For a horror movie, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) isn’t all that scary. Its climactic sequence—in which Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), the deranged caretaker of a remote skiing hotel, chases Wendy (Shelley Duvall), his terrified wife, with an ax—was being parodied on late-night TV almost as soon as the movie came out. But there is one moment that never fails to creep me out. It’s when Wendy finds the writing project her husband has been laboring over for weeks and discovers that his typed manuscript, hundreds of pages, contains nothing but endless repetition of the phrase All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. As she thumbs through the stacked pages in horror, one sees that the typist has lost the meaning of the words entirely and begun shaping them into designs.
Given this level of focus, you can understand why some of the commenters in Room 237 take film auteurism to its logical extreme, refusing to believe that anything Kubrick committed to celluloid was random or accidental. Continuity errors become clues: the fact that a chair appears behind Jack in one shot and then disappears after a reaction shot of Wendy is offered as evidence that Kubrick is parodying low-budget horror movies. And get this: when Kubrick zooms in on Danny, he passes through an open door decorated with peel-off stickers of cartoon characters, the most prominent of which is Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, yet in a later scene, after Danny has experienced a psychic vision (the “shining” of the title), the Dopey sticker is gone. Certainly in the course of a six-month shoot, a sticker might fall off a door, but critic Geoffrey Cocks doesn’t think so: “I think what Kubrick is saying is, before, Danny had no idea about the world. And now he knows—he’s no longer a dope about things.”
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the correct location of the Stanley Hotel: Estes Park, Colorado.
Directed by Rodney Ascher
