The White Man’s Burden

“ When I had a chance... when I was doing a story out in Denver, we went up to Estes Park. It was in the off-season. Went into the Stanley Hotel, and I asked to see the manager. 

And he came out, and we were just having lunch with him. And I said, "Can we talk to you? I write about The Shining." 

He said, "Really?" This fellow told me that he got a phone call from Stanley Kubrick, who said, "I think I want to make a movie about The Shining." 

And then he would keep this fellow on the phone for a long time. 

He said, "We had many long, long conversations in which he picked my brain about everything." 

And at that point, he said, "Kubrick was talking about maybe coming here to make the movie here," which I expect, at that point, that fellow liked the idea of, so it would make his hotel famous. 

And Kubrick said, "I'd like to send out a research team." 

And so he then sent out... the man said it was something like two or three people who came out here and stayed here for two or three months, taking photographs everywhere. 

And they spent a lot of time also down in Denver in the Colorado state archives, finding out, as I would now expect, the full history of Colorado, which... the flag of which plays a part. 

And the gold rush, the Colorado Gold Rush was also a very big event. And there's all... there's still a lot of American Indian/white people tension in Colorado with Navajos and Arapahos just to the south. 

This research team found out absolutely everything about Colorado, about Estes Park, about the Stanley Hotel, about its entire history, took photographs all over the place. 

Three months was the impression that I have of what he said about how this research team gathered absolutely everything. 

Kubrick unearthed an enormous amount about the real history of Colorado, where this takes place, because what he has done is found a way to dig into all of the patterns of our civilization, our times and our cultures, and the things that we don't want to look at. 

And this movie is very much also about denial of the genocides that we committed... we white folk from Europe... committed here and not that... not that white folks are the only people who do genocide. 

All humans do, as Kubrick makes clear in this movie. 

He would research everything and the full history and nature of everything you're gonna see in the movie on the screen and then boil it down and boil it down until he got the universal human and global patterns that make it so real. 

“White Man's Burden, Lloyd, My Man. 

White Man's Burden. 

I Like you, Lloyd. I always liked you. 

You were always the best of 'em. 

The best goddamned bartender from Timbuktu to Portland, Maine, 

or Portland, Oregon, for that matter.”

“Thank you for saying so.”

What does it mean? 

Jack saying, "You always were the best of 'em." 

Starting in Timbuktu? 

Jack The Schoolteacher was never in Timbuktu, but Jack The Universal Weak Male hired by armies to go commit atrocities has always been there. 

Now, of course, the word "Portland" is neat because it means where we landed or where The British or The Europeans landed. 

And Portland, Maine... 

Oregon is where they may have taken off from to go further west. 

Kubrick is thinking about the implications of everything that exists. You know, The Power of The Genie is in its confinement, as the great American poet Richard Wilbur said. 

Boiling it down, you know, 10,000 years in a little lamp, you got to get your act together. 

But that's the essence of great art. 

It's like a dream. 

It's boiled everything down to an emblematic symbol that's got all of life in it. 

Now, if you'll allow me to make a little bit of a link here. 

As I've thinking of this more in recent years, what we now understand to be the nature of What Dreams Are, I mean, it seems to be, the general theory is, that it's a way for the brain to boil down all of the previous experiences and then add in that day's experiences as well to see what kind of overall universal patterns there are to be found, so that you can be aware of what the patterns are out there, so that your subconscious will be all the more ready to react suddenly when you see something dangerous happen or something important happen that may lead you to a mate or to some food or away from danger. 

And therefore, the way Kubrick made movies was not unlike the way, according to these current theories, our brains create memories and, for that matter, dreams. 

That's the ultimate shining that Kubrick does. 

He is like a mega brain for The Planet who is boiling down with all of this extensive research, all of these patterns of Our World and then giving them back to us in a dream of a movie... because movies are like A Dream... and that's related to why I think there's a lot of evidence that what Kubrick also gave us in The Shining is a movie about The Past. 

Not just any past. The Past. 

I mean past-ness. 

It's a movie about how The Past impinges. That's what ghosts are. That's what those skitter-y voices in the opening shot that are following are about. 

There's two phrases from T.S. Eliot that I often think of when I'm thinking about The Shining. One of them is "The night"... 

I think they're both from T.S. Eliot... 

[ It’s James Joyce. ]

"The nightmare of history... How can we awake from The Nightmare of History?

And the other is his phrase... T.S. Eliot's phrase... "History has many cunning passages." 

And I think both of those phrases are directly apt for The Shining, in which we see many cunning passages in The Maze and in The Hotel itself and in which The Past becomes a nightmare, and in which Kubrick shows us how you escape from the nightmare of The Past by retracing your steps, as Danny does in that last line, which means acknowledging what happened and learning about The Past and then getting out, only if you are going to be able to shine and see what the patterns are so you know to get away from them and avoid them and go for the good things. 

I mean, The Shining is his movie about how families break down, whether they are an individual family or the larger societal family that tries to break up individual families. 

And his hat movie, Eyes Wide Shut is the opposite. It's about a family sorely tried, Bill Hartford and his wife and child, that survives all the horrible temptations that are in our DNA.”