Room.237.2012.720p.BluRay.x264.YIFY
- The poster that came out in Europe,
at least in England, I believe,
before the movie was released in Europe said,
"The wave of terror that swept across America."
And Kubrick controlled the posters very carefully.
Now, it made you do a double take.
I remember seeing it in Europe.
I was the Rome Bureau Chief at the time for ABC News.
And I remember looking at it.
It said, "The wave of terror that swept across America."
What's he talking about?
And you'd sort of think that he was talking about
the impact of the book The Shining.
Maybe.
The impact of the movie that had just opened over there?
Maybe.
It didn't quite fit.
The wave of terror that swept across America
from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon,
was the genocidal armies and the white men with their ax
clearing it all and bringing in extractive industries,
among many other good things as well.
But that was the wave of terror that swept across America,
terrifying, of course, the American Indians.
- I went in to see this movie in Leicester Square Movie Theater,
right near Leicester Square in London.
And I remember it quite clearly from...
I can even remember the seats we were sitting in.
If I went back to that theater, I could point them to you,
sort of near the back and over to the left.
From the moment of the opening astonishing helicopter shot,
I was terrified.
I had no idea what was coming.
I remember sort of sitting on the front edge
of my theater seat there to keep from falling off.
And I remember gripping my belt buckle with my left hand,
I think it was...
yes, my left hand, sort of to keep from falling off
the edge of the seat and to try to control my terror
as I watched this movie.
I had no idea what was coming.
I hadn't read the book.
I had barely seen any of the posters.
And I remember that I was stunned when the movie was over.
We left the theater, went in...
down into our underground car park
to get into the car to leave.
And as we were driving up out of the car park,
I was sitting in the back left seat.
I was thinking, "What was that? What was that?
"What was it? What was it?
What was it?"
And I think my visual imagination
looked at that Calumet baking powder can,
the one right behind Hallorann's head
when he was talking to Danny.
I knew what "calumet" meant.
It meant "peace pipe."
And I thought to myself, "peace pipe, Indians.
"Oh, my goodness,
they're all over the place in that movie."
- The loser has to keep America clean.
- And I suddenly said to my friends,
"That movie was about the genocide
of the American Indians."
And they said, "What are you talking about?"
And I started explaining it,
because I'd noticed the Calumet baking soda can.
In the first... the first time we seen one,
it's a single baking powder can straight on.
And you can see the whole word, "Calumet,"
so there's no duplicity,
like the little girls represent later.
This is an honest truth,
an honest peace pipe between them.
The other time we see the Calumet baking powder cans
is when they're very carefully placed
behind Jack Nicholson's head when he's talking to Grady.
- No need to rub it in, Mr. Grady.
I'll deal with that situation as soon as I get out of here.
- There's about six or seven of them stacked up,
and they're all turned different ways,
and you can't read any one of them completely.
It's... I've always interpreted those as being broken,
dishonest peace pipe treaties.
They're not... these two guys, Grady and Jack,
are not being honest with each other.
Grady is trying to get Jack to go kill his family
and commit genocide,
in the larger sense of the movie.
You know, I mean, Kubrick often,
in many of his movies,
he will end them with a puzzle
so that he forces you to go out of the theater saying,
"What was that about?"
And he would put things in the scenes
that he knows will be, among other things,
like confirmers when people start to try to figure out
what the movie is about.
And we know he took this kind of care.
There's a photograph in one of the books
that actually shows Kubrick
carefully arranging objects on the shelves
in that dry goods room.
I thought afterwards,
"How come I saw this and a lot of other people didn't?"
And I've thought about it.
It's a combination of factors.
First, I grew up in Chicago and, therefore,
just north of the Calumet Harbor
and spent summers up in the sand dunes of Michigan,
around on the other side of Lake Michigan.
My father took me and my sister out
to collect little bits of Indian pottery.
I'd already... I'd already covered,
at that point in 1980,
five years of the Lebanese civil war.
I was, at that point, covering John Paul ll.
I was the Rome Bureau Chief.
And listening to what he was saying about...
because he had experienced the Holocaust at its epicenter
and also other horrors.
And so all of those factors
were very much alive in my mind
when we went to see The Shining,
which I just thought was going to be some kind of horror movie
by this great moviemaker.
And all of those coming together along with the little key,
the Calumet baking soda can,
is why I just happened to tune to it
as we were driving up out of that underground parking garage
just off Leicester Square.
- I first saw the movie in 1980 when it first came out
and saw it probably two times.
I can say that I remembered the skier poster.
That is one thing that really stuck with me.
And the window.
The window in the office,
that's another thing that really stuck with me.
I remember, you know, in the newspapers afterwards,
people being disappointed.
And I remember people that I knew,
yes, in dialogue afterwards,
being disappointed that it was not more a horror film.
Well, no Kubrick film's really just a regular movie.
I understood that from,
well, when I was 10 years old and I first saw 2001.
I walked away.
I thought, "This is a film
that's supposed to make me think."
- I had my first religious experience
seeing the film 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.
I was a smart kid and liked art,
but I really did not like movies
and thought that they were really a substandard art.
And, you know, films like
My Fair Lady and Doctor Dolittle were out.
And it was a rather pathetic time in the '60s for films.
And my girlfriend, she pulled up
and told me that she'd seen a movie the night before
and she wanted to see it again.
So she took me to the theater, the Cinerama Dome,
and I watched it.
And I had never in my life envisioned that a movie
could do what this movie was doing.
And it was showing me things that I had never seen,
and it was intellectually challenging.
And it was an artistic masterpiece in every way,
from the soundtrack to the visuals to the story line.
And when the movie ended, I couldn't get out of my seat.
I was frozen in the seat,
completely paralyzed by what I'd just witnessed.
And the usher actually had to come and get me out.
And I was the last person, me and her.
And I staggered out of the theater
completely changed as a human being
and decided at that moment
that the only thing that I wanted to do
for the rest of my life
was to make films in one fashion or another.
And so I have done that.
So I owe Stanley Kubrick and his film 2001: A Space Odyssey
everything for everything that I have become in my life, so...
- I saw a number of Kubrick films
before I had an academic interest in him.
And then I went to see The Shining in 1980.
And frankly, I didn't think that much of it.
I thought the other Kubrick films that I'd seen
were far superior.
But as I thought about the film afterwards...
and even when I wasn't thinking about it...
there were things that bothered me about it.
It seemed as if I had missed something.
And so I went back to see it again.
And I began to see patterns and details
that I hadn't noticed before.
And so I kept watching the film again and again and again.
And since I'm trained as an historian
and my special expertise
is in the history of Germany and Nazi Germany in particular,
I became more and more convinced
that there is, in this film,
a deeply laid subtext that takes on The Holocaust.
I think it probably was the typewriter,
which was a German brand, which might seem arbitrary,
but by that time, I knew enough about Kubrick
that most anything in his films can't be regarded as arbitrary,
that anything... especially objects and colors
and music and anything else, probably have some intentional
as well as unintentional meaning to them.
And so that struck me.
Why a German typewriter?
And in connection with that,
I began to see the number 42 appear in the film.
And for a German historian, if you put the number 42
and a German typewriter together,
you get the Holocaust,
because it was in 1942 that the Nazis made the decision
to go ahead and exterminate all the Jews they could.
And they did so in a highly mechanical, industrial,
and bureaucratic way.
And so the juxtaposition of the number 42
and the typewriter was really where it started for me
in terms of the historical content of the film.
Of course "adler" in German means "eagle."
And eagle, of course, is a symbol of Nazi Germany.
It's also a symbol of the United States.
And Kubrick generally has recourse to eagles
to symbolize state power.
Kubrick read Raul Hilberg's
The Destruction of the European Jews.
And Hilberg's major theme in there
is that he focuses on the apparatus of killing.
And he emphasizes how bureaucratic it was
and how it was a matter of lists and typewriters.
Spielberg picked that up in Schindler's List, of course.
I mean, the film begins with typewriters and lists
and ends with a list, of course.
And so that informs...
and I had a chance to talk to Raul Hilberg.
He visited Albion College.
And he said that he and Kubrick corresponded about this.
