1

KUBRICK SHINING

( a working title copyright – and some notes in progress toward… ) by Bill Blakemore, January, 2012, NYC

Includes… for purposes of academic clarification:

A pdf PHOTOCOPY OF MY 1987 ARTICLE IN THE WASHINGTON POST

ON STANLEY KUBRICK’S FILM, THE SHINING

--With informal notes on a few corrections in that article, a copy of its

reprinted form in The San Francisco Chronicle, notes on the inaccurate and incomplete version of that Chronicle reprint, notes on the article’s origins, further analysis of the Labyrinth them in the film…Plus discussion of:

AN UNRECOGNIZED SHORT KUBRICK FILM HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

… and a note on the place of The Shining in what is, in a sense KUBRICK’S ANTI-ENLIGHTENMENT TRILOGY

- Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket –

--Plus a brief note about explanations of the source of the power to ―Shine.‖

--Plus a rough list of ―Areas For Future Exploration in Kubrick Studies.‖

All in response to various requests and questions about all this…

My 1987 article on Kubrick‘s The Shining was written for, and edited by, The Washington Post. It was published on the front page of the Post‟s Sunday

entertainment section on July 12, 1987 under the headline, ―Kubrick‘s ‗Shining‘ Secret: Film‘s Hidden Horror Is The Murder of the Indian‖.

Academic books and articles have usually cited not this Post version but a

reprinted version that appeared soon after in The San Francisco Chronicle.

However, an inaccurate and significantly incomplete version of that

Chronicle reprint of the Post article appears to be the version most readily found the internet – leading to various complications in citation and analysis.

2

Below are:

1—A pdf photocopy of the original 1987 article in The Washington Post

This is posted here for the purpose of academic clarification, as above.

2—Notes on 4 mistakes or confusions in that Post article…

… including discussion of consonant echoes in the mythical Maze/Labyrinth parallels

… (not ―an old Indian trick,‖ but an old Greek trick)

… and a possible oblique reference to his film The Shining by Kubrick in his filmed acceptance speech for the DGA‘s D.W. Griffith Lifetime

Achievement Award…

… Brief discussion of the ways in which that short film may be

thought of as:

―An Unrecognized Short Kubrick Film … … Found Hiding In Plain Sight‖

3—A copy of the San Francisco Chronicle reprint (found online) … which has different headlines and interlineated analytical subheads

4—A brief note on the inaccuracy and omissions of further transcriptions of the San Francisco Chronicle version that appears to have been the

version readily found on the internet and most often cited…

5—Notes on the origins of this article in 1980 in London and Rome, then in 1987 in New York:

This recounting suggests a new area of Kubrick Studies – exploring the ways in which people discover and become conscious of his larger

meanings in a way which Kubrick more or less intentionally set up to happen in the films … And is also done following Kubrick‘s lead when he

remarked that it is vital when making a film to be able to recall the feeling that was generated when he first read a book the film is based on.

3

1--pdf photocopy of the original 1987 article in The Washington Post

--provided for purposes of academic clarification in Kubrick studies

4

5

6

7

BELOW IS A pdf PHOTOCOPY OF THE FIRST PAGE OF THE JULY 12, 1987

WASHIGNTON POST ENTERNTAINMENT SECTION – CALLED “SHOW” (page “F1”)

ALSO PROVDED FOR PURPOSES OF ACADEMIC CLARIFICATION IN KUBRICK STUDIES

8

9

2—Notes on 4 mistakes or confusions in that 1987 Post article…

… including discussion of echoes of the mythical Maze/Labyrinth

(not ―an old Indian trick‖ but an old Greek trick)

… and a possible oblique reference to The Shining by Kubrick in his filmed acceptance speech for the DGA’s D.W. Griffith

Lifetime Achievement Award…

… Brief discussion of the ways in which that short film may be thought of as:

―An Unrecognized Short Kubrick Film …

… Found Hiding In Plain Sight‖

4 POINTS CORRECTING AND CLARIFYING THE ORIGINAL 1987 ARTICLE IN THE WASHINGTON POST:

1.

The third paragraph, written by the editors (as explained below under ―Origins Of This Article…‖) opens with the words: ―But ‗The Shining‘ is not

really about the murders at the Overlook Hotel . It‘s about the murder of the murder of a race… ―.

Instead of saying ―not really about,‖ it should have said ―not only about.‖ There are many other themes woven through the movie, including art,

writing, marriage, certain aspects of U.S. history, British ―post colonial‖ influence, and - as the article clearly states before its conclusion - the

world‘s history of genocides … among several others.

And as Kubrick‘s art here requires, and is discussed in the article, it also really is about the murders at the Overlook – ―about a man who tries to kill

his family,‖ as Kubrick himself said.

2. At the end of the fourth paragraph, it says ―These are ‗confirmers‘ such as

puzzle makers often use to tell you you‘re on the right track.‖ I cannot remember if the word ―are‖ in ―these are ‗confirmers‘‖ was mine

or the editors‘, (see ―Origins of the article‖ below) but I remember feeling, when I first read it in the Post, that it would have been better stated with

something like this: ―These may be used as something like the ‗confirmers‘ such as puzzle

makers often use…‖

10

--My point being that Kubrick is not making a simplistic roman a clé sort

of film, with a one-to-one match-up key simplistically linking elements and characters in the film to elements and characters in the real world.

Instead, he is making a universal sort of art in which all parts in it resonate with the whole world both in the film and in the world itself.

This is a result of the drive of the greatest artists always to find the most powerfully succinct universality, as I discuss elsewhere.

3. Five paragraphs later, just under the Post‟s subhead ―Indian Ghosts‖, the

article states that ―…manager Stuart Ullman tells the caretaker‘s wife Wendy in the only lines in the film in which the Indians are mentioned. ―

Yet by the time I wrote this article in 1987, and having rebased to the US, I must clearly have see the longer American version in which there is an

additional dialogue line – shortly before the one about the burial ground –

explicitly mentioning Indians. Some of the themes I refer to in the article are to be found only in the longer American version.

I have a vague memory that jus before writing the article, I managed to get a copy of the film - I supposes it would have been in VHS format – or to

have seen it somewhere, so as to refresh my memory of its details, six years after seeing the larger themes.

I had not yet met Kubrick assistant Leon Vitali, who informed me that Kubrick had shortened the American version for its British opening by some

18 minutes shorter – and that Kubrick had wanted the two separate versions both to survive.

When writing the article, which I did an a bit of a hurry between news assignments, I may have simply forgotten, if I had noticed, that there was

an additional reference to the Indians in the American version. It comes when manager Ullman is introducing Jack and Wendy to the

Colorado Lounge and, responding to Wendy‘s question asking ―Are all of

these Indian designs authentic?‖ replies, ―Yes,… I believe they are based mainly on Navajo and Apache motifs.‖

I vaguely remember that when I first watched the longer American version and was fascinated, if a little confused, to see whole scenes I‘d never seen –

including among others, for example, the early scenes of the doctor examining Danny and then talking with Wendy in the living room about

Danny and hearing from Wendy about Jack‘s alcoholism – both cut for the shorter ―International Version.‖

It wasn‘t until some fifteen years later that I met Kubrick‘s associate Leon Vitali who told me that Kubrick wanted there always to be two versions of

this film – the longer one for the U.S., and the shorter one the rest of the world.

11

When at some point I sent a question about this shorter version to

Kubrick through a friend living in London who knew the author Michael Herr – who was at the time working with Kubrick on the script of Full Metal Jacket

– the short answer that came back to me (admittedly third hand; I have yet to ask Mr. Herr directly if he remembers whatever it was that Kubrick may

have said was that ―He (Kubrick) just likes it better.‖ - the later, shorter version.

The only other direct reference to Indians in dialogue – which Kubrick kept in both the shorter and longer versions – comes soon after that other

reference, when Ullman is still giving them a tour of the hotel, and again in response to a question from the innocently curious Wendy, ―When was the

Overlook built?‖ Ullman replies: ―Ah... construction started in 1907. It was finished in 1909. The site is supposed to be located on an Indian burial

ground, and I believe they actually had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it.‖ ( TK CHECK EXACT WORDS AGAINST THE FILM)

4. I don‘t like the phrase ―an old Indian trick‖ (2nd paragraph under the Post‟s

subhead ‖Clues‖) … that refers to Danny‘s tracing his steps backwards in the snow during the final chase scene in the Overlook Maze.

