HOLLYWOOD IN TOTO: Why The Shining Never Loses Its Shock Value.
There is a great deal of mystery to many scenes, but the film offers riches of subtext and interpretations to ponder. More importantly, it’s hugely entertaining, hypnotic and an intensely terrifying work of art. Kubrick’s film holds its secrets close to the vest, but few films this influential are still so potent.
There’s a noteworthy sequence at the midpoint, where Wendy hears Jack murmuring loudly from a nightmare. She runs to him down vast hallways and the camera tracks with her; as she sprints down a seemingly endless series of turns and corners, the viewer feels trapped.
Like a mouse in a maze or Wendy and her son in the hotel’s maze, the audience begins to share their sense of isolation. The Overlook Hotel is grand and spacious, but Kubrick strangely gives us the feel of claustrophobia.
Once Wendy reaches Jack, he awakens from a horrible dream, which is described in a tortured, regretful manner. This scene may be key to Nicholson’s brilliantly stylized performance. From the first moment we meet Jack, he seems meek, holding back the figurative demons that have plagued him from alcoholism and physically harming his son.
It appears The Overlook is possessing Jack since he first walked through the front door. Jack’s recollection of his nightmare to Wendy is a moment of clarity and empathy breaking through. Soon thereafter, his possession grows, and he again seems to be wearing a mask of sanity.
Nicholson’s work ranges from understated and darkly comic to theatrically broad. It always works.
Having been an absolute Kubrick obsessive in college, not surprisingly, I’ve seen The Shining loads of times on every video media, but I hadn’t seen it on the big screen until about 15 years ago, when it played around Halloween at the Cinemark in San Jose’s Santana Row, and I went with my wife. I eventually noticed that we were watching two entirely different movies. She was terrified by the plot and the film’s creepy tension; I was chuckling at a subversive deconstruction of a horror movie that contained some of Stanley and Jack’s greatest hits: News Flash: The Shining Is Actually A Comedy.
(Though my wife totally concurred with James Lileks, who once wrote about the film’s “biggest question of all: why did it require going to a mountain resort and spending time in evil isolation to make him take an axe to Shelley Duvall? I’d have been tempted on day two of the marriage.”)