And the fact that he read it then, in the 1970s,
when there was a big wave of interest in Hitler
and the Holocaust and the Nazis, I think...
I think just tells us that that typewriter,
that German typewriter...
which by the way, changes color in the course of the film,
which typewriters don't generally do...
is terribly, terribly important
as a referent to that particular historical event.
- I worked in a film archive for a decade,
kind of like fast-forwarding
through World War II ten times a day.
But, you know, like, when you see things
over and over and again,
their meanings change for you.
Like, when you see these... see, like, World War ll newsreels,
like, after a while, you come to realize
that it's all faked on film.
You are not seeing troops storming Normandy.
You're seeing troops storming a beach in Hollywood.
You know, like, you're not seeing a plane flying to Japan.
You're seeing a plane flying over, you know, New Mexico.
What you're really being shown is, like, staged heroism.
You know, like, you're seeing men moving with machines,
but you're not seeing what they're talking about.
And I think that that's something that Kubrick plays on.
Like, he plays on your acceptance of visual infor...
and also your ignorance of visual information.
Like he'll often, like, put little special clues
that you see, like, in the corner.
Every scene, there's an impossibility,
like the TV doesn't have a cord
or even something as simple as, like, them...
they, like... they bring too much luggage up.
They, like... Jack, you know, glances over at a pile
of their luggage that they brought,
and ifs about the size of a car.
You know, a lot of it is jokes.
Like, they're taking the tour.
They're crossing the street from the maze
to go check out the garage.
Like, a car is just about to hit them.
And then it cuts right before.
- I had anticipated the film
and had read the Stephen King novel
before the film came out and found it a very appealing story.
And I had spent a lot of time
at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado,
which is where he was inspired to write the book The Shining.
And so I, you know... I knew a little bit of the background.
And when Kubrick's film came out,
I was first in line to see it, of course.
And I was just really disappointed
and walked out of the theater
wondering what the hell I had just witnessed.
And, I... actually, my reverence for Stanley Kubrick
diminished after that.
I was disappointed, but I still watched it every few years.
I couldn't understand why I was so attracted to watching a film
that I actually didn't like.
And now in all these years later,
I know why it is a great film.
It is a masterpiece,
but not for the reasons that most people think.
We are dealing with a guy who has a 200 IQ.
I believe that when Stanley Kubrick
finished with Barry Lyndon, he was bored.
He had conquered the filmmaking landscape.
He had succeeded in making masterpiece after masterpiece,
and he was bored.
Barry Lyndon is a boring movie.
It is wonderfully shot.
It is beautifully costumed.
But it is a film made by a guy who is bored.
And I could see that.
And so I think Stanley retreated after Barry Lyndon.
And he began working on a new kind of film,
a film that had never been made before,
a film that was made by a bored genius
who had thoroughly emptied the jug of everything
that could be done in filmmaking.
And he was looking for the next thing.
And what he did was he began reading Subliminal Seduction
and a number of other books which were about how advertisers
were injecting...
injecting images, subliminal images,
into advertising to sell products more.
- Suggestible trends.
- You know, there'll be an ad for Gilbey's Gin,
and inside, the ice cubes will be various sex organs
and things to add a subliminal appeal to the ad.
Kubrick went to these advertisers,
and he asked them what their methods were.
And then he took those methods
and he applied them to The Shining.
Inside The Shining are hundreds of subliminal images
and shot line-ups.
And what these images are telling
is an extremely disturbing story about sexuality.
And the subtext of the story,
besides the other subtexts of the story,
is a story of haunted phantoms and demons
who are sexually attracted to humans
and are feeding off of them.
You'd have to be able to be a complete fanatic like I am
in order to find all this,
but, you know, I'll give you my favorite.
I'm only gonna give you one, but I'll give you my favorite.
When Jack meets Stewart Ullman in the office
at the very beginning of the movie
and he reaches over to shake Jack Nicholson's hand...
and so step through that scene frame by frame.
And the minute, the moment,
the frame that he and Jack Nicholson touch hands
and right after the line that Barry Nelson says,
which is, "Nice to see you,"
you can see that there's a paper...
a paper tray on the desk.
And as soon as they touch hands, the paper tray
turns into a very large straight-on hard-on
coming out of Barry nelson.
Yeah, it's hilarious.
It's a joke... a very serious joke... but a joke by Stanley.
And there's many of these in the film.
And very disturbing, some of them.
And this will all be in my film, Kubrick the Magician.
I'll give you one more.
This one's harder to find, okay?
And you have to know what Stanley Kubrick looked like
during the making of The Shining to know this one.
But if you go to the opening credits
and you pan the frame...
you... you go through the frames,
right after it says "Directed by Stanley Kubrick,"
as soon as his name passes off the frame,
stop and you will see that the clouds have Stanley Kubrick
airbrushed into them, his face...
with the beard and the wild hair and the whole thing.
I know this one's a little harder to find.
And I will have to...
I will have to Photoshop this one to show people it,
but there is definitely the photograph of Stanley Kubrick
in one frame airbrushed into the clouds.
- In most films, a dissolve is used
to indicate a long passage of time between two scenes.
But in The Shining, the dissolves go on for so long
that they create a superimposition,
where different scenes seem to be interacting with each other.
For example, you have the exterior image...
a tracking shot of the lobby
of the camera moving along the western wall
south towards the entrance.
And you see a janitor mopping the floor,
but it looks like he's...
it looks like a he's a giant, mopping,
like, clearing the forest
because he's mopping, like, a vacant area in the forest.
And then the...
then the ladder lines up...
lines up with the pyramid form of the exterior of the hotel,
which, in the exterior set, disappears.
Like, we don't see...
we only see that in the Timberline exteriors.
But the England movie set exteriors of the hotel,
like, the pyramid is missing,
and it seems as if the hotel
then takes both sides of the Timberline Hotel
and then kind of, like, makes a composite of it.
So it's... you know, it's a perceptual shift
of making people look like giants,
also making the hotel look larger or smaller than it is.
I mean, these things kind of litter the movie.
But then the shot goes on.
We see a...
we see a janitor pushing a folded-up bed on wheels.
And then he's followed by another...
he's followed by another guy, who's carrying, like, one...
like, one coffee table?
And then another... like, another guy is carrying one chair.
Like, where are these guys going with, like, these light loads,
you know?
Then we see Jack sitting on a chair, eating lunch.
And the manager and his assistant crosses paths
with two women who...
and just as he's in the corner of the screen...
you just see it for a second.
You see one of the women is wearing, like, a 13,
a number 13 jersey?
Can you hear that?
My boy, yelling?
Hold on one second.
I'm gonna see if I can...
I can see if I can calm him down.
You know, so, like, he's like,
leaning back and eating a sandwich.
And he's got, you know, a magazine in his lap.
And as he stands up to greet them,
he, like, throws it down.
And if you look at" look at...
look at it, you know, close up,
it's an actual Playgirl magazine.
Yeah, a Playgirl magazine in the lobby of a hotel
right in front of his boss, like on his first day at work.
Yeah.
Like, the cover is like, people getting ready for New Year's.
There's an article about incest.
At the beginning of the film, Danny's been physically abused.
But there's a suggestion
that he's been sexually abused as well.
You know, so like, just in that one...
one shot, there's all these, like, you know, complex things
going on in the background,
like things that are choreographed
to match up exactly.
Like, we see a guy...
we see a guy, carrying a...
entering the room, carrying a rug.
And by the time the scene is just ending,
we see him walking up the stairs.
Like, he's crossed the entire place,
you know, timed exactly.
I don't even...
Yeah.
- When Ullman is leading the Torrances
out of the elevator and into the Colorado Lounge
for the first time, there's a pile of suitcases.
And in the dissolve into that scene,
the scene before, a group of tourists
are standing in the lobby.
And those tourists dissolve into the suitcases.
Now, as an historian of the Holocaust,
I find that very, very striking
and certainly not accidental
'cause he's using those sort of cross-dissolves.
Now, that could be, along with the ladder,
where he's trying to make substantive connections
as well as formal ones.
- Oh, the window in Ullman's office,
it is absolutely beautiful.
