The Shining [DVD] [1980]

Classsic film

Though not Kubrick's best, "The Shining" is a true horror classic: full of atmosphere, haunting backdrops, chilling soundtrack, masterful camerawork (especially low-angle tracking shots are excellent), and Jack Nicholson's razor-sharp acting are combined with Kubrick's perfectionism and his keen eye for detail. The result is an awesome experience, you'll never forget. Even at the very beginning you expect something sinister will happen. A creepy music on the background, a yellow Volkswagen meanders along road at threatening Colorado Rockies. Mesmerizing aerial shots and overall atmosphere here are beyond all description. Really, really perfect. Kubrick begins to display his unique skill and vision at the very first scene. Actually the story is quite simple: a recovering alcoholic Jack finds an off-season caretaker job at an isolated, mountain-locked hotel in the middle of nowhere in Colorado Rockies so that he can make some money as well as write in peace. Because the hotel is inaccessible during winter, he takes his family to the hotel too. Once the family is alone in the hotel, Jack begins suffering from writer's block and cabin fever. Also, the hotel seems to be replete with all sorts of evil vibes and horrible legacies. Under these circumstances he slowly disintegrates, descends into insanity and inflicts an unbearable terror on his skinny wife and psychic son, Danny. Although it seems so plain and simple, actually this is not the case. The fact is that all Kubrick films are open to many different interpretations, because they contain lots of symbolism and cryptic meanings hidden deep in the plot and visuals. This is true here. My theory is that the film is about alcoholism and its devastating effects on family. The hotel symbolizes how unbearable a home can be for those who have to live there. It enjoys some of the most unforgettable shots in motion picture history, such as the amazing chase scene in snowbound topiary maze, Jack's shattering of door with ax, blood pouring out of elevators, looming details of hotel interior as Danny rides his Big Wheel through empty hallways, and haunting look of Grady twins. There are plenty of them, all neatly distributed and absolutely wicked.

Great film.

Excellent,

So I have only just watched to Shining for the first time- and I admit I'm in my mid 30's. I can see why this movie was such a phenomenon and a favorite. Looking at it with eyes that are used to CGI and a lot scarier content will make this movie look tame but you can not deny the greatness that is Jack Nicholson. The movie does get into your head and the music does have the ability to keep you on the edge of your seat. There are some cringe worthy moments but all in all a great film that paved the way for thrillers nowadays. It needs to be seen

Great reading!!

