“Real horrorshow”: The juxtaposition of subtext, satire, and audience implication in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
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haven't seen it posted here or on the Kubrick Site before.
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“Real horrorshow”: The juxtaposition of subtext, satire, and audience
implication in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
Literature Film Quarterly (1997)
Greg Smith
It may not be too much of a stretch to claim that Stanley Kubrick’s
The Shining (1980) is the most underappreciated film of his career.
This neglect is undoubtedly attributable to the fact that as the
cinematic adaptation of a Stephen King novel which is equally under-
rated, The Shining may be categorized as a horror film-and it is, but
it is also one which exists on a much more profound level than the
garden-variety pulp flicks that give the genre its widespread
disrepute. Interestingly, popular film critics in America tended to
rake The Shining over the coals upon its release because it did not
adequately fulfill expectations based on Hollyood convention (some
critics complained that the film was too complicated and didn’t make
sense, others that it was too slow, still others that it was not scary
enough), while academic film critics apparently steered clear of it
because it was a horror film and as such not worth paying attention
to. But what all of these critics failed to realize was that with The
Shining Stanley Kubrick has created a film that is unnerving precisely
because of the tension produced by the conflict among the horror film
conventions in its surface plot, the indictment of American racist and
sexist ideology in its subtext, and the satirical streak that runs
throughout this political commentary and surrounding time-honored
Gothic trappings. Perhaps most impressively, Kubrick also manages to
implicate us as an American audience in this tragi-comic scenario in
many ways, some visceral and some intellectual, all of which serve to
expose our race and gender stereotypes; and it is no surprise that
Kubrick, a director who indulges his penchant for using mirrors as
cinematic devices in The Shining, ultimately suggests that his film is
horrific not because it’s about ghosts, but because it reflects us,
its audience, as Americans.
Although many academic film critics prefer to concern themselves with
Kubrick films other than The Shining, there are a few who have tried
to vindicate the film. In general, such critics tend to fall into one
of two camps, viewing the film as being either deadly serious or
systematically farcical in its intent. However, it is the mixture of
both its serious and its satirical aspects which makes The Shining so
unique, and it is this same mixture which the majority of the film’s
academic critics fail to consider in detail. 1 One of the more
sophisticated and successful critics, Richard T. Jameson, comments in
his article “Kubrick’s Shining,” “Has there ever been a more perverse
feature film than The Shining in general release? No one but Kubrick
could have, would have, made it. Certainly no one but Kubrick could
come as close to getting away with it” (32). Jameson is referring here
not to the film’s plot, which he elsewhere deems “unremarkable” (28),
but primarily to the cultural and psychological implications (the
latter being those which his article focuses on) hinted at through the
presentation of the plot. In other words, it is not the story per se
which is perverse, but the manner in which it is depicted on the
screen by Kubrick. And as a director who painstakingly oversees and
plans out every nuance of his films, Kubrick infused The Shining with
as much complex subtlety as possible.
This is true of all aspects of the film, including its ostensibly
simple screenplay, which Kubrick collaborated on with Diane Johnson
(an English Lit professor whose specialty is Gothicism). Taken at face-
value, the general story line is indeed standard enough Gothic fare,
if somewhat modernized. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a
caretaking job at a posh Colorado summer resort hotel that closes down
during the winter season. A former schoolteacher turned writer, Jack
is looking forward to the isolation and time the job will provide him
with, both of which he thinks will benefit his writing career.
Accompanying him for the duration of the job are his wife, Wendy
(Shelley Duvall), and his seven-year-old son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), who
has the “shining,” a psychic ability which enables him to see in part
past and future events as well as to probe the minds of others. Jack
is a tenuously reformed alcoholic who has hurt Danny in the past as a
result of his drinking, and the caretaking job, it is implied, is his
chance to get his act together and make a new start. The Overlook
Hotel, where the family will be residing, is the site of an atrocity
involving an earlier caretaker who murdered his wife and daughters
while employed in the same capacity. The hotel, of course, turns out
to be haunted, and Jack seems doomed to follow in the former
caretaker’s homicidal footsteps. Again, this is fairly common, if
serviceable, suspense film protocol. But it is in the subtextual
content lurking just below the surface of these narrative conventions
where the screenplay manifests its complexities, many of which can be
seen as highlighting Kubrick’s thematic concern with the dark side of
white American psychology and its connection to politics, sexuality,
and family. As such, it will be useful here to examine each of these
three topics as subtexts and finally to consider the film’s satiric
content and Kubrick’s subsequent implication of the audience.