The casual viewer isn't going to see
so many things in Kubrick's films,
although I think they may register unconsciously.
You know, but they're not going to, you know,
perceive perhaps these things
because as I've said,
he presents them as being real.
You know, it's realism.
And it's not your typical horror...
you don't have a horror film
except for this one section at the end,
right where Wendy walks in and the lobby is blue
and you've got the cobwebs all around.
And it's almost like
a Saturday morning kind of horror film
suddenly there for a second.
And you kind of go.
"Ooh, what is this with the skeletons and the cobwebs?"
And it's kind of cheesy.
But then, after that, following that,
you've got her going down the red hallway,
which... on the big screen,
that's petrifying.
So I think the kind of cheesiness before it
helps set up that red hallway.
So anyway, what was I saying?
Right, the windows.
So you got... Jack has entered.
And you can see... you are...
Kubrick shows you.
But he shows you this lobby, and you get to see...
as Jack moves across the lobby, you see the elevator beyond.
And you see beyond that, a hallway.
You don't see yet how far back it goes, you know,
the other things back there, but you have an impression
that this place is towards the middle of the hotel.
You just have that impression that it's towards
the middle of the hotel.
And you go from the lobby into the general manager's office
and then into Ullman's office, and there's this window.
And the window's a powerful window.
I mean, the light coming through there is glaring.
It's like a character in itself.
It takes over.
And you've got these tendril-y, sinister kind of trees
that are outside the window.
And you've got...
it's just such a forceful presence,
this light that comes over everything.
And, you know...
And there's something wrong with it.
There's something wrong with it,
and I think it registers as something wrong.
This is an impossible window.
It's not... it is impossible.
It is physically impossible.
It cannot be there.
It should not be there.
There's no place in the hotel for this window to exist.
It's only toward...
finally, towards the end of the film,
that you have the realization that there are several hallways
in succession behind the office.
You see it when Wendy,
when she's later down there and she sees Dick Hallorann's body
after he's been killed.
You have her behind... in that hallway behind the office.
So really, now, what can I tell you about the maps?
No, I did not sit down with graph paper.
I did not even begin to attempt to do them to scale.
Let me see.
I can't say which room I started off with.
I don't remember.
I just went through and decided I was going to do...
try to do as much as I could, feeling that...
I felt, eventually, that there were places
that I could plot out, such as where the girls were killed.
I was not absolutely sure at that point,
when I started out doing the maps,
where the girls were killed.
But I felt that it was somewhere back around
the area where they lived.
Suite number, what?
They lived at suite number 3.
- When Jack is sitting, typing at his typewriter,
and Wendy comes in and interrupts him
while he's working...
and in one shot of Jack...
- You get a lot written today?
- Sitting at the typewriter, a one shot,
you look back behind him.
And of course, you can see very clearly
'cause Kubrick was the master of depth of field.
He kept everything in focus so he would have lots of space
in which to puts things that he wanted you to notice.
And in the first shot, behind Jack sitting at his typewriter,
back against a wall, behind him probably 10 or 12 or 15 feet
is a chair.
And then there's a switch to a one-shot of Wendy
saying something.
- Hey, the weather forecast said it's gonna snow tonight.
- And then the camera switches back to Jack,
and the chair is gone.
- What do you want me to do about it?
- And my students and I always have fun with that,
saying, "Well, continuity error?"
Could be.
Or it's not, and the answer, if it's not...
or if it was originally
and then Kubrick saw it and decided to keep it,
is that he's parodying honor films
in order to remind you that this isn't just a horror film.
And there's another one in The Shining that's, I think,
less well-noticed.
And I think it's even more clearly substantive.
When Danny has his first vision of the elevator gushing blood
and the camera is tracking toward him,
past the open door of his bedroom
and toward the hall and the bathroom,
the open bathroom door across the hall...
and his bedroom door, as you would expect a kid's door,
has lots of cartoon characters on it
And, the one who is most apparent,
because it's right at the edge of the door
and it's the largest one that you can see
and it's the last one you can see as the camera moves past it,
is one of the Seven Dwarves.
And it happens to be Dopey, okay?
Subsequently, after Danny has passed out,
Wendy and the pediatrician leave Danny's room.
And as they do, they, of course, go out his door.
And you again see the door,
the open door with all the cartoon characters on it,
and Dopey isn't there.
Now, again continuity error?
I don't think so.
I think what Kubrick is saying is that before,
Danny had no idea about the world, and now he knows.
He is no longer a dope about things.
He has been enlightened.
- Anything you say, Lloyd.
Anything you say.
- The the advocaat is spilled.
There's the accident.
Kubrick is setting it up
as where they come around in a circle,
'cause I feel like that's what the camera does.
I feel like the camera brings us around in a circle
so that we're coming back.
The bathroom seems to be overlaying the Gold Room and...
so that the advocaat situation
in the bathroom is occurring about
in the same area that it did in the Gold Room.
- They use the camera
to create an emotional architecture in your mind
but at the same time, showing you that it's false.
The set is complete... so completely plastic
that its contradictions pile up in your subconscious.
Hallorann is showing...
showing Wendy, you know, the place where she will,
you know, basically, entrap Jack...
entrap him both physically,
but also, like, that will be the last straw for him,
last straw for the management of the hotel.
It's in the store room that he finally is like,
"Okay. Now I'm gonna do it."
And, you know, the opening of that door
is the famous, like, only thing that's supernatural
happens in the movie that can't be explained any other way.
Yeah.
But except that it can be explained another way,
in that Danny lets him out.
I do have this idea that Danny
is a lot more consciously murdering his father
than the narrative lets on.
I don't know. It's weird.
Like, you notice how, like, Wendy's walking backwards
when she's having that confrontation with Jack
in the lounge, you know.
And she's being drawn up to the hexagonal hallway room.
And you see Danny shining at the beginning of that.
He's in his room, and there's, like,
lights flickering in his eyes.
Like, is Danny drawing... you know,
drawing his mother up the stairs so that she can, you know,
sacrifice Jack on top of that, you know, weird pyramid?
- When I had a chance... when I was doing a story
out in Denver, we went up to Estes Park.
It was in the off-season.
Went into the Stanley Hotel, and I asked to see the manager.
And he came out, and we were just having lunch with him.
And I said, "Can we talk to you? I write about The Shining."
He said, "Really?"
This fellow told me
that he got a phone call from Stanley Kubrick, who said,
"I think I want to make a movie about The Shining."
And then he would keep this fellow on the phone
for a long time.
He said, "We had many long, long conversations
in which he picked my brain about everything."
And at that point, he said,
"Kubrick was talking about maybe coming here
to make the movie here," which I expect, at that point,
that fellow liked the idea of,
so it would make his hotel famous.
And Kubrick said, "I'd like to send out a research team."
And so he then sent out...
the man said it was something like two or three people
who came out here and stayed here
for two or three months, taking photographs everywhere.
And they spent a lot of time also down in Denver
in the Colorado state archives,
finding out, as I would now expect,
the full history of Colorado,
which... the flag of which plays a part.
And the gold rush, the Colorado Gold Rush
was also a very big event.
And there's all... there's still a lot
of American Indian/white people tension in Colorado
with Navajos and Arapahos just to the south.
This research team found out absolutely everything
about Colorado, about Estes Park,
about the Stanley Hotel, about its entire history,
took photographs all over the place.
Three months was the impression that I have
of what he said about how this research team
gathered absolutely everything.
Kubrick unearthed an enormous amount about the real history
of Colorado, where this takes place,
because what he has done is found a way to dig
into all of the patterns of our civilization,
our times and our cultures,
and the things that we don't want to look at.
And this movie is very much also about denial
of the genocides that we committed...
we white folk from Europe...
committed here and not that...
not that white folks are the only people who do genocide.
All humans do, as Kubrick makes clear in this movie.
He would research everything and the full history and nature
of everything you're gonna see in the movie on the screen
and then boil it down and boil it down
until he got the universal human and global patterns
that make it so real.
- White man's burden, Lloyd, my man.
White man's burden.
I like you, Lloyd.
I always liked you.
You were always the best of 'em.
The best goddamned bartender
from Timbuktu to Portland, Maine,
or Portland, Oregon, for that matter.
