I was a little surprised when The Flower said she wanted to see The Shining again, not because it’s not a great movie but it seemed like it wasn’t that long ago we saw it. However, she hadn’t come with us the last time, which was over four years ago! I think I had gotten confused because, being concerned friends her age only consume cultural garbage, she wanted to get together with them to see it when it came around last year. But that fell through. And as it turns out, she has never seen this in the theater.

Which, you know, with Kubrick, is like not seeing it at all.

The movie still works, of course. I had been inspired by this (frankly goofy) YouTube video positing that Danny was the source of all the evil in the movie. That Jack was psychically sensitive like Danny and Hallorann, but he didn’t know it, and it’s Danny’s psychic emanations that are driving him mad.

Yeah, no. Stephen King wishes he were that creative. C’mon, it’s Indian Burial Ground stuff. What struck me this time was how literally much of parallels to alcoholism work: Every stage of his insanity maps to different kinds of “drunk”: angry drunk, happy drunk, cheat-on-your-wife-with-a-woman-who’s-not-as-good-looking-as-you-thought drunk, etc. Except, as The Flower pointed out, the final scenes which are inexplicable allegorically. (She’s not a fan of overthinking things, especially things that make aesthetic sense.)

I noticed all the red this time. This is another case where overthinking is problematic. The video I watched said “red” was the color of youth and vitality, to the extent of denying that the stuff coming out the elevators was blood—something only a censor could be dumb enough to believe—and then points out that Danny is always wearing red. Except for one scene, where he goes into the forbidden room 237, which signified…something. But seeing that scene again, it’s apparent he’s not wearing red because he’s on the patterned carpet which is full of red, and there would’ve been no contrast. The aesthetic trumps the literal again, I believe.

But one thing has always bugged me about the movie, and that’s the end. The picture of Jack there at the party in 1921. I think the popular explanation is a sort of “Twilight Zone” type “twist”, that Jack has become part of the house. But I found the possibility intriguing that we, the audience, are being lied to, and that Jack doesn’t actually look like Jack at all. There are a lot of interesting mirror shots in this, which suggests…something…but I’m not sure it’s really supportable. (The aforementioned goofy video poses a theory like this, and suggests that’s why we don’t see Jack except in the hotel, while dismissing the fact that we see him in car on the way up too.)

This isn’t particularly mysterious, though. Kubrick himself says the photo suggest Jack is a reincarnation of an earlier Jack, the one in the picture. OK. Not how reincarnation works, of course, but follows the Moviegique reincarnation rule: You can’t have different actors playing the same character through reincarnation because the audience will reject that.

Something else I noticed: At the end, Wendy looks into a room wear a man in a bear/dog costume is kneeling over a bed and doing something presumably perverted to a man in a tux who is lying on the bed. I mean, the implication is oral sex, but that mask would make it impossible. Kubrick was on the vanguard of furry-dom, I guess.

Anyway, the two hours crawl by, of course, but if you like Kubrick, they’re a good crawl, and you can really enjoy the detail. We enjoyed it and The Boy, who was previously engaged, expressed sorrow that he had missed.