In his Marxist-influenced explication of The Shining, “American
Horror,” David A. Cook postulates that the film, as an allegory for
American economic and racial politics, “is less about ghosts and
demonic possession than it is about the murderous system of economic
exploitation which has sustained this country since, like the Overlook
Hotel, it was built upon an Indian burial ground that stretched quite
literally `From sea to shining sea”’ (3). Here the horror film
convention of explaining supernatural events by having the haunted
house built on a burial ground takes on political implications,
although the first-time viewer will likely be led to believe that the
ghosts of the Indians who were fought off of their land by the
builders might haunt the hotel. (“I believe they actually had to repel
a few Indian attacks while they were building it,” Ullman, the
manager, tells Jack and Wendy in the amused conversational tone of the
worldly man who is above such concerns as he gives them the grand tour
in one of the opening sequences.) But in fact, all of the hotel’s
ghosts (both male and female) are white. Also significant with regard
to this subtext are the only two adults in the film that are positive
male characters, both of whom are African-Americans: the Overlook head
chef Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), who shares the shining with
Danny and makes the exhausting trip from his winter home in Florida in
an unselfish attempt to intervene on behalf of the boy and Wendy when
Jack brandishes his wickedly gleaming fire ax and goes hobbling and
drooling after them during the latter part of the film; and Larry
Durkin (Tony Burton), Hallorann’s friend who owns a service station on
the outskirts of Denver and who aids Hallorann in reaching the
Overlook by providing him with a Snowcat to travel the otherwise
impassable, blizzard-clogged route to the hotel. Earlier in the film,
Jack has a conversation in an adjoining bathroom with the ghost of the
former murderous caretaker Delbert Grady (Philip Stone), who appears
as a haughty English butler during an obviously ironic July 4, 1921,
costume party in the hotel ballroom (attended exclusively by white
revelers), and who informs him that Danny has used his shining to
“bring an outside party into this situation.”2 Jack is nonplussed.
“Who?” he asks Grady, and Grady replies from within what critic
Richard T. Jameson terms “the quaint snobbery of his anachronistic,
English-accented cultural frame” (32), “A nigger. A nigger cook.” The
most disturbing racial/political implication of the film’s subtext
becomes clear at this point, according to Jameson, when “Jack repeats,
‘A ”nigger?“’ (a superb reading by Nicholson) in a tone . . . on the
verge of disbelieving laughter . . . yet [Jack] is also fascinated by
the new ripple of self-congratulating possibility here. Whose
sensibility is in charge” (32)? This, of course, is the crux of the
matter; at a never-ending 1921 Fourth of July party in one of
America’s most ritzy hotels, the sensibility in charge is very likely
that of the wealthy American white male, and the message to Jack here
is clear-if he wants to join this party, and if he wants to benefit
from doing so, he will have to shed his enlightened liberal
schoolteacher/writer personality and adopt the racist views seen as
constituting a valid claim to authority by wealthy, white, pre-
Depression and pre-World War II American societal circles.