I no longer remember whether the phrase was mine or inserted by an editor to underline the Indian theme (see ―Origins of the article‖ below) but I

should be able to determine that if I ever locate the original draft submitted to the Post.

―An old Indian trick‖ sounds condescending, is in any case probably inaccurate (I don‘t know if retracing your steps is any more an ―Indian trick‖

than it has been of some subsets of any group anywhere at any time in history) and I am sorry for it, whoever put it in the article.

It also misses the obvious mythical reference that Kubrick was surely working with – in which it‘s not ―an old Indian trick‖ but an old Greek trick.

Kubrick is dealing with the ancient Greek myth about the Labyrinth on the

Island of Crete which has the monstrous Minotaur at the center… who is then slain by the hero Theseus… who then escapes from the maze by

following the thin thread that Ariadne unspooled behind as they entered. Early in the film, Kubrick takes care to draw the parallel between the

Overlook hotel building and the Overlook Maze outside – and in terms (as the 1987 article notes) which suggest the enormous bounty of the North

American continent that greeted European settlers. As Halloran is showing Wendy and Danny the kitchen, he asks Danny ―Is it

big enough for you?‖ to which Danny replies‖ Yeah, it‘s the biggest place I‘ve ever seen.‖

Wendy then remarks, ―Yeah. This whole place is such an enormous maze, I feel I'll have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs every time I come in.‖

12

Halloran laughs and replies: ―Don't let it get you down Mrs. Torrance - it's

big but it still ain't nothing but a kitchen... a lot of the stuff you'll never have to touch.‖ The film script (in a version found online TK CHECK AGAINS

TH FILM) continues:

WENDY I wouldn't know what to do with it

if I did.

HALLORAN Well one thing for sure, you don't

have to worry about food because you folks could eat up here a whole

year and never have the same menu twice.

( TK CHECK EXACT WORDS AGAINST THE FILM)

5 RESONANT ECHOES IN OVERLOOK MAZE/GREEK LABYRINTH PARALLELS

There are at least 5 other interesting points about this old Greek echo in

Kubrick‘s Shining.

First… Jack is not really the monster in the maze. As the 1987 Washington Post

article eventually points out, Jack is a major victim of the film, a tool of higher powers, not its real hidden monster, and is indeed found dead at the

end of the film not at the center of the Labyrinth maze (where the Legendary Minotaur resides) but frozen on some side alley of the maze

where he had simply petered out, exhausted and lost in his own abused

insanity. (The article does refer to him early on as a ―villain‖ – but there are several

scenes where Kubrick lets us see his innocent inner fear – notably when he sobbingly tells Wendy of how horrible a nightmare he had just had while

asleep at his writing table – a nightmare in which he killed her and Danny.)

Second… It‘s also interesting to note that Danny and his mother had in fact found

the center of the maze earlier, in playful exploration, and found it remarkably empty and devoid of any monsters.

To them, it‘s not so daunting a maze. They find their way in – we see Wendy calmly leading Danny in, showing him how, when one turn proves

false, to simply try another way. (―Here‘s a dead end.‖ TK CHECK WORDS

13

AGAINST THE FILM ) They started their exploration in a playfulness (Jack

refused to join them on the grounds that he had work to do) which then gave way to discovery and innocent wonder.

As they enter the center of the maze it is revealed as a large and rather plain open space with empty benches along the sides, suggesting that all

sorts of different folks could sit and think there, perhaps watch each other and talk… perhaps providing whatever meaning they wanted to fill the empty

center – another notion consonant with Kubrick‘s stated existential thinking. This center not only has no monster, it is unnaturally big – seems a little

odd and out of place for such a maze in such a resort, suggesting we are indeed, perhaps, moving into mythical and/or psychological mindscape.

There seems to be nothing to do in the center of this maze – but perhaps resonates with the idea that humans who make it there then have choices –

freedom . Wendy is innocently inspired by it: ―Isn‘t it beautiful?... It‘s so pretty. … I

didn‘t think it was going to be this big…‖ (TK CHECK AGAINST WORDS IN

FILM) But during this exploration we learn through editing cuts back to Jack that

he is not working at all, but restlessly and insensitively throwing a ball against the large Indian paintings on the wall of the Colorado Lounge.

He then goes over and stands over a model of the maze, looking down on it… and in a shot from Jack‘s point of view, we see the living Wendy and

Danny unnaturally visible in the center of this model which is also unnaturally huge – far bigger than the real maze outside the building could

possibly be… possibly suggesting that the affect of Jack‘s mind has now taken on and unrealistic grandiosity – become megalomaniacal, believing he,

(an unproductive writer who apparently has trouble keeping a job – just the sort some army builders have liked to hire to do their dirty work) can now

lord it over a huge world he has just found, realized he may be the boss of… and trapped in the center of it are his wife and son - his family.

In this and his subsequent attempted superarrogation of the maze-like

Hotel, he sees little of reality. He is the embodiment of a sort of manipulated id. (– Not entirely unlike the ―Id‖ in that American 1950‘s horror movie… in

which a giant monster Id terrifies an American town… until this huge ―Id‖ makes the mistake of walking into some high electric wires which make it

suddenly and briefly visible as it dies from the high current – or so I remember the film, seen in my mid teens. I must check it out.)

Third…

The mythological Greek labyrinth seems to some scholars and archeologists to represent something like the ―winter palace‖ of the empire

of the Aegean Sea Kingdom Peoples, the people of ancient Crete in pre-Classical Greece, whose center of military imperial power was an

unassailable naval base in the flooded crater of the Island of Thera, an

14

enormous and intermittently dormant volcano north of Knossos in the

Aegean Sea - that disintegrated in a great explosion whose ashes and tsunamis remnants are being dug up all around the eastern Mediterranean.

Some experts suspect that eruption may have been source of the legend of the destruction of the empire of Atlantis. Atlantis is first mentioned in the

dialogues of Plato, who recounts being told of it during a visit to Egypt from historians there.

In Stephen King‘s novel, The Shining, the Overlook Hotel is obliterated - blows up- at the end due to a build-up of extra pressure in a boiler in the

basement. So it‘s not entirely unreasonable to ask whether Kubrick may even have

been titillating the expectations of that large portion of his audience in 1980 which he could reasonably expect to have read the highly popular novel …

when he placed the word ―Danger‖ prominently on an Overlook boiler in a scene in which Wendy is routinely checking readings on the dials as part of

their work as winter caretakers.

But if so, it would have been to intentionally thwart expectations, and thus perhaps unsettle that part of the reading audience even more – for in

the film, the Overlook does not blow up, but persists at the end entirely intact, complete with ghosts and la-dee-da parties… – just as the American

empire did in 1980, some years after the last of the overtly genocidal American ethnic cleansing of the American Indian were, apparently,

concluded. They have reportedly continued in parts of South America. Again, as in the

U.S. echoes in Kubrick‘s Shining, they have been motivated in significant part by gain for extractive industries… and, of course, as of this writing in

2012 and as the newspapers around the world have made plain and simple to understand in recent years, such genocides were not ended after the

genocidal Nazis, but have continued to emerge around the world… and as this film suggests, as the evil potentials in human natures and even

―civilization,‖ if not somehow vigilantly guarded against and checked, may

always continue to do.

This possible persistence of such evils in the future – after any viewing of the film, was only emphasized by a penultimate scene that Kubrick cut after

the first few days of its initial public screenings in the U.S.

In it (as described from a recent showing of it at the Eastman House in Rochester New York) Wendy, having made it down the mountain, is

recovering in a hospital, Danny is once again playing with toy vehicles on the floor out in the corridor, and manager Ullman is visiting them. As he leaves,

he turns around and roles a ball toward Danny on the floor – repeating the film‘s earlier spooky invitation up in the Overlook to Danny to enter room

237.

15

Cutting this penultimate scene still leaves the Overlook and its ghosts entirely intact, unexploded and blithely carrying on into history – in the final

shot, a long slow dolly down the corridor, happy 1920‘s band and dance music (―Moooon light… and the stars and youuuuu…‖) wafting through the

halls which are filled with celebratory balloons… which, we learn at the end of the shot, as it focuses down onto the caption under the photo in which

Jack is young and leading the pack, is for a ―July 4th Ball - 1921‖ held in the ―Overlook Hotel.‖

This still suggests the continually repeated cycles of horror and denial we

find in the records of human history all over the planet.

