And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
Stanley Kubrick’s cold and frightening “The Shining” challenges us to decide: Who is the reliable observer? Whose idea of events can we trust? In the opening scene at a job interview, the characters seem reliable enough, although the dialogue has a formality that echoes the small talk on the space station in “2001.” We meet Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a man who plans to live for the winter in solitude and isolation with his wife and son. He will be the caretaker of the snowbound Overlook Hotel. His employer warns that a former caretaker murdered his wife and two daughters, and committed suicide, but Jack reassures him: “You can rest assured, Mr. Ullman, that’s not gonna happen with me. And as far as my wife is concerned, I’m sure she’ll be absolutely fascinated when I tell her about it. She’s a confirmed ghost story and horror film addict.”
Once Jack and his family enter the Overlook, the movie frequently emphasizes how big and wide the hotel looks inside—especially when they are the only people inside the hotel after its closing day. As the camera steadily follows its main characters moving around here and there in the hotel, their surrounding environment often feels as vast as the space background of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There seems to be no possible way out for them at times, as reflected when the camera ominously looks down upon Wendy and Danny wandering inside a big hedge maze right next to the hotel building.
Around that point, Jack is already tumbling toward madness, so we depend more on Danny and Wendy’s perspective. Still, neither is very reliable because they become psychologically isolated in their own way too. After experiencing something scary in a certain room in the hotel, Danny’s mind is much more unsettled than before, and those horrific visions of his soon come quite true to his petrified horror. In the case of Wendy, she desperately tries to get things under her meager control, but there inevitably comes a point where she finds herself swept into her terror and confusion.
Kubrick keeps everything cold and distant, just like he did in many of his films, which makes the movie all the more terrifying. While its three main characters are broad caricatures, their descent into insanity is still quite arresting because of the overwhelming claustrophobia. Seemingly trapped forever in their separated status, they lose more human qualities alone, which was probably why Kubrick deliberately had his two lead performers go over the top in their forthright acting. While Nicholson dials up his familiar manic mode as much as demanded, Shelley Duvall amplifies her neurotic quality to the extreme. Her strenuous efforts here in this film deserve more appreciation, especially considering how Kubrick harshly treated her during the shooting.
“The Shining” is based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King, who disliked the movie for understandable reasons. To King’s dismay, Kubrick erased most of the human depth in the original story while adapting with co-writer Diane Johnson. Instead, he distilled the claustrophobic qualities of King’s story for his single-minded artistic vision, and his achievement has considerably influenced a bunch of arthouse horror films, such as Ari Aster’s debut feature “Hereditary” (2017), which owes a lot to “The Shining.”
The "Here's Johnny!" scene took three days to film and involved Jack Nicholson breaking down 60 doors.
The Script
Kubrick changed the script so frequently that Nicholson eventually stopped memorizing it until right before filming.
Shelley Duvall
Kubrick pushed Duvall to her breaking point to get a genuine performance of terror; she famously held a Guinness World Record for the most retakes of a single scene (the baseball bat scene).
The Blood
The iconic elevator blood scene took a year to plan but only three days to shoot. The "blood" was actually several hundred gallons of dyed water.
Stephen King famously disliked the adaptation, calling it "a beautiful Cadillac with no engine." The differences are fundamental:
The Character of Jack: In the novel, Jack is a tragic hero struggling against his demons who eventually sacrifices himself for his family. In the film, Nicholson's Jack appears on the brink of madness from the very first scene.
The Nature of the Hotel: King’s Overlook is an active, supernatural entity that needs Danny’s power. Kubrick’s Overlook is more of a psychological mirror that amplifies the rot already present in Jack’s mind.
The Ending: The novel ends with the hotel exploding due to a faulty boiler (a metaphor for Jack's internal pressure). The film ends with a frozen, silent labyrinth—a shift from explosive heat to absolute cold.
Mirrors and Doubling
A recurring motif in the film is "doubling" or "mirroring." This serves to highlight the duality of Jack’s nature and the blurred line between reality and the supernatural.
Reflections: Many pivotal scenes occur in front of mirrors (e.g., Jack talking to himself in the bedroom, the "REDRUM" reveal). In Kubrick’s world, the mirror often shows the "true" version of a character or event.
The Grady Twins: While the book featured sisters of different ages, Kubrick chose twins to enhance the visual symmetry and create a sense of unnatural repetition.
Dual Characters: Jack is mirrored by Grady; Danny is mirrored by "Tony" (the little boy who lives in his mouth).
Popular Fan Theories (The Room 237 Phenomenon)
The film’s density has birthed numerous conspiracy theories:
The Apollo 11 Theory: Some believe the film is Kubrick's "veiled confession" for allegedly faking the moon landing, citing Danny’s Apollo 11 sweater and the change of the room number from 217 (in the book) to 237 (roughly the distance in thousands of miles to the moon).
The Holocaust Subtext: Critics like Geoffrey Cocks argue the film is an allegory for the Holocaust, pointing to the repeated use of the number 42 and the presence of German typewriters.
The Minotaur's Labyrinth: The hedge maze and the hotel’s shifting layout suggest the Greek myth of the Minotaur, with Jack representing the beast lost in his own mental maze.
Directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on the 1977 novel by Stephen King, The Shining is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential horror films ever made. While it famously deviated from King’s source material—much to the author's chagrin—it transformed a standard "haunted house" story into a cold, symmetrical, and deeply unsettling exploration of isolation and madness.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” is like an erotic daydream about chances missed and opportunities avoided. For its hero, who spends two nights wandering in the sexual underworld, it’s all foreplay. He never actually has sex, but he dances close, and holds his hand in the flame. Why does he do this? The easy answer is that his wife has made him jealous. Another possibility is that the story she tells inflames his rather torpid imagination.
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star as Dr. Bill and Alice Harford, a married couple who move in rich Manhattan society. In a long, languorous opening sequence, they attend a society ball where a tall Hungarian, a parody of a suave seducer, tries to honey-talk Alice (“Did you ever read the Latin poet Ovid on the art of love?”). Meanwhile, Bill gets a come-on from two aggressive women, before being called to the upstairs bathroom, where Victor (Sydney Pollack), the millionaire who is giving the party, has an overdosed hooker who needs a doctor’s help.
.jpeg)
.jpg)