It’s About Evil (A Messy Analysis)
Back in October, I thought — I can definitely write about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. I’ve watched it multiple times, I’ve seen the documentaries, followed the conspiracies. The novel was integral to my teen horror awakening. I KNOW this subject, I told myself, it’ll take me two weeks, tops. I’ll have it ready for Halloween.
8 weeks later (12 weeks now), Montreal has had its first snowfall (it’s Christmas now, we’ve had too many to count), and I’ve restarted this damn essay four times (five). The unholy number of open browser tabs is making my laptop angry. Trying to throw my two cents into the very crowded arena of Kubrick opinion pieces has me stuck in a loop of endless research. “Of course you are,” a friend told me when I complained about my plight over drinks instead of writing. “Multiple books have been written about this movie. Entire books, about one movie. What did you expect?” I downed my cocktail and made another.
The most frustrating thing about this research process is that so many people have reinforced their opinions and theories with the ‘fact’ that Kubrick was a so-called perfectionist, a master, someone with complete intentionality. And, respectfully, that is not true, and something that Kubrick himself often refuted. Though Kubrick’s meticulous process did lead to a lot of really cool, intentional choices, many fans overlook the more chaotic elements that go into filmmaking. The Shining monopolized four entire sound stages for almost two years, and still the script was constantly being re-written during the shoot. Kubrick spent 13 months just shooting this movie, requiring over 30 takes for the most basic scenes, and hitting almost 150 takes for one scene with Scatman Crothers (Dick Hallorann). Is this perfectionism, or was Kubrick just not communicating his vision to his performers? Did he even know what his vision was?
Today, the film is beloved, but the reviews from 1980 are very different. Warner Brothers really hyped the movie up, calling it “A masterpiece of modern horror”, and Kubrick used the bloody-elevator shot as the film’s entire trailer, an accurate but misleading representation of the movie. The film was so universally hated that both Kubrick and Shelley Duvall earned Razzie nominations at the first ever Golden Raspberry Awards, alongside such poorly-aged thrillers like William Friedkin’s Cruising and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill.
The thing is, I know exactly how I feel about The Shining. The stunning technical innovations truly floor me (will I fan-girl over Steadicams in just a few paragraphs? Yes. Yes I will), but the stories of Kubrick’s on set behaviour are disturbing. And though I want to talk about that dynamic, The Shining is so strange and mysterious that I keep getting sidetracked by the literal lifetime’s worth of content surrounding this movie. To me, the intent of The Shining is much simpler than many critics, fans and click-baity content creators would have you believe, and I think it’s much darker too. It’s deceptively dark, especially since there is very little on-screen violence and almost no on-screen deaths. But Kubrick puts what we need to see in the middle of the frame — everything important is front and centre on screen. It should be impossible to miss.
And yet…
Some Very Cool Film Facts About The Shining
Before we get into conspiracies and controversies, I just want to highlight some of the incredible technical achievements and how they contributed to the film’s unsettling aesthetics.
The Steadicam is a camera stabilizer that gives camera operators an enormous amount of range to move the camera. Before Kubrick hired its inventor Garrett Brown to operate the device for The Shining, scenes shot using the Steadicam had only been seen in a handful of films (Bound for Glory, Marathon Man, Rocky). Because of this invention, Brown was able to shoot the long, winding sequences that follow Danny through the hallways of The Overlook hotel at an incredibly low angle in single takes. The effect adds a dreamy, otherworldly atmosphere while forcing the audience to experience a child’s vulnerable perspective. These sequences were also possible because Kubrick’s team built full sets, with working doors, ceilings and light fixtures, allowing the camera to move smoothly throughout different combinations of rooms and hallways. They built massive sets like the Colorado Lounge or the Gold Room to completely dwarf the actors and emphasise their lack of power, while smaller sets like the Red Bathroom or Room 237 were built to frame Jack in a position of power (and/or delusion).
The decor is incredibly memorable, thanks to set designer Roy Walker who travelled the country photographing different hotel rooms. “We wanted the hotel to look authentic rather than like a traditionally spooky movie hotel” Kubrick told film critic Michel Ciment (from his 1980 book “Kubrick”), which is how such iconic designs, like the honeycomb carpet, ended up in the film. In order to capture these beautiful sets with these innovative camera techniques, director of photography John Alcott wired the entire set with practical lighting, meaning that all the lamps, chandeliers, and overhead lights on screen were working light fixtures. This gave Alcott the ability to light massive spaces with very long depths of field. To mimic the outdoor lighting that pours into the Colorado Lounge, they rigged massive 30-feet high light fixtures just to flood the room with “daylight”, which may have been the cause of a fire that burned down the set months before the end of the shoot.