But there are other attitudes Jack will have to embrace along with
that of the wealthy white racist if he wants to join this exclusive
and eternal Fourth of July costume party where the whisky flows free
of charge and where erotically mysterious women in cat masks and elbow-
length black velvet gloves sit with gingerly-poised cigarette holders
between their fingers. Paramount among these attitudes is that of the
noncommital, swinging, chauvinistic single guy, and Jack slips into
this role with little difficulty when he first encounters the
Overlook’s ghostly bartender, Lloyd:
Though the attraction of booze is primary, Jack’s banal and cliched
bar-fly conversation with Lloyd is mostly about women.... [H]e and
Lloyd reveal that Jack thinks of women in the coarsest possible terms:
he describes Wendy as “the old sperm-bank” and “that bitch.” Wendy
enters and interrupts this repellent male conversation with the news
that a “crazy woman” in one of the hotel’s rooms has tried to strangle
Danny. Jack evinces no interest until Wendy mentions that the woman is
in the bathtub, and thus sexually available. (Caldwell lid)
Now the Overlook, having just provided Jack for the first time with
alcohol (the party miseen-scene is yet to take place), offers him the
possibility of adventurous sex. Although Caldwell’s assumption that
Jack equates the woman’s being in the bathtub with sexual availability
may be a bit over-wrought, it is true that when Jack investigates the
bathroom of Room 237 he discovers a voluptuous nude young woman in the
tub, who rises seductively to embrace and begin kissing him. At this
point, the camera does a zip pan away from Jack and the woman to
reveal a startling shot-reflected in the bathroom mirror-as Jack
discovers he is actually embracing the decomposing corpse of a woman
who then begins to cackle in gratuitously effective horror film
fashion and to chase Jack, her arms extended in ghoulish invitation,
as he backs out of the room. Some critics (such as Christopher Hoile
in his fascinating article “The Uncanny and the Fairy Tale in Stanley
Kubrick’s The Shining”) have interpreted this scene as being of
importance primarily because of its Freudian overtones, but I also
believe this scene can be viewed as the hotel’s way of both luring and
frightening Jack over to its ideological side. Essentially, the
management has seen that he will jump off the wagon, then accept their
misogynistic perspective (Lloyd sympathetically assures Jack: “Women.
Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em,” who replies eagerly,
“Words of wisdom, Lloyd. Words . . . of . . . wisdom.”), then commit
adultery, and finally adopt their racist perspective as well. But like
all shrewd employers, those in charge of the Overlook do not dole out
all their incentives at once, and in order for Jack to receive this
particularly alluring bonus in its robust and youthful form, he will
have to do some “work” first. If he refuses, as implied by the sudden
and horrifying degeneration of the attractive young woman, the hotel
can indeed make things get ugly fast.
The “work” required of Jack, of course, is the murder of his wife and
son. After all, in order to be a truly engaging, swinging single, 19?
Os white male, the hotel management implies, Jack must not have the
cement shoes of a family holding him down. During the bathroom
conversation with Jack, Grady characterizes Jack’s “job” in culturally
acceptable-even motivational-terms: like Grady in the past, Jack must
“do his duty” and “correct” his family. Although the butler
superficially defers to Jack during this conversation, it becomes
quickly apparent that he is actually in charge of the exchange, and it
shouldn’t be hard for Jack to read the message from the 1921 front
office between the lines: “Okay, Jack, you’ve demonstrated your
allegiance to us so far. now let’s see some tangible results. And if
not, no more goodies for you.” But if he delivers? Then the eternal
party, both in the ballroom and-in more pleasurable terms than
previously, one assumes-in Room 237, awaits.3
Somewhat perversely, Kubrick laces The Shining with a solid streak of
satire that is nervejanglingly effective when played off against the
standard “horror film” content of the film’s surface plot and this
more subtle (and hence more deeply frightening) subtext. A great deal
of this satire is reserved for Jack’s dialogue and general actions
(both of which are interpreted to the manic hilt by Nicholson), as he
rants and raves and mugs around the hotel. Supposedly a writer, Jack
produces at his typewriter an enormous pile of paper bearing only the
sentence “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over,
but in different patterns so that the sentence mimics various
conventional writing forms, including poems, paragraphs, the one-
sentence-per-line arrangement reminiscent of the wayward student
reproducing the same cliched litany on a blackboard as punishment, and
even one page where a grouping of the sentence is blocked off from and
encompassed by an otherwise solid text so that it resembles (God help
us) an academic essay. Like this same sentence, manifest repeatedly in
different forms, Jack projects himself into various roles (roles often
associated with melodramatic white male Hollywood and television
actors) which he then plays out in the most over-the-top fashion: the
suffering writer, the overworked husband and father, the sexist drunk,
the “worldly” party-goer, and finally the raving lunatic.
