[Minor edits done 2/4/13.]
This is a very familiar film, and doesn’t need much commentary from me. Whether you’re about my age—I first saw it in the theater in 1980, and have seen it probably close to two dozen times since, in different venues—or you’re among the younger generations who have sampled it since, it seems a landmark in modern horror films. But it seems that received wisdom, or popular attitudes, about it can fall into two camps: those who admire it as a sort of high-water mark of a kind of (1970s) filmmaking (or as the tour de force sort of movie Stanley Kubrick could make); and those who feel it is almost self-parody, or has admirable qualities but also “unrelatable” qualities.
This is a very familiar film, and doesn’t need much commentary from me. Whether you’re about my age—I first saw it in the theater in 1980, and have seen it probably close to two dozen times since, in different venues—or you’re among the younger generations who have sampled it since, it seems a landmark in modern horror films. But it seems that received wisdom, or popular attitudes, about it can fall into two camps: those who admire it as a sort of high-water mark of a kind of (1970s) filmmaking (or as the tour de force sort of movie Stanley Kubrick could make); and those who feel it is almost self-parody, or has admirable qualities but also “unrelatable” qualities.
What most may galvanize people’s
views about it lie in some of the same aspects: for instance, its bent toward a
kind of clinical realism in watching a man have a psychological breakdown,
eventually to turn into the stereotypical “ax murderer,” is what makes it
fascinating; but the film’s detractors can include those who are appalled by
domestic abuse and may be turned off, at best, by the same realistic depiction
of a man nastily berating and, later, threatening his wife.
The film, of course, famously
deviates from its source, Stephen King’s novel, in removing some of the more
fantastic elements (such as shrubs that turned into moving animals), and ended
up being a sort of realistic look at a “decompensating” man, with little
reference to supernatural elements other than ghostly figures (like those of
Lloyd the bartender, played by Joe Turkel, who worked with Kubrick in Paths of Glory [1957], and Delbert Grady, played by Philip Stone, who also worked with Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange [1971] and Barry
Lyndon [1975]). The hotel, of course, is alleged to have a certain
otherworldly spirit about it—the murders and such that occurred there make it
an ominous source of energy that can lead newcomers to go astray.
But a lot of this, it would
seem, was something Kubrick apparently wanted to have be equally interpretable
as either “real supernatural” elements or as figments of Jack Torrance’s increasingly
sick imagination. (The novelist Diane Johnson—ironic to consider as having
worked on this—cowrote the screenplay with Kubrick.) As it happens, Kubrick had
to concede to a need to have one ghost, that of Grady, be a deus ex machina
that lets Jack out of the storage room into which Jack’s wife Wendy has locked
him. This was not merely Jack’s imagination running amok.
So if Kubrick wanted, like Roman
Polanski with Rosemary’s Baby (1968),
to have the supernatural stuff be as attributable to a nervous breakdown in the
protagonist as much as attributable to real evil and such, in Polanski’s case
the ambiguity only broke down in the final scene, where Rosemary (amid a rather
ghastly christening party or such) finds her baby. In The Shining, the “realistic presence” of the supernatural is a
conundrum that the film can’t quite escape. The film braids supernatural with
realistic elements so that it doesn’t fully come down on the side of one or the
other. But we still enjoy the film for its smooth, highly engineered quality.
Micro-looks at parts of the film
Here are a few little notes on
the film—and there are many Web sites dedicated to it, too, which you can find
if you Google “the shining.” (There was one, put up by a knowledgeable fan, that
I enjoyed looking at repeatedly years ago, but I can’t seem to find it now.)
* How big was that Beetle? Jack
drives that oft-seen emblem of the 1960s and ’70s, a Volkswagen Beetle. Did you
notice that, with the three of the family members in that little car (with rear
engine, air-cooled and not with normal coolant-filled radiator), it is
incomprehensible how they got the mountain of luggage (is it 700 pounds’ worth?)
into the car that is in the lobby of the Overlook Hotel when Jack et al. move
in? This could well have been a joke of Kubrick’s; he was always precise about
being realistic with details.
* Duvall was run roughshod to
produce distrait Wendy. Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall, is a bit
of a cartoon, yet despite her seeming to be drawn as a pathetic, put-upon
housewife a good part of the time, she still ends up being basically sympathetic.
By film’s end, she seems to have been the strong one to save her child (who is
resourceful in his own right), almost by default. Duvall, also, was famously
put under strain by Kubrick’s demands, in order to get the properly “distressed”
performance out of her. This has been discussed repeatedly in different ways
over the years. In the 1980 making-of doc that is very interesting on a number
of counts (it is on the recent two-disk DVD of the film), she is articulate and
seems forgiving about Kubrick in discussing how he pressured her. But in some
later comments she has made (which I think I saw in a video somewhere), she
seemed less forgiving.