- Thank you for saying so.
- What does it mean?
Jack saying, "You always were the best of 'em."
Starting in Timbuktu?
Jack the schoolteacher was never in Timbuktu,
but Jack the universal weak male
hired by armies to go commit atrocities
has always been there.
Now, of course, the word "Portland"
is neat because it means where we landed
or where the British or the Europeans landed.
And Portland, Maine... Oregon is where they may have taken off
from to go further west.
Kubrick is thinking about the implications
of everything that exists.
You know, the power of the genie is in its confinement,
as the great American poet Richard Wilbur said.
Boiling it down, you know, 10,000 years in a little lamp,
you got to get your act together.
But that's the essence of great art.
It's like a dream.
It's boiled everything down to an emblematic symbol
that's got all of life in it.
Now, if you'll allow me to make a little bit of a link here.
As I've thinking of this more in recent years,
what we now understand to be the nature of what dreams are,
I mean, it seems to be, the general theory is,
that it's a way for the brain to boil down
all of the previous experiences
and then add in that day's experiences
as well to see what kind of overall universal patterns
there are to be found,
so that you can be aware of what the patterns are out there,
so that your subconscious will be all the more ready
to react suddenly when you see something dangerous happen
or something important happen that may lead you
to a mate or to some food or away from danger.
And therefore, the way Kubrick made movies was not unlike
the way, according to these current theories,
our brains create memories and, for that matter, dreams.
That's the ultimate shining that Kubrick does.
He is like a mega brain for the planet
who is boiling down with all of this extensive research,
all of these patterns of our world
and then giving them back to us in a dream of a movie...
because movies are like a dream...
and that's related to why I think
there's a lot of evidence that what Kubrick
also gave us in The Shining is a movie about the past.
Not just any past.
The past.
I mean past-ness.
It's a movie about how the past impinges.
That's what ghosts are.
That's what those skitter-y voices in the opening shot
that are following are about.
There's two phrases from T.S. Eliot that I often think of
when I'm thinking about The Shining.
One of them is "The night"...
I think they're both from T.S. Eliot...
"The nightmare of history...
how can we awake from the nightmare of history?"
- And the other is his phrase... T.S. Eliot's phrase...
"History has many cunning passages."
And I think both of those phrases are directly apt
for The Shining, in which we see
many cunning passages in the maze and in the hotel itself
and in which the past becomes a nightmare,
and in which Kubrick shows us how you escape
from the nightmare of the past by retracing your steps,
as Danny does in that last line,
which means acknowledging what happened
and learning about the past and then getting out,
only if you are going to be able to shine
and see what the patterns are
so you know to get away from them
and avoid them and go for the good things.
I mean, The Shining is his movie about how families break down,
whether they are an individual family
or the larger societal family
that tries to break up individual families.
And his hat movie, Eyes Wide Shut is the opposite.
It's about a family sorely tried,
Bill Hartford and his wife and child,
that survives all the horrible temptations
that are in our DNA.
- This is our famous hedge maze.
It's a lot of fun.
But I wouldn't want to go in there
unless I had an hour to spare to find my way out.
- I did not look at it again for a number of years
until it came out in rental.
And then I picked it up a couple of times.
And, what, you had three days in order to watch a rental?
And so, I can remember watching
it over and over again during those three days
and really taking a good look at it then.
And I was able to think "Oh, yes, this is what I remember.
This is what I thought I saw,"
and then catching more things.
But it wasn't, of course, until DVD came out
that I was really able to sit down
and take a good look at it as far as just running through it
over and over and over again.
Kubrick presents these things where it's, you know, real...
you know, it's realistic.
You're not supposed to see what's actually going on.
You've got Danny.
He's in the game room. He turns around.
We're supposed to be focused on the two girls there.
And than you... I saw... over on the left,
I see this skiing poster.
And the thing is that you already have Jack.
He's already asked about skiing.
But why isn't... you know, "What about skiing?
Isn't the skiing good here in the hotel?"
And he's already given the story of why it isn't good,
why they can't do that.
But you got the skiing poster.
And my eye is drawn to it.
And I realize that's not a skier.
That's a... that's a minotaur.
It just leaped out at me.
And so that was something
that I was able to look at later on VHS
and say, "Yes, I had actually seen a minotaur there,"
where the upper body, you've got this really, you know,
overblown physique, very physical physique.
And then you've got the suggestion...
you have a suggestion of a skiing pole there,
but it's not really there.
It's just a suggestion of one.
And the lower body is positioned,
the way the legs are,
it's like a minotaur, the build is.
And you've actually got the tail there.
And so it is a minotaur.
And this is in... on the opposite side of the door
you have a cowboy on a bucking bronco, so...
and so you got a kind of echo there,
where you got the
minotaur on one side, the bull man,
and on the other side, you got the cowboy,
the man on the bucking bronco.
And this is just following the scene where they...
Ullman has been taking Jack and Wendy
through the Colorado Lounge,
showing off the Colorado Lounge.
And they go into the hall
behind the Colorado Lounge.
And what's there, but on the wall,
there is a painting of an American Indian
with a buffalo headdress on.
And at that point, Ullman is discussing with Wendy
who has stayed there at the hotel.
Royalty, the best people, stars have stayed there.
- Royalty?
- All the best people.
- You have "monarch" on the bottom, which, you know,
keys in with royalty.
And you also have this whole idea of the stars.
And the minotaur's name is, what, Asterius?
His name is Asterius, which means "starry."
So you know, you got several things there
to do with mythology that fit in.
It's very exciting to me.
That was the... you know, that's the kind of
leap-up-end-down moment where you go,
"Oh, wow, look at what Kubrick has there."
Yeah, I mean the minotaur lives at the heart of the labyrinth.
He's a part of the labyrinth.
The labyrinth, at least in the myth...
you know, in this particular myth...
was built for the minotaur.
The hotel is... you know, it is the labyrinth.
And Jack is the minotaur.
You have scenes with him where he...
such as in... what is it?
The Thursday scene.
The snowfall has started.
You have Wendy and Danny outside playing.
And Jack is inside the Colorado Lounge,
and he's looking out at them.
His head is tilted down, and his eyes are somewhat...
his eyes are elevated.
They're pointing up.
And his eyebrows are drawn up.
But he has this expression on his face
that he gets progressively throughout the film
that is very bull-like.
It has a very minotaur-like expression.
It's the same kind of expression that Kubrick
pulls out in other films,
such as it was on Private Pyle's face
in the berserker scene in the bathroom
in Full Metal Jacket.
So it's, you know, not specific to this film.
There's more minotaur imagery and labyrinth imagery.
There's the Gold Room.
In front of the Gold Room,
you have the "Unwinding Hours" sign.
And that plays in with the labyrinth,
where you have...
Theseus enters into the labyrinth,
and he has the thread with him
that he ties at the beginning that,
you know, assists him in going through the labyrinth,
where he can find his way back out.
And so I see the "Unwinding Hours" sign
as having to do with that thread.
For a while there, I was into baseball.
And I get very excited with baseball when I'm into baseball.
You know, I can be by myself,
and I will be leaping up and down.
And Kubrick is like that for me,
where all I have to do is see the minotaur poster there,
and I go, "Oh, my goodness. Look at this!"
Because you're not supposed to see the minotaur.
- Danny is shown riding his big wheel
through the hotel three times.
The first ride, I think, is about realism.
That's Danny is a...
Danny is doing a loop around the lounge set.
You know, he goes through the service hallway
and then he goes through the lounge
and then he goes back into the service hallway.
And, you know, when you first see the movie,
you're like, "He's just wandering around.
It's crazy, it's just"...
But it... no, it's very...
it's just a very simple loop.
He does it once.
But that gives you an idea of where...
of what that place is.
I mean, you know, all right, you understand
that that set is real.
You know, like, it's a continuous shot.
There are no tricks.
In the second ride, in the hexagonal hallway,
there are a lot of...
there are more tricks.
Like, he doesn't do a loop.
He does kind of like a key-shaped...
you know, or a p-shaped loop around this hallway.
And you see the realism of the connection to the lounge set.
