The Shining

If you manage color hue unlike almost every other color film ever made (auto-settings on cameras shift this with white balance, light outdoors is bluer, incandescent bulbs are more yellow) then the film seems even more 'real.' All of these elements are perceived somewhat unconsciously by the audience, and Kubrick knowingly may have paid attention to as many details as possible to create films that are the deepest penetrations of the brain, the sharpest, subliminal cortex impulses. This apparently stable method allows Kubrick to then play endless games with your unconscious. Not obviously. Very, very subtly.

By playing a kind of cognitive game out of spatial distortion, contrasted imagery, wordplay and mirroring, while breaking certain rules of time, Kubrick jumpstarts the medium and its goals. He invents perhaps another genre and strengthens the potential for film to become a language all its own. Along the way paradoxes emerge. Our accepted, basic grammar of time in storytelling becomes in Kubrick's hands a tool or syntax that's applied in unexpected ways. You know how time works typically in film, a character says "I'll meet you at three" and then we cut to see him waiting at a train station and the clock already says "3:23." The audience is immediately anxious. Kubrick avoids these conventions and instead shows time overlapping, interweaving, both linearly and non-linearly. A simple example is the ending, which inversely ends in the past with its date: July 4, 1921. When rules like time are distorted subtly, subliminally, the audience has many more opportunities to explore the story. The film even seems to operate backwards, which means the film is a mirror of itself through time. The Shining is a film meant to be seen both forwards and backwards.

In reverse, The Shining is the most visually unifying motion-art ever conceived. Backwards it operates beyond the scale of any built, ideal, or imagined form existing inside fantasy, philosophy or reality. And yet forwards the film is a horror that shows us the hotel slowly, unceasingly absorbing a human being. Jack Torrance is pulled into the hotel's mirrors until he's finally frozen as a ghost into a black and white still. The film's poster hints at this - it's a perfect object to serve as an introduction to the film. The duo-color poster condenses the entire film into a near end-state. There's a boy in the poster and we assume it's Danny though it doesn't exactly look like him. Compare it to another Kubrick film. The boy bears more than a passing resemblance to the Starchild of 2001. Looking at both posters below, can you decide which he more looks like? Kubrick wants us to see both Danny and the Starchild inside The Shining's poster. As you'll slowly discover below, he mirrors every gesture in 2001 within The Shining. Now use it as a mirror. The Starchild ends its film in the space above the Earth at a grand scale and this yellowed child ends its film small and flattened, opposite states. An even subtler meaning emerges. Danny/Starchild appears to be behind the wall of wherever the poster is hung. He's on the verge of being flattened into a photograph, which is the key horror of the film. A ghost inside a wall. Now to give you an idea how complex the film is, there's another meaning built into the poster.

While the poster's ghostly being operates as a double, or a mirror depending on how we perceive it, so does the very text that announces the film. Here Kubrick's maddeningly dense storytelling abilities come into view, he orchestrates another double meaning, instead now through the text. Though hard to believe, this T-form, while ably fulfilling its role as the first letter of "THE," also unmistakably references a Mayan logograph. The poster's T, a logogram, is the day sign IK equal to our Monday in Maya, the first day of the Maya's calendar and "MONDAY" (which comes from 'moon-day') will later be spelled for us as an intertitle. Specifically it's also a window shape that can only be found at the Mayan city of Palenque. Kubrick borrows the window's exact dimensions, and shows precisely how it would be used to frame a face. The window is both small to fit eyes and mouth and is placed at medium height, precisely how it appears in the poster. In contrast to The Shining's endlessly false windows, this is a real window in a real place. Statistically, the coincidence of its framing ratio is impossible. While it may be impossible for you to believe, let alone comprehend a reason for the integration, in a footnote written for the forthcoming book, a Mayan anthropologist will verify Kubrick's use of these Mayan forms. Now you may ask, why is proving Kubrick's use important? Because Kubrick is exploring uncharted waters both in language and film storytelling. He's playing with tools of language, previously used in other much more stable contexts, and overlapping their properties and meanings. While we live in an increasingly "meta" age where movies seem to be merging, blending into one mediocrity after another (singularity), these tools indicate Kubrick was venturing in an opposite direction. Deeper into the shroud of film reality. Kubrick's films may even be an all together separate medium from films.