I could literally go on for pages about all the technical ways The Shining is incredible. The wide angle lens used on the camera both highlights the vacancy of the hotel, and also distorts the faces of the characters in close-ups. The music is otherworldly; Kubrick commissioned scores from multiple composers, including legendary electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos (whose alteration of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique opens the movie). Music supervisor Gordon Stainforth cut the visuals to follow such classical pieces as Penderecki’s De Natura Sonoris №1 and Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, even layering multiple compositions over one another towards the end to create a cacophonous conclusion. The editing is also incredibly precise and unique. It continuously shows the characters’ terrified reactions to the hotel’s horrors before ever cutting to the ghosts, which creates tension and dread in the viewer.
TL;DR — they did lots of very cool things that I like a lot ok let’s move on!
It’s Not a Continuity Error, It’s A Message
There are multiple conspiracy theories surrounding Kubrick and The Shining, and many of them are nonsense. The notorious room 237 is a focal point of many theories since Kubrick changed it from the book’s number, 217, at the request of The Timberline Lodge (the hotel used in many exterior shots). If one were to believe that The Shining is Kubrick’s fake-moon-landing confession, then 237 points to the average distance between the Earth and the Moon (237 thousand miles — but it’s actually over 238 thousand miles). If one was tempted by the theory that The Shining is about the Jewish Holocaust, then 237 is actually 42 (2x3x7) as in 1942, the year the Nazis government implemented what they called “the Final Solution” (the government’s plan to murder Jewish people).
Another fountain of conspiracy is the hotel’s inconsistent layout. Uber-fans have created multiple maps of the hotel’s architecture in order to highlight all the impossible windows, doors and hallways that crop up as the film progresses. Access routes to the kitchen and the Gold Room shift, and many doors seem to lead to nowhere. Whether these are oversights (given the length of the shoot and all the deleted sequences, this is highly probable) or intentional (like Ullman’s impossible window towards the film’s beginning), they all feed into the film’s labyrinthian motif. Given how important the massive hedge maze is to the film’s conclusion, it’s reasonable to assume that Kubrick and his crew created and/or didn’t fix inconsistencies to the layout, since both instances add to the confusion regardless.
“The Shining is about the Native American genocide” is another prominent ‘alternative’ interpretation. Paintings by famous Indigenous artists like Norval Morisseau and Alex Colville are all over the hotel walls. The Colorado lounge and hallways are decked out in (seemingly) Apache and Navajo designs which were inspired by the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite Park, a place built and designed by colonizers. Given how front and centre a lot of these pieces are, I thought I’d be able to learn more about who made them, or what tribe inspired them, but I found almost no information beyond what the film actually says, which was incredibly frustrating. Are these white people’s interpretation of something vaguely “native”, or did Navajo artists actually design them? These pieces feel like they are relics from another world, not the art of living Indigenous peoples who continue to protect the land and fight against an ongoing genocide. The deeper meaning behind their inclusion isn’t that deep at all — mere reminders of colonization.
Still, this theory does have a little more meat to it compared to others. Ullman directly references the Native American genocide, saying “The site is supposed to be located on an old Indian burial ground and I believe they actually had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it”. The popular ‘Indian burial ground’ trope has been often used as a kind of shorthand in horror fiction to explain why a certain place is vaguely ominous. This is problematic in multiple ways — there are thousands of Indigenous tribes with different customs, a lot of whom were nomadic. The folk-horror documentary Woodlands Dark & Days Bewitched touches on this (alongside many other tropes) when Ojibwe culture journalist and advocate Jesse Wente quips “If non-indigenous people are going to be afraid of the Indian burial ground, then I got some news for you: it’s all an Indian burial ground.”
Usually conspiracy theories are way more appealing than the truth, but with The Shining, these theories seem oddly constrained, and theorists often miss the one way in which the theories are all connected. They all revolve around a kind of systematic, grand scale evil, the crimes done in service of imperialism. In 1980, Kubrick spoke about the concept of evil when he talked with Newsweek about what initially drew him to this story. “There’s something inherently wrong with the human personality,” he said, “there’s an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious: we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly.” No matter what rabbit hole you may fall through, they all end up in pretty much the same place.
