One reading of the shining

"MAZES, MIRRORS, DECEPTION AND DENIAL"

CHAPTER ONE PREPARATION & RESEARCH Back in late 2006 I wrote my first film analysis article and it was about Stanley Kubrick’s film version of The Shining. I quickly posted a video version of the article on Youtube, which gathered tens of thousands of viewings during early 2007. The feedback varied from gushing applause … to accusations of me having too much time on my hands … to angry accusations regarding controversial themes. It was a good learning experience, because the feedback that came in from that first film analysis video helped me sharpen up my writing and research skills. This helped me to write more comprehensive and plausible analysis of a further sixteen films. In November of 2007 I updated my analysis of The Shining to correct some errors, add some additional details, and to present some additional themes. The second article was approx fifty percent longer. The updated video has gathered over 10,000 viewings on Youtube and has several thousand more downloads from my website, and this time the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Having now written detailed analysis articles for five Stanley Kubrick films, I’ve become much more familiar with the symbolic style he used. Combining this with the hundreds of emails from both fans and critics of my previous articles on The Shining, I now find that the analysis needs updating again. This time however, the length and depth of the analysis will at least triple because the film has turned out to be far more multi-layered and intricate than I ever suspected. But before cracking on, I’ll first offer some explanatory notes about the methods and sources I have used in writing this article. This is primarily for the benefit of people who are skeptical of film analysis in general or who are specifically skeptical of my personal approach to the subject. There is also a benefit for me in that I won’t have to spend as much time answering the same questions over and over to new readers / viewers. People asking standard questions will be directed to this chapter. The first point I’d like to make about Kubrick’s method is that from 2001: A Space Odyssey onward he made films that always had at least two separate narratives that would co-exist simultaneously within the same film. Most scenes would serve at least two narrative functions – one would be the more obvious surface narrative and the other narratives would be subliminally communicated. If this seems outrageous then that’s perfectly understandable, as I have not encountered any film outside of Kubrick’s body of work that successfully managed this feat on such an intricate level. Kubrick had developed a unique and complex system to this effect, and it appears that he shared his technique with no one – not even his closest collaborators. One of the rare examples of Kubrick openly acknowledging a dual narrative in one of his films occurred when he was being interviewed by Jerome Agel. I picked up this quote from page 277 of the biography Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto. The quote refers to Kubrick’s phenomenally cryptic sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which to my knowledge was the first Kubrick film to feature a dual narrative.

“I don’t like to talk about 2001 too much because it’s essentially a non-verbal experience. It attempts to communicate more to the subconscious and to the feelings than it does to the intellect. I think clearly there’s a problem with people who are not paying attention with their eyes. They’re listening. And they don’t get much from listening to this film. Those who won’t believe their eyes won’t be able to appreciate this film.” – Stanley Kubrick For a long time audiences and critics have had that nagging feeling of there being something more to Kubrick’s work than was apparent in their initial viewings. They have been compelled to watch his films over and over as if seeking the missing pieces of a conceptual puzzle. Many film analysts have at times broken through parts of the surface narratives, but this has often raised more questions than it has answered. To this effect Kubrick films are some of the most studied works in film history and the interpretations are incredibly varied. I have personally found that the most important principle in analysing Kubrick’s work is not to try and identify themes based upon a single, irrefutable detail, but to instead identify what I’ll refer to as ‘emergent themes’. By this I mean that the subliminal narratives of a Kubrick film can only be perceived by cross-referencing hundreds of details until a consistent pattern emerges. Individually, each detail can be discredited as either a continuity error or a mere aesthetic choice, “he did it because it looked cool”, but when those details are grouped together they form an unmistakable and undeniable pattern – one that defies the odds of chance. In many cases these emergent themes make even more consistent sense of the film than the surface level script does. So how do we identify these emergent themes? I’ve found that the most reliable way is to watch a Kubrick film scene by scene and shot by shot, while making very detailed written notes about what you are seeing and hearing on screen. For this article I compiled over fifty pages of hand written observations (in addition to the content of early versions of the analysis article). It was only when I began reading these notes back and grouping them together according to similarity, that many of the new themes became noticeable. It’s a laborious process, but highly rewarding if you have the patience. Of course, with any kind of subjective study, such as analysing a film, you run a very high risk of imposing patterns upon the work that you expect to see, instead of what’s actually there. To this effect you must seek out not just pattern, but also difference. Contradictory details generally will mean that the pattern you are seeing is mistaken or that the film maker was not consistent in their messages or modes of expression. I’ve found overwhelmingly that the surface narratives of Kubrick’s films carry far more self-contradictory details than the subliminal narratives do. So when your interpretation is making more consistent sense than the surface script, that’s when you know you are breaking the conceptual codes of a Kubrick film. Another key concept in deciphering subliminal meanings in Kubrick’s work can be described as ‘plausible deniability’ or ‘deniable encryption’. Basically, this means that a message or subliminal code has been disguised within a seemingly circumstantial context. Kubrick was the master of this strategy, as I will demonstrate in this article. For that very reason anybody who doesn’t want to see beyond the easy surface narrative of a Kubrick film will generally be able to pass off his subliminal encoding as something simple and innocent, allowing them to fall back into the comparative comfort and ease of the surface narrative. This allowed Kubrick to plausibly evade explaining his films' meanings for years. It also means that my descriptions in this analysis must be exactingly specific to bypasses the veil of illusion that Kubrick weaved with such amazing skill.

If you are a person who generally dislikes complexity then I suggest you read one or two chapters of this article at a time, giving yourself short breaks to digest the material. Occasionally I get comments from viewers of my film analysis articles/videos, who say that I’m simply finding hidden meanings in certain films because I am noticing co-incidental patterns and imposing whatever meaning fits. I can understand this perception because I only write articles about films in which I have found hidden meanings. That probably gives the impression that I see all films as being conceptually deep. It’s not the case though. The vast majority of films I‘ve seen appear conceptually shallow and simplistic, despite my familiarity with subliminal encoding techniques. Some examples of films that I have repeatedly been requested to analyze, but in which I haven’t uncovered coherent, consistent or interesting subliminal themes (at least outside of those already written of by many other reviewers) are … Donnie Darko, Memento and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. So I’ll hope you’ll bare this mind if, at times, I appear to be "stretching" to find meaning in The Shining. It’s also important for the reader to differentiate as to when I’m stating my interpretations as absolute fact and when I’m acknowledging a healthy entertainment of doubt in my own assertions. If you hear me use the words ‘possibly’, ‘could be’, ‘maybe’, ‘in my opinion’, and so on … then please acknowledge that I am only offering ideas for your consideration. That may seem like an obvious point, but many of my more disagreeable email correspondents seem to miss it. Many people have also asked me for ‘sources’ to back up my interpretations of Kubrick films. The most frequent question asked is “Did Kubrick ever confirm this in interviews?” Of course, for anyone writing about Kubrick, the answer to that question will virtually always be “no”, for the simple reason that Kubrick very rarely did interviews. And when he did, he avoided answering what he called “coneptualizing questions”. Here are some quotes demonstrating how elusive Kubrick was in talking about the meanings of his films.

“I've always found it difficult to talk about any of my films. What I generally manage to do is to discuss the background information connected with the story, or perhaps some of the interesting facts which might be associated with it. This approach often allows me to avoid the ‘What does it mean? Why did you do it?’ questions.” - interview with Michael Ciment about The Shining “Never! He never talked about the philosophy of the film to us.” – Kier Dullea (actor ‘Dave Bowman’ 2001) p305 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto “He’d never talk about his movies while he was making them, and he didn’t like talking about them afterward very much … Most of all he didn’t want to talk about their ‘meaning’ … He might tell you how he did it, but never why.” – p71, Kubrick by Michael Herr (co-writer / coproducer of Full Metal Jacket) “Attempts by writers to examine his life or career in detail were scrutinized and, more often than not, thwarted, usually by the same method. Kubrick would initially agree to co-operate, on condition that he had the right to authorize the text. He would then withhold approval until the deadline passed or the writer lost patience. In 1968 the magazine Books recorded eight hours of conversation under this restriction, but was permitted to use only four sentences.” – p297 Stanley Kubrick: A Biography by John Baxter

“I'm not going to be asked any conceptualizing questions, right? … It's the thing I hate the worst. … The truth is that I've always felt trapped and pinned down and harried by those questions.” - Kubrick interviewed by Tim Cahill for Rolling Stone. Regarding The Shining, Kubrick did a comparatively detailed interview with Michael Ciment. Although he didn’t directly describe the film's meanings, he did provide many comments that support portions of this analysis. Where relevant the Michael Ciment interview will be quoted. In addition, Kubrick did something quite out of character with The Shining. He allowed a behind-the-scenes documentary to be filmed by his daughter Vivian on the set. This short documentary was personally approved by Kubrick and the footage was apparently selected from hundreds of hours of material. The specific choices of footage that Kubrick allowed into this documentary also support several of the themes in this analysis. Once again these references will be included. I’ve also read detailed accounts of The Shining’s production history as described in Kubrick biographies written by John Baxter and Vincent Lobrutto. These both feature a variety of cast and crew claims that will be quoted in this article. An important detail about the film’s initial release is that there was originally an additional scene at the ending, in which Danny and Wendy are visited in a hospital by the hotel manager Mr. Ullman. This ending was seen by the film’s earliest audiences on selected cinemas, but was removed before the wider release. There are some surviving stillsand a variety of written accounts about the scene's content, which also support certain themes identified in this analysis. We’ll return to this topic in later chapters. In my previous analysis of The Shining I based my interpretation upon the European release of the film, but the US release contains an additional twenty-three mins of footage. This article brings that additional footage into account. In fact several of the additional themes in this article are very difficult to identify in the trimmed down European version. Kubrick once said that he found it best policy to let his films ‘speak for themselves’. This is true in that almost everything required to uncover the hidden depths of his work are contained within the films, and do not require a verbal declaration from Stanley himself. When he wanted to communicate a theme to the subconscious or to encode it for future generations to unravel, he would make sure the theme infected multiple scenes using dozens of subliminal details. And so The Shining film itself is the primary source for this analysis. However, there is another source worth mentioning …

CHAPTER TWO KUBRICK TAKES THE HELM A very important, and often heated, area of discussion is the comparison between Kubrick’s film and the original novel of The Shining by Stephen King. I read the novel three times, although over fifteen years have passed since. Rather than read the novel again, I’ve allowed myself the short cut of compiling key differences between the film and book from other reviewers – some of the most prominent differences are listed below. If I have mistakenly misinterpreted any details of the original book in this process then feel free to mail me with corrective details. • • • • • • • • • • • •

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Jack has a problem with authority figures in the book, but is loyal to authority in the film and has writers block instead. Ullman, the hotel manager, was authoritarian in the book, but is charming and friendly in the film. Grady, like Jack, was an alcoholic in the book. This is not suggested in the film. Wendy was a tough, self reliant, attractive blonde in the book and is whimpering, geeky and dark haired in the film. The hotel wants Danny’s powerful psychic abilities in the book, but in the film the hotel’s motives are unspecified. A collection of animal-shaped hedges come to life and attack Danny. This is replaced in the film by a hedge maze chase. In the book Jack kills himself, rather than succumb to the hotel’s will. In the film he totally surrenders to his urge to kill and freezes to death in the maze. In the book a defective boiler explodes and destroys the hotel. There is no exploding boiler in the film. Jack attacks the family with a mallet, but uses an axe in the film. In the film a river of blood flows out of an elevator. This is not in the book. Danny has the life frightened out of him by a pair of murdered twin girls. This wasn’t in the book, although the tentatively linked back story of Grady’s murdered daughters was. In the book only Danny encounters the woman in the bath tub. In the film this encounter is told in exposition and we are instead offered a mysterious new scene in which Jack encounters the woman. The bear costumed man in the film, who appears to be giving felatio to a man in a tuxedo, doesn’t appear anywhere else in the film and seems totally out of place in the story. In the book this man is dressed in a silvery dog costume and is given an extensive back story. In the film Danny’s ‘imaginary friend’ Tony is presented as his finger. This wasn’t the case in the book. The film ends with Jack framed in an old photo. The book doesn’t.

One of the reasons I am not compelled to reread the novel word for word is because of these already overwhelming differences with the film. And after reading the rest of this analysis, I’m sure you’ll agree that Kubrick transformed Stephen King’s story beyond all recognition. He simply borrowed the bare bones plotline of the book and used to it to tell a series of other stories that had absolutely nothing to do with Stephen King. “King had written a screenplay adaptation of his novel (The Shining) for Warner Bros before Kubrick became attached to it, but Kubrick chose not to read the script because he decided he

wanted to infuse the skeleton of King’s story with his own ideas.” - p412 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto Here is an excerpt of an interview with Stephen King, in which he discusses the virtually nonexistent collaboration between himself and Stanley. So for all the Stephen King fans out there who are perhaps hoping that they will here find an analysis that regards the film as artistically inferior to King’s novel, I may as well disappointment now rather than later. For my money, The Shining is the greatest horror film of all time, and I base that opinion upon the elements that Kubrick introduced to the film that were not in the book. I’m not saying it is necessarily superior. It’s just a totally different animal. I will, however, offer conciliation for King fans in that I agree with their assertions that Kubrick was disrespectful of King’s book. He used the novel as a commercial vehicle for an entirely separate collection of his own ideas that the mechanics of the novel superficially fitted with. Rather than acknowledge this, Kubrick offered the following justification.

“When The Shining came up she (Diane Johnson) seemed to be the ideal collaborator, which, indeed, she proved to be. I had already been working on the treatment of the book, prior to her starting, but I hadn't actually begun the screenplay. With ‘The Shining’ the problem was to extract the essential plot and to re-invent the sections of the story that were weak.” - interview with Michael Ciment This description of ‘weak’ sections in the book, in my opinion, was a red herring so that Kubrick could disguise his real reasons for changing the story. His refusal to read King’s own screenplay adaptation also supports this. “Johnson (co-writer on The Shining screenplay) and Kubrick worked together in England for three months in 1978 … Sitting at a big table in a large hall, Johnson and Kubrick first worked separately, outlining the film. They compared the two outlines and discussed each scene. The process was repeated two or three times as the plot evolved.” - p414 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto The above quote possibly offers a key insight into Kubrick’s multiple narrative writing technique. By having Diane Johnson concentrate on structuring the surface narrative, this would allow Kubrick to design the subliminal narrative covertly and without making the surface story incomprehensible. I’d also like to offer some info here about the production of The Shining. For those not familiar with Kubrick’s unusual production habits this will give some background as to how he operated, and in particular, how he kept his entire cast and crew second guessing what his real motives and strategies were as a film maker. Some of this information also supports sections of this analysis article. Here are some noteworthy cast, crew and biographical quotes.

“I believe fantasy stories at their best serve the same function for us that fairy tales and mythology formerly did. The current popularity of fantasy, particularly in films, suggests that popular culture, at least, isn't getting what it wants from realism. The nineteenth century was the golden age of realistic fiction. The twentieth century may be the golden age of fantasy.” – Kubrick interviewed by Michael Ciment about The Shining

“We wanted the hotel to look authentic rather than like a traditionally spooky movie hotel. The hotel's labyrinthine layout and huge rooms, I believed, would alone provide an eerie enough atmosphere.” – Kubrick interviewed by Michael Ciment about The Shining “I’m a great off-stage grumbler. I complained that he was the only director to light the sets with no stand-ins. We had to be there even to be lit. Just because you’re a perfectionist doesn’t mean you’re perfect.” - Jack Nicholson p443 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto “The final shot in the film was the last one to actually be shot on the set. Tony Burton, ‘They shot that for days. Stanley would just look at the monitor and say ‘Let’s go again.’ They couldn’t get a third of the way across the lobby. It took them a week before they got a third of the way across. Stanley kept seeing bumps – he wanted it to be smooth. So they changed the cart on the dolly. Then they put it on a track. Then they changed the wheels. Then they put some more weight on it. Then it wasn’t enough weight. They put more people on it. People were hanging onto this cart trying to keep still so they could get this shot.’” - P443 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto “Why are you telling me that? I can’t do anything if it’s good news. It’s only when there are problems that I can intervene.” – Kubrick talking to Julian Senior, quoted from p310 Stanley Kubrick: A Biography by John Baxter “Tony Burton, ‘I don’t know how many times they shot the blood in the elevator. Somebody told me they had been shooting that ever since the shoot first started the year before. They shot it three times while I was there. About every ten days they would shoot it again and Stanley would say ‘It doesn’t look like blood,’ and they would say, ‘Well, is it the texture? Is it the colour?’ It would take them like nine days to set the shot up and then they would come back, the door would open, it would come out and Stanley would say, ‘It doesn’t look like blood.’ But finally they got it.’” - P444Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto “Most of the hotel set was built as a composite, so that you could go up a flight of stairs, turn down a corridor, travel its length and find your way to still another part of the hotel. It mirrored the kind of camera movements which took place in the maze. In order to fully exploit this layout it was necessary to have moving camera shots without cuts, and of course the Steadicam made that much easier to do.” – Kubrick interviewed by Michael Ciment about The Shining “We were shown an incomplete film. There were great gobs of scenes that never made it into the film. There was a whole strange and mystical scene in which Jack Nicholson discovers objects that have been arranged in his working space in the ballroom with arrows and things. He walks down and thinks he hears a voice and someone throws a ball back to him.” - Wendy Carlos discussing production of The Shining score, P447 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto “The shot where the camera follows Wendy up three flights of stairs and slows down just moving ahead of her when she sees two ghosts in the midst of a sexual act, became one of Garret Brown’s favorites – he got thirty-six opportunities to shoot it.” – p425 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto Annie, the actress who played the doctor in The Shining, was made to go shopping with Kubrick for clothes. She tried various outfits to which he repeatedly said “no” and told her to try the next

one. Eventually she walked into his office and he pointed at the clothes she was already wearing and said “That’s what I want her to look like. Let’s get those clothes”. The strange thing was that they were the same clothes she was already wearing when she first met him to go shopping. Then after having Annie do endless takes of the scene in which she interviews Shelley, during which he refused to give her any direction or answer her questions, he used her very first take in the film. Annie, “I know he used the first take because there were many more colours in the first one than in the others.” Also … Regarding the scene of her interviewing Danny on the bed, Kubrick rejected the notion that her character should be comforting to the child. He told Annie “I don’t want any of that, I want it very businesslike.” – condensed from pages 427 to 429 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto “Barry Jackson told Annie that he had around thirty-five takes for saying one line ‘Hiya Jack’.” Condensed from p429 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto A single camera position of Scatman Crothers explaining The Shining to little Danny racked up 148 takes. The shot lasted seven minutes and Kubrick printed all of them - Condensed from p430 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto “It’s just the story of one man’s family quietly going insane together.” – Kubrick discussing The Shining with John Hofsess, quoted from p415 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto “An early treatment for the screenplay reveals that … A scrapbook on Jack’s writing table contains a photograph of a New Year’s celebration in 1999 with Jack in the photo.” - p415 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto “For the scene in which Halloran shows Wendy and Danny through the storage rooms of the kitchen, Kubrick demanded eighty-five takes, in the middle of which Crothers broke down and cried in frustration. ‘What do you want, Mr Kubrick?’ he screamed, ‘What do you want?!’ … Nobody was ever sure if this system bore fruit.” - p316 Stanley Kubrick: A Biography by John Baxter “That long tracking shot where Jack Nicholson pursued Shelley Duvall up the staircase while she’s waving a baseball bat at him was taken fifty or sixty times. Typically, Nicholson’s first take would be absolutely brilliant. Then the thing would start to get stale after about ten takes. … the impression I got is that Stanley tended to go for the most eccentric and rather over-the-top ones. There were plenty of times when Stanley and I were viewing the stuff where my private choice of the best performance – or sometimes he would ask me – wasn’t in, while the more eccentric one was.” - Gordon Stainforth on editing The Shining, quoted from p317 Stanley Kubrick: A Biography by John Baxter “Kubrick had an exacting overhead-view map of the maze, which was used to get in and out and to plan shots. Copies were given to the crew, who nevertheless continued to get lost throughout the production. Garret Brown (steadicam inventor and operator) recalled that if you got lost and called out “Stanley!” Kubrick’s laughter seemed to come out from all directions inside the maze.” - p437 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto

“The exterior façade of the rear view of the Overlook hotel was built on the backlot of the EMIElstree studios and was modelled after the Timberline Lodge.” - p416 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto “Vivian was going around shooting us making the picture all the time. She had a little cart that she pushed around. You would be in conversation with Stanley, some debate or subject would come up and he would say ‘Yeah I was talking to Jack about that yesterday. Vivian, what was that Jack said?’ and she would go into the cart, find what the conversation was about and read it back to him.” - Tony Burton, who played Larry Durkin in The Shining (his scenes were cut from the European release of the film) p434 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto These stories about Kubrick’s behaviour are fascinating. Was he paranoid? Did he enjoy overworking his crew until they broke down in tears? Was he indecisive about what he wanted? Was he obsessive? Or was he creating a thick smoke screen of illusionary distractions to keep his collaborators in the dark about what he was really up to? Personally, I believe the latter was frequently the case. The multitude of subliminal details in The Shining contained in this analysis have barely ever been described by the film's cast and crew during interviews. It’s as if they had no awareness of such subliminal details, and with high numbers of takes, consistently changing scripts and assorted on-set mind games from Kubrick, it’s no wonder. I also advise the reader to view the behind-the-scenes documentary that is included in the current DVD versions of The Shining. Actor Scatman Crothers and actress Shelley Duvall try their best to put a brave face on during interviews, but their sense of frustration with Kubrick’s demands is plain to see. This will be explored in more detail in later chapters. To shoot The Shining, Kubrick had a huge and intricate set built at Elstree Studios, apparently the biggest ever at the time. The set was supposedly built as an all-in-one, in which the camera could move through freely in a single shot. The most frequently used portion of the set in the finished film is of course the Colorado Lounge, in which Jack does his writing. Because of the huge walls of powerful (and hot) lights that were used to create artificial daylight in this set, the Colorado Lounge supposedly caught on fire, destroying the set. Despite only having a handful of simple shots left to film for those scenes, Kubrick had the set rebuilt from scratch rather than work around the problem in the editing room. Chapter four of this analysis will explore the layout of The Shining’s sets in specific detail, as this is a key area in which Kubrick applied subliminal concepts. So now let’s explore the film’s subliminal themes directly.

CHAPTER THREE CARTOONS AND FAIRY TALES The multitude of cartoon and fairy tale references in The Shining tend to be missed or glossed over in most of the analysis / reviews that I’ve read. And it was only after a series of emails asking me about the meanings of specific cartoon related details that I finally took the theme seriously. Leaving analytical judgements aside, here is a list of obvious cartoon references in the film. • •

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In Danny and Wendy’s introductory scene – the one where Danny is eating a sandwich – we can hear the soundtrack of a Roadrunner cartoon playing on a tv set. When Danny is brushing his teeth, just before his first psychic vision, a collection of cartoon stickers can be seen left screen on his bedroom door. These include Snoopy from the Charlie Brown cartoon, one of the seven dwarves, Minnie Mouse, and Mickey Mouse wearing a magical hat. In an undoubtedly deliberate reference, Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse and Snoopy were also visually featured in the journalist’s meetings of Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick’s follow up film to The Shining. When the psychiatrist talks to Danny in his bedroom there is a toy in the background right screen, which appears to be a figure of the Disney character Goofy. When walking through the kitchen Wendy makes a reference to the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, “This place is such an enormous maze, I feel like I’ll have to leave a trail of bread crumbs every time I come in”. Danny is addressed several times with the nickname Doc, as used by Bugs Bunny in the Looney Tunes cartoons. Wendy: “We call him Doc sometimes, you know, like in the Bugs Bunny cartoons.” Halloran: “Well anyway, he looks like a doc doesn’t he? (doing an impression of Bugs Bunny) What’s up Doc?” Jack: “How’s it going Doc?” When Danny enters the Torrance apartment and finds Jack sat on the bed, he’s wearing a sweater with a picture of Mickey Mouse kicking a football. Once again this is referenced in the film Full Metal Jacket – in the picture of Snoopy in the journalist scene, the cartoon character is kicking a football in an identical stance. In the scene where Wendy picks up the baseball bat, just before her first violent confrontation with Jack, a Roadrunner cartoon can be heard on a tv – again off screen. At Durkin’s garage, a tv set behind Halloran’s friend Larry, is playing a cartoon. And then there are the very obvious cartoon references in Jack’s dialogue before he chops his way through 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.” Now I’ll offer some interpretations of possible additional cartoon references in the film and how, in combination with the more obvious examples, they thematically affect the story. One of the most prominent conceptual uses of these cartoon symbols is that when the psychiatrist is questioning Danny on his bed, Wendy is wearing clothes that are virtually identical to those of the Goofy figure beneath the window – yellow boots, a red sweater and blue overalls (a blue dress for Wendy).

Shelley Duvall has big eyes and buck teeth, much like Goofy, and her sobbing in later scenes has a snorting quality similar to Goofy’s chuckle in the Disney cartoons. It’s possible that Kubrick

merely noticed these aesthetic similarities to Shelley and played a prank on her in retaliation for their conflicts on the set, as witnessed in the behind-the-scenes documentary. Yet it’s also possible that he chose Shelley for the role with these Goofy-like similarities in mind. He may have even directed her to sob in a similar way to Goofy’s chuckling. My guess is that Kubrick knew in advance he would be encoding this character crossover and took this into account when casting. My primary reason for this assumption is because the Jack Torrance character not only spoke “Big bad wolf” dialogue in the film, but he is also unshaven with long hair … a visual manifestation of the “Big bad wolf”. The steadicam shots that follow Danny throughout the hotel and the maze also tie in with Danny representing the Roadrunner, who in the Looney Tunes cartoons was always chased by Wile E. Coyote, again represented by the wolf-like Jack Torrance. Just like in the Roadrunner cartoons, Jack gives chase to Danny the Roadrunner, but is outsmarted and fails to catch his prey.

The use of Roadrunner cartoon music when Wendy picks up the baseball bat in her apartment is heard from an off screen tv, but it thematically matches Wendy’s behaviour. So as not to frighten little Danny, she sneaks over to the couch, picks up the bat and then sneaks out of the apartment, while the music suggests mischievous tip-toeing. Another possible inclusion of cartoon or fairy tale symbology is the use of giant multi-coloured carpets in the hall outside room 237 and in the room 237 interior.

From what we see of the rest of the hotel, the colourful set designs are mostly based upon Native American art. Are the more child-like carpet designs related to Danny’s child-hood imagination? We’ll return to this in chapter six. The events that we see inside room 237 may also be a further reference to child hood imagination. The Hansel and Gretel fairy tale was already hinted at by Wendy’s comments in the kitchen about leaving “a trail of breadcrumbs”, and in room 237 we are presented with a mysterious female character who entices Jack with a sensual invitation, but then she turns into what may be a symbolic manifestation of the wicked woman from Hansel and Gretel, who herself lured the children in with candy before transforming into a witch. This could also explain the over the top colours and patterns of room 237 as being symbolic of the gingerbread house from the same fairy tale. These Hansel and Gretel parallels are not a conclusive interpretation, but they certainly fit.

It certainly appears that Kubrick infused The Shining with subliminal links to cartoons and fairy tales, and there are several possibilities as to why he would do this. One interpretation is that Kubrick was making a mockery of the surface horror story. Neither his films nor his rare interviews gave any indicators that he believed in the supernatural or the afterlife. He spoke and acted like a confirmed atheist. “I think the unconscious appeal of a ghost story, for instance, lies in its promise of immortality. If you can be frightened by a ghost story, then you must accept the possibility that supernatural beings exist. If they do, then there is more than just oblivion waiting beyond the grave.” – interview with Michael Ciment about The Shining One of the more frequent criticisms of The Shining is the over the top performance of Jack Nicholson in the latter half of the story. Jack’s murderous intents could have been made much

more frightening if the scenes were played straight and the comedic lines dropped. Kubrick would certainly have known this and so it’s only logical that he intentionally had Nicholson ham up his performance to the point of silliness. Here is a quote from the editor who assisted Kubrick in cutting the film. “That long tracking shot where Jack Nicholson pursued Shelley Duvall up the staircase while she’s waving a baseball bat at him was taken fifty or sixty times. Typically, Nicholson’s first take would be absolutely brilliant. Then the thing would start to get stale after about ten takes. … the impression I got is that Stanley tended to go for the most eccentric and rather over-the-top ones. There were plenty of times when Stanley and I were viewing the stuff where my private choice of the best performance – or sometimes he would ask me – wasn’t in, while the more eccentric one was.” - Gordon Stainforth on editing The Shining, quoted from p317 Stanley Kubrick: A Biography by John Baxter This wasn’t the first time Kubrick had manipulated an actor’s performance to be over the top. He famously did the same thing with George C. Scott’s performance in Dr Stangelove. He would pacify Scott’s desire to give a skilled performance by allowing him to do a number of serious takes, then he would ask him to do a couple of outrageous takes just for the hell of it. Of course it was the latter takes that made in into the final cut. The other subliminal themes that will be presented in this analysis will further support the assertion that Kubrick was not drawn to The Shining by a desire to make a supernatural horror film. There are some genuinely disturbing sequences, but they are subliminally based around very real psychological devices, not the supernatural. In a nutshell, Kubrick mocked the ghost story and possession themes by transforming them into laughable cartoons and fairy tales at the subliminal level.

