Stanley Kubrick's The Shining - review: from the archive, 2 October 1980

After Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill comes Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (Warner West End, X). Both movies are moulded from deep within the horror genre, specifically to scare our pants off. But if the De Palma is skilfully sexed-up Hitchcock, what on earth is the Kubrick? The answer is not quite what it seems. The directors in question are playing two different games. And it would be much more advisable to look at the Kubrick in the light of what else he has vouchsafed to us than to compare it with the fag end of the Exorcist Syndrome.

It could be argued, of course, that The Shining, built around the Stephen King story that might well have been retitled The Axe-man Cometh, is far from Kubrick’s first or best horror film. In a sense, Paths of Glory, Dr Strangelove and Clockwork Orange are horrific, as studies of humanity dehumanised and defeated. The new film, as I see it, is a progression of that bleak vision - the tale of a man so isolated within a void of his own making that even bloody madness seems an escape.

The man in question is Jack (Jack Nicholson), possibly an alcoholic and certainly a would-be writer who signs on as winter caretaker of a resort hotel in the Colorado Rockies in order to work on the book that will finally lift him out of the ruck. With him are his wife (Shelley Duvall) and son (Danny Lloyd). And they are alone, with the hotel’s memories, which include a previous caretaker who killed himself after chopping up his wife and children. Added to that, the son is in some way psychic. He has the gift of “shining,” the ability to pick up vibrations others are luckily denied. The Overlook Hotel couldn’t be a worse place for such extra-sensory perception.

One is not at liberty, with this sort of plot, to divulge much more, except to say, because it is made so obvious so early, that Jack is threatened by the same breakdown as the other caretaker. And perhaps the most chilling moment of the whole film is the moment you see exactly why. Shelley Duvall, driven out of his work room by her husband’s irritation, goes back when he’s not there to find sheaves of paper covered with endless neatly typed repetitions of the same message: all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Even the already celebrated “Heeere’s Johnny!” of the murder scene has nothing on that. But the two episodes are inextricably linked.

The whole film, in fact, links itself to the state of Jack’s mind. Bartok’s eerily precise Music for Strings, Percussion and Harp extends over the bleak countryside through which the family drive, Ligeti and Penderecki underline the huge hotel’s depopulated spaces. And with the invention of the Steady-cam, Kubrick’s penchant for virtuoso tracking can more easily be made to analyse in spatial terms the extent of his chief character’s disorientation.

All this is fine, yet I can’t help thinking that the Stephen King original, with its spook-ridden, other-worldly junketings, gets in the way of Kubrick’s grim vision, finally cheapening and distorting it. The genre within which the film is cast exerts too great a price. Nicholson’s performance, even if deliberately over the top, still shouldn’t encourage as much laughter as fear. Nor should the final twists of the plot look so illogical. If The Shining isn’t trivial, it certainly encourages one to think that it is. But, perhaps, even that’s a change for the better. Generally, it’s the other way around.