The
Shining by Stanley Kubrick is perhaps the finest horror
film ever made. Notice the operative word here is
'horror.' This is a horrific film, built by a master
craftsman, lifted from the pages of a pulpy and overwritten
novel by that master of action and mood, Stephen King.
Let's
examine the word horror. Horror and horror movies (as
they're commonly called) are two different things. Horror
movies are usually splatterfests, predictable fulcrum's
of tension released by either startle effects (which
are scary in the way that nearly being struck by a car
is scary) or gothic make-up effects. These films also
have a whole legion of devotees who worship their every
detail of phantasmagorical delight. So be it. I begrudge
them nothing, though I do not share their fascinations
or obsessions.
The
emotion of horror and its kin, fear, are very difficult
to actually describe. They are the very things we spend
our lives, as Sartre and Camus would have it, trying
to build a wall against and die. Real terror is also
very difficult to describe, though those that have experienced
it know its feeling. It's even harder to create this
feeling in a film or a work of fictive design. The very
phoniness of its 'handedness' is what usually makes
it easy to spot and inure oneself to. It's other than
us, other than truth and we can comfort ourselves in
that. It isn't real, after all. The charm of splatter
films and gothic horror fests is that they are not real;
they advertise themselves as such, and thus juice up
the theatricality and sound/visual effects. All of this
does not transport us so much as distract us and then,"
Whammo!," startle us.
Enter
Kubrick. His particular genius is a total understanding
of the visual, the unwinding nature of film and how it affects
the mind. He has always had a deep gift for telling
his stories to our minds through a secret, visual door.
This is sometimes discomforting to our expectations of narrative
sense (2001: A Space Odyssey) or genre sense (The
Killing, Paths of Glory) or to our sexual
expectations (Lolita). Kubrick's dark sense
that life is a joke (and that it's on us) is mapped into
his films almost without exception. When he took on
The Shining, he was working to create a scary film.
One that started in reality and firmly pushed its way into
the supernatural, all without the stock effects of startle
horror or gothic hokum. This was going to be a psychological
terror and Kubrick knew he had a secret weapon, a trump
card. He had the gift of speaking to the subconscious,
and that was where he would tell the story.
Much
of what begins on the long drive to the Overlook is
a narrative that is sparse and the setup is utterly
pedestrian. The Torrances, including the pickled-in-alcohol
Jack (Jack Nicholson), nervous shrew of a wife Wendy
(Shelly Duvall) and boy Danny (Daniel Lloyd), are to
take care of a hotel for the winter. The boy has some
serious problems that are exacerbated by the new locale
and his first understanding interaction with an adult
is with the hotel's chef (Scatman Crothers). Then the
tiny bits of dissonance creep in. Torrance hurls a stream
of expletives at his wife. His mood is altered to match
the boy's growing fear. The wife is an unreliable witness,
as she is both inept and cowering in her congenital
fear of her husband and a ninny in the growing strangeness
of the events that surround her.
What
most fans of the 'horror' genre don't get about this
film is that it isn't for them. They are such devotees
(and so exhausted in their fear fix) that they can't
bear the tension that is building up in the film. It
is still, like the tightening of a piano wire, one twist
at a time. The boy is the only conduit for us and he
is not rational. He is not only a child but an overwhelmed
one, especially given the content of what his 'shining'
is giving him. His performance is mesmerizing, true
and totally beguiling. As this narrative is streaming
at us, Kubrick is also beginning a weirder, non-rational
dialogue with our subconscious with the imagery he is
using. The film was one of the first to use the steadicam,
not just because it was a cool new toy (sure, Kubrick
loved those, but never indulged in them unless he thought
them useful to his story), but because its smoothness
was unnerving, raising the tension.
There
are two things I have seen in this film that, no matter
how many times I see them, still terrify me. The first
is the sight of the two girls. Their bloody murder and
the still inserts Kubrick drops into the film catch
us in moments we can understand, "startle"
moments. But just as we are startled (the shot that
does the startling is of their bodies on the floor of
a hotel room), another shot is spliced in. This insert
is a shot of the two girls standing there looking at
us. They're expression is inscrutable, a mix of expectation
and accusation, a begging for a witness or a mouth to
speak what happened.
The
second is the opening of the elevator door. The
imagery is now famous and vastly imitated (which by
the way is what happens to most of Kubrick's film moments,
they are imitated until they are a symbology of their
own, lifted from their context and made into a language
of simile). The door opens and a WALL of blood--not
a pool, not a puddle, a wall--comes down the hall.
(Editor's Note: I couldn't agree more.
The combination of slow-motion visuals and complete
silence in this scene allows us to focus all our attention
on comprehending exactly what we are seeing and what
it means. Therein lies the terror.)
There
are also a million details that are psychologically terrifying:
the conversation in the red bathroom between the butler
and Torrance, the axe chopping, the glint in Nicholson's
eye. The contents of his typing are deeply disturbing
(as well as funny), the sound of the big wheel on the carpet,
then the floor, then the carpet then the floor. The
woman in the bath, her seduction and pusing sores are one
for the ages, the curious man in the bear costume and the
murderously-tinged fellatio that appears about to take place.
The
tension of this film is unbearable, as the narrative
sort of fades and the psychological warfare Kubrick
conducts is in full pitch. The mind is not able to make
sense of the imagery but it's pushing all the terror
buttons. By the time Jack is turning in his Tonight
Show schtick, the narrative is mostly comedy. It's
broad, funny and bracing. But the psychological war
is so effective to this point that we can't really take
it in. All the way up to the bizarre and fitting zoom
into the Overlook's historical photo array, the film
is a thrilling touch at our weakest points: Kubrick
is unspooling this film into our mind's eye. The back
door is open and he's spooked the living daylights out
of our irrational mind.
If
there is one flaw with the film, it is the ending with
Torrance frozen in the snow. This seems cheap
and ineffective. We want a struggle to the death,
father and son. Either we should have seen Torrance
sit down and have a scotch with Danny in pieces, or
we should have seen Danny kill his dad, but then be
shown the kid in the photo just to realize that HE is
the cause of the horror, not Torrance. There seems
to be an indecision on Kubrick's part (or perhaps he
regarded it as unimportant, who knows) as to what the
literal narrative was and how to land it.
This
is a flaw, true, but a quibble. The film is an emotionally
perfect game. Kubrick pulls off one of the great magic
acts of all time. In pitching terms, he gets us looking
inside and then sails an unhittable pitch past our reason
and into our subconscious, landing something that is
so deeply disturbing, it resonates for years.
Dileep
can be reached at dileep@babblog.com. |
