Repetition in The Shining in The Shining
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Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film ‘The Shining’ is an iconic horror and supernatural thriller that stars Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd and Scotsman Crothers. The film, based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King, tells the story of an author, Jack, (Nicholson) struggling with writer’ block, who becomes the seasonal caretaker of the Overlook Hotel with his family so he can write his novel in peace, however the hotel is haunted, and Jack is lead down a dark path into madness. Now, I’m not a horror fan at all. Most of them are poorly acted, poorly made and really badly overdone sequels and remakes, but The Shining is definitely an exception: this film scares the shit out of me. Really. I mean, I scare easily, but this one is special. Kubrick’s works are quite weird and horrific in themselves, but there’ something really damn weird with this one. Whether that’s Jack Nicholson’s outstanding performance from adoring father to murderous monster, or the spirits that haunt the overlook, the bear-gimp guy being something in particular that terrified me on the first viewing of this, and continues to do so on repeat viewings. However, one thing in particular is truly horrifying about this film. Repetition. And with that comes the theme of madness and insanity. And, if you’re a fan of the game Far Cry 3 or the band ‘The Hives,’ you may know a couple of definitions of these terms.
Far Cry 3
‘’Did I ever tell you what the
definition of insanity is? Insanity is doing the exact… same fucking thing…
over and over again expecting… shit to change…’’
The Hives - Try It Again
‘’They say the definition of madness, is
doing the same thing, and expecting a different result!’’
So what am I getting at exactly? Well,
if things are repeated often enough, it can seem quite foreign to us, and we
can start to get annoyed, upset, or even go mad. And that is exactly the case
with The Shining. Kubrick, in preparation for the film, read an essay
from the great Sigmund Freud, who wrote about an idea he calls ‘The Uncanny’ in
which if something is given to us over and over again, we can be frightened by
this. And you can bet of course, that this inspired Kubrick in the making of The
Shining.
I only managed to see this repetition
after a few viewings of the film, and holy crap it is everywhere! I trust
myself when I say that when I watch the film again I’ll find more instances of
repetition, but for now, here’s a list of things we see over and over again.
- Endless hallways
- Endless hedges in the maze
- Snow
- The patterned carpet
- ‘All work and no play make Jack a dull boy’
- REDRUM
- The Grady sisters
- Sound effects
- Music
- Lines of dialogue such as ‘give me the bat Wendy’
- Jack’s axe swings
- Danny’s visions
- Repeated instances of these visions including the blood filled elevator
Now I could go on, and I’m going to but these are just a handful of examples. Kubrick repeats everything. Its mad, if you pardon my joke there. In the case of the Grady twins, we see them over and over again from Danny’s point of view, and the fact that there is two of them who look exactly the same are probably the most notable and iconic instance of repetition. Theres nothing scarier that creepy children, and more than one of them who look identical? Even more creepy. ‘Come play with us Danny, forever and ever.’ That quote is a direct reference to this repetition, and implies Danny’s possible death where he’ll live with these two girls for eternity. You see what I’m getting at?
The panning upward high angle shot of
Danny playing with his toys on the endless iconic carpet of the Overlook shows
us how endless this pattern is and is direct link to this repetition, combined
with the endless hallways that go on and on. Danny, or Tony, repeating REDRUM
over and over is spine tingling, especially when a child is doing it, a
‘possessed’ child at that. Wendy’s encounter with Jack’s transcript is… well,
obviously repetition, a huge example without a doubt! I could keep talking
about my examples and how they’re repeated but I’m sure you get it. But it
indicates madness massively, especially for Jack, now turn away for spoilers if
you haven’t seen this one, but in the maze scene in the third act, where Jack
is chasing after Danny, we see Jack frantically make his way around the maze,
outsmarted by Danny’s backtracking where he gets lost and ends up freezing to
death inside the maze. The maze could act as a metaphor for Jack’s mind, I mean
a maze looks a lot like a brain, and Jack losing his way in the maze acts as
him losing his mind, and his freezing to death inside that could symbolize the
entrapment of him in his own head.
And of course I have to talk about the
ending, and the ambiguity. Depending how you decode the film, you can think
different things about it. But what’s clever is that Kubrick has inserted
repetition in the overall plot line and history of the Overlook. Delbert Grady
murdered his family, when he was the caretaker, to which that role was passed
onto Jack, who proceeded to do the same thing, but obviously failed. Now,
depending on who was caretaker before Grady, and even after Jack, who’s to say
this isn’t a reoccurring thing? What if this is what all the caretakers do, a
repeated madness inside each caretaker, going on forever and ever? Kubrick
truly is a genius, and this of course can be interpreted in different ways.
So in conclusion, we can see that Kubrick
truly wanted to horrify this audiences in many ways, but repetition is one that
stood out, and something that will stand out for a lot of you too. It is
horrific how much repetition is in this and how it’s used, it’s not only the
characters that have to endure these haunting reoccurrence - it’s us too, and
with Kubrick’s amazing camerawork and directing, it’s as if we’re the ones
experiencing the true terrors of the Overlook hotel. And that’s why this is the
most amazing and haunting horror film I’ve seen.
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