1980 Week: The Shining

          Perhaps even more interesting than The Shining itself is the enormous culture of debate, scholarship, and theorizing that has emerged around the film. At the most extreme edge of this peripheral realm is the insane 2012 documentary Room 237, during which various fans explain their bizarre readings of the movie while director Rodney Ascher employs clips from The Shining, as well as other archival material, as “evidence” supporting the readings. In the most memorable sequence, a Kubrick obsessive says The Shining contains Kubrick’s admission that he helped NASA fake the 1969 moon landing.

          Drifting back to Earth, another fascinating byproduct of The Shining is the conflict between Kubrick and Stephen King that even Kubrick’s death could not conclude. King, who wrote the popular horror novel upon which the film is based, famously denounced Kubrick’s movie because of liberties the director took with King’s storyline. For context, it’s important to note remarks that Kubrick made during his lifetime to the effect that only bad novels merit cinematic adaptation, because they can be improved upon. Hell hath no fury like an author scorned, or, for that matter, an auteur.

          Why is The Shining the object of so much fascination? Devotees of the movie would attribute its longevity to pure cinematic power—beyond mere scares, the film contains provocative allegories and unnerving ambiguities. The Shining also contains one of Jack Nicholson’s most iconic performances, complete with the famous moment when he hacks through a doorway with an axe, then pokes his head through the resulting hole and hisses, “Here’s Johnny!” Yet The Shining probably lasts simply because it’s so many things to so many people, hence the varied interpretations found in Room 237. The Shining is a horror movie, to be sure, complete with gory murders and unexpected jolts, to say nothing of ominous atmosphere that lasts from beginning to end. Moreover, The Shining is a character study, an exercise in paranoia, a fantasy with supernatural elements, and a tragedy. So even though it’s excessive and frustrating and weird, it’s almost completely unique. Employing King’s novel as a springboard, Kubrick—who cowrote the script with Diane Johnson—embarked on a demented flight of fancy.

          As has been endlessly reported in articles and books and documentaries, Kubrick utilized painstaking production techniques, building a gigantic set, shooting innumerable takes, and attenuating production over a reported 500 days. The parallels between this Bataan Death March approach to filmmaking and the storyline are inescapable, because The Shining follows author Jack Torrance (Nicholson) as he and his family occupy the remote Overlook Hotel as winter caretakers while Jack tries to write a novel. Some combination of Jack’s mental problems and unknown forces occupying the hotel transform Jack from a family man into a maniac. Caught in the path of his rampage are his timid wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their psychically gifted son, Danny (Danny Lloyd). Things don’t go well for anyone.

          Kubrick shoots the hell out of his remarkable set, creating mesmerizing images with gimmicks including Steadicam photography, while the eerie score by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind accentuates the oddity of it all. By the time the film concludes with an epic nighttime chase through an outdoor maze blanketed in snow, Kubrick has generated such a potent quality of claustrophobia and fear that The Shining is more than just spooky—it’s upsetting. 

The Shining: GROOVY

Barry Lyndon (1975)

          Slow, somber, and subtle, Stanley Kubrick’s three-hour historical drama Barry Lyndon, adapted from an 1844 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, isn’t just one of the most unusual films of the 1970s—it is, in many ways, one of the most unusual films ever released by a major Hollywood studio. Arty and meditative from its first frame to its last, the picture is more of a cerebral exercise than an entertainment experience—envision a serious of gorgeous paintings accompanied by mesmerizing classical music and a wry narration track that contextualizes onscreen events, and you’ll come close to imagining what it’s like to watch Barry Lyndon. Even the film’s principal actors, Ryan O’Neal and Marisa Berenson, are featured as objects, their beautiful faces and figures used as blank slates onto which Kubrick projects his (and Thackeray’s) timeless themes of gamesmanship and greed. By reducing the importance of his actors to visual impact, Kubrick amplifies that Barry Lyndon is auteur filmmaking in the purest sense—even though the writer/director/producer didn’t generate the underlying material, he orchestrates every miniscule detail. (There’s a reason the movie took a reported 300 days to shoot, an eternity compared to normal production schedules.)