CHAPTER FOUR AROUND EVERY CORNER

Watch the two part video supplement for this chapter or scroll down and read the more detailed text version part one part two

In the previous version of this analysis I included a short explanation about the layout out of Ullman’s office and the surrounding lobby and hallway areas. Here is a map of the area in question.

As the map demonstrates, the window behind Ullman’s desk should not exist because the hotel hallways wrap around the back of the office wall.

The following scenes in the film collectively reveal the spatial impossibility of Ullman's window. • • • • •

The interview. Ullman explaining to Wendy and Jack that “By five o’clock tonight, you’ll never know anybody was ever here.” They take a right turn around the back of Ullman’s office. When Danny climbs out of his hiding place and is chased by Jack, he also runs around the back of Ullman’s office. Jack limping through quiet hallways with an axe before killing Halloran. He glances down a corridor in which the left wall is directly behind Ullman’s office. Wendy running away when she sees the party guest with the wine glass and gash on his head. The left wall is precisely at the back of Ullman’s office, and there is no window to be seen.

My interpretation of this set design anomaly, as presented in the previous version of this analysis, was that Kubrick was deliberately disorientating the viewer. In response I have occasionally received correspondence from people who believe this piece of set design was simply a mistake in the film making process. However, when I recently acquired a copy of the US version of The Shining, and watched the additional twenty three mins of footage that are not in the European release, I quickly noticed another set design flaw of a similar nature. It is the scene in which Ullman shows the Torrance couple through the Colorado Lounge. The camera, moving sideways, scrolls from one end of the Lounge to the other, giving a full view of the giant windows on the far wall.

At the end of the shot we see another hallway just behind / under the staircase where Jack later gets clubbed over the head. Look in the far background.

Two people with luggage emerge from a hallway that wraps around the back of the wall, but how can this be?

We have just seen five gigantic floor-to-ceiling windows on the very same wall, supposedly giving us a view of the hotel exterior. None of the camera angles in the Colorado Lounge scenes show a portion of the building extending outwards where the mysterious hall is.

This hallway is also the direction Danny comes from after being strangled in room 237, even though room 237 is on the other side of the Colorado Lounge (scroll down to view a map of room 237's position). Why didn’t he come down the stairs near room 237 or down the huge flight of stairs where Jack and Wendy have their fight? Having found two examples of windows that shouldn’t exist (Ullman’s office and the Colorado Lounge), I decided to go through the film scene by scene and draw maps of the Overlook sets. Here are some of the results. Inside the Torrance’s apartment we find that there are windows in both the living room and bathroom. Due to them being at right angles to each other, the apartment should be placed on a corner of the building structure.

When we eventually get to see an exterior view of the apartment’s location (the scene where Danny slides down a hill of snow from the bathroom window), we find that the living room and bedroom windows could not exist. The exterior wall extends in both directions.

And that isn’t the only spatial impossibility of the Torrance apartment.

From our views of the hallway just outside the apartment entrance, we find something interesting. The section of hall that theoretically runs along the outside of the Torrance’s living room and bedroom ends at a T-junction. There is an “EXIT” sign posted up on the right wall, implying that a door and fire escape is just around the corner. Any fire escape in that position would overlap the Torrance’s bedroom or bathroom.

In addition to this there is also a doorway along the same wall, but any room behind it would overlap the Torrance apartment. The scene of Jack axing his way into the bathroom does show a door on the other side of the same wall, but it can’t match up with the one in the hall. As indicated by the small flight of steps just inside the apartment door, the level of the bedroom floor would be several feet higher. Here’s another example of disorientation. The hallways with the strange spaghetti patterned carpets, where Danny is twice drawn toward room 237, feature a variety of spatial defects.The doorway to room 237 is neighboured along the same wall by two other apartment entrances, each just a few metres away.

This doesn’t leave much room for spacious apartments. They would have to be narrowly tucked in side to side, but when we do eventually see room 237’s interior, we find that the entrance leads left into a large living room, which then leads into a large bedroom and then into a large bathroom. The apartment totally overlaps the position where the next apartment should be.

The neighbouring doorway on the other side of room 237 should also lead to an apartment, but if we go to the end of the wall, we find that there is a set of doors leading to a stairway.

The stairway connects to the steps on the floor below, which we saw in the long hallway with the dark red floor (seen in Danny’s first tricycle scene). This whole stairway section overlaps whatever room would be found behind the door next to room 237. So the doors on both sides of room 237 don’t lead anywhere. The long wall opposite room 237 separates the entire hallway from the Colorado lounge. From the end of the hall, seen after Danny doubles back on himself in the tricycle, we see right screen that this whole wall would be roughly two metres thick, yet it features five doorways to apartments that spatially cannot exist.

In the same tricycle scene Danny first passes room 237 on his right, then rides around a squared section of walls before turning back down the same long hallway, so that room 237 is now on his left. If we look at the section of walls that he rides around, we find that it is also just a couple of metres thick. On the side facing the Colorado lounge there is a door to an elevator, but on the opposite side it features two doorways. Once again, how could any apartments or even an elevator fit in this small space?

Piecing the spatial defects together just for the halls around room 237, we find there are nine doorways leading to apartments that cannot exist. Maybe a couple of these doors could be passed off as storage cupboards, but to pass off all nine doors in such a way is stretching to the extreme, especially since many of them are double doors, just like room 237. In case you still doubt the idea that Kubrick intentionally played with our unconscious sense of space in his set design, here’s another example. As Halloran shows Wendy and Danny around the kitchen, he walks them in a slightly odd path through the various utility tables and arcs back on him self. This can be noticed by the large black door at the beginning of the shot, which features the words “FIRE EXIT – MUST BE KEPT CLEAR” written in huge white letters, and is also seen in the background when they exit the store room. In the latter shot we can clearly see left screen a long section of worktop that Wendy and Halloran manoeuvred their way around while exploring the kitchen (see below).

Much later in the film, Jack limps through the kitchen with his axe and walks directly through the space where the worktop should be.

Returning to the first kitchen scene, Halloran disorientates us by taking a spaghetti-like path through the kitchen. He then tells Wendy: “Right here, is our walk in freezer” and opens a big steel door. The shot cuts to the freezer room interior, but watch how the door swings in each shot. In the shot outside the freezer room he grabbed the handle of the door with his left hand, but when the shot cuts to inside he pulls the door open with his right hand … and the door swings open from the wrong side.

When they step back out of the freezer room we find that they have emerged from a door that is opposite the one that they supposedly entered. We can tell this by the large windows of the “Chef’s Office”. It’s also difficult to notice because the camera position has flipped sides from when they entered, giving the impression they’re on the same side of the hall.

So what just happened? Well, my take on it is that Kubrick is playing more spatial mind games with his audience. A strong indicator of this is that when they exit the freezer room we see another set of doors in the background, the left of which is wide open. The open freezer door in

the foreground is positioned so that it overlaps the empty door space behind it, indicating that the door can symbolically shift both position and orientation.

Another supporting detail for this is that a small mirror can be seen on the wall opposite the freezer room after they exit, and both freezer room doors also have reflective surfaces.

Mirror props are central to The Shining’s subliminal narrative, which will be covered in subsequent chapters. In this particular scene the mirror prop, which has door shaped dimensions, may be a clue that the freezer room was symbolically mirrored on set. A youtube user who I was discussing this with theorized that an additional scene was cut out of the film, in which Halloran had showed Wendy into yet another storage room. He suggested that Halloran turning his face away from the camera as he spoke the words “walk in freezer” was an indication that part of his dialogue was lifted from another take to compensate for the jarring visual cut. Continuing on with this scene, Halloran walks around a corner and takes Wendy into the storeroom, but another set of spatially jarring details occur. As they walk from the freezer room they pass another door on the same wall, which is just two or three metres from the corner they’re about to turn.

This is yet another of the film’s impossible doorway motifs because any room behind this door would overlap the storeroom, which in size is at least five metres squared.

Through a set of windows we can clearly see the much smaller dimensions of the Chef’s Office on the adjacent corner to the storeroom. The original freezer door that Halloran and Wendy entered is right next to it and so the Chef’s Office serves as a visual measuring device, demonstrating how small the storeroom should really be. Obviously, Kubrick wasn’t just interested in making pretty pictures with his set arrangements. Jack verbally hints at the obscurities of the hotel design, while eating breakfast in bed: “It was like

I’d been here before. I mean we’ve all had feelings of déjà vu but this was ridiculous. It’s almost like I knew what was going to be around every corner … Ooooohhh.”

Repeatedly in The Shining we see doors in the wrong places, impossible windows, and rooms that are too big. Can these all be accidental? For the sake of being thorough, here are yet more examples of spatial mind games in The Shining’s sets. We see the entrance to the hedge maze in three different scenes. The first two times we see it, the entrance is facing the camera and the hotel can also be seen left screen, but when it comes time for Jack to chase Danny we find that the entrance has shifted to a different side of the maze and is now facing the hotel.

Also, in the second shot of the maze, the scene when Wendy and Danny enter, we are shown a map directly outside the entrance. And there is a hedge right behind the map. Shouldn't this hedge be inside the maze?

Both the map and its accompanying hedge are missing in the other shots of the maze entrance, despite the wider and more distant camera positions.

We are never given a clear indication of how the Gold Room connects up to the rest of the hotel either. It is flanked by a mustard coloured hallway that doesn’t seem to spatially link up properly with the one in the hotel lobby (see reception map at the beginning of this chapter). The Gold Room entrance sign in the lobby also switches from one side of the door to the other in different scenes, and for some reason a second Gold Room entrance sign is seen at the actual Gold Room entrance. We’ll return to the subject of the Gold Room in a later chapter. Other sets that are featured without any apparent sense of orientation to the rest of the hotel are: • • • • •

The games room Basement boiler room The red bathroom where Jack meets Grady The river of blood hallway The hallway where Danny sees the dead girls.

Of course, we can’t expect the film to give us enough visual information to reverse engineer a full map of the entire hotel, but considering the lengths Kubrick went to in disorientating our spatial awareness, he will have at least considered how each set of the Overlook would affect the audience’s unconscious maps of the building. If we think of The Overlook in terms of major set pieces, such as kitchens, gold room, Colorado Lounge and so on, it would be logical to assume that Kubrick and his set designers would at least have come up with a rudimentary map of how these locations would relate to each other. I managed to do this fairly accurately in my short film The Sex Game, in which the story took place in a single house, but was shot in three different locations. Yet, here in The Shining Kubrick plays yet more spatial mind games. Here's a glaring contradiction. Wendy is shown preparing meals in the kitchen and she also wheels Jack's breakfast through to the lobby from the gold room area.

On that basis we can assume that the kitchen is close to or just beyond the gold room. But later, as Jack limps through the hotel to kill Halloran, he first passes through the kitchen and then he enters the lobby from the opposite side of the gold room, near Ullman's office. The kitchen can't be on both sides of the lobby.

On the larger scale, a very prominent spatial contradiction is the difference between the Overlook interior and exterior. The exterior shows that large sections of the hotel are built at odd angles to each other, yet all of the interior sets feature rooms and halls that use perfect right angles. The aerial shot of the Overlook Hotel is footage of a real hotel called the Timberline Lodge.

Considering that a large set was built in England to mimic the Timberline Lodge exterior, Kubrick could easily have had the interior sets built to more closely resemble Timberline as well, but he chose to base much of the interiors on the Ahwhanee Hotel, which has a completely different look.

More info about the Overlook Hotel sets can be found at http://www.unrealaudio.net/theshining2/realoverlook.htm. The author of the site has also conversed with Gordon Stainforth, who assisted Kubrick in editing the film. Stainforth mentions the bizarre flipping of the freezer room entrance, but makes no mention of an additional scene being shot and edited out. So having established that the sets of The Shining were designed with deliberate spatial defects, you’re probably asking yourself “Yeah, so what’s the point?” The point is that the Overlook is not just a place of isolation. It is a symbolic maze – a vast labyrinth of winding corridors, mysterious open doorways and disorientating design. When the characters speak, their voices often echo throughout the hotel, reminding us of its scale and emptiness. In many scenes, such as Danny's chat in the kitchen with Halloran, we can hear very faint noises echoing throughout the hotel. Sometimes these sound like objects being moved and sometimes like distant voices. The films soundtrack incorporates many noises that are distant and echoed, again implying a large isolated labyrinth (the music of room 237 an excellent example). The big giveaway is that the map we see outside the maze entrance and the table top version that Jack looks at are identical … that is until we cut to the top down view (the one where we see Danny and Wendy as ant-sized figures in the centre). At this point the maze paths have altered and are symmetrically mirrored, both vertically and horizontally. It's layout is also much larger and there is no exterior edge. Danny and Wendy are symbolically trapped in a never-ending maze of mirrors.

The daytime shots of Danny and Wendy walking through the maze together also mismatch the map shown outside it's entrance. The easiest way to notice this is to look at the top of the hedge walls immediately after we cut from the maze map outside. The top of the hedge is arched, revealing it to be the maze entrance, at which point they took an immediate left turn. According to the exterior map they should have then walked a very long and straight path, but in the footage the maze has a different layout.

Even the small scale maze map, shown in the making-of documentary of The Shining, mismatches the maps seen in the film.

The daytime maze footage consists of two shots. The second one matches up with the portion of the maze map highlighted in red (including the dead end they encounter), but the first shot follows a course that doesn't match up with any part of the map. Even if we flip the footage along it's vertical plane it still doesn't match up. However, the night time shots of Danny and Jack running through the maze in the film's climax do appear to match up with the small scale map given out on the set. The changing maze layout between the two daytime shots could only be achieved if, A) Kubrick had more than one maze set to film in, or B) The existing maze layout was altered between shots. Personally I'd put my money on the latter. The following production story suggests that Stanley played a practical joke by having the maze set altered during the shoot without handing out updated copies of the map. Kubrick had an exacting overhead-view map of the maze, which was used to get in and out and to plan shots. Copies were given to the crew, who nevertheless continued to get lost throughout the production. Garret Brown (steadicam inventor and operator) recalled that if you got lost and called out “Stanley!” Kubrick’s laughter seemed to come out from all directions inside the maze. p437 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto The terror of being isolated in a maze, while being eternally chased in never-ending circles, is communicated in the tricycle scenes. Danny rides a full lap around the Colorado Lounge and an adjacent hallway until he’s back where he started, just as he loops back upon himself before encountering the locked door of room 237. In both of these scenes he is chased by an observing camera, of which he has no escape. However, in the final maze chase of the film Danny again does a full lap upon himself, but this time breaks the loop and makes his way to the maze centre (his path is highlighted in blue on the map below).

Scale is also important in this film. The imposing size of the hotel, its oversized carpet patterns, the mountain ranges, and especially the huge Gold Room and Colarado Lounge, make the characters look small and defenceless - like helpless children. Add this to the solitude of the Torrance’s circumstances and the psychological brew is potent. These are some of the key elements that give the film its unsettling creepiness. And it does this almost entirely without the clichéd cobwebs and dark shadows of other ghost stories.

Note: Screenwriter John August has written of his disagreement with my interpretations of deliberate spatial disorinetation. His critique can be read here and my response here.

CHAPTER FIVE MIRRORS AND SYMMETRY The deceptive maze themes of The Shining are reinforced through the use off mirrors. This is most prominent in scenes that take place in: • • • • •

The Torrance apartment in the Overlook Room 237 The Gold Room (including its red lavatory) The mustard coloured halls leading to the Gold Room (mirrors on the wall left screen) The bathroom at the start of the film (where Danny has his first psychic vision).

As mentioned in the previous chapter, a small door shaped mirror prop was also featured outside the freezer room, possibly informing us that the shifting room was deliberately mirrored in the set design. This cross symbolism between mirrors and doors also occurs: •

When Danny approaches room 237. Peaking into the open doorway we see two mirrors, which are also doors themselves, leading to the living room. Their slightly ajar positions are very similar to the actual doors in the forground.

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Inside room 237 Jack’s viewpoint briefly pans left in the bedroom, where we see a door shaped mirror prop embedded in an alcove of identical dimensions. Then the shot pans to the bathroom door, again suggesting a connection between doors and mirrors.

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In the shot of Jack having breakfast in bed, the mirror that we see him in overlaps the doorway to Danny’s bedroom.

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As Wendy rushes to the small window in the bathroom to escape her axe-wielding husband, the camera passes across the cabinet mirror, which is conveniently positioned to reflect the door.

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There is also a round mirror prop directly inside the Torrance apartment entrance that reflects the doors surface. Even when the door is open, a distant doorway in the hall remains reflected in this mirror.

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And the most obvious example, Wendy’s viewing of the scribbled word “murder” is shown on a bathroom door, which we see in a mirror.

The Shining isn’t the first Kubrick film to feature a symbolic connection between doors and mirrors. In 2001, the monolith was frequently symbolized as a doorway between dimensions. Having travelled through the stargate, the astronaut Dave Bowman found himself looking into a bathroom mirror and when the shot was cut to a close up, the pipe and reflections of his helmet revealed that the camera had flipped over to the other side of the mirror. He was existing in two parallel dimensions at once (read the 2001: A Space Odyssey analysis for more).

In The Shining, mirrors are also conceptually hinted at by other kinds of reflective or "shiny" surfaces. The film’s opening shot instantly introduces the mirror theme by showing us mountain ranges reflected in surrounding lakes.

Polished floors and walls are also frequent, especially in the Colorado Lounge and room 237 hallways. When they’re more dimly lit this hall of mirrors effect is even more prominent.

But the most unconsciously powerful form of mirroring in the film is Kubrick’s use of visual symmetry. Some of the sets are designed so that when the camera is placed in a particular position the screen on which we are viewing the film is conceptually mirrored down the centre. Some examples of this include: • •

Jack writing at his desk, viewed from directly behind (see above). The room 237 Hallway, which appears almost identical from either direction.

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The twin girls stood at the end of a blue hallway.

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Halloran’s viewpoint in his bedroom. The red lavatory, which even features mirror props on one side.

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Jack staring down the lobby (while hearing the distant ballroom music).

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The wide shots of Jack’s interview. The interior of the freezer room. The low angle of Jack pleading with Wendy through the store room door. The river of blood.

The most obvious use of mirror symbology occurs when shots zoom in or out of actual mirror props. This occurs when Danny speaks to his imaginary friend Tony in a bathroom mirror and when Wendy sees the word “murder” written backwards on the bathroom door.

The scene in which Jack is brought breakfast is one of the most interesting in this respect. We begin with a close up of Jack’s face, which zooms out to reveal that we are looking at his reflection in a mirror before zooming back in until the mirror surface fills up the whole screen again. Then we see a jarring visual cut. Jack’s image flips so that we are seeing him in his natural orientation, instead of viewing his reflection. The assorted mirror concepts in The Shining aren’t just about disorientating us. They are essential to unravelling the hidden narratives of the film, through the concept of duality. This duality takes many forms – character duality, location duality, scene repetition, and of course, parallels between the film’s content and the audience’s reality – a standard Kubrick device. On that basis, conceptual mirroring will resurface repeatedly throughout the rest of this article.

CHAPTER SIX OTHER KINDS OF TRACES When Halloran and Danny have their private conversation in the hotel kitchen, we are given the following explanation of what their shared psychic power is, “Well, you see Doc, when something happens it can leave a trace of itself behind. Say like if someone burns toast. Well, maybe things that happen leave other kinds of traces behind. Not things that anyone can notice, but things that people who shine can see. Sometimes they see things that haven’t happened yet. Sometimes they see things that happened a long time ago.” This simple description applies not just to Danny’s experience, but also to the actual film structure. Repeatedly throughout The Shining, Kubrick bombards us with visual, auditory and conceptual hints of what is about to happen next. It’s a common psychological device in film, sometimes referred to as foreshadowing, and has been used by suspense masters like Hitchcock. In The Shining however, the use of foreshadowing fits in as a narrative device. It makes the audience share Danny's psychic traumas of the hotel. •

During the conversation with Halloran Danny asks “Mr Halloran, are you scared of this place?”, and immediately we cut to our first wide shot of their conversation, which shows a set of knives in the background pointing directly at Danny’s head – a hint of the murderous danger that awaits the family.

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Jack's knowledge of a former caretaker murdering his family is also foreknowledge for the audience of the films coming events. Aside from the obvious on-screen flashes of the twin ghost girls prior to Danny seeing their dead bodies, we are subliminally hinted of their presence several times when the Torrance’s are being shown around the hotel. At least three times we see women in pairs carrying luggage about. Two of these pairs are heard wishing goodbye to Mr Ullman. The most prominent link between these women and the twin girls is that the pair we see outside Jack’s apartment are seen with a portion of hallway in the background that

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features the same blue and white flowered wallpaper that we see when the twins’ dead bodies are revealed. This wallpaper appears at no other point in the film.

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In the first tricycle scene the red floors of the hallway may be a subliminal foresight of the river of blood, which Wendy sees in the films climax. The red painted hall that she walks down just prior to seeing the river of blood is also a subliminal to this effect.

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Danny being chased playfully by his mother into the hotel maze anticipates him being chased by his kill-crazy father. Her teasing dialogue also mimics the close proximity with which the camera chases Danny, “I’m gonna getcha. You better run fast. Look out. I’m coming in close.” She even reaches out with her arms as if about to strangle him like the woman in room 237.

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The sound of the tricycle wheels alternating between the carpet and floorboards sound uncannily like the music when Danny is chased through the freezing maze by his father. When Jack is chopping his way through the bathroom door we see a shot in which Wendy is crying and screaming in the background on the right portion of the screen. On the left of the screen we see the tip of the axe repeatedly smashing through the wood of the door. This visual arrangement almost looks like Wendy is actually being killed with the axe. All we're missing is the blood.

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In Danny’s vision of the murdered twins, Kubrick very subtly uses this device again. We begin with a shot of Danny riding off into the distance in a green hallway and taking a right turn. The accompaniment of dramatic music let’s us know we’re about to see something scary. As Danny then turns a left corner the musical drum of surprise kicks in a second before the ghost girls have appeared on screen. It’s as if the music was anticipating what was around the corner. The scene of the dead girls may also be foreshadowing Wendy’s discovery of Halloran’s body. She takes a right turn then a left before seeing his blood soaked corpse. In both scenes the camera takes us in for a close up. One with a series of visual cuts and one with a fast zoom. The overwhelming red and white decor of the Goldroom lavatory may be a subliminal representation of the historic bloodbath that has been and is yet to come again.

The lavatory scene in which Danny has his first Shining episode features a shower curtain draped over a bath tub with Danny looking into a mirror on the right wall. This

composition matches that of Jack's encounter with a naked woman later in the story and both scenes feature variations on the same piece of music.

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As Wendy wheels a tray with Jack’s breakfast through the lobby, she walks the exact same path that Halloran does in his death scene. As Wendy is about to reach the pillar that Jack hides behind the scene ends and we cut to a different part of the hotel.

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Jack's repeated throwing of a tennis ball at the wall above the fireplace is our foresight that he will later be chopping through doors with an axe in pursuit of his family. Note the loud echoing bang of the ball and compare it with the slamming thud as Jack chops through doors.

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An additional reinforcement of tennis ball throwing as a metaphor for axe swinging is that Jack slams the ball against the floor just a few metres away from where he later kills Halloran. He then throws the ball toward the position where Wendy stands when she sees Hallorans body. Notice also that there are toys scattered about the floor including, to Jack's left, a small black teddy bear with its torso clothed in red - a foresight of Halloran's death. This all links up with Jack's comment that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, which translates as “all work and no murder ...”.

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The above scene is also a subliminal link to the deaths of the twin girls. They ask Danny to come and play with them and Jack slams the ball to the floor where Danny has been playing. This is a good example of Kubrick weaving multiple metaphors into a single shot. Another example of playful ball throwing as a foreshadow of axe swinging is that Danny and Wendy are shown throwing snowball’s at each other outside. This happens as Jack stands staring with madness out of the Colorado Lounge windows.

Some other interesting, but slightly less conclusive examples are: • •

The psychiatrist telling Wendy that “kids can scare you to death” which anticipates the vision of the dead twins – often cited as the film’s scariest moment. The word “Stovington” on Jack’s t-shirt (when he’s eating breakfast) viewed backwards through the very same mirror that Wendy sees Danny’s REDRUM graffiti.

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And a man dressed almost completely in white who stands staring over the table top maze in the same stance that Jack does (he can be seen in the far background as Jack tells his wife he’s got the job). This position of this ghost-like man in white is on the opposite side of the table to where Jack stands, and so may be conceptually tied in to the mirror image maze that Jack sees in the tabletop model.

There are many examples of the film using subliminal association to force us into experiencing little Danny's terrible “shining” visions. Perhaps this simulated psychic vision is another root of the film's sense of unseen menace. What could be more frightening than being a solitary child ... with psychic foresight and an over-active imagination ... running away from a murderous adult ... in an endless maze that plays spatial tricks on the mind?

CHAPTER SEVEN IT’S LIKE I GO TO SLEEP A unique device that Kubrick used to encode hidden narratives in his films is what I call Unannounced Dream Sequences. The concept is simple. In the surface narrative the scene in question is offered as a literal event in the story structure – something that really happens to the characters, but in the hidden narrative the scene is entirely in the characters imagination – a dream sequence. Rather than overtly show us that the character is asleep, Kubrick uses subliminal indicators which, if identified by the viewer, reveal the symbolic dream nature of the scene. Typically Kubrick would use these dream sequences to encode a different insight into other events that the character experienced in their waking state earlier in the film. Here are some specific examples of unannounced dream sequences in Kubrick’s work. •

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In Eyes Wide Shut the sexually ritualized masked ball sequence is an unannounced dream sequence. The whole party is a symbolic revelation of the lies and decadence hiding under the glittery surface of the high society party that took place at the beginning of the film. Subliminal details are used to reveal that the masked participants of the orgy are actually the same people from the first party. In Full Metal Jacket both the beating of Private Pyle and all of the lavatory scenes are dream sequences that communicate Private Joker’s struggle to resist military brainwashing. Several of these dream sequences even feature a rhythmic humming music reminiscent of the kind of deep breathing experienced during sleep. In the hidden narrative of 2001: A Space Odyssey the entire stargate and evolutionary rebirth sequence is simply a dream experienced by the astronaut Dave Bowman after defeating the oppressive HAL 9000 computer. In this dream sequence Bowman comes to the explosive realization that the monolith is a cinema screen rotated 90degrees. He is then spiritually reborn as he exits the two dimensional confines of his cinematic universe and becomes part of his own audience, seeing himself both in and out of the movie simultaneously.

In The Shining dream sequences are again used as part of a hidden narrative. Just as Kubrick was not a believer in the supernatural or the after-life, he never presented as a person who believed in the phenomena of psychic abilities either. The subliminal details of little Danny’s shining visions reveal that his psychic episodes are simply nightmares about his father’s psychotic tendencies. This is a fairly complex aspect of the film, which will be explored over several chapters of this analysis, but for now we’ll simply explore the encoded details that reveal which scenes are dream sequences. By far the biggest giveaway is Danny’s description of his own psychic episodes. Halloran asks Danny how his imaginary friend Tony tells him things and Danny replies, “It’s like I go to sleep and he shows me things, but when I wake up I can’t remember everything.” Remember also that Danny’s very first psychic episode in the film resulted in him being found unconscious “I remember mommy saying ‘wake up Danny, wake up’.” Much later in the film Danny is heard in his bedroom shouting “Redrum.” His mother enters the room and shakes him. The ensuing dialogue again hints at the nightmare nature of his

visions. Wendy: “Wake up Danny, you were having a bad dream.” Danny: “Danny can’t wake

up Mrs Torrance. Danny’s gone away Mrs Torrance.” One aspect of the film that puzzled me for many years, and which makes perfect sense when considered in the context of dreams, is the bizarre carpets in the hallways around room 237. These carpet patterns demand our attention and have been commented upon time and time again by reviewers as having an unsettling effect upon the viewer.