Stop it, Stephen
Though an innate sense of evil is central to many of Stephen King’s stories, the differences between King’s novel and Kubrick’s film are vast. In the novel, Jack is a newly-sober writer struggling to repair his relationship with his wife and son. His inner monologue is prominent, and we learn a lot about his shame and his demons. By the end of the novel, though the hotel’s ghosts have mostly taken over his mind, he’s able to control himself just long enough to allow his wife and son to escape before burning everything to the ground. In King’s story, Jack is a hero of sorts, and the evil spirits ultimately defeat themselves. In a 2013 conversation with the BBC around the release of his book Doctor Sleep (a sequel), King explained:
“Jack Torrence was as autobiographical as I’ve ever come… At the time that I wrote the book, I was drinking a lot (I didn’t think of myself as an alcoholic, but drunks never do). So I saw him as this sort of heroic character who was battling his demons, on his own, the way that strong American men are ‘supposed’ to.”
Given how much of himself he put into the novel, I almost get why King would be so perpetually offended by Kubrick’s adaptation. In the film, Jack is an unsympathetic brute who is cruel and angry from the very first frame. King protested everything from the choice of actors to the way the film was edited, telling author Tim Underwood in 1988 that “nothing in the movie is really scary”. King even wrote and produced a 1997 mini series called “Stephen King’s The Shining” which was marketed as a more “authentic” adaptation. As Michael Blowen wrote for the Boston Globe: “Kubrick’s The Shining grows richer with each viewing. In King’s version, once was more than enough.”
The pain of having someone as imposing as Kubrick tear into your work and rearrange it to his liking is something none of us will ever know. I’m sure King’s frustration was exacerbated by Kubrick’s total disinterest in anything the author had to say. When talking about what drew him to King’s novel, Kubrick was very forthright. Though he openly praised the novel in a 1980 interview with Spanish writer/director Vicente Molina Foix, saying “I thought the plot, ideas, and structure were much more imaginative than anything I’ve ever read in the genre”, he didn’t hold back the rest of his opinions.
“King’s great ability is in plot construction” he explained, then added “he doesn’t seem to take great care in writing, I mean, the writing seems like if he writes it once, reads it, maybe writes it again, and sends it off to the publisher.”
Later on when talking about the reasons he removed or simplified much of the characters’ backstories, he added “I think that [King] was a little worried maybe about getting literary credentials for the novel… He seemed too concerned about making it clear to everybody that this was a worthwhile genre of literature.”
Though Kubrick died in 1999, Stephen King continues to this day to talk about his dislike of the movie whenever he’s asked. He talks about it so much — honestly, he’s probably talking about it right now.
Wendy Survives
Just like Jack, the film version of Wendy is quite different from the book. In the novel Wendy is a wife who wrestles with her own demons, and chooses to stay in her relationship with a lot of apprehension. In his interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick explained why he changed her personality, and why he specifically sought out Duvall for this role, though he seems to mix up Shelley the actress with Wendy the character.
“The novel pictures her as a much more self-reliant and attractive woman, but these qualities make you wonder why she has put up with Jack for so long. Shelley seemed to be exactly the kind of woman that would marry Jack and be stuck with him. The wonderful thing about Shelley is her eccentric quality — the way she talks, the way she moves, the way her nervous system is put together.”
This is the decision that arguably earned Kubrick the most criticism. When King spoke with the BBC in 2013, he described Wendy Torrance as “one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film. She was basically just there to scream and be stupid” and in 2014 he told Rolling Stone she was a “screaming dish rag”. Back in 1980, film critics were exceptionally harsh towards Duvall’s performance. Though many articles seem to understand that Nicholson was playing a character, they offered no such latitude to Duvall. Under the headline “Kubrick’s 12 million dollar shiner”, the Washington Post wrote “where Nicholson seems to need toning down, the jittery and amateurish Duvall cries out for basic dramatic coaching”. Among all the criticisms, no one was crueller than Variety, who said “Shelley Duvall transforms the warm, sympathetic wife of the book into a simpering, semi-ret*rded hysteric.”
The “Wendy-is-annoying” sentiment is something I learned long before I ever watched The Shining. I thought her screams and pleas were grating, and her weakness frustrated me. That infamous scene on the staircase, where she tries desperately to ward off her husband with a bat, made me feel angry, not at Jack for trying to murder his wife, but at Wendy for not fighting back. It was safe for me to judge Wendy from the comfort of my own home, where I’d chosen to watch The Shining. Because I was expecting violence, it was easy for me to criticize her passivity. Instead of being mad at Jack for being a murderer, I was mad at Wendy for being weak.