And... but you also see the fakery of the fake elevators.
And you see... for just one second,
you see the big stained glass windows out of the corner,
in the corner of the frame
right before he takes a turn around the elevator.
Like, that's incredible because,
like, that connects that whole hallway
to the giant Colorado Lounge set.
I mean, that's just for one second.
They didn't have to do that, you know?
But it's also... you know, it's a metaphor
because he's also elevated.
He's one level up from where he was before.
Like, he starts in the same place, just one floor up,
you know, in the northeast corner of the set.
So now he's in the northeast corner and one level up.
And if you take it as a metaphor of, like,
going from a mundane reality to up into your head
to more of a fantastical reality...
The third one is even stranger,
'cause he starts off in the service unit.
He starts off in the same,
you know, northeast corner of the lobby hall,
of the lobby service hallway.
And then he takes a turn, and suddenly he's upstairs
in the area outside their apartment
So, like, it's a kind of a combination
of the first two, where like he's down low
and then he's up high.
And then he takes a turn, and he's suddenly...
he's in that that yellow, yellow and blue wallpaper.
Let's say that's in the service hallway area.
He's, you know, right outside his parents' bedroom,
so there's this connection between him
going on these big wheel rides and dreaming.
Like, he's near his bedroom.
He's near... like, you see his parents are working downstairs,
but he's upstairs.
You know, like, you see his mom on the telephone,
and then he's flying.
He goes above her to the bedroom,
which is above where she's working,
just as the hexagonal hallway
is above where his dad is working.
So these big wheel rides become like a visionary way
of Danny to explore his parents' headspace.
You know, like, room 237 is his, like...
that's his father's fantasy chamber
where, like, he gets it on with the witches.
And the twins are like his mother's fantasy...
fantasy headspace where, like, they're these double blue women
who want to play with Danny forever and ever.
- We're all gonna have a real good time.
- My interpretation of The Shining
is that there's many levels to this film.
This is like three-dimensional chess.
And he's trying to tell us several stories
that appear to be separate but actually are not.
And he's doing this both through the overt script that he wrote.
He's telling it through tricks of the trade,
the subliminal imagery and these constant retakes,
giving him odd angles and things.
And he's also telling you
through the changes that he made to the Stephen King novel.
So if you watch those three things,
you begin to understand this deeper story.
And this deeper story has its birth, I guess,
in the idea that Stanley Kubrick
was involved with faking the Apollo moon landings.
In fact, I contend that 2001: A Space Odyssey,
in part, was a research and development project
for the Apollo footage that was shot.
I'm not saying we didn't go to the moon.
I'm just saying that what we saw was faked
and that it was faked by Stanley Kubrick.
And I've had Hollywood special effects people
from the '60s and '70s who were front-screen projection experts
tell me that I absolutely have nailed the Apollo footage
as being the result of front-screen projection.
Just go to any Apollo site and look,
and you'll see that they have to hide the bottom of the screen.
And you can always see the set/screen separation line
in every Apollo footage, every Apollo image,
and the video footage that has a background.
And Richard Hoagland, the researcher,
has looked into the Apollo imagery.
And he has found all sorts of problems with it
because in the sky around the astronauts,
he's found reflecting lights and refracting things and...
kind of a junk and geometry of things
that are in the sky.
And he concluded, wrongly,
that there are gigantic alien cities made out of glass.
What he's really seeing is the reflections of light
of the tiny beads on the scotch light screen
which is being used in the front-screen projection process.
And so, once I nailed the front-screen projection process
inside the Apollo footage,
then I became interested in seeing if Kubrick left any clues
in the rest of his career to his possible involvement
in faking the Apollo moon footage.
And I was overjoyed about two years ago
when I received my Blu-Ray copy of The Shining.
And I put it in my Blu-Ray machine
and sat down one night to watch it.
And I realized that all of the things that one could imagine
that Stanley Kubrick would have had to go through
to fake the Apollo moon footage...
and there in the movie,
every time that Stanley deviated from the Stephen King novel,
he deviated into those exact questions.
You know, what was it like to make a deal
with the U.S. Government?
What was it like to accidentally tell someone what you were doing
and to watch them possibly have to suffer the consequences
of your lack of integrity?
What was it like to lie to your wife
and tell her that you were doing one thing
when you were doing another?
What was it like when your wife found out
what you were really doing?
These are the questions that I had long before
I had seen The Shining again
after a maybe an eight... or nine-year absence.
And I didn't... wasn't sure I was right for the first hour.
I wasn't sure that I had actually...
you know, I wasn't sure if I was blurring the line
between what I wanted to see and what I was seeing.
And then at about 58 minutes in the film
is the famous scene where Danny's playing with his trucks,
and he stands up
and he's wearing the Apollo 11 sweater
with the rocket taking off.
Then I knew I'd nabbed it.
And then I started watching the film with an intensity
that I don't think I'd ever watched a movie before,
and every line began ringing true.
You know, "Wendy, that is just so typical of you.
"Don't you... don't you know
"I have obligations to my employers?
"Do you have any idea what a contract is?
Do you know what an agreement is?"
jack Nicholson's whole tirade against his wife...
that's Stanley.
That's Stanley telling his wife that after she discovered
what he was doing, which was the Apollo footage.
No, that's actually not true.
If you call the Mount Hood Resort
and you ask for room 217
you will find there is no such room.
So that's just not true.
That statement's not true.
And so what...
Stanley was lying.
Its not the reason that he changed the room number
from 217 to 237.
The reason that he changed it from 217 to 237
was because the room, room 237 in the film is...
represents the moon landing stage where he worked.
And the moon, the standard science textbook said...
and they still say...
but now with lasers, we've gotten a little better reading.
But... is that the mean distance of the moon
from the earth is exactly 237,000 miles.
So he changed that so that you would understand
that this was the moon room.
So Danny stands up.
He's got the Apollo 11 sweater on.
He begins walking down the hallway
towards room 237.
And there's a key in the lock.
And on the key are...
is the words "room" and then the word "n-o,"
which is an old acronym for "number."
So "room number 237,"
except that the only capital letters on the key
are r-o-o-m and then the "n" from the acronym n-o.
And if there's only two words that you can come up with
that have those letters in 'em.
And that's "moon" and "room."
And so on the key, the tag, it says "moon room."
And that is the moon room.
This is where everything happens,
and none of it's real.
And it all has to be lied about.
And he can't let anyone know what's really going on
in room 237.
And there's many, many other deviations from the book
to the movie.
- It isn't real.
- The deviations drove Stephen King out of his mind.
He just ranted and ranted for years
how much he hated The Shining.
And he hated it because he'd given Kubrick
all this great source material
and Kubrick threw it out.
And the whole idea of this is best exemplified
by the scene where Dick Hallorann
is driving up the highway,
trying to get to the Overlook during a winter storm
and he passes a wreck.
And in the wreck, a semi has crashed
and crushed a red Volkswagen.
And this is a direct message from Kubrick to King,
because in the novel,
Jack Torrance's car is a red Volkswagen.
But in the movie, it's a yellow Volkswagen.
And what Kubrick is saying in that scene
is a big "F you" to Stephen King.
He's saying, 'This is my vehicle.
"I have wrecked your vehicle.
And everybody in the world can see it.'
And this drove King crazy.
And it should have.
But what was really going on
and what is just much more deliciously fascinating
about all of this is that, in fact,
Kubrick was faking the making of the Stephen King novel
in order to reveal the idea of what he went through
to do the Apollo moon footage.
- My argument, as far as Kubrick goes,
is that he was a preternaturally observant child.
He read omnivorously.
He went to movies all the time.
And I think if you're going to movies and reading in the 1930s
and the 1940s, a lot of what you're seeing and reading
is Hitler and the Nazis and the war.
So as a sensitive kid, he must have been alive to these things.
And I don't think he ever forgot anything, and this is...
which is why his films are so rich.
- Little pigs, little pigs,
let me come in.
Not by the hair on your chinny-chin-chin?
Then I'll huff and I'll puff...
- And I'll blow your house in!
- Well, The Three Little Pigs,
I mean, I don't remember...
That might have been one of the things
that Jack Nicholson
might've ad-libbed initially.