In chapter three I suggested that these carpets and the ones in room 237 are part of the fairy tale and cartoon themes of the story. Well, they also fit neatly into the dream logic of Danny’s visions. Notice that the cartoon-like carpet designs are drastically different to the Indian art seen elsewhere in the hotel. It’s as if the playschool aesthetics of childhood have manifested themselves in the hotel decor. The room 237 hallways don’t exist. They are a product of Danny’s dreamscape interpretation of the Overlook.

Think of it this way. Danny seems to be the only character who ever explores the cartoon-like parts of the hotel. The only exception to this is when Jack enters room 237 and then stumbles back out into the hallway after encountering the ugly woman. There is an explanation for this also, but we’ll explore that in the next chapter. Some other details hinting at the discrepancies of décor are that in the first Colorado Lounge scene where Jack and Wendy are being shown around, a man walks down the main stairway of the room carrying a rolled up carpet or rug. Its design looks nothing like the crazy carpet designs of Danny’s dream sequences. That may seem a bit vague, but if you remember that when shooting a scene like this one every prop and every action, even by non-speaking extras, is thoroughly arranged in advance. Kubrick will have instructed his crew to have this guy carry a carpet down the stairs.

The one scene in the film where we almost get to see a continuous transition between the Colorado Lounge and the upper floors (where room 237supposedly is) occurs when Wendy and Jack fight on the stairs. Wendy backs up to the top of the steps, almost enough for us to see the real designs of the upstairs carpets, but then whacks Jack over the head and the scene ends.

There is one other shot of Jack typing, in which we view him from the upstairs level, but even here there is no view of the upstairs carpets.

Another important indicator of Danny’s dream sequences is their timing in relation to other scenes. The very first tricycle sequence, where Danny rides around the Colorado Lounge, is followed by Wendy bringing Jack breakfast in bed. We see Jack asleep through the mirror and the mirror overlaps the doorway to Danny’s room, possibly a hint that Danny is also asleep. This of course would confirm the tricycle sequence as one of Danny’s dreams.

Just before the second tricycle sequence, the one in which Danny tries to enter the locked doors of room 237, the hotel exterior is shown in the late evening, followed by a shot of Wendy preparing dinner for the family. This cuts to the tricycle sequence and then to Jack typing in the Colorado Lounge at night - the one where Wendy disturbs Jack's writing and he tells her where to go. A logical mismatch here is that Jack doesn’t want to be disturbed, yet Danny’s tricycle was shown riding around the upper floor of the Colorado Lounge. If Jack couldn’t tolerate his wife walking in and disturbing him then why would he tolerate the noise of Danny’s tricycle coming from upstairs? Combined with the lateness of the hour this suggests that Danny was again dreaming the tricycle sequence. And now onto the third and final tricycle sequence – Danny’s encounter with the twin girls. There’s a lot going on in the scene, but for now I’ll just highlight the indicators of it being a dream. From the window behind the two girls we can see that the sequence is set at night when Danny would least likely be riding around on his tricycle. But what’s also interesting is the wallpaper. As mentioned earlier this wallpaper appears in just two places in the hotel – the dead girls sequence and in the far background outside the Torrance apartment entrance. In the dead girls’ scene if we ignore the scary apparition and just look at the wallpaper, it’s quickly apparent that the flower patterns form an endless series of question marks.

It seems that Kubrick wants us to question something here – be it the décor, the identity of the girls, the location, or even whether the scene is real. If this is a dream sequence then the question arises as to why Danny would have such a dream. We’ll return to this mystery later. After seeing the dead girls Danny talks to himself through his finger, “Remember what Mr Halloran said. It’s just like pictures in a book Danny. It isn’t real.” This is strange because we witnessed a long dialogue sequence between Danny and Halloran, but those words were not spoken. We can only assume that their conversation continued from where the scene was cut, or that Halloran never even spoke those words at all. This is another mystery that we’ll return to in later chapters. Moving on from the tricycle scenes, the next dream sequence is when Danny enters room 237. Again we have these odd carpets and this time a tennis ball is rolled toward Danny with inhuman precision.

Now some of you may be thinking, “Hold on a minute, room 237 was a real event. Danny had the injuries on his neck to prove it.” In the hidden narrative though, the room 237 scenes are also dream sequences, because Danny’s injuries came from a very different experience, which will be explored in the next chapter. Immediately after Danny enters room 237 we fade to a scene in which Jack has his nightmare about killing the family with an axe. Again the concept of dreams is present in the narrative. When Halloran and Danny have their shared shining episode, in which we see inside room 237, both of them happen to be laying in bed. Halloran looks like he’s about to nod off to sleep and then his psychic vision begins. Danny looks utterly traumatized as he shakes in his bed, but his eyes are open. So this time it seems he is at least partially awake. Confused? Let’s move on …

CHAPTER EIGHT WHICH ROOM WAS IT? When Wendy tells Jack about Danny being strangled by a crazy woman, Jack asks her “Which room was it?” and the scene ends. The question “Which room was it?” is important because cross-symbolism between room locations is absolutely essential to uncovering The Shining’s hidden meanings. The room 237 scene is the longest, most complex and most psychologically intense of Danny’s psychic episodes. It is a dream sequence that reveals the fundamental subconscious trauma that is the root of all his psychic visions. But to understand room 237 in detail we first need to pay close attention to a different scene – one that is normally disregarded as uninteresting. In the lobby Danny asks his mother if he can go get his fire engine from his bedroom. His Mother makes him promise not to wake Jack up, but when Danny enters the apartment he finds Jack sat on the bed, looking tired and miserable. Jack gestures for Danny to sit on his knee and Danny approaches with a look of hesitant obedience. A strange conversation then takes place that starts off like a perfectly normal expression of fatherly love, but then Jack makes his weird comment about staying in the hotel “forever and ever”, just as the twins had. Danny then expresses fear of Jack and asks for assurance. Jack reassures Danny that he would never hurt him and the scene ends abruptly with a sudden jolt in the musical score. To accompany the scene Kubrick chose Bela Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. This is one of the saddest and most depressing pieces of music I’ve ever heard and is totally at odds with the dialogue. So what’s this scene really about? Well, in studying the room 237 scenes in detail I noticed a multitude of parallels with this strange fatherly love scene. The layout of room 237 is very similar to the Torrance apartment. We enter, turn left, pass through a living room then a bedroom and into a bathroom. The slow movement of the camera through room 237 was paralleled when Mr Ullman was showing the Torrance’s around their apartment. Ullman even emphasized the layout, “Living room, bedroom, bathroom.” Jack and Wendy pass through each room, taking a good look around, then enter the bathroom where we see them stood side by side with a mirror on the right wall. This all parallels Jack’s bathroom encounter with a woman in room 237.

Here are some specific parallels between room 237 and the fatherly love scene. • • •

Jack sees a woman sitting in the bath just like Danny saw Jack sat on the bed. One scene takes place in a bathroom and the other features a wide open bathroom door next to the bed. Jack sees the woman slowly push the shower curtain aside, and Danny sees Jack hold out his arm in a similar gesture. We see Jack do this as he’s reflected in a mirror, possibly symbolizing the duality of the event, and there is even a curtain draped behind the mirror, as if Jack is symbolically pushing it aside like the shower curtain.

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Jack sees a sexual invitation, just as Danny saw a fatherly love invitation. Jack hesitates then slowly approaches just like Danny did in the fatherly love scene. In both scenes the characters embrace intimately, but then the parallels stop.

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Jack looks in the mirror and sees the rotting woman, but Danny has a weird conversation with his father that results in reassurance.

These aesthetic parallels are too frequent and too specific to be accidental, so I’ll now offer an interpretation that makes sense of both these scenes. Room 237 doesn’t exist. Its cartoonish décor, just like the surrounding hallways, is a figment of Danny’s imagination. It’s a symbolic representation of the Torrance apartment manifested in a dream sequence. This is why the rooms have a similar layout. It’s also why we see multiple aesthetic parallels with the fatherly love scene. One of the things that makes this so difficult to figure out is that the acceptance of room 237 as a dream sequence requires a change in the film’s narrative structure. But the answer is actually staring us in the face if we pay enough attention to both scenes.

There’s a really bizarre piece of editing. After Jack sees the rotting woman in the mirror he begins staggering out of the room, pursued by the woman with her hands reaching out in a strangling gesture. But this cuts back and forth to the woman lying in the bath tub, slowly sitting up. Remember also that Danny was told by his mother in the lobby not to wake up Jack while getting his fire engine from the bedroom. Have you made the connection yet? Danny was strangled by Jack in the fatherly love scene for having woken him up. The conversation in the fatherly love scene was a false reassurance, and Kubrick ended the scene just as Jack was about to turn nasty. This's why the scene featured melancholy music that ended with a sudden jolt as we shifted to the next scene. It’s also why we are shown the rotting woman rising out of the bath tub – it’s a parallel of Jack being woken up in bed.

As with any severe trauma, Danny would have gone into shock and repressed the painful experience with amnesia. The dream sequences that followed – being summoned into room 237 by a rolling ball, and Jack’s encounter with the rotting woman – were simply trauma induced nightmares that Danny had after the fatherly love scene. In these dreams Danny is reliving his terrifying ordeal of being strangled and laughed at by his father. Victims of trauma have a tendency to try and identify with their abuser. And this is what Danny does as his suppressed memory of the event consciously resurfaces through his dreams. He reinterprets the trauma as if he is his own father and externalizes the identity of his abuser as a witch-like fairy tale figure. The transformation of the naked woman from beauty to ugliness, which he sees in the bathroom mirror, is a parallel of his father’s sudden mood switch from loving reassurance to violent aggression. The scenes of Danny entering room 237 and Jack walking through to encounter the woman in the bathroom both begin with the exact same shot of the apartment door slightly open with the 237 key hanging from the lock.

It’s interesting that the camera moves toward the mirrors just inside the door when Danny enters, only to fade to a different scene, because when we eventually see the inside of the room we initially don’t know exactly whose point of view we’re experiencing, so the question begs to be asked, "Whose reflection were we about to see in the mirrored doors just inside room 237?" It’s not until after a hand pushes open the bathroom door that we cut to a shot of Jack looking petrified. So the mirrored doors inside the room 237 entrance are a hint of the viewers obscure identity. The cross symbology between doors and mirrors comes powerfully into play in the room 237 scene. The action of a hand slowly pushing open the bathroom door is mirrored in slow motion by the action of the naked woman pushing aside the shower curtain.

After we see the rotting woman in the bathroom mirror, Kubrick then shows us two shots of Jack stepping backward through doorways - the bathroom then the bedroom. Each of these shots flips to a reverse angle in which the rotting woman is shown passing through the same doorway. If we take into account the film's repeated cross symbology between doors and mirrors then these shots of Jack and the rotting woman reveal themselves to be reflections - further demonstrating that the ghostly apparition is a dream manifestation of Jack himself. This may seem like an interpretational stretch, but pay close attention to the shots. Kubrick was very specific in using doorways to frame each character.

Another important connection is that the close ups of Danny trembling in his bed show him with a creepy facial expression very similar to the woman in the bath tub.

So as well as revealing that it was Jack being woken that caused him to strangle Danny, the woman rising out of the tub may also represent Danny himself waking up from his amnesia. From this scene onwards Danny's behaviour changes radically - a subject we'll explore in more detail toward the end of this analysis. Virtually every detail of these scenes fits with the aforementioned alterations to the story structure. •

When we see Danny playing with his toy cars outside room 237, he has no fire engine, which is what he was trying to get from his room when Jack strangled him.

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The fast camera pan from Danny’s face to his father sat on the bed was paralleled by the fast camera pan from Jack’s face to the rotting woman in the mirror. There was a mirror facing the bed in the Torrance apartment. Danny would have been able to see himself and his father in this mirror at the time he was strangled. There was also a mirror in the corner of the room 237 bedroom, facing the bed, and the symbology of the bathroom door as a mirror may have again been representing the duality between the two scenes or the fact that the original experience actually took place in the bedroom instead of the bathroom. The steady heartbeat that we hear over the room 237 scene could also be an indicator that it was a dream. Considering the shift from arousal to fear that occurs in the bathroom we would expect the heartbeat to speed up, but if it was just a dream then it wouldn’t. As Jack staggers away from the woman he backs down a couple of steps and for a few seconds afterward his view of the approaching woman is from a low angle, like a child’s would be.

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The twin doors of the Torrance apartment living room also parallel the twin mirror doors seen just inside room 237.

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And in a different scene, Wendy paces nervously back and forth in the Torrance apartment, during which we hear the same heartbeat rhythm from room 237 ... the camera again moving back and forth between living room, bedroom and bathroom.

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After Jack exits room 237, he becomes a dark silhuoette, perhaps hinting at the obsucrity of his identity in the dream.

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He also locks the room 237 door, leaving the key in the lock, as if he has no intention of going there again. The exterior shot of Jack exiting also shows the hall in darkness, but in the interior shot of Jack stumbling back through the living room the hall was well lit. This could be also be about pushing the room 237 experience into a dark corner Danny's mind, never to be accessed again.

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This trauma-induced nightmare concept also explains why Jack returns from room 237 completely composed and claiming to have found nothing. Wendy even tells him at this point that Danny is “still asleep”, yet another indicator that room 237 was a dream sequence . Jack probably never even went into room 237 in the first place and just told Wendy that the door was open and the lights were on to make Danny’s story more convincing. Danny may have

even made up the story of the crazy woman because he was afraid of causing a violent fight between his parents. Kubrick went all out to bombard the viewer with subliminal connections between room 237 and the Torrance apartment. Watch Wendy carrying the breakfast tray toward Jack in the bedroom, a foreshadow of the rotting woman stiffly approaching in a strangle gesture.

And then there’s Jack creeping toward Wendy up the Colorado Lounge stairway with a grin and his hands reaching out to grab her.

Another bathroom scene occurs in the film near the start. Danny is talking to himself in a mirror, once again on the right wall, as the camera creeps slowly forward. The shower curtain is pulled across even though there’s no one in the shower, a foreshadowing of the room 237 shower curtain. Both scenes even feature the same music. And the cartoon stickers on Danny’s door are quite suggestive of the room 237 décor. Mickey Mouse is seen in his sorcerer’s outfit in the lower left corner, gesturing toward the bathroom. And the rainbow sticker could be a hint of the cartoon-inspired design of the room 237 carpets, which seem to feature a pattern of overlapping purple rainbows.

Another detail I’d like to mention that possibly cross symbolizes the Torrance apartment with room 237 is that in the book the haunted room was numbered 217, but in the film it was changed to 237. Kubrick said in interviews that the number change was purely because the Timberline Lodge Hotel, which the Overlook exteriors were based upon, has a room numbered 217 and they didn’t want the film to scare future customers away from that room. Being that Timberline didn’t have a room 237, Kubrick changed the 1 to a 3 and everybody was happy. Out of curiosity I checked up on the Timberline Lodge and found that it has only 70 rooms, so I emailed them and asked if they have ever had a room numbered 217. It turned out that they do despite there only being 70 rooms. So it sounded like Stanley was just being straight up about the matter. However, then I noticed that the Torrance apartment is number 3 – the same number that Kubrick inserted into the 217 number to keep the Timberline Lodge owners happy. Coincidence perhaps, but considering all the other subliminal connections between the two rooms, maybe not.

A factor that remains to be explained about the whole room 237 scene is the fact that the sequence begins with Halloran watching tv in his bedroom and having a shining vision. How can room 237 be a dream sequence if Halloran sees it? There are several details of Halloran’s portion of the scene that suggest something else is going on. Firstly, the scene begins with a shot that zooms out from a tv screen. This also happened when Danny asked his mother if he could fetch his toy fire engine from his bedroom.

So instantly we’ve found a parallel. Then there’s the visual symmetry of the shot. There are lit lamps and stacks of records on both sides of the tv, Halloran’s feet are positioned symmetrically, and the framed picture on the wall is directly centre screen. The composition of the shot is symbolically mirrored along the vertical axis of the screen. When we switch to a third person view of Halloran we again find symmetry in the set arrangement. There are lit lamps on both sides of the bed and again a framed picture perfectly centred on the wall above Halloran’s head.

The overall impression so far is one of duality. But even more interesting is the content of the framed pictures. They both feature naked black women who are posed in near identical positions to the woman in the bath tub. Obviously there’s some sort of character crossover going on.

Then there’s the fact that Halloran is falling asleep just before his fearful vision kicks in, suggesting a dream.

When he begins to shake with fear his eyes look slightly upward from the tv, as if the woman in the framed picture has come to life and transformed into something terrifying.

A detail that supports the idea of his framed pictures of women coming to life is that in the wide shot the bottom of the red picture is almost touching the headboard, but in the next close up of Halloran it is gone.

Once he begins seeing the vision that he is supposedly sharing with Danny, we cut to room 237 and we don’t see his face again for the rest of the scene. My interpretation is that the shots of Halloran in his bedroom are part of Danny’s dream sequence. Notice that we later see three separate scenes of Halloran making phone calls from his apartment. The decor - wooden walls and floorboards - doesn't look much like it did in his bedroom sequence.

In fact, Halloran looks calm and composed, just like Jack did after his room 237 non-event. Halloran didn’t have a shared psychic vision with Danny because there was no psychic vision. It was just Danny dreaming. Halloran’s reason for travelling to the Overlook is revealed in his conversation with Larry Durkin, “We’ve got a very serious problem with the people who’re

taking care of the place. They turned out to be completely unreliable assholes. Ullman phoned me last night and I’m supposed to go up there and find out if they have to be replaced.” This is a typical hidden narrative device on Kubrick’s part. In the surface narrative Halloran is lying to Durkin, but in the hidden narrative he is simply saying things how they are. The reasons why Ullman would choose to send Halloran on this trip to the Overlook are an entirely different matter, which we’ll return to later. Another supporting detail for the dream narrative is that Halloran spoke to Danny about having conversations with his Grandmother without ever opening their mouths. This appears to have had an aesthetic effect on Danny’s dream sequence in that there is no conversation with the woman in the bathroom and that she turns into an old woman – a grandmother figure. The room 237 sequence is richly symbolic and multilayered, but the trauma-induced dream interpretation makes sense of virtually every detail. Danny’s shining visions are nothing more than the unconscious manifestations of childhood anxiety and trauma within a violently dysfunctional family unit.

So far I’ve only explained the supposedly supernatural events of the film in terms of Danny’s dream sequences. This has revealed the hidden narrative of room 237, but there’s still the subject of the twin girls, plus a batch of other ghostly apparitions. These will all be covered in subsequent chapters. But now that we’ve uncovered the unpleasant truth about who strangled Danny, it’s time to explore the mind of Jack Torrance.

CHAPTER NINE CRAZY JACK “It’s just the story of one man’s family quietly going insane together.” – Kubrick discussing The Shining with John Hofsess, quoted from p415 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto As detailed in the previous chapter, there are dozens of subliminal connections between the room 237 sequence and the fatherly love scene. Room 237 is basically a dream logic version of the Torrance apartment and the neck injuries inflicted upon Danny for having woken his father up. One of the biggest giveaway’s that Jack strangled Danny is a shot in which Jack walks down a mustard coloured hallway before switching on the lights of the Gold Room. In the previous scene he was accused by his wife of choking the boy and in this scene his reaction to the presence of mirrors confirms her accusation. There are a series of four mirrors on the wall to our left. As Jack passes each mirror he reveals his guilt with violent gestures. In particular, as he passes the second mirror he shakes his fist in the air as if strangling a toddler.

And while passing the third mirror he tries to swipe his own reflection from his field of vision.

Jack is trying to suppress his feelings of guilt. In chapter five we explored the use of mirrors in terms of their cross symbology with doors, but here we find that they serve to reflect Jack’s thoughts. This also happens in several other scenes – in fact it happens in every one of Jack’s encounters with the ghosts of the Overlook. After passing the four mirrors outside the Gold Room, Jack sits at the bar and again is unable to escape his reflection due to mirrors behind the bar.

So he covers his eyes and offers his soul for a drink.

When he opens his eyes again the mirrors are cluttered with bottles of alcohol and his refection has been replaced by Lloyd, the barman.

The weird conversation that follows is basically a visual metaphor of Jack speaking to himself. They’re both wearing maroon coloured jackets and have a similar cheeky smirk. Once Jack gets into the swing of his dialogue the camera stays on him and we see nothing of the barman. Just a couple of scenes later Jack encounters the woman in room 237 and again he sees the apparition in a mirror.

So aside from the room 237 scene being a dream sequence, it also maintains the paradigm of apparitions as symbolic reflections of living characters. Later Jack returns to the Gold Room and, after a brief chat with Lloyd, has a discussion with Delbert Grady in the lavatory. Yet again the apparition, to whom Jack speaks, is standing in front of a mirror. The angle at which we see the close ups of Grady feature a background mirror

that should be refelcting Jack, but Jack is absent - perhaps a continuity error or perhaps another hint that Grady is merely Jack's reflection.

And the symmetrical compositions of the wider shots enhance the mirror concept.

In the wide shot in which Jack is facing the camera his eyes even appear to be looking over Grady’s shoulder and at himself in the mirror.

Details of the conversation also support the notion of Jack externalizing his inner demons as hallucinated ghosts. Jack, “Mr Grady, you were the caretaker here.” Grady, “I’m sorry to differ

with you sir, but you are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know sir. I’ve always been here.” The repeated presence of mirrors during Jack’s ghost conversations has been noted by film critics, but the one exception seems to be when Jack talks to Grady through the door of the storeroom. The unlocking of the storeroom from the outside is generally accepted as the final indicator that the hotel is in fact haunted and the ghosts real. However, there are details that conflict with this. The mirror concept is present here, but in a slightly different form to the other scenes. The inside of the storeroom door is a flat steel surface that gives a blurred reflection – in other words it’s a symbolic mirror and Jack is again talking to himself.

If you take a look at the door from which Halloran and Wendy exited the freezer room from, you’ll find that both sides of this door have the same grooved pattern as the outside of the storeroom.

Only the inside of the storeroom door has the flat polished design because it is a symbolic mirror for the purposes of the hidden narrative. So if all of these conversations with ghosts are basically manifestations of Jack being insane then is there even a supernatural presence in the hotel at all? Time and again, ghostly visions reveal themselves under scrutiny to be dream sequences, reflections or hallucinations. But again, what about the physical unlocking of the storeroom from outside? Jack couldn’t hallucinate this into reality. There is at least one rational alternative to explain Jack’s release, but I’ll save that subject for a later chapter. For now I’ll ask you to bare with me and work with the premise that Jack is insane and all his ghostly encounters are merely reflections or hallucinations. His strangling of Danny at the Overlook is not an isolated incident. When Danny is seen by a psychiatrist at the start of the film, Wendy explains that her husband dislocated Danny’s shoulder in a drunken rage for scattering his work papers across the floor. She explains that Jack had then told her he was never going to touch another drop of alcohol and that he’d kept his word and not had a drink in “five months”. This five month timescale is important because just over a month passes during their stay at the Overlook before Jack goes insane – so this would

mean he’d been off the booze for roughly six or seven months. However, his conversation with Lloyd (himself) in the Gold Room conflicts with this timing. He tells Lloyd, “Here’s to five miserable months on the wagon … and all the irreparable harm it’s caused me.” The missing month could justifiably be written off as a logistical error in the script, but then a much more exaggerated mismatch of timing occurs. Jack, “I did hurt him once ok. It was an accident …

completely unintentional. Could’ve happen to anybody … AND IT WAS THREE GODDAMN YEARS AGO!!!” This huge mismatch of time is very difficult to pass off as a script error. Combine this with the revelation that it was Jack who strangled Danny in the Overlook and a simple truth is revealed … Jack Torrance was and still is a violently abusive father. No wonder little Danny was afraid to go to the hotel and had nightmares about what was coming. Danny, “Dad … You would never hurt Mommy or me would you?” The prospect of spending an entire winter alone with his parents is a recipe for an escalation of Jack’s abuse. The argument between Jack and Wendy about Danny’s injuries is a typical parental argument, in which one partner is abusive of the child. Jack, “I think he did it to himself. … Once you rule

out his version of what happened there is no other explanation is there? … It wouldn’t be that different to the episode he had before we came up here.” He then storms out of the apartment, giving a resentful glance at Danny’s bedroom and slamming the door on his way out. Jack’s own self-assurance in the Gold Room mirror sounds like the standard self-deception of a compulsively violent father, “I wouldn’t touch one hair on his goddamn little head. I love the little son of a bitch. I’d do anything for him … Any fuckin’ thing for him.” Jack also seems to dislike the intrusion of Doctor’s into the family’s affairs, “When do you think maybe he should

be taken to a Doctor. … You believe his health may be at stake. … And you are concerned about him. .. And are you concerned about me?” Wendy is the typical weak-minded partner who allows her husband to abuse her own child. During her conversation with the psychiatrist her hand trembles as she lights her cigarette, as if she is scared the doctor may find out some terrible family secret. And her explanation of Jack dislocating Danny’s shoulder is obviously an attempt to play down Jack’s level of violence and responsibility. Her willingness to believe Danny’s absurd story of a crazy woman hiding in room 237 is also a convenient escape into denial. Danny’s psychological problems are a form of disassociation from his abuse traumas. He pushes the painful parts of his experience into unconsciousness by creating an imaginary friend who carries those experiences for him at the unconscious level. When he senses a new threat from his father, the anticipation manifests itself through conversations with his finger or through nightmares or through symbolic visions that cause him to lose consciousness. Wendy’s confession to the psychiatrist that Danny’s “episodes” began when he was put into nursery school suggests that the violent abuse began around that time. And Jack’s description of himself as “formerly a school teacher”, hints at a history of violent behaviour toward other children, which was also true in the book. Some of these dysfunctional family indicators can hardly be described as subliminal. They’re quite overt, even in the surface narrative, and have led some reviewers to perceive the film as being primarily a study of family breakdown in modern America. This may be the case, as later chapters will reveal that Kubrick had several other controversial things to say about America.

An interesting aspect of all this is the role of alcohol. The liquor that appears at the bar in the Gold Room is certainly imaginary. There was no liquor in the room when Jack walked in. Ullman also told the Torrance’s while showing them the Gold Room that it is hotel policy to “always remove all the booze from the premises” during the winter break to lessen the insurance costs. The only other way Jack could have gotten a real drink would have been for him to sneak his own supplies to the hotel. this is another mystery that will be explored as part of other themes in a later chapter. An interesting visual connection is that when Jack takes his first sip of a drink in the Gold Room his face suddenly takes on a gaunt look with his eyes rolled slightly into his upper eyelids. This is virtually the same expression his frozen corpse has at the end of the film and even the shot size and angle are identical.

Kubrick is showing us that Jack was never spiritually possessed in the first place. He was simply a violent drunk. His staggered rambling in the maze would certainly pass for intoxication.

In fact most of his increasingly erratic behaviour during the film can be seen as that of a violent drunk.

CHAPTER TEN CRAZY KUBRICK Kubrick’s decision to allow a documentary film to be shot on the set of The Shining was an unprecedented departure from his usual ultra-secretive work policy. The resulting 35 minute film has led many film critics to reach a variety of mistaken assumptions about Kubrick’s personality. Based upon this documentary Kubrick has been described as “camera shy”, “impatient”, and “demanding”, but the factor that seems to be universally forgotten is that Kubrick personally approved the content of the documentary film. Are we really to believe that Kubrick would take great efforts throughout his career to avoid public attention – rarely giving interviews, not travelling outside of Britain to make films – yet would suddenly bare his soul on set in front of a rolling camera? Are we to believe that he would approve a final edit of this behind the scenes documentary that would further fuel rumours of him being difficult to work with? I’ve read several Kubrick biographies and, while many cast and crew members have expressed difficulties in working with Kubrick, they very rarely describe him as having emotional tantrums or making degrading comments to people on set. He was renowned as being calm and rational even when spending days repeatedly filming a single shot. His ability to frustrate people tended to be based more upon his lack of open communication and his obsessive attention to detail that required endless takes of the most seemingly arbitrary shot. So why did he so thoroughly break his own codes of practice in allowing documentary footage to be shot on The Shining? Well, the first thing to note is that Kubrick had full control over the documentary. All of the behind the scenes footage was shot by his daughter Vivian so trust wouldn’t have been an issue. Kubrick could rest assured that the footage would be safely stored away where only he and Vivian could access it. Another factor is that if Kubrick was even remotely concerned with dispelling negative industry rumours about himself then he would have made sure to conduct himself more professionally on camera and to make sure the most selfcomplimentary footage made it into the final edit. Without realizing it, many film critics and biographers have accidentally identified Kubrick’s motive for releasing this documentary. Time and time again they have described his edgy behind the scenes behaviour as being comparable to the film’s main character Jack Torrance. One of the biographies I read (sorry, I can’t recall if it was the one by John Baxter or Vincent Lobrutto) even claimed that there were running jokes on set about the similarities in appearance and behaviour between Jack Nicholson’s character and Stanley Kubrick. My theory is that Kubrick was deliberately creating these character parallel between himself and Jack, both in the documentary and among his crew in general. Consider the following: •

Kubrick is seen typing away, just like Jack Torrance does in the film.

