Because the art is so heightened, so composed, and so unmistakable, it can take people away from themselves. When Kubrick films filter through our minds, especially the five heavily symbolic masterpieces, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut, they carry many nodes and vortices to trip our minds into ulterior sensations and so the films become more than films they are living dreams someone has produced upon us. As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.
Nor can one hope to define or explain it. It has a wider ‘unconscious’ aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. Art, especially visual art, is not about answers but iconography - pictures have narrative and parabolic qualities, but their aim is at the unconscious. Kubrick threaded very pregnant symbols into his images. When Jack moves through the reception area…on his way to a shining over the model maze, he throws a yellow tennis ball past a stuffed bear and Danny’s Big Wheel, which rests on the very spot (a Navajo circle design) where Halloran will be murdered (ironically, in front of the cashier’s cages). They become jumbled as mythical symbols in this wayward war of the unconscious, as Craig Nelson says in his book Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze, This yellow ball and other objects - the Big Wheel, Danny’s Apollo 11 sweater, the ax, Danny’s stuffed bear and the ghost in a bear suit, American foodstuffs (including the Calumet Baking Powder with the Indian feather hat), the local news that Wendy and Halloran watch, the film Summer of ’42 and the Roadrunner cartoon that Wendy and Danny watch, the copy of The Catcher in the Rye she reads, and the Playgirl magazine Jack pages through are very indicative of Americana. The Overlook Hotel has been built on an ancient Indian burial ground and according to Ullmann, the hotel manager, “I believe they actually had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it.” The presence of a Navaho Sandpainting looms over the fireplace in the Colorado Lounge (Jack’s giant writing den) and he angrily throws a tennis ball at it early in the film. With the exception of Lloyd the bartender, all the ghosts seen are British. (Most of the rest of the crew was British.) The film examines the ordinary American family and, by extension, the relations between them, minorities (Halloran), and the British, the country’s primary settlers. Kubrick, Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd (the son), Scatman Caruthers (Halloran-the cook), and Garret Brown (the Steadicam inventor and operator - it was the first film to employ the Steadicam for a majority of its shots) brought this to light. Though filmed on a soundstage in Britain, its appeal lies in its inexorable Americanness.
#The shining playgirl magazine movie#
Yet Kubrick told Jack Nicholson, “In reality, this is an optimistic picture…in some way this movie is about ghosts…anything that says there’s anything after death is an optimistic story.” It isn’t timeless because its time will never come it’s timeless because it will always be ahead of time. In between is spectral subject matter, and like the other Kubrick films, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Eyes Wide Shut, it touches something raw, something we often can’t help keep hidden-our fear of death. The sibilance of the syllables attack because of the film’s iconography: Jack, the ax, the hotel, the Big Wheel, REDRUM, the blood pouring out of the elevator, the white bathroom door being broken down, climaxing in “Here’s Johnny!”, from the moving opening shot on the water in Glacier National Park to the last ghostly blue titles on black, THE END. The very two words of the title uttered by human breath ooze warmth. The Shining is the most exciting and complex narrative motion picture in existence.
This essay includes a quote from The Shining wherein a racist term is used to demonstrate a dramatic shift in the narrative.