Jack Nicholson himself as
spoken as if Kubrick engaged in an “end justifies the means” strategy with
Duvall in handling her as an actress. In this regard, Duvall isn’t alone; Tippi Hedren in The Birds (1963) has
been famously remarked on (including in a recent cable bio-pic on her, The Girl [2012]) as having been put
through too-tough treatment by director Alfred Hitchcock in the making of the
film (including real birds being attached to her that could apparently do her
harm). A more modern example is Alison Lohman, who was subjected to demanding
treatment by director Sam Raimi for Drag
Me to Hell (2009); she has referred to Raimi as seeming like two
personalities, one his friendlier, comradely way and the other his harder way.
She has commented that he subjected her to “torture” (this said in a video or
quote from a video I saw online). (For more on Lohman, see the second part of my review of Matchstick Men
[2003].)
* Some scenes that work really
well. Some people seem to talk about Kubrick movies (as in Robert
Osborne’s talk with a cohost on a TCM presentation of a Kubrick work) as if
parts can be admirable/interesting, but not the whole movie. This is especially
true of his later movies, I think—say, from Barry
Lyndon (1975) on, when his movies became fewer and further between, and his
attention to craft matters became, apparently, increasingly obsessive. (See, if
you can find it, the article in The New
York Times Magazine of July 4, 1999, on Kubrick, in which various
collaborators and other former associates talk about him in a sort of oral
history.) In The Shining, some of what
I think are the really well-wrought scenes are:
+ When Jack
first talks with Ullman, the hotel’s manager, in an initial interview. Some may
say this scene displays what can be so idiosyncratic about Kubrick, the fussy
attention to visual aspects that owe a lot to still photography (notice the
compositional balance, and the color scheme on the desk, including a
maybe-somewhat-mocking red, white, and blue in different things echoing the
American flag, also present on the desk), and the production method of getting
enough takes to get a sort of almost depersonalized, verging-on-boring quality
to the performance of the actors. But I have to say I like how this is done in
this scene—it conveys how a business interchange can have mixed elements of
spontaneity, humdrum quality, disingenuousness, etc. The performances are
precise and nuanced. Nicholson in particular is interesting to watch, even if,
in this scene, he gives suggestions as Jack Torrance as if this fellow is
someone to be a little suspicious about (as to his stability) from Day One.
+ Another
well-done scene is where chef Dick Hallorann, played like a deeply patient trouper
by Scatman Crothers, talks with Danny over some ice cream that Dick has
plied Danny with. Though the scene took an enormous number of takes—according
to Steadicam inventor and operator Garrett Brown, one shot of Crothers went to
about 170 takes—and though Danny Lloyd, playing Danny Torrance, seems to show
in some takes that he is under strain from all the takes (while Lloyd was
selected by Kubrick for his ability to have patience with long spells of
production), the scene seems to work well with Hallorann speaking with appropriate
delicacy to a young boy. Such a situation, today, would raise concerns among
middle class parents of boundary issues (“What is that man going into such
depth about with my child?”), but overall, Hallorann shows care in approaching
Danny about an issue he would naturally be shy about. And this interleaves well
with things coming to a head where Danny suddenly “plays the trump card" of
revealing he knows there is something ominous about Room 237, which gets
Hallorann suddenly defensive, warning Danny in a tough manner to stay out of the
room. (By the way, you might notice that Crothers employs an element of Black
English—which is not a matter of degraded English but is a dialect of American
English—when he says “When someone burns toast”—notice how he leaves off the t at the end of the word toast. I’ve noticed in various contexts
that American Blacks elide the end of the consonant blend st, such as to say “toothpas’e” rather than “toothpaste.” This is
different, and more subtle, than the more famous tendency of pronouncing ask as “ax.” Saying “ax” may connote
lack of refinement, but the elided st
doesn’t quite suggest the same.)
+ Another fine
scene is where Jack speaks to Danny when Jack is sitting, unable to sleep, on
his bed. I will come back to this later.
* Inconsistency about the timing of
Jack’s dislocating Danny’s shoulder. The details surrounding Jack’s
past fit where he accidentally dislocated Danny’s shoulder are a little murky.
In an early scene where Wendy has a discussion with the doctor over an episode
Danny has had (which they don’t know had to do with Danny’s capacity for ESP,
where he gets a hint of the horror ahead with the hotel), Wendy—with Duvall’s
performance in this scene perhaps one of the shakiest in the film—says after
Jack dislocated his shoulder, Jack said, seeing his drinking was a problem,
that if he did it again, Wendy, you can leave me. And he hasn’t, and “he hasn’t
had alcohol in five months,” she notes with some satisfaction.
Yet when Jack is at the bar with
Lloyd, he first says he has been “on the wagon” for five months. This squares
with Wendy’s claim. But then when Jack is stewing disconsolately over the old
issue of his fit, he grouses that it was “three
goddam years ago!” Is this true? If it happened three years ago, why did he
only stop drinking five months ago? Or is he lying about the “three years”?
Though this could well have been a script-writing error on Kubrick’s part, he
may have fashioned the detail this way to suggest some unreliability about
Jack. (Or maybe other viewers have another theory.)
