The Shining
IN EARLY 1977 Warners executive John Calley sent Kubrick the galleys of a new novel by a young horror writer. The novel was The Shining and its author, Stephen King, was already well known for Carrie (1974) and Salem’s Lot (1975). Kubrick had been thinking of making a horror movie, but most books in the genre left him cold. King’s book was different. Despite its flawed, baggy style, it had a mythic punch. The book was all about a father going to pieces and terrorizing his wife and son. A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon featured two sons, Alex and Bullingdon, whose angry energy triumphed over an older generation. The Shining’s son, Danny, is much younger—a boy of about six—and the contest between him and his father is a matter of life and death: bloodthirsty Jack chases Danny with his axe.
The Shining is the story of Jack Torrance, a schoolteacher from Vermont and an aspiring writer. Looking for seclusion that will allow him to write, he takes a job as winter caretaker of the Overlook, an immense, empty hotel in the Colorado mountains. The hotel turns Jack into a “thing,” a monster aching to murder his wife and child. King’s book is about a writer trying to escape, like King himself, from alcoholism. Kubrick cuts the novel’s elaborate backstory, its flashbacks to Jack’s childhood and his life in Vermont, and makes The Shining puzzling and spare in a way that King never could.
King’s novel dealt with two themes dear to Kubrick’s heart: the failure of mastery and vicarious, hollowed-out existence. Jack’s violent effort to control or “correct” (kill) his wife and son falls short, and in Kubrick’s film he ends up frozen to death in a snowy hedge maze. The Shining, which confronts family violence and male rage even more directly than Barry Lyndon, would turn out to be Kubrick’s most personal movie so far.
In June 1977 Kubrick chose a screenwriting partner: Diane Johnson, a novelist and professor at Berkeley. Kubrick had read Johnson’s adroit, spooky 1974 novel The Shadow Knows, told in the scared voice of a woman whom the reader can’t entirely trust. Johnson got a phone call from Kubrick and went to London, where the two of them, working at Kubrick’s home, produced draft after draft of The Shining’s screenplay. They talked about Freud, horror fiction, and Bruno Bettelheim on fairy tales.
Kubrick rather than Johnson invented the most hideous and memorable scenes in the screenplay: Room 237’s bathtub nude turned into a decomposing old woman—an echo of a shocking moment in Clouzot’s Diabolique (1955)—and the twin elevators gushing blood. The latter shot became the film’s preview, omnipresent in movie theaters during Christmas season 1979. As usual, Kubrick needed to get the shot exactly right: he used so much fake blood during the many takes of the elevator scene that the villagers downstream from Borehamwood Studios were convinced a massacre had occurred.1
Kubrick felt a surprising affinity for the murderous Jack. Johnson said that Jack Torrance “had to be a specially demanding verbal combination—intelligent, unpleasant, mordant, and sarcastic. What struck me was how well Stanley wrote Jack. Much better than I could. Considering the ease with which Stanley wrote Jack, you wouldn’t imagine Stanley to be the pleasant, kindly husband and father he is.”2 Jack is in fact Kubrick’s doppelgänger: his madness reflects the director’s own work ethic. Jack the writer is more than dedicated, he is obsessive, just like Kubrick the filmmaker. Unlike Kubrick, though, he has no partners in his creative project, no sense of spontaneity or teamwork, just a will to control. And unlike Kubrick, he answers frustration with wrath. Losing control makes him a monster.
Jack is a type, an empty vessel filled by the anger that storms through the American male. No one embodied such anger with more panache than Jack Nicholson. The hopped-up Nicholson, with his big bad wolf grin and agile quotation mark eyebrows, made gonzo fury look charming.
