Film Review
In common with many of Stanley Kubrick's films,
The Shining is far more highly
regarded today than when it was first released.
Since its lukewarm reception by critics and audiences in the early eighties, the
film's standing has gradually increased and today it is not only a cult
classic of the horror genre but it is also regarded by many as the
greatest of all horror films. This is one of Kubrick's most
intense and visually arresting films. It has a hypnotic,
dreamlike quality that makes it both compelling and deeply unsettling,
and the more times you watch it, the more disturbing and profound it
feels.
Yet Kubrick was only led to make this film through a strange conspiracy
of circumstances. The director had hoped to make a film on
the life of Napoleon Bonaparte but had to abandon this when his
previous period drama,
Barry Lyndon
(1975), failed at the box office. What Kubrick needed was a
subject with mainstream appeal that would also allow him to make an
artistic statement.
The Exorcist (1973) had
recently been released to great acclaim and brought legitimacy back to
the horror genre. As with his earlier
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968),
Kubrick saw an opportunity to take a popular well-worn genre and give
it a new lease of life.
It was Warner Brothers who suggested that Kubrick make an adaptation of
the Stephen King novel
The Shining.
Kubrick was impressed by some of the concepts in King's novel and saw
that the story had great potential, although he would introduce
significant changes to the plot. King resented the
alterations that Kubrick made to his story and was motivated to make
his own adaptation for a TV mini-series (which is judged to be inferior
to Kubrick's film).
The most significant difference between the novel and the film is the
extent to which supernatural forces drive the narrative. In the
novel, the horror comes mainly from external demonic forces that arise
from the spirits of the dead (in both book and film, the hotel is
stated as being built on an ancient Indian burial ground). In the
film, by contrast, the horror comes from within the protagonists
themselves, from their deep-seated psychological flaws. Kubrick's
film is far more ambiguous than King's novel, in that the boundary
between what is real and what is not is never apparent. There is
no objective standpoint, no clear demarcation between reality and
imagination, and it is this which makes the film so frightening and so
mesmerising. It is both a horror film and an enigma.
One thing that Kubrick insisted upon was to bring in a psychological
realism that King's novel lacked. The characters in the film are
real people whose behaviours have a rational basis. Jack
Torrance's descent into madness is plausible because it is apparent
from the outset that he despises his wife and son. He blames them
for his bouts of alcoholism, he resents the fact that they have
prevented him from making a success of his life and so, subconsciously,
he desires to kill them. The psychic phenomena he encounters in
the hotel (which are never explained but appear to have a physical
presence) are what unleash the monster within and transform
mild-mannered Jack into a deranged killing machine.
Central to the film is the recurring motif of the maze. This
first appears in the opening sequence, the aerial shot that tracks the
Torrances's car as it winds its way through a desolate labyrinth of
mountains. Then there is the hotel itself, with corridors that
seem to go on for ever, with a geometry that almost defies the laws of
space and time. And there is the real maze in the hotel grounds,
the box hedge amusement which provides the film with its horrific
denouement.
The concept of the maze has fascinated mankind for millennia and has an
important place in Freudian psychoanalytical theory. The maze
symbolises life, an endless series of twists and turns, decisions that
prove to be fruitless and fruitful. It also represents our
subconscious mind, a dark and mysterious labyrinth, at the heart of
which lies something unspeakably horrible - our true bestial
nature. Like the Minotaur in the Greek myth, we keep the worst of
ourselves imprisoned in the dark labyrinthine crevices of our mind.
What makes
The Shining so
powerful is the way in which it is shot. Much of the film's
visual impact and sense of menace derives from the use of the
Steadicam, then a recent innovation, which brings an extraordinary
fluidity and immediacy to the photography. Without the Steadicam,
it is unlikely that the climactic chase scene in the garden maze could
have been shot, depriving us of one of the great sequences in movie
history.
As was the case with virtually all of Kubrick's films, the making of
The Shining was a long and arduous
experience for cast and crew alike. The director's unflinching
perfectionism not only pushed his lead actors Jack Nicholson and
Shelley Duvall almost to breaking point, but it extended the shoot from
three months to virtually a year (resulting in a delayed start for
several other films which were scheduled to go into production at
Elstree Studios, including Steven Spielberg's
Raiders of the Lost Ark and the
second
Star Wars
film). Kubrick would shoot scenes repeatedly until he had
pretty well exhausted all the permutations (and his actors in the
process). Famously, the pivotal scene in which the chef Dick
tells Danny about the Shining took around eighty takes.
Shelley Duvall was particularly ill-treated by Kubrick, who would
harass and humiliate her to the point that she became physically
ill. By the end of the shoot, both Nicholson and Duvall were
close to exhaustion and virtually neurotic, something which proved to
be to the film's advantage. The performances that both actors
deliver in the final scenes are far superior to what a less demanding
director could have extracted, conveying madness, hysteria and sheer
terror that is truly horrifying to watch.
By the end of the film, Duvall/Wendy is at the
very limit of mental and physical collapse whilst Nicholson/Jack has
clearly lost every marble he ever possessed in his entire
life, and a few more besides. Nicholson's performance has
been criticised for being over-the-top but there is no other way the
part could have been played. The evil and madness that the actor
conveys is absolutely real, the synthesis of every Gothic horror fiend
that has ever been portrayed on screen, utterly believable, utterly
terrifying.
The Shining
really is the stuff of nightmares.
© James Travers 2009
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Next Stanley Kubrick film:
Paths of Glory (1957)