We Have to Talk about The Shining
I’m a Shining obsessive, like many others who have come before me.
And there’s no doubt in my military mind that The Shining is a meditation on the massacre of American Indians and the institution of antebellum slavery. It’s a dark and barbarous part of our history that, at least in Kubrick’s mind, we haven’t sufficiently reckoned with.
You don’t have to agree with Kubrick to enjoy the film. And I don’t think he was necessarily singling out the United States. He was telling a distinctly American story, but the theme is universal across our species and throughout our history.
Stephen King just happened to write the novel Kubrick then used as a prism through which to dissect the human condition.
To King, The Shining was a personal story about his own alcohol and drug abuse, and his building resentment towards his family. That’s in part why he has always hated Kubrick’s adaptation. Kubrick turned the story into something more than a personal journey. Something far deeper.
Kubrick was not a moralist. He made a film that explores how human beings exhibit both uncanny brilliance and inconceivable savagery, and tangentially, how those two are sometimes fused in the aspiration towards art, which is a mortal human’s attempt at “the eternal.” That’s a side note, however, and you’d probably have to be interested in philosophies of art to care much.
King is a good writer, and obviously a channeling vessel of some kind. But if you read his work, he’s not exactly the most astute cultural or historical analyst. He’s a storyteller, with gobs of ideas. But he’s not an intellectual, per se. At least, his intellectualism isn’t of a very subtle quality.
Like all good art, there are a lot of ways to interpret Kubrick’s film. But I believe what Kubrick was going for was an exploration of the violence interwoven into American history, especially during our establishment as a nation.
It’s a classic depiction of the “return of the repressed,” a la Freud: “The return of the repressed is the process whereby repressed elements, preserved in the unconscious, tend to reappear, in consciousness or in behavior.”
The major clue, the doorway into interpreting the film, is when Mr. Ullman is giving a tour of The Overlook grounds. He tosses off, quite casually, that the hotel was built on an ancient Indian burial ground.
This is nowhere in the book, which is conspicuous to say the least.
To insert something as potentially corny as this, when it was not in the source material, speaks volumes. To explain paranormal phenomena using the old “built on an ancient Indian burial ground” is such a cliche trope that, for Kubrick to include it, must have some deeper meaning. Otherwise it’s a total misstep, and we all know Kubrick was famous for not making missteps.
It would be trite, and Kubrick was never trite.
If that itself wouldn’t make the subtext obvious, there’s about a bajillion (literally one bajillion) references to Native American culture and appropriation in the film. There are also a bajillion websites listing all the suggestive imagery Kubrick uses.
Scatman Crothers is clearly meant to represent the black experience. He shines, in the sense that as an African American, he’s able to see the history white America tries to ignore when it posits itself as the “shining lantern on a hill,” a place built on ideals of peace and brotherhood. The shining, anyone?
Notice the posters on Scatman’s walls when he gets the “call” from Danny. Black women in African garb with ginormous afros? Is it suggestive of black awakening at the time, or am I just whistling Dixie?
Add to this the choice of film, pointed out by others, that Wendy is watching on the “magic television” that is not plugged into a wall socket. The movie is a tale about the loss of innocence that befell America during and after World War II. Summer of ‘42, it’s called, and I went out of my way to watch it.
It’s actually a great movie, and I recommend you do the same. Not what you might be expecting.
The point is well taken, that the mechanized slaughter of World War I, and its direct echo in the mass savagery of World War II, put an end to the shiny, happy notions of civilizational progress. Especially for the West. We all should know this by now. If not as fact, then as the fact that this is how these wars have been generally interpreted.
And how about the hilariously weird conversation about the Donner Party as the family rides up the Sidewinder in their VW Beetle, the feet of Nazi automobile engineering par excellence?
It seems to suggest to me that, in the colonization and subjugation of the continent, there were times when we “ate each other,” both literally and metaphorically. The drive to conquer the wilds of America, to civilize it so to speak, cannot be understood apart from the brutality necessary to doing so. And if not the outward brutality, the brutality of the drive itself. A collective will to power, expressed in science, exploration, and art.
And for all of those who see the handful of references to the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and take that as evidence for Kubrick’s admission of having faked the moon landing, I offer a different take.
The rocket is symbolic of the phallus, which especially for semioticians is a shorthand critique of the male desire to dominate nature. The same drive that propels us to dominate nature drives us to dominate other human beings.
And that’s my two cents!