Kubrick early on settled on Nicholson to play Jack Torrance. Nicholson had just won an Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), in which he starred as the rebel misfit Randle McMurphy. At the time Nicholson’s life was in turmoil. He was breaking up with Anjelica Huston, and he had just found out that the woman he thought was his mother was actually his grandmother, and his elder sister really his mother. Nicholson was a refugee from the coked-up LA scene, but there were drugs in London too. He modeled his mad Jack partly after Charles Manson, whose gang had murdered actress Sharon Tate, girlfriend of Roman Polanski, a good friend of Nicholson. He called his performance “sort of balletic,” and he was right: Nicholson moves with grace as he jabs the air with his fists, thumping and hollering in macho release.3
Kubrick wanted Shelley Duvall as his Wendy. He and Johnson had earlier thought that Wendy would be a strong, defiant character, perhaps to be played by Jane Fonda or Lee Remick. But Kubrick went in the opposite direction with the gangly, twitchy Duvall, who was so high-strung as to seem almost otherworldly. A regular in Robert Altman’s movies, she had just won at Cannes for her role in Altman’s Three Women (1977). Duvall’s job in the film was to be terrified, at times to the point of hysteria. To this end, Kubrick made her life miserable on set, yelling at her over her mistakes, and he warned his crew not to show her any sympathy. Duvall knew why Kubrick was making her suffer, and she acknowledged later that she learned more about acting from him than she had from Altman. But the filming was no fun for her.
Vivian Kubrick depicts her father taunting Duvall in her short documentary about the making of The Shining. (She shot more than 100,000 feet of film, but the movie that exists is just half an hour long.) Gordon Stainforth remarked that Kubrick wanted the scenes cut out in which “he was very warm and nice” and “what was left were the sequences of him shouting at Shelley in the snow.”4 He wanted to play the ogre, not papa bear, and align himself with the madly irate Jack.
The last two members of The Shining’s ensemble were both inspired choices. For Dick Hallorann, Nicholson recommended his friend Scatman Crothers, a singer and television and film actor. Crothers, then seventy years old, was a kind, genial man with a bowlegged stride. As Hallorann he played the nice guy, cautious by instinct, with a touch of severity underneath. Kubrick’s practice of doing take after take—invariably saying something like “Let’s go again” rather than telling his actors what they had done wrong—took its toll on Crothers. When Nicholson axed him, Crothers had to fall thirty times. Kubrick filmed more than a hundred takes of one seven-minute sequence, Hallorann’s early conversation with Danny over ice cream.
Crothers sometimes had trouble remembering his lines, but that wasn’t the case with the boy who played Danny. Leon Vitali headed a crew that interviewed more than four thousand American boys before selecting five-year-old Danny Lloyd, the son of a railroad engineer. Vitali was Danny’s dialogue coach and constant companion on set. Lloyd had no idea that he was making a horror movie: he saw none of the paralyzing frights of the Overlook Hotel, no blood, no ghosts.
The Shining relies on Danny Lloyd’s firm and assured performance. When he crouches in his hiding place and hears his father’s mad bellowing, he is a boy in a Grimms fairy tale, stark and still. We see Danny watching a Road Runner cartoon: like Chuck Jones’s agile hero, he outwits his enemy. Danny finally wins by retracing his steps in the maze, tricking the ogre of a father who wants to murder him.
Along with the actors, the star of The Shining is the Steadicam. Kubrick’s cameraman Garrett Brown had recently invented a device to produce tracking shots without tracks or a dolly. (Brown first used it in John Avildsen’s Rocky [1976].) “It’s like a magic carpet,” Kubrick said.5 A spring-jointed platform attached to the cameraman eliminated the bumps and jerks that came with handheld shots. The Steadicam created shots that were perfectly smooth, the camera gliding forward without a ripple.