But even this suggestion of perpetual evil is still entirely within the high mythical world in the movie – that we experienced only in the ―past‖ – in the

movie we have just seen, and is now over. It is unspecific – not anchored

solidly in time and place – and we can only imagine that it may still be going on up there in the still-intact Overlook.

The fact that the music is clearly 1920‘s/1930‘s in style suggests to us, at

least at first, that it was in the past… but then we note that there is already a commemorative photo on the wall of that – or a - 1921 party, subliminally

(at first – then perhaps more consciously, as we think about it) suggesting that we are now some undetermined distance into the future.

Is it a future later than the time of our seeing this movie? Possibly – we

know that Overlook Hotel has the ability to take za present person – probably from any age – and visited past evils into his affect and behavior…

or something like that.

Why did Kubrick cut the penultimate scene in the hospital?

Two thoughts on that:

--He may have simply felt, after a few days screening it for the public, that

it felt somehow like a cheap shot, and took away a suspenseful or spooky feeling that is created remains when we see Danny and Wendy disappear

into a closing curtain of nighttime mountain mist and cloud - that also looks curiously like fog rolling in (reminiscent of ―Nacht und Nebel? – Night and

fog – one of the first powerful films about the Nazi horror in the Holocaust? Maybe.)

Even the fact that the top of the road down the mountain starts with a bit

of an uphill climb away from the Overlook may subliminally suggest to some

16

that they are not out of the woods yet, so to speak… and in any case, that

closing curtain of fog-like mist and cloud help emphasize to us that we don‘t know the first thing about whether they made it down to safety.

--Kubrick may have thought that to leave Ullman alive down in the

normal world of the hospital… and presumably still in a job having to do somehow with responsibilities for the owners of The Overlook (insurance

worries?) and so available for the future might, in a metaphorical sense at least, make the Shining too specifically pessimistic - a statement suggesting

perhaps too certainly that humanity could never overcome the horrible repeated evil tendencies that his film has just shown us - that it is not

entirely unthinkable that humanity may at some point find a way to overcome these horrible cycles.

And so he left only the final reference to these cycles (in the long dolly shot to the 192 photo) … which keeps all metaphors and actions in the film

referring in any explicitly placed only to humanity‘s past.

For this reason, Kubrick‘s The Shining might be examined as a film in which Kubrick is exploring, in a way, the nature of ―past-ness‖ itself, just as

2001: A Space Odyssey may be thought of as a film in which he is exploring the nature of ―future-ness‖ itself.

Some critics have observed that, even though the year 2001 had come and gone, the film entitled 2001 curiously continued to seem not have

become dated. As one critic put it somewhere, it seemed that Kubrick had ―imagined a

credible future‖ … and I would suggest that somehow, in the alchemy of the artist‘s process, he may have captured something of ―future-ness‖ itself.

This idea might reward further analysis.

Fourth…

The Overlook Maze seems to evoke not only the maze of great empires including not only Crete‘s but also America‘s as it expanded westward - and

this is, in an ironic sense, Kubrick‘s one ―western‖ (– but see notes below on his ―Anti Enlightenment Trilogy – including Full Metal Jacket and its

Hollywood ―Western,‖ complete with Cowboys and Indians.) But also the maze of history itself … in the sense in which T.S. Eliot wrote

of it in his poem ―Gerontion,‖ a monologue by an old man following World War I, where he says that, ―History has many cunning passages‖ – here are

lines 33-36:

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think how History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

17

Guides us by vanities

And in James Joyce‘s novel Ulysses, the character named Stephen

Dedalus, who is also the central character of Joyce‘s earlier novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, says that ―History is a nightmare from which I am

trying to awake.‖ Dedalus is also the name of the legendary architect who built the

Labyrinth in the old Greek myth. One classical response – admired by psychologists in all millennia - to that

ancient problem of how to ―awake from the nightmare of history‖ is to say that it is necessary acknowledge what has gone before – to recognize that it

is necessary to ―retrace your steps‖, so to speak, and the steps of mankind – acknowledge what happened … suggested perhaps symbolically by the

retracing of his own steps by which Danny escapes this echo-laden maze… and in a way in which Kubrick suggests, through his partly autobiographical

character Danny, artists may also do for society through their art.

It might be interesting to check whether Kubrick has left any references to

James Joyce in his films, or ever discussed Joyce‘s character Stephen Dedalus with friends and colleagues.

A POSSIBLE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND PROFESSIONAL/CRAFT HINT REFERING TO THE SHINING‟S MAZE (AND AT LEAST TO THE

MYTHOLOGICAL LABYRINTH) IN KUBRICK‘S FILMED ACCEPTANCE SPEECH OF THE DGA (DIRECTOR‘S GUILD OF AMERICA) D.W. GRIFFITH LIFETIME

ACHEIVEMENT AWARD… AND BFRIEF DISCUSSION OF HOW THAT MAY BE…

AN UNRECOGNIZED SHORT KUBRCIK FILM…

… FOUND HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

Only 3½ minutes long, it is easily found on the internet on You Tube

Fifth… This old Greek Labyrinth myth seems to have had special meaning for

Kubrick beyond his use of it in The Shining. He referred to it in his filmed acceptance speech which he sent to the U.S.

when he won the D. W. Griffith Lifetime Achievement Award from the DGA – the Director‘s Guild of America.

In it, he cites the story of Icarus, the son of Dedalus. To escape from their imprisonment in the palace of Knossos (which may

be roughly analogous, in the mythmakers‘ minds, with the Labyrinth itself,

18

according to scholars and archeologists), Dedalus fashioned wings for them

both that were made of feathers and affixed to their arms by wax – and then warned his son not to fly too close to the sun.

But Icarus does, the wax melts, and he falls into the sea and drowns. Kubrick says this in his filmed speech to the DGA:

“I‟ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should

only be, as is generally accepted, „Don‟t try to fly too high,‟ or whether it might also be thought of as, „Forget the wax and feathers, and do a

better job on the wings.‟ ”

To do a better job on the ―wings‖ (another item in the Greek myths with strong metaphorical links to art) in making movies takes a strong will, and

Kubrick, though described by many who met him with phrases like ―One of the nicest people I‘ve ever met,‖ was, when it came to making movies,

known widely among those in the movie industry, with varying degrees of

admiration, as, in effect, a very willful boy -

He was indeed ―a very willful boy‖ (as Jack says of Danny in The Shining) and Kubrick may be trying here to relate to his fellow directors, in an

astonishingly succinct, powerful, personal and professional way the deep seriousness of their craft when conducted at its greatest potential.

And it is also, in every sense, ―a Kubrick film,‖ after all, however brief.

--Unless evidence emerges that he did not control absolutely every aspect

of it himself – and that would surprise me and every other Kubrick scholar I know very much.

This potential for doing a better jobs with the wings when making movies,

Kubrick implies, is also a potential for good, after all; would it not help

humanity to create movies that have a hand in ―shining‖ through the maze of the nightmare of history and helping use see – as the best journalism also

does – what‘s actually going on, what we‘re up against and what is worth saving?

Thus Stanley Kubrick has delivered in this short filmed statement a sort of

super-succinct Ars Cinematica and artist‘s moral manifesto.

It is perhaps more powerful - for the long run, the coming decades and centuries - by being delivered in this controlled and controllable cinematic

form than if he had come to the ceremony in the U.S. in person.

19

Even the stark simplicity of this short film – a single static shot of one man

standing against a black background, a curtain – is a sort of objective correlative of Kubrick‘s ideas and philosophy.

--Of for example, his statement somewhere that ―it is important that a

movie be made by one person‖ … and also of his statement somewhere along that lines that he was sure that any meaning and comfort that humans

might hope for in the universe would have to be provided by them – or words to that effect – that we have to provide the meaning.

It has always seemed to me that Kubrick‘s depiction of Danny in The

Shining is partly autobiographical in a non-trivial way.

This is seen, for example, in the above-mentioned line in which Jack agrees with ghost Grady‘s complaint that Danny is a ―very willful boy.‖ –

Willful as Kubrick was known to be, but also as Kubrick is perhaps

suggesting anyone must be, one way or another, who seeks to break through the accepted comfortable habituated ossifying norms that tend to

harden in any age, and seeks thus to ―shine‖ through the evil cycles of mindless violence our species perpetrates… and as this film, made by

Kubrick, also seeks itself to do.

