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| 'Hereeeeeee's Johnny!!' |
‘The Shining’ is a special film to me, because it was the only Stanley Kubrick film I have ever watched in the cinema. My friend, ‘G.’, and I have watched a re-release of this film back in 2006, when the Broadway Cinematheque in Hong Kong was celebrating its 5th anniversary and therefore has organized a Stanley Kubrick film festival, in which it showed all the available Kubrick films. I remember that my friend had a great impression on this modern classic, and though I have already watched ‘The Shining’ a couple of times before this showing, the cinematic atmosphere, with the intense soundtrack system, created quite a memorable experience for such a thrilling film.
How about the other audience and critics when the film first came out in 1980? Well, rather shockingly, it was a huge disappointment. While the film made a decent result in the box office, the critical reviews were bad. Stephen King, whose novel the film was based on, had a legendary hatred on the film (and also Kubrick). The major reasons for these sentiments were actually quite similar to that for 'Eyes Wide Shut' - a justified over-expectation, the challenge of genre categorizations, and the slow pace. Many people at that time did NOT find ‘The Shining’ horrifying - because the film was shot in broad daylight and wide composition, and these characteristics defied all the grammatical rules for a traditional horror movie. And, many people felt the narrative of the story was rather slow and not intense enough, and especially for Shelley Duvall's character, Wendy Torrance, critics saw her performance from hateful to misogynistic.
I believe the above observations are totally valid, if you are making the above assumptions. Without these assumptions, I see 'The Shining' more as a thriller, a film that relies on slow-building suspense rather than cheap scares. To be honest, is it that surprising to see that Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance will eventually go nuts at the end? I believe most audience will expect that to happen, and indeed want that to happen. It is the gradual deterioration of the man's psyche that makes the film thrilling. While I do not disagree that a dark and expressionistic atmosphere will make a film scarier, Kubrick's original approach makes the film more chilling. The deliberate cleanliness and brightness of the environment will certainly contrast the sudden appearance of the hidden demons and dark forces, and such a high contrast approach will certainly make the film more thrilling.
Like many of the Kubrick films, The Shining has evolved throughout the last 35 years and it has established a cult classic among many audience members. I would say 'The Shining' is likely to be his most popular and entertaining film, and it will certainly be the first Kubrick film to watch if anyone is fascinated by the director. The film signifies what that means to be Stanley Kubrick: perfectionism, obsession, discipline, a concern with performance, and the emphasis on visual. The Shining is an extremely visual film - the visual details are so plentiful that they could be more important than the rather banal and often heightened dialogues the characters said. Indeed, the reason why the film can have such an everlasting impression on the audience is because when they view them again and again, they will discover more and more insights from the film. Their commitment and curiosity as a careful observer will be rewarded. Numerous interpretations and fan theories have been proposed everywhere, and just reading these views can already be enjoyable.
‘The Shining’ has an intense impact on the subsequent films. When you see a cinematic composition very symmetrical, 2 doors next to each other, 2 twins standing hand in hand, the presence of a maze, a bartender in golden light, someone shouting 'Here's Johnny', and a few Pixar films like 'Toy Story', you can feel ‘The Shining’ 's influence. Ironically, some of the creators in Pixar turn out to be huge fans of 'The Shining', because while many Pixar films have thought-provoking themes regarding families, 'The Shining' is likely an un-family friendly film. The film seems to suggest that domestic life is bloody hell –with blood being guaranteed in the film.
‘The Shining’ is a film about performance. Kubrick has become infamous among actors when it came to the production of ‘The Shining’, because he has asked for a large number of takes from the actors, even in some mundane scenes. While one can easily attribute this to a sort of self-indulgent obsession or egomaniac perfectionism, many viewers believe that this strategy is deliberate. It makes sense if Kubrick was seeing the actors as an instrument (bear with me, I do not mean to be offensive), or more appropriately, a function of the film. I am not saying that Kubrick was dehumanizing his actors – because in the design of the film Kubrick has not really intended to make ‘psychologically realistic’ characters, those you will expect to see in the real world. It is more appropriate to see these characters as archetypes, or ideas released in human forms. Kubrick was wise enough to understand the repeating demands for more takes will generate an anxiety from the actors – because, as they are humans they will perceive they are not fulfilling Kubrick’s requirement. So, they will try to explore a whole spectrum of possibilities for their performance. They can tighten up, act in a more stylized way, and contradict their own interpretations of the film. True, you can argue it is not fair for the actors, because in a human-centered point of view, you are undermining the creative contributions the actor may be investing into their roles, and Kubrick is like treating them as tools rather than artists. Yet, I feel that it makes sense if the style of a film is detached, and of course not anyone may identify with this style –hence the detractors of Kubrick films. Nevertheless, the actors in the film have all given really memorable performance, and I believe a lot of audience members can come to identify with this over the years.
This aspect of the film leads us to a minor, yet significant criticism by a number of critics and the members of audience. They complained that the film was ‘non-psychological’ or not psychologically realistic. The reason for these people’s disappointment originated from the preference that Kubrick did not provide any conclusive – especially psychological - reasons why Jack Torrance has gone crazy. Kubrick did not provide any information regarding Jack’s conditions through his quotes – they were basically all rants and banal statements that made not much sense. Furthermore, Kubrick did not provide even a narrative how Jack would have reached this type of psychological condition – like some previous traumatic events for example. In Stephen King’s original conception, King at least has attributed Jack’s situation to alcoholism. For a more traditional approach of American cinema, psychological realism is a requirement for a story with a clear narrative – even an evil character has to be made clear what his motivations for doing something bad are. It seems not to be the case in ‘The Shining’, a film about an American family from an American director.
Many critics, by contrast, believed that these preferences were deliberate by Kubrick, because as I have stated above, he had no intention to base the film on psychological realism. Kubrick wanted to present Jack as a psychologically hollow man, a bit like the psychopathic samurai in ‘The Sword of Doom’, where the filmmakers in both of these films did not intend to explicitly explain why the characters behaved in such a way. The philosopher Deleuze said that Kubrick was being more of a ‘symptomatologist’ here – he was showing the symptoms and expressions of Jack Torrance's craziness. Of course, there certainly existed some reasons or processes that would lead to Jack's situation, yet Kubrick chose to communicate these reasons indirectly through the images, rather than expressing them directly in words.
Therefore, ‘The Shining’ is very much like ‘2001’, where a number of perspectives are possible to make sense of the film. This approach of ‘anti-realism’ should not be seen as negative without careful consideration, because Kubrick 's concern in his later films was often about the way how characters performed as a function - much like a pawn piece on a chessboard - in a given environment and how the character would interact with the environment. He was also concerned with how these resulting interactions (in this case, Jack's apparent possession by the Overlook Hotel) would impact the other characters and the surroundings. Thus, there was not a requirement to guarantee the portrayal of a psychological interpretable character in this case, because it was the interaction rather than inner-psychology that mattered. Certainly, some viewers might find it difficult to accept this approach and saw it as a weakness on Kubrick’s part. Yet, this detached approach can be a powerful one when the concerns of the story are on bigger ideas, including the more allegorical, abstract ... and timeless ones.
by Ed Law
2/9/2017
Film Analysis