Kubrick wanted the Steadicam to accompany Danny’s Big Wheel as he pedaled through the halls of the Overlook. So he put Brown in a wheelchair equipped with a speedometer, his camera about fifteen inches above the ground. As Wendy wheels the hotel’s room service cart to give her husband a late breakfast, Kubrick crosscuts to Danny manically driving his Big Wheel through the Overlook’s corridors. Forward-driving Danny, whose play has the determination of work, will turn out to be the hero of the movie. Like the pulsating heartbeat that later invades the film when Jack goes crazy, the sound rhythm of Danny’s endless rolling sets the pace: muffled when on the hotel’s carpets, loud when he crosses its hardwood floors. (Kubrick is fond of sound-based timekeeping: remember Dave’s heavy breathing in 2001 when he crosses the spaceship to disconnect HAL.)
“We are falling into the movie,” writes David Thomson, a “cool and premeditated” plunge. The Shining is full of smooth, vertiginous forward motion from its first moment, an implacably level helicopter shot swooping across a rocky western landscape. The shot shows an island surrounded by blue water, fitting emblem for a movie about being marooned in a lonely stronghold called the Overlook Hotel. The island seems to be moving toward the viewer, a frequent effect in Kubrick’s inexorable-seeming tracking shots (as well as the Stargate sequence in 2001). Urged by Kubrick, two cameramen, Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman, had developed a new way of doing helicopter shots, from the front rather than the side door of the helicopter, to produce a forward-sweeping effect similar to the Steadicam’s.6
The smoothness of The Shining hypnotizes the viewer a little. Like Jack, we space out, ready to be taken in. We feel open, empty, before this film, Kubrick’s shiny monolith. In the movie’s only trick shot, Jack in the Colorado Lounge, out of ideas as usual, looks down on a model of the maze and sees a tiny Wendy and Danny running through it. We then observe in medium shot a menacing, vacant-headed Jack, mouth slightly open, eyes tilting upward, ready to submit to some invisible power. Having failed as an author, poor Jack waits to be possessed.
When we think of The Shining we remember Nicholson venting his world-consuming rage at the trembling Duvall. But the movie also relies on an equally familiar male strategy, repression. Being interviewed by Ullman (Barry Nelson), the hotel manager, early in the movie, Jack dutifully keeps his answers as dull as possible. How will his wife and son take to the isolation of the vast, deserted hotel in winter? We wait a beat while Jack composes his most compliant face, and then: “They’ll love it.” When Ullman, with a nervous chuckle, tells Jack the story of Charles Grady, the caretaker who a few winters earlier went mad and “killed his family with an axe,” Jack responds with a leaden, impassive face. Superbly, this reaction shot of Jack is held just a few seconds too long, enough for us to get uncomfortable. Then Jack, cracking a polite, measured grin, says, “That is, uh, quite a story.”
Jack at the movie’s beginning has the job applicant’s steady blankness, the false self you need to get ahead. Just as bland is Danny’s interview with a child psychologist (Anne Jackson): Danny, like his father, is good at concealment. Jack, we have to assume, fails to tell Wendy about the Grady murders, the primal trauma in the Overlook Hotel. Instead, he says to Wendy that he just loves the place, and does a spooky, parodic whoo-ooh.
The Shining’s scenes are replete with clichés. Wendy tells Jack, “It’s just a matter of settling back into the habit of writing every day.” Hallorann reminds Wendy of the dried prunes in the storeroom: “I tell you, Mrs. Torrance, you got to be regular if you want to be happy.” While he drives through a snowstorm, Hallorann’s car radio announces, “We have what you call your bad weather out there . . . get the cows in the barn.” Such platitudes are the American way, defending us against all manner of disasters. You got to be regular if you want to be happy.
Keeping things normal and repressing trauma, via clichés if need be, is an American tradition. But then the blood starts to gush out, as in a fairy tale, and it doesn’t stop. “They ate each other up?” Danny asks Jack about the Donner party, with a little boy’s winning accent. “They had to,” Jack confirms with satisfaction. This family will eat itself up when its ferocious energies come out, coaxed by the Overlook. Jack and Wendy are a perfect pair, her cringing submissiveness and his masculine torrent echoing against each other forever and ever.