So it seems at least possible that in his DGA acceptance speech, Kubrick was also – maybe – even laying a quiet hint of connection even to the maze

in his film, The Shining – not entirely unlike the ―confirmers‖ that puzzle makers may allow. Maybe… Whether he he did so consciously is not

important, given how much meaning works with the Labyrinth myth.

--But if so, he was perhaps – maybe - even suggesting that he knew people might find The Shining to be itself something of a maze.

As mentioned in my 1987 Washington Post article, he does send us out into the lobby with that puzzling last image in our heads that gently irritates

us to find our way back through the film and to decipher it.

20

3—A copy of the San Francisco Chronicle reprint (found online)

… including its new headline and new ALL-CAPS interlineated subheads that add critical analysis and which thus may be

partly related to why this version has sometimes been the one cited by other writers… It is also an inaccurate and incomplete

version of this Chronicle reprint, under the headline ―The Family of Man,‖ that seems to be most readily finable online.

-------------------------

'Real' Meaning of 'The Shining' - Kubrick film not just a

horror story

THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE - Wednesday, July 29, 1987

Author: BILL BLAKEMORE , WASHINGTON POST : WASHINGTON POST

ABC News TV correspondent Bill Blakemore has been captivated by the movie "The Shining"

ever since he saw it in 1980. Raised in Chicago near Calumet harbor, and having spent several

boyhood summers searching for Indian artifacts, Blakemore saw the film as an intentional

metaphor about American history. Herewith his theory:

.

Stanley Kubrick's last film, "The Shining," is explicitly about the genocide of the American

Indians -every frame, word and sound of it.

Kubrick, whose latest movie, "Full Metal Jacket," is now playing, does not make simplistic films.

Fans found it surprising in 1980 when he turned out a movie that was apparently no more than a

horror film. The action took place at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado, where the winter caretaker,

a chilling Jack Nicholson, became progressively madder and tried to murder his wife and his

telepathic son.

But "The Shining" is not really about the murders at the Overlook Hotel. It's about the murder of

a race -

the race of Native Americans - and the consequences of that murder.

CALUMET CONNECTION

21

If you are skeptical about this, consider the Calumet baking powder cans with their Indian chief

logo that Kubrick placed carefully in the two food-locker scenes. (A calumet is a peace pipe.)

Consider the Indian motifs that decorate the hotel, and the way they serve as background in

many of the key scenes. Consider the insertion of two lines, early on in the film, describing how

the hotel was built on an Indian burial ground.

These are "confirmers" such as puzzle-makers often use to tell you you're on the right track.

"The Shining" is also explicitly about America's general inability to admit to the gravity of the

genocide of the Indians - or, more exactly, its ability to "overlook" that genocide.

Not only is the site called the Overlook Hotel with its Overlook Maze, but one of the key scenes

takes place at the July 4th Ball. That date, too, has particular relevance to American Indians.

That's why Kubrick made a movie in which the American audience sees signs of Indians in

almost every frame, yet never really sees what the movie's about. The film's very relationship to

its audience is thus part of the mirror that this movie full of mirrors holds up to the nature of its

audience.

BLOODY EMPIRE

The film is also about how the all-male British military establishment, itself forged in bloody

empire-building, passed on to its offspring continental empire, the United States, certain

timeworn army-building methods, including separating weak males from the balancing influence

of their more sensitive womenfolk and children.

"The Shining" is also about America's current racism, particularly against blacks.

The Indian culture has only a mute presence in the film, much as it does in America today. The

Overlook has Navajo and Apache motifs throughout, as manager Stuart Ullman tells the

caretaker's wife Wendy in the only lines in the film in which the Indians are mentioned.

Ullman says, "The site is supposed to be located on an Indian burial ground, and I believe they

actually had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it." This bit of dialogue does not

appear in Stephen King's novel "The Shining."

The first and most frequently seen of the film's very real American "ghosts" is the flooding river

of blood that wells out of the elevator shaft, which presumably sinks into the Indian burial ground

itself.

The blood squeezes out in spite of the fact that the red doors are kept firmly shut within their

surrounding Indian artwork-embellished frames. We never hear this rushing blood. It is a mute

nightmare. It is the blood upon which this nation, like most nations, was built, as was the

22

Overlook Hotel.

NO ACTUAL INDIANS

Indian artworks appear throughout the movie in wall hangings, carpets, architectural details and

even the Colorado state flag. Yet we never meet an actual Indian.

But we do get to know, and like, and then see murdered, a powerful black character, Chef

Hallorann -the only person to die in the film other than the protagonist, villain and victim, Jack.

The murdered black man lies across a large Indian design on the floor -victim of similar racist

violence.

Kubrick carefully controls every aspect of his films' releases, including the publicity.

The posters for "The Shining" that were used in Europe read across the top, "The wave of terror

which swept across America," and centered below that, the two words "is here."

At first glance this seemed to be a poster bragging about the film's effect on America. But the

film wasn't out yet when the posters first appeared.

The wave of terror that swept across America was the white man.

As manager Ullman says in the opening interview, after telling Jack of the horrible murders that

took place earlier in the Overlook, "It's still hard for me to believe it actually happened here, but .

. . it did."

The type of people who partied in the Overlook included, as Ullman tells Jack and Wendy, "four

presidents, movie stars." And when the impressed Wendy asks, "Royalty?," Ullman replies

simply, "All the best people."

King's novel has nothing to do with any of these themes. As he has with other books that gave

their titles to his movies, Kubrick used the general setting and some of the elements of King's

novel, while drastically altering other elements and ignoring much of it, to suit the needs of the

multi-film oeuvre about mankind's inhumanity to man that he's been making at least since "Dr.

Strangelove."

VISUAL PUZZLE

As with some of his other movies, Kubrick ends "The Shining" with a powerful visual puzzle that

forces the audience to leave the theater asking, "What was that all about?"

"The Shining" ends with an extremely long camera shot moving down a hallway in the Overlook,

reaching eventually the central photo among 21 photos on the wall, each capturing previous

good times in the hotel.

23

At the head of the party is none other than the Jack we've just seen in 1980. The caption reads:

"Overlook Hotel-July 4th Ball-1921."

The answer to this puzzle, which is a master key to unlocking the whole movie, is that most

Americans overlook the fact that July Fourth was no ball, nor any kind of Independence Day, for

native Americans; that the weak American villain of the film is the re-embodiment of the

American men who massacred the Indians in earlier years; that Kubrick is examining and

reflecting on a problem that cuts through the decades and centuries.

SOUND OF MOVIEGOERS

And in a final stroke of brilliance, Kubrick physically melds the movie audience leaving his film

with the ghostly revelers in the photograph. As the credits roll, the popular English song on the

sound track ends, and we hear the 1920s audience applaud, and then the gabble of that

audience talking among themselves - the same sound the crowd of moviegoers itself is probably

making as it leaves the theater.

It is the sound of people moving out of one stage of consciousness into another. The

moviegoers are largely unaware of this soundtrack, and this reflects their unawareness that

they've just seen a movie about themselves, about what people like them have done to the

American Indian and to others.

Thus to its very last foot, this film is trying to break through the complacency of its audience, to

tell it, "You were, are, the people at the Overlook Ball."

The opening music, over the traveling aerial shots of a tiny yellow Volkswagen penetrating the

magnificent American wilderness, is the "Dies Irae" ("Day of Wrath"), part of the major funeral

mass of the European Roman Catholic Church. This movie is a funeral, among other things.

And it was Hitler's Germany, another genocidal culture, that first produced the Volkswagen.

At the end of the movie, in the climactic chase in the Overlook Maze, the moral maze of

America and of all mankind in which we are chased by the sins of our fathers ("Danny, I'm

coming. You can't get away. I'm right behind you"), the little boy Danny escapes by retracing his

own steps (an old Indian trick) and letting the father blunder past.

MAZE AND HOTEL

Kubrick carefully equates the Overlook Maze with the Overlook Hotel, and both with the

American continent. Chef Hallorann emphasizes to Wendy the size and abundance of the

kitchens, remarks upon the extraordinary elbow room (so attractive to early settlers) and begins

his long catalog of its storerooms' wealth with those most American of items: rib roast,

hamburger and turkey.

