# Shining, The (1980)

### reviewed by
Shane Burridge

    The Shining (1980) 140m

How could any movie live up to a publicity campaign that culminated with full-page newspaper ads in the Southern Hemisphere blaring 'The tide of terror that swept the world is here'? Stanley Kubrick's only horror film, an adaptation of Stephen King's bestseller, was a disappointment for first-time audiences who were expecting to be scared out of their wits, but grew to be a more rewarding film for repeat viewers. The film begins with caretaker Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) moving into a Colorado Hotel which is closed and inaccessible during the Winter - Jack figures he can use the months of isolation to work on a novel. The film ends with Jack running amok with an ax, howling for his family's blood. What happens in between? That's THE SHINING's main controversy. The other area of controversy, at least for those Kubrick fans who had been weaned on the philosophical/ideological complexities of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, was that THE SHINING was too simple - it just seemed to be a ghost story about a man who went nuts in a Hotel, so what was the big deal?

After initial mixed feelings about the film, King joined its critics, finally agreeing to say nothing further in exchange for the rights to produce his own television version. In King, the cause of Jack's switch from father to murderer is clear-cut: he and his son are telepathically sensitive to a host of evil spirits that haunt the Hotel. In Kubrick, it's much murkier. He sets up a number of horror-movie motifs and then brushes over them - clairvoyance, ax murders, ghosts, a pact with the devil, insanity, animated corpses, ghosts, and reincarnation (to cap it off, he has the family move into the Hotel on Halloween). Every supernatural event can be explained rationally - here the telepathy becomes a conduit not for entities but hallucinations. Kubrick offers many other alternatives for Jack's madness - the isolation, his frustration as a writer, the cabin fever that has him trapped in the Hotel, his alcoholic past. Is Jack conjuring up his own demons? Has the Hotel become a sort of magnifying lens that expands hallucinatory images and passes them on in a form of autosuggestion to everyone else staying there? We can't trust any image that we see as real, although as viewers we are too caught up in events to give this much thought. It's only afterwards when you might work out the only piece of the puzzle that doesn't make sense - that if this was all happening in the characters' minds, then who let Jack out of the room he was locked in?

THE SHINING is a horror film to admire for its atmosphere, not its frights, although many fans enjoy it for Nicholson's pumped-up performance. It's hard to tell what may have attracted Kubrick to a mainstream horror novel, but I suspect it was the setting that clinched it. In THE SHINING the idea of the haunted house is turned completely inside out. Gone are the dark corridors, the narrow staircases, musty attics, dank cellars and scary woods outside. Instead the Hotel is immaculate, huge, and illuminated, surrounded by empty white wildnerness. There is barely a shadow to be seen. At the one point in the film when a character (Danny) enters darkness it is treated not as a place to be feared but as an area of refuge, only to have it become lit up with floodlights. John Alcott's cinematography and Kubrick's precise camerawork make THE SHINING a visual treat - which is quite something when you consider that it is shot mostly indoors. There is some great floor-level Steadicam tracking that follows Danny as he cycles through the hallways and a memorable cutaway shot of Jack staring at the Hotel maze, which is worth the price of admission alone.

In discussion THE SHINING is often companioned with 2001 (and not just because they share the same running times and a four-act structure). It's an intriguing comparison - inner space versus outer space. If the Star Child at the conclusion of 2001 was meant to signal an evolved consciousness of humanity then it's easy to see THE SHINING's clairvoyant child, Danny, as being its flesh and blood incarnation. The Hotel is his new, mysterious universe; an arena in which he may flex his fledging powers. Meanwhile Jack, who regresses to a grunting, animalistic state by the film's conclusion, returns full circle to 2001's apes. In both films we see points of evolution represented not only by characters but also by the weapons they use (in THE SHINING it progresses from club to knife to ax). There is also an obvious metaphysical link between both films - Kubrick likes to show us that time and space are connected. The psychological pathways of Jack's mind literally become a labyrinth by the film's end, in which he becomes hopelessly lost.

The Hotel itself is also a maze, cosmic or otherwise - the Steadicam's lengthy, fluid negotiations of its corridors serve not to map the layout of the Hotel but to disorient us. Even Wendy, when first entering the Hotel, remarks that she will have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find her way around, a la Hansel and Gretel (another story which features a father instructed to kill his children with an ax). In short, the Hotel is unfixed in space and time (the intertitles that announce the days, date and time don't do anything to make the experience more concrete for us). The past and the present are an overlapping confusion, muddied further by Danny's precognitive flashes into the future. The Hotel itself cannot be discounted as a major character of THE SHINING. Even though it may be unfixed it can still occupy what Jung called an objective psyche, a place where biology and psychology might mingle with and influence each other. The Hotel is a living entity (blood gushes from its elevators like burst arteries), thinking, imagining, creating images of humans to act out endless games for its amusement (the 1927 photograph at the end of the film would suggest as much). The forces of creation and destruction are in constant conflict. Small wonder that Jack, as a character in this staged entertainment, is unable to write a novel himself.

I'm impressed with THE SHINING and always look forward to repeat viewings every five years or so(only in cinemas, mind you) that give me the chance to re-evaluate my prior discoveries about the film and make new ones. The beauty of Kubrick's film is that despite its many layers it can still be enjoyed at the most basic level of a simple horror yarn. But don't be surprised if something sneaks into your subconscious and stays with you for some time afterwards. It may have even happened to Stephen King.

    sburridge@hotmail.com

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