The Waning: Kubrick's Grandiose Hotel
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen THE WANING KUBRICK'S GRANDIOSE HOTEL Stanley KUBRICK'S The Shining is a movie about cabin fever. If it were set in a cabin, Kubrick might have been able to concentrate his energies on...
...The heroes of his best films—Ryan O'Neal in Barry Lyndon and the crew of the spaceship in 200/ —have no psychological depth...
...And act up he does...
...Nicholson is an actor who needs to be kept on a tight leash...
...That would be the best thing that could happen to Kubrick's career just now...
...As a consequence, any psychological tensions Kubrick might have generated just evaporate into the countless cubic feet of thin air the film's set contains...
...The most decisive evidence we have that Jack's visions are his and his alone is that they are so incoherent...
...His characters are psychic, not merely psycho...
...My impression was, however, that King doesn't allow the room for a purely psychological interpretation of events that Kubrick allows...
...The genius of both 2001 and Barry Lyndon is that all the spectacular and visionary scenes really do mean something in the end...
...Could it be Kubrick believes that all this stuff Jack sees really is being conjured up by Jack himself rather than by Stanley Kubrick, the director of this movie...
...That Nicholson comes on in such an aggressive, hammy way might not be so bad if Kubrick had made his wife into an adequate antagonist for him...
...If I hadn't finished the book before I got to the cashier, I might have had to pay for it...
...The desire to make the film read this way is what gets Kubrick into the, for him, uncertain area of character development and acting...
...The vast chilliness of the closed-down hotel and Kubrick's own cold, analytical style of filmmaking keep the fever here from ever reaching the contagious stage...
...It goes very much against the Kubrick myth to suggest that there might be some aspect of one of his films over which he hasn't had complete control...
...They work toward a clarification of the human experiences those films depict...
...This routine business meeting is almost the only scene in the film where Nicholson shows any restraint as a performer...
...He reacts to her with such exaggerated, goatish lust that the whole scene, which is ultimately supposed to be scary, is laughable instead...
...But Kubrick obviously can't swallow all that nonsense, so he has tried to make the plot at least ambiguous...
...Unable to control one side of his film, Kubrick loses his grip on the other as well...
...1 August 1980:439 But much of what he sees we could as easily take to be figments of his own deranged imagination...
...They are like Bishop Berkeley's tree falling in the forest when no one is there to hear it...
...Each contributes to the nonentity of the film as a whole...
...Nicholson's histrionics as he stalks Kubrick's vast, empty hotel are like an explosion going off in a void...
...2001 is ninety percent scenes of this sort, and Barry Lyndon is also a film set largely on social occasions and hedged around with eighteenthcentury decorum and ceremony...
...Nicholson obviously feels that he has to live up to all these overwrought visions, or rather act up to them...
...To tell the truth, psychodrama isn't Kubrick's forte anyway...
...But in The Shining the fantasy remains just the ravings of a lunatic...
...The point when building them was to squander natural materials like timber in a way that would reassure everyone America could never run out of either natural resources or space...
...The idea of those hotels, inspired by Teddy Roosevelt, was to let Easterners revel in Manifest Destiny...
...In order to make us believe that he's someone who could be seeing pink elephants of such Kubrickian quality, he mugs, scowls, double-takes, grins, pouts, and leers constantly...
...At the hotel all the liquor has been removed for the winter...
...In Kubrick's film Jack is made to seem dangerous and crazy before the family even moves to the Overlook Hotel...
...When he enters a forbidden room where something has terrified his son Danny (Danny Lloyd), he finds a beautiful, naked woman...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...And not just an ordinary hotel, but one of those gothic-rustic piles built in the Rockies at the turn of the century...
...Some things that happen—such as his mysterious release from a storage locker where his wife imprisons him out of fear he's running amok—suggest that all the sinister people Jack sees from the hotel's past are real ghosts rather than hallucinations...
...The best acting in The ShinCommonweal: 438 ing is a scene where Jack (Jack Nicholson) first goes to the Overlook Hotel to be interviewed for the job of winter caretaker...
...She's the sort of woman who calls her husband "hon'' all the time...
...If he isn't closely directed, he overacts, as he demonstrated when he directed himself in Going South...
...He is unable to make sense out of Jack's hallucinations at the hotel, just as we are unable to tell for sure whether they are really hallucinations...
...But the plain truth is that in The Shining he has let Jack Nicholson run riot...
...Everything that happens at the hotel can be seen as an hallucination, a part of a mental breakdown that Jack is suffering...
...Since I read The Shining while standing in the check-out line at the supermarket, my recall of it is somewhat spotty...
...The one complements the other nicely...
...They provide that clarification which acting and character development do hot provide in a Kubrick film...
...He is a creator of mises en scene, a master of grand tableaux in which the characters are usually life-size cutouts...
...King writes for the crowd interested in the supernatural...
...With no one in the theaters to watch Kubrick's film, maybe it will cease to exist...
...If it were set in a cabin, Kubrick might have been able to concentrate his energies on his characters...
...Though Kubrick has changed some details at the hotel—lapidary bushes that snap at passersby in the novel have become an inscrutable maze in the film—I think that basically he sticks to King's conception of the place...
...The mise en scene of the hotel has to be what attracted Kubrick to King's novel...
...But she is, as played by Shelley Duvall, the much blander sort of person we are used to encountering in Kubrick's films...
...She's a perky, cheery, empty-headed optimist who tries to look on the bright side of everything Jack does right up until, almost, the moment he takes after her with a fire axe...
...They reveal themselves most fully in scenes where the action is inconsequential, scenes of low drama such as the one in 2001 where the crew chats about their mission with their commanding officer aboard a lunar taxi...
...Where Nicholson's performance is too obvious, the symbolisms of the mise en scene are too obscure...
...The mise en scene, like Nicholson's performance, turns into a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing...
...Commonweal: 440...
...But being Kubrick, he has to have cabin fever in a castle...
...It's as if Kubrick has become the victim of the uncertainty he himself is trying to create...
...When he delivers a vicious tirade because she's interrupted his work to tell him his dinner is ready, she says neutrally, "I'm sorry, hon...
...Their relationships might have built up enough steam to blow the roof off this film...
...The setting ioxThe Shining, the Stephen King best-seller which Kubrick and Diane Johnson have adapted, is of course an entire hotel with only three lodgers...
...yet one night Jack finds a 1920s party in progress in the main ballroom, and the bartender on duty pours him free drinks until he's sloshed...
...His wife (Shelley Duvall) mentions to their doctor that Jack is a reformed alcoholic who once dislocated their little boy's shoulder in a fit of rage...
Vol. 107 • August 1980 • No. 14
