The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
When The Shining was released in 1980, the critical response was muted, even cool. It’s a little difficult for me to understand this considering both my overwhelming fondness for the film and its place in the cinematic canon. The mixed or negative reviews tend to focus on what they perceived as a clinical and detached tone and that the film wasn’t as good as the likes of Stanley Kubrick’s previous films, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey or Barry Lyndon. They note the deviations from the novel, which Stephen King will be more than happy to tell you all about. And then you have the Golden Raspberry Awards, proving their wrongheadedness goes back almost thirty years, nominating Kubrick as Worst Director and Shelley Duvall as Worst Actress.
The reevaluation of The Shining was accompanied by a number of critical interpretations of the material that go beyond the surface material of a dysfunctional family at a haunted hotel. Anyone who has seen Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary Room 237 can give you a precis on some of them. I find Bill Blakemore’s theory, published as “The Family of Man” and discussed in the documentary, that Kubrick’s film is about the genocide of Native Americans to be somewhat compelling. Geoffrey Cocks has published a book, The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust, which argues for coded references to the Shoah in The Shining and other of his films. Plausible, I think, especially considering that Kubrick intended to make a film about the subject before shelving it when Steven Spielberg released Schindler’s List. Then there are the truly outre ones. There are people who believe Kubrick faked the moon landing and The Shining is his confession. It’s secretly about MK-Ultra and mind control, as if A Clockwork Orange isn’t right there. The Illuminati, buddy: it always comes down to the Illuminati.
It’s often been said that the attraction of conspiracy theories is that they are comforting, bring order and sense to a world that has neither. When thinking like this becomes applied to art, it takes on additional dimensions. I think there’s a reductive tendency when it comes to symbolism for many people: that the whale in Moby-Dick can only mean one thing, when, in fact, it can mean many things at once, including just being an usually large member of its species that Ahab wants to kill for taking his leg. If a work of art is one big metaphor, every element feeding into it, it gives the interpreter a sense of mastery over it. Congratulations, you’ve figured it out. The problem is solved. No need to worry about subjectivity or aesthetics then!
In the case of Kubrick’s The Shining, there’s an additional matter that I think attracts this sort of conspiratorial thinking. It allows the viewer to not have to deal directly with surface subject of the film: abuse within a family. Jack Torrance is domineering toward Wendy and Danny in a way that is–crucially–not unrecognizable or even an exaggeration until the film’s climax. We are told straight away about Jack hurting Danny during the interview with the child psychologist. We can plainly see how meek, frightened, cowered Wendy is by her husband. It’s eggshells all the time in that household and at the Overlook. While the spectral events in the Overlook are frightening in their own way, it’s this all-too-common family dynamic that I find truly terrifying. I suspect that much of Stephen King’s disdain for the adaptation of his book is that Kubrick and screenwriter Diane Johnson made Torrance, who in the novel is manifestly an authorial surrogate, into such an obviously abusive figure, rather than a sympathetic man succumbing to alcoholism and supernatural influence.
Furthermore, this patriarchal dynamic of a man terrorizing his family can and does lead to violence outside the home. It’s not for nothing that the only violent deaths shown within the film are Danny’s ghostly vision of the Grady sisters’ corpses, killed by their father, and the murder of African American chef and would-be savior Dick Holloran (Scatman Crothers) being murdered by a white man threatened by intrusion into his ‘domain.’ The buried references to genocide that Blakemore and Cocks unearth show us just what horrors domination, dehumanization, and violence can unleash on a mass scale.
It’s domestic abuse that’s mirrored on a societal level by the same forces of male oppression, but you don’t have to think about such ugliness in ourselves and the world if you’re so focused on Danny having a sweater with an Apollo 11 rocket on it.
That said, all the conspiracy theories about Eyes Wide Shut? Those are obviously true.
oliveresque 