The implication here, simultaneously humorous and disturbing, is that
Jack may not really have gone insane. Many critics have assumed that
the film is simply Kubrick cataloguing Jack’s descent into madness,
but it seems more likely that he may just be feigning insanity because
to do so makes his “work” into “play.”4 In what is arguably the film’s
most viscerally frightening scene, we watch as Jack, grinning and
capering gleefully, systematically hacks his way through first the
locked door of the caretaker’s apartment and then the locked bathroom
door within, all en route to his wife and son, who are barricaded in
the john. “Wendy, I’m home,” he calls amiably upon chopping through
the first door, with that one phrase recalling the banal entry cue of
countless American white male sitcom fathers from the 1950s, along
with associated images of the ridiculous television idealizations of
the nuclear families they headed. “Heeeere’s Johnny!” he announces
dementedly when he manages to whack a sizeable hole in the bathroom
door, now aligning himself with the comedic king of American late-
night television who, it should not go unnoted, is well known for
being unable to cultivate a successful marriage. Lastly, Jack also
casts himself as the Big Bad Wolf before even going to work on the
bathroom door (“Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in. Not by the
hair on your chinny-chin-chin? Then I’ll huff . . . and I’ll
puff . . . and I’ll blow your house in . . .”), recalling another
fictional “wolf’ who has been subtly present throughout the film, the
Coyote character in the Roadrunner cartoons Danny is repeatedly seen
watching.5 Suddenly this whole scenario-one in which a man is going
after his family with a rather large and nasty ax, you will remember-
becomes a twisted, surreal, cartoon-like event which is very possibly
Kubrick’s wry comment on the way Americans like to have their violence
depicted in movies. Most American cinematic depictions of violence are
aesthetically cartoonish (lots of flashy cuts, explosions, gunfire,
numerous anonymous casualties) while attempting to maintain a serious
overall tone; but here Kubrick reverses this, making the violence
slow, deliberate, and consequently tough to watch (we see or hear
nearly every vivid heft, descent, and blow of the ax), while
maintaining a perversely humorous tone (in attempting to murder his
family, Jack is not only having a pretty good time; in fact, he’s
having such a good time that he can’t for a second display even a
modicum of seriousness). As an audience, we don’t know whether to
laugh at this or scream at it, and our ambiguous reaction is all the
more disquieting because of it.
And here, finally, as it has continually threatened to, the focus of
the film has perhaps shifted uncomfortably onto us as an audience.
Throughout the film, Kubrick has teased us with our role as
participants: leading us along through the maze-like Overlook as he
follows Danny’s Big Wheel with his trademark Steadicam point-of-view
tracking shots; casting us briefly in the role of Lloyd the bartender
when Jack first enters the ballroom (”Hi, Lloyd,“ Jack remarks
nonchalantly, gazing straight into the camera); showing us the entry
into Room 237 primarily through Jack’s eyes (a sly way of attempting
to arouse male viewers who, like Jack, are about to have this erotic
rug yanked out from under them?); hinting that we, along with the
forest ranger whom Wendy contacts by radio at one point. should become
irritated with her; letting us read, along with Wendy, Jack’s
comically unsettling prose; bringing us with Hallorann down the
Overlook’s eerily symmetric entrance hall by virtue of the film’s
slowest and most intense tracking shot; and taking us, ultimately, on
the outdoor chase through the Overlook’s snow-choked hedge maze as
Jack grips his fire ax and lurches, alternately enraged and giggling,
after Danny. Danny has led Jack into the hedge maze, not unlike what
Kubrick has done with his audience by having led us through the outer
trappings of a Gothic horror story into a cinematic maze which
confronts us on four different levels: its surface manifestation as
Gothic horror story, its subtextual level (where American race and
gender stereotypes are perpetuated as a way of keeping the Overlook`s
good old boys club intact), its satiric level (where commonly held
images of the American nuclear family and of the white American male
as father and husband are scathingly distorted), and its mirroring
level, which veritably demands that we evaluate not only the film
itself, but our reactions to it as well. ”Do you see yourself and your
attitudes and values reflected here?“ Kubrick seems to be asking us.
