The concern with organized institutional forms of violence and power in- forms the uncanny subtext of The Shining and, as others have pointed out,
it represents a common focus in Kubrick’s films.26 The repetition of the past
finds representation in the film in ways that are both overt and metaphorical. Nevertheless, in every case these repetitions suggest passivity or helpless- ness before the onslaught of history. One of the most obvious examples of repetition revolves around Jack’s efforts to repeat the actions of the former caretaker Delbert Grady. At the same time Danny’s uncanny encounters with the ghosts of Grady’s daughters explicitly connect the repetition of history with violence. Furthermore, in his enigmatic encounter with Grady in the bathroom adjoining the Gold Room, Jack accuses Grady of being the caretaker and is told that he has always been the caretaker. Significantly, this encounter ends with Jack becoming convinced that he must “correct” Wendy and Danny. Soon after this real or imagined conversation, Jack sets out to kill Danny and Wendy, but only after repeating many of the same lines spoken by the ghosts of the hotel. This repetition of language signifies Jack’s imprisonment within the nightmare of history and emphasizes his subjec-
tion to powers beyond his control or understanding.27 Jack’s manuscript
supplies a significant indication of his growing alignment with inhuman forces depriving him of all individual agency. The repetition of the same line—All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy—registers his entrap- ment within an ideological system reinforcing patriarchal, class, and racial domination and links his attempts at mastery to the narcissistic motives of
176 John Lutz
play discussed above. To the degree that the manuscript emulates a wide variety of poetic and written forms of expression, it dramatizes a complete emptying of content from literary form that renders it meaningless. Subject to the commands of history, Jack’s personality undergoes a parallel emptying that dramatically points out how his unconscious allegiance to the past has destroyed his creative potential.
In effect, the haunting presence of history materializes and drives him to replace the possibility of fulfilling meaningful work or self-realization with a meaningless repetition of the past. As Thomas Allen Nelson points out, the manuscript “resembles a horizontal labyrinth . . . [suggesting] fate and psychological entrapment [and] associates Jack’s madness with an image of
reduction and repetition.”28 Jack’s madness signifies the materialization of
history and, on a symbolic level, the supernatural forces that nurture his
growing instability function concretely in the film as historical ones.29 If Jack’s
repetition of the same text points to his own progressive dehumanization into a figure whose narcissistic motives can be manipulated to transform him into an agent of brutal violence, the film, along with its historical subtext, points to the role of modern institutions in reproducing both domestic and global nightmares. Just as the Overlook Hotel is haunted by unseen evil and Jack Torrance is hunted by hidden forces bent upon his family’s destruction, so, too, are the seemingly benevolent faces of political, economic, and cul- tural authority shown to be stalked by an uncanny double inflicting untold violence and harm upon the powerless. As Linda Holland-Toll points out, “It is not the idea that Jack is a monster which is so discomforting; it is that Jack Torrance reflects so many people in the society, who would not like to think of themselves as monsters, and who, indeed, to all appearances,
are not monsters.”30 Holland-Toll is speaking of King’s novel; however, her
insight can easily be applied to the Jack Torrance in the film, who initially no more appears to be a monster than do the monstrous institutions that Kubrick aims to unmask and expose.
These monstrous institutions show themselves in the form of concrete traces of the past. This past is registered not only in literal historical refer- ences but also in the untold numbers of photographs that line the walls of the Overlook. In this sense Jack’s joining of the ranks of those who populate the hotel’s photographs is entirely appropriate, since it signifies the way in which the past exerts its concrete influence on the present. Indeed, Brigitte Peucker observes the degree to which The Shining is “haunted by photogra-
phy.”31 To the extent that photographs are a means of recording the past and
assigning it a place and meaning, Kubrick uses photography as a metaphor for the helplessness and passivity of human beings before the onslaught of
From Domestic Nightmares to the Nightmare of History 177
history. The elaborate tracking shots of the camera, coupled with the vast visual puzzle or spatial labyrinth represented by the interior of the hotel, construct an uncanny space that frequently gives his characters a false as- surance of being able to master it before their actual experiences violently shatter their illusions and demonstrate the degree to which it masters them. In this respect Kubrick’s characters may not be unlike the members of his audience, who, provided with a story ostensibly about the mental break- down of an isolated man and the collapse of his family, are actually given a tale about the hidden brutality of their own institutions, an uncanny fable mirroring their own pursuit of mastery and their own subjection to the nightmare of history.
