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Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is not generally considered a family picture, but it is certainly one of the most brutally honest films ever made about the nature of family relationships.  I discovered this when seeing the film for the first time with my father when I was fourteen. My father took me to dozens of R-Rated films when I was growing up, which reflected, I think, his trust in my maturity rather than any negligence about what was morally appropriate for children (though there was some of that too). Many of my fondest memories of my father involve going to the movies, and going to R-Rated films was something we usually did together, without my Mom or my sister.  For two guys who hated sports, this was our equivalent of playing catch. We’d seen plenty of horror films together, but I never anticipated that a horror film would hit quite so close to home as The Shining.

The Torrance family at the film’s center undergoes a traumatic experience of isolation, in which their darkest fears and desires are unleashed. While the Torrances’ isolation is most intense during their stewardship of the Overlook Hotel, it in some sense precedes and anticipates their snowbound stay. During Jack’s interview at the Hotel, Wendy and Danny are shown alone together, eating lunch. As the camera pans towards the housing complex where they live before moving to the Overlook, the audio track conveys the sounds of children playing—but during the lunch scene Danny says that “there's hardly anybody to play with around here.” Kubrick’s signature long-focus composition frames mother and son starkly against the panoramic spread of their disordered apartment, emphasizing their isolation in the midst of the frame’s wide visual field.

We learn during Jack’s interview that the Torrances have just moved to Colorado from Vermont, but it is not until a pediatrician is called in to check on Danny after he experiences a blackout that we learn more of the details of their past life. During this interview the camera focuses on Wendy, as she awkwardly describes to the doctor how Jack once dislocated his son’s shoulder in a fit of drunken rage. The violence of the event is masked by Shelley Duvall’s nervous smile and chirpy voice, her forced cheeriness deflecting the viewer’s empathy. The alleged “happy ending” to the story, that Jack quit drinking as a result of this incident and hasn’t had a drink for five months, is further undercut when we shift from Wendy’s face to that of the doctor, who looks frankly horrified. The camera resumes its deep focus, isolating Wendy from the doctor by framing them on either side of a series of bookshelves with the books arranged in a nervous zigzag. While today we might expect a call to Child Protective Services, in the world of The Shining such confessions only serve to further isolate the family.

Tense social moments like this make their eventual isolation at The Overlook Hotel something of a relief. Indeed, I often think that, if offered, I would take the Torrances’ job in a heartbeat. The cavernous ballrooms, mountain views, and labyrinthine hallways of the Hotel have always seemed utopian to me, an atmospheric synthesis of an old English estate and a cabin in the woods. In this respect the setting is reminiscent of the ghost stories of M.R. James, an English antiquarian whose tales frequently depict encounters with the monstrous and macabre in quiet country vacation spots.  The Shining is itself a strange kind of ghost story, with at least three kinds of hauntings going on. As the Hotel Manager is showing the Torrances around the grounds, he reveals that the Overlook was built on an old Indian burial site. These ancestral spirits may be responsible for the disturbing events that have taken place over the years of the Hotel’s existence, the most recent of which was committed by the former Caretaker, Delbert Grady, who murdered his wife and two daughters with an axe before killing himself with a shotgun. 

For all of the film’s stylistic and dramatic originality, these ghostly elements lend it a surprisingly traditional quality. Its wintry setting nudges the film towards the now-forgotten tradition of the Christmas ghost story. The most famous example of this Victorian tradition is Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but hundreds of such stories were published in the popular Christmas editions of the many family magazines that began circulation during the periodical publishing boom of the mid-nineteenth century. M.R. James himself would invite friends and family to his home to recite ghost stories around the fire, and the BBC later honored this tradition in the 1970s by presenting televised versions of his and Dickens’ ghost stories during Christmas. While the Victorians may have been the first to market this tradition, telling haunting tales around the fire is a venerable custom in most cultures, particularly during the Winter Solstice, when the forces of night and darkness threaten to devour light and life. 