Jack’s real target, though, is his son, not his wife. Danny is Jack’s competition: he has the creative gift that the hollow Jack lacks. This kid would be eager, curious, and innocent in a Spielberg movie, his senses wide open and wondering. Kubrick’s universe is far darker. In The Shining, Danny glimpses blood and disorder, a confused image of what lies beyond childhood.
Danny tells himself that the Overlook’s flood of gore and the Grady twins, now holding hands like Diane Arbus’s famous pair and now lying hatcheted in a hallway, are like pictures in a book. And Jack pretends the hotel’s frights are safely fictional, like a horror movie designed to thrill and chill us. In The Shining the vicarious becomes real, a prime fantasy of the movies. The frights Jack invoked in fun take him over: they are the only inspiration this failed writer ever finds.
Kubrick’s Shining is a not-so-typical horror movie, but it also nods toward the western. Jack, Wendy, and Danny are a pioneer family assaulted by horrors, the VW bug their covered wagon, as they talk about the Donner party. The Overlook, Ullman tells Jack, was built “on an old Indian burial ground,” a reminder of the old West’s clash between white and Indian (and a perfunctory tip of the hat to a favorite Stephen King topos). The western often pits the man’s intransigent need to do his duty against stereotypical female concerns like the health of a child. “Let’s talk about Danny. . . . You believe his health might be at stake,” Jack sneers at Wendy in the cataclysmic staircase scene, the peak of their battle. His masculine obligation, the deal with the devilish Overlook Hotel, overrules her maternal instinct. “I have signed a letter of agreement, a contract,” Jack tells her, his hand whipping through the air. Like HAL, Jack takes on the white man’s burden, responsibility for the mission.7
“There’s something inherently wrong with the human personality,” Kubrick said to interviewer Jack Kroll, explaining what drew him to King’s novel. “There’s an evil side to it.”8 It was just like Kubrick to describe evil as something “wrong with” humans, a kind of misfiring. In many Kubrick movies characters stumble over a malfunction, a design flaw, from Johnny Clay in The Killing to HAL in 2001. “What is your major malfunction?” Full Metal Jacket’s Drill Instructor Hartman shouts at Private Pyle, who promptly shoots him in the chest. Jack’s breakdown in The Shining is a catastrophic design flaw that comments on the American wish to live large, to express oneself with terrific power.
In horror movies the monster is not angry; it is merely an overriding, demonic force. In The Shining, as in no other horror film I can think of, male anger itself is monstrous. Kubrick’s movie joins the mainstream of great American movies about masculine rage, from Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1951) to Ford’s The Searchers (1956) to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976).
Jack is shouting and moaning in his sleep, head slumped on his desk in a puddle of drool. When Wendy shakes him awake he stammers out his nightmare: he murdered her and Danny, chopped them to bits. Then a frozen-looking Danny appears with a wound on his neck. Wendy, suspended between father and son, accuses Jack. This is her one moment of indignant rage: “You did this to him . . . you son of a bitch,” she yells. The next scene begins with Jack dancing furiously down the hallway to the Gold Ballroom. Jack’s walk, which required many takes to get right, shows Nicholson at his balletic height, pummeling the air as he stalks along.
Jack approaches the ballroom’s bar, sits downs and claps his hands over his eyes, just like Danny blocking out the sight of the blood-filled elevators. “I’d give my goddamn soul for just a glass of beer.”