Kubrick was a great believer in that.
But even if it was, I think the selection
of that particular little rhyme
certainly fits in with the time periodization
I've just been talking about,
because Kubrick would've run across that
when he saw The Three Little Pigs
as an Academy Award winning cartoon in 1933.
And so it comes out of that period.
And so the whole idea of a wolf, which, during the 1930s,
gradually transformed itself in popular mythology
and popular culture from being a symbol
of want and of hunger in the Great Depression
into a symbol of enemies;
Enemy nations, enemy peoples,
military aggression.
And of course, this reflects the rise of fascism
and Nazis in Europe.
But initially, the wolf at the door
was an anti-Semitic stereotype and caricature
that... initially the wolf wears a disguise.
And the background music
is clearly Eastern European sort of klezmer
or Yiddish music.
And it's a classic example
of early 1930s Walt Disney anti-Semitism.
So I think there are layers of meaning
in The Three Little Pigs."
And since Kubrick was a Freudian
and we know that he used Freudian work
in doing the screenplay for The Shining...
Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment...
and it's a Freudian analysis of the meaning of fairy tales.
And in The Shining, we can see the fruits of that
when they're constantly making references to Hansel and Gretel.
- I feel like I'll have to leave a trail of bread crumbs
every time we come in here.
- The witch in the oven and children being burned
and so forth, which of course,
is also perhaps, suggestive when it comes to the Holocaust.
- The blood is one of the main ghosts
and perhaps the overarching ghost,
in a certain sense, in this movie.
We first see it when Danny, at the beginning of the movie,
is at the sink in the little apartment
down in Denver or Boulder or wherever it is.
And he's talking to Danny,
"Why don't you want to go there?"
And then suddenly Danny shows him blood.
And as we learn a little bit later,
the Overlook was built on the Indian burial ground
between 1907 and 1909.
- Construction started in 1907.
It was finished in 1909.
The site is supposed to be located
on an Indian burial ground,
and I believe they actually had
to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it.
- So presumably, we can imagine the elevator
shaft sinks down into the very bodies of the Indians,
so to speak.
And that's where the blood is coming from;
Literal blood of the Indians.
And this movie is a movie about, among other things,
the blood on which nations are built;
Certainly the United States,
with the genocide of the American Indians.
But it's not only that.
This is a complete metaphor for what Kubrick is on about,
because the elevator's doors remain closed.
In other words, it's as if it's like a symbol
of the repression.
We don't want to admit to it.
But in spite of our attempting to stay repressed about it,
blood will out, murder will out,
as Chaucer says in one of his tales.
And so the blood comes squeezing out from the side
and overwhelms us.
And it keeps recurring over and over through the movie.
And it's...
And finally Wendy, when, at the very end of the movie,
she starts seeing ghosts.
She sees the blood.
It's the symbol of what we all have in common.
And there's lots of symbols in here
of what all humans have in common.
- 42 shows up in other places.
Wendy and Danny watch The Summer of '42
on a hotel television.
And there are a number of other
little references to that number.
And it's within a larger context
that Kubrick uses involving numbers in The Shining.
And they're all multiples of seven.
The hotel was built in 1907.
The party in which Jack is pictured at the end of film
occurred in 1921 in July,
the seventh month of the year.
These multiples of seven, I think,
also reflect the fact
that Kubrick was aware of the importance
of Thomas Mann's novel of 1924, The Magic Mountain,
which similarly concerns a sanitarium...
though not a hotel... high up in the mountains.
And Mann uses the number 7 there as a matter,
a symbol of the sort of dangerous fate
that seems to have been stalking Europe lately.
And in the novel Lolita, Nabokov uses the number 42
as a symbol of fate and Humbert's paranoia,
the idea that he is constantly being tracked
and that his life is doomed.
And even though Kubrick, in his film of Lolita,
only uses the number once,
interestingly enough on a hotel room door,
I think at some level of consciousness,
Kubrick was always also drawing from Nabokov's use
of that particular number
as a symbol of danger and malevolence and disaster.
- The opening sound is from the great funeral mass,
Dies Irae, which is the day of judgment,
which announces, "This is going to be a funeral.
"This is going to be about a judgment on the human race."
It's about the past.
But I think I remembered
that my impression from the opening scene
in which that astonishing helicopter shot
gives you a totally creepy feeling.
You're looking at great, beautiful nature,
but you know you're following something.
You're, like, flying along
on top of this little, tiny, insignificant car.
It's the ultimate point of view shot
without telling you who the point of view is.
If you want to stop and think about it,
you think, 'This is a helicopter shot"
But for the general audience,
all you know is that you are like a ghost.
You are like an angel.
You are like something
that flies with supernatural abilities
across the landscape of the planet.
And the soundtrack had that skittering...
I can't imitate it...
but that skittering music that sounded to me...
and I was conscious of this the first time I saw the movie...
like the thousands of voices from the past.
"The cloud of witness," as the phrase is in...
Dorothy Sayers uses it as the title for some story.
The cloud of witness, all the ghosts from the past;
And I didn't know.
Were these the voices of the many crowds
of aliens or of ghosts or...
I didn't know what.
But already that skittering, high music
with that follow shot across the lake
and then across the car itself,
it was the ultimate in spooky
because you had the feeling this car is being followed
and it doesn't know it, and we're following it.
I mean, I could go on for a long time
about the symbolism of that
with regard to what The Shining really is.
And The Shining, as we come to understand it,
is seeing through all the layers of history
and the horrors of history,
even autobiographically in that scene
where Grady and Jack talk in the blood-red men's room
and Grady says, "Your son has a very great talent.
"I don't think you realize how great it is.
He's a very willful boy."
And Jack says, "Yes, he is..."
- A very willful boy.
- Did you know, Mr. Torrance,
that your son is attempting to bring an outside party
into this situation?
- That's Kubrick.
What he's trying to do is bring the audience
and humanity into this situation.
In this movie, he is trying to get through to us all...
the human race in the movie theaters watching this...
that we are doing these things but don't see it,
that we are committing these horrendous things
over and over again and then forgetting them...
which is... of course, he represents
many, many times in the movie...
by having characters seem to know something
and then not know it and forget it.
- You, uh, chopped your wife and daughter up into little bits.
- I don't have any recollection of that at all.
- That's like the human race.
We commit atrocities and then forget it.
- Bill, I'd like you to meet Jack Torrance.
- How do you do?
- Bill, how do you do?
- It's nice to meet you.
- It's a pleasure to meet you.
- Some people think that,
like, not all of the interview is real.
Some of it is Jack's imagination or fantasy
of what the interview would be like.
Like, also, Bill Watson's clothes change.
Like, his pants change patterns.
And what's also weird is,
he plays Pontius Pilate in Jesus Christ Superstar.
- ♪ Crucify him ♪
♪ Crucify him ♪
♪ Crucify, crucify, crucify ♪
- Really playing against type
and just being this sort of cipher.
I mean, in a way he's, he's kind of Jack's double
kind of in the same way that Bill Hartford has a double
in Eyes Wide Shut.
You know, he goes to that blonde woman's house
whose father just died
and her fiancé looks exactly like Tom Cruise,
has the same haircut.
- I've always thought that Bill Watson, the little assistant...
and by little, I mean that he's sort of a shrunken figure...
to Ullman, who's brought in and sits there
looking sort of dour and resentful and quiet
and whose skin color is sort of a half...
it's not white.
It's sort of toward brown.
I've always thought that he sort of represents a subdued...
somebody from a subdued race.
He seems a little bit diffident when Ullman says,
"Will you go collect their luggage?"
He says, "Fine."
- Fine.
- And as they're given the tour around all the hotel,
Bill Watson is always trailing behind,
like somebody who's going to be a little factotum
to go get things.
I've always thought he sort of maybe represented,
you know, the condition in the dominant arrogant culture
that the Indians had at that time.
- He is the silent guardian
for the government.
Stewart Ullman represents the face of the U.S. government.
And that's why Kubrick gave him the toupee
that makes him look like John F. Kennedy.
And I think that he is the guy
who's silently watching everything and, you know...
CIA, I guess.