Several years ago, I was delighted to discover how well The Shining works as a Christmas ghost story, when my wife and I were spending the holiday with her family. After Christmas dinner we got into a conversation about times when we’d been snowbound, and this led us gradually to a discussion of Kubrick’s film. We reminisced on favorite scenes while sipping hot toddies, until we all agreed that watching this would be much more entertaining than our traditional viewing of A Christmas Carol. Just as the cold outside makes the warmth inside more welcoming, so the vision of a family tearing itself apart onscreen makes one feel closer to the family on the couch. Jack Nicholson’s malignly comic performance provides just the right sense of dangerous hilarity, heightening the sense of camaraderie, and the whole family can cheer at the end as Danny ingeniously escapes his father’s pursuit and reunites with his mother.  It’s easy to forget, but The Shining actually does have a happy ending.

The film has become a family tradition for us, but underneath the sense of kinship and connection with my in-laws that the film seems to foster, are more disturbing family memories. Like Jack Torrance, my father was an alcoholic, and several scenes in the film capture the experience of being the child of an alcoholic better than any film I know. In particular, I find especially troubling the scene where Danny quietly enters the chamber of his sleeping father to retrieve his toy fire engine and finds his father sitting awake on his bed. In a kind of narcoleptic daze Jack calls Danny over for a little talk. As disturbing as is Jack’s affectless attempt at speaking on a child’s level, what most troubled me about this scene when I first saw it with my father was the benumbed wariness of Danny’s responses to his father’s affection. What is most unsettling about being the child of an alcoholic is the sense of uncertainty: I never knew which version of my father I was dealing with from night to night, and this is what I saw in Danny’s response.

I wondered if my father saw it too. I suspect he did. I know that I came to see things a little more from my father’s perspective after seeing this film, through its painfully honest portrayal of the alcoholic’s struggle to stay sober. By the time Jack utters the anguished line: “God, I'd give anything for a drink. I'd give my god-damned soul for just a glass of beer!” I believed him, and felt something of the frustration and self-loathing my father must have felt but never expressed to me. More powerful than the haunting by aggrieved Indian spirits or the souls of the murdered Grady family is the haunting of the Torrance family by what they aren’t able to say to one another.  Watching The Shining over the years with friends and family, I’ve realized that sometimes a horror film is the only way to say I love you.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

I have always been drawn to visions of the future, but little did I know what brutal images were held on the Beta videocassette of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange I rented at the tender age of ten.  Although the film had been banned in Great Britain, it was shelved innocently in the science fiction section of Johnny’s TV, and no one would have thought of suggesting that this might be inappropriate viewing for a child.  By the time I reached the infamous scene where Alex and his droogs violently assault and rape a woman while forcing her husband to watch, I knew that I had crossed some indefinable line and that I couldn’t turn back. Later, wondering what had led me to this most disturbing of film experiences, I realized that it had all started with a filmstrip. 

Once upon a time, before Ken Burns, teachers needing a break from making lesson plans would beguile their classes with a charming and primitive piece of media technology: the filmstrip. An inexpensive and uncomplicated alternative to moving film projection, filmstrips consisted simply of a little reel of cellulose about the size of a roll of tape, encased in a cardboard or plastic box, accompanied with an audiocassette. The projector was not designed to move the filmstrip, just to beam its expanded image onto a screen: the task of moving one still image to the next generally fell to a student volunteer, often myself, who was prompted by a loud beep from the cassette recording that provided narration and image. To those who grew up in the era of the filmstrip, this distinctive beep is like an electronic Madeleine, unleashing a flood of childhood memories.  Oh, bliss it was in that era to be alive, but to be in A/V club was very heaven!

Such primitive media technologies have a distinctive charm that, like Czech animation or natural history dioramas, is indistinguishable from their premature obsolescence.  There is something poignant about the notion of watching sequences of still images in an age of television and film. I remember settling into the experience of viewing these slow-moving narratives as into a kind of meditational trance, broken occasionally by the pitch bend and warbling of stretched cassette tape. How fitting, then, that this peculiar medium would be the means of introducing me to the strange world of early electronic music.