”Which aspects? What about your country? Your family? Your ideas about
family? About marriage? About being single? Being male? Being female?“
According to critic Jeff Smith, as adults ”our fall [like Jack’s]
accompanies selfconsciousness, which in cinematic terms is our
projection of ‘self’ onscreen, our willingness to assimilate ourselves
to given characters and viewpoints“ (72), and when the characters and
their situations are as personally and politically loaded as those in
The Shining potentially are to an American audience, this can be a
very uncomfortable fall indeed, one which lands us in the darkest
aspects of ourselves and the society which has grown up around us.6
Again, Smith explains:
Those glaring, artificial lights that bathe all [Kubrick’s] human
habitations, from chateaus to War Rooms to Moonbases to prisons, and
now even garden mazes, render human activity as starkly overapparent
at the Overlook as anywhere, and with less chance than ever of escape
back into ”nature“ (which itself seems forbiddingly incandescent). In
that light-the light of movies-Jack cannot help encountering inner
forces and spirits, nor we our lowest fears and desires. Jack’s fate
attaches itself to the whole depraved audience, which in the end stays
behind with him somewhere in the terrible, neon-lit space of its own
consciousness. (73)
The conclusion of The Shining, although it contains something of an
optimistic resolution (Wendy and Danny escape, the boy symbolic of
hope for the future, while Jack cannot find his way out of the hedge
maze and freezes to death), is finally as unnerving as the film as a
whole. Hallorann, who has come so far to break up a party whose racist
exclusiveness is symbolic of his country’s history, is killed by Jack
upon his arrival. In a rather pessimistic manner, Kubrick here almost
forces the audience to overlook Hallorann’s contribution to Wendy and
Danny’s escape, although it is the approaching sound of his Snowcat
that draws Jack away from the bathroom where Wendy is cornered. Jack
quickly kills Hallorann and is once again free to stalk and murder his
family, which he tries to do. Wendy and Danny must still escape on
their own once Hallorann is no longer able to help, so our attention
as an audience is directed from his murder to their still precarious
safety. The disturbing implication for us as an audience and as a
culture (surely intended by Kubrick) is this: is Hallorann an
acceptable sacrifice for saving Wendy? And how much of our racial or
gender biases as a culture or as individuals informs whatever answer
we give this question (even if our answer is to avoid it or claim that
it’s unanswerable)?
The film’s final shot is a slow track through a hall of the Overlook
to a black and white photograph of Jack and his fellow revelers at the
1921 July 4 ball, and it might be wondered here whether Jack’s
appearance in this photograph indicates that he was admitted to the
party even though he did not fulfill his work quota, or whether he was
given a token spot in the photograph (where he remains frozen like in
the hedge maze) as a reward for his efforts but does not actually
exist in the supernatural ”reality“ of the party itself? One scene
from early in the film which might help clarify this shows Wendy and
Danny entering the hedge maze for a playful race while Wendy teases
him that ”the loser has to keep America clean!“ In the end, of course,
it is Jack who is the loser because he can’t find his way out of the
maze, the possible implication here being that in death Jack has been
admitted in some capacity to the Overlook’s ”sophisticated“ white male
entourage, a group that might very well use a polite euphemism such as
”keep America clean“ to represent their racist and sexist agenda. This
would serve to underlie the disturbing ironies and paradoxes of this
fascinating film, because contrary to the photograph’s aesthetic,
nothing here is black and white except for the racist and sexist
ideology of the Overlook’s vulgar fantasy world. Kubrick, it seems,
knows that this is indeed the case, and by ultimately throwing this
ambiguity back onto the audience, by making it our responsibility to
find our way out of the maze, he has created a film in The Shining
that is not only a remarkable cinematic achievement, but a profoundly
disturbing cultural mirror.