Kind of NSA guy.
And he probably represents
the real managers of the house,
of the Overlook, and Barry Nelson is the...
just the person that's out in front.
- He doesn't say a thing.
He's the summer caretaker.
And he seems to me
to have certain correspondences with Wendy.
Jack really doesn't work around the hotel.
Wendy gets in there, and she does all the work.
- You do get the feeling that he's going...
that Jack's going to be doing his work,
because he seems a little, like, leery of Jack.
Like, I've been in job interviews,
and I've always found that that second person
they call in is, like, the person
you're actually interviewing for.
He's making the decision, like, that silent person,
that, like... kind of, like, glare...
like, squints at you.
Yeah, and he sighs when he's asked to move Jack's luggage.
- Bill, would you have the Torrances' things
brought to their apartment?
- Fine.
- There's a dissolve which fades from a wide shot
of the, you know, final black-and-white photo
to a close-up of Jack's face.
And just for a second there,
his hairline fades in to form a Hitler moustache.
- I think a lot of things happened right here
in this particular hotel over the years
and not all of 'em was good.
- He once said,
"How do you get all of that"...
meaning the Holocaust...
"into a two-hour movie?"
I think he found the Holocaust of such evil magnitude
that he just couldn't bring himself
to treat it directly,
which is why he used the form of a horror film
to treat it indirectly.
- I believe Kubrick, possibly consciously,
has solved a kind of problem that history has,
which is that it's very hard for many people
to connect emotionally to a gigantic big killing
we hear about in the past.
People who don't have direct family experience
of it themselves may hear the statistic.
You know, Hitler, among other things,
killed 6 million Jews in his Holocaust.
6 million's a number too big.
I mean Stalin is reputed to have said, you know,
"You kill one person, it's a murder and a tragedy.
"You kill a million people, it's a statistic."
He was talking about a psychological fact.
And, you know, Stalin himself was... what is it...
starved about 3 million people
in the western Ukraine in the '30s on purpose.
My point is it may be that Kubrick
was conscious of having offered a kind of way to bridge
that inability to feel for those gigantic statistics in that,
if you go and see The Shining innocent the first time
and are terrified... you're just terrified
and you'll always remember being terrified...
and then go back aware of what the symbolism
and the general larger pattern meanings of the movie are,
then you can begin to make something of a connection,
saying, "Oh, my God."
I remember being terrified
for the individual little Danny and Wendy here.
And that feeling is actually being...
is for people who are symbols of victims
of all kinds of horrendous genocides.
And of course, his wife has subsequently talked about,
you know, how close he came to making his Holocaust movie,
The Aryan Papers, but that he got mom and mom
and more depressed and was relieved
when he had an excuse not to do it.
He used Schindler's List as saying,
"Ah, it's already been done."
I mean, that struck a bell with me.
And I've done a lot of stories as a journalist
about people who study...
either talked to people who are victims of horrors
or study it.
And there's... Freud talked about it as the contagion.
The depression seeps into you.
It's... you know what... Kubrick had a wonderful comment
about this when somebody asked him.
"Isn't it true that your movies are showing us
"just the horrendous side of humanity.
You know, that's awful bleak."
And Kubrick said,
"Ah, but there's something very positive about it as well.
"And that is, it shows at the very least
that we can get our minds around what that horror is."
And Danny, from the beginning,
has his mind all over the problem.
He's looking at it.
In a way, Danny's big wheeling back and forth,
up and down the hallways...
Danny is learning that hotel.
He's learning all the horrors.
He's seeing them.
But they're just in the past,
and Hallorann gave him the secret.
He said, "Remember, Danny."
Remember what Tony tells him.
Remember what Mr. Hallorann said:
"They're just like pictures in a book.
They're not real."
Now, that's a really important lesson.
People who shine, who see through history,
understand that the past simply does not exist
except in one place.
And that's the present tense instant of the mind,
remembering.
That is, exactly... that is a place you can go to somehow
and yet it doesn't exist.
And so Hallorann tells Danny,
"You're gonna see some horrible things."
Apparently, he told him.
"You're gonna see some horrible things,
"but remember, they're not real.
"They're like pictures in a book.
They no longer exist."
That's a key to not getting depressed about it.
And that's...
You see, this is a movie about what the past...
how the past impinges, any past,
and about how to get over that
and how not to be a victim of history.
You know, if you doubt what I've written about it,
just go see the movie.
I've figured all this out from just seeing the movie.
It's there.
It's obvious, and most people who went and saw the movie said,
"Oh, my goodness. It is there."
- Okay.
Yeah, I was, I mean, obsessed with The Shining
and reading all the online analyses of it
and was particularly a big fan
of the MSTRMND's lengthy analysis of it.
And he had one phrase that kind of stuck in my mind,
that The Shining was a film
meant to be seen forwards and backwards.
And, I mean, he didn't mean at the same time.
He meant that in, with the mirror form metaphor
that's central to the film
that things, you know...
that things forwards and backwards
happen throughout the film.
That... people walk backwards in the film, you know,
people talk backwards.
- Redrum. Redrum.
- You know, if you reverse the film,
it has a format similar to 2001.
All these kind of things happen.
At the end of The Shining,
he's reduced to a screaming ape,
just like in the beginning of 2001,
there are screaming apes.
But I was talking to my pals at the Spectacle Theater,
riffing about experimental ways of showing films.
And they were like, "Well, do you think
"you could come up with something,
you know, to show here?"
I was like, "Sure, what we should do is we should show
The Shining forwards and backwards at the same time.
"You know not... let's not be creative.
"Let's just actually reverse the film
and show it exactly mirrored, superimposed."
The first image is of the reflective lake.
And the last image is of the inscription
on the photograph,
in which Jack is frozen for all time...
The "Overlook Hotel, July 4th Ball, 1921."
So those superimposed make it...
kind of make it seem like a postcard, like an invitation.
Like...
"Come to the July 4th Ball here in Crater Lake."
There's a really cool part where, like, you know,
the helicopters are following his car
and his name scrolls up in the credits
and, like, meets the car, right...
right in the same position where the grid of photographs,
right in that photograph that he's trapped in.
So his car, his name and his photograph
all line up for one second.
Pretty cool.
The interview has a, like... it's great.
While they're talking about...
you know, very dryly about all the murders that happened,
like, you know, in the superimposition,
Jack's running around with an axe going bananas, you know.
There's a lot of just great, great, great superimpositions
of people's faces lining up, like Jack's...
Jack's, like, got the death look,
and he's staring through Danny's face
as Danny's eating a sandwich.
Then there's a lot of things... there's a lot of, like...
there's a... you know, there's some fun jokes,
but then there's serious stuff where,
like, you...
where the hallucination... the visions that Danny has,
where you'll see them,
like, overlaid on top of other situations.
Like the twin girls are overlaid on top of Wendy,
which, if you study the film,
you see that the twins are associated with Wendy.
They're like her, like, visionary counterpart.
All the symbols in the movie start...
overlap in the superimposition,
backwards/forwards superimposition.
The murdered twins are overlaid across Jack's face,
and he looks like a clown.
It makes like a clown mask,
and there's blood everywhere
and, like, blood on his lips.
And blood coming out of his eyes.
And, like, you know, Danny takes it...
you know, like, Danny has his hands over his face,
and it's... Jack is looking out from his head,
and then he open... he, like, peeks out and he sees Grady.
And then Grady and Jack continue their conversation
into the next scene,
which is where he's watching television.
And it's like they have this...
their lips are, like, in the TV.
Jack and Grady's lips are in the TV.
And these masks are formed by the windows.
And ifs like Danny's envisioning this.
Danny's envisioning...
you know, envisioning the pact between Grady and jack.
Like, he goes into... he sneaks into the bedroom,
like, right through Jack's head,
right in between them.
And just like that scene is...
that's the scene where Danny is testing
his father, like, "Do you really, you know!"...
"Do you like this place?
You're not gonna hurt us, are you?"
Like, Danny kind of knows that his dad has lost it.
The last shot is 1921,
and the first shot is of the road.
Ullman mentions that it was finished in 1921.
So it's, again, it's a way of returning the narrative
back to the beginning.
