The Shining (1980)

Pauline Kael, in her review for the New Yorker, saw The Shining as a crude, clumsy examination of man turned back into ape; a regressive step in Stanley Kubrick's cinematic endeavours, which had seen the birth of the Nietzschean Star-Child at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Certainly, The Shining is an endlessly slippery film. It refuses to conform to the tropes of horror, and when it does employ them, it is usually for subversive purposes. The remote hotel in the mountains is not the dark, Gothic motel of Psycho, but a strangely well-lit, labyrinthine mansion of kaleidoscopic carpets and sharply defined corridors. Shelley Duvall's weepy, wifely Wendy is not quite the shrinking violet she seems, but we're never sure whether to laugh at her or keep our fingers crossed for an escape. Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance is so obviously mad from the outset that Kubrick does away with suspense early on, but what he leaves in its absence is much more interesting. He wants to find out what lurks beneath the superficial scares of the horror film; what is waiting for Danny, and us, at the heart of the maze?

There are very few real frights in The Shining - Kubrick is far more concerned with building an atmosphere of interminable repetition and claustrophobia. Maze images dominate the film's architecture, from the patterns on the hotel floor and the network of corridors through which the Steadicam stalks Danny, to the literal maze looming vast and unmappable at the side of the hotel. One of the many deliberate errors in Kubrick's work is the 'model maze' in the hotel lobby, which bears little resemblance to the actual structure it is claiming to represent. All this serves to heighten the sense that the Overlook Hotel is watching its residents, trapping them in its seemingly ordered grounds. As Wendy muses whilst being given a tour, 'the whole place is such an enormous maze I’ll have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs every time I come in.’ Her Grimm's fairytale reference is unknowingly apt, as this winter in the mountains descends into every child's worst nightmare of parental malevolence. 

The problem some people have with The Shining is the sense that, at times, it seems to parody its own purposes. Nicholson's facial expressions are so excessive, so explicitly a caricature of psychosis, that he rages through the hotel as a kind of tragicomic clown, and it's tempting to chuckle when, armed with an axe, he utters the immortal line: 'Honey, I'm home!' However, Kubrick revels in this kind of generic playfulness. The Shining is parodic only in the sense that it sometimes mocks the tradition it has been born from. Ultimately, Kubrick doesn't need static television sets, home-videos of houses at night, or shower scenes gone awry to generate unease. The brilliance of this film rests in the depth of its structure. We are led through a maze of uncanny repetitions and dead ends and we are left to wonder if it is really a mirror Kubrick has placed at the centre, one of the many mirrors into which Jack leers knowingly during his descent into uncontainable madness.