The shining

Résumé du document

By choosing to produce ?The Shining' Stephen King's masterpiece, in 1980, Stanley Kubrick tackled one of the most bounded and codified cinematographic genres: the fantastic mode. Kubrick produced the film just after the relative failure of Barry Lyndon, and this time, it was a huge success. ?The Shining' was released in 1980, after 11 months of tiring and intense shooting. Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance offers a masterly composition, which will certainly go down in history with the fantastic film. Shelley Duvall as the mother and Danny Lloyd as the "shining" child are also very convincing, and it was said that the young boy managed to act the way he did without even knowing he was playing one of the leading roles in a horror movie! The Shining also impacted the audiences due to its fantastically shot scenes. Kubrick used the Steadicam in order to shoot most of his scenes from a particular angle of vision. Danny's wanderings through the corridors of the Overlook Hotel, for instance, were shot from a camera placed on his shoulder. This process helped The Shining to stand as a landmark in the history of the movie industry. All those features contributed to the success of the film, but some viewers did not wholely approve of Kubrick's interpretation of the story.

Extraits

[...] Those mirrors either distort reality or show up things as they really are. For instance, the truth about Jack's intentions is revealed in a mirror as Wendy and Danny see the word reflected from Danny's lipstick scrawlings. The duality motif is also marked by many parallelisms -physical and local as well as scenic-, and the fact that the spectator cannot choose between the two antagonistic theses constitutes the ultimate aim of the concept of doubles: the amplification of uncertainty. Finally, more anecdotally, we could see in the initials of the writer and the producer -Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick- a last pair of entities, each one defending an interpretation of the story. [...]

[...] That is what we are going to develop in this second section. From the very beginning of the movie, we learn that Jack is everything but a well-balanced man: ha has troubles with alcohol, has hurt in son once in the past, is totally out of inspiration for his book and already has a glimmer of lunacy shining in his eyes. We are not surprised then of his transformation -or should we say, evolution-, throughout the movie, into a bloodthirsty psychopath. [...]

[...] You may have guessed we are talking about Stephen King, The Shining's author. He even said as regards the movie: I think there are two basic problems with the movie. First, Kubrick is a very cold man -pragmatic and rational- and he had great difficulty conceiving, even academically, a supernatural world . Not that religion has to be involved in horror, but a visceral skeptic such as Kubrick just couldn't grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel. So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. [...]

[...] Indeed, we are provided with pairs all through the movie, pairs which give, again, even more credit to the principle of uncertainty. The concept of doubles has always had a hold on the collective imagination of mankind. In The Shining, Kubrick has tapped into this resonant archetype throughout. The film is replete with doubles and cycles, people existing in two time frames at once as possible different incarnations, and conflicting personas which are battling for supremacy. This theme is best embodied by the numerous mirror scenes the film is full of. [...]

[...] Tony could therefore be seen as an answer to a traumatism: Danny may have invented this double -as we may see in deep in part three- in order to protect his self, as it is said in psychoanalysis. Consequently, if we take the non-apparitionist thesis for granted, the events occurring in The Shining could be interpreted as the results of the protagonists' interior disorders -or psychosis. Then, we can define our heroes as the victims of their inner selves. Isolation and confinement may add to an already existing psychosis, but Jack and Danny may very well suffer from their inner disorders, that are introduced from the very beginning of the movie. [...]