24

The Calumet baking powder can first appears during Hallorann's tour of the dry-goods storage

locker. In a moment of cinematic beauty, we are looking up at Hallorann from Danny's point of

view.

As Hallorann tells Wendy about the riches of that locker, his voice fades as he turns to look

down at Danny and, while his lips are still moving with words of the abundant supplies, Danny

hears the first telepathic "shining" from Hallorann's head as he says, "How'd you like some ice

cream, Doc?" Visible right behind Hallorann's head in that shot, on a shelf, is one can of

Calumet baking powder.

This approach from the open, honest and charismatic Hallorann to the brilliant young Danny is

an honest treaty, and Danny will indeed get his ice cream in the very next scene.

Over the promised ice cream, Hallorann virtually explains the entire symbolism of the movie -

how bad things happening in a place leave something of themselves behind - ghosts, real

ghosts as it turns out, from the very real horrors that have happened in America.

The other appearance of the Calumet baking powder cans is in the scene where Jack, locked in

the same dry-goods locker by his terrified wife, is talking through the door to the very British

voice of ghost Grady.

Grady, speaking on behalf of the never identified "we," who seem to be powerful people, is

shaming Jack into trying to kill his wife and son. ("I and others have come to believe that your

heart is not in this, that you haven't the belly for it." To which Jack replies, "Just give me one

more chance to prove it, Mr. Grady.")

Visible just behind Jack's head as he talks with Grady is a shelf piled with many Calumet baking

powder cans, none of them straight on, none easy to read. These are the many false treaties,

revoked in bloody massacre, that the U.S. government gave the Indians, and that are

symbolically represented in this movie by Jack's rampage to kill his own family - the act to which

Grady is goading Jack in this scene.

Nor is the treaty between Grady and Jack any less dishonest. For Jack will get no reward for

doing Grady's bidding, but rather will reap insanity and death.

WEAK MALES

Kubrick has sought to expose in several of his movies before this one the delusionary tricks by

which big powers get weak males to do brutal and ultimately self-destructive battle.

We never see ghost Grady in this scene, but if we're wondering whether the voice of Grady is

just in Jack's head or comes from a "real" ghost who can do real damage, we are chillingly

convinced when we hear the pin being pulled out on the outside latch of the locker door. All

ghosts in this movie are real horrors in America today, and indeed in most cultures present and

25

past.

The second set of ghosts seen in the movie is that of the British twin girls - Grady's murdered

daughters, alike but not quite alike. They represent, quite simply, duplicity, and not only the

duplicity of the broken treaties with the Indians. Only young Danny sees these twins; children

have a sensitivity to duplicity in the adult world around them.

Kubrick is examining in this movie not only the duplicity of individuals, but of whole societies that

manage to commit atrocities and then carry on as though nothing were wrong.

That's why there have been so many murders over the years at the Overlook; man keeps killing

his own family and forgetting about it, and then doing it again.

This is why, too, Jack has such a powerful sense of deja vu when he arrives at the Overlook, as

though "I'd been here before." Later Grady tells him, "You are the caretaker (who murdered his

children). You've always been the caretaker." ("Born to kill," perhaps, as the ads for "Full Metal

Jacket" proclaim?)

Kubrick is not a moralist. He's an artist, a great one, and along with the greatest artists he is

holding the mirror up to nature, not judging it.

Though he has made here a movie about the arrival of Old World evils in America, he is

exploring most specifically an old question: Why do humans constantly perpetrate such

"inhumanity" against humans?

When asked what "The Shining" is about, Kubrick has only answered, "It's about a man who

tries to kill his family."

That family is the family of man.

Caption: PHOTO (2)

(1) Jack Nicholson as an insane family man in 'The Shining', (2) Shelly Duvall is frozen with fear

as an axe rips through a door

26

4—A brief note on the inaccuracy and omissions of the shortened

version of the San Francisco Chronicle reprint of the Washington Post original that appears to be the one most readily found on the

internet.

A notably incomplete and shortened version of the above San Francisco Chronicle reprint of the original Washington Post article appears to be (at

least as of this writing in January 2012) the version most readily found online, and may be the only version consulted by some authors who cite the

article.

Among the omissions are important (if slightly imperfect – see ―4 Mistakes above…) sentences that open the original article, and other important

sentences that set up its closing lines.

One version readily found on the internet credits the ―San Francisco

Chronicle Syndicate, July 29th 1987‖ (which is 17 days after the Washington Post‟s publication of the article), and is found, for example, at the web

address http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0052.html and labeled ―The

Kubrick Site: Bill Blakemore on ‗The Shining‘‖.

This version also has an enticing but problematic headline: ―The Family of

Man,‖ which does capture a central theme, but steals from the end a bit.

5—Notes on the origins of this article in 1980 in London and Rome, and then in 1987 in New York.

To recover the original feeling of the first discovery… a la Kubrick These notes on this article‟s origins are meant not only to resolve academic

confusions about it. They are also a record of the dynamics by which the larger meanings of this movie

manifested themselves in the mind of just one of the countless viewers who have been attracted to the film … and who, each in their own way, began to discover

more and more in the film as they reflected on it all. Kubrick spoke somewhere of the enormous value of the memory of the feeling –

the emotional experience - during his own first reading of a book upon which he then based a movie. He said it was a vital key, resource and guide when lost in the

many jumbled distractions and technical details that arise when actually making the movie.

27

I hope and expect to write more about “Kubrick Shining,” and this account of the emergence of the larger meanings as I experienced it helps me recall the feelings

and reactions I had upon first seeing it, … and also upon then first exploring it further in the additional examinations – explorations of the kind that Kubrick

expected many viewers would continue to have after they first saw it and then began to wonder what it was really about…

… or at least to rescreen it just for that deep artistic salutation that doesn‟t necessarily need an intellectual travel guide as long as it delivers the film‟s

emotional “feel.” (“Often it‟s more in the feel of the thing than the think of the thing,” as Kubrick is quoted somewhere as saying.)

Since Kubrick so clearly meant and expected that viewers would have these continuing discoveries of the film‟s larger meanings, to reflect here on the course

such discoveries take in various viewers is, in a sense, to study this great work further.

This may suggest yet another new area for Kubrick Studies – analyzing how

he may have generally controlled the process, order and dynamic by which viewers would later come to realize the larger meanings – or the

underground structures and supports– of any of his great and mature films, which is almost all of them.

1980 IN LONDON AND ROME…

In 1980 in London, a few minutes after seeing Kubrick‘s The Shining for the

first time, I realized that its intentional ―themes‖ included the genocide of the American Indians, and other aspects of American and world history.

A few minutes after we passed through the lobby, I mentioned this to the

three friends with whom I had seen it. I did so as we were driving out of the garage where we had parked. (I still remember, for some reason, that I was

sitting in the back left seat. Was that because I was so excited about this –

or that some many parts of my memory were fast being activated by this realization, and so activating the CREB molecules in my brain which

neurologists say help lay day long-term memories when they are activated in an intense way - happy or traumatic?)

I immediately cited to my friends in the car (as we drove up the ramp into

the night time streets of London from what I remember to have been an underground parking lot) the one Calumet can in the first food locker scene

and the dialogue line about the Indian burial ground.

I had been riveted and frightened during that first viewing.

28

I remember becoming aware at some point while watching the film that I

was instinctively sitting forward in my theater seat… and grasping my belt buckle with my left hand, almost as if to ―hold on‖ – all of which worked its

way into my consciousness as the pain and impression-marks on my hand surfaced in my awareness.

I should add – in the cause of truthful reflection and reporting - that I had

gone into the theater with the highest expectations.

My opinion of Kubrick was, by 1980, extremely high. I had come to feel that he was a great artist who was not in the business of entertaining us in the

way we expect to be entertained, and I had taken great care to read nothing about this film – other than the posters advertising it.

Nor had I read Stephen King‘s novel, The Shining, nor do I remember having

heard anything about it.

IT was simply going to be ―the latest Kubrick film‖ – and no doubt a gfeat

one… though as always with Kubrick, anyone following his work knew that there was really no way to predict (if you had succeeded with a robust

―Spoiler-defense‖) what was about to happen in the film – or to you – when you entered the theater.

So I was, in a sense, self-conscious of expecting something powerful…

though I had no idea what.