Good

The thing I most admire about Stanley Kubrick is the way he successfully married art with commerce to such an incredible extent. He made films Americans working in the commercial mainstream as a rule never make. His films constitute deep and profound artistic reflections on the human condition which are cold, intellectual, negative, misanthropic, misogynistic and monstrous. Closer to the European ‘art film’, they have no right to be popular and yet people flocked to see them in droves. Within every one there is an obvious dialectic between commercial necessity and artistic creativity, the director taking painstaking effort to excel in both to the extent that the films are often two films in one. The most obvious is always the commercial film, the one that guarantees audiences and money in the bank for the studio. Following the principles of Vladimir Pudovkin, Kubrick was wedded to narrative simplicity and crafted films which rely on linear (usually narrator-driven) storylines which are so clear anyone can grasp them. Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange are all notable for their simple narratives riding over fiercely intelligent complexities. In Barry Lyndon Kubrick appeared to miscalculate his audience and get the commercial side wrong. The narrative is simplicity itself, but nobody in 1975 was much interested in watching an 18th century costume drama despite the jaw-dropping cinematography. And yet Barry Lyndon may well be the director’s greatest achievement. There he puts on screen the profoundly Kubrickian vision of Man entrapped by the mechanisms of his own making which courses through all his films, but for the first time he denies (possibly on purpose) the commercial imperative and the film did bad box office. Kubrick knew his next film had to ‘score’ in order for him to retain his artistic independence. The Shining then is a calculated reply to the commercial failure of Barry Lyndon with Kubrick proving himself still up to the task of making a double-headed film that was successful both artistically and commercially. Indeed, it proved to be such a huge commercial rollercoaster success that the latter qualified the former. Cynical critics perhaps smelling a rat pelted this ostensibly broad, unsubtle, brash and loud horror-schlocker with mainly hostile reviews. It was the first Kubrick film since Paths of Glory NOT to be nominated at the Academy Awards, and it’s only with the passing of time that critical opinion has come round to re-evaluating it upwards. Cards on the table then, for me The Shining is one of 5 Kubrick masterpieces (alongside Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, 2001 and Barry Lyndon) and is therefore one of the greatest films ever made, but it is not the film most people think it is. I would like to get beyond the film’s main commercial generic text (the film as a mere horror flick) and suggest that hiding behind the shock and the gore is a jet-black comic satire on the nuclear family, and beyond that an examination of the country which contains this family. But before I get to what I think The Shining is really about (the main text which as per usual with Kubrick is offered as a subtext), I have to acknowledge the film’s dominating impossible-to-avoid commercial text. It is without question meant to look like a horror film and Kubrick chose the genre primarily because he knew it would hit a universe chord in audiences and be popular. An adaptation of a Stephen King horror novel, the film is accepted everywhere as a horror masterpiece, often topping lists of Best Of horror films (Time Out currently has it at No.2 behind William Friedkin’s The Exorcist) and there’s no doubting Kubrick uses the genre ingeniously for commercial exploitative purposes. Prior to its American cinema release Kubrick advertised it intensively on TV with a single short image (the blood gushing in slow motion from the elevator) accompanied with an ‘R’ rating even before the censors had passed it as such. Clearly The Shining was a film that was going to scare the living daylights out of you (the biggest prerequisite for any horror film) and millions of Americans knew about it months before it was actually released. The exaggerated hard sell of horror tropes continues throughout the film and critics’ accusations of lack of subtlety are well-grounded. The opening credits roll up over helicopter shots of a car bearing Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) to The Overlook Hotel high up in the Colorado Rockies where he is to be interviewed for a job as winter caretaker accompanied by eerie electronic music (by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind) combining the Dies Irae death chant with weird sonorities and high pitch screaming voices. The effect is to unsettle us from the start, something underlined in the scene back in the Boulder Torrance family apartment where Jack’s son Danny (Danny Lloyd) tells his mother Wendy (Shelley Duvall) via ‘Tony’ (the boy who lives inside Danny) that he doesn’t want to go to the hotel and consequently ‘shines’ into the bathroom mirror by seeing the afore-mentioned blood elevator. ‘Shining’ is defined as the ability to communicate without talking and to see events that have happened before or that may happen in the future. Danny has this psychic gift and it is identified and explained by the hotel cook Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) who shares the affliction. Hallorann explains that many people have the gift but either don’t understand it or refuse to accept it and in the course of the film both Jack and Wendy come to ‘shine.’ As per Kubrick’s wont narrative incident and plot is cut down to the bare bones and the film plays out as a simple case of the hotel’s past coming to life and turning Jack from a family patriarch into a monster intent on hacking his ‘loved ones’ into little bits. Except that as played by Nicholson Jack is a manic grinning lunatic from the very outset and hasn’t far to fall. The film is basically a haunted house fable replete with standard shock images – a pair of dead girls appear from beyond the grave to implore Danny to play with them “forever and ever and ever” before being pictured cut up, butchered and bleeding in a corridor; the elevator gushes blood repeatedly; a naked siren morphs into a dead and decaying old hag in Jack’s arms in Room 237; Wendy observes a man in a beast suit fellating a man in evening wear before meeting another man with his skull split in two who toasts her with “Great party, isn’t it?” Danny and Wendy’s visions are violent and shocking while Jack’s are romantic and soothing as befits a man reacquainting himself with his psychic roots – two sequences in the Gold Room where he is confronted by a barman and then a waiter who turns out to be the same Delbot Grady (Philip Stone) who cut up his own wife and kids with an axe. Jack’s metamorphosis into an axe-wielding monster is obvious from the start and Kubrick exaggerates his usual stylistics to the hilt to wind up tension that isn’t really there. This means use of extreme wide-angle lenses; extensive sequences shot with a Steadycam (then a brand new device) to simulate Danny’s rides around the hotel on his Big Wheels tricycle and then to get inside the heads of characters and apparitions chasing and being chased; use of extreme music for extreme effects – Ligeti, Penderecki and especially Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; and shock cutting to go with the music to bring us to the intertitles which split up the action. The acting is as extreme and manic as the visual presentation, Jack the epitome of the dislocated patriarch at first sarcastic and scathing and later murderously feral, Wendy the highly strung panicky housewife all wide-eyed innocent shock and motherly concern rendered ridiculous when tottering around with a huge phallic knife she doesn’t know what to do with, and Danny the ‘normal’ innocent American boy wedded to TV animation and ice cream who learns instinctively how to defend himself against the parental dysfunction which has been afflicting him for years before it reaches its logical conclusion at the center of the frozen hedge maze behind the hotel as he successfully eludes his monster father for the last time. The film piles up the various horror movie tropes and clichés and as the public reception tells us it worked “real horrorshow” for a great many people, but alas, not for me. The film’s lack of subtlety (its very obviousness and sheer predictability) may be the reason why I have never been scared by it. Even on first viewing at the end of the 80s I remember laughing a lot more than screaming from shock, especially at ‘classic’ moments when Jack advances on Wendy as she backs off holding a baseball bat in the Colorado Lounge and then when Jack goes after Wendy with expressions like “Wendy, I’m home” and “Heeeeere’s Johnny!” as he axes down the door. My initial reaction to laugh has always led me to believe that The Shining as a horror film isn’t actually very successful. This was confirmed by Stephen King himself who had a number of problems with what Kubrick did to his book. He said, “The real problem is that Kubrick set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre. Everything about it screams that from the beginning to the end, from plot decision to that final scene – which has been used before on The Twilight Zone.” I would suggest that perhaps rather than not having sufficient knowledge of the horror genre, Kubrick didn’t actually “set out to make a horror picture” at all. What we have is much more a parody of a horror picture which guides us to the point that the director had other things on his mind deeper and more pressing than the generic need simply to shock us. In other words the horror picture makes up the first of two films in an appropriately schizophrenic whole, the commercial film designed to bring in the masses and placate a studio eager to make up what they lost on Barry Lyndon acting as a red herring which casts the meat of what Kubrick is really saying as subtext. One thing the horror film always flags up is a binary schizophrenic view of the world and it is this rather than shock and gore factors which really inspired Kubrick’s