          Set throughout Europe in the middle-to-late 1700s, the story follows Irishman Redmond Barry (O’Neal) as he seeks his fortune. The synchronicity between Kubrick’s dry humor and Thackeray’s narrative becomes evident during an early scene featuring a highwayman. The robber stops Barry on a remote path in a forest, then steals Barry’s horse and money, but the whole exchange is conducted with the high language and perfect manners of gentlemen. Courtly criminality—could there be a better metaphor with which to communicate Kubrick’s cynical worldview? After being stripped of his humble resources, Barry transitions to a series of military adventures, but he eventually flees the military and bewitches a fabulously wealthy Countess, Lady Lyndon (Berenson). The minor obstacle of her husband is quickly dispatched when Barry’s brazen play for Lady Lyndon’s affections causes the husband to die of a coronary. Barry installs himself as the man’s replacement, but Barry’s social climb commences a new series of travails.

          Even though the film sprawls across three hours and moves at a stately pace, Barry Lyndon is hypnotic. Working with the genius cameraman John Alcott, Kubrick designs one beguiling visual after another, using deft tricks to create verisimilitude suggestive of the story’s era—most of the shots are static (and when they’re not, the camera moves are generally gradual and understated). Further, in the film’s most talked-about flourish, Kubrick and Alcott employ specially designed lenses to shoot nighttime interior scenes with only candlelight for illumination. Every sensation that meets the eye in Barry Lyndon casts a spell, from the spectacular Old Europe locations to the ornate costumes and hairstyles; better still, Kubrick merges images, music, and narration with symphonic precision. Whether the movie actually packs an emotional punch is a subjective matter—as is the larger question of whether such a story needs to pack an emotional punch—but the consummate artistry of the endeavor is undeniable. Whatever its shortcomings, not the least of which is O’Neal’s beautifully vacuous presence in the title role, Barry Lyndon captures moods and sensations virtually no other film has before or since.

Barry Lyndon: RIGHT ON

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

          Laced with some of the most haunting images in cinema history, A Clockwork Orange cemented director Stanley Kubrick’s reputation as a misanthropic genius, even though the film’s nauseating violence is delivered hand-in-hand with pitch-black humor. A polarizing movie that turns some people off Kubrick forever, A Clockwork Orange is also a cult favorite that devotees return to again and again, despite (or perhaps because of) its gleeful depiction of a sociopath’s inner life. Adapted by Kubrick from a novel by Anthony Burgess, the movie depicts a horrific near-future Britain plagued by a random violence, and the worst offenders belong to an anarchistic street gang led by Alex (Malcolm McDowell). In one notorious scene, Alex and his “droogs” beat an old man while warbling “Singin’ in the Rain,” and in another, they assault and rape a woman with, among other implements, a giant pop-art penis sculpture. Dressed in matching white uniforms and black bowler hats, Alex and his droogs are like a roving art installation moving through Kubrick’s harrowing vision of psychedelic future in which youths drink at “milk bars” in between bouts of “the old ultraviolence.”
          The first half of the movie, showing Alex running amok and cheerfully embracing his psychological demons in caustic voiceover, is filled with clever imagery and deft wordplay; the second half of the movie, in which Alex is captured, tortured, and “reformed” by sadists including doctors who use him as a guinea pig for inhumane experiments, presents the shocking thesis that Alex’s giddy malevolence is child’s play compared to the clinical evil of “civilized” society. Every frame of A Clockwork Orange is deliberately provocative, and Kubrick wasn’t above using controversy to goose ticket sales, although the strategy somewhat backfired when the movie encountered difficulties during its British release. (After troubled individuals claimed the picture influenced their violence, Kubrick had the picture yanked from UK screens.) But even taking into account Kubrick’s hucksterism, A Clockwork Orange is a meticulously rendered piece of cinematic art, its power derived as much from Kubrick’s craftsmanship as from the innate vigor of the lurid storyline. Masterfully orchestrating contributions from cinematographer John Alcott, electronic-music composer Wendy Carlos, film editor Bill Butler, and others, Kubrick presents an overwhelming phantasmagoria of angst, dissent, rebellion, and violence, which helps explain why so many disaffected people connect with the picture.
          Ultimately, the film rises and falls on McDowell’s fearless performance. With one strategically placed false eyelash, he’s a nightmarish image while rampaging through the first half of the movie, and with his eyes propped open by metal clamps, he’s a pathetic victim in the second half. A Clockwork Orange typecast McDowell as a villain, which indicates the power of the performance but doesn’t suggest how entertaining and weirdly sympathetic Alex becomes in McDowell’s skilled hands.
          Abrasive, cruel, rude, and vulgar, A Clockwork Orange is so excessive that watching the movie for the first time is like getting bludgeoned, but it’s also one of the few truly unique narrative features ever made. It exists almost completely in its own context.

A Clockwork Orange: FREAKY