Kubrick believed in Stanislavski’s method acting principle, and wanted his actors to deliver their lines “so completely that there were no other possible lines anywhere in your head”, wrote Michael Herr for Vanity Fair in 2010. With the scene where Jack threatens Wendy on the staircase, Kubrick shot 127 takes, forcing Duvall to maintain a feverish level of hysteria every day for three weeks. She described her experience of playing Wendy Torrance for David Hughes’ book The Complete Kubrick, saying “from May until October I was really in and out of ill health because the stress of the role was so great. Stanley pushed me and prodded me further than I’ve ever been pushed before. It’s the most difficult role I’ve ever had to play.” In later interviews, when asked about how he treated his own leading actress, Kubrick would downplay and deflect the stress of the shoot. He told Michel Ciment:
“It was only with the greatest difficulty that Shelley was able to create and sustain for the length of the scene an authentic sense of hysteria. It took her a long time to achieve this and when she did we didn’t shoot the scene too many times. I think there were five takes favouring Shelley, and only the last two were really good.”
Shelley Duvall left Hollywood suddenly in 1994 and settled into a small town in Texas, disappearing completely from the public eye. In a heartwarming 2021 profile for the Hollywood Reporter celebrating her body of work as an actor and producer, Seth Abramovitch revisited the staircase scene with Duvall. She talked openly about the challenge:
“After a while, your body rebels. It says: ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry. To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled — I would just start crying.”
She eventually decides to rewatch the sequence on Abramovitch’s iPhone, and the scene brings tears to her eyes. “ ‘It was very hard,’ she explained. ‘Jack was so good — so damn scary. I can only imagine how many women go through this kind of thing.’ ”
It’s the director’s job to communicate their vision to their cast and crew. No actor “requires” hundreds of takes to deliver an “authentic” performance, and I don’t need a director to actually terrify his actress in order to believe that she’s scared. With Wendy, Kubrick didn’t understand why someone he found attractive or intelligent would be in an abusive relationship, and so he crafted a character he could dislike and treat poorly. King is unable to see Jack and Wendy as anything but extensions of himself, and because the film versions are so ugly, he feels comfortable hating them.
Now when I watch The Shining, all I see is Wendy’s (and Shelley’s) terror. I see her justifying her husband’s history of violence in her very first scene. I see her taking care of the hotel while Jack stares at his typewriter. I see her struggling to not open the pantry door as Jack begs her to be let out. I see her defending her son. Despite Kubrick’s intentions, and King’s opinions, Duvall makes Wendy fight back in thousands of ways, in every scene. Wendy survives.
The Impulse to Scratch
Many fans, critics and industry people excuse Kubrick’s abuse on set as ‘part of his artistic process’, as if the ‘authentic’ results justify the means. But nothing about a movie is authentic. Though the lights may be wired to work like real lights, and the sets may be built to scale, everything has been selected, crafted, and arranged to one man’s liking. The images have been edited together, music and sound effects have been added - absolutely nothing that we watch on screen is real, in any way. In fact, I would argue that filmmaking is the art of manufacturing a mirage that feels authentic, of assembling an infinite number of parts in just the right way so that we feel something true.
Despite making a movie that points a big ol’ finger at intimate partner violence, Kubrick misses his own abuse, as so many abusers do. Writer/comedian Maggie May Fish makes this point in her excellent video essay Myth of the Auteur: Stanley Kubrick vs David Lynch.
“[It’s] a film about patriarchy and the cycles of abuse, whose means of production seem to reproduce that same pattern of patriarchy and abuse in order to represent those ideas. He’s like ‘I made a movie about this bad thing.’ But in making the movie, he did the bad thing!”
The 1996 documentary Stanley Kubrick: The Invisible Man explores many other instances of Kubrick’s behaviour as told by his collaborators. Malcolm McDowell (who scratched both his corneas while shooting that scene in A Clockwork Orange) had a lot to say.
“What stops him from being a genius, for me, is this lack of humanity. … At the end of the day, they say what was he like as a man, what was he like as a human being? I think that’s probably the test that he doesn’t do well at.”
