A Night in Shining Horror

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT it was safe to go back into a hotel, walk down an empty hallway into a furnished room and draw a warm bath comes Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, a brilliantly precise and demanding film that turns horror into art and art into horror. With obsessive simplicity, Kubrick manipulates the pieces of an ordinary world--a family, a kitchen, a bathroom, a television--to create an extraordinary image of terror and death.

Script and crypt have always crept menacingly side by side in Kubrick's imagination. This latest film explores the death of love in post-war (and pre-WAR) America. It depicts the horror of a people who watch their own bloody past on TV, paint a bloodier future in books and movies Kubrick's included), and sit nervously waiting to be swallowed by an inevitable, self-destructive evil.

But a horror movie should be about jumping out of your seat and gagging on popcorn and clutching the stranger next to you in a bear hug. In this regard, The Shining is strangely flawed. Kubrick's film contains more than two hours of intellectual horror, too much suggestive fear for those audiences hoping for a bood and guts creature form the black lagoon/omen/jaws/prophecy, or even those expecting Hitchcock-like suspense. It demands patience, a susceptibility to delicate suspense, a relish for the ounce of boredom that wafts through a hallway before all hell breaks loose. And even with these allowances, The Shining still lacks a telepathic logic that might make it perfect.

Yet much of the horror that seeps across the screen makes chilling sense. Jack Torrance has drifted from the security of a teaching job at an elite New England prep school to the doors of the Overlook Hotel, where he applies for the position of winter caretaker. The Overlook stands high in the Rockies of Boulder, Colorado, an enormous summer resort with a history that extends to the beginning of the century. During the winter, however, snowfalls that cover the access road from November to May cut off the Overlook from civilization. Jack expects to finish a novel during the quiet months in the hotel.

In 1970, the hotel mananger tells Jack, the winter caretaker, a drunk named Delbert Grady, succumbed to "cabin fever" and axed his wife and two daughters into little bits and stacked them in a corner smiles; he's a rational person who's been on the wagon for five months now. He assures the hotel manager that his wife Wendy and his son Danny will love the Overlook.

But five-year-old Danny hates the Overlook before he ever gets there. Danny has "the shining," the capacity to see visions of both the past and the future. Danny's imaginary friend Tony warns him about the Overlook and shows him the horrors that will flood the hotel. Danny doesn't know how to fight his visions.

No one can prepare for what comes next, as Jack falls under the hotel's dangerous spell. The Overlook, it seems, shines as brightly as Danny. It draws Jack back to the roaring 20's and then unleashes him on his family.

KUBRICK'S FAVORITE THEME of man seeking his own death weaves its way subtly through this nasty plot. Jack Torrance is a man who has always allowed his drinking and his temper to overwhelm his reason, a man who sets his own roadblocks and then tries to run them in a battered Volkswagen. He stands as a crazy metaphor for the world in Kubrick's eyes: the rational progress we make always seems to be a step behind the torture we inflict on the earth and the nuclear apocalypse we plan for. In the end, we will be limping after the future, bloody ax in hand, howling for one more breath of life.

In this vein, The Shining draws from 2001, where man was overcome by man-made constructions. The Overlook's power to shine and torment its guests recalls the malignant power of HAL, the computer in Kubrick's space odyssey. the walls of the Overlook breathe; in one scene, mention of the hotel creates a physical space between Jack and Danny. "I love it," whispers Jack, leering.

The Overlook represents our monstrous, ghostly past, a life-giving-and-taking force similar to the black slab in 2001. "You've always been the caretaker," the ghost of Delbert Grady informs Jack, and indeed, man has always been here. When Jack tells Danny that he never, ever, wants to leave the hotel, he is striving for a painful immortality that cannot be reached outside the hotel.

This striving has a romantic edge. Jack is also a man in search of his double, which he sees in his son. Kubrick never hesitates to shoot whole sequences through a mirror; two heart-stopping moments are the work of simple reflections. In the mirrors, Jack sees his second self, the self that has fallen under the hotel's influence.

In a remarkable way, The Shining is also a study of marriage in America, a bloody Kramer V. Kramer. Jack Torrance bows to the pressures of the Protestant ethic, sacrificing the love and emotion in his marriage to dreams of success and security. Clearly, Jack and Wendy are incompatible, yet have pursued their marriage for Danny's sake, damaging him in the process, for he can see their deepest thoughts. Jack's impotence--America's impotence in the face of past horrors--provides one clue to the decline of their relationship. Kubrick begins to play with sexual imagery just as the film starts to thrust toward a climax. In a sequence that reveals Wendy's sexual dominance, she wields a phallic baseball bat at hip level, thrusting it rhythmically in Jack's face as he grins maniacally and moves closer. Only when Jack takes up the ax does his sexual strength return.

KUBRICK'S CAMERA NEVER RESTS, sliding past the pillars and walls of this magnificent hotel, keeping us confused. Like the Torrances, we get lost in this maze of doors and rooms and carpeted hallways. Several times the camera dances to floor-level and we view Danny, Wendy and Jack from the Overlook's perspective: Danny through the bars of his tricycle; Wendy a prisoner of Jack's typewriter; and Jack a desperate, slovenly, impotent creature.

The camera seems to do more than follow these characters. It chases after them, sprinting after Danny on his tricycle tours of the hotel. The camera threatens Danny, even more than Jack or the hotel's visions. He runs to escape this electric eye that records the past and projects the future.

Kubrick crafts his camera angles carefully, providing framing and backgrounds that serve as leitmotifs for each character. He maintains a persistent symmetry, as if the Torrances were caught in a photographic vise. And he is witty: when Jack makes up his mind to punish Danny, the cartons in the pantry behind him read "Pimento Pieces" and "Peach Slices."

The pace is slow but relentless, jarring at times, measured by a sickeningly warped sense of time that is disturbing even when it is almost boring. Intertitles warn of a slowly decreasing time frame measured first in months, and finally in minutes. Through the film, Kubrick never loses his eye for detail, using red to fantastic effect. The soundtrack groans initially with laughably melodramatic tones but turns into a collection of distorted household noises: plumbing gargles, airplane take-offs, TV gibberish, heartbeats, breathing, and chanting.

Kubrick seems to have run out of time, to have removed part of the plot and left other parts so that the story remains confusing. At worst, it is incomprehensible; at best, it requires a curious patience that will sort though the bizarre imagery for the right link. Yet the triumph of the extraordinary amidst the ordinary makes a frightening film.

JACK NICHOLSON plays Jack Torrance with an incredible range of facial contortions and emotional gyrations. He keeps us laughing nervously along, alienated from Shelley Duvall's goofy Wendy, eager to see what new twitch he will add to his repertoire. His eyebrows flap like crazy crows and his mouth and eyes twist into an astounding collection of evil leers. Even his voice changes frequency. This brilliantly amusing psychopath is a stylized mixture of madman and dramatic artist, one glazed eye directed at himself, the other on Danny, who is played to terrified perfection by little Danny Lloyd.

Stanley Kubrick is America's finest film craftsman. The Shining may not be a masterpiece but it is the only film in months that deserves a second look. The horrors of the Torrances' battle against Overlook obscure Kubrick's careful hand the first time around. Only a second journey through the padded hallways and inviting doors of the mysterious Room 237 reveals the brilliance of a director whose razor-sharp art draws both from precise science and glassy-eyed witchcraft.