One afternoon our music class took a break from our usual routine of playing recorders, banging out Carl Orff compositions on wooden xylophones, or singing obscure Civil War ballads in order to watch a “very special filmstrip” about a new kind of instrument that could make all the sounds of an orchestra and more. The sound of the filmstrip’s signal beep gradually gave way to a host of bleeps and bloops, which first amused, then mesmerized me. As the narrator led us through the inventions of Léon Theremin, Robert Moog, and Raymond Scott, we eventually reached a sequence describing “The Synthesizer Today,” which included such seventies classics as the theme to The Rockford Files, “Popcorn” by Hot Butter, and Wendy Carlos’ Switched on Bach, which was followed by a brief mention of Carlos’ music for A Clockwork Orange, accompanied by Philip Castle’s iconic poster image. The combination of strange, alluring sounds and stark futuristic imagery proved irresistible, and the prospect of seeing Kubrick’s film was added to my growing list of adolescent obsessions.

Seeing the horrific rape scene in the film left a similarly indelible impression on me, and proved to be as effective an education in the immorality of violence against women as the education the film’s protagonist experiences as part of his aversion therapy.  This scene remains the image that comes to mind whenever I hear the word rape, and it gave me an early, brutal understanding of the uniquely sadistic and degrading nature of this act. If prostitution can be glibly referred to as the oldest profession, then surely rape is the oldest crime.  Ironic, then, that the film I had hoped would take me into an imagined future ended up exposing me to the primitive and the barbaric.   

This is, of course, one of Kubrick’s abiding themes, most concisely presented as the visual argument of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s opening sequence, where a thigh bone used as a primitive murder weapon is thrown into the sky and becomes a space-ship. Alex and his droogs prowl a decayed urban landscape, its unrelenting bleakness evoking Orwellian images of dystopian futurity.  As they set about their brutal acts of ultra-violence, the film ruthlessly undoes any naïve faith we might have had in dreams of future progress.  Wendy Carlos’ innovative score provides an aural parallel to this experience by rendering familiar classical pieces in electronic form, often accentuating their raw undertones. 

As a teenager I would return to the film, drawn to the stark images of a retrogressive future that seemed closer than ever. I later learned that most of the film was shot, not on sets, but in actual London settings, including Thamesmead, one of many planned urban communities of the 1960s and 1970s that produced scenarios not unlike that presented in Kubrick’s film, when families experienced traumatic feelings of disorientation as they relocated to blocks of buildings that had little in common with the neighborhoods they’d grown up in.  What was an unpleasant reality for many Londoners became for me a kind of stark fantasy image, one on which I gazed obsessively in its various permutations, as seen on album covers and music videos produced by a new wave of electronic artists, like Gary Numan, John Foxx, and The Human League, composing pop music for a dark future.

Though I still deplored the violent acts of Alex and his mates, A Clockwork Orange resumed its earlier place among my obsessions. As with Alex, the film’s earlier aversion therapy didn’t take. Perhaps that’s because none of us experience only one form of social conditioning. While Alex is given nausea-inducing drugs meant to establish negative associations with the violent images on screen, his therapists clearly underestimate the staying power of his previous conditioning.

The influences on Alex’s life can be regarded simply as various forms of technology. Whether these take the form of synthetic drugs or synthetic music, planned community or penal institution, they are all highly contrived, elaborately developed cultural constructions that condition him in a variety of ways, many of them contradictory, many of them unplanned. Similarly, when my music teacher played a film strip one day in 1975, she couldn’t have anticipated that it would induce one of her students to rent a video that would expose him to traumatic scenes of ultra-violence, nor could I have anticipated that the sound of synthesizers would lead me through an image of the future that would initially repulse me, and later draw me towards its dangerous attractions.

Watching Kubrick’s film now, I feel a sense of nostalgia for its abandoned futures, mingled confusedly with the futuristic attraction that initially drew me to it.  As one media technology gives way to the next, we forget what hopes we invested in the new as it becomes obsolete, and as the old technologies fade, we look back to them as if they held some lost secret. If the most prescient element of Kubrick’s vision is its exposure of the naïve idealism with which we greet each new technological development, its most ruthless is its exposure of the futility of nostalgia. After seeing A Clockwork Orange, nobody pictures Fred Astaire when they hear “Singing in the Rain.”

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.