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im watching that shit rn for the 4th time and im coming to the realization that its all just edgy filler

Normally, a symbol so cleverly buried would go unnoticed, but as the film unravels, another Mayan symbol appears that Kubrick reuses much like the IK. The K'AN symbol, seen repeating in the Gold Ballroom's carpeting, is a logograph of the word for the color yellow. Clearly this is a sly reference to the name of the room; gold=yellow. Both symbols add layers of meaning to the film, even indirectly explain each other's presence, as well as reference supernatural occurrences later in the film. Both symbols are only to be found in the Americas. Likewise, Kubrick, who designed his films' release campaigns adroitly, used this poster only for the American release. For all other territories he used Jack's face menacing Wendy. Of course the poster is only the beginning. If we can extrapolate all of these relatable meanings from merely the film's poster, then what awaits you in the film is a deluge of buried information.

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For how lauded it is, I expected this movie to be scarier.

Within what seems to be a streamlined, dulled version of Stephen King's masterly pulp novel, Kubrick has built for us a massive and alive mysterium. A ghost story without vaporous, glowing undead or sliding chairs. Far ahead of his time, he carefully planned an unusually intricate series of continuity and orientation shifts in plain sight. To conjure the supernatural, the shifts go by so quickly the audience rarely notices even one of them. And even more importantly, the shiftings have meaning and create meaning connecting to other occurrences. In his arsenal of tools, Kubrick uses symbols, signs, archetypes, gestures, rituals and metaphors. Collapsing historically dizzying human moralities and cosmologies developed over thousands of years through visual forms (examples: border control through maps, order control through mazes), Kubrick scatters them, then contrasts and flows them with well planned, abnormal spatiodynamics. "Special effects" through intentional continuity errors, shifting props or false windows. The audience plays its role through memory and perception. What do you remember about The Shining? Kubrick is pushing all of these hidden meanings into your head without letting you become too aware of them. Framings, colors and patterns merge and blend as animations within viewers' unconscious. He shows us two similar forms and our mind merges them. There are even two distinct hotels in the film. The simulacrum where the film is set has two sides bridged by many mirrors, not all of which are the reflective kind.

lalala didn't read it

How do we decrypt The Shining? By reverse engineering it. By peering into its structure. Pulling apart aspects of its tools and forms that refer to one another, one can see roughly what Kubrick was aiming for. It's actually a pretty simple formula. The structure is largely false and it fools the audience, manufacturing a type of subliminal phenomena. And why would he do this? Again, it's simple. By making you think something is real while showing you it's fake, he gets to play with the idea of meaning in your unconscious. Where language begins, or is stored. Once neurophenomenologically decrypted, The Shining can be seen as a beginning to a new form of post-Western visual guidance. Perhaps even a new facet of language. One day these 'simple' teasers may be magnified inside blockbuster films and videogames that access the brain even more directly. Kubrick, a thinker's magician, is trying to teach the audience without any of us becoming aware of either lesson or method. If it is a primer for an entirely next-stage visual language, then it's accessed through a complex key in brain science: paradox. Once we start to take apart how the dialogue is used, you'll come to realize the film is a careful satire, and in darker ways a refutation of how we share and store knowledge through Indo-European text. The spoken English in the film is loaded with unusually nuanced visual and verbal paradoxes that escalate scene by scene. There is terror in the dialogue. The spoken horror of The Shining is, like the visuals, revealed in confabulation, nursery simplification, deception, broadcast in a variety of technologies (phone and radio) and qualities (like sarcasm and pure rage) - critical components to the dread laced in the flickering visuals that drive the film to its end. The only clear communication of the entire film is wordless - the shining Danny sends to Halloran that calls for his help. It's an essentially silent film within the film.

As an alternate to its spoken plot, Kubrick laces visual forms throughout from indigenous American cultures (some that employed complex spoken languages without written form/alphabets, like the Navajo). From a nearly decimated past, it effectively augments even bypasses western systems of description by very subtly alerting us to their alternate visuals, motifs and even parts of their narratives and rituals. Perhaps an evolutionary tweak that doesn't or won't go away, The Shining, cooly and mildly reviewed upon release ("when I first saw The Shining I didn't love it but it has since become one of my favorites..." - Steven Spielberg) has evolved into a kind of cult film to adherents, could be the initialization of a movement to shift our tools en masse.

