A Story of Isolation and Insanity
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, 40 Years Later
The endless speculation about the true meaning of Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece The Shining––40 years old this May––is well documented. Whether it’s on countless Reddit message boards or in the wildly entertaining documentary Room 237, the over-analysis and conspiracy theorizing has almost become more present in the popular culture of 2020 than the film itself. This may have been the secret fate of The Shining all along; there are too many not-so-hidden clues for it not to be the subject of fervent speculation, and there are too many iconic images within the film’s two and a half hour runtime for it not to have been turned into a million memes by teenagers who never saw it.
“It’s about the genocide of the Native Americans,” some say. “It’s about how we faked the moon landing,” others cry, maybe a little too wildly. “It’s about the devil!” “It’s about the holocaust!” “It’s about Johnny Carson!” All of these are potentially valid ways to examine The Shining, but all of them neglect the real reason why it is such a deeply, bone-chillingly terrifying film. What makes The Shining so scary, especially 40 years later, is the text that is the easiest to see: the human mind is a fragile thing, and it may only take some time alone with our thoughts for it to completely unravel.
The thematic element of losing one’s mind in isolation has obviously become more prescient over the past weeks, as we have spent more and more time in varying levels of quarantine within our homes due to the rapid spread of COVID-19. The Shining is a story about a man named Jack Torrance who accepts a job as the winter caretaker for a secluded Colorado hotel, drags his wife and son up there to live in complete isolation for five months, and then proceeds to go insane and try very hard to murder them both. For many, the scenario that the Torrance family faces in The Shining mirrors their own a little too closely. Kids are home from school, parents are forced to work from their bedrooms and home offices and kitchen tables (if they’re lucky enough to have a job that allows them to work from home in the first place), and all there is to do is sit around and wonder if you really like your son as much as you thought you did.
Of course, we have many luxuries that the Torrances were not afforded, like the countless streaming services and social media outlets with which we remain constantly connected to the outside world. But that, too, speaks to the chilling nature of the movie. If we couldn’t tweet every thought that crossed our minds for others to like and respond to, would we fare much better than Jack? I’m not so sure. Then again, I just hit CTRL + A on my keyboard and deleted 32 pages of “All work and no play makes Jake a dull boy” written in Comic Sans, so maybe I’m not a good litmus test for this.
But even in 1980, The Shining was subtly critiquing our inability to be alone with our thoughts. This can be seen early on in the film, when Jack’s young son Danny says that he learned about cannibalism from watching TV. “See, it’s okay,” Jack sarcastically replies, “he saw it on the television.” The statement is a subtle yet ardent criticism of television’s creeping ubiquity in society, something that may seem quaint now. Another example of this is when Danny and his mother Wendy are sitting in one of the many cavernous rooms of the haunted Overlook Hotel, watching a television set that is infamously not plugged into any power source whatsoever. The TV sits ominously in the dead center of the room, commanding the gaze of everyone, characters and moviegoers alike. Without these mental life rafts of ours, Kubrick implies, we are lost at sea. Just look at what happens to Jack.
Jack Torrance, famously played by Jack Nicholson, almost immediately begins to go insane. He wants to use his newly acquired free time to break ground on his new “writing project,” but ultimately ends up staring at blank pages and getting a little too angry when his family interrupts him. Frighteningly relatable. At one point, Jack lords over a small-scale replica of the hedge maze on the grounds of the hotel, glaring down at a physical representation of his own mind. As their isolation from society grows, so too does Jack’s madness, and as Jack’s madness grows, so too does his isolation from his family. At some point, probably around the time he starts drinking ghost-whiskies with Lloyd the ghost-bartender, Jack is gone for good. He’s too deep in the maze.
The terror of The Shining lies mostly within the surface area of Jack Nicholson’s face. Just look at his face. Look at his eyebrows. There are certainly other aspects of the film that provoke fear––the bloody impressionist imagery, the floating, ghost-like movement of the camera, and even the wailing musical score––but there is maybe no image in film history more disturbing than Nicholson standing alone in his makeshift study, staring blankly yet maliciously out at his wife and son playing in the snow. Every moment Nicholson is on screen is a variant of this image. Initially, Jack’s face is a mask of feigned pleasantry in his interview with hotel manager Stuart Ullman and in his interactions with his family. That mask soon begins to crack, giving way to blank stares and outright rage as the film goes on. The only moments that Jack seems to be genuinely at ease or happy are when he’s interacting with spirits, either of the hotel or of his psyche, culminating in that final, haunting grin.
To many, this may not seem particularly frightening; a man with a pre-existing tendency for alcoholism and child abuse going insane before our eyes is hardly surprising, given the circumstances. But what makes the story so terrifying, both in its film and novel incarnations, is the simplicity and relatability of the horror. There are crucial supernatural elements to The Shining, but at its core it is a story about how isolation decays the mind of one man and dissolves the fabric of one family. If there’s a scarier potential right now, I am not aware of it.
We will be okay. We will poke our heads out of our homes this spring or this summer or this fall and we will be more or less fine. Most of us will not have attempted to murder our spouses and children. But Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece nonetheless serves as a cautionary tale of the fragility of the human mind. At the end of the film, when Jack frantically follows Danny out into that hedge maze in the middle of a blizzard, we see a man entirely unhinged, unable to determine where he is or how he got there. Danny makes his way out, retracing his steps all the way back to the entrance of the maze and the safety of his mother’s arms. Jack is left wandering, wondering where his son is and how he got himself so goddamn lost. Eventually he sits himself down and freezes to death. That’s how it works; you don’t realize you’ve gone insane, you just keep digging deeper and deeper until you’ve buried yourself, keep tangling the knot until it is an indiscernible ball of twine.
Over the next few months, we will all probably end up charting a course closer to Danny’s––experiencing the loneliness and madness first hand and maybe ending up a little too deep in the maze for our own liking, but eventually making our way out again. The Shining, however, doesn’t hesitate to remind us that we’re not far off from ending up like Jack instead.