And so Jack rubs his eyes open to the magic of one of Kubrick’s greatest scenes, one that required eighty-plus takes. Jack sees none other than Lloyd the Bartender, played with robotic finesse by veteran Kubrick actor Joe Turkel. A slow grin dawns on Nicholson’s face. Turkel’s jaw appears wired to a grim undead levity. The clichés that The Shining loves now come to vicious life. “Women, can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em,” Lloyd recites. In Jack’s mouth such platitudes gather a vast satiric energy: “Words of wisdom, Lloyd . . . words . . . of . . . wisdom.” Jack’s eyes gleam with manic delight. Suddenly there’s nothing more hilarious than sustaining oneself with lines like these, and Jack and the audience are in on the joke together. “A momentary loss of muscular coordination”: that’s how he dislocated Danny’s arm when he came home drunk. Just a minor malfunction: and he mimes the snapping of the arm in a way that only Jack Nicholson can, with manic barbed-wire delight. The more we exult in Jack’s declaration of independence from “the old sperm bank upstairs,” as he names Wendy, the more we fear him.
Jack sells his soul for the intoxicating flavor of rebellion, cutting himself loose from the wife who keeps him down. (We can’t help but remember Kubrick’s script ideas of the 1950s, when he fantasized about walking away from the clingy Ruth Sobotka.) Yet what he gets is not freedom but “orders from the house,” as Lloyd tells him later on: he is a servant to the hotel’s endless cycle of death. The shots of bourbon that Lloyd gives Jack will convey him to the underbelly of the Overlook, Room 237: the place where trauma dwells, like the fruit cellar in Psycho (1960).
Danny goes to Room 237 before Jack does. We see Danny responding to what he thinks is his mother’s voice inside the room. Some Freudian legend seems aprowl here. The strange woman lurking in Room 237 is the polar opposite of Wendy, with her girlish, unerotic naïveté. Instead of a mother with her comforting banalities, Danny finds a female devourer. A sign of adult sexuality run amok may have traumatized Danny, giving him the guilty mark on his neck.
When Jack investigates, he finds in Room 237 a sallow and impassive naked young woman rising from the bathtub. This wan succubus, who has the alien sheen of a mannequin, embraces the slack-jawed, vacantly lustful Jack. She then turns into a decomposing old hag who cackles madly as Jack flees. He locks the door of 237 and backs away fearfully. (Kubrick will shrewdly rhyme this moment with Danny retracing his steps in the snowy labyrinth at the end of the movie.)
The two women in 237 are an emblem of Vanitas, who promises fair but conceals the mortal decay that lies beneath the surface of youth. Jack, while kissing his naked muse in 237, may think he is being anointed by immortal beauty, but the hotel plays a joke on him: he finds himself “chained to a corpse” (a phrase that King repeatedly used to describe Jack’s marriage to Wendy).
Schopenhauer supplies the best comment on the two women in Room 237. Discussing “the vanity of all endeavor,” the German philosopher gives as his example the conversion of Raymond Lull, a medieval “adventurer” who became a monk and philosopher: “Raymond Lull, who had long wooed a beautiful woman, was at last admitted to her chamber, and was looking forward to the fulfillment of all his desires, when, opening her dress, she showed him her bosom terribly eaten away with cancer. From that moment, as if he had looked into hell, he was converted.”9
Here’s one more passage from Schopenhauer: “Most of us carry in our hearts the Jocasta, who begs Oedipus for God’s sake not to inquire further; and we give way to her, and that is the reason why philosophy stands where it does.”10 Sure enough, an inscrutable-looking Jack reports to Wendy that there was “nothing at all” in Room 237. Earlier, Dick Hallorann said the same to Danny. Both men have given way to their internal Jocasta: and so repression wins again.
Ironically, Penderecki’s “The Awakening of Jacob” plays while Jack is in 237—“Truly the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it,” Jacob says when he rises from his dream in Genesis. Kubrick’s pitch-black humor is at work again.
Later on in The Shining we hear Penderecki’s Polymorphia, the sound, according to the scholar Roger Luckhurst, of “a horde of insects eating their way out of the string section.”11 The film’s soundtrack is subtly layered, with heartbeats, ambient sound, and at times several music tracks at once. Penderecki and Ligeti would later be horror film staples, but Kubrick pioneered the use of these avant-gardists.