Notes
1 Of the academic criticism written on the film. I find Richard T.
Jameson’s ”Kubrick’s Shining“ (Film Comment [6 [1980]: 28-32) to be
the most compelling article, although all of the pieces contained in
my ”Works Consulted“ list contain fascinating points and are well
worth reading, particularly Thomas Allen Nelson’s book Kubrick: Inside
a Film Artists Maze, which includes an entire chapter devoted to
rigorous and exhaustive analysis of the film’s psychological and
visual themes.
2 An effective and visually ironic American flag motif is suggested
during this conversation by virtue of the bathroom’s bright red walls,
its stark white porcelain fixtures, and Jack’s blue jeans. Actual
American flags are directly associated with white male power figures
elsewhere in the film as well: there is a miniature American flag on
the desk during Jack’s job interview with the manager, who is wearing
a red tie, a white shirt, and a blue blazer; a full-sized American
flag in the Forest Service radio room which we see, significantly, on
the occasions when Wendy and later Hall)rann contact the rangers; and
there is still another full-sized American flag on a short pole which
juts from the wall behind and to the right of Jack’s typewriter. It is
also interesting, in relation to the film’s subtextual concern with
American racism, that Jack uses the cliched imperialist phrase ”white
man’s burden“ while talking to Lloyd, the Overlook’s ghostly bartender
Finally, it might also be noted that these subtextual associations of
America with racist ideology are contrasted by American images in the
film which are traditionally associated with the pastoral, fun, and
progressive aspects of the nation: Danny’s baseball bat. his Mickey
Mouse and football sweaters. and also his sweater which has the Apollo
moon mission depicted on it.
3 Interestingly, lack does not seem to question the fact that Grady
may have been promised the same enticements by the Overlook, only to
end up as an eternal butler at this never-ending party.
4 In connection with the question of the authenticity of Jack’s
insanity, critic Thomas Allen Nelson proposes that ”Not only in the
beginning, but in other ‘interviews’ of part one (Wendy and the doctor
Jack and Wendy in the car, Hallorann and Danny in the Kitchen),
Kubrick disturbs the still waters of cinematic normality with
something more important than just Danny’s bloody shinings: through
his characters’ bland, offhand reportage of gruesome acts of horror
from the past, he suggests that Ullman’s world might have less
substance than a madman’s phantasms“ (213).
5 Here Jack’s pursuit of Danny is implicitly paralleled with the
static plot of the Roadrunner cartoons Danny watches, wherein the
comically evil Coyote pursues the loveable Roadrunner in episode after
episode but meets invariably with defeat, usually of a rather violent
but humorous nature.
6 Of course, to assume that the average American film-going audience
would consciously note these rhetorical nuances would be stretching
things a bit far-and this in and of itself contains a certain sly and
disturbing irony that Kubrick surely must have been aware of when
making the film.
Works Consulted
Caldwell, Larry. ”’Come and Play With Us’: The Play Metaphor in
Kubrick’s The Shining. “ Literature/Film Quarterly 14 (1986):106-11.
Cook, David A. ”American Horror: The Shining.“ Literature/Film
Quarterly 12 (1984): 24. Hoile, Christopher. ”The Uncanny and the
Fairy Tale in Kubrick’s The Shining.“ Literature/Film Quarterly 12
(1984): 5-12.
Jameson, Richard T. ”Kubrick’s Shining.“ Film Comment 16 (1980):
28-32. Nelson, Thomas Allen.
Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.
Paul, William. Laughing,
Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy. New York: Columbia UP,
1994.
The Shining. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. With Jack Nicholson, Shelley
Duvall, Danny Lloyd, and Scatman Crothers. Warner Bros., 1980.
Smith, Jeff. ”Careening Through Kubrick’s Space.“ Chicago Review 33
(1981): 62-74.
”Real Horrorshow“: The Juxtaposition of Subtext, Satire, and Audience
Implication in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Greg Smith
Western Michigan University
Copyright Literature/Film Quarterly 1997
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