- Mr. Hallorann, what is in room 237?
- Nothing.
There ain't nothing in room 237.
But you ain't got no business going in there anyway,
so stay out.
- In the sex room, 237,
where we see this beautiful, sexual temptress,
who then becomes a rotting body...
realistically depicted as a rotting body...
the design on the rug shows basically the most...
in geometric form with round curves...
the act of intercourse itself,
one after another after another after another,
sort of like a picture
of down through the generations of what produces life.
You go back out in the hallway, in the larger society,
and the round curves of that very same design
have become hexagons,
not so nice and round, and a little bit more
like the beehive hexagon
but down the whole corridors of history.
I think he's got an image of it there,
so he's talking about the family of man,
both in an individual nuclear family
and in the whole course of our genetic history.
- Once Denny enters room 237, like, that's...
that kind of is, like, the activation
of the rest of the movie.
Like, that's what causes Jack to go insane finally.
That's what brings Hallorann to the hotel.
Like, the room 237 is, like, is sort of this...
I mean, I compare it to the mysterious hotel room
at the end of 2001,
where there's...
It's this strange, strange place
that somehow, like, transforms the rest of the narrative.
The Shining takes place on the top of a mountain
in kind of like a, you know,
magical shape-shifting environment.
And, like, travel is...
traveling out of it is...
You know, instead of 2001, where you're traveling to something,
the point of The Shining is to escape, is to travel out.
And room 237 is, like...
it's kind of like the escape pod of...
of the hotel.
- If you multiply the numbers 2, 3 and 7, you get 42.
Now, I admit, perhaps I'm grasping at straws there,
but it is consistent with the pattern of reference
in the film.
- Another thing which my film Kubrick's Odyssey
really reveals
is the carpeting on the floor
during the famous Danny scene,
where he stands up with his Apollo 11 shirt.
The patterns in the carpeting exactly match launch pad 39-A.
You know, even the driveway and everything.
And if you notice in that shot, the pattern on the rug changes
when Danny stands up.
- The carpet's reversed,
and there's no pathway there anymore.
The pathway that the ball took rolling down towards Danny
is gone now.
It's no longer there 'cause it's reversed.
And you get a sense of a closure.
Now the hexagon is closed.
It's almost like he's been closed in.
- Seven years after The Shining had come out,
to my surprise, nobody had written,
as far as I could tell,
about what the major themes of the movie were,
beyond the delightfully scary immediate story
of the family and the hotel itself.
And I was actually doing a story somewhere over in Europe,
and I was told over the phone that the posters were out
for Full Metal Jacket.
I asked about the description,
and I was told it had a peace sign right next to the words
"Born to kill."
And I said, "Oh, my goodness.
His next movie's gonna be about some of the same themes."
Anyway, I thought, "My goodness."
I had presumed that it would have become obvious,
so I thought, "What the heck?
"I'll just see if I can write an article about it
to give people more fun when they see Full Metal Jacket,
to know what his last movie was about,
in larger senses.
- I've gotten a lot of flak from people who work for NASA.
And, you know, I want to tell them, that I, you know,
I'm not saying that we didn't go to the moon.
And I'm not saying that their technology
that they helped build
isn't great and awesome and everything.
I'm just saying that what we saw was faked.
And I know I have it proved
with the front-screen projection process.
As far as what the government has done,
I fully expect my taxes to be audited next year,
to be honest with you.
And, you know, I've had visitations, you know.
And they're definitely watching me for sure,
and they're not too happy with what's going on here.
And I think they're probably very worried
about the next film.
And that one will be the really explosive film.
- We were walking along the beach on vacation
with some people in Costa Rica.
I had this delightful experience.
We were walking along with a young couple
who were from San Francisco.
And it was a long walk.
We'd gone through this big, beautiful jungle.
And were coming back on the beach
to walk back to where the tent camp was.
And the guy started...
we started chatting about Kubrick.
I said, "Oh, Kubrick's great,"
And the guy said, "You know,
The Shining, it's actually about the American Indians."
I said, "Really?"
And he went on talking, and I said, "Really?"
And I just couldn't resist just playing dumb for while
while he told me the whole thing.
I was delighted!
♪ Dies irae, dies illa ♪
- Kubrick just sets up synchronous space.
His movies are...
they create synchronous situations in themselves.
There's this man who says, you know,
"Quite a party, isn't it?"
Why did Kubrick put him there,
with the split down his head?
Why did he put him there?
And I was contemplating that.
And in comes my son.
And he was nine years old at the time.
And he didn't know what I was working on.
And he came in, and he began to tell me a story.
And he said, "I've just thought this up."
And his characters head was split open with a chaos bolt.
And the character says, "Talk about a splitting headache."
And out of the contents of his head
leaps a small person who is his real self.
And it goes running off, saying in a high, squeaky voice,
"Forget this. I'm going home."
And, yeah, I thought that was really stunning synchronicity,
I mean, 'cause you've got all the elements there.
You've got the ax.
You've got the whole idea of the lightning bolt,
the chaos bolt, striking the person's head,
the splitting headache.
You've got Tony...
Tony's squeaky voice, yeah.
I thought that was quite a synchronicity.
- One can always argue that Kubrick
had only some or even none of these in mind.
But we all know from postmodern film criticism
that author intent is only part of the story
of any work of art.
And those meanings are there regardless
of whether the creator of the work
was conscious of them.
- I think... if you want to know what I think,
I think the hotel is so whacked out
that I don't have any clue what's going on
from the beginning.
When you really sit and think about it, I mean...
because the whole thing is so whacked out,
and it's so not put together...
it's so... everything is so wildly out of place
that when you... the more... the closer you get
into looking at things, the more you look at them.
It's kind of like, you know, the scene in Eyes Wide Shut
where Bill goes... you know, he returns.
He retraces his footsteps,
and he goes back to the mansion where he was.
And he's told, you know, to stop your inquiries.
They will serve you no purpose.
It's almost like it gets to that with The Shining.
The more you magnify things, the more you look at them,
the less purpose it serves 'cause it's so out of whack.
None of it makes sense from the beginning.
- There must be a lot of stuff in there
that nobody has yet seen,
so people ought to keep watching it.
- But why would he make the movie so complicated?
- Yeah, I mean, but why did Joyce write Finnegan's Wake?
It's a way of, like, opening doors
from, like, a hermetically sealed reality
into possibilities.
And it's also a way of trapping someone like me.
Like, who goes looking for clues and, like, keeps finding them.
And next thing you know, you're like, "Man, I've been...
"I've been trapped in this hotel forever.
I'm dreaming about this place."
You know, I'm like Jack.
I'm, like, all work and no play.
Or the other way around.
It doesn't really matter, like...
You're, like, in this loop.
But, you know, there are escape routes, like the...
like, I think he puts escape routes
into it, into this maze, into this trap.
I mean, there are ways out of it.
And Danny finds a way out of it,
you know, by retracing his steps,
by going backwards and forwards.
And once you start, you know, studying, you know,
synchronicity and symbolism,
then, like, suddenly, like,
you're noticing in your own life,
like, things start popping out.
Things that you hadn't noticed before, you know, like your...
point of view is being altered by your study.
And, you know, it's the...
It's quantum physics, you know, like,
the act of observing, like, affects
you know, the thing observed.
- Hi, Lloyd.
- Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it gets weird because, like, I'd... you know,
as I've been obsessing over this thing, you know, I've been home,
like, I'd been out of work for a while, like...
I have a small son.
You know, we're thinking of moving out to, like,
somewhere isolated.
I mean, things get strange, you know?
Like, you're...
like, wow, my life has actually become
The Shining, you know?
♪ Dies irae ♪
♪ Dies illa ♪
♪ Solvet saeclum in favilla ♪
♪ Teste David cum sibylla ♪
♪ Dies irae ♪
♪ Dies illa ♪
♪ Solvet saeclum in favilla ♪
♪ Teste David cum sibylla ♪
♪ Dies irae ♪
♪ Dies illa ♪
♪ Solvet saeclum in favilla ♪
♪ Teste David cum sibylla ♪
Synchronisation, Spell-Check & Error-Correction by SNUIF