There’s a kind of void around Kubrick’s work, especially with The Shining, where so many things about him are left unsaid, unaddressed or unconfirmed. He hints at colonization and genocide, but to what end? What is the point of a film about humanity’s inherent evil nature if there is no commentary? Kubrick shows us “the dark side”, to borrow his words, but if we don’t look at it directly, we miss the actual evil right in front of the camera. The Shining may showcase cruelty inflicted by the powerful on the powerless, Kubrick is still unable to empathize with his actress or her character, the recipients of this cruelty.
Despite knowing all of this, The Shining feels true to me in many ways. Sometimes I admire Kubrick for refusing to over explain his films — why should he summarize years of work just so the public can get a soundbite? Sometimes I wonder if Kubrick built something beyond his own comprehension, and I can’t decide if that’s heartbreaking or magnificent. How could something so powerful come from such chaos, I wonder, and then inevitably I’ll start to go through the movie in my head. It’s like an itch in my brain, the more I ignore it, the more the impulse to scratch takes over. Maybe I missed a key detail, I think, maybe this time I’ll be able to figure out what that guy in the bear suit really means.
And then I’m sitting down to watch it again. That bloody elevator, that’s the oceans of blood left in the wake of the patriarchy! Jack’s clearly a racist, the way he talks about “white man’s burden”. Kubrick was woke, actually! Maybe, probably not. It’ll make sense this time, I tell myself. This time I’ll crack it.
BC
December 24th, 2021
- A Shining Razzie Throwback published by John Wilson on The Razzie Blogz on May 28th, 2020
- An interview with Kubrick by Vicente Molina Foix from 1980 republished on Cinephilia & Beyond, published in The Stanley Kubrick Archives by Alison Castle
- Film Review: ‘The Shining’ published by Variety on December 31, 1979
- Forever and Ever and Ever: Reappraising the Score of The Shining published by Christine Lee Gengaro on Senses of Cinema in July 2020
- Impossible to Overlook: Set Design in ‘The Shining’ published by Andrea Sciambarella on Reel Rundown on March 9th, 2021
- ‘It’s All an Indian Burial Ground’: Folk Horror Cinema’s Reckoning with Colonial Violence published by Nathaniel Budzinski on ArtReview on December 10th, 2021
- King vs. Kubrick: The Origins of Evil published on Senses of Cinema in July 2020 by Filippo Ulivieri
- Kubrick published by Michael Herr on Vanity Fair on April 21st, 2010
- Kubrick on The Shining: An Interview with Michel Ciment from Ciment’s 1980 book Kubrick, compiled on visual-memory.co.uk
- Kubrick’s $12 Million Shiner published on The Washington Post by Gary Arnold on June 13th, 1980
- Making The Shining by Vivian Kubrick in 1980
- Meet Garrett Brown, Steadicam Inventor and One of the Most Influential Minds in Cinema History published on No Film School on December 6th, 2016 by Emily Buder
- Myth of the Auteur Stanley Kubrick vs David Lynch by Maggie Mae Fish on June 22, 2021
- Photographing Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining published on American Cinematographer on April 11, 2019 by Herb A. Lightman
- Rookie of the Year: The Shining and Alex Colville published on Unwinnable on October 6th, 2014 by Matt Marrone
- Room 237, a 2012 documentary by Rodney Ascher
- Searching for Shelley Duvall: The Reclusive Icon on Fleeing Hollywood and the Scars of Making ‘The Shining’ published on The Hollywood Reporter by Seth Abramovitch on February 11, 2021
- ‘She made music jump into 3D’: Wendy Carlos, the reclusive synth genius published on The Guardian by Jude Rogers on November 11th, 2020
- Stanley Kubrick: The Invisible Man by Paul Joyce produced for Channel 4 in 1996
- Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview published on Rolling Stone on October 31 by Andy Greene
- Stephen King returns to The Shining with Doctor Sleep published on the BBC on September 19th, 2013
- The History of Steadicam published on Tiffen
- The History of Timberline Lodge
- The Music of The Shining published on Eye Scream in 2019
- The Shining: Stanley Kubrick’s Horror Show published in Newsweek on June 2, 1980 by Jack Kroll, republished on Scraps from the Loft on September 17th, 2016
- Why Kubrick did so many takes in Full Metal Jacket by CinemaTyler on February 8th, 2021
- Why The Shining is Terrifying by Super Eyepatch Wolf on October 14th, 2017
- Why The Shining’s Music is Genius by Listening in on April 22, 2019