• • •

He appears frustrated, short-tempered and domineering - like Jack. He swears and raises his voice - like Jack. He has long hair - again like Jack.

But the most prominent example of this parallel is Kubrick’s degrading treatment of the actress Shelley Duvall (Wendy) and the actor Scatman Crothers (Halloran), both of whose on screen characters are victims of Jack Torrance’s madness. And so it is they who are the targets of Kubrick’s most irrational behaviour on set. His demanding impatience with these two performers is very prominent both in the documentary and in cast and crew reports about the shoot. Halloran is the only character to be killed in the film and Kubrick reportedly drove him to tears with gruelling numbers of takes.

In one scene I had to get out of the Sno-Cat and walk across the street. No dialogue. Fifty takes. He had Shelley, Jack and the kid walk across the street. Eighty-seven takes. Man, he always wants something new, and he doesn’t stop until he gets it. – Actor Scatman Crothers (Halloran in The Shining) p443 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto For the scene in which Halloran shows Wendy and Danny through the storage rooms of the kitchen, Kubrick demanded eighty-five takes, in the middle of which Crothers broke down and cried in frustration. ‘What do you want, Mr Kubrick?’ he screamed, ‘What do you want?!’ … Nobody was ever sure if this system bore fruit. - p316 Stanley Kubrick: A Biography by John Baxter A single camera position of Scatman Crothers explaining The Shining to little Danny racked up 148 takes. The shot lasted seven minutes and Kubrick printed all of them. - Condensed from p430 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto

40 takes of Scatman Crothers being axed to death – Condensed from p431 Stanley Kubrick by Vincent Lobrutto In the documentary Scatman Crothers is in tears, while talking about the “joy” of working with other performers on set, but considering the stories of how Kubrick over worked him, he may have been crying about the pain and frustration of the shoot.

As for Shelley Duvall, we actually get to see Kubrick repeatedly degrading her in the documentary. After she complains, “Look at this. I pulled hunks of hair out on the window sill,” she passes a few strands of her hair to Kubrick, who holds them up to the camera and sarcastically comments “Hunks of hair. Okay”.

He then prompts her to do another take. “Come on. Let’s go Shelley.” And when she carries on grumbling he interjects, “Don’t sympathize with Shelley. It doesn’t help you.” This kind of arguing may occur on some film sets, but it generally wasn’t Kubrick’s approach and it is definitely a golden rule of industry practice to keep these personality clashes in private and off camera. While filming a dialogue scene in the Torrance bedroom Kubrick tells her, “Many parts of that

were very good. There were quite a few fuck ups, but many parts were good. … Come and look at this Shelley. The only part CLEARLY wrong was at the end when you said ‘we’ve gotta get him out of here’ is that you got strong at the end, and I think it has to be a last desperate begging. You know. And I still think that you shouldn’t jump on every emphatic line. It looks fake. It really does. … Shelley I’m telling you it’s too many times. Every time he (Jack Nicholson) speaks emphatically you’re jumping and it looks phoney.”

And Kubrick continues to talk down to Shelley as they discuss the script, “I think that line is in

the right place … I honestly don’t think the lines are gonna make a lot of difference if you just get the right attitude.” And he gets even more cross with her in an exterior scene, “There’s no desperation. Oh come on, what do you mean ‘roll video’? We’re fuckin’ killin’ ourselves out here and you’ve gotta be ready. Shall we play mood music? When you do it you’ve gotta look desperate. Otherwise you’re just wasting everybody’s time.”

It could be argued that Shelley Duvall provoked Kubrick’s wrath with her apparent attentionseeking behaviour on set. And it may even be that he was so frustrated with her that he decided to capture her counter-productive habits on video to show to the industry. Shelley even admits her desire for attention, “Jack (Nicholson) is such a big star, such a famous personality that

people do tend to be a bit sycophantic with him … and it wasn’t entirely ineffectual. I mean I did get jealous sometimes, I admit. … Well, it was mostly between takes, not during work. When we were actually working on a scene that did not interfere at all, but on occasion when we were just sitting around or about to come to work or standing by in our rooms, whatever. I mean there were times when I felt a bit jealous because he got very much attention … and I suppose I like attention.” Shelley’s assertion that her jealous attention seeking didn’t interfere with filming is then directly contradicted by a shot of her laying down on set while people are covering her with blankets and putting pillows under her head. It looks as if she’s feigning illness to get attention mid-shoot. Kubrick also appears to have played a practical joke with the edit. During Shelley’s interview, when she explains her desire for attention, a caged bird can be heard off screen squawking away as if seeking attention. The bird noises can be heard over Shelley's interview approx 50 seconds into the following clip. Filmed interviews are normally done in locations that have minimal sound interference, so it’s quite possible that Kubrick either deliberately ensured the caged bird would be on set or he may have had the it's audio dubbed over Shelley as a way of mocking her. Notice that in the footage of Shelley talking more sensibly about working on the film the bird audio is absent. Personally, I’m quite convinced that Kubrick gave Shelley Duvall and Scatman Crothers a difficult time as a way of drawing parallels between himself and the character of Jack Torrance. A significant shot shows Shelley sat in a chair staring at a playback monitor, looked extremely stressed, and the shot then pans to the right where we see Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson sat side by side watching the same monitor.

It’s like Kubrick is demonstrating that he and Jack Nicholson (Torrance) are equally the source of Shelley’s misery. Jack Nicholson has also commented that he found Kubrick good to work with, but that he seemed like a completely different person with Shelley. It’s also unlikely that Kubrick would have told his cast that he was faking or acting his tantrums, just like they were acting in the film. It was very rare that he told anyone what he was really up to with anything. He only gave people enough information to ensure they would comply with his wishes on set. If an actress like Shelley was really being a nuisance to him, Stanley wouldn’t have responded with emotional outbursts. He would have used his chess wizard mind to calmly outplay his opponent as usual. So did we get to see the real Stanley Kubrick, heart and soul, in the Making of The Shining? Frankly, no. He baffled people who had worked with him for years, so it’s unlikely that a 35 min film approved by Kubrick himself would allow us any greater insight into his true character. What we’re seeing is Jack Torrance played by Nicholson in the film and by Kubrick in the documentary. This is another of the film’s many duality paradigms. It also allowed Kubrick to promote The Shining in a behind the scenes documentary without revealing any of his closely guarded secrets. The Making of The Shining is, in a way, a fiction film in itself. And it seems that Kubrick didn't care about the effect it would have upon his reputation. In his usual smoke screen fashion, it may have even assisted him in disguising his true motives as a film maker. Many film critics have sincelabelled him as obsessive-compulsive, a control freak and deeply paranoid - and he seemed happy to encourage these rumours. Kubrick also used the behind the scenes documentary to reinforce many more of The Shining’s subliminal themes. To understand this we first have to acknowledge that we’re not just seeing random footage from the shoot. Kubrick will have collaborated with his daughter, telling her what kinds of footage content he required for the documentary. It’s also industry standard, especially in the days of DVD extras, to semi-script behind the scenes footage and interviews. It’s

a modern form of marketing, disguised as critical insight … hence most DVD extras have a strong bias toward the film in question that borders on straight forward advertising. So just as with the usual DVD extras, we have little way of knowing which details in the Making of The Shining documentary were choreographed and scripted as opposed to just natural behaviour on set. Kubrick virtually announces that the documentary is semi-scripted in the very first shot. We see the numbers 4 and 3, each beneath a window on the exterior of the set where The Shining was filmed.

The shot pans across to the next three windows where we would expect to see the numbers 2 ,1 and 0, as if counting down to action on a universal lead counter (inserted at the beginning of video edits as an industry standard).

Next we cut to Jack ordering food over a phone in his room and the documentary wastes no time in making parallels with the movie content. Jack tells Vivian she looks cute in her red shirt – Danny also wore one at several points in the film. Vivian then films Jack’s bathroom – mirror on the right, bath tub to the left, just like the bathroom in the Torrance apartment.

Then Nicholson brushes his teeth, just like Danny did in the first bathroom scene of the film.

And afterwards he tells Vivian “You’ll have to excuse me because I’m going to take a piss.” He then closes the door behind him and on the outside of the door is a calendar picture of a soft porn model.

This all parallels the room 237 scene in which doorways were used as symbolic mirrors to reveal the naked woman as a reflection of Jack Torrance. And all that is just in the first scene. There are several more parallels with the feature film embedded in the documentary, but those themes are explored later in this analysis. Where relevant, the documentary content will be incorporated into the remaining chapters.

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE BIGGER PICTURE As with most of Kubrick’s later works (from 2001: A Space Odyssey onwards) The Shining operates on multiple paradigms. In the last chapter we discovered that the so-called “Making Of” documentary was not a genuine documentary at all, but a symbolic parallel of the feature film content. Now let’s explore another paradigm shift that has been subliminally encoded. As previously cited, the distant views of The Overlook were shot at a real hotel location in America, called The Timberline Lodge. In particular our first view of Timberline is an aerial shot, and an important detail is that there is no hedge maze next to the hotel.

This has widely been considered a continuity error, but in my opinion the shot is just a little too blatant in its revelation of the surrounding terrain of Timberline. Kubrick instructed camera crews to shoot hours upon hours of helicopter footage in his absence because he didn’t like flying in airplanes, especially across the Atlantic. So instead the footage was shot by a separate crew and sent back to him. Surely his instructions would have been meticulous, as usual, and therefore he would have requested multiple aerial takes of the Timberline Lodge from different distances and different altitudes. He also would have taken into account that aerial shots would reveal the absence of a maze in the hotel grounds. If Kubrick wanted the exterior shots of the Overlook to give the impression that the maze existed somewhere off screen or behind part of the hotel then he could have very easily achieved it. On that basis, it’s worth considering the possibility that, just like the deliberately disorientating spatial “errors” in the Overlook’s interior sets, this glaring exterior continuity error is part of another subliminal theme. Actually, I’ve found that there are several paradigm shifts operating in the distant hotel exterior shots. In this chapter we’ll explore two of them. The first is that the Maze and the Overlook

hotel are symbolically one and the same. In chapter four we explored in detail the theme of the Overlook being a maze, and we explored that both the hotel and the hedge maze dramatically change their layouts between scenes. Here are a collection of further details that subliminally merge the hotel and maze as being one and the same. •

As Ullman introduces the maze to Jack and Wendy they are actually walking towards the Overlook, which scrolls on screen from our left. “This is our famous hedge maze … And the hedge is about as old as the hotel itself.” The identical age between the hotel and maze is a clue of their cross-symbolism, but how can Ullman be introducing the maze as they walk away from the maze entrance? Just a couple of scenes before this Ullman was showing the Torrance’s the Colorado Lounge, which is inside the hotel, so shouldn’t they be walking from the Overlook as he introduces the “famous hedge maze”. If we think of the hotel and maze as being symbolically interchangeable this directional contradiction makes much more sense. Ullman and the Torrance’s have just walked out of the maze entrance after seeing the Colorado Lounge and so his description of a “famous hedge maze” is referring to the hotel itself.

•

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It was also noted in chapter four that the Overlook exterior is designed with large sections at odd angles to each other, but that all of the interior sets feature rooms and hallways positioned at perfect right angles, which matches up with the squared design of the hedge maze. As Ullman explains the hedge maze, there are a series of triangular or pyramid shaped trimmings periodically positioned along the top of the maze’s outer walls. Compare this to the hotel. The roof design features similar triangle shapes. It seems Kubrick had the hedge maze sets designed to mimic the exterior roof patterns of the Timberline Lodge.

•

At several points in The Shining we see distant views of The Overlook from a position parallel to the hotel base (with a mountain in the background). As the shots change from summer to winter throughout the film, they also shift from day shots to night shots, with an increasing amount of snow built up against the walls and with an increasing number of lit windows. The hotel is gradually beginning to look like a flat exterior wall of the hedge maze.

•

By the time we get to the maze chase at the end, the exteriors of the Overlook and hedge maze look incredibly alike.

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Kubrick’s choice to put lights inside the maze is also interesting. I’ve looked around online at lots of real life hedge mazes and I’m yet to find one that has internal lights. Mazes are not intended as a night time or winter activity. It would also be pretty irresponsible of The Overlook Hotel’s management to allow the maze to be accessible during the freezing winter. A gate and padlock would be required for health and safety. The lights along the hedge walls inside the maze parallel the spatially impossible windows inside the Overlook, which also seem to generate their own artificial light.

• •

•

As Wendy and Danny wonder around the maze in the daytime the shot fades to Jack wandering around the hotel lobby, again cross symbolizing the two locations. And as Wendy and Danny walk through the centre of the hedge maze she comments, “Isn’t it beautiful”. On her first day at the Overlook she made the same comment about the Colorado Lounge, “Wow. It’s beautiful”. The Colorado Lounge is a parallel of the hedge maze centre. In one of the scenes missing from the European DVD release Wendy runs from the Goldroom hall into the lobby and sees skeletons, but all the lights are out and Halloran's body is gone. This is strange because several of these lights were on when Jack killed Halloran in the same location. He immediately gave chase to Danny and so wouldn’t have turned back to switch out the lights. However, due to Jack switching on the exterior lights, the lobby is now lit through the windows in a way that mimics the hazy blue lighting of the maze interior.

•

Notice also in the skelton scene that the windows in the Gold Room hallway are lit by extremely close up light sources, as if they are the hotel equivalant of the halogen light alcoves in the maze.

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Even the maze map that we see in the grounds is titled “The Overlook Maze”.

Shifting to a different paradigm Kubrick offers us the concept of a fractal maze – of mazes within mazes. •

The most unmistakable example of this is that when Jack looks down on the table top maze. We see Danny and Wendy walking around the maze centre as if they were antsized, but the really interesting thing here is that the shadow angles cast by the walls are perfectly matched by the shadow angles inside the actual hedge maze (as seen in the steadicam shot of Danny and Wendy that immediately follows).

•

Another example of fractal mazes is that Danny is seen playing with his toy cars on the spaghetti-like carpets near room 237, as if the windy patterns represent tiny roads. This is a small scale parallel of Jack’s car driving through windy mountain roads in the film’s opening. Danny even uses a yellow toy car, just like his father has a life sized yellow car.

•

Another possible hint relating to toy cars is that when Danny and Wendy are having snowball fights, the start of the shot shows the Sno-cat vehicle outside the garage, as if someone has been riding it about and then left it lying around like Danny’s tricycle.

•

And then of course Danny’s tricycle being chased by a camera mimics Jack’s car being chased by a camera.

So this concept of mazes within mazes doesn’t only manifest at the child’s play scale. It also extends beyond the walls of the hotel. The mountain ranges and roads are a grand scale version of the Overlook, which itself looks like a series of mountain peaks. The tallest peak of the Overlook roof is repeatedly framed by a mountain in the background, a simple cross symbolism metaphor.

Perhaps we are to take from this that the Overlook hotel is a representation of America. As Wendy says when walking in the centre of the maze, “I didn’t think it was gonna be this big. Did you?” The table top maze that Jack watched them in seemed to have no edges, as if it went on forever in all directions and the centre was the exit. When Danny and Wendy were racing each other into the maze, Danny said, “The loser has to keep America clean”. Being that Wendy

seems to do all of the work in the Overlook, while Jack writes, it would seem she is keeping America clean. Another example of the mountain ranges being part of a huge coast to coast maze is seen when Halloran is driving to the Overlook in his Sno-cat. He drives down a snowy path, flanked by rows of pine trees – the image parallels Danny and Jack running through the maze.

So why would Kubrick go to all these efforts to create a paradigm of the Overlook hotel as a representation of the United States a whole? The answer is traight forward. Kubrick wanted to create parallels between the surface horror story narrative and his own thoughts on the history of the United States.

CHAPTER TWELVE SLAVERY, CANNIBALISM AND GENOCIDE Now we come to the first of several controversial themes in The Shining – the genocide of Native Americans in early US history. I covered this topic extensively in my previous analysis, in fact it was the main premise of the review, but due to the greatly extended length of this current analysis, the genocide theme will cease to be my central contention about the film’s meaning. I’ll also be changing some of the basic premises of this theme and adding several new details and observations. Occasionally, youtube viewers have accused me of imposing an anti-American political view upon The Shining and that in their opinion the film only contained circumstantial Native imagery. This kind of feedback has virtually always come from American viewers of my videos and so I can only conclude that they felt their heritage was being insulted by my interpretations. So before I continue, I’ll offer a few statements for those who disapprove of the genocide interpretation. The first thing to note is that if you explore my other videos and articles you’ll find that I have more negative things to say about my own country than any other. I’m well-aware that England has a long history of imperialism, slavery and genocide that goes way further back in history than that of the US. In particular my interpretations of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut could just as easily be taken as Anti-English. Another factor is that Stanley Kubrick was American himself, so these genocide themes can’t be written off as an external attack on American pride. His decision to relocate out of America may have been partly due to some dissatisfaction he felt with with the US. I’ll also add that if you’re willing to stomach the criticism of US history contained in this chapter, you’ll find later in this analysis that Kubrick encoded scathingly anti-British themes in The Shining as well. And for those wishing to know my personal stance on this issue, I’ll state for the record that I have very positive views on the US Declaration of Independence. The Constitution and Bill of Rights were great documents, and I’m sure most American’s would agree with my disapproval of how the US government has in recent years been destroying those founding documents. So now let’s crack on with the analysis of Kubrick’s subliminally encoded genocide theme.

While being shown through the Colorado Lounge Wendy asks Ullman “Are all these Indian designs authentic?” and he replies, “I believe most are based mainly on Navajo and Apache motifs.” Then in the Overlook grounds Ullman explains to the Torrance’s “The hotel is built on an old Indian burial ground and I believe they actually had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it.” Ullman also told Jack Torrance during his interview that the “construction began in 1907 and was finished in 1909.” Can this really be the case? I’m no expert on US history, but didn’t most of the clashes between native tribes and settlers take place in the hundreds of years prior to the twentieth century? However, if we remember that Kubrick has

symbolically presented the Overlook as a representation of America itself then Ullman’s statement makes sense. The settlers did fight off several “Indian attacks” as they were building their new country. In the interview scene Ullman has a small US flag on his desk, which is not unusual in the United States, but notice that he is also wearing red, white and blue.

Perhaps intentionally, Danny was also wearing a red, white and blue shirt in his scenes back in Boulder.

An apparent continuity error in the Boulder scenes is that a British Type G (three-pin) socket is shown in the upper right as Danny talks to him self in the bathroom mirror (see above). The film was shot in England so it could just be a mistake. On the other hand, the metaphor of the Overlook as America suggests that the Torrance’s are symbolic settlers. During their drive to the

Overlook they even enter into a conversation about settlers. Wendy, “Wasn’t it around here that the Donner party got snowbound?” Jack, “I think that was further west in the Sierra’s.” Danny, “What was the Donner party?” Jack, “They were a party of settlers in covered wagon times. They

got snowbound one winter in the mountains and they had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive.” The Donner Party cannibalism tragedy was a real part of American history, but Jack’s explanation of it is also symbolic of the coming events for his family. They travel to a hotel that represents America and they become snowbound. Jack then goes crazy and tries to kill his family. And in reference to cannibalism, he calls his family “little pigs” through the bathroom door while doing his big bad wolf impression, implying a desire to eat them. Danny told his Mother during the drive to the Overlook, “Don’t worry Mom. I know all about Cannibalism. I saw it on TV.” Of course he saw it on television – he was watching Roadrunner cartoons, in which Wile E. Coyote tries to catch and eat the Roadrunner. Food is emphasized a great deal in the film, especially in the scenes of Halloran rambling on about all the different types of food in the freezer room and store room. There’s also an emphasis on ketchup. Danny says French fries and ketchup are his favourite food. The camera passes over stacks of giant ketchup tins in the store room – maybe foreshadowing the river of blood and further hinting at cannibalism.

The words “Sliced Peaches” are also seen on boxes in the store room when Jack talks through the door to Grady

In fact there are several very specific uses of brand names in the store room scenes that relate to other subliminal themes, but we’ll return to that later. Moving on from cannibalism, let’s take a closer look at the hotel décor. Although the exteriors of the Overlook are based on The Timberline Lodge, its interiors are inspired by another real life hotel called the Ahwahnee. The photos contained in the following link were sent to me by a former employee of the Ahwahnee in response to my first video analysis of The Shining. As you can see the similarities are unmistakeable. Ahwahnee interior designs. The Ahwahnee hotel also features a large room called the El Dorado Diggins bar which is themed to the California Gold Rush period.

The El dorado Diggns Bar at the Ahwahnee Hotel The mining of gold was an important motive for early settlers and so Kubrick has included a Gold Room in the Overlook hotel, where Jack reminisces with his own past. Its design is very different to the one in the Ahwahnee hotel for reasons which we shall explore in the next chapter. The Ahwahnee design includes plenty of Native American designs in its tapestries and carpets, just as the Overlook does, but there are some key differences of native décor related to The Shining’s hidden narrative. Perhaps the biggest differences are in the Colorado Lounge. Large US and Colorado flags hang above Jack’s writing space in The Shining, but are not featured in the Colorado Lounge at the Ahwahnee.

Kubrick also includes these same flags in the games room set where Danny plays darts.

But the most important difference is that in The Shining Kubrick has included a giant painting of symbolic figures above the Colorado Lounge fireplace.

This is actually a form of Navajo Indian art called a sand painting and its contents hold great symbolic meanings in their culture.

The Colorado Lounge at the Ahwahnee does not feature sand paintings. We could just pass this off as an aesthetic “it looks cool” choice on Kubrick’s part. That is until we pay attention to how the sand painting is used in different scenes. Remember that Jack’s throwing of a tennis ball is used symbolically in the film as a metaphor for axe swinging. In one scene Jack repeatedly throws the tennis ball at the figures featured in the sand painting. One of the figures is dressed in the same shade of blue as the dead twins who Danny saw with an axe near their bodies.

The symbolic connections are undoubtedly deliberate. The murders at the Overlook represent the historical genocide of Native Americans and Jack and his alter-ego Grady represent the perpetrators of the atrocities. Some Navajo sand paintings feature a set of twin figures symbolising Father sky and Mother Earth, which may also be related to the twin concept in The Shining.

The placement of the sand painting figures above a fireplace could even be symbolic of genocide in a sacrificial sense. Incidentally, the imaginary room 237 featured in Danny’s nightmares is almost directly behind the sand painting fireplace. This further supports the theme of room 237 and the Torrance apartment being one and the same. He throws a tennis ball at one and an axe at the other.

Another Native American symbol that may have been deliberately referenced in the maze scenes of The Shining is the widely used Man in the Maze symbol, featured below.

Some email correspondents have also told me that an old Indian warrior trick was to backtrack in their own footsteps to evade detection, just like Danny does. However, I’ve been unable to verify

this in online searches. (If any readers of this article are aware of sourced references to this please

email me the details. Thanks) Jack offers a hint of his pro-genocide philosophy while talking Lloyd in the Gold Room, “White man’s burden, Lloyd my man. White man’s burden.” White Man’s Burden is a Rudyard Kippling poem that was historically used in the US as a justification for white rule over other races. Jack then follows this up with another innuendo relating to settlers in covered wagon times, “Here’s to five miserable months on the wagon, and all the irreparable harm it’s caused me.” His conversation with Grady in the lavatory clearly has a racial hatred element. Grady, “Your son is attempting to bring an outside party into this situation … A nigger.” This of course refers to Halloran, the only character in the film who Jack kills. As a side-note, Kubrick gave readers of the book an unpleasant surprise with his use of the Halloran character. In the book Halloran rescues Danny and Wendy from Jack, but in the film he is unexpectedly axed to death. Halloran’s character is important because he represents both the slaughtered Native American’s and the Black immigrants who were brought in for slavery purposes. He looks very much like a cross-breed between the two races and as head chef, he is a servant of his county’s white guests. His cross-symbolism with natives is demonstrated in the first store room scene. As Danny hears the line “How’d you like some ice cream Doc”, a tin of Calumet baking powder is placed behind Halloran’s head. Both Halloran and the Indian chief design on the tin are viewed at the same angle and the shot zooms in until both their heads fill the screen. Is he a head chef or a chief's head?

The Calumet Baking Powder company is a real business, established in 1889, but this doesn’t mean its presence here is not symbolic. Kubrick often would incorporate real places, products and historical events that circumstantially fitted in with whatever he wanted to communicate. In the documentary Kubrick’s Boxes, some of the research materials in his archives showed just how far he was willing to go in seeking out real world symbols in support of his subliminal narratives. For a simple gate prop in Eyes Wide Shut Kubrick had a photographer take thousands of photos of real gates as reference material. The documentary narrator seemed baffled by this, but it makes very good sense when we take into account that Kubrick attempted to weave symbolism into every creative choice in his film projects. The more aesthetic choices he had, the better. A stack of Calumet tins are also shown behind Jack’s head when he is locked in the store room.

He holds his hand up to his injured head to soothe the pain, which could also be symbolic of his tormented guilt relating to America’s repressed history of Native genocide, which some researchers have claimed to be as horrific as the holocaust (1) (2). Halloran talks of a hidden history to Danny in the kitchen, “I think a lot of things happened in this particular hotel (country) over the years and not all of ‘em was good.” Guilt and denial are essential psychological devices in The Shining. Jack’s guilt about his abusive behaviour toward his son is accompanied by his wife’s denial of the issue and by Danny’s trauma-induced amnesia, but they’re also manifested in terms of genocidal history. In today’s climate of hypocritical equality propaganda American’s are much more aware of this dark aspect of US history, but in 1979, when The Shining was released, it would have been a much more tabboo subject. Hence Kubrick relied on subliminal encoding to bypass potential controversy. Genocide and slavery symbolism creeps into the film on many more levels. In particular, Wendy’s character has been radically altered from a strong and independent blonde in the book to a whimpering dark haired geek in the film who is frequently dressed like a Native American woman.

Jack shows very little love or affection toward her and she waits on him hand and foot, making all the meals and running the boilers in the grimy basement. This is ironic, considering it was Jack who was interviewed for the job. Even the hotel manager, Ullman, seemed to view Wendy as little more than slave labour. While showing the Torrance couple around, he asks Halloran to show Wendy the kitchen – instantly he is assuming her role as a menial worker. Then when he returns to meet her in the kitchen he makes the same assumption, “Dick, can we borrow Mrs

Torrance for a few minutes. We’re on our way through to the basement. I promise we won’t keep her very long.” Again there is an unspoken agreement that she will carry out the menial tasks. It's also worth noting that in order to gain citizenship in their own land after the founding of the US, many Indian women would marry white men. No doubt they were still seen as second class citizens. So perhaps it could be this factor that gives Jack his consistent temper and frustration with his wife. She reminds him of the atrocities committed against these native people. A memory he would much prefer to deny, as some people still do even to this day. When Jack and Grady chat in the lavatory, during the ballroom party, a song by Ray Noble and Al Bowlly plays in the background. It includes the following lyrics, “It's all forgotten now, the

trouble and the pain, forgot in every word I say, forgot in every tear you shed ... our troubles are beyond recall ...”. These lyrics parallel Jack’s repression of genocidal history. The native themes are also manifested in the film’s score. In the opening mountain shots echoed tribal chanting can be heard along with what sound very much like terrified screams. A Penderecki piece, which features native-instrument-like sounds and ritualistic vocals, is used six times – As Wendy sees Danny’s “MURDER” graffiti in a mirror, as Jack kills Halloran, as Jack begins chasing Danny, as Wendy sees Halloran’s body, as she see the party guest, and as she sees the man in a bear costume. One of the most baffling shots is the river of blood emerging from an elevator.

This isn’t just a random aesthetic to scare us. It was used in the very creepy trailer for the film and it pops up in several scenes. The first thing to note is that its design is plucked straight from a lavatory entrance in the Ahwahnee hotel.

Perhaps this is related to the red décor of the lavatory scene where Jack has his racist chat with Grady – implying a genocidal bloodbath. A consistent use of the river of blood image is that it is intercut with shots of Danny screaming directly at the camera with his eyes wide open.

The two floor dials above the elevator doors look suspiciously like glaring eyes and so it seems that Kubrick used the elevator to represent a giant gaping mouth.