* Jack confronting Wendy with a
long, ominous rant. The most tour-de-force scene that Nicholson pulls
off is when, in the second half of the film, he is confronting Wendy in the
enormous Colorado Lounge. (By the way, perhaps you heard—to get the
snow-reflected, mountaintop light that comes in through the windows, Kubrick
used stage lighting that he calculated to be a certain level to produce that light.
That isn’t outdoor light you see. Apparently the lighting power was so great
that it caused enormous heat in some part of the stage.) I always find this
scene fascinating. However many takes Kubrick used (for various shots) to get
Jack to be pitched at the fury he shows, with Wendy a crumbling, confused,
tearful mess before him, it works quite well on its own terms. But this may be
precisely the scene that divides viewers: those who love what Kubrick has wrought
with this might feel this scene epitomizes what works well, while those who
shudder at a clinical depiction of domestic abuse might find Jack’s intense
ranting to get them the willies so much that they condemn the film just on this
score.
* Jack declining in personality at
the bar. One aspect of the film, written on by a critic, Don Shiach (see
Reference), misses the point. This
is when Jack is sitting at the bar with Lloyd serving him, specifically Nicholson’s
depiction of a sort of hick, with the acting seeming hammy. Is this merely bad
acting, as Shiach suggests? (A caption for a photo in the book notes, “This
shot from the ballroom sequence gives some idea of how overripe Nicholson’s
performance was.”) Kubrick was too much of a stickler for details to have let a
performance degrade into self-parody. There was a point to Nicholson’s
performance here, and I think it works well, especially—today—when it can serve
as a time capsule for decades-old manners. Jack Torrance seems like a
Western-tinged, slightly juvenile country bumpkin of sorts when he talks with
Lloyd. Of course, we can say that he is reflecting that he is the old Jack, or
Mr. Grady, or whatever deceased person Torrance is supposed to represent (in
1980) in terms of reincarnation (consider the zoom in on the photo of a Jack
Nicholson-like character in a 1920s Overlook photo at the end of the film).
But as I recall how people
(especially young ones) behaved in the 1970s, in becoming rebels—whether they
closely identified with the hippies of the 1960s and early 1970s, or not—and
especially if they embraced some ethos tied to substance abuse, there was a sort
of “country rebel” quality to their manners. Jack (Nicholson or Torrance)’s manner in
talking to Lloyd, even before he gets drunk, reflects this showy, bumpkin-ish
quality. So one could say that Jack Torrance wasn’t merely echoing the spirit
of the person “he had been before at this hotel,” but is showing a decline in
terms of how, when someone aims toward more substance abuse, he or she also
declines in personality a bit.
You remember the expression from
biology: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
This means that, in the development of an advanced organism (like a human) in a
womb, the organism seems to go through stages as if echoing the evolutionary
stages—it seems like a tadpole, then like a small mammal, etc. Well, when
someone is in the throes of a personal decline—from mental illness, drugs or
drink, or severe personal misfortune—there can be a decline in personality
style. He or she shows a (temporary) “Reverse ontogeny recapitulating
phylogeny.” He was an educated, articulate Italian before; now, snared in
substance abuse, he seems like a dumb guinea. She was a refined WASP before;
now, in the throes of a personal breakdown, she seems like a dirtbag on the
order of the city-accented Protestant character Bill the Butcher played by
Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York
(2002).
So, Jack Torrance, returning to
booze, now seems like a degraded-hick version of himself. To depict such a
character decline is a very astute observation (on American personality styles,
you might say) by Kubrick, I think; and it is well wrought by Nicholson.
* Jack with his son Danny on the
edge of the bed. The whole sequence where Danny goes to the family
living quarters to get his fire engine, and encounters Dad sitting up on the
bed, is interesting for a few reasons. For one, very personally, this scene
comes uncannily close to how I saw my father the last time I saw him alive. On
April 17, 1970, I got up early, hearing someone in the kitchen, thinking it was
my mother. I went down, and saw it was Daddy, sitting at the kitchen table
about 20 feet away, not looking entirely well. I decided to return to bed. He
died later that day, at home, when I was in school.
But all that aside, I think this
scene in The Shining works well in
terms of showing an elemental nature to the relation between father and son, some
minimal decency working out between them, while the possibility of nervous
breakdown and horrible danger lies just beneath the surface of things.
Danny Lloyd as Danny seems
appropriately modest, even a little nervous, as he approaches Jack, and sits on
his lap. The fact of their having been multiple takes (hopefully not 50-80)
shows in Danny’s seeming stiff and depersonalized in Jack’s lap (and yet he can
deliver a line with a ready enough voice). Jack, looking suitably disheveled
(you can almost smell the morning breath and pre-shower body stink), unwinds
his performance with a mix of distracted psychological weirdness, occasional
tenderness for the boy on his lap, and sometimes a little self-satire (the
satirical elements through the film, which usually happen in Nicholson’s
performances, are what some might feel lend an over-the-top nature to the
depictions here). Amazingly, a lot of this scene is done in one long take. The
mixed classical music and other sound effects add to the odd atmosphere in the
scene.
Interestingly, Danny Lloyd
worked on only one other movie after this one, then never acted again
(according to his Wikipedia page).
Reference.