Do we as a species undervalue entertainment while it is unwittingly evolutionary? Obvious to some, film and videogame represent a giant leap into the next stage of our languages (and into consciousness); perplexingly they remain ghettoized in market exploitation. And then there's our collective understanding of motion-media. Why is it explored merely as an aspect of psychology or sociology by academia when motion-media is revolutionary beyond systems of study now in place? Why is visual culture only a fraction of what is offered to children in education? Children must attain a strong connection to motion-based experiences on their own accord, richly stylized now in multiple dimensions, in mostly commercial atmospheres? Crucially The Shining is about a boy's journey. Its most powerful thematic message is that adults cannot 'read' the hotel. They cannot comprehend its danger, thus are at its mercy while Danny fluidly navigates it, guided by its visuals, flirting with death until he traps his father in its other side. He plays the hotel.

A landscape of mountains is mirrored into a nearly still lake. What appears for a split second as still is actually in motion. We are traveling at high speed, flying. An island first shown centered passes to camera left. The Navajo, one of two tribes mentioned in the film, identify our earthly plane as the Fifth Realm. Kubrick seems to comply by opening his film with an image from the beginning of the Navajo's origin myth, as it crosses onto Earth: "He had gotten through to the upper world, and came out on a little island in the center of a lake." [Navaho Legends Matthews 1897]. The island proves what plane of existence we inhabit and viewed in reverse, we see this plane we are leaving behind to enter perfection, symmetry. An image focuses right as the camera looks towards the sedimentary mountain, it forms an arrowhead-shape in the mirroring lake. In a film littered with both Native American and European derived visual forms (rugs, wall hangings, furniture, chevrons, diamonds) Kubrick immediately hints at a geologic/natural source for native cosmological shape-forms and their colors that appear throughout. These colors and forms duplicate in the Lobby's floor then the Colorado Lounge walls and onward. He is suggesting if a religion/myth/spirituality engages forms and colors from the land - the arrows that are seen here become the patterns of Navajo art - then it may be suffused with powers beyond our view. Does this form-transform have an endpoint?

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Chosen not for its proximity to Colorado where the film is set, this opening image of St. Mary Lake (Glacier National Park, Montana) showcases two essential native cosmological structures seen from right angles to one another. Link shows how easy this was to scout: St. Mary Lake is where spirits of the Blackfoot underworld are said to sleep and is bordered in the opening shot by 'Gunsight' Mountain seen directly ahead arrayed with four mythic mountains left of center frame. The west's conquerors call this mountain range Rockies, but the tribes that surrounded these monumental peaks had another name they shared: "The Shining Mountains" [Journals of Lewis and Clark 1906]. The island that passes to our left, mirrored, appears floating and behaves visually like the spaceships of 2001. Likewise it appears to be moving by itself, magically enacting a passage between upper and lower worlds. In effect, you are watching the first motion-image of Navajo and Blackfoot cosmology, a stunning evolvement of the landscape traveling in 2001 grafted into a mythical viewpoint. The lower half is where Jack will be trapped eventually. Presently he inhabits both upper and lower. Tracking right (and as a movement it is meant to be instructive, teaching the audience the film is made of right-angles). The right-pan is revealing as well, it exhibits an arrowhead shape in the mirror pointing left aimed directly under the upwardly aimed Gunsight Mountain. Cut and we are now looking down, upon a road. This parallel path to the lake is a real road: ‘Going-to-the-Sun’ Road, another central cosmological pathway in Blackfoot tribal mythology. Located directly at the continental divide in Glacier National Park, the road’s construction/destruction was begun in 1921, the year the film ends, so in a subtle manipulation, the road begins in 1921 as well as the photograph that ends the film in a flash: a buried nod to continuum.

Jack just says Lloyd and the ghost just rolls with it because why argue?