imagination, for The Shining is obsessively made up of binary and binary-opposite combinations in its narrative events, character deployment and extraordinarily detailed mise-en-scène. Robin Wood in his much quoted and highly influential article ‘Return of the Repressed’ describes the classic horror formula as one where “normality is threatened by the beast” with the doppelgänger showing “normality and the Monster as two aspects of the same person.” In The Shining Jack is shown as two people in one, the husband and father writer/teacher caretaker of the Overlook and the Monster who becomes fixated on his work and turns on his family. Jack is the father/husband of the present who is taken over by the Monster of the past (1921), his metamorphosis translating as a return of repressed bad memories surfacing from the hotel’s collective unconscious. There are two Jacks and there are two Gradys, Delbot Grady in 1921 and Charles Grady in 1970 who hacked up his wife and family. There are also two Dannys, the ‘normal’ boy and Tony, the boy who speaks Danny’s unconscious. The film starts with two road trips up to the hotel and two interview situations, one Jack’s job interview and the other Wendy and a social worker where we learn ‘Tony’ first appeared when Jack hit Danny in a drunken rage 3 years before and where we also learn that Jack was a writer/teacher and is now a recovering alcoholic. At the hotel we discover there are two mazes, one the interior of the hotel (which Wendy characterizes as “a ghost ship” and so big that they need to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way out) and the other the hedge maze at the rear of the hotel. The hedge maze is even doubled as a model in the reception area which Jack at one point ‘shines’ over staring down at Wendy and Danny walking around at the center. Indeed Jack is always inside, the Minotaur at the center of the maze of the hotel while Wendy and Danny are often outside. When Jack is lured out of his environment by a young Theseus (Danny) at the film’s conclusion it results in his death. Other binary couplings crop up repeatedly to further mystify things and to extend the depiction of everything we see as an endless maze with no limits to its twists and turns, its dead ends and false trails. In the job interview the manager Ullman (Barry Nelson) asks Bill Watson (Barry Dennen) to join for no other reason than he looks exactly like Jack and when he joins Wendy, Jack and Ullman it is to make a foursome as they walk around the hotel. As they tour Ullman says goodbye to two pairs of beautiful ladies (whom Jack obviously reacts erotically to). The Colorado Lounge where Jack sets up his typewriter is dominated by a giant Navajo fake sand painting above the fireplace which depicts 4 figures, 2 couples. In the film we see two bathrooms are associated with the Torrance family (in Boulder and in their apartment quarters in the hotel) and two are associated with the hotel and the hotel’s evil past (the green and white bathroom of Room 237 where Danny and then Jack are assaulted and the red and white bathroom of the Gold Room where Jack talks to Delbot Grady). Charles Grady has two daughters who haunt Danny and the hotel has two food storerooms, the dry goods storage where Wendy locks Jack in and the freezer room. For the sake of binary presentation the dairy section (eggs, milk, etc) is omitted. Kubrick’s binary presentation of the mise-en-scène is illustrated most obviously through the use of mirrors and reflected (doubled) images in all the bathroom scenes and especially in the Torrances’ bedroom where Jack is mirrored comforting Danny and then later Danny’s word ‘REDRUM’ written on the door is reflected as ‘MURDER’ as Wendy wakes up to the boy standing beside her bed holding a knife warning of an approaching Jack about to axe the door down. Then there’s the film’s contrast between two further living spaces. When Danny ‘shines’ to reach Hallorann in Miami we notice Hallorann is pictured in a room laying on his bed in two reverse zooms which reveal two pictures of naked women on the wall at the head and the foot of his bed. He is shown dead center of a double bed with two identical lamps one either side of him. This balanced depiction of a healthy libido in the world of the sane is contrasted with Ullman’s office which is the picture of the Overlook’s schizophrenia. Outside the office on walls on either side of the door are pictures. On the left is an abstract picture of a person splintered up into pieces in red and blue. On the right are photographs of mountains with peaceful blue skies reflecting the beauty of the 4 seasons. The split personality continues into the office. On the left a colorful jigsaw puzzle country map, a twisted abstract sculpture and ancient photos of the Overlook continue the dislocated feel of the abstract painting, all of which clashes with the orderly rows of pictures, awards and citations which reflect Ullman’s character and past on the right. Dead center as if to split or represent the room is a small American flag on the desk next to a pot containing pens and a toy axe! In his tidy ‘normal’ interior space Hallorann watches TV which declaims a binary opposite – while Miami is suffering a record heatwave Colorado is suffering a record snowstorm. Jack ‘shines’ twice and is taken both times to the Gold Room where he meets Lloyd the barman (Joe Turkel last seen in a Kubrick film as one of the condemned men in Paths of Glory) and then Grady the waiter. We actually ‘meet’ both Lloyd and Grady twice each, Lloyd twice behind the bar and Grady in the Gold Room and then later outside the dry goods storeroom where he lets Jack out after Wendy has locked him in. Jack is given two chances to kill his family and fails twice. Finally, the film finishes on two frozen images of Jack, one of him frozen into a death grimace outside in the hedge maze and one of him in a photograph staring out of a party scene dated ‘July 4th, 1921’. Everything is shown in binary pairs and binary opposites in freakishly extreme measures showing us Kubrick milking the very most out of the binary system horror films usually signify. However, this obsession with binary combinations goes way beyond what we find in Stephen King and in usual horror films to the point where we wonder what the real meaning behind Kubrick’s maze-like enigma is. The director is never one to state his ideas clearly in either words or images although (as a born cameraman) he clearly prefers the latter probably because it allows for greater ambiguity than words allow. He said: “Truthful and valid ideas are so multi-faceted that they don’t yield themselves to frontal assault. The ideas have to be discovered by the audience, and their thrill in making the discovery makes these ideas all the more powerful.” Themes should be communicated as subtext, “obliquely, so as to avoid pat conclusions and neatly tied-up ideas.” Revealing of all Kubrick films (and especially of The Shining) Kubrick also says, “There’s something in the human personality which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.” Clearly Kubrick is in the business of making open texts which audiences are invited to make sense of as they wish. And so I take up the invitation and suggest that behind the facile generic horror schlock the maze of binary combinations leads us to the real text of The Shining which is no less than an allegory of America. The horror we see emanates from the collective unconscious not just of a hotel filled with bad memories, but of an entire nation built on genocide and the imposition of a false New Order represented by modern America and the central nuclear family which epitomizes it. Key to this reading is the scene outside the Overlook on ‘Closing Day’ as Ullman is about to show the Torrances the Snowcat. As they walk he reveals that the hotel was constructed from 1907-1909 on the site of an old Indian burial ground, and he specifically mentions that the Indians were not happy about it, parties of them actually attacking construction workers as the hotel was being built. The metaphor is obvious – the Overlook Hotel is a palimpsest layered over an Indian graveyard just as modern America is a palimpsest layered over an ancient Indian civilization. The Overlook equals modern America and the Indian graveyard equals the discontent of the civilization that was decimated to make way for it. The hotel ‘overlooks’ or ‘represses’ bad karma originating from the original sin which we all recognize as the genocide inflicted by European settlers on an indiginous Indian nation. Not surprisingly then the film begins with European civilization cutting through a now spoiled American nation (Jack’s car and the road it travels upon) to the sounds of a requiem mass – the Dies Irae (the ‘Day of Wrath’) commemorating the suffering of a whole nation along with the distorted screams which may be the distorted echoes of an exterminated people. The residue of the American Indian population hangs over the interiors of the Overlook, in the many wall decorations, the birds’ heads and especially in the mise-en-scène Kubrick allots to the Colorado Lounge, the main area where Jack sets up home and metamorphoses into a Monster. The large rugs are all earthen-colored and deliberately Indian in design and the whole room is dominated by the giant Navajo sand painting which looks down from over the fireplace. We half expect the mural to come to life and for the Torrances to be attacked by Indian warriors, but their presence is kept to those distorted screams, the blood oozing from the elevator (the collective blood of all victims of the Overlook either Indian or European) and to the discreet use of the colors yellow and blue, colors used in the sand painting which denote for the Navajo nation different things. Yellow equals male/death while blue equals female/sky/happiness/love. Not only is this yet another Kubrickian binary opposite, but we see both colors deployed significantly throughout the film. We see Jack’s car at the beginning is yellow and that the Grady daughters are hacked up in a yellow corridor. Jack is most at home propping up the bar in the Gold Room, gold being a variant on yellow. We also see the staff wing where the Torrances have