Room 237 is the core of The Shining’s horror. Now Danny, dribbling spittle and shaking like an epileptic, feels the shock waves from what Jack sees in Room 237. So does Hallorann, transfixed on his bed in Miami like Dave Bowman in the Stargate. Lying on his bed after Jack visits 237, Danny sees REDRUM for the first time: the red room, the room of blood that ties sex to death, the place where a father tries to kill a mother and a son.
The Shining’s tension escalates further as Kubrick gives us another unforgettable sequence. Here is Wendy rifling through Jack’s manuscript, which, she sees to her horror, contains the same sentence thousands of times over: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” (Like Sobotka, she is a “suction cup” who aggravatingly tries to help Jack with his work.) The edge of Jack’s typewriter looms like 2001’s monolith, perfectly centered in the frame beneath Shelley Duvall’s panicked face. Wendy’s husband has, indeed, been hard at work, and now, while we gaze from a distance, from Jack’s distance, at her back, the man himself enters the Colorado Lounge. Drily, softly, he says, “What are you doing down here?” Wendy jumps like a jerked marionette, and so do we. The Shining’s greatest scene has begun with an electrifying jolt.
Earlier, Jack warned Wendy to “stay the fuck away” from his desk, in response to her chipper offer to read his writing. “That’s the one scene in the movie I wrote myself,” Nicholson said. Years earlier, when he was a young man with a wife and daughter, Nicholson was acting in a movie during the day and writing a screenplay at night. Once while he was writing, he said, “my beloved wife, Sandra, walked in on what was unbeknownst to her, this maniac.”12 That performance ended Nicholson’s marriage. But in The Shining, Wendy meekly retreats, saving her fire for the “all work and no play” sequence.
The wife has uncovered the husband’s secret: not a concealed love affair but instead hopeless, endless writing. Jack is a mere drudge chained to this hell, the Overlook, bereft of a creative spark. Empty repetition shows the hotel’s power. Like a minor-league demon in Dante or Spenser, Jack does the same thing over and over, locked into his pact with the hotel. Here the joke is about the American male’s reliance on steady routine for his self-definition. What happens when your job gets you down, when you become a dull boy, when things get “all balled up at the head office,” as Charlie (John Goodman) puts it in the Coen brothers’ parabolic masterpiece Barton Fink (1991)? What happens is the floodgates burst: “Look upon me, I’ll show you the life of the mind,” Goodman chants, jogging murderously through his inferno, a burning hotel with rows of separate fires, one for each room.
The Coens’ Charlie Weathers (aka Mad Man Mundt) derives from Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, but also from Jack Torrance. These killers are masters of American lingo, expert polishers of the glad-handing phrase. We saw Jack’s average Joe routine with Lloyd, at the bar. Now, with Wendy in the all-work-and-no-play scene, he lunges into snide, vicious parody: “You’re confused,” he sneers, aping her shrinking manner. Wendy is now a quivering, sobbing wreck. “You need to think things over. . . . You’ve had your whole fucking life to think things over!” he shouts, as if he were vitality incarnate, and she the ball and chain of bourgeois stupidity. Then, rather lightly, with a little smile, now savagely savoring the words: “What good’s a few more minutes gonna do you?” Poor Wendy has only a few more minutes of life left, of this Jack is sure. He is all set to whack her with that baseball bat. But—and here comes the scene’s high, impish joke—first he has to convince her to give him the bat. And she won’t. “Wendy. Light . . . of . . . my . . . life,” Jack says. (A line from Lolita!) Just for the fun of it, Jack plays the psychotic he has become: “I’m not gonna hurt you Wendy. I’m just gonna bash your brains in. Bash them right . . . the fuck . . . in.”
