The Shining

1.
The horror genre is abused, its potential neglected and its audiences jaded. Fear is exchanged for elaborate anatomy lessons or exercises in trauma. Their characters are ciphers rather than complex persons with whom the audience can relate (to remove the connection-factor and allow for an easier escape route). Plot and theme are almost abandoned. The experience is unengaging in general, if not entirely alienating to anyone expecting a presentation both enlightening and intimidating. The best examples of the genre are films like The Others, The Changeling (1980), The Orphanage (my bias leans toward the ghosts)...but they tend to include all the prerequisites for a good time: emotional intensity, functional character psychology, philosophical and even revolutionary themes (sometimes) and an atmosphere of vague existential despair. They remind us of our meaninglessness in the universal sense and the triviality of our values while affirming life.

2.
Stanley Kubrick, in the above sense, shot some of the best horror around, be the subject nuclear war, cosmic consciousness, dehumanization...there he compares to David Lynch, Bergman or Francis Bacon. His semi-expressionist compositions obscure characters ruined internally, struggling with their existence in an arbitrary universe. He'd be cinema's Beckett, were that title not reserved for Guy Debord.

3.
The plot is secondary to the character sentiment displayed but if a description is necessary, it's a perfect summation of its themes: a family disintegrates through literal and allegorical social alienation, ideological seduction and a lack of base communication. It also sides with the intersubjective -- the moment's focal character arranges the reality of the shot.

4.
The negative aspect is that the apparently flawless narrative hides the director's terrible and almost misogynist treatment of lead actor Shelley Duvall. He preferred her performance be less simulated. Directorial abuse is different than method acting and does slant the film.

5.
Onto the characters: Jack as Jack is always awesome (minus some of his contemporary work). His character is silenced and marginalized. His literary ambitions are stifled by his creative lack. He is thus unable to communicate his emotions to a family he resents, despite them being the closest people to him, literally and in any other way. He is attracted to the facade of the hotel's spectres and is willing to take his family out (before, one would assume, himself) to partake in something both imaginary and dead. The fictional offers of prosperity and class imply death is the only option for success.

6.
Wendy is, I think, a realistic depiction of the battered dependent housewife, one who is both a loving mother and the only responsible one in the family -- she engages in Jack's responsibilities to allow him writing time and so enables and enhances their discord. She is likewise alienated from her son and unaware of his psychic abilities and unaware as to the malign presence in the hotel. She sees the rotted realities of the hotel as she searches for her son in the climax. Her dynamic is that of a survivor overcoming her prior ties to a man who hates her.

7.
Danny, the son, is psychic but evades understanding himself on any rational level, substituting 'Tony' as a defense mechanism. He is connected to his father and the hotel's chef Dick Halloran in the same manner, and his strength in intuition deems him a threat and a target -- he sees his father for who he is but cannot communicate that to his mother, reasons obvious enough. In their mutual survival, their relationship fuses.

8.
The film's main antagonist is not Jack. Grady, the classist, racist, caricatured British butler and representative of the the spirits, the past and Jack's Jungian Shadow, who despite his scenes number two, is scary. Fucking frightening. He has the same name as the previous caretaker, also responsible for offing his family/self but appears as a waiter from the jazz era, the last golden dawn of capitalist expansion, the end of European imperialism, the deregulated Coolidge era, a time idealized by all the bourgeois apologists today. And as the glamor of capital is mostly historical, it fits. He convinces Jack to 'do the deed' while only implying any reward. He is marketing telling us to discard our parts worth cherishing for a chance to experience nothingness.

9.
The film's other hero is Dick Halloran, Jack's doppelganger -- he's the same age, has similar social issues, works for the same company, is psychic but he cares and shares the responsibility trait with Wendy. Grady is the anti-him, and he even dehumanizes him in his bathroom description, despite his character being among the strongest in this picture. His compassion separates him from Jack, who is reduced to a parody of parental values, and his caring side, like Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, causes his collapse. Capitalism's message is 'caring kills'.

10.
The last is the Hotel. It represents all wrong with any society: ancient, expansive, constructed and thriving on violence, greed, artificial relationships, motivated by distorted perspectives of reality but filled with 'all the best people'. We are all a product of a malign means of social organization and it requires us to self-destruct if we want to participate.

11.
The main themes are familial alienation and ideological corruption. Jack hates his family and views them as a hindrance and too contemptuous of him. Wendy is alienated from them both while ignorant of their psychic bond, just receptive to the practical brutality given out by her spouse. Danny loves his mother as all children do and is terrified of his father for his rage and his obvious intent. Family in any intimate sense is impossible in their chosen environment. Jack's ambition for the imaginary ruins his ties to the real, of which his tolerance is lowered unto erasure. But the biggest theme, as in any Kubrick, is alienation: the set is isolated, the family divided between opposed and competitive interests, Jack's double is dehumanized to an Other (reflective of their shared estranged perspectives) -- all caused by a false consciousness and an obsession with the past instead of present and future opportunities.

12.
Its style, like expressionist cinema, is dialectical: the wide, expansive and rapid cinematography contrast the narroew, contained and inert emotions and ideas presented therein.

13.
5/5. I love this film with a rabid, violent, consumptive passion.