This may seem a bit of a stretch, but an important indicator is that the Ahwahnee hotel is located within the Yosemite valley, through which a river runs called the Merced. The Ahwahnee hotel also gets its name from a Miwok tribe called the Ahwahneechees - it translates as “Valley of the gaping mouth”. The Miwok tribe were apparently almost wiped out by disease and had to leave the now renamed Yosemite Valley, hence the Europeans took their place. So considering all the other native genocide references in The Shining, my interpretation is that the river of blood hallway and elevator does indeed represent a gaping mouth in a valley, from which a river of Native American screams and blood are flowing.

A chorus of screams is heard over the elevator shot while Jack and Wendy argue in the bedroom. And the final instance, in which Wendy sees the river of blood, is accompanied by a shot of her terrified face, eyes and mouth wide open. Note that she also looks as if she’s choking, just as Danny was choked by Jack.

The first showing of the blood river, in Danny's first shining version, is accompanied by a rumbling noise, which can be interpreted as the sound of flowing water or the deafening simultaneous screams of thousands or even millions of Native Americans. The river of blood is the final shot of the hotel interior, except for the shot of Jack in the old photo. It seems to indicate a final revelation of America’s hidden history of native genocide. Once Danny and Wendy’s eyes are wide open to this truth they are free to make their escape. Jack’s apparent familiarity with the classically English party guests supports the notion of the family as trans-atlantic settlers. We’ve already identified that his conversation with the Englishman Grady was a conversation with his own reflection. For a more powerful example of Jack’s double identity as an Englishman compare the following two scenes. In the Colorado lounge Wendy discovers Jack's insane manuscript. We cut to a dark and out of focus shot of ballroom photos, which strafes left until we see Wendy reading the manuscript again. An unidentified silhouette steps in from the right. We then hear Jack's voice “How do you like it”. Wendy screams and faces him. Jack has just metaphorically stepped out of the black and white photos of the past and into the present.

Remember that the final shot of the film shows that he was already in the old photos to begin with.

The manuscript scene ends with Jack taking a whack on the head from a baseball bat, from which he bleeds.

Now let's observe the scene where Wendy discovers Halloran's body. She sees his bloody corpse lying on a native art section of floor tiles and the camera also pans across an elevator entrance that is identical to the one from which we see the river of native blood.

Then without seeing or hearing anything she screams and spins to face an apparition that has stepped in from some unknown direction. Just like Jack in the manuscript scene, the ghostly Englishman has stepped in from some mysterious direction. The bleeding gash on his head also parallels Jack's head injury from the baseball bat.

The reason she knew the apparition was there before facing it was that the scene was a repetition of when she was startled by Jack while reading the manuscript. It's as if Jack had let her see Halloran's body and then startled her again by repeating his line “How do you like it?” The Englishman is Jack Torrance, just as Lloyd and Grady were. The themes of a suppressed history of violence and bloodshed in the US are one of Kubrick’s central political themes in The Shining. The Overlook Hotel is a representation of what the settlers have built – a society that is a beautiful paradise on the surface, yet it has menial workers slaving away to maintain the affluence of the upper classes and it forever stands upon the graves of the Indians. The films' characters represent players in the history of America. Their actions are

driven by fear, guilt and denial of what is buried in their past, and which seems destined to repeat itself in an eternal time loop. The famous shot of what appears to be a young Jack Torrance waving to us in an old photo is undoubtedly part of the film’s cryptic messages. The photo is labelled 4th July ball 1921. The 4th of July is of course the declaration of independence, the most important day in US history, but what about the mysterious year 1921? Then there’s the mystery of Jack’s manuscript. The aesthetic overlaps between Wendy discovering the manuscript and discovering Halloran’s body suggest that the manuscript is somehow symbolic of Jack’s genocide motive. Notice that as Jack is typing just before Wendy enters and interrupts him, a close up of his face shows one of the gaping mouth elevator doors directly behind his head – maybe an association between his writing and the river of Native blood.

Another clue is that the shot of Jack throwing a tennis ball (axe) at the Navajo sand painting begins as a close up of his type writer.

Jack absolutely disapproves of any attempt by Wendy, his symbolic Native American wife, at reading anything he has written. Although a large scrap book placed on the desk as he writes appears to contain newspaper clippings, which suggests that his writings are history related.

And then there’s the cross-symbolism between “murder” And “play” suggested at many points in the story, which is most prominent in the dead twins scene. The girls are heard asking Danny to “come and play” with them before we see their blood soaked corpses. Every page of Jack’s documents repeats the phrase “All work and no play (murder) make Jack a dull boy.” He seems to be writing something that will result in murder or genocide. Whatever the content of the document, it is something that Jack considers far more important than his own family. “DOES IT MATTER TO YOU AT ALL THAT THE OWNERS HAVE

PLACED THEIR COMPLETE CONFIDENCE AND TRUST IN ME AND THAT I HAVE SIGNED A LETTER OF AGREEMENT … A CONTRACT !? … IN WHICH I HAVE ACCEPTED THAT RESPONSIBILITY.” In my previous analysis I put forth the contention that the manuscript was a metaphor of the written declaration of independence, but having discussed the issue at length with many correspondents, I’ve now dropped that interpretation. The Declaration of Independence was not in itself the cause of genocide in the US. Another possible meaning for the manuscript is that it could represent the Indian Removal Act, which was a key document that resulted in many native deaths. This would certainly tie in with the genocide themes. There are more possibilities to consider though.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN PART OF THE FURNITURE

Recently I stumbled across a set of articles about the Shining’s symbology by a blogger who goes by the name of Johnny53. Most of his articles interpret the film’s themes very differently to the way mine do, but he certainly has a good eye for detail. In particular he brought to my attention the occurrence of moving chairs in The Shining, which he interpreted as the imaginary friends or doppelganger’s of the film’s characters. Here are some of Johnny53’s observations. In the games room we see two apparently identical shots of the twin girls staring at Danny, but on close inspection two of the chairs in the lower right hand corner slightly change positions between the two shots. We don’t actually see them move, but they are in different positions. I’ll also add to Johnny 53’s observations that the twins actually shift positions slightly. Two more chairs on a table closer to them also move. So do the tables themselves and one of the ash trays.

Later, when we see the two dead girls, a blood stained chair is prominently shown left screen. It’s interesting that the chair is in a toppled position, like the girls are.

When Ullman shows the Torrance’s into the Gold Room there are seven chairs lined up at the bar and they are all evenly spaced. When the shot cuts away from them we see Danny and Ullman’s secretary, Suzi, approaching. The camera pans with them until we see the bar again, but all seven chairs are now in slightly different position. There are also seven characters in the shot – Jack, Wendy, Ullman, Bill, Halloran, Danny and Suzi. Perhaps there is a deliberate correlation between the numbers of characters on screen and the number of chairs that move.

Just in case this concept seems like clutching at straws, take a look at the second Gold Room scene. Jack switches on the lights and enters. The chairs at the bar are evenly spaced, but when the shot cuts closer as Jack approaches the bar, just one of the chairs has altered position. Again this matches the number of characters on screen.

An earlier example occurs during Wendy’s chat with the psychiatrist. The white chair closest to Wendy at the breakfast table prominently shifts positions between shots. Even with the shot sizes changing in distance and angle, the difference in the chair’s position is still very noticeable.

Johnny53’s keen observation of these details prompted me to further study the use of furniture in The Shining. My first question was that if the subtle movement of chairs is intended to match however many characters are on screen, then why do we only see one toppled chair in the shot of the dead twins? Here is a possible answer. There is one toppled chair and there is one picture frame up on the wall that has been knocked so that it has swivelled on its side. Both these items of furniture are also blood stained like the dead twins.

If the chair and picture frame are intended to parallel the bodies then it would seem that chairs are not the only items of furniture that are used symbolically in the film. All items of furniture are now open to scrutiny. The occurrences of moving furniture can, at first glance, be brushed off as continuity errors. However, before you jump to such a conclusion I invite you to look closely at the river of blood sequence, which is broken up into short segments shown at different points in the film, but can be seen in almost it’s entirety in the film’s trailer. After the blood spills out of the elevator, furniture begins to float around, presumably dragged by the current of blood. The blood splashes up over the camera lens, temporarily blacking out the scene, and afterwards we see furniture floating about freely. However, notice that only the chair that was positioned against the right wall is moving. The one on the left wall hasn’t budged an inch. The small pot that is positioned between the elevator doors hasn’t moved either, even though it was right in the path of the blood as it first gushed out. In fact, once the elevator door has fully opened, the river of blood isn’t very deep at all. It only appears deep because the camera lens is washed in red, giving the illusion of the entire room being full of blood. How could the shallow depth of this blood river shift tables and a chair right across the hall? And why do the pot in the centre and the chair on the left wall not move?

My interpretation of these details is that Kubrick is further communicating the film’s hidden theme of furniture moving by its self. It’s a classic cliché for supernatural horror films to show furniture being moved by invisible forces, but in The Shining Kubrick has made use of this theme at an incredibly subtle level. But before we make any attempt at further interpreting any kind of thematic intention of these invisible furniture shifting forces, we first need to gather more information about how Kubrick used furniture props in the film. So far we’ve identified instances of furniture moving in small increments – the games room, the Gold Room, the psychiatrist interview – but there are many other instances in which furniture shifts larger distances or sometimes they shift entirely in and out of specific parts of the hotel. •

The Gold Room sign in the hotel lobby shifts several times throughout the film. Depending on which scene we’re watching, it is either on the left or right side of the doorway to the Gold Room area.

•

When Ullman and the Torrance’s first enter the Colorado Lounge a large rug is visible in the foreground. Once they are alone in the hotel a set of chairs and a table appear on this rug. Danny swerves around them during the first tricycle scene.

•

Whenever we see the mustard coloured hall near the lobby there are red couches against the wall and in between them are mirrors. There is also a mirror prop at the far end of this hall, visible behind Halloran as he walks through before being killed by Jack. In the final shot of the film the camera moves through the lobby and into a framed picture of a younger looking Jack, but the red couches have gone and the mirrors have been replaced by native tapestries. If this is a continuity error then it’s one of the most severe that I’ve ever seen in a big budget film. Another feature that changes in this hall is that when Wendy runs through to see the skeletons, the mirror at the far end of the hall has disappeared.

•

In the room 237 hallway, the props remain in place in each scene except for a black ash tray bin opposite room 237. It shifts to different positions along the hall between scenes. A stack of boxes also disappears from one end of the hall (near the elevator doors) and behind it is a folded up mattress – an identical one is also seen at the opposite end of this hall.

•

In the kitchen Halloran and Danny sit at a table talking about their “shining” experiences. Later Jack is dragged into the storeroom and we see this table scroll by in the background. However, when Jack limps through the kitchen with an axe the table and chairs have shifted several feet closer to the store room.

•

As Wendy tells Jack in the Colorado Lounge that “it’s going to snow tonight” a chair and stool can be seen against a wall behind Jack. They completely disappear in one shot, only to reappear in the next.

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A large wooden object is shown on the centre table in the Colorado Lounge early in the film. After Jack throws the tennis ball at the sand painting – the most prominent shot of the wood carving – it completely disappears for the rest of the film.

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A similar wooden prop sits on a table in the hallway that wraps around the back of Ullman’s office. Jack glances at it just before he sees the party balloons where he later kills Halloran. Immediately after Wendy sees Halloran’s body it disappears.

•

Just after Jack throws the kitchen utensils all over the floor, he turns a corner and behind him is a small brown couch with three pictures above it. When the party guest with the wine glass is seen in this exact same position the wall pictures are gone.

•

The kitchen utensils that Jack scattered also shift position significantly in a later scene. He limps past this same spot and there are none on the floor, even though he kicked one out into the open earlier. Wendy also accidentally kicks one of them as she runs through the same hall where he threw them and we can see that they are in very different positions. The kicking of these props by two characters seems to be an attempt by Kubrick to draw our attention to them. Notice also that a display cabinet disappears between the two scenes.

•

As Wendy and Danny watch TV in the lobby the camera zooms out, revealing that two chairs have disappeared, which were present in the lobby scene at the start of the film.

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As Jack enters the Gold Room on his own several red chairs can be seen to the right. They shift several feet away from the wall a few minutes later as Wendy follows Jack into the room.

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In the Colorado Lounge we see a cream couch facing Jack’s writing desk. This is most visible when he is throwing the tennis ball at the sand painting, but by the time Wendy enters the room with her baseball bat, the couch has disappeared. In the very first Colorado Lounge scene the couch was also positioned the opposite way around, facing away from the writing desk. A large rug in the same location as the couch also disappears when Wendy finds Jacks manuscript.

•

Characters even make a point of randomly touching chairs in some scenes. In the first Gold Room scene Ullman and Wendy touch chairs by the bar. Remember that all seven of these chairs shifted in the next shot. Jack also touches one of the chairs in Ullman’s office before he sabotages the radio. Notice that the chair he touches has significantly shifted position since his interview scene. This was also the same one that Bill Watson sat in when Ullman told him to “Grab a chair” during Jack’s interview.

So what are we to make of all this? Well, so far what we have is basically a collection of apparent continuity errors – some subtle and some extremely prominent. Kubrick wasn’t incapable of continuity errors, but some of these ones would be considered very sloppy work even on a low budget film. And it’s standard practice for continuity personnel on big film shoots to take reference photographs of all sets so as to ensure props are correctly positioned in all scenes that share the same location. The other factors that so far suggest Kubrick deliberately had furniture props move about are A) the matching numbers of characters in relation to moving furniture in some scenes, and B) the furniture that seems to come alive and swim in the river of blood. Now there is something else that much more strongly suggests that the moving furniture is part of a deliberate theme. During the Overlook’s closing day, when Jack and Wendy are shown around the hotel, workmen are seen carrying furniture back and forth in almost every major set. •

In the Lobby they carry chairs, tables and folded up beds in and out of the building. Why are they moving these items about and why in and out of the hotel entrance?

•

In the Colorado Lounge a man is seen moving chairs and stools about in the exact same area as the seemingly mobile cream coloured couch.

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In the same scene a man carries a rug down the stairs. Its design is similar to that of the rug that disappears. Again the question needs to be asked, why are these men shifting the furniture and rugs around?

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Also in the Colorado Lounge is a man vacuuming a red couch near the stairs. Is this a parallel with the disappearing red couch at the end of the film?

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Near the Torrance apartment are a variety of furniture items left in the halls – stools, chairs and a mattress draped over the banister. In fact there are furniture items in most of the blue hallway scenes, including the dead twins scene and the bear costumed man. Again, I ask, why are these pieces of furniture left lying around in the halls?

•

I already noted in a previous chapter that the map outside the maze entrance wasn’t present during Ullman’s guided tour, but if we look at the HiDef version of the film it becomes noticeable that the maze map was originally placed right against the outside of the maze hedge. Later it is replaced by a bench and moves directly in front of the maze entrance, but it moves yet again in the table top version of the maze, this time being placed back against the hedge wall but on the right side of the maze entrance. This is also more noticeable in the HiDef release.

•

Curiously, a worker is also seen brushing the gravel inside the maze entrance. Is this guy supposed to brush through the entire maze? It seems like one hell of a choir.

•

When Ullman guides us into the Gold Room workers are again shown vacuuming and moving furniture about. In this case they are also folding up and removing white sheets.

•

Next we come to Halloran’s tour of the kitchens. The shot begins with a lone worker shifting mounds of luggage into an elevator.

•

And our final shot of Ullman’s tour is in the hallway where Danny later hides from Jack. A worker is seen moving plates about and another is seen moving crates of 7up.

It seems that Kubrick is drawing a consistent parallel between the workers moving furniture during Ullman’s guided tour and the multiple instances of furniture changing position throughout the rest of the film. Could it be that these manual laborers represent some sort of unseen presence in the Overlook? An interesting factor during Ullman’s guided tour is that he twice says “goodbye” to pairs of women, but he ignores all of the other workers and servants. Can he even see them? My interpretation of all this is that the seemingly mobile furniture of the Overlook represents the hordes of slave workers whose manual labor historically built the United States, and who worked behind the scenes to provide a plush lifestyle for the nation's ruling class. This also specifically overlaps with the themes of Native American genocide and black slavery as described in chapter 12. A very interesting statement from Ullman is that in his description of the former caretaker killing his family he claims that Grady “Stacked ‘em neatly in one of the rooms of the west wing”. That’s a really bizarre description. Since when can bloody corpses be stacked neatly? No, I believe this was a verbal hint relating to furniture, which can be stacked neatly.

A very strong assertion of this premise is that in our final view of the Overlook interior, Wendy runs down a hall that is painted red and which is full of neatly stacked chairs and tables. If all these furniture items represent neatly stacked dead bodies, then no wonder the hall is painted completely red. Kubrick showed us in the dead twins’ scene that Grady had made a good start on painting the walls red with the blood from just two murders. It’s only appropriate that Wendy then sees the river of blood gush out of the elevator, spoiling the hotel décor and causing the furniture (bodies) to swim about.

Ullman’s specific reference to Grady’s family being hidden in the “west wing” may even be a reference to the political burying of America’s genocidal history. Another consistent aspect of the Shining’s set designs that may be linked to this is the presence of bold signs relating to cleanliness. There are many of them throughout the film.

This obsession with cleanliness could be linked to the hotel guests and owners consistently wishing to have all evidence of bloodshed in their country washed away, their sins so to speak. It may also be a manifestation of racial fear being that enslaved ethnic groups have often been perceived as dirty by their rulers. There’s an old saying that rich people see their servants as “part of the furniture” and it would seem that Kubrick has taken this phrase and manifested it in the Shining’s visual theme structure. The affluent guests of the Overlook (America) see the hotel servants and workers as objects, existing merely for their own pleasure and comfort. Unknown to them these pieces of furniture are living, breathing people with real emotions and a life of their own. The independent movements of these servants is forever destined to haunt the conscience of their masters, bringing unpleasant disruptions to the illusion of ruling class paradise. In this sense, the unseen menace in The Shining is Kubrick’s bold statement against elitism, which of course has historically been the basis of all forms of discrimination, be they racial, religious or ideological. Now let’s explore the concept of "shining" itself.

HAPTER FOURTEEN SOME SHINE AND SOME DON'T A frequent theme in Kubrick’s films is the concept of enlightenment or spiritual rebirth. In 2001: A Space Odyssey Dave Bowman’s stargate journey resulted in him being reborn as an illuminated child.

Full Metal Jacket also included a paradigm by which brainwashed soldiers were reborn as ghosts of their former selves into a battlefield that represented their own personal hell. In The Shining, enlightenment is so central to the film’s core meanings that it is even present in the film’s title. Being that Danny’s “psychic” visions are simply nightmares and trauma-induced amnesia, the word “shining” acquires a different meaning to that intended by Stephen King. In Kubrick’s cinematic symbology “shining” is a state of clear minded awareness, with particular reference to the process of awakening (awakening was also a central theme in Eyes Wide Shut). Each time Danny “shines” he is breaking through his own psychological barriers of amnesia, the final turning point of which is his nightmare revelations of fatherly abuse in the room 237 dream sequence. Enlightenment also occurs for Wendy. In her encounter with Jack in the Colorado Lounge she finally sees her husband for the abusive psychopath that he is, during which the giant windows blaze directly at the camera in all their glory. We, the audience, are “shining” with her.

Both Danny and Wendy gain strength from their enlightenment about Jack’s true nature. It enables them to fight their abuser. Wendy’s final moment of enlightenment about the hotel’s (America’s) history is when she sees the river of blood. In the close up of her watching in terror, a pair of white lights can be seen on the wall over her left shoulder. The perspective of these lights is identical to Wendy’s glaring eyes. This is important because the concept of enlightenment is often symbolized by bright, shining eyes, implying clear and all-seeing vision.

Enlightenment also occurs for Jack, but with the opposite effect. He is forced to see his own reflection in the Gold Room bar and lavatory mirrors, both of which are framed in bright white light.

So the concept of enlightenment is linked to mirrors because they are “shiny” surfaces that allow Jack to see himself externally. Rather than gaining strength through self-reflection, this form of “shining” drives Jack insane. Where as Danny’s pathology was initially divided by abuse and then reintegrated through enlightenment, the revelation of truth has the opposite effect on Jack. It causes him to go into denial and split his psyche in two because those who intentionally abuse others must always avoid seeing themselves externally for who they are. From this point on, Jack is tormented by imaginary friends, just as Danny was. Kubrick is cleverly and sincerely making use of the popular cultural phrase “take a good look in the mirror”?

Incidentally, here’s another paradigm shift relating to imaginary friends in mirrors. During Danny’s conversation with Halloran, note that both characters are sat with their hands clasped in identical gestures. They are mirroring each other.

Is Danny really talking to Halloran or is he simply talking to himself again? Perhaps the confirmation can be found in that the wide shot shows Halloran positioned in front of the storeroom door. Remember that doors double up as mirrors in this film, and this particular door is the same one through which Jack spoke to his own reflection while hearing the voice of Grady. It’s very likely that this is simply another of Danny’s dream sequences. The concept of “shining” has other subliminal applications in the film. One clue is given in Halloran’s dialogue with Danny in the kitchen, “Some places are like people, some shine and some don’t. I guess you could say the Overlook has something about it that’s like shining.” This is true in a literal sense. In chapter four we explored how several windows in the Overlook could not exist due to hallways and rooms that existed behind the walls in which they were framed, yet we still see bright light shining upon the sets from seemingly non-existent exteriors. This paradigm communicates a concept of false enlightenment, which Jack is drawn to and hypnotized by. In the Colorado Lounge he is shown staring into the false light of the giant windows, utterly fixated, and when Danny finds him sat on the bed he is staring into the false light of the Torrance living room window, again seemingly hypnotized.

In Ullman’s office Jack makes a verbal reference to the allure of false enlightenment. Ullman, “When the place was built in 1907 there was very little interest in winter sports, and this site was chosen for it’s seclusion and scenic beauty.” We immediately cut to a wide shot of the window behind Ullman’s desk as Jack responds, “Well it’s certainly got plenty of that.” The resulting laughter from the three characters further supports the in-joke about the false light from the window.

The hotel does in fact shine. It gives off its own false light through false windows – an illusion of beauty. Jack again talks of his attraction to the Overlook’s false light while eating his breakfast, “I’ve never been as happy or comfortable anywhere. … I fell in love with it right away.” He then follows this up with a historical reference, “When I came up here for my interview it was though I’d been here before. I mean, I know we all have moments of déjà vu but this was ridiculous.” The popular interpretation of Jack’s déjà vu comment, and his youthful appearance in an old photo at the very end of the film, are generally taken as evidence of him having visited the hotel in a previous life. This is the simplest and easiest interpretation, but being that Kubrick has consistently used subliminals to disregard the supernatural narrative, is it likely that he would allow a concept like reincarnation to remain intact? In a later chapter we will explore whether Jack’s supposed reincarnation matches with the film’s finer details, but for now let’s identify who or what exactly is the source of false light that Jack is drawn to.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN THIS IS OUR GOLD BALL ROOM

The following 5 video supplements are based upon some of the concepts outlined in this chapter and include additional information from the SK archives and other sources. Please scroll down to read the more extensive text. Kubrick's Gold Story - part 1

Kubrick's Gold Story - part 2

Kubrick's Gold Story - part 3

Kubrick's Gold Story - part 4

The Shining - end photo mystery solved?

Back in the late 1960’s Kubrick made Dr Strangelove, an incredibly controversial comedy about the possibility of nuclear war. With this film Kubrick revealed an intense distrust and distain for the Pentagon. He even included a sub-plot of an ex-Nazi working at the Pentagon as a consultant - no doubt Kubrick was aware of Operation Paperclip while researching the film. Rather than follow this up with an equally controversial film, Kubrick then developed a unique double narrative story structure for his next project. 2001: A Space Odyssey had a surface level narrative, developed with Arthur C Clarke, to attract big money investors like IBM and NASA on the promise of pro space exploration and pro artificial intelligence themes. The surface level narrative of an alien race guiding man’s evolution also fooled critics and audiences for many years, but beneath this was a separate narrative which was communicated through complex subliminal details. Part of the subliminal narrative in 2001 was an attempt by Kubrick at exposing the corrupt political agendas of the space race, but in particular the film featured a message that the Eye of Providence floating above a pyramid (featured on the US Dollar bill) is a form of false enlightenment and a symbol of pyramid structured tyrannical social control. Twice in the film Kubrick shows the monolith from an angle that makes it appear like a pyramid minus its

capstone, but instead of an illuminated Eye of Providence, Kubrick placed the crescent of a celestial body at the apex. The enlightenment is instead shown as the sun emerging out of the pyramid base.

The social message is a simple one when decoded. Kubrick was telling us that the powerful people at the apex of our social control system are the unenlightened or falsely enlightened, represented by the Moon or Earth crescent as a sleeping eye, and he was calling for people lower down the social hierarchy to achieve intellectual enlightenment and rise up to replace the corrupt powers at the apex. It was a revolutionary message and the story of the astronauts doing battle with the shady HAL 9000 super computer was the story of how people can defeat their seemingly invincible rulers. After 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange, and again he subliminally encoded a secondary narrative. Once again he included anti-conspiratorial messages against the power figures of the western world. This time the Eye of Providence within a capstone was featured on the film’s marketing poster. The main character, Alex, had an eyeball attached to the sleeve of his gang costume, and in the poster he reaches out with a knife so that the eyeball on his wrist is positioned in the centre of the triangle. The image is suggestive of the Eye of Providence

being gouged out of a capstone triangle. Kubrick further disguised this message by having the triangle designed very similar to the letter A’s featured in the “Clockwork Orange” font, so that it looks like Alex is emerging from a giant letter “A”.

Many years later, Kubrick included a very prominent manifestation of the pyramid and eye in his last film Eyes Wide Shut. It was featured on a mask worn by a cloaked figure in the Somerton Mansion scenes. The capstone overlapped the wearer’s eye and the entire mask was painted in colours identical to the Dollar bill.

These days the pyramid and eye is widely rumoured to be a Freemasonic secret society symbol, although Freemasonic Eyes of Providence tend not to feature pyramids below them. The symbol has also been rumoured to belong to an alleged secret society group called the Illuminati. Now before we move on, I first need to make some statements on the subject of conspiracy theories because this is an area of polarized public opinion. Some people lose interest in a discussion as soon as they encounter any information related to conspiratorial interpretations of modern society, while others lose interest in anything that doesn’t interpret our society as conspiratorial to the core. Personally, I’ve found both extremes of the conspiracy theory debate to be equally at fault. Some of the more hardcore conspiracy enthusiasts actually believe the Earth is controlled by a race of shape-shifting lizards living in underground bases. There are even detailed documentary films and books available on the subject that cite a great deal of historical evidence as “proof” of the lizard race theory. I’ve worked with enough schizophrenics over the years who thought they were either Jesus, the Devil or Paul McCartney to be aware of how people can construct a complex non-reality for themselves, so I can assure you here that I’m not going to try and persuade you of any baseless conspiracy theories with this film analysis. On the other hand I must also assert that the evidence of grand scale corruption in our own western back yards during recent years is overwhelming. We were lied to on a massive scale by political leaders and a largely compliant mainstream media that a war with Iraq was completely necessary [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. The evidence of a WMD threat from Iraq was manufactured as a false justification for an imperialistic oil war, yet some people still adamantly refuse to acknowledge this and prefer to be believe that we’re fighting a shadowy network of underground extremists who operate globally to cause mass destruction on whatever level they can – which itself is a conspiracy theory. Any serious attempt to decode Kubrick’s films must allow for the possibility that Kubrick himself may have interpreted our society conspiratorially. The subliminal symbols of 2001: A Space

Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut strongly suggest that this was the case. So I must ask you to join me in the conspiratorial middle ground as we explore The Shining in more detail. I only half suspected that the false enlightenment themes of The Shining were related to the Eye of Providence until an email correspondent pointed out an important set detail in the Colorado Lounge. It’s seen only once in the film. As Wendy leans forward to flick through Jack’s manuscript there is a slightly out of focus strip of colourful designs on the ceiling that do not look like Native American designs. The strip contains alternating blue and red triangles, each with a circular object in the centre. They look very much like the eyeball and triangle design featured on the Clockwork Orange poster. Is this the Eye of Providence?

I began researching the hotel’s upon which Kubrick claimed to have based The Overlook sets. I’d read that the Gold Room lavatory was based upon a bathroom at the Biltmore Hotel. I couldn’t find any verification that such a bathroom existed, but I did find that the Biltmore Hotel contains a hall called the Crystal Ballroom. Here's a map of the room from the Millenium Biltmore Hotel site and below is a snapshot of the room.

Several hotels in the same Millenium chain feature a Gold Room, though they don't look much like the one in The Shining. However, as we're about to discover, Kubrick had some very specific design ideas for The Shining's Gold Room. Although the huge party hall in The Shining features a sign labelling it as simply the Gold Room, listen to Ullman’s choice of words as he guides the Torrance’s inside the hall: “This is our Gold Ballroom”. Bear those words in mind and take a good look at the Gold Room set.