Looking down: The view is an overlook, giving the audience the idea of an overlook before they enter a place named it. The film ends with an overlook, the ending still is taken from a balcony or a ladder down at an audience. The single arrowhead form we just panned to is now multiplied out of trees pointing upwards. A Yellow VW Beetle travels this road, followed by our view, an unseen spirit. Beetle is symmetric, both front and back are the same, from afar it looks as if it could be traveling forward or backwards, following a double yellow line. Color and form hide the unusually apt name: Beetle. Metaphorically, at this height, we are inhumanly scaled in awareness. The Beetle is bug-sized in our optics as if we are giants, mimicing a scale we think is offered to Jack as he gazes at his family within the maze later, or the scale at which Danny plays with his cars. Kubrick offers us the most ambitious POV of the film here, Tony’s/Danny’s, a double/mirror like the Danny/Starchild double whose image appears in the film's poster. The reborn Starchild's source is Dave Bowman in 2001.

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Fucking strange. I, honestly, just finished the book about 15 minutes ago and get on TV and here is this thread..

they made a book based on the shining?

This. He didn't know who Grady was at first.

Mountain is the destination of this road: a physical dead end. A metaphysical doorway.
The road and car repeatedly near the center of the frame. Upon passing across the timberline momentarily (into an unreal, lunar-like landscape), titles begin to rise. Reverse of standard end credits – an assertion the film is being shown backwards. We swoop over driving VW Beetle to conform to the prey's horizon. The Beetle, framed right, passes camera precisely mirroring the island passing left earlier, offering a split-second of equal scales. This sweeping shot equalizes to the Beetle's horizon for a split second, something the film remains at inside the hotel, on the floor's plane, for most of the film. The audio is an electronic blending between Church/Horror tonal organ and native battle cry chants. The battle cries synch and merge with the organ's repeating notes. The hue of the title's blue is not the same as the sky's tone, it's turquoise, referencing turquoise-sky relation in Native American mythology. The dominance of blue in North American Native cosmologies cannot be underestimated "...he failed to buy enough blue beads and blue blankets [for the expedition], blue as any French or British trader knew, was the favorite color with Indians" [Those Tremendous Mountains 1980]. Kubrick merges film convention (rising titles to mimic an end) and cosmology (the turquoise-blue being sent skyward) a visual simplification of east-west phenomenon contrast (a visual incantation scored to the similarly dual, warfare-laced music).

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yep, written by the same guy who did games of thrones and the terminaters

As a geological form, the turquoise's color is an element of an "earth/lake-merging-sky glyph" [at times the word shot is inappropriate since it indicates a still frame] that began the film and continues, through color exchanges evolving transitionally into color movement seen later in the film. Here blues of the underworld meet the upperworld, repeatedly, from sky's reflection to titles. Titles amplify color oppositions: Blue-yellow. Sky-Car, Divider Line-Credits. If the road is painted with yellow, an unconscious pattern the west signals the sun with, then titles follow suit in opposition, consciously contrasting the film with turquoise.

Another right-angle, the Beetle seems to overlaid with sunflares visually embodying the name of the road and the name of the film, an intentional optical conjuring. These sunflare's yellow hues later transition into the underworld portals of The Overlook's purified blood-red (both flow from left sides). Kubrick uses flares and reflections intentionally, they are not random. By employing uncoated lenses (coated lenses reduce flare effects dramatically) he keeps us more than aware of the sun in a film about a supernatural force named after the sun's power. Kubrick never films the sun directly, instead he carefully showcases the sun as a refracted image, broken into two projections, optical ghosts of the sun. In the lower right capture, double suns are seen directly above the "J". Though the surrounding flares are distortions of the sun, these two clearer objects are more akin to camera obscura effects: they are direct prisms of the sun's image onto film. Below these two frames is a coated lens-flare showing two clearly defined sun refracted images of a solar eclipse. The flares and the road's lines share similar angles:

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>A nigger.

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...cook

What the FUCK was his problem?

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the shinning

did he live?

Just learned that Blade Runner's theatrical cut used some cut helicopter footage from Shining for the ending, you can see it at 6:16 here: youtube.com/watch?v=vIDWGLOSVN4&t=373s, pretty neat.

(Ridley Scott talks about how that happened at 3:27: youtube.com/watch?v=Pw85gFGooyk&t=204)