“Give me the bat.” Nicholson says it straight, gazing direct, like a hypnotist willing control over his patient. Then comes his tongue flick, a small stroke of genius: “Give me the bat. Wendy. Give me. The bat.” But now the tables turn. Shaking like crazy, she lands two solid blows, first to his hand—she’ll get him again there, with her knife in the bathroom—and then to his neck, right where Danny was wounded. Swatted powerfully by his frail, jumpy wife, Jack tumbles down the staircase. Wendy proves to be no basket case but rather, as Grady (Philip Stone) notes later, surprisingly “resourceful.”
The baseball bat scene on the Colorado Room’s staircase works in part because Kubrick enlists us on Jack’s side. A small part of us wants, with Jack, to bash the irritating Wendy’s brains in. When she bashes Jack instead, we are not so much exultant as nervous about what comes next. Her bright idea, to drag Jack to the pantry and lock him in, ought to put him out of commission. But Grady intervenes to free Jack from his prison. Jack rampages through the hotel with his axe and, with one blow, kills Hallorann, who has just arrived in the Sno-Cat.
When he had Jack axe-murder Hallorann, Kubrick was thinking of the killing of Arbogast in Psycho, a rapid shock to the viewer’s system that, when Hitchcock’s film first opened, caused more screams than the shower murder. Kubrick filmed Jack landing three vicious blows to Hallorann’s chest, but the next day decided that this was too brutal, too much of a play for audience reaction. In the final cut Jack axes Hallorann once, then glides up slowly like Murnau’s Nosferatu from the dead body. Kubrick’s parents, Jack and Gert, were on the set the day the death of Hallorann was filmed, and Kubrick was afraid that they would be traumatized by it. Kubrick’s worry replays the theme of the movie: a son’s concern about what will become of his parents. As it turned out, the Kubricks, not at all distressed, enjoyed the scene greatly.13
The Shining’s staircase scene, with Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall in the foreground (Courtesy of Photofest/Warner Bros)
Even more terrifying than Jack’s murder of Hallorann is his attack on Wendy, who cowers in the bathroom, her upraised knife shaking wildly. Jack Torrance swings his axe like a pro, with expert well-muscled heft. (Nicholson was for a time a volunteer fireman.) Heaving that axe into the bathroom door, grinning “Heeere’s Johnny,” Jack is at his most big-bad-wolfish. But the fairy tale shrewdness of his wife and son gets the better of him.
Kubrick and Johnson struggled over the end of The Shining. At one point they pictured Hallorann becoming “murderous,” “an appalling figure of savagery” who kills the entire Torrance family and then shoots himself. Another “Ending idea: Danny and maybe cook left alone,” or Danny “saved by cook.”14 But Hallorann turned out to be expendable. By contrast, King makes him Wendy’s new boyfriend, and a kindly father substitute for Danny, after Jack’s death.
Both Psycho and The Shining tease us with their endings. Frozen Jack in the labyrinth, like grinning Jack in the 1921 photo that concludes the movie, reminds us of Hitchcock’s final close-up of Norman, with Mother’s skeletal teeth shining through his smile. In both views the men are possessed by something that America loves: mother, work. But the two men are quite different. Norman is just a dutiful son, with no particular ambition. Jack by contrast imagines he is a writer who needs his solitude, but in fact he creates nothing. By freezing Jack, Kubrick thwarts the romantic selfhood so basic to American fantasies.
The maze’s “snow” was fine, powdery dairy salt; the lights were bright orange, later passed through a blue filter. As in the ballroom scene, oil smoke was used to cloud the air. The temperatures neared a hundred degrees. The crew got lost in the maze, the smoky “orange hell,” as Brown called it. “It wasn’t much use to call out ‘Stanley!’ ” Brown said, “as his laughter seemed to come from everywhere.”15 Kubrick was the absent sarcastic god ruling over the labyrinth, this big boy’s play set. Kubrick repeatedly measured the height of the fake snow, making sure it was between eight and ten inches high—essential if the footprints were to look real. Like a fairy tale ogre, Jack chases his son with an axe, itching to commit bloody murder. He howls like a beast into the snowy void. “Danny, I’m coming for you,” Jack bellows, a pathetic wounded animal.