My subsequent concerns that I may have been hyper-ready to be entertained – and thus perhaps in effect convincing myself that it was scary

and riveting - have been assuaged over the years by hearing so different many people tell me that when they first saw the movie they were simply

―terrified‖ – that is was ―really scary‖ – and various other accounts that

assure me that Kubrick succeeded in doing what he apparently indicated to his co-screenwriter Diane Johnson, when they started work: that, no doubt

among other goals, he wanted make a really ―scary‖ movie.

I had not realized any of the deeper and larger meanings of the film during that fist viewing.

I think I did, perhaps, have a sense of heightened curiosity, in addition to

being scared, wondering almost (but not quite) consciously, ―What‘s going on here?!‖

– And this heightened state, even if only unconscious, may also be a sign of

the great psychological mastery of Kubrick‘s art; conversations I have had

29

over the years with others who found the film truly scary indicate something

like this.

I did consciously, briefly, fleetingly, note the Calumet baking powder can in that first food locker scene… and, barely, Ullman‘s comments about the

Indian burial ground… and then forget them as the movie rushed ahead, only to recall them immediately afterwards when puzzling (as so many do

after first seeing the film) over what the ending was all about.

That first viewing was at a theater in Leicester Square in London.

Thus I assume it must have been the shorter version of the film – the ―international version‖ which Leon Vitali has told me Kubrick wanted always

to remain differentiated from the ―American version‖ which is 18 minutes longer and which had opened earlier in the U.S.

(It was sometime after that American premier that Kubrick reportedly cut the additional 18 minutes for the subsequent U.K. premiere. ( TK CHECK

THE KUBRICK BIOS TO DETERMINE THIS) That American premier had opened with a penultimate scene which Kubrick cut after only a few days (as

described above under ―An Unrecognized Short Kubrick Film…‖) in which Wendy and Danny, recuperating in a hospital, receive a visit from manager

Ullman.

This scene still exists on film in the Eastman House archives in Rochester, New York, and has been shown there.

Soon after that first viewing in London, I confirmed my notions about the

genocide themes in the film during a private screening in Rome, offered by the studio‘s representative there. During this second screening I discovered,

among other things, the multiple Calumet cans in the second food locker

scene.

I assume that, since it was in Europe, this was also the shorter ―International‖ version that had opened in London. I don‘t recall noticing the

additional scenes at that viewing.

I also soon realized that Kubrick neither expected nor wanted anyone to realize the larger themes of Indian and universal genocide upon the first

viewing.

As partly discussed in my article, he wanted, among other things, that viewers would come to experience their own inability – in a metaphorical,

movie-going sort of way - to see what was right in front of them, so to

30

speak… and then realize afterwards what they‘d actually seen, and what

some of the deeper universal structures of what had so frightened them.

Kubrick may have consciously – or not consciously – also figured out a unique way to bridge that unfortunate limitation in human attention

indicated in a famous quote often attributed to Joseph Stalin – another perpetrator of genocide:

“The death to one person is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.”

This notion might play out as follows:

a) Kubrick made a film that terrifies the audience in deeply traumatic and memorable ways… ―about a man who tries to kill his family‖… as Kubrick

carefully says. b) Those viewers then slowly become aware of the historical analogues to

genocides – genocides which, when they read about them (unless they were

involved or lost relatives of friends in them) are still basically full of enormous ―statistics.

c) Those viewers remember the feelings of terror they had when watching the film … and slowly or quickly … might begin to connect those feelings,

somehow, to the genocides that were analogues of the actions overwhelming Jack and his family.

This is an awkward theory – I am not sure if Kubrick would ever have

expected such a growth of initial feelings in viewers into feelings for victims of huge atrocities - but he might at least have expected it to have informed

an newly robust morality or ethic about violence and genocide and several other things.

In any case, at some point soon after that second screening, which must

have been in early 1982 at the latest, I also realized that the reason I had

figured out these larger meanings so soon after first seeing it - when so few others, to whom I explained them, had - was a unique combination of

coincidences peculiar to my life:

They included:

a) Growing up in on the south side of Chicago, near the Calumet River, and at some point learning the meaning of that word: that it‘s French for

Indian peace pipe

b) Learning as a boy of the American genocide of the Indians, partly as a result of searching for fragments of Indian pottery during summers in

nearby Michigan

31

c) Learning early on about the Nazi Holocaust - in the late 1950‘s when a luminous and exacting high school English teacher, Mrs. Lois Rosenthal

Wien, taught us the The Diary of Ann Frank, recently published in English.

d) My subsequent work as a TV correspondent and Bureau Chief for ABC News, during which I covered a number wars and conflicts in the Mideast

and the Indian Subcontinent – work which continually challenged my understanding of why humans continue to commit genocides and other mass

atrocities involving the most brutal dispossessions, and then often manage to seem to carry on largely as if nothing bad had happened – or rather,

many of those that weren‘t direct victims of those great traumas do.

--There may well be more to find in The Shining that represents and/or resonates with the effects of post-traumatic stress…

Well, come to think of it, of course there is…

A NOTE ABOUT EXPLANATIONS OF THE SOURCE OF THE POWER TO ―SHINE‖

… and it actually has to do with hints about what triggers the ability to ―Shine‖ in a person – any person … which is the central subject and action of

this film, the central subject of the movie and it‘s title:

For starters, the two characters in the movie who clearly ―have the shine to them‖ as Hallorann puts it – and did (in the world of the movie) since

before they came to The Overlook - are both victims – overtly - of trauma and the subsequent need to deal with the resulting post-traumatic stress:

Danny and Hallorann.

Plus, of course, Hallorann‘s grandmother…

Wendy also develops this ability to ―shine‖ later in the movie, immediately after she we watch her experience severe trauma induced by her husband,

Jack.

And in another sense, Jack almost ―Shines‖ – but only by half. He seems to retain no ability to be aware that anything is wrong or unusual when he

sees ghosts – he is gullible and credulous and completely eager to please his ―betters‖ – he‘s a real ―tool‖ … so we don‘t think of him ―Shining‖ – even

though he does see ghosts from other times … he just doesn‘t seem to know that they are ghosts…

32

Jack seems to be at one with the world of ghosts… so he has no

separation from them… making him less conscious and thus more frightening – and literally spooky….

(And it is to be noted that being able to shine is not necessarily good – it

helps save Danny, and ultimately his mother… but it leads Hallorann to his death.)

The American Doctor Seeks the Source of the ―Shining Agent‖ Tony…

In the American version (but not in the shorter international version that

opened in Britain) we see the Doctor look in stunned silence at Wendy as she hears the story about how one night, Jack came home drunk and,

finding that his toddler son had innocently messed up his teaching papers by playing with them on the floor, yanked his son‘s arm so badly that it

dislocated Danny‘s shoulder.

The Doctor, who has told Wendy that ―I‘m quite sure that there is nothing

physically wrong with Danny,‖ and incidents are often isolated, often ―brought on by emotional factors, and they rarely occur again.‖

This leaves open the possibility of something psychological.

Still apparently looking for an explanation – for the gently probes a little

further – she asks, ―When did Tony then gently probes a little further and asks whether the appearance of the (Shining-savvy imaginary Tony)

coincided with their recent arrival in the town of Boulder.

Perhaps the Doctor is thinking that Tony emerged as Danny was dealing

with the emotional upheavals of a new home at such a tender age …

But we then learn that Danny was already hardened to difficulty before they arrived.

Wendy tell the doctor that Tony appeared ―about the time we put him into

nursery school‖ - back in Vermont, near the East coast.

(Again, possibly consciously on Kubrick‘s part, a westward journey of trauma? See the ―Anti-Enlightenment Trilogy‖ section below.)

33

She tells the story of how he had an injury – ―He dislocated his shoulder‖

– except that he didn‘t, his father, as she explains dislocated it for him – yanking him as described above.

Before telling these details, she tries to excuse it to the – covering for her

alcoholic husband – by saying to the doctor that ―…it‘s just sort of thing you do a hundred times with a child – you know, in a park of on the streets – but

on this particular occasion my husband just … used too much strength and he injured Danny‘s arm.‖

The close-up on the doctor‘s face, showing her silent stunned reaction to

this story, strongly suggests that, as a professional, she could now speak volumes about the possible sources of Danny‘s malaise, if she chose to.

At this point in these notes, it may not be irrelevant to suggest that they

could be a possible connection with Kubrick‘s own thoughts about the

Holocaust – which have been so rigorously documented and explored by the scholar Geoffrey Cocks in his various books and journal articles.

