Gothic Isolationism in The Shining
In his essay “Inconsolable Darkness” John Gianvito writes: “It (Gothic) a venturing into a world created by ones own fears and desires, in a state of enthrallment both seductive and destructive (47)”. Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining tells the story of a character who is thrust into a Gothic world in which his own fears and desires turn him into a monstrous figure, isolated from both his family and reality. Through use of Gothic narrative elements as well as art direction, cinematography and character development The Shining paints a portrait of someone who is driven to acts of destruction through isolationism.
Gianvito further writes: “What has been supplanted in contemporary manifestations of the Gothic is the requirement to be transported, either geographically, as across some mountainous divide in Transylvanian mists, or psychologically, via descent into the imagination of a neurotic sensibility (48)”. The opening sequence of The Shining involves a series of shots of the main character Jack Torrance and his family driving in their car through a mountainous landscape.
The car begins on a prairie with a shot of the mountains in the foreground as the car drives towards it. The sequence is shot almost entirely in long shots, with the camera very far away from the vehicle, which is dwarfed by the terrain around it. The car gradually moves from a warm looking climate towards a snowy, cavernous landscape. The only other car is seen moving in the opposite direction. The way the vehicle is shot in relation to the mountains and the direction it moves in indicates that the people inside of it are headed towards a very lonely, isolated location.
The Torrance family arrives at their location, a large hotel located in the middle of the Rocky Mountains known as The Overlook. The establishing shot of the hotel shows a snow covered building, obviously large in stature but small in comparison to the mountains that surround it. In the Gothic tradition the building could be equated to Dracula’s castle in Transylvania; a palace that is gloomy and lonely rather than vibrant and exciting.
Once Jack Torrance enters the hotel, it is established that he is novelist, brought to the Overlook by his editors on a retreat while the hotel is closed down during the winter so he can finish his next book. Discussion with the hotel owner along with a separate discussion involving Jack’s wife and a doctor establishes that Jack is a mostly unsuccessful novelist as well as a former alcoholic with a history of physical abuse towards his child whose personal struggles have hindered his success. The idea of a working man and his inability to find personal success in his work very much plays into Jack Torrance’s isolation and transformation into a monster figure at the end of the film.
The function of the camera throughout the entire film plays an important part in the emphasis that all of the characters in the hotel are isolated. Film critic Jack Kroll writes: “Kubrick’s camera moves like a haunted thing itself, whizzing behind little Danny as he pedals his tricycle furiously through the endless hallways, moving backward from Wendy as she flees desperately from the husband who has turned into a mad slaughterer, gliding beside Torrance as he lurches through the corridors with the flailing gestures and gibberish that have become his monstrous language, wheeling with dizzying velocity through the hotel’s outdoor maze where Danny goes to flee his father’s murderous pursuit.” There are very few Point of View shots in the film.
The camera is separate from the characters, moving on its own axis and situating itself in places apart from the action. This gives a very voyeuristic quality to the entire film. Because the camera mostly exists as a separate entity from the characters the audience feels as though we are looking in on events we wouldn’t otherwise be witness to. The cinematography in general gives the interiors of the Overlook Hotel a vast, empty feeling. There is a frequent use of tracking shots in the film, as the camera very slowly moves in and out of different rooms to gradually zoom in on action occurring.
The camera will often move down always and into large mostly empty rooms where one of the characters will be by themselves, creating a sense of spatial distance between the characters and any occurring action as well as emphasizing the emptiness of the Overlook.
The most notable instances of actual point of view shots in the film involve characters witnessing events that don’t actually occur or seeing things that aren’t actually there. Pauline Kael writes: “In addition, there are long, static dialogues between Torrence and two demonic characters – a bartender and a waiter – who are clearly -his- deamons: they are personified temptations, as in a medieval mystery play, and they encourage him in his worst impulses.” A scene halfway through the film shows Jack sitting at a bar at the Overlook, talking to a bartender who proceeds to serve him drinks.