Can you see it yet? The curved arc of the ceiling against the rear wall, and the straight alcoves of light running the length of the ceiling, create a giant image of the blazing Sun or Eye of Providence. There are three scenes in the Gold Room and each one shows a long tracking camera movement in which we see this blazing globe.

The gold room symbolically represents a “gold ball” or blazing sun, just as the Biltmore Hotel features a “crystal ball” room.

But why would Kubrick do this? Well, the plain and simple answer is that the rich party guests represent either the Freemasons, Illuminati or whatever elitist political crowd placed the eye of providence on the Dollar bill. An important detail of the dollar bill pyramid is that its base has 13 steps or social hierarchy layers. This is very clearly referenced as Ullman explains the maze, “The walls are thirteen feet high”. Notice that the maze includes pyramid capstone trimmings along the tops of the walls. Being that the maze and the hotel are symbolically the same, this is a round about way of telling us that the Overlook and hence America, is the iron mountain or pyramid featured on the Dollar bill. Remember also that we saw capstone and eye symbols on the ceiling of the Colorado Lounge, and the hotel and maze feature capstone-like structures along the top.

Another detail on the Dollar bill pyramid is that it features the Roman numerals 1776. Some sources say that the Eye of Providence seal was suggested for the dollar bill by design committees during the declaration of independence in 1776, but others claim that this refers to the birth date of the Bavarian Illuminati, a secret society with apparently conspiratorial aspirations for world power. It seems likely that Kubrick believed the latter in relation to the Dollar bill pyramid. The photograph that Jack appears in at the end of The Shining is inscribed with Overlook Hotel, July 4th Ball, 1921. The 4th of July is the declaration of independence, which occurred in 1776, but remember also that in the film’s symbology the word “ball” refers to the sun or Eye of Providence. So the “July 4th ball” more likely refers to the all-seeing eye of the 1776-born Illuminati. Incidentally, the historically accepted date for the inception of the Illuminati was May the 1st 1776. Listen to Jack ranting to his wife as the giant windows of the Colorado Lounge blaze in false light behind him. “Has it ever occurred to you that I have agreed to look after the Overlook hotel until May the first!” So we have the Illuminati inception referred to by exact date and year. (Note: the year 1921 is featured on the photograph inscription. This has been a source

of confusion for some time, but I’ll be returning to it with a specific interpretation later in this chapter). There are other details that further suggest the Gold Room décor to be an illuminated Eye of Providence or sun symbol. In the storeroom scenes there are two interesting brand names written on cardboard boxes that were apparently made up for the film. One reads “Texsun” and the other reads “Golden Rey”. Sunrays are what the Eye of Providence or sun emit.

Cross references with The Shining’s sun symbolism were also featured in Kubrick’s follow up film Full Metal Jacket. In one of the final scenes the soldiers manage to flush out a sniper, who turns out to be a woman dressed quite distinctly to look like a Native American woman.

As she fires her Kalashnikov machine gun, a large golden sphere symbol is featured on the wall behind Joker (the soldier she is firing at) and in its centre is a Swastika sun symbol as used by native tribes (not the tilted Nazi version).

Take a good look at this sun symbol and compare it to the giant one in the Gold Room. There even appears to be markings in the Gold Room’s sun walls that are vaguely reminiscent of the swastika (clearer in the HD version). Perhaps this is one of Kubrick’s examples of a metaphor that is easier to decode when his films are cross-referenced.

More clues can be found in the Gold Room. Notice that there are no sunrays running along the centre of the ceiling. This undoubtedly has made it more difficult for audiences to notice the sun symbolism of the room, but as Jack dances about during the party scene we get to see another piece of the message. A woman in a white gown strolls past Jack and on her backside is an unusual red marking. In the standard DVD release it looks like a hand print, which I couldn’t make sense of, but in the HiDef version the marking is much clearer. It shows a small red sphere with four rays coming from it at the same angles as the missing sun beams in the ceiling design.

Just a minute later Kubrick has Jack wipe his Advocat stained hand on Grady’s back, leaving a visible mark. This could well be a subtle hint that we are supposed to pay attention to the marking on the woman’s dress. Notice also that this same woman has a feathered plummage emerging from the front of her forehead - the place where the "third eye" or "inner eye" is said to be located in enlightenment philosophies (Inner eye symbols were also used in 2001: A Space

Odyssey in the space craft hostess's uniforms and in the eyelid-like doors of the discovery ship, which opened to reveal the eyeball shaped spacepods).

So in the costume of the woman in the Gold Room we have yet another piece of cross referencing between enlightenment and sun symbolism. In tongue in cheek fashion, Kubrick seems to be implying that the party guests think the sun shines out their arses. Or he may simply be calling them “assholes”, just as with the orgy sequence of Eyes Wide Shut he was calling the European nobility decadent perverts (notice how the paintings on the sets mirror the orgy participants). Halloran also described the hotel occupants as “assholes” in one of his phone calls, “We’ve got a very serious problem with the people taking care of the place. They turned out to be completely unreliable assholes.” Here’s another possible hint of sun symbolism in the Gold Room. Wendy is seen bringing breakfast in bed to Jack, strangely delivered from the Gold Room hallways, but a caption screen before hand says “A month later”. How can there be any eggs available if the Torrance’s have been in the hotel a month? They’d have spoiled weeks ago. Perhaps the symbolic answer can be found in Wendy’s dialogue, “I made ‘em just the way you like ‘em, sunny side up.” Another metaphor relating to the all-seeing eye was first used in 2001. After the stargate sequence seven octahedrons were shown mysteriously floating through space, each of them sucking light

inwards over a transparent red landscape. At the very beginning of the shot a white, glowing lower case letter “i” scrolled past in the landscape, symbolizing an “illuminated eye”. In the following shot the octahedrons were removed and the landscape was flipped upside down so that the illuminated “i” was flipped to the top of the screen and the light was restored to the landscape. This mirroring or flipping of the image also hinted that the octahedrons represent pyramid capstones, mirrored at the base. It sounds bizarre, but it appears Kubrick wanted his anti-secret society messages to remain well hidden for some time.

Kubrick again uses the concept of an illuminated letter “i” in The Shining to symbolize the Eye of Providence. The illuminated framing of the mirrors at the Gold Room bar form giant letter “i”s and when Jack sits down we can see that the illuminated section of the bar surface forms another illuminated lower case “i”. This "i" is very similar to the angled one featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it's on the left side of the screen as opposed to the right - the mirrors right screen even hint at this. And to further enforce the symbol we can see the giant eye and sunrays dominating the background of the shot.

The seven diamonds or octahedrons from 2001 also make an appearance in The Shining. A tapestry near Ullman’s office features a criss-cross pattern that forms seven diamonds.

Directly behind this tapestry, on the other side of the wall, are crates of the soft drink 7up, seen when Jack throws utensils across the floor.

In our first close up view of this tapestry Jack stands dead centre screen with his head placed over the exact centre of the tapestry. The shot composition is also mirrored, just as the diamonds of 2001 were pyramid capstones mirrored at the base.

This strange cross symbolism between Kubrick films was an incredibly subtle encoding technique. The individual details have no apparent meaning until the films are cross referenced. Another of Kubrick’s encoding techniques for showing the Eye of Providence above a pyramid was what I’ll call "flattened perspective". The visual symbol only becomes apparent when the viewer abandons their three dimensional perception of the screen content and instead views the film as a flat surface of light and colour. One of the best examples of this is at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The monolith is shown several metres away from Bowman as he reaches his hand out from the bed to touch it, but when the shot cuts to a different angle we see Bowman in the lower third of the screen with the monolith in the upper two thirds. If we view this as a flat image we can see that Bowman only has to stretch a few inches to touch the monolith surface. It’s at this point of flattened image contact that he is reborn as an illuminated baby. He has connected with the reality that the screen content is simply a flat surface.

The flat perspective method was also used in the council meeting scene of 2001 to encode a pyramid and eye image. Our view of Floyd giving his speech showed the table in a pyramid formation with Floyd at the apex and a white cinema screen behind him. During the stargate the light patterns began to fill up the screen with pure white, as if draining away the colours of the film to reveal an empty cinema screen, before cutting to a close up of a human eye followed by a dazzling explosion. If the eye or explosion is mentally projected over the blank white screen in the council meeting then the pyramid and Eye of Providence symbol is completed (see chapter 11 of the 2001 analysis for more details).

A less complex example was used in the tramp beating scene of A Clockwork Orange. Alex and his gang approached the tramp from a bright shining light source depicted at the apex of a pathway, which if viewed in flat perspective formed a pyramid.

In the Shining we get another of these flat perspective pyramids with false enlightenment at the apex. This one occurs in the slow lead up to Halloran’s death. Halloran walks through the hotel Lobby with the camera following behind him. There is a single onscreen light source – a chandelier outside Ullman’s office. Combined with the angle of the floor patterns, and if viewed in flat perspective, we see a pyramid with the illuminated chandelier at the apex. Notice also how Kubrick has carefully framed the shot so that the chandelier remains visible over Halloran's shoulder instead of the shot composition being perfectly symmetrical.

Of course this could just be an accident, so rather than just believe my interpretation I invite you to examine the use of chandeliers throughout the entire scene. Halloran’s shouting of “Hello, is anybody here?” is first heard as Jack limps through a side entrance to the lobby. From over his shoulder we can see again that there is only one chandelier switched on, but it’s not the one near Ullman’s office. It’s the one by the reception.

Is this a blatant continuity error or a hint that the switching of lights was deliberate? Also think about the timing of the flat perspective pyramid and illuminated apex motif. It occurs in the immediate build up to Halloran’s death. The message here seems to be that whoever placed the Eye of Providence on the Dollar bill was also responsible for the genocide of the Native Americans, represented by Halloran. In chapter nine we explored how the ghostly figures of Grady and Lloyd the bartender were basically reflections of Jack talking to himself. We also identified that the party guest with the wine glass was simply another manifestation of Jack. The Englishness of these alter egos is important because it establishes Jack as a symbolic member of the Gold Room party crowd. A very brief shot of Jack in the making of documentary even shows him in a tuxedo.

His banter with Grady that he has “plenty of jackets” plus the casual way in which he is greeted as one of the club, is an outright announcement that in this scene Jack is really dressed in a tuxedo and that the presence of his cheap clothes is simply a visual lie to keep the audience locked into the surface narrative. There is also a cross symbolism between the ballroom party and the slaughter of the natives. Jack first hears the music of the party while wandering about in the halls, at which point he sees balloons and party confetti scattered about the lobby.

However, when he strolls into the Gold Room party there are no party balloons or confetti anywhere, not even in the adjoining hall.

The answer to this riddle is simple. The so-called "party" is a celebration of native genocide. The balloons and confetti appear in the lobby because that’s where Halloran is murdered. After Wendy sees his dead body the party guest with the gash in his head confirms the genocide celebration metaphor, “Great party isn’t it.” And it’s confirmed yet again as Wendy sees the skeletons in the lobby. They’re dressed up in party gear, they’re surrounded by bottles of wine, and a couple of party paraphernalia items can be seen on one of the tables.

The term “Gold Ball” as a metaphor for the sun may also apply to the tennis ball Jack throws about. The cross symbolism between tennis ball (sun) throwing and axe swinging provides yet another reference that the falsely enlightened party crowd are responsible for genocide. In the HiDef DVD I noticed the following postcards in one of the reception area scenes. They appear to show yellow weather balloons floating about. Perhaps these are just innocent postcards or perhaps they're related to the tennis ball and sun symbolism - it's difficult to tell as they're barely visible in the shot.

In several of Kubrick’s films candle motifs are used to symbolize the falsely enlightened because they are similar in appearance to illuminated letter “i’s. In 2001, Bowman defeated HAL by unscrewing and exposing the cells of HAL’s brain. These cells had the appearance of candles or letter “i”s. Rather than switching the lights off Bowman exposes them, so to speak.

Bowman’s final rebirth into enlightenment occurred in a room that was mysteriously lit through the floor while the candles in the walls were unlit.

The candle motif for the falsely enlightened was also prominently used in the subliminal narrative of Barry Lyndon, and here in The Shining Kubrick uses circle formations of candle shaped light bulbs in the chandeliers. 2001’s motif of an astronaut unscrewing candle-like lights to defeat his computer opponent is re-used in the first Gold Room scene of The Shining. A man is stood on a step ladder unscrewing bulbs from a chandelier.

The ladder itself may also be representative of the pyramid or mountain seen on the Dollar bill. In the Closing Day section of the film we see a view of the Overlook beneath a mountain. And the top of the mountain features a ring of clouds around its peak. This image fades to a shot of a ladder viewed perfectly side on in the lobby with a chandelier passing just behind its apex, just like the one in the Gold Room was viewed side on with a chandelier at the apex. The camera then strafes sideways from the ladder (pyramid) and across the same view of the lobby hall that we see when Halloran is killed, and again lit chandeliers are seen at the apex of the hall. It’s almost like Kubrick is whispering at us, saying “Just perceive the hallway and chandelier in its perceptually flattened out form like the ladder”.

It can be argued that Kubrick simply used that chandelier design because he’d seen it in the designs of the Ahwahnee hotel, but it’s important to remember that Kubrick was an expert opportunist. Rather than just create artificial symbols out of thin air, he preferred to hunt down aspects of the real world that co-incidentally fitted in with the themes he wished to communicate – it was one of his methods of plausible deniability. For example, the elevator door design was also borrowed from the Ahwahnee hotel, but Kubrick used it to symbolize a gaping mouth. In fact the entire film can be considered in the same context. Kubrick borrowed the bare plotline narrative of Stephen King’s best selling horror novel not because he simply liked it, but because the book just happened to provide a raw template for Kubrick to encode his own story of genocidal history. Kubrick’s choice of a series of imposing mountain range shots in the opening scenes may have also been linked with his desire to encode these pyramid and eye of providence metaphors. In particular, the sun shines over mountain peaks creating lens flares across the screen – quite simply, the mountain peaks are shining. The presence of Indian-like screaming in the opening score also reaches its peak at the exact moment at which the sun's lens flare reaches its peak of brightness.

The battle against elitism was one of Kubrick’s primary motives as a film maker. It infected all of his films from Dr Strangelove right through to his final film Eyes Wide Shut. Early in The Shining he even identifies this directly with dialogue. As Ullman proudly shows off the Colorado Lounge we hear the following: Ullman: “This place has had an illustrious past. In it’s heyday it was one of the stopping places for the jet sets … even before anyone knew what a jet set was. We had four presidents who stayed here. Lotsa movie stars.” Wendy: “Royalty?” Ullman: “All the best people.” That’s quite an elitist statement. The framed photos displayed in the Overlook all seem to be based around the same crowd of people. The figures in these pictures are frequently shown out of focus so that they appear as luminous apparitions.

The film is set in the 1970’s and so there should be a variety of colour photos relating to more recent decades in the hotel’s history, but they’re all black and white and all seem to be depicting some historical celebration or party event. Not only that, but the hotel shown in these pictures isn’t the Overlook. It's another location entirely. Could the depicted party event be the declaration of independence or the formation of the Bavarian Illuminati, being that those events are also referenced elsewhere in the film? Maybe. However, there is one particular detail that suggests a different historical event. The final photo of the film features the date 1921. I’ve searched around a great deal to find historical events related to that year and I’ve only found two things that resonate with the other themes described in this analysis. The first is that 1921 was the year of retirement from office for the US president Woodrow Wilson, who handed over all control of America’s banking systems to the privately owned Federal Reserve. The result of this was America’s abandonment of the gold standard, the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the great depression. Note that the exact date of retirement of Wilson was March 4th 1921 and the date July 4th 1921 is shown in the photo of Jack waving goodbye to us. Possibly significant concerning the 4th of July is this speech given by Woodrow Wilson on 4th July 1914 at Independence Hall. In it Wilson very cleverly dismisses the Declaration of Independence as an irrelevant historical document, no longer applicable to America.

Possibly in relation to Jack's awful typing skills, I stumbled across the following 1913 New York Times article that mocked Woodrow Wilson's typing skills. Being that Jack is charged with “taking care” of the Overlook, which as noted is a representation of America, it’s only logical that he represents one of its Presidents. Several more details imply that Jack symbolizes Woodrow Wilson specifically. In the Gold Room party scene, Jack offers to pay for his drink and is told, “Your money’s no good here. Orders from the house.” When he enquires “I’m a man who likes to know whose buying their drinks Lloyd”, the bartender answers, “It’s not a matter that concerns you Mr Torrance. At least not at this point.” These cryptic innuendos make sense if we consider Jack as an incarnation of President Woodrow Wilson and his relationship to America’s monetary system. In particular “Orders from the house” could be a reference to Colonel Mandell House, the personal advisor who guided Wilson in surrendering the US government’s right to issue currency to the private bankers. Another possibility is that “Orders from the house” could be referring to the European-based House of Rothschild, a banking dynasty which had dominated and controlled the majority of Europe’s central banks for hundred’s of years and which was also rumoured to be the behind-the-scenes controlling force of the Federal Reserve System. As we’ve noted, March 4th 1921 is the date that Woodrow Wilson retired. It's exactly two months out from the July 4th date presented on the photo of Jack. And so in the final photograph we see Jack as the Master of Ceremonies, or President, waving goodbye (or saying hello) to us. A very important detail is that a man stood behind Jack has his hand placed upon Jack’s raised arm as if about to pull him back into the crowd and out of our sight.

And an even more important detail, noticeable in the HiDef release, is that in the palm of Jack’s hand is a small folded up piece of paper, held under his thumb.

Another reference is that the man with his hand on Jack's arm is almost a dead ringer for a young Woodrow Wilson, bar the moustache. And the woman with him could easily pass for Woodrow's wife Edith Wilson. Notice also that the woman has a broach on her dress that looks like a combination between a heart and a dove. The only online references I could find between this and Edith Wilson was that the french apparently gave her a diamond Peace Dove broach during America's involvement in the failed League of Nations, later to resurface as the United Nations, but then it may just be a broach.

If this family resemblance is correct then it's a clever trick by Kubrick, as audiences would ineveitably focus their attention on Jack's face. Another possibility, and I know I'm stretching on this one, is that the woman at Jack's side bares strong similarity to Woodrow Wilson's daughter Margeret Woodrow Wilson.

The lyrics of a ballroom song called “Midnight, the stars and you” are heard as we puzzle over this photo, and they emphasize the importance of whatever message is conveyed in Jack’s hand, “Your eyes held a message tender, saying ‘I surrender all my love for you’.” Whatever message is held in Jack’s hand is absolutely crucial to the meaning of the 1921 photograph. Here’s a Woodrow Wilson quote that links many of these ideas together: “I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” -Woodrow Wilson, after signing the Federal Reserve into existence. There is some debate over exactly when and where Wilson spoke these words and there are some variations on its exact wording. Some sources even claim it’s a fraudulent quote. Resolving such a

matter is beyond the scope of this article and therefore I invite the reader to explore the issue for themselves. Here’s another quote from a policy article written by Woodrow Wilson called The New Freedom. (the quote can be found near the beginning of the article) “Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it. They know that America is not a place of which it can be said, as it used to be, that a man may choose his own calling and pursue it just as far as his abilities enable him to pursue it; because today, if he enters certain fields, there are organizations which will use means against him that will prevent his building up a business which they do not want to have built up; organizations that will see to it that the ground is cut from under him and the markets shut against him. For if he begins to sell to certain retail dealers, to any retail dealers, the monopoly will refuse to sell to those dealers, and those dealers, afraid, will not buy the new man's wares.” Perhaps the note in Jack’s hand refers to one or more of these quotes by Woodrow Wilson. And even if the quotes and the books that cite them amount to nothing more than hearsay, it’s still possible that Kubrick believed them. The various topics he chose as film subjects required him to study history extensively. This all perfectly ties in with the anti-elitist messages of The Shining. Extending this interpretation further, it must also be noted that the Federal Reserve Act which Wilson secured a legal passage, was allegedly conceived and written by a cartel of powerful banking families operating through a private club called the Jekyll Island Club. The Jekyll Island Club Hotel, where the group held their meetings, is still going today and its website boasts the following:

“At the turn of the century, tycoons, politicians, and socialites flocked to Jekyll Island to revel in their own luxury and America's burgeoning wealth. The JekyllIsland Club was described in the February 1904 issue of Munsey's Magazine as ‘the richest, the most exclusive, the most inaccessible club in the world.’ Its impressive members included such luminaries as J.P. Morgan, William Rockefeller, Vincent Astor, Joseph Pulitzer, William K. Vanderbilt, and other recognizable names on the roster were Macy, Goodyear, and Gould.” And here’s another quote from the same page on the hotel’s site, specifically related to the Federal Reserve Act. “Because of the concentration of internationally prominent business leaders, the JekyllIsland Club has been the scene of some important historical events, such as the first transcontinental telephone call placed by AT&T president Theodore Vail on January 25, 1915. Finance, as well as politics, was of paramount concern to many club members. J.P. Morgan could create or quell economic panics on Wall Street with the financial resources at his personal command. George Baker, head of the First National Bank of New York, and James Stillman, head of the National City Bank of New York, also members of the Jekyll Island Club, were nearly as wealthy as Morgan. In 1907 when a particularly virulent economic panic caused a run on the banks, one of

these three men paved the way for a secret meeting on Jekyll. Travelling under assumed names, Senator Nelson Aldrich, four other bankers of national importance, and the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury made their way to Jekyll posing as duck hunters. Meetings the following week led to the development of the Aldrich Plan, which called for a centralized banking structure for the country. Although Congress did not pass the plan in 1912, President Woodrow Wilson and others used the Aldrich Plan as the basis for another plan that became the Federal Reserve Act, establishing the Federal Reserve System.” Incidentally, while researching the history of the Jekyll Island Club, I found that the island features a location called Driftwood Beach. This links in yet again with the symbolism in The Shining, although possibly by mere accident. The strange pieces of misshaped wood seen on tables in the Colorado Lounge and near Ullman’s office are actually pieces of Driftwood.

Drftwood is basically twisted dead trees that sometimes wash up on beaches and are often used for ornamental décor.

Another possible interpretation of the year 1921 in Ihe Shining is that it could refer to the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR is a powerful think tank and foreign policy group that has had great influence on US politics and economics since its inception and has included the membership of many presidents, as well as some of the same family bloodlines that were involved in the Jekyll Island Club. As far as I can tell, the CFR is not specifically referenced elsewhere in The Shining, but in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr Heywood Floyd tells the members of his private moon base meeting “Anyway, this is the view of the council”, at which point the camera angle shifts to show the pyramid and capstone symbolism of the room’s table with its illuminated screen at the apex. Here are links to documents that verify the CFR’s interest in space exploration [1] [2]. The case for CFR references in 2001: A Space Odyssey are plausible, but in The Shining references to Woodrow Wilson and the passing of the treasonous Federal Reserve Act are more prominent as an explanation for the year 1921.

Soldiering on with conspiracy territory, (we may as well get it all out the way in this chapter) Ullman describes in the Gold Room that, “We can accommodate 300 here very comfortably”. If Kubrick really was a firm believer in conspiracy concepts like the Illuminati then he may also have had concerns about a slightly less well-known conspiracy theory – the Committee of 300, and hence this would be Ullman announcing to us which organisation the party guests represent. Ullman’s mention of “Royalty” as “All the best people” is probably an important motif in The Shining. Kubrick’s prior film, Barry Lyndon, openly showed the ridiculous lengths that

ambitious men will go to in pursuit of a Royal title in the British Honours System, also known as the Peerage System. This is a point at which Kubrick was exploring elitism that can absolutely be verified – ie there’s nothing theoretical in the matter. It’s absolute historical fact that Britain has a nobility club extending across the globe – part family bloodline and part loyalty-earned membership. In The Shining the circular formation of candle-like light bulbs in chandeliers at the apex of a pyramid during Halloran’s death could be related to the concept of Royal peerage. That’s a long shot, but remember that to crack the code of a Kubrick film no stone should be left unturned. While researching this article, I also found that hedge mazes were originally created as amusement for king’s and prince’s. Interesting. Kubrick also liked to use phonetic puns to communicate his subliminal narratives and so Halloran’s comment over his telephone that, “I’m supposed to go up there (the Overlook) and find out if they have to be replaced,” could be jokingly referring to Halloran replacing the chandelier bulbs or falsely enlightened leaders, much like the step ladder guy in the Gold Room. Of course once he gets near the lit chandelier in the lobby he is murdered instantly. Ullman, despite his polite persona, seems to be in cahoots with Jack regarding false enlightenment. He sits in front of a falsely illuminated window while interviewing Jack in his office, he gives all the practical and menial hotel work to Wendy as if it’s a given and he overlooks the presence of menial workers carrying furniture and luggage about the hotel. Could it be that he’s hired Jack for the job of president? The reports that I’ve read about the deleted ending of The Shining, in which Ullman visits Wendy and Danny in a hospital, pretty much confirm that he is indeed a high ranking figure of the elitist crowd that Jack serves during his term in office at the Overlook, but that’s a subject we’ll return to later. Before we move on to the next chapter, if you’re not familiar with a lot of the conspiracy theories discussed here then you may well be jumping to a “Rob’s a bit of a nutter” conclusion. I’ve found that any mention of modern day conspiracies generates that reaction from a small number of readers, regardless of the evidence available. It basically amounts to wishful denial from people who want to maintain an illusion that modern governments care about their populations. Although I don’t necessarily believe in the Illuminati, the Committee of 300, the New World Order and so on I will say that the vast majority of centralized governments throughout history, be they Roman, Chinese, British, Russian, German or American, have shown themselves time and time again to be driven by the aspirations of corrupt groups of men who wish to live in luxury as an unchallenged elite. Only a fool could fail to recognise that fact. Kubrick knew it and whether he successfully pointed his accusing finger at the right people or organizations is not a matter I can resolve on your behalf. This chapter is simply my attempt to help you hear Kubrick’s conspiratorial messages.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN DANNY’S ORDEAL The video below is loosely based on this chapter and chapter 17 of this analysis. Alternatively scroll down and read the more detailed text version.

One of the most frequent questions I’ve received about The Shining is “What does the guy in the bear costume mean?” The popular interpretation is that the scene is a throwback to a subplot of Stephen King’s book, in which a party guest in a dog costume has a homosexual relationship with one of the hotel’s former owners. For a detailed description of this subplot follow this link. The first thing to note is that in the film the guy is dressed in a bear costume instead of a dog costume.

A shift from dog to bear costume doesn’t have any significant effect on the aesthetic scariness of the scene so there must have been some sort of logic at work in Kubrick’s decision. The second obvious factor is that Kubrick has omitted the entire back story associated to the dog costumed man in the book, leaving his audience at a complete loss as to the scene’s meaning. In researching the film I have found three thematic interpretations of the bear man scene and I believe Kubrick intended all three of these metaphors as part of the subliminal narrative. This chapter will cover the first of those themes. There are actually several other references in the film to bears. The easiest one to notice is in the scene of Danny talking to the psychiatrist. In the close up of Danny we see that his pillow has a teddy bear face on it. Look carefully at this teddy pillow. Its eyes are similar in design to the floor

dials of the gaping mouth elevator, which we’ve already identified as symbolic eyes, and the teddy’s mouth is bright red, which again is similar to the gaping mouth doors of the elevator.

Another connection is that both of these bear motifs are featured in relation to beds or bedrooms. Now I won’t beat around the bush by building up to my interpretation of this theme. Some readers will probably disapprove or take offence at what I’m about to say regardless of how I explain it, so I’ll just say it outright. Danny has been sexually abused by Jack. Here is a piece of

evidence which on its own acts as virtual confirmation of this theme. When Ullman and Bill Watson approach Jack in the lobby on Closing Day, Jack is reading a January 1978 issue of Playgirl Magazine.

First of all there’s the obvious homosexual innuendo, but the story titles featured on this particular issue include the following: INTERVIEW: THE SELLING OF (STARSKY & HUTCH’S) DAVID SOUL INCEST: Why parents sleep with their children. HOW TO AVOID A DEAD END AFFAIR. Of course the caption relating to incest is the one that’s relevant to this chapter, while the Starsky & Hutch caption may be a reference to Jack giving his soul for a drink and the affair caption could be related to Jack’s encounter with the woman in room 237. Notice how Ullman even points his finger at the magazine as if informing us of its significance. Returning to the comparisons between the bear costumed man scene and Danny talking to the psychiatrist, sexuality is subtly referenced in both scenes. The bear man appears to be giving felatio to the man on the bed, just as the dog man in the book was carrying out a sexual submission role with his partner. The open patch on the bear man’s behind in the film simply adds to the sexual emphasis.

