communicate the process  he just flips a switch. But the maze is already established as a symbol of Jack's own mind (and, like Jack, it has `always been there'). At its center are the wandering, invasive figures of his wife and son. When Jack enters the maze, he is chasing after himself, in the form of his son, and his single intention is to murder the last piece of himself. He follows the tracks (that dog again), but they disappear, and rather than following them back out, he gives up, defeated by his own madness. He stands howling in the freezing cold, surrounded by bushes (trees) and armed with an axe. It's an ineffectual weapon with which to escape his lonely predicament, just as the typewriter cannot free him from the splendid isolation of the Overlook Hotel.