their apartment and Wendy exercises domestic control is colored blue. She even wears a blue bathrobe as does Jack when he is ‘reassuring’ Danny as he balances him on his knee saying he wants to live in the Overlook “forever, and ever and ever” which chillingly parodies exactly what the Grady girls tell Danny. The Grady girls in turn are dressed in blue. Further to the colors blue and yellow we also notice Kubrick obsesses over the combination of red, white and blue. These are of course the very colors of the American flag and significantly, throughout the film there is barely a single shot or sequence which doesn’t feature them all together. Modern America (America the palimpsest) is present throughout from the moment Jack arrives for his job interview to the moment of his death. The colors are present either very obviously or insidiously through subtle arrangement of mise-en-scène coordinated with clothing. Most obvious of all are the two scenes at the beginning of the film after the credits – Jack’s interview in Ullman’s office intercut with Wendy at home in Boulder with Danny. I have already mentioned the stars and stripes flag on Ullman’s desk which presides over a schizophrenic interior space. Most notable is the way Ullman’s sense of order (the right side of the office) is counterpointed with Bill Watson’s sense of chaos. Not only is he present as Jack’s ‘shadow’, but he sports a necktie which is clearly an abstracted stars and stripes design which matches the office’s ‘madness’ on the left. Ullman and Watson together define America as a schizophrenic binary opposite and this is crystalized within one man (Jack) once they leave. Wendy and Danny are first introduced sitting at their breakfast table, Wendy in a bright red sweater under a blue and white dress while Danny wears sports pajamas with ‘42’ written in blue on white with wide red borders around the neck and sleeves. Later obvious statements of red, white and blue come in the American flag next to the ‘Continental’ logo on the side of Hallorann’s plane and Danny’s Apollo 14 shirt which he wears zipping around on his tricycle prior to his Room 237 episode. More insidiously Kubrick slips in the three colors where the focus would appear to be completely contrary. The two guest bathrooms are very arrestingly colored green/white (Room 237) and red/white (the Gold Room), but we see Jack’s blue jeans and red jacket makes the three colors omnipresent anyway. In fact throughout the final third of the film Jack wears the same clothes and with white ubiquitous (especially the snow) the American combination is inevitable. Further statements on fundamental Americana are the highlighting of national holidays. The Torrances move into the Overlook on October 30th (Halloween) and Jack ‘shines’ himself back to a July 4th (Independence Day) ball in 1921, the commemorative photo of which being the very last image we see in the film. But most important of all is Kubrick’s depiction of family, the social construct which most defines what modern America is all about. All Kubrick men are trapped and doomed within constructs of their own making. Each film deals with a different construct and in The Shining that construct is the family. Kubrick takes the idea that modern American society places family values at its very center, that the average ‘nuclear’ family unit consists of a patriarch, a matriarch and one child, that over 50% of families fail and that of the families that do ‘survive’ it remains questionable how ‘happy’ they really are. The reality for large numbers of Americans is a childhood growing up in split or one-parent homes, listening to domestic quarrels as victims of internalized domestic heartache. Spielberg’s success rests largely on identifying this common concern of modern America and showing children transcending their split-home childhoods as examples of how to triumph over adversity. Kubrick on the other hand addresses ‘family’ squarely and simply in The Shining as yet another mechanism of defeat. Very typically for him he identifies the nuclear family as centered round a patriarchy which is ultimately impossible to maintain. Society dictates the husband sets up a system of control, but this system ends up controlling him. It is the story of so many in America to the extent that Jack writes large what every other male either potentially or really feels. In short Kubrick presents Jack’s fate as the fate of the modern American man. Jack is already on the edge even before he reaches the Overlook Hotel. An ex-teacher/writer, a child abuser and a recovering alcoholic, his role as patriarch is already bearing down on him to the extent that like Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket, “He can’t hack it any longer.” Conversations with Wendy and Danny are strained, Kubrick concentrating initially on Jack’s facetious reactions to their banal chatter. In the generic context of the horror film Nicholson’s performance is way over the top from the start leaving no distance for him to fall, but seen as a comic send up of his role as patriarch trying to lord it over his family, we appreciate Nicholson’s