The bartender isn’t a real person, but a vision in Jack’s head. Jack is shown speaking to the man and drinking from a glass poured to him but a quick cut in the action reveals that nobody is actually standing behind the bar and Jack doesn’t even have a glass in his hand. The vision of the bartender is manifested in Jack’s conscience by the hotel itself, and the drinking is a way to exploit one of his weaknesses as a former alcoholic. Earlier in the movie, there is a scene in which Danny Torrance is riding tricycle through the halls of the hotel. The scene is almost entirely done with a tracking shot, from behind Danny’s back but suddenly he stops riding the tricycle because he witnesses a very haunting vision that is shown from his own perspective.
Jack’s child Danny is a very important figure in the film, one who deals with his own personal isolation and demons. It is revealed early on in the film that Danny has an ability called “The Shining” which enables him to read the thoughts of others and see things that others aren’t able to see. Once Danny enters the Overlook hotel, he is filled with visions of murderous events that happened in the past inside of the hotel. After it is revealed to Jack that a man went insane and murdered his family in the Overlook many years ago, Danny is haunted by images of blood soaking the hallways and of the two twin daughters that were killed in the hotel many years ago. Danny’s unique ability allows him to deal with the horrors of the hotel in his own ways and in the end he has more strength against them than his father.
Jack’s previous physical abuse of his son eventually manifests. As Danny is riding through the corridors of his hotel on his tricycle, he is suddenly drawn to a specific room and enters it. Once he exits the room, he walks up to Jack in a state of fright and horror with visible marks on his neck. Danny explains that there was a woman in room 237 who attacked him. Jack enters the room himself to try and find what the problem is. He enters the bathroom only to find a beautiful woman in the bathtub, that he immediately embraces but once he does is horrified to find that her reflection in the mirror is that of an old, dying woman.
Film critic Rod Munday offers an interpretation of this scene from a website dedicated to critical analysis of Kubrick’s films:
A Freudian would argue the struggle that takes place in room 237 is between Jack’s Eros (life instinct) and Thanatos (death instinct). Eros is epitomized by the sex act, sex promotes life in the literal and metaphorical sense, it gives us vitality, strengthens our sense of being alive and banishes the dread of our own mortality from our thoughts. However, when Jack looks in the mirror and sees the decaying form of the old woman reflected there, the fortress of his Eros is breached and overrun by his Thanatos.
According to Freud, aggression can save a person from the innate self-destructive tendency of the death instinct, extroverting it as a desire to kill. Thus, after Jack meets his Thanatos in room 237, his only recourse is murder, in order to still feel alive. Maybe Danny’s youth saves him from a similar fate? His Eros and Thanatos are not fully developed, yet his ability to ‘shine,’ allows him to experience all that his parents suppress, perhaps Danny’s ability to vicariously confront the horrors of the hotel plays a part in his salvation?
The Freudian interpretation of Jack and Danny’s struggle is important to the motives and actions behind Jack Torrance’s character in general. Jack Torrance is a sexually insecure character in general, and an unsuccessful family man on top of that. His failure to maintain a strong marriage and act as a good father directly echoes his failures as a writer. Jack is not seen as having any kind of personal relationship with his wife Wendy in the film. Their conversations are cold and distant. They never embrace, they don’t dine together, they don’t act in anyway that’s typical of a married couple.
Most of the conversations they have in the film involve Wendy slowly walking up to Jack and approaching him about something and Jack reacting angrily or frustrated as though she is nothing but an interruption to his life. Jack’s sexual and martial weakness is exploited by the Overlook and turns him into a killer. Because Jack is alone in the world and weak because of it he is able to be exploited in such a way. Danny’s loneliness on the other hand gives him strength and the ability to overcome, perhaps because he’s not yet able to experience the anxieties that come with sexual maturity and adulthood. Critic Brian Siano writes: “Jack is isn’t all there to begin with; he’s fundamentally incapable, so when he falls headlong into the demands of the Man’s World, his particular behavior’s going to be strained, erratic, and murderous.”