In the psychiatrist scene Danny lays on the bed with his jeans removed and his hands curiously covering his groin area, just as Jack did in the fatherly love scene.

The dialogue of the scene is full of innuendos about abuse. Danny: "Tony is a little boy that lives in my mouth." Doctor: "If you were to open your mouth could I see Tony?" Danny: "No." Doctor: "Why not?" Danny: "Because he hides." Doctor: "Where does he go?" Danny: "To my stomach." Doctor: "Does Tony ever ask you to do things?" Danny: "I don’t wanna talk about Tony any more." Another bear reference is found in Danny’s bedroom at the Overlook. Ullman shows the Torrance’s their apartment and Jack, not Wendy, steps forward and peaks into the child’s room. Directly above Danny’s bed is a framed picture of two bears, one standing and one sitting.

The bears are only discernible in the HD version. Of all the places in the film that a picture of bears could appear this one is right above Danny’s bed and there are no other framed bear pictures in the film. It’s also possible that the framing of the bear picture is a parallel of the felatio bear being seen within a door frame. And the parallels continue. Our partial view of the felatio bear, before he leans back from the bed, matches our partial view of Danny brushing his teeth before his first Shining vision.

Is this implying that Jack forced his son to perform felatio in the fatherly love scene? This concept is further paralleled in our first view of Danny’s bedroom in the Overlook. Next to the bed is a mirror above a sink and in front of the sink is a stool for the child to stand on, just as he was stood on a stool when brushing his teeth.

We identified in previous chapters that Jack strangled Danny in the fatherly love scene and with these new details it would seem that he also sexually abused his son during this event. Jack’s manifestation as a rotten, naked old woman in the room 237 dream sequence parallels the horrific physical disgust Danny would have felt during his nightmarish ordeal. It’s now even more clear why Kubrick chose such a sombre piece of music for the fatherly love scene. Here’s another parallel. Danny (manifested as his own father in room 237) embraces the naked woman and sees the horror of his predicament in a mirror. Jack embraced Danny on the bed in the fatherly love scene, from which Danny would have also been able to see his own predicament in a mirror. This is the same mirror in which Wendy hugs Danny before seeing the REDRUM graffiti on the bathroom door. Not only that, but Wendy is wearing Jack’s blue robe. There are lots of parallels going on here.

There is also an odd Mickey Mouse parallel. Mickey and Minnie Mouse stickers are shown on Danny’s bedroom door as he brushes his teeth and in the fatherly love scene he wears a Mickey Mouse sweater.

Many people have asked me about the significance of the number 42 on Danny’s T-shirt in the tooth brushing / shining scene.

I don’t go for number interpretations generally, but here I’ll make an exception. In the lobby Danny and Wendy watch a film called Summer of ’42, which is about a young man who has an affair with an older woman.

This is right before the fatherly love scene. The number 42 was shown on Danny’s shirt as a parallel with the sexual relationship content of the film Summer of ‘42, and Danny is wearing it in the early summer scenes of the film. The particular scene from Summer of ’42 that we see on the lobby television shows the older woman telling the young man to sit down while she makes lunch for him. Wendy parallels this in her last line of dialogue to Danny as he runs to get his fire engine: “Make sure you come right back 'cause I’m gonna make lunch soon”. The film within a film parallel is also hinted at by the television content initially filling up our entire view of the scene before zooming out to reveal Danny and Wendy in the lobby. The complete lack of wires running to the TV, pointed out by of my correspondents, may also be related to the concept of a fractal film. These observations could easily be interpreted as evidence that Wendy has also had an incestuous relationship with Danny, but my guess is the “older woman” relationship refers to the woman in room 237, who we know is simply a dream manifestation of Jack.

There seems to be many hints in the film that Wendy is aware of her son’s abuse and is covering up and denying the issue. Her gullible belief of Danny’s room 237 story is plain silly. When the psychiatrist asks Danny “Who's Tony” Wendy, stood defensively with her arms folded, quickly interjects, “Tony’s his imaginary friend”, as if trying to gloss over the issue. Her relationship with Jack seems to be totally lacking in intimacy. Add to that the fact that he reads Playgirl magazine. And another strange aspect is that there are lots of pornographic pictures of women on the billboard in the basement (see HD version of the film).

How did these pictures get there if Wendy does all the menial chores. Is she a lesbian? Did Jack put them there? Some details supporting the latter is that Jack leers at other women several times in the film. There’s the woman in room 237 obviously, but there’s also a woman walking down a flight of stairs in the lobby who he briefly stares at and there’s the two women who say goodbye to Ullman outside the Torrance apartment – Jack is last to enter the apartment and sneaks a sly peak at them.

Another important detail is that Jack doesn’t wear a wedding ring at all in the film, not even when he and his family are driving to the hotel, but Wendy always wears hers. Hasn’t she ever challenged him on this?

He doesn’t want to spend any time with her, he refuses to take her for a walk after breakfast, he bars her from entering the Colorado Lounge where he hangs out and he stays up all night while she's in bed and sleeps alone in the day. It’s not much of a marriage. On the subject of wedding rings, a consistent detail is that none of the males in the film wear one. Jack, Ullman, Bill Watson, Lloyd the bartender – not one wedding ring, and Grady’s hands are gloved so we can’t see whether he is wearing a ring or not. It seems that commitment to family is a problem for all of these males.

The sexual abuse theme is even communicated in the “making of” documentary. Kubrick was renowned for not allowing visitors during a shoot, but in the documentary we see James Mason and his family visiting the Torrance apartment set. Vivian Kubrick explains in the commentary that James Mason was acting in a local theatre, and so Kubrick gave him an invitation. In particular, we see Jack Nicholson and James Mason having a personal chat, while the rest of Mason’s family meet Kubrick himself.

Why did Kubrick break his code of on-set secrecy and why did he show this meeting in the documentary? It’s actually quite simple. He was creating a parallel between Jack Torrance and the main character of Kubrick’s earlier film Lolita. In Lolita, Mason played Humbert Humbert, a man who has a sexual relationship with his underage stepdaughter. Sound familiar? Let’s compare the two characters in more detail. Both Jack and Humbert are writers. Both of them keep their personal writings hidden from their wives. Both of them secretly despise their wives. And both of them have sexual relations with a minor within their own family unit. Elsewhere in the documentary there is an emphasis on sexual behaviour from Jack. He tells Kubrick’s daughter Vivian, “You look cute in your red shirt”, a soft porn calendar is seen on his bathroom door, he is seen unzipping his pants to pull out a tape recorder and he provocatively unbuttons his shirt to pull out the connecting wires. Kubrick didn’t just show us random footage from the set. He chose each clip for thematic reasons.

As well as the incest parallels with the film Lolita, The Shining also carries abuse parallels with another Kubrick film called Barry Lyndon. In Barry Lyndon a commoner, who marries his way into high society, systematically beats his stepson, Lord Bullingdon. Bullingdon bares a striking resemblance to Danny Torrance.

Later in the film, the adult Bullingdon is played by Leon Vitali. Vitali became a close career-long collaborator of Kubrick’s and on the set of The Shining he was assigned to work closely with the young actor Danny Lloyd (there are several parallels in The Shining between actor’s first names and the first name’s of character’s – two Jack’s, two Danny’s and two Lloyd’s). We see this relationship between Vitali and Danny when shooting the scene of Danny looking for a hiding space. This parallels the big brotherly relationship in Barry Lyndon between the adult Lord Bullingdon and his younger half brother, who is also a Danny Torrance look-alike. In the HD version, several book and newspaper titles are visible in the psychiatrist scene. One newspaper article is called “Illness as metaphor” and was written by Susan Sontag.

This was a controversial essay claiming that the medical professions have a tendency to mistakenly label physical health conditions as manifestations of psychological problems. It’s more than likely that Kubrick placed this article title in the scene to communicate that the psychiatrist’s dismissal of Danny’s health problem is mistaken. She has either overlooked or deliberately ignored the abuse that has cause Danny’s problems. One final detail hinting at Jack's guilt as an abuser of his family is his rotten glance to Danny's bedroom (and the camera) after argueing with Wendy about Danny's injuries.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN BEAR IN MIND I mentioned at the start of the last chapter that I’d found three themes simultaneously communicated in the bear costumed man scene. The first was the revelation of Jack sexually abusing his son. This chapter will introduce the other two themes. As well as Danny’s teddy bear pillow, there are a handful of Winnie the Pooh refs. In the kitchen Halloran asks Wendy, “Your husband introduced you as Winifred. Now are you a Winnie or a Freddie?” A Winnie the Pooh stuffed toy appears in the lobby not far from the black teddy bear that parallels Halloran’s murder. It is also placed next to the column from which Jack launched his axe attack. Note the presence of a ball - a further connection to Halloran's murder as a "ball" or party event.

The same stuffed bear is seen sitting on a couch next to Danny’s fire engine and a baseball bat as Danny watches TV in a trance-like state with his mother.

The Winnie toy seen on the couch with a fire engine further communicates that Danny is represented as a bear elsewhere in the film. Now here’s where things start getting a bit weird and confusing. A stuffed bear is featured on the Colorado Lounge set, directly in front of the fireplace. We see it in the wide shots of the room and in the steadicam shot of Wendy running to wake Jack up from his nightmare.

In the latter shot the bear rug face is seen with snarling teeth and the fast movement of the camera causes the face to move toward us rapidly, which parallels the zoom shot in the bear man felatio scene. Now you could say to yourself, “It’s just a bear rug”, but an interesting detail is that the bear rug is missing as Wendy walks through the Colorado Lounge with a baseball bat.

As the scene progresses, Jack catches Wendy reading his manuscript and he follows her threateningly across the lounge and up the stairs, at which point we see that the bear rug has reappeared.

Is this a continuity error? No. Both the bear rug and Jack Torrance are present in all of the Colorado Lounge scenes in which we see the fireplace area. But they are both missing in the build up to Wendy reading the manuscript. The bear’s reappearance later in the scene is a parallel of Jack’s reappearance. So we have Halloran, Danny and Jack symbolically paralleled by stuffed bears. Winnie the Pooh also famously wore a red shirt in his early cartoons which is paralleled by Danny wearing red as he is sat on the bed, Halloran wears a red shirt as he travels to the Overlook to be murdered, the black teddy bear version of Halloran wears a red shirt, and Vivian is wearing a red shirt in the documentary – Jack, “You look cute in your red shirt”.

Now here is something really interesting. The original cinema release of The Shining featured an additional ending scene that Kubrick deleted from the film during its first run across US theatres. Briefly, the ending showed Ullman visiting Wendy and Danny in a hospital after escaping from the Overlook. I won’t cover this ending scene in detail yet, except to offer the following selected description by someone who saw this full version of the film. Mark Ervin – “After the shot of Jack frozen in the maze, cut to Ullman moving through a white hallway. The camera back tracks via steadicam keeping Ullman perfectly centred in a medium shot. He’s wearing a large, in fact really large, fur coat (brown fur, like a bear) and carrying some ugly dark roses for Wendy.” The following production still confirms Mark Ervin’s observation about the bear-like fur coat in the missing scene.

Note that Ullman’s fluffy hair also makes him look like a bear, which is also true of the psychiatrist character.

Returning to the bear costumed man scene there are two particular details that can further help us decode the symbolic parallels of bears with the film’s characters. One is that it wouldn’t be possible for the bear costumed man to give felatio, due to the large teeth of his mask. This appears to be an indicator that the costume is not real, but merely symbolic or hallucinatory. Another detail is that the bear costumed man has a loose flap hanging down the back of his costume, which reveals his bare bottom.

Bear suit … bare bottom. Is this a pun? Is Kubrick using a sly visual metaphor to reveal certain characters in the film, such as Jack and Ullman, as bear-faced liars? Being that the two bears in the film that have teeth are the one in the Colorado Lounge, which represented Jack, and the felatio bear, are we to conclude that Wendy actually sees Jack giving felatio instead of Danny? Absolutely. As it turns out, the abuse suffered by Danny is something that has been passed down through the generations. Abused children grow up to become abusers and repeat the sins of their parents in a continuous cycle. And this takes us directly into another thematic device in The Shining – several generations of the family are being played by the same actors.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN REWRITING HISTORY At many points in this analysis we’ve encountered instances of The Shining’s narrative flipping back and forth between historical events and foresight of future events. The timeline of the film’s subliminal structure is mixed up in a similar way to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, but of course in Pulp Fiction it’s easier to unravel the chronology because the film doesn’t deceive the viewer with a false surface narrative. Fortunately, there are several mark-up devices in The Shining that can be used to categorize scenes into their appropriate place on the film’s timeframe. One of those is the use of unannounced dream sequences. Another, which we’ve partially explored, is cross symbology of characters – the rotting woman in room 237 as Jack, Halloran as a Native American. This chapter will explore a mark-up device which I’ll refer to as The Shining’s “fractal narrative”. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the astronaut Dave Bowman made a journey through the so-called “stargate” which took him out of the two dimensional cinematic universe and into the 3-D universe of his own audience. At several points in the story we were offered subliminal indicators that we were watching a film within a film, for example the monolith was a 90 degree rotated cinema screen. The same technique is used in The Shining, but this time several scenes are presented as a film within a book … and the book in question is Jack’s manuscript. Early scenes of the film reveal that Wendy is an avid reader. The Torrance apartment in Boulder is full of stacked books. She is seen reading “Catcher in the rye” at the kitchen table as Danny eats a sandwich and in the lobby scene she is reading again. In both of these scenes Danny watches television as Wendy reads. In Jack’s interview with Ullman, he responds to the story of a previous winter caretaker murdering his family, “Well, that really is eh … quite a story”. He then assures Ullman, “Well, you can rest assured Mr Ullman, that’s not gonna happen with me and as far as my wife is concerned, I’m sure she’ll be absolutely fascinated when I tell her about it. She’s a eh … confirmed ghost story and horror film addict”. These lines are very appropriate to the film’s subliminal structure. Jack expresses writer’s block to Wendy as he eats breakfast in bed. In the scene immediately following, the camera zooms out from a blank page in Jack’s typewriter to reveal him throwing his tennis ball at the sand painting figures. Is this an indicator that Jack is writing about the slaughter of his family or the natives?

Although Kubrick shows us Jack’s manuscript in the form of endless repetitions of the same line “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, one scene demonstrates that Jack was actually writing a specific story. In the scene of Wendy interrupting Jack’s writing to tell him about the weather, there is a large scrapbook open on his desk with newspaper clippings and articles pasted onto its pages. These appear to be Jack’s research materials, which would indicate he is writing about a true past event.

After Wendy leaves the room we cut back to Jack, but his scrapbook is open on a different page.

A fresh piece of paper has also magically appeared in his typewriter, even though he tore the last page out as Wendy approached him. These two details suggest that Wendy’s entrance, interruption of Jack's work and his angry response were all in Jack’s imagination. He was fleshing out a part of his manuscript. So why would Jack be writing a fictional argument with his wife? Because Ullman planted the idea in his mind to write a horror novel based upon the real life case of Charles Grady killing his family. As he told Ullman, “That really is eh … quite a story”. This also explains why he says his “confirmed ghost story and horror addict” wife will be fascinated about the Grady case. He is intending to tell her about the case through his fiction novel. Rather than being possessed by some evil force in the hotel, Jack’s murderous insanity is brought on by him writing about the Grady case, with himself in the lead role. He writes himself into insanity. During his first conversation with Delbert Grady, Jack reveals, “I saw your picture in the

newspaper. You eh … chopped your wife and daughter up into little bits and then you eh … then you blew your brains out”. This is why he had a nightmare of chopping his own wife and son “into little pieces”. He has been reading newspaper clippings about the original case and rewriting the story in novel form. A very bizarre shot is when Danny’s neck scars are revealed to Wendy in the Colorado Lounge. A shot over Jack’s shoulder shows Wendy and Danny positioned directly above the typewriter, as if they are part of his writing.

Perhaps this is another indicator of Jack’s confusion between reality and his fictional imagination. The scenes of Halloran making phone calls to the KDK 1 station and then making his way (via plane, car and snowcat) to the Overlook feature a variety of details that suggest they are also manifestations of Jack’s writing. The first thing to note is the almost deliberately lame dialogue. There’s too much narrative exposition, the typical sign of a bad writer. The scenes are incredibly basic and lack the edginess that characterizes the rest of the film. The acting is also clunky, as if Kubrick was deliberately under-directing his cast. And Halloran appears far too relaxed considering that in the surface narrative he shared Danny’s horrific vision of the woman in room 237. The prop and set arrangements of Halloran’s travelling scenes offer more clues that the scenes are manifested in Jack’s imagination at his typewriter. As Halloran drives through snow in his car, he passes an overturned truck and underneath the truck is a crushed red Volkswagon. Jack originally drove a yellow Volkswagon to the overlook.

A Westminster Boulder sign is also seen from Halloran’s car. The Torrance’s had travelled from Boulder.

A black and white magazine cover on the desk in Durkin’s garage bares resemblance to the black and white photos featured on the Gold Room entrance sign.

Also in Durkin’s garage is a picture of cartoon pig characters being chased by ghosts. Jack later calls his family “little pigs”.

A man near the entrance to Durkin’s garage is looking at a soft porn calendar.

Remember that we saw one of these on Jack’s bathroom door in the making of documentary.

Overall these are very boring scenes and in the surface narrative serve no more purpose than to simply drive the plot forward, but in the subliminal narrative they reveal Jack’s talentless writing skills. Notice that in the middle of Halloran’s journey Kubrick dissolves to a shot of Jack writing in the Colorado Lounge for a few seconds and then back to Halloran’s plane landing (US DVD version). We are watching Jack’s manuscript content as he writes it. Another example of this seemingly poor writing by Jack is that we are shown three incredibly boring scenes of Halloran making phone calls from his apartment as he tries to reach the Torrance’s. In all three scenes Halloran paces back and forth in the same manner as if Jack is rewriting the same scene. Once again we have lame dialogue and minimal acting. This process of Jack rewriting history effectively causes the Grady tragedy to repeat itself in the Overlook, but the time loop goes back further. The scenes of Jack entering the Gold Room to chat with Lloyd and Grady contain some very consistent details relating to a shift of time. Jack talks to a Delbert Grady, but Ullman said it was Charles Grady who killed his family with an axe. Another clue is that Jack is only referred to by his surname and although he talks about his family he doesn’t use their names at all. Jack at the bar: “Just a little problem with the old sperm bank upstairs … I never laid a hand on

him goddamn it … I wouldn’t touch one hair on his goddamn little head … I love the little son of a bitch … I’d do anything for him, any fuckin’ thing for him … I did hurt him once ok … The little fucker had thrown all my papers all over the floor. All I tried to do was pull him up!” Why all the inconsistency with names? Because in the Gold Room we are watching a different generation of the Grady and Torrance bloodlines. Delbert Grady was the father of Charles Grady and both of them murdered their families. Likewise, the “Mr Torrance” who we watch in the Gold Room isn’t Jack. He’s Jack’s father. That’s why his descriptions of his wife and son don’t include their first names. And that’s why we see a Jack Torrance look-alike in the framed picture at the end of the film.

The time mismatches relating to Jack’s abuse of his son also fit with this multi-generation interpretation. Jack hadn’t drank for five months after injuring Danny’s arm, but the Mr Torrance in the Gold Room tells us that he injured his son “Three goddamn years ago”. There's a cycle of abuse in the family. Danny was injured by Jack for scattering his writing papers across the floor and the same thing was done to Jack by his father. Danny is sexually abused by Jack in the fatherly love scene and again Jack suffered the same abuse in his childhood (the bear felatio scene). Another hint is that Jack is referred to as a “son of a bitch” by his wife and his father. Wendy after seeing Danny’s injuries, “You did this to him. You son of a bitch!” Torrance Snr at the Gold Room bar, “I wouldn’t touch one hair on his goddamn little head. I love the little son of a

bitch!” Perhaps this also sheds light on the film’s hints of never-ending cycles. Grady’s cryptic lavatory dialogue, “You are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker”. The twin girls, “Come and play with us Danny … forever … and ever”. The Grady and Torrance families are trapped in cycles of abuse. Remember that Jack symbolically stepped out of a photograph behind Wendy while she was reading his manuscript.

His presence as a ghostly shadow can also be found in other picture props in the hotel. The two best examples being the wall picture just inside the room 237 doorway ...

... and the picture next to the map of Colorado in Ullman’s office – here the shadow figure is visible when Jack is sabotaging the radio.

Jack was also seen in silhouette form after leaving room 237.

So the hidden narrative of The Shining is quite complex. Some scenes show a prior generation Mr Torrance hanging out in the Gold Room. Other scenes are manifestations of Jack’s imagination as he types his manuscript. And yet more scenes are dream sequences. And … there is still more to unravel. An important question is, “Are any of the other scenes of the film set in the past?” To answer this we must first make some storyline adjustments based upon what we’ve already decoded. If the scenes of Halloran travelling to the Overlook are part of Jack’s manuscript then how does the real Halloran end up being killed in the Lobby? In a way we’ve already answered this riddle. Halloran represents the natives who were slaughtered in genocide, so his murder can be considered an echo of a past event. It’s interesting that as Wendy creeps down a hall to see Halloran’s body the lights above her are off, but after seeing the body she spins to see the party guest and the lights are on.

Another odd detail in this scene is that an ornamental piece of Driftwood on a table (beneath the seven diamonds wall tapestry) disappears immediately after we see Halloran’s body. And then of course there’re the disappearing wall pictures.

Perhaps this collection of continuity mismatches is communicating another time shift. The switching on of the lights could also be a continuation of the film’s conspiratorial messages related to falsely enlightened secret society members. Shortly after Wendy sees Halloran’s body she re-enters the Lobby from a different direction. All the lights are off, the room is full of skeleton party guests and Halloran’s body is gone. The hallway through which she runs in the build up to seeing the skeletons is a peculiar piece of set design. She runs directly from a dead end wall that has a table beneath it.

In other scenes of this hallway, when it is more lit, there is a mirror on the dead end wall. This mirror is, for some reason, missing in the skeleton scene.

It’s possible that these assorted details such as missing mirrors and missing dead bodies are again related to time shifts in the subliminal narrative. We may even be seeing the wife of Jack’s father (or even a more distant relative) in the skeleton scene, rather than Wendy. The gash on the party guest's head links him symbolically to Jack and the camera directly gives chase to Wendy as if the ghost is running after her. Is this the wife of a former caretaker being pursued to her death? An important narrative change is that if it’s Jack’s father who talks to Delbert Grady in the lavatory then the young boy, whose behaviour they discuss, would be Jack himself. Did young Jack try to rebel against his father by bringing “an outside party into this situation?” And what exactly was the “very great talent” that Jack had as a child? Did he show some early promise as a writer? Could it even be that he attempted to write about the genocide of the natives, the

“outside party” being the slaughter of Halloran in the lobby? Whatever the answers to these questions, it seems that young Jack in some way rebelled against his father and was “corrected” for doing so? In other words he was beaten, abused and traumatized, hence he grows to become like his father, even appearing exactly like him. Another possible time and narrative shift may occur as Wendy reads Jack’s manuscript. This is a sketchy idea but I’ll put it on the table anyway. The battle between Wendy and Jack in the Colorado Lounge could actually be what Wendy is reading about in the manuscript – Jack’s fictionalized version of the past. The prioritizing of personal writing over the well-being of the family unit is a generational recurrence. Young Jack, Wendy and Danny are viewed as traitors when they attempt to investigate the work papers of the man in the family. All these family men seem to require absolute secrecy in what they write, as if struggling from one generation to the next to keep the lid on the atrocities they have committed. The final shot of the lobby, with the shot dollying into a photo of Jack, is probably happening in a different time zone to Halloran’s death. Wendy and Danny left the hotel in a hurry and so the lights in the lobby should still be on.

Not only have they been mysteriously been switched off, but the chairs are draped in white sheets.

And the Gold Room sign has also moved to the right side of the doors, but it was on the left side when Halloran was killed.

It was also on the right side of the doors at the beginning of the film when Jack came for his interview.

So it seems likely that all of the lobby scenes in the second half of the film, which feature the Gold Room sign to the left of the doors and no sheets over the furniture, were set in the past and that the final shot is more likely in the present or future. For some reason the forward motion of the final shot also suggests a continuation of Jack’s forward moving view of the lobby, in which we saw balloons and party confetti.

Apparently in the deleted ending scene, Ullman explains to Wendy in the hospital that her visions of ghosts in the Overlook were simply hallucinations. This was another standard device of Kubrick’s – a character explains the hidden narrative in simple verbal terms, but the deceptive surface narrative prevents us from believing it. The concepts in this chapter are incomplete in terms of the explanations I’ve offered. There are several loose ends, but there is undoubtedly a pattern of historical repetition in The Shining. The hidden narrative jumps back and forth between different generations of the Torrance family. In this chapter we explored how Nicholson played both Jack Torrance and the father of Jack Torrance, who we can only refer to as “Mr Torrance”, and how these men each repeat the mistakes of the previous generation. A simple metaphor of this cycle of abuse is communicated in

several of the long distance shots of the Overlook scattered throughout the movie, in which we hear owl-like sounds. Are these the screams of women and children being murdered in the Overlook? The Shining, however, is also the story of how this cycle of abuse is finally broken. To understand how this occurs we must turn our attention to the multiple manifestations of Danny Torrance.

CHAPTER NINETEEN MAYBE IT WAS ABOUT DANNY In chapter eight we explored the idea that the room 237 sequence was actually a dream in which Jack Torrance symbolically represented Danny, while the laughing hag was a manifestation of Jack himself as the strangler and abuser of his son, and the woman rising out of the bath tub represented Danny awakening from his amnesia. Here we will take this notion of interchanging appearances of Jack and Danny and apply it to several other scenes. Before we do this I’d like to bring to your attention a subliminal detail that literally “spells out” the interchanging appearances of Jack and Danny. If you’ve read much about the production history of The Shining then you’ll probably be aware of the rumours that Kubrick had one of his assistants manually type out the line “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” thousands of times. The end result is shown in the film as Jack’s manuscript, however only 16 pages of this text appear on screen. The lines are formed into varying paragraph sizes and patterned shapes. The formats of certain pages could carry several implications, such as the pages of a screenplay, but it’s the deliberate inclusion of varied spelling and grammar mistakes in which we find Kubrick’s embedded message. It appears four times on the second to last page that we see, although with slight alterations in spelling. “All work and no play makes Jack adult boy” “Al All work and no play makes Jack adult boy” “All work and no play makes Jacka dult boy” “All wori and no play makes Jack a dult boy”

How could Jack misspell the words “a dull” as “adult”? The “t” key on a typewriter is four letters across and one line up from the “l” key. It’s too far away. Then there’s the fact that the mistake occurs on the second letter of a double consonant. If Jack was able to find the correct key to type the first “l” then how would his finger manage to wonder across to the “t” instead of just doubletapping for the second “l”? Quite simply, the spelling mistake was deliberate. Kubrick cleverly allowed his audience to glance over a few pages of irrelevant repetitions of the same text so that the “adult boy” message would bypass their attention. The pages also weren’t on screen long enough for the message to be noticed in cinemas and tv screenings. Only the pause facility of VHS and DVD players would allow an inquisitive viewer enough time to find this hidden sentence. After Jack discovers Wendy reading the pages he speaks a line that may be a sly reference to the subliminal content of the manuscript, “Maybe it was about Danny. Maybe it was about him.” In several scenes Danny enters a trance-like state, in which he speaks dialogue in a gruff voice. Based upon him adopting a similar voice when in conversation with his imaginary friend, Tony, it’s easy to assume that every instance of him speaking in a gruff voice is a manifestation of Tony. There are some details that suggest otherwise. The scenes of Danny speaking in gruff voices can be broadly categorized into two types – those in which the voice is accompanied by him wagging his index finger and those that aren’t. I believe this to be a simple indicator of when Danny is speaking as Tony and when he is speaking

as his father. Let’s just run through the various scenes in which Danny uses this gruff voice and examine its effect on the narrative. At the breakfast table at the start of the film, in his first bathroom Shining episode and after seeing the dead twins … he wags his finger. In these scenes he is speaking the voice of Tony. The first change comes in a scene that isn’t in the European cut of the film. We cut directly from the Jack / Grady lavatory discussion to a shot of Wendy pacing around in the apartment as she tries to work out a plan to escape the hotel. After a minute or so she hears Danny saying “redrum” in his bedroom in a gruff voice, but when she goes in to the room Danny isn’t wagging his finger. The timing is important because Jack was just entering into a discussion with Grady (himself) about how to “correct” (murder / abuse) his family problem. Danny’s repetition of the line “redrum” is happening in parallel with Jack’s decision to commit murder. We’re not hearing Tony’s voice in this scene. We’re hearing Jack. The next manifestation of Danny’s gruff voice is heard in another scene that’s absent from the European release. Wendy and Danny are sat on the Torrance apartment bed watching Roadrunner cartoons. Danny is in a trance-like state. Wendy tells him she’s going to “talk to Daddy” (Jack?) and he responds “Yes Mrs Torrance”. He uses the gruff voice and wags his finger. So we’re back to hearing Tony again. The next relevant scene is by far the most prominent example of Jack speaking through Danny in a gruff voice. Jack has just been released from the kitchen storeroom, Wendy is asleep in bed and Danny is pacing about mumbling “redrum” in a gruff voice … without wagging his finger. Everything Danny does in this scene parallels what Jack is doing elsewhere in the hotel. Jack is intending to kill his family, while Danny chants “redrum” (murder). Jack is fetching an axe and making sure it’s sharp, while Danny picks up a knife and makes sure it’s sharp. Jack is getting closer and closer to the apartment and working up his killer instinct, while Danny’s chanting of “redrum” gets faster and louder. Danny even manages to anticipate what is about to happen by writing “redrum” on the bathroom door because this is where the murder will take place. The separation of Danny’s alter ego voices into manifestations of Tony and Jack, through the presence / absence of his wagging finger, fits very well throughout the film. However, it carries some other implications relating to the hidden narrative. When Danny is chanting “redrum” in his bedroom Wendy tries to calm him. He responds with the following statements, “Danny’s not here Mrs Torrance … Danny can’t wake up Mrs Torrance … Danny’s gone away Mrs Torrance”. From this the scene dissolves to Jack walking, trance-like, through the lobby before sabotaging the radio in Ullman’s office. Is this Danny manifested through Jack’s body - the “adult boy” referred to in the manuscript? A particular supporting detail is that in the lobby the “adult boy” passes a clock. It’s time reads 11.46 (see HD version).