If Kubrick has built is a semi-autobiographical element into his character,

Danny… and given that Kubrick‘s own background had a history of trauma and having – for survival reasons and not voluntarily – to develop various

means of dealing with post traumatic stress in incidents, some unspeakably huge, that stretched back through history far before his some of his

forebears even came to America two or three generations before Kubrick was born… there may be a conscious resonance her on his part with the

traveling p- sometimes wandering – necessity in the past to carry the post traumatic stress and involuntarily won abilities to ―Shine‖ repeatedly into

new lands … not unlike the supposedly ―new lands‖ (once the Indians were out of the way) into which American pioneers – and Gold companies, among

other extractive industries – pushed their way, including through Colorado,

as Kubrick had had his researchers document thoroughly in Estes Park and the Denver Library before he got down to making the film.

The other person in The Shining who ―shines‖ - from the beginning of the

movie‘s action and long before - is of course Hallorann.

There is little need to explicate here the post traumatic stress which his fellows blacks have had to suffer, continually– and still do – in the United

States and many other countries where white-skinned Caucasians, and some brown-skinned groups, including Arabs, and ―yellow-skinned‖ Asians, have

sought dominance and hegemony.

34

And, not irrelevantly in this movie set in the United States which, until the

late 1960‘s even had legal apartheid – his ability to ―shine‖ ends up being fatal.

The white Danny‘s ability to ―shine‖– and that of even his previously

feckless mother who begins to posses it after she has experienced some severe traumas as the movie advances – faces far less obstacles in its

search for escape from ―the nightmare of history‖ and its maze, than that of the dark-skinned – and enormously intelligent and kindly – black man,

Halloran.

In fact, one might say that it was, in a sense, tragically, painfully and involuntarily won ability to shine that Hallorann… and his grandmother -

possess that brought him back to the Overlook in the dead of winter to try to rescue them.

How many parallels of that tragic inter-racial psychological dynamic between blacks and whites might one find in American history?

Such is Kubrick‘s preternatural ability to condense enormous knowledge and

sad wisdom into compelling – and great – art.

1987 AND FOLLOWING…

In the years immediately following that first viewing in London – in the early 1980‘s, just after The Shining came out - I figured that the presence of

these larger themes in Kubrick‘s film would soon be discovered and written about by various people.

But in 1987, now based in New York for ABC News, when Kubrick‘s next film,

Full Metal Jacket, was about to come out, I realized that I was not aware

that anyone had, and so I felt I should write it up – at least in case this new film had some of the same themes.

Some of the symbolism and simple wording in the advance posters for Full

Metal Jacket suggested it did – ―Born to kill,‖ and on the cloth covering of a marine‘s battle helmet, a black-and-white 1960‘s peace symbol button

alongside missile-shaped bullets that were stick in a leather band around the outside of the helmet.

Those bullets may well have been what military armaments catalogues that

Kubrick had reportedly seen described as being a category called ―full metal jacket‖ – a phrase that the by then insane private Laurence, with a glare in

his face that matches one Kubrick used in Jack Nicholson Jack was going

35

megalomaniacal while looking down at the model of the Overlook Maze– and

in other movies – informs an alarmed Private Joker describes the bullets he‘s putting into this rifle… with which, in a few moments, we will see him kill

himself.

There are surely structural and allegorical parallels of a kind between the respective insanities of Jack and Private Laurence.

Certainly the helmet in the poster is itself not unlike a ―full metal jacket‖ for

the mind… or at least the brain… of these hapless weak males thrown into various kinds of battle.

So I phoned the New York Times… where a nice editor thanked me very

much for the offer, but said that he was over-stocked with Kubrick articles as he had just commissioned three in conjunction with the opening of the

new Kubrick film.

I then phoned The Washington Post and was connected to the editor of the

Sunday entertainment section, one Mary Haddad, who said she was interested.

So at some point soon thereafter I sat down in a briefly unused conference

room next to our new third floor videotape editing rooms at ABC News, typed out the article, and faxed it to her down in Washington.

At least, I presume I faxed it rather than mailed it, as I remember it all

happening within a very few days – even that I may have written and faxed it on a Thursday or Friday… just before the Monday that she told me, as I

remember, of having read the King novel ―over that weekend‖.

She told me she found in reading it that, indeed, there was nothing in it

about the genocide of the Indians.

This seemed to be further indication to her of the pertinence of my submission – perhaps suggesting to her more about the originality of what

Kubrick was up to.

It would take me a while to find my original article as submitted and nail down the exact details.

I think it‘s in some carton in storage somewhere - but I do remember that

she told me that one of her editors had suggested adding, as a better set up for the readers, some lines that then appeared as the 2nd, 3rd and 4th

paragraphs in the 1987 article.

36

She read these lines to me over the phone, I quickly said fine, and, as I remember, it was published the following Sunday in the ―Show‖ section with

the headline, ―Kubrick‘s ‗Shining‘ Secret,‖ and the subheader, ―Film‘s Hidden Horror Is The Murder of the Indian.‖

I was also told by Ms. Haddad that the article might be picked up by various

newspapers that subscribed to the Washington Post syndication service.

I also remember phoning an editor at The Los Angeles Times. I figured it might well be of interest to people in that movie-making town, and simply

wanted to alert the paper. I was a little surprised at the vehemence with which he said he wasn‘t at all interested in running it. My memory is that he

may have already head from or spoken with Washington Post editor Mary Haddad about the article, but I‘m not sure – and who knows what made him

sound so irritated? Perhaps he was sitting on a tack.

Some years later, I learned that The San Francisco Chronicle had picked it

from the Washington Post syndication service… and given it a different headline (―‗Real‘ Meaning of ‗The Shining‘ – Kubrick film not just a horror

story‖) and replaced the Washington Post‟s interlineated capitalized sub-heads with completely different sub-heads in ALL-CAPS that add a more

complete outline of some of the article‘s larger points. (This Chronicle version is pasted in above.)

In 1994, seven years after the article was published, I had the pleasure of

listening to a tourist I happened to meet on a remote and wild beech on the Ossa Peninsula in southwest Costa Rica that Kubrick‘s The Shining was

actually all about the genocide of the American Indian.

So I kept asking him for more details about it all – which he provided pretty

well – before asking him where he had learned this… to learn that it was from an article in The San Francisco Chronicle… at which point, in apologetic

good humor, I revealed my authorship.

This encounter told me that the article – which I had only intermittently thought about in the continual rush of a journalist‘s work - had perhaps

struck a chord.

Every now and then, though, I would enjoy talking about it, after hearing people first describe to me which moments in the film they found scariest,

and why – which I always wanted to hear about before I talked about what I had found.

37

I was sometimes asked if I had asked Kubrick for confirmation, and always

explained that I didn‘t want to – or need to – because it seemed to me that these references were so specific and explicitly and unambiguously obvious

to anyone who had seen the film… or son would… and by and large people told me that was the case.

I also avoided any chance to try to meet Kubrick because, as long as I was

going to write about his films, I felt it important not to be influenced by his personality.

Artists may be trying to do any number of things… but what matters is what

they succeed in doing, and the only place to tell, obviously, is in their results, their works of art.

I did, on a couple of occasions, have one or two simple questions about the

film, to which I figured I could get the answer only from Kubrick himself –

chiefly, as I remember, whether he controlled the wording of the posters for The Shining.

So I asked my friend Jack Laurence (a reporter for CBS News in the Vietnam

war) to ask his friend Michael Herr (another reporter in the Vietnam war who, around this time was working with Kubrick on the script of Full Metal

Jacket) to ask Kubrick about his control of the posters… and got a simple reply back, which was all I wanted – in that case, yes.

I asked Jack to make sure that he told me nothing except the yes or no

answer to my question.

I remember, though, that – according to Jack (if I remember right) Kubrick sent a question back to me: When was I going to publish my article?

I took this as a possible indication that I was indeed on to something, that he knew someone looking into the specific words of the posters might have

discerned some lager meanings (―The wave of terror that swept across America…. Is here‖) – Not that I had any doubt about the larger meanings in

the film; once you note them, they are loud and clear.

