From Musick Hund: The Shining (1980)

In Kubrick's oeuvre, The Shining does for the domestic space what 2001 did for outer space. Well, that's a bit simplistic perhaps, but the analogy is apt on a couple of levels. One has the feeling that what really attracted Kubrick to King's novel was the chance to film a small group of actors in a very large space, and the movie ends up being more about the Overlook than about Jack, Wendy and Danny. King fans may be disappointed by this, but cinematically it not only makes sense, it transforms the source material into an epic meditation on the convergence of America as a space--a scene, a backdrop of history--and the family's "homey" space. Thus Altman's comment to the Torrences, "if you feel like spreading out, you've got the whole rest of the hotel to move around in," takes on added significance when one considers that, even empty of staff and guests, the hotel is still inhabited by others. Soon we are shown Jack very vigorously throwing a tennis ball against the Colorado lounge's "Navajo and Apache motifs," while he is, as is it says in the screenplay, "not writing." It is worth considering why Jack chooses to set up his work area smack in the middle of the hotel's largest social/public space. One could speculate that it is the only space big enough to hold his ego, but it is also, cinematically, the natural backdrop for Jack's fantasies and nightmares, with its giant hearth and conflicting symbols of the American west. Jeffrey Cox, in his book Wolf at the Door, argues that that we should pay special attention to the Adler typewriter upon which Jack whacks out his insane opus. If one looks closely, the German eagle of the Nazi era is visible on the front of the machine. The takeaway for Cox is that this is a film whose subtext is the Holocaust. But the Nazis drew much of their philosophy of eugenics from the technocratic records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; and the blood gushing from the elevator/wound of the Overlook is not flowing from and into the symbolic space of Europe, but that of an American west bearing the conflicting marks of a mixed inheritance. The holocaust is certainly one of the film's symbolic points of reference, but its subtext is another, earlier, genocide. To decide The Shining is really "about" the holocaust is likely to distract us from the ways in which it traces the paths from megalomania to murder in a peculiarly American symbolic space, and from the strangely gothic wellspring of a specifically American domesticity.