brilliant performance fully as he gives us all the various facets of the American father. In the car he scolds Danny for not eating his breakfast and then takes the mickey out of Wendy’s concern about the talk of cannibalism and the way Danny has learned about it – “See it’s OK, he learned all about from the television!” In the hotel he reacts warmly to Wendy bringing breakfast in bed, but when she tries to mollify him with platitudes over his lack of writing (“it’s just a question of getting used to it…”) his sarcasm simply drips from his toast as he says, “Yep, that’s all it is!” Jack tries to assert his patriarchy by taking over the wide spaces of the hotel, especially the Colorado Lounge which becomes the center of his “work-world” – work becoming the very justification of his existence as it does for many a father. Wendy interrupting him induces a classic dismissal again dripping in sarcastic vitriol which concludes by ordering her to “get the f*** out” (a scene actually taken from the collapse of Nicholson’s own first marriage), before the scene where Wendy automatically assumes Jack ripped Danny’s clothes and bruised his neck. In a classic hen-pecking situation the husband is sent off scurrying to drown his sorrows in the nearest bar which materializes in the Gold Room where Lloyd fuels his bitter sexism. He recognizes Wendy still not forgiving him for something that happened 3 years ago and refers to her as “The old sperm bank upstairs,” women in general as “White man’s burden,” and agrees with Lloyd’s clichéd pronouncement, “Women – can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” Like all husbands peeved at their henpecking wives, if it’s not the nearest bar he runs to it’s the nearest woman to have an affair with. She of course materializes in Room 237. Kubrick’s definition of the family unit as essentially patriarchal is further revealed in his presentation of Wendy. In another beautifully observed satiric performance from Shelley Duvall we see at first the wife as victim, but as Danny and she are threatened she assumes the masculine role in the family. Oppressed by the phallus, she picks up her own phallus (a baseball bat) to defend herself. The central scene following her discovery of Jack’s ‘work’ consisting of page after page repetitions of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” is performed as an exaggerated clichéd conversation between parents as to what should be done with theirproblem child. The words are perfectly civilized, but Nicholson’s delirious sarcasm and mimicking of Wendy (“As soon as possible…”) while Wendy backs off with her baseball bat suggests two things – Jack trying desperately to assert his role as patriarch as he talks about his role as a hotel caretaker bound by a contract and Wendy taking over the patriarchy by beating him and sending him rolling down the staircase into unconsciousness. We also recognize a third factor, the fact that the scene is so funny, Nicholson’s leering as ridiculously enjoyable as Duvall’s pathetic screaming is risible. A later ‘domestic tiff’ scene is even more hilarious as Jack announces his arrival with the words all wives want to hear – “Wendy, I’m home!” followed by a demented hacking down of a door, the recitation of the nursery tale of the Three Little Pigs with Jack huffing and puffing to blow the house down. The climax of the sequence is reached with Jack’s “Heeeere’s Johnny!” Johnny Carson Show imitation. The referencing is all to home situations every couple would be familiar with, but exaggerated of course with satiric venom until Wendy finally asserts her ‘patriarchy’ by trumping Jack's axe with her giant phallic knife. Jack is defeated, but Kubrick is not the director to let the woman win either and the film finishes with Wendy and Danny driving off to leave the hotel an empty shell, misanthropy and misogyny victorious over everything else. Bloody incidents in modern America layered over the genocide of the past, the America depicted in The Shining (colored red, white and blue) is a place impossible for anyone but ghosts to live in. It’s a work perhaps only an exile like Kubrick could have made.

La compré porque ponía que era la edición americana de 144 min de metraje. SI LA COMPRÁIS POR ESO, NO LO HAGÁIS PORQUE NO LO ES. La voy a devolver.

Price is high but worth the buy!

Jack Nicholson's most iconic role. This is the US version which is shorter and better paced than the European extended version which has some unnecessary scenes. The bluray has multi-language audios and subtitles and lots of extras. It's a slow paced movie, there isn't much violence but the acting is what makes the Shining so memorable.

Ein Klassiker, den man gesehen haben sollte.

I absolutely LOVE Kubrick and The Shining, but even I can admit that the U.S. theatrical cut is too long and has scenes that are utterly pointless and do nothing but drag out the run-time. Many of those scenes are cut from this version of the film, and ANY Kubrick fan owes it to themselves to watch this European Cut, since both Kubrick and his editor considered it the superior version, and decide for themself.