“There's a dissolve which fades from a wide shot of the, you know,
final black-and-white photo to a close-up of Jack's face.
And just for a second there, his hairline fades in
to form a Hitler moustache.
"I Think a lot of things Happened right here
in this particular hotel over the years
and not all of 'em was Good."
He once said, "How do you get all of that"...
meaning The Holocaust... "into a two-hour movie?"
I think he found the Holocaust of such evil magnitude
that he just couldn't bring himself to treat it directly,
which is why he used the form of a horror film
to treat it indirectly.
I Believe Kubrick, possibly consciously,
has solved a kind of problem that History has,
which is that it's very hard for many people
to connect emotionally to
a gigantic big killing we
hear about in The Past.
People who don't have direct family experience
of it themselves may hear the statistic.
You know, Hitler, among other things,
killed 6,000,000 Jews in his Holocaust.
6,000,000 is a number Too Big.
I mean Stalin is reputed to have said, you know,
"You kill one person, it's a Murder and a Tragedy.
You kill 1,000,000 people, it's a statistic."
He was Talking about a Psychological Fact.
And, you know, Stalin himself was... what is it...
starved about 3,000,000 people
in The Western Ukraine in the '30s on purpose.
My Point is it may be that Kubrick was conscious
of having offered a kind of way to bridge
that inability to feel for those gigantic statistics
in that, if you go and see The Shining innocent the first time
and are terrified... you're just terrified
and you'll always remember being terrified...
and then go back aware of what The Symbolism and
the general larger pattern meanings of The Movie are,
then you can begin to make something
of a connection, saying, "Oh, my God.
I remember being terrified for
The Individual little Danny and Wendy here.
And that feeling is actually being...
is for people who are symbols of victims
of all kinds of horrendous genocides.
And of course, His Wife has subsequently talked about,
you know, how close he came to making His Holocaust movie,
The Aryan Papers, but that he got more and more
and more depressed and was relieved
when he had an excuse not to do it.
He used Schindler's List as [an excuse], saying,
"Ah, it's already been done."
I mean, that struck a bell with me.
And I've done a lot of stories as a journalist about people who study...
either talked to people who are victims of horrors or study it.
And there's... Freud talked about it as The Contagion.
The depression seeps into you. It's... you know what...
Kubrick had a wonderful comment about this
when somebody asked him,
"Isn't it True that Your Movies are showing us,
just the horrendous side of Humanity --
You know, that's awful bleak."
And Kubrick said,
"Ah, but there's something very positive about it as well.
And that is, it shows at the very least
that We can get our minds around what that horror is."
And Danny, from The Beginning,
has His Mind all over The Problem.
He's looking at it. In a way, Danny's big-wheeling back and forth,
up and down the hallways... Danny is learning that Hotel....
He's learning all The Horrors. He's Seeing them.
But they're just in The Past, and
Hallorann gave him The Secret.
He said, "Remember, Danny."
Remember what Tony tells him.
Remember what Mr. Hallorann said:
"They're just like Pictures in A Book,
they're not real."
Now, that's a really important lesson :
People Who Shine, who see through History,
understand that The Past
simply does not exist
except in one place --
And that's The Present Tense instant
of The Mind, remembering.
That is, exactly... that is a place you can go to somehow
and yet it doesn't exist. And so Hallorann tells Danny,
"You're gonna see some horrible things."
Apparently, he told him.
"You're gonna see some horrible things,
but remember, they're not real.
They're like pictures in a book --
They no longer exist."
That's a key to not getting
depressed about it.
And that's... You see, This is a Movie about what The Past...
How The Past impinges, any past,
and about How to Get