Even though Jack the monster has frozen to death in the Overlook’s maze, he lurks forever in the photograph from 1921. The movie’s magical Borges-like ending was originally followed by a sequence shown when The Shining premiered in May 1980 in New York and Los Angeles. Leon Vitali described the added scene to an interviewer:
[Wendy is] in bed, and Danny’s in the corridor in his dressing gown reading comic books. Then Ullman, the manager that we saw at the beginning, turns up coming in all the way from Florida to see if they’re okay. He says to her you mustn’t worry, these things . . . What’ll be great is I’ll invite you to my house, and it’s warm, there’s fresh air, and the sea. Danny can run around. Then she breaks down and cries in gratitude and relief. And he walks out into the corridor and sees Danny there on his way out, and he says, “oh Danny, I’ve got something for you.” Then he throws out a yellow tennis ball which he had in his pocket, which Danny catches.
In the final shot of this scene we realize that the hotel manager was clued into the Overlook’s diabolic power all along. “There was a Hitchcockian side to this resolution, and you know that Kubrick was crazy about Hitchcock,” said Shelley Duvall, who liked this first ending.16 In his final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick would use Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) as such a Hitchcockian figure of mastery. But in The Shining he preferred something more perplexing. The epilogue, Kubrick must have realized, was too shadowy-conspiratorial, with its hint that Ullman was the master of the sinister hotel that waited like a spider for its next victim.
Julian Senior remembers that Kubrick asked him “Whadda ya think?” about this first version of The Shining’s end:
I said, you know Stanley, for me the most extraordinary shot of the whole movie is the track into the photograph—that’s it. The stuff at the hospital room, the tennis ball, the kid . . .
He stopped fifteen paces behind with a face like thunder. And Stanley had dark brown eyes with no pupils, it was like looking into an abyss. And there was a pause and he said “Don’t you ever tell me how to direct a movie.”17
But Kubrick agreed with Senior, as it turned out, and cut the hospital room scene. Like the Dr. Strangelove pie fight, the sequence seems to have disappeared: no one I know has seen it since The Shining’s 1980 opening.
In the end Kubrick let the forces that inhabit Jack remain invisible. The finished movie ends with a slow zoom in on Jack in black tie, dapper and ready, at the Overlook’s July 4 party, 1921.18 Kubrick insisted on July 4 because Jack began with a declaration of independence, his ferocious plea that he is a writer, and therefore bound to go it alone. Jack chained to the typewriter, tapping out the same awful sentence hour after hour, was desperate to be released from work. Play was what Jack so badly needed, and the high-stepping 1920s is a supreme American image of play. But the twenties Jack Torrance, like most of the self-invented Gatsbys that pepper American history, is really just an image, not a lived reality. In Jack’s end is his beginning: he will happen again and again, an empty shell coming round for his latest incarnation. We’ll meet again, Jack Torrance, the next time we watch the movie. Cinema, like the Overlook, promises a ghostly immortality.
Yet Danny rather than Jack might be the real center of The Shining. The embattled child, who, like the boy Kubrick, perseveres into self-reliant strength despite the threats coming from authority (whether the father’s or, in Stanley’s case, the school’s), again offers a key to his work. Here’s a Freudian fable, submitted for your approval. Imagine Danny coming up with the plot of The Shining. He has been left alone with a placating mother and a sometimes violently moody, abstracted father. He’s getting tired of the dull game he witnesses every day, in which one parent deflects the other’s frustration and disappointment. So the child turns his father into a wild man, and he makes his mother bear the brunt of the father’s bloodthirsty rampage. In the end, the father gets killed off by his own fury. By bringing out the rampant chaos within the father, Danny survives and becomes someone other than Jack, an escapee from the Oedipal bloodbath. A bit sharper-edged, no, than the Spielbergian saga of a boy trading in his parents for a gentle alien pal?