Notes
My epigraphs are taken from William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage, 1975), 80; Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: Interna- tional Publishers, 1991), 15; and The Shining, dir. Stanley Kubrick (Warner Brothers, 1980).
1. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David Mclintock (New York: Penguin, 2003), 123.
2. Diane Johnson, “Writing The Shining,” in Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film,
and the Uses of History, ed. Geoffrey Cocks, James Diedrick, and Glenn Perusek (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 58. 3. Freud, The Uncanny, 147.
4. Stephen King, The Shining (New York: Pocket, 1977), 382, 433–34. Subsequent page references to this work will be given parenthetically in the text.
5. Cynthia A. Freeland, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), 215.
6. Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 108.
7. Greg Jenkins, Stanley Kubrick and the Art of Adaptation (London: McFarland, 1997), 23.
8. Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” in The Uncanny, 38, 40.
9. Joseph Reino, Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Semetary (Boston: Twayne, 1988), 36.
10. Freud, The Uncanny, 142, 143.
11. Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze (Bloomington: In- diana University Press, 1982), 199.
12. Johnson, “Writing The Shining,” 59.
13. Randy Rasmussen, Stanley Kubrick: Seven Films Analyzed (London: McFarland 2001), 263.
178 John Lutz
14. Frank Manchel, “What About Jack? Another Perspective on Family Relationships in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,” Literature/Film Quarterly 23, no. 1 (1995): 72.
15. Philip Kuberski, “Kubrick’s Caretakers: Allegories of Homeland Security,” Ari-
zona Quarterly 63 (Spring 2007): 5.
16. David A. Cook, “American Horror: The Shining,” Literature/Film Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1984): 2.
17. Nelson, Kubrick, 217.
18. Rasmussen, Stanley Kubrick, 236.
19. Geoffrey Cocks, “Death by Typewriter: Stanley Kubrick, the Holocaust, and
The Shining,” in Cocks, Diedrick, and Perusek, Depth of Field, 203.
20. Greg Smith, “‘Real Horrorshow’: The Juxtaposition of Subtext, Satire, and Audience Implication in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,” Literature/Film Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1997): 302.
21. Larry W. Caldwell and Samuel J. Umland, “‘Come and Play with Us’: The Play Metaphor in Kubrick’s Shining,” Literature/Film Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1986): 106, 111.
22. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Norton, 1961), 14. 23. Ibid., 15.
24. See Peucker, Material Image, 111. Peucker argues that the corridors of the hotel can be viewed as corporeal passages for the transport of blood, and the hotel as the body of the mother. Similarly, Robert Kilker, who views the film as a vehicle for a subtle misogyny based in the fear of the abject, interprets the winding road leading to the Overlook as an umbilical cord to a monstrous feminine from which Jack cannot free himself. See Robert Kilker, “All Roads Lead to the Abject: The Monstrous Feminine and Gender Boundaries in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,” Literature/Film Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2006): 57–58.
25. Freeland, The Naked and the Undead, 225.
26. See Cocks, Diedrick, and Perusek, Depth of Field. In their introduction the edi- tors point out that many of Kubrick’s films “confront in particular the unprecedented organization of power and violence among people and states that dominated much of the first half of the century” (8).
27. Pat J. Gehrke and G. L. Ercolini, “Subjected Wills: The Antihumanism of Kubrick’s Later Films,” in Cocks, Diedrick, and Perusek, Depth of Field, 111, 117.
28. Nelson, Kubrick, 228.
29. Cocks, “Death by Typewriter,” 200–201.
30. Linda J. Holland-Toll, “Bakhtin’s Carnival Reversed: King’s The Shining as Dark Carnival,” Journal of Popular Culture 33 (Fall 1999): 137.