From Domestic Nightmares to The Nightmare of History: Uncanny Eruptions of Violence in King’s and Kubrick’s Versions of The Shining

John Lutz

Intro

• Jack has always been there…
• 1921 photograph at the end
• Hallorann’s mistake that the past has no power over the present
• The film and the novel “investigate the complex ways in which the past acts upon - indeed, lives on in - the present” (160-161)
• The novel: the past manifests through Jack’s growing abuse of Wendy and Danny - Jack victimized by his own father too
• The film: much broader victimization, American systematic violence on oppressed and exploited groups
• Child abuse as allegory of nightmarish violence hidden in the foundations of US society
• Hidden violence as Uncanny… (“belongs to the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread”)
• Kubrick very interested in Freud’s conception of the Uncanny...

Intro Cont...

• Faulkner: history as neither dead nor past but a concrete material force constantly threatening to emerge in the present
• Kubrick’s Uncanny is decidedly corporeal
• “...Kubrick’s use of the uncanny is concerned with rendering the past corporeal and registering the ways in which the nightmare of history continually impinges upon and defines the present” (162)
• Both the novel and the film “explore psychological, historical, and economic traces of the uncanny” (162-163)
• “...woven together thematically through the narrative of domestic abuse, the postcolonial narrative of American expansion at the expense of nonwhite victims, and the desire for power and control that underlies commodification and the social hierarchies that reinforce it” (163)

King’s Inverted Family Romance

• Distinction between inner and outer worlds of his characters
• Danny’s inner “shine”
• Danny going through Freud’s “family romance” phase through his use of the shining
• “An expression of the child’s longing for the happy times gone by, when his father seemed to him the strongest and most distinguished of men, and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women”
• Child’s desire to return to the past when they are still capable of idealizing their parents
• King’s novel “represents an inverted ‘family romance’ in which the daydream of the more distinguished father is replaced by the nightmare of the monstrous one” (164)
• Dick Hallorann becomes this ideal, despite his lower societal status...

The Uncanny Double

• The uncanny and the double
• “Freud emphasizes that one can find embodied in the double ‘all the strivings of the ego that were frustrated by adverse circumstances, all the suppressed acts of volition that fostered the illusion of free will’” (164)
• Danny’s supernatural guarding, Tony, as another uncanny double…
• Both Jack and Danny are victims of violence from their fathers…
• Jack and Grady...
• King’s novel includes Jack’s dad and his voice instructing and goding Jack into doing bad things
• Child victim transformed into the adult abuser
• Voice of Jack’s father represents one of his uncanny doubles
• “...a powerful trace of the past provoking feelings of frustration, helplessness, and rage that will materialize in an eruption of violence directed at his wife and son” (165)

“Can You Find the Indians?”

• “Basing his assessment of the evil lurking in the hotel upon a familiar visual puzzle, Danny unconsciously makes use of a quite common stereotypical, racist image of Native Americans in order to understand the uncanny threat of violence that he senses closing in around him” (168)
• Historical victims into victimizers…
• Kubrick and the allusion to genocide of Native Americans
• Images of Native Americans serve as “an elaborate visual puzzle for the viewer, an uncanny trace of violence that represents not Native Americans as agents of evil, but the inability of America to acknowledge or come to terms with the genocide of Native Americans” (168)
• “Indians” constantly lurking in the background…
• Overlook built on Native American burial ground…
• Jack talking to Lloyd about the “White Man’s Burden”
• Violence in the film not just domestic, but also European and American history violence

Native American Genocide Themes in The Shining

David A. Cook: “The Shining is less about ghosts and demonic possession than it is about the murderous system of economic exploitation which has sustained the country since, like the Overlook Hotel, it was built upon an Indian burial ground” (170)

Violence and the Illusion of Mastery

• “Consistently throughout the film, Kubrick forges links between various victims of oppression in order to focus attention upon how the assertion of white male violence lies at the foundation of American society” (171)
• Oppression of Native Americans and oppression of women
• Jack’s fantasies of complete masculine freedom, paternal authority, and sexual license
• Jack “overlooking” at Wendy and Danny from the Colorado room’s maze replica as they walk the actual maze outside
• Shot as if Jack has mastery over this situation
• Ironic that Jack inevitably dies in this maze
• Overlook = position of commanding height and the act of missing something that has significance
• Name of the hotel suggests both complete and incomplete acts of perception

The Overlook and the U.S.

• Ullman and his office as U.S.
• American political authority
• Faceless hotel “management” is not unlike “the frequently faceless directors of financial interests or corporations responsible for large-scale economic exploitation” (172)
• “In effect, Jack is offered admission to the ranks of the ruling class if he adopts the managerial/paternalistic standpoint intended to keep women, nonwhites, and unruly children in their place” (172)
• Jack’s misdirected rage toward minorities and women while “faithfully serving the interests of the very group working against his well-being and happiness” (172)

Play and Mastery

• Overlook as enormous playground
• Freud’s fort/da game…
• “In short, Freud discovers an underlying motive for play that is quite serious and, indeed, all important - the attempt to compensate for the original loss of the mother and return to a state of primary narcissism” (173)
• “[Jack’s] fantasies of power turn out to be secretly directed and controlled by hotel management. Jack’s past - America’s past - ultimately masters him, and he becomes a willing pawn of history” (174)
• Pursuit of Danny in the hedge maze...

The Nightmare of History

• “The concern with organized institutional forms of violence and power informs the uncanny subtext of The Shining and, as others have pointed out, it represents a common focus in Kubrick’s films” (175)
• Repetition of the past - overt and metaphorical
• Repetitions suggest passivity or helplessness before the onslaught of history
• All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy…
• “Registers his entrapment within an ideological system reinforcing patriarchal, class, and racial domination and links his attempts at mastery to the narcissistic motives of play discussed above” (175-176)
• “In effect, the haunting presence of history materializes and drives him to replace the possibility of fulfilling meaningful work or self-realization with a meaningless repetition of the past” (176)

The Shining and Photography

• “The monstrous institutions show themselves in the form of concrete traces of the past” (176)
• The Shining haunted by photographs
• “...photographs are a means of recording the past and assigning it a place and meaning, Kubrick uses photography as a metaphor for the helplessness and passivity of human beings before the onslaught of history” (176-177)