Also in the HD version we get a good look at the Gold Room sign just before Jack has his first conversation with Lloyd.

It says “THE UNWINDING HOURS … Weekdays 9:00pm – 12:00pm … Weekends 8:00pm – 1:00am”. Being that Jack likes to spend his time drinking in the Gold Room, perhaps the 11:45 timing of the radio sabotage scene is an indicator that Danny sabotaged the radio while Jack was drinking in the Gold Room. Here we’re getting into a mysterious aspect of the hidden narrative that I haven’t quite figured out, but I’ll offer my thoughts so far. There are many details that suggest Danny, having recovered from his amnesia and seen his father for the psychopath that he is, has set an elaborate trap to kill Jack. • • •

Outside the maze Danny deliberately steps out into the open from the snowcat so that Jack will see him and give chase. He’s obviously learned the routes of the maze off by heart. He’s already planned to use the reverse footprints tactic to strand Jack in the centre, otherwise he wouldn’t have ran into the maze in the first place.

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During Halloran’s death Danny gives himself away with a scream. He didn’t have to climb out of his hiding place and give himself away, but he does and he allows himself to be seen. Danny also seems to have chosen this hiding space so that he’ll be found and chased. His plan to be chased through the door near the storage unit in which he hides is confirmed in the “making of” documentary. We see the crew filming little Danny as he finds his hiding space. Kubrick directs him through a microphone “Look back Danny … scared … look back Danny … start to slow down …start to slow down … see the door … see the door … look at the cupboard quickly … get in the cupboard”. It would make no sense for Kubrick to direct Danny to “see the door” unless the boy’s character has the door in mind as part of his plan.

As a point of interest, the shot of Wendy and Danny escaping the Overlook in a snowcat shows a double-cross signpost sticking out of the snow. After the snowcat climbs off into the distance a cloud of mist floats on screen and obscures both the snowcat and the double-cross. Double cross of course means to “betray”.

So it’s possible that Danny sabotaged the radio as a way of isolating Jack from his equally sordid employers. The only detail I’ve found that directly contradicts this is that Jack tells Wendy through the store room door “You’re not going anywhere. Go check out the snowcat and the radio and you’ll see what I mean”. Of course Jack hasn’t specifically said that he sabotaged the

radio. Perhaps he means that he’s sabotaged the snowcat and that the radio will be spouting news of bad weather. Danny and Jack’s maze chase also seems to be mirrored in the Overlook, which it should be because the maze is a symbol of the Overlook anyway. • •

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Danny uses a trail of footprints to trap Jack in the maze, and Wendy speaks of a “trail of breadcrumbs” in the kitchen. The symbolic “trail of breadcrumbs” conversation in the kitchen leads Danny, Wendy and Halloran to the “walk in freezer”. The maze itself could be considered a walk in freezer. Being that the walk-in freezer deceptively has two mirrored doors (see chapter four), it’s feasible that in the hidden narrative Danny lures Jack into one door and then escapes and traps him via the second door. The winter shots of the film were created on English sets and exteriors using tons of salt for snow. As a possibly deliberate reference Jack is woken in the store room by the voice of Grady as he is sleeping on bags of “Holly Salt”.

The seeds of Danny’s plan have also been suggested by a user on my forum to have originated in the room 237 dream sequence. Danny the “adult boy” treads backwards through his own footsteps, away from the rotting woman (abusive father) and locks her in. The one truly convincing detail of the film in support of the supernatural surface narrative is the moment when Jack is released from the store room, supposedly by Grady’s ghost. During interviews about the film Kubrick cited this as the final moment that reveals the hotel is haunted, but we’ve been deceived by cryptic comments from Kubrick many-a-time. I’ve identified four other possibilities for your consideration.

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Danny snuck down and unlocked the door while Wendy was asleep. Why would he do this? To ensure that Jack could be lured into the freezer / maze rather than be rescued by the authorities. He got out of the storeroom through the side exit (see chapter four) – the one which we could see near the two freezer room doors. All he’d have to do is pull away the shelving units, although when Jack limps through the kitchen with an axe we can see that these shelving units are still in place. The axe was already in the storeroom to begin with and Jack used it to smash the lock. We are never shown where he got the axe from and there is a corner of the storeroom that is never shown. Jack doesn't actually escape. The sound of the lock being opened is in his imagination just as Grady voice was. He slowly dies in the storeroom, tormented by his hallucinations. The axe attack scenes we see are from a different generation of the torrance family. In the making of documentary there is a shot of Jack and Wendy rehearsing their lines directly outside of the storeroom as Kubrick types nearby. The shot seems a little pointless, which isn't Kubrick's style so perhaps some other theme is being communicated here. The scenes of Jack arguing through the door with Wendy could be part of Jack's manuscript, still being read by Wendy in the Colorado Lounge.

One last detail that possibly cross references the interchanging identities of Jack and Danny is that in the first storeroom scene Danny stands in a trance with his hands in his pockets as he shines Halloran talking to him. In the Colorado Lounge we later see Jack staring at the false light of the window with his left hand in his pocket. Both shots feature a slow zoom and share the same piece of music.

An additional note, and possibly Kubrick's most personal message of the film, is that Danny and Wendy's escape from the hotel (America) mirrors Stanley and Christiane Kubrick's abandonment of America. It was around the time of shooting Dr Strangelove, a highly political film, that Kubrick began his carefully crafted avoidance of public attention and his commitment never to return to the US, not even for a visit. Kubrick also made many cross references between himself and the Jack Torrance character (see chapter 10), as well as establishing the "adult boy" theme described above. Is the "adult boy", who breaks the generational cycle of abuse at the Overlook, a self-reference on Stanley's part? Is Jack's manuscript a representation of the film

itself, appearing on the surface to be an endless repetition of the same old tired story "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", only to later reveal upon careful inspection to be something else - Kubrick covertly bringing conscious awareness of genocidal history and elitist corruption to those who "shine"?

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO LITTLE GIRLS, ABOUT EIGHT AND TEN Watch the two video supplements for this chapter or scroll down and read the more detailed text version (Note: the video version has some additional details not found in the text) Video 1 - Mystery of the Twins Video 2 - Something in the River of Blood

You may have noticed that I’ve made very few references in this analysis to the subject of the twin girls who haunt Danny. No serious examination of the film would be satisfying without exploring the symbolism of the twins because the scene in which we see their blood-spattered corpses has scared the hell out of more audiences than any other scene in the film (the woman in the bath tub was the scene that gave me nightmares as a child). These twins are universally assumed to be Grady’s daughters, but quite simply they have nothing to do with the Grady family. The first detail that discredits the idea of them being Grady’s daughters is that Ullman described Grady as having “two little girls, about eight and ten”. In other words, Grady’s daughters were not twins. Ullman’s assumptions of different ages would be based upon visual differences in the girls’ appearance, but the girls Danny sees are definitely twins because Kubrick chose a pair of young twin actresses (Louise and Lisa Burns) to play them.

So if they’re not Grady’s daughters then who are they or who do they represent? The answers to this are complex because as is often the case with Kubrick, multiple metaphors are at work simultaneously. The first concept for decoding the twin scenes is to view them as the mirrored image of a single character. In the tricycle scene not only are they presented to us in symmetrical composition, but the hallway in which they are stood is also symbolically mirrored along the centre. They also speak identical lines of dialogue in sync and even their blood stained corpses are symbolically mirrored. One twin is face down and the other is face up, with their heads and feet on opposite sides of the screen and the limbs arranged identically. It’s as if during the process of being murdered their torsos have been spun along the centre axis of the screen.

The set design isn’t precisely mirrored along the central axis because there’s a connecting hallway to the left, but directly to the right of the hallway is a door with an exit sign above. This exit sign will become thematically important shortly.

We previously explored the use of moving furniture as representing people and in the dead twins scene we appropriately see a toppled, blood smeared chair in conjunction with the mutilated bodies of the girls. However, there is only one toppled chair, just as there is only one girl who is symbolically mirrored.

It’s also interesting in this scene that the apparent murder weapon, an axe, is so prominently displayed in front of the twins. In the close ups of the girls a glass covered alcove can be seen in the upper right. Is this a cabinet for the axe? If it is, why is the cabinet unopened in the shot of the murdered twins?

Another possible axe cabinet is shown outside the Torrance apartment, again on the right wall.

Kubrick also communicates the mirror symbology of the twins by associating them with other symmetrical compositions through simple editing. Shots of the twins are flashed on screen next to shots of the twin elevators and the low angle of the “Redrum” doorframe. We find more subtle hints of the twin / mirror concept during the room 237 hallway scenes. Most of the doorways in these halls are single doors, but room 237 features a double door, possibly implying a mirror. These doors are also polished and reflective (remember the cross symbology of doors and mirrors in chapter 5). When Danny turns the locked handle he is facing this polished double surface and so is facing his own reflection. It’s at this point that we cut to a shot of the twins – his own double reflection.

So on one level the twins represent Danny, perhaps accompanied by his imaginary friend. Rather than seeing the past, he is anticipating his own potential murder / abuse. He also saw the twins in his first shining vision, while looking into a mirror. And yet another supporting detail for this is that in the tricycle scene he wears a red jacket over a light blue sweater, just as the dead twins wear light blue dresses smeared in blood.

And then there's the blue seat of the tricycle, which against Danny's back gives him the appearance of wearing a blue dress.

The twins also represent Danny’s anticipation of his Mother being murdered. They have jet black hair like Wendy and they wear blue dresses. Wendy wears a blue dress at the start of the film with red stockings and sleeves, which gives her the symbolic appearance of an axe murdered twin.

When wandering the maze with Danny holding her hand she is again wearing red and blue.

In fact, with their creepily boy-like faces, the twins appear to be a synthesis of Danny and Wendy.

As Danny steps into the open doorway of room 237 he is approaching a set of angled mirrors that are about to show him a double reflection of himself, but he also shouts into the mirrors “Mom are you in there?” Possibly a double meaning as in asking if she is in the mirror as Danny's twin.

The slightly ajar doors and mirrors of the room 237 entrance were also paralleled when Danny encountered the twins – a large cupboard right screen had its doors slightly ajar.

There are many other scenes that reveal the mysterious twins as symbolizing Danny and Wendy. The boy and his Mother hold hands like the twins as Halloran walks them through the kitchen. While exploring the maze they again hold hands – a simple parallel of the twins walking in and out of the games room, trying to find their way out of the Overlook. Immediately after Danny sees the twins in the games room we cut to a shot of Ullman, Jack and Wendy in the hallway near the Torrance apartment – its background wallpaper is the same as that when we see the dead twins. And the next time we see Danny he is walking about holding hands with Ullman’s secretary Suzi. The games room is another multi-faceted twins scene. The twins turn their heads in mirrored fashion and smirk at each other. This time the set is not symmetrical, but the twins are

positioned centre screen in a doorway, just as they were flashed on screen when Danny faced the room 237 doorway. The particular doors that we see at the games room entrance have the same polished colour as the room 237 doors. This may have been deliberate on Kubrick’s part.

The games room is also a direct parallel of the Colorado Lounge, which was Jack’s playroom. The Colorado Lounge had a US flag and a Colorado flag above Jack’s writing desk. These are also featured on the rear wall of the games room. A single red pool table is positioned near the elevator doors of the Colorado Lounge. Again, the games room has red pool tables. Danny throws darts at a board just before he sees the twins, while Jack threw a tennis ball repeatedly at the twin like native figures above the fireplace. The native aspect of the twins may also be present in that a small wall picture of a native child is briefly seen high up on the wall as Danny’s tricycle turns a corner to face the twins. In the games room notice also the strange use of a MONARCH mountain ski resort poster. The skier is a silhouetted figure with the sun blazing over his shoulder and his hand held up so that it overlaps his shoulder. Perhaps Kubrick chose this to suggest a shiny knife in the hand of a dark figure in a stabbing gesture.

Another theme possibly associated to the twins is the cross symbolism between murder and the sexual abuse experienced by Danny. The foreground figure of the slaughtered twins appears to have her dress pulled upward over her stomach and both twins have suffered injuries directly to their necks, while their lower torsos and genital regions are completely smeared in blood.

It’s strange that they would be killed in this way by the swings of an axe, so it may be a parallel of Danny ’s neck injury and sexual abuse. A supporting detail is that if we compare the four separate shots of the dead twins by flicking back and forth between them, we find that they’re not actually identical shots. The last three shots reveal the twins to be breathing … their stomach’s move. If you download the four images below and then flick through them with your windows picture viewer you'll notice the breathing pattern.

As tempting as it is to pass this off as a simple editing error, I have several additional observations that support the suggestion that the blood stained twins are alive. 1. There’s nothing difficult or complex about using the same shot four times while editing a scene like this – it’s actually quicker and easier to use one shot instead of four. 2. For a few seconds before we see the dead twins Danny is shown breathing deeply with fear. If the twins are mirroring him then perhaps his breathing is also being mirrored. 3. The two initial shots of the dead twins are virtually identical and the twins don’t appear to be breathing, however the camera position moves very slightly, as if the observer is breathing. The camera doesn’t appear to move between the second, third and fourth shots, but the girls’ stomachs do. 4. The two supposedly identical shots in the games room were actually different takes – again using slightly different camera positions. Kubrick also had chairs, tables and ash trays shift position between the two shots. 5. Kubrick used the same trick in Full Metal Jacket to make a dead NVA soldier subtly move between shots. This living-dead motif was confirmed by a piece of graffiti written on a helmet in the lower right, which read “boo!” So in the twins scenes Danny appears to be anticipating both sexual abuse and the possibility of murder. The twins ask Danny to come and play with them, and “play” is something we’ve already established as being linked to sex and murder in the film's symbology. Another noteworthy detail here is that the location of the dead twin halls is very close to the Torrance apartment. It’s orientation can be decoded by comparing it to two other shots – 1) Ullman walking the Torrance’s down a blue hall to view their apartment, and 2) Wendy pushing the breakfast tray out of an elevator near the Torrance apartment.

The most distant walls in the above shots feature the flowery white wall paper seen in the dead twins scene, but all of the other walls feature a simple sky blue colour, almost identical to the colour of the twins’ dresses. The L shape of the hallway that wraps around this location is where Danny's tricycle encounter with the twins occurred.

Danny is riding in anti-clockwise circles outside the Torrance apartment. Hence he will be playing with twins “forever and ever” as he cycles around this unending hallway, each cycle taking him closer and closer to the twins. The camera shots steadily moving closer to the twins could also be suggesting the continuous movement of Danny’s tricycle, forever stuck in a loop and unable to escape the horrifying vision. Confirmation of this hallway arrangement can be seen left screen in the shot of the dead twins. The wallpaper in the hall from which the chair has toppled is sky blue, like the wallpaper outside the Torrance apartment.

And in the wider shots of the twins we see an “EXIT” sign directly above a door on the right wall.

This same sign is visible in the background as Wendy wheels the breakfast tray out of the elevator.

This looped hallway motif even explains why Kubrick used a wallpaper design that shows flowers arranged to look like question marks. He is teasing us to pay attention to the layout of the halls. Remember that in the maze chase at the end of the film Danny almost loops back upon his own tracks (see Chapter four), but breaks the pattern by turning right. If he hadn't done this he would have encountered Jack and been slaughtered. The same is true of the dead twins vision. In order to escape his endless left-turning loop of abuse, Danny must change directions and exit to his right. As if the dead twins scene wasn’t multi-layered enough, Kubrick has also linked it to the river of blood scene, which in itself has some impressive subliminals. One parallel is that as Danny first “shined” the red river, a wall of blood splashed up and blacked out the screen. This is also true of the dead twins scene, except that it's Danny’s hands which rise up and black out his vision.

Jack also did this when looking into a mirror in the Gold room. This parallels Danny's Shining visions of his abused / murdered self as well as the generational abuse cycle.

On a slightly different tangent regarding the river of blood, here’s a really impressive subliminal detail. The elevator door doesn’t open automatically. It’s a manual operation door. Watch Ullman opening the elevator door to the Colorado Lounge – he slides it open manually. If you look closely at the initial burst of blood that gushes out of the elevator, the door doesn’t open smoothly. It opens half way, pauses and then quickly opens the rest of the way. But how could it be manually opened from inside if it’s full of blood? Take a look at the floor directly beneath the opening door. An object or body flops out of the elevator in the initial bulge of blood. What appears to be its head and shoulders can then be seen on the floor for several seconds directly beneath the continuous waterfall of blood, but then the figure is obscured completely as blood splashes inwards from the walls (scroll to top of page to watch a detailed video regarding the object in the river of blood).

If the object flopping out of the elevator is a dead body then whose body is it? My guess is that it’s Danny’s imaginary friend Tony. Tony is described by Danny as “a little boy” who “hides in my stomach” and “lives in my mouth”. The elevator door and its floor dials we’ve already established as symbolizing Danny’s gaping mouth and eyes. Danny sees this vision while pressurizing Tony to reveal his fears about the hotel (and while talking to himself in a mirror). This I believe to be the visual revelation of Tony and his subtle presence can be noticed because the drenched body is “shining” under the elevator hall lights. The cutting of a close up of the twins with the river of blood also suggests that the twins represent a mirrored version of the body. Incidentally, a further link is made between the elevators and lavatories. During Wendy’s attempt to phone out from the Overlook (before entering Ullman’s office) a notice board is visible right screen. It features a small white card which reads the curious words “EYE SCREAM” (only readable in the HD release).

The obvious connection is that “eye scream” is a pun for “ice cream”. Halloran was heard whispering psychically to Danny, “How about some ice cream Doc?” He was actually speaking different dialogue to Wendy and a Native American chief was visible on a baking tin behind his head. So perhaps the voice isn’t Halloran’s. Perhaps it’s the Indian chief whispering “How about some I scream?” That ties in absolutely with the idea that the river of blood represents the blood of the slaughtered Indians. It was the Indian chief's voice we were hearing.

The elevator itself is an “eye scream”. It has floor dials for eyes and it’s doors are a screaming mouth. The deafening rumble heard over the river of blood scene may even be the simultaneous screams of the natives, all heard in unison – too much for a human ear to take. But back to the lavatory connection. Wendy, in native-styled clothing, is trying to hear a phone reception on the switchboard, but can’t. Above the switchboard are two blue wall pictures in white frames placed close together.

These are the eyes and the switchboard is the mouth – the eye scream, except Wendy can’t hear anything, just as we the audience don’t notice the screaming native themes. In case you think the idea of the pictures as eyes and the switchboard as a mouth is corny, observe as Wendy walks away from the switchboard. Directly behind the wall where we saw the switchboard and “eye” pictures was a set of lavatory doors that are virtually identical to the “eye scream” elevators. They don’t have floor dials obviously, but the two “eye” pictures are still visible right screen through a window in the switchboard room.

The initial shot of Wendy at the switchboard also featured a slightly shaky, handheld camera position. This was very unusual for Kubrick. When the shot cuts away and Wendy walks out into the lobby we find that in the prior shot we were viewing Wendy from the point of view of a basket ball player who was featured on a poster in the switchboard room.

The poster was featured on a door, which the crew would have to have opened inwards to get the wide shot of Wendy at the switchboard. The basketball player is also clothed almost completely in red so, in conjunction with the unusual handheld camera work from the poster position, perhaps the basketball player is another subliminal hint of the blood stained body that flopped out of the elevator. Now we’ve slightly veered off from the subject of the twin girls, which is easy to do in a film so thickly layered with interlinking metaphors. I’ll now offer a few final observations about the twins before we move to the next chapter. An almost definite manifestation of the twins, the meaning of which has so far eluded me, is again visible in the HiDef release of The Shining. As Wendy and the psychiatrist leave Danny’s

bedroom, his parent’s bedroom is visible through an open doorway in the background. On the furthest wall is a framed picture of two young children, a boy and a girl, clothed in blue. They aren’t mirrored images of each other though. It is a boy giving a flower to a girl. Beneath the picture are a few items of furniture including a single chair, perhaps a reference to the single chair that was near the dead twins.

Are we to take from this that Jack and Wendy are also represented by the twins? The only other supporting details I could find for this were that Jack and Wendy are both seen wearing a blue robe in different scenes (Jack speaks the line “forever and ever” while wearing the robe) and both of them “play” with Danny in different ways. Now here’s an oddity in the “making of” documentary that could very well be a reference to the twins. We’ve already discussed the symbology of Jack Nicholson being introduced to James Mason on set in that they both played sexually abusive father figures in Kubrick films. But also in the same scene Nicholson is introduced to a variety of other people who seem to be friends and relatives of James Mason. Among them are “two little girls about eight and ten” who are introduced as Katie and Liza. Katie, the older of the two, is almost a dead ringer for the twin girls of the film. She has her hair done in the same way with a white head band and she is facially very

similar to them as well. We get a very good look at her because she glances straight into the camera for a moment. Her younger sister, Liza, doesn’t look anything like the twins, however her sky blue dress is almost identical to those worn by the twins.

How can this be? Was this whole "making of" scene scripted ... with actors stepping in to symbolically play out roles relating to the subliminal narrative of The Shining. Personally, I doubt it. A much more believable theory is that this visit to The Shining set by Mason and friends occurred before any of the twin girl scenes were shot. Kubrick may have observed these “two little girls about eight and ten” and then based the twin girls’ costumes and appearance upon Katie’s face and hair and Liza’s dress. If this was the case then it’s likely that James Mason was unknowingly being used by Kubrick to play Delbert Grady. As with any analysis of a Kubrick film, we’re forever stuck with speculation and little in the way of absolute proof. But here in this chapter we’ve hopefully decoded along the way most of, if not all, the meanings that Kubrick embedded in The Shining with relation to the twin girls.

CHAPTER TWENTYTWENTY-ONE IS TONY ONE OF YOUR ANIMALS? The last major theme that we haven’t explored in depth is the identity of Danny’s so-called “imaginary” friend, Tony. We did explore in previous chapters that in Danny’s first Shining vision he’s talking to himself in a mirror, in other words he’s talking to himself rather than Tony. We also explored that when he has his kitchen conversation with Halloran that the two characters were mirroring each others body language (eg clasped hands on the table) and that Halloran was positioned in front of a symbolic mirror – the same shiny door through which Jack was talking to Grady (himself) in the store room. So in effect this may have been a dream sequence in which Danny was talking to himself again. So far it’s all straight forward – Tony is Danny’s subconscious warning him that something isn’t right with his Father and with the Overlook Hotel (The United States). But … there are many other symbolic manifestations of Tony, which suggest a variety of additional meanings. One of those alternative meanings was suggested in the last chapter - that Tony is the body that flops out of the elevator (Danny's mouth) in the river of blood. When being interviewed by the psychiatrist Danny is asked, “Is Tony one of your animals?” He denies this to be the case, but in the wide shot of the bedroom we see several animals. Some of them are stickers on Danny’s door – several species of bird, an owl, a duck, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and a few Snoopy stickers. The large sticker of a yellow bird is called Woodstock and is from the cartoon Charlie Brown. Woodstock is chasing a ball, which is important because it was a ball that lured Danny toward the symbolic room 237. something interesting is that large sticker of one of the Seven Dwarves is present as Danny brushes his teech yet missing in the psychiatrist scene.

Between Wendy and the door is a black monolith shaped piece of card with crude paintings of three animals on it. The animals appear to be 1) a smiling dog wearing a red coat 2) an orange cat or lion with a yellow head that appears curiously like the sun, and 3) a grinning purple elephant. To the right we see the Goofy figure, a cartoon animal, which is wearing the same clothes as Wendy. Next to Goofy is a book with TIGER written on it above a cartoon face of a tiger seen creepily peaking out from behind a small chalk board. The curtains appear to show a cartoon character holding a baseball bat and part of a white cartoon face laughing aloud (possibly a foreshadow of Wendy’s baseball bat encounter with Jack). On the window ledge is a yellow

duck. The same duck was seen peaking out from behind the curtains in the bathroom just a few minutes earlier and so probably symbolizes a laughing Jack Torrance just as the laughing woman in room 237 did. The duck’s position on the window ledge, backed by false light, also suggests that it is Jack, the domineering husband, “pulling Wendy’s strings” so to speak.

In the close up of Danny we see that his pillow is a laughing or screaming teddy bear and on his t-shirt is Bugs Bunny and a basketball net.

One of the frequent complaints about The Shining is that Kubrick didn’t include the moving hedge animals from Stephen King’s book, but judging by the number of animals in the psychiatrist scene alone, it’s possible that Kubrick reinterpreted the animal theme to appear in the films props. The HiDef version of the film makes a variety of props more clear, and something that quickly becomes apparent is that there are a huge number of depictions of animals throughout the entire film. Dozens of animal pictures can be found.

Alex Colville's painting, Horse and Train, is visible in the Torrance apartment as Wendy walks the psychiatrist into the living room.

A deer’s face is seen in Danny’s tricycle scene near room 237.

A fox picture hangs to the right of the room 237 bathroom.

As Wendy runs up a stairway she passes a Colville picture titled Moon and Cow.

And a moment later a picture of two buffalo hangs to the right of the doorway where she sees the bear suited man.

Then of course we have the various manifestations of bears already explored in chapter seventeen. There are lots of animal images in The Shining. One of the more interesting of these animal images is the aforementioned tiger face in the psychiatrist scene.

This is probably a manifestation of Danny’s imaginary friend because at two later points in the film we see a similar tiger face on a box of cereal. The first is on a shelf in the upper right as Halloran talks about the different foods in the storeroom.

And the second is seen peering from a table behind Wendy as she argues with Jack through the storeroom door, having locked him in.

This makes sense in the subliminal narrative because for Danny to set a trap for Jack and release him from the storeroom would require that he be aware that Jack had been locked in there. So perhaps the tiger on the Frosted Flakes box represents Danny spying on the proceedings. And then there’s one other small, but very significant detail … the trademark cartoon character seen on Frosties boxes is called Tony the Tiger. It’s also possible that Tony is manifested as a bear in some scenes. Both the psychiatrist and Ullman have reddish fluffy hairstyles, giving them a bear-like appearance. The psychiatrist wears a brown coat and Ullman has been described as wearing a huge brown coat in the deleted ending scene, again giving him the appearance of being a bear. When Danny is offered ice cream by Halloran outside the storeroom, watch Ullman, the symbolic bear. He stares down at Danny with a knowing smile as he very slowly scratches his face with his index finger – the exact same finger wagging movement that Danny makes when talking to Tony.

Adding to all this is the fact that Tony speaks in a gruff voice, like an animal, and in Danny’s first scene he speaks to his Mother through his wagging finger, but on this occasion using a mouse-like voice. It’s possible that Kubrick developed the assorted animal themes in The Shining by researching Psychodrama and Art Therapy. These two disciplines often involve clients play acting their past traumas through fictional characters. In particular the drawing of the abused and abuser as symbolic animal characters has been known to help children break through amnesia, while maintaining emotional disassociation.

Note: This article is yet to be completed. Further chapters and notes will be added as more information becomes available.