Jack Torrance is seen on camera working at his typewriter in various stages. There are different scenes of him typing at a fast and vigorous pace, as well as scenes of him wandering the large vacuous room that his typewriter is in, tossing a ball against the walls (with a large echoing effect on the soundtrack to emphasize the hollow space) as he searches for ideas. The revelation of what he has actually been typing is one of the most genuinely frightening moments of horror in the entire film.
The scene involves Wendy approaching Jack’s typewriter and picking up his manuscript, reacting with a loud unpleasant scream to the words on the page just as her husband enters the room. Rather than an actual story, the words “All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy” are repeated over and over again in various patterns over the pages Jack has typed. It’s officially the moment where Wendy has discovered that her husband has gone insane and must react to the situation in front of him immediately with no time to think about it.
Critic Kian Bergstrom writes:
Jack’s opus, pounded out day after day on its keys, is an exercise in futility and illegibility. The ten words of his mantra, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” become, in their stupefying repetition, divorced from meaning and context, and float freely within what Emerson would in his late essay “Nature” call a “system of approximations.” Jack’s attempts at self-expression, the holy grail of Modernist art, are stymied and coagulated into incomprehensibility by virtue of their own purity and lack of intercession or explanation. His creative endeavor becomes more meaningless and unapproachable than the worst potboiler or cheapest exploitation.
Jack’s inability to do his job, express himself as a writer, and accomplish his goal in life come to fruition in this scene. The words “All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy” give poignancy to his entire situation. He has viewed his responsibilities in life as a husband, father, writer and caretaker as work. There has been no fun or “play” involved in these duties because he’s always been bad at them. He is a weak man, incapable of fulfilling his basic societal roles and do to his isolation in the hotel unleashes all of those anxieties.
The dialogue between Jack and Wendy after the writing is discovered echoes Jack’s feelings about his life. He yells violently at his wife about how she’s never been anything but a disturbance and distraction in his life. He questions whether or not she’s ever stopped to think about what she’s been doing to him. He blames everything that has happened to him on his wife’s inability to understand him and his needs and says that she has been nothing but a hindrance to him his entire life. All the feelings he has brewed up throughout the course of his life, all of his angst about his own personal failure is verbally expressed to Wendy in this scene, all in very ironic fashion considering that Jack has nobody to blame but himself for his own weaknesses.
The closing passages of the film involve Jack exploding in bloodthirsty rage and attempting to murder his wife and son. His frustration with his life comes out and he seeks to redeem himself by eliminating what he views as two of his biggest weaknesses, his wife and son. The final sequences involve an extended chase throughout the interiors and exteriors of the Overlook hotel and the ending of the film involves a chase through the hedge maze outside of the building. Jack’s bloodlust at the end of the film proves to be his undoing, as he single-mindedly chases after Danny through the maze without rhyme or reason and is eventually outran and left in the cold to die. Danny uses the simple method of following his footprints in and out of the maze while Jack lumbers on aggressively without employing any kind of strategy.
Siano writes:
It’s this last decision of Jack’s that does him in, and we can spend a little while analyzing it. Until this point, Jack has been very methodical removing the parts from the radio and the snowmobile, tracking Danny’s footprints but here, on an impulse, he makes the fatal decision to go blundering ahead with no real plan in mind. One can relate this to his earlier isolation, where he steadfastly refused to leave his “writing” and go explore and understand this universe of the Overlook.
In being outwitted by his son at the end of the film, Jack has failed just as he has in every other duty in life. His inability to kill people who are smaller in stature than him is a metaphor for his failures. He runs around aggressively, wielding an axe in phallic fashion attempting to use it properly but his aggression fails him just as his sexuality and manhood have failed him.
In the end, Jack Torrance is a victim of the own desires, temptations and fears brought onto him by his gothic environment. As he enters a place that is isolated from the universe he is faced with his own desires and fears as well as the harsh reality of his life and those fears transform him into a violent monster.
By placing him in an isolated environment, showing him in spaces that are both claustrophobic and empty, using the camera in voyeuristic fashion The Shining shows the mental disintegration of Jack Torrance. As he is further isolated from the real world, his frustrations and anxieties come to full view and he becomes an extreme example of a man failing to fulfill his roles in modern society.