It was also around this time, as I remember, that I sent in the question to Kubrick, via Jack and Michael Herr (who as of this writing I have never met

nor spoken with) about why he kept a shorter version of the film – 18 ½ minutes shorter – in circulation outside the U.S. - Did it have anything to do

what wanting to have more reference to the American Indians in the audience in the country where that genocide had occurred?

38

I don‘t know what form the question was in by the time, in this game of

―telephone‖, the question may have reached Kubrick… nor what he may have said… but some time later, when I asked Jack, he said ―Oh, he just said

that he likes the shorter version better.‖

If that is all accurate, it would not in any way preclude other reasons Kubrick may have had as well.

It was many years later, after Kubrick‘s death in 1999, that I met his close

assistant, Leon Vitali, and was told by him that Kubrick wanted there always to be these two versions of The Shining – the American and the

International.

* * * * FREGADING THE INNACURATE ONLINE VERSION – ―THE FAMMILY OF MAN‖

I do not know when the inaccurate and incomplete version of the1987 article, credited to the San Francisco Chronicle syndication service and titled

―The Family of Man, was first put on the internet, nor by whom.

It appears to be a rushed and carelessly transcribed re-type of some sort.

The now ubiquitous public internet really wasn‘t much in use yet – if at all - in 1987.

I did not become aware of the growing body of Kubrick scholarship, nor of

the citations of the 1987 article in some books and other studies, until the last few years.

* * * *

Further study might pursue the following idea – working outlines, titles and subtitles for which might be roughly worded thus:

KUBRICK’S ANTI-ENLIGHTENMENT TRILOGY

- Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket – ...proceeding ever westward in time and space…

… the 1700’s, the 1800’s, the 1900’s …

-from northeast Europe, though ―Portland Maine to Portland Oregon‖ (as Jack says)

and on across the Pacific to Vietnam (--and taking the American Indians with them, via Hollywood)

39

I have not pursued whether there is any evidence to suggest that Kubrick

was conscious of such an ―Anti-Enlightenment Trilogy…‖ or whether it is just coincidence.

If so, it‘s a most shapely and beautiful coincidence:

Kubrick‘s eponymous Barry Lyndon is told by King George III in that film that he should indeed raise an army to send across the Atlantic to fight the

rebels in America, and – the King acidly adds - go with them himself.

Does the arrogant-sounding King instinctively(or otherwise) want the fawning Irish pretender-to-status Barry Lyndon to remove to a more

comfortable or appropriate distance from his august presence?

--And the genocide of the American Indian, so evocative in The Shining, shows up in a shattered movie theater in the Vietnamese City of Hue in Full

Metal Jacket in the form of the typical Hollywood western, ―Charge At Feather River‖ – but with marquee in Vietnamese.

The war-shattered movie theater – a theater into the dark of which American soldier Animal Mother, with an overtly racist jibe to a fellow soldier

who is a dark-skinned black and who has had made moves to be the first to take an eager prostitute, offering herself to the whole platoon, into the

theater – insists on taking the Vietnamese prostitute first.

This scene comes (as I remember TK MUST CHECK ) not long after the small platoon, hunkered down during a battle and while being filmed by an

American news crew that‘s walking backwards just outside the theater, had joked about who was going to play the cowboys and who the Indians … with

one of them deciding that the ―Gooks‖ would play the Indians.

―Gook,‖ according to Wikipedia – is a derogatory term used by Americans first for Korean individuals… and then Vietnamese

individuals… TK MUST CHECK – BUT IF SO, KUBRICK MAY

INTENTIONALLY SHOE IT TO ROPE IN REFEFRNCE TO YET ANOTHER WESTWARD EXPLANING AMERICAN WAR.

In any case, Kubrick created this apparent ―anti-enlightenment trilogy‖ while

based on ground - from within - the heart of the horror, so to speak – northeast Europe and especially Britain where he lived and worked with his

beloved German wife (whose antecedent family even included a filmmaker who produced some Nazi propaganda.)

40

--From within the heart of the Labyrinth, one might say… and like Dedalus

he managed constantly through his art to fly away free out across the world… and, I suspect, and believe I have in effect read, that, feeling bad

about the dangers and problems to be faced by Icarus (the young, today, any young, the parlous future of humanity) … was still at work on ―doing a

better job with the wings…‖ and modeling that activity… in a most non-trivial way… and still at work.

AREAS FOR FUTURE EXPLORATION IN KUBRICK STUDIES (Very rough – some notes towards concepts to refine…)

--The kind of ―Great‖ artist Kubrick is – And How HE is ―Great‖ His greatness includes the integral drive in him to continually universalize

though condensation and through the making of beauty… - No two of the ―Greatest‖ artists are Great in the same way – each invents a new way to be

―great‖ … but becoming ever more ―universal‖ in whatever specifics are crystallized seems to have something to do with it…

Did Kubrick try, in a sense, to make each movie be about all of existence

and our entire experience in the world? – Or at least consonant with it all? – --- each time, through different genres, and The Shining through the Horror

genre?

--What Motivated Kubrick? --To help the world?

--Just make the best movie possible? --To outdo others?

--to plum the depths of meaning and existence, using filmmaking as a tool for doing so?

-–If so, for personal pleasure or contribution to the world, or both? --For the joy and fun of it?

--To make money… --Keep existential horror at bay

What combination of all or some of the above … or others?

41

--Why Kubrick wanted two different versions of The Shining in perpetuity – What are the differences between the American Version and the 18-

minutes-shorter International Version– do they reveal something about his tactics of implanted curiosity-generation and irritation – did he want there to

be even more Indian reference for audiences in the U.S> version because it was in the country where the Indian genocide took place and where the

audience is sitting…?

The Unity of Victims in The Shining – and other movies

Indians-Blacks-Jews (by cultural reference and Danny‘s autobiographical nature) -small children everywhere (Danny)-Women

(Wendy), weak males (Jack)… all ―Shining‖ because all suffer trauma as a result of being considered inferior by others and by the large ―big powers‖ –

though they too are also ―victims… ― – All end up being victims of existence,

being born, in a way…

The ways in which Kubrick‘s kind of greatness is similar to that of great

journalism and also the work of great historians – he is seeing and researching and then reporting succinctly and powerfully and clearly – and

the work of philosophers as well.

The ways in which Kubrick is the first truly ―global‖ great artist –and to what

degree was he aiming for a global audience - he was constantly checking information for theaters in cities around the world.

(Re the short Kubrick DGA film – it‘s an image of how to stand apart from an

awfully dangerous world – Kubrick‘s distrust of enthusiasm… not a private

man but an aware man; personally loved his family and pets, his colleagues when possible and friends always .. and life… just avoided all the nonsense

that comes with Hollywood type of fame and that dehumanizes and robs self… … )

Dream-imagery in The Shining: for example, visual-verbal puns are known sometimes to emerge as natural conflations in dreams – such as a man with

―blood on his head‖ – as we see – and Wendy also sees – toward the end of the final chase… the drunk bald man in a tux holding out a glass of whiskey

saying ―Great party, isn‘t it‖ – and she turns and flees toward the blood-elevator doors – though there is a door between them with light behind it –

through which she will push presumably and escape back ―into the light‖ –

42

something like that little noticed door (between the two duplicitous elevator

twin doors – not unlike the spooky twins) is not a mistake in a Kubrick movie…

Describe ―The Way Stanley Made Movies‖ – As Jan Harlan Put It

How did he first develop a method for creating movie – from conception to premiere – and beyond. Hoe did it evolve?

By the time he made The Shining, it included research teams in the field. He

sent several people to Estes Park Colorado to learn everything about its history , and also to the Denver Pubic Library to research the whole region…

In this way he was thus being also both very journalistic and acting also as

an historian and philosopher of history…

How Kubrick keeps resisting the ―bifurcation fallacy‖ built in to so much

crude human thinking – the tendency to find a simple answer so that there can be sudden action… Fore example, the way in which he resists the

temptation to give us any single villain or even villain class in The Shining. We may be tempted to think we finally see a true central villain in the bald

drunk in a tux holding a glass of drink and saying ―Great party, isn‘t it?‖ near the end of the paroxysm of evil toward the end, but even all the ghosts in

this movie are victims, like Jack, of the horrors in the human condition and in collectivistic structures of our often brutal species.

Kubrick is exploring the great forces of life on earth that continually grind up individuals, families and nations.

Exploring that tendency toward simple answers that can be adaptive in barging ahead with mere survival .. until it isn‘t.

END END END END