“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
–Dr. Samuel Johnson
Though only marginally filmed here, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has always stood out as a defining moment in Colorado’s cultural history. Well, for me anyway. I was only 6-years old when The Shining was released, and there was no way in hell my parents would take me to see the thing, but my unhealthy fascination with the TV trailer’s wintry menace and the horror-struck, elfin face on the film’s poster stuck deep in my gut for the 8 or so years until I was deemed old enough to watch it on cable.
Mostly, the ambiguous nature of what was supposed to be so damned scary troubled me. I was well acquainted with monster movies, but what kind of monster was in The Shining? Was it the trees? The elfin thing? The snow itself? I asked my parents what “the monster” was, but they could only shrug at me.
I remember blizzard-like conditions on the night they left me with a babysitter to go to the theater (although verifiable facts now tell me the release was in late May, but this is Colorado and I suppose there could have been a blizzard), and my Dad, an avid reader of Stephen King novels, was well aware of my fixation and teased me gently about the film’s Colorado roots, much to my mother’s displeasure. It probably helps that this scene was dressed in the tensions of my parent’s own unraveling marriage, but that was the moment that The Shining became my film; it was about a little boy in Colorado surrounded by indefinable horror, and therefore it was the first adult movie that I could relate to, years before I was old enough to actually watch it.
Once finally allowed entry to the film, it was all that I’d built it up to be: horrifying and bloody, riddled with skeletons and ghouls, but above all else, it still felt personal. To this day, what I want in a film is to feel entirely lost, to have no sense of where the film is going, and though a first viewing of The Shining certainly provides that, it stays nestled so deep in its own overbearing style that the entirety of the thing feels familiar, and the rare flashes of actual Colorado (an establishing shot of Boulder’s Flatirons, the nebulous connection to Estes Park that elevated its Stanley Hotel to near mythic levels) raise the film to another level of significance. Surely, this is not a key element of Kubrick’s design, but it hints at how other locales might grow connected to films set in their worlds. New York, London and LA have several billion films about them, but what does it say about Colorado that we seem to have this one, and well… there’s Red Dawn and the South Park movie, Aliens vs. Predator 2, and that Day of the Dead remake, but these contradictory facts really only strengthen my argument.
And now, as an adult, I can see a little further past the grand guignol spook show of bloody torrents and stacked corpses and can begin to understand how Kubrick aimed the deeper horrors of his film toward the father (Jack Nicholson); here is a failure of a man, down to his absolute last chance to provide for his family, who is haunted by memories of his own very real drunken brutality, whose son understands the horrific truths of him on a primal level, and yet he is primarily cursed by an inability to communicate and explain himself, and this is doubly horrific for a man who defines himself, as Jack Torrance does, as a writer.
A common complaint against the film is the casting of Nicholson as a sane man who breaks down and that his familiar screen persona is easily more the feral beast of the film’s second half than the straight-laced father of the first, but it’s clear to me that this is by design: what we see in The Shining is not so much the transformation of a character but the collapse of a social role. In the key scene where Wendy (the astonishingly 70’s looking Shelly Duvall) discovers Jack’s “manuscript,” and its seemingly endless pages of well formatted, but essentially juvenile, complaint (“all work and no play… “), we see that the true monster here isn’t The Overlook Hotel’s myriad demons and that they aren’t somehow possessing or transforming her husband, but that they’re giving voice to the vulgar thug that he truly is, like a sort of preternatural Iron John movement.
The pacing in The Shining is so masterful, and the pressure cooker levels of tension so severe, that Jack’s descent into either madness or base, brutal truth seems so smoothly inevitable that while I can understand the complaint against Nicholson, of how a man getting in touch with his inner-monster could be viewed as less horrific than the transmogrification that audiences expect, I can’t help but feel that Nicholson’s portrayal, and Kubrick’s decision to cast him, is more honest. Consider how a father, in more normal circumstances, would view a son’s ability to seamlessly communicate with a more protecting father figure, or a wife’s desire to take that child away, as a threat. The realities of divorce, separation and remarriage have broken better men than Jack Torrance.
After having lived my own fair share of personal failures, there’s something far more fundamental in the film to relate to than just the presence of Denver’s long-time anchorwoman Bertha Lynn, there’s the savage satisfaction in the film’s climax, as Jack goes berserk and hunts down his family with an axe, where he hatefully yells through the battered down door of the family home in a perfect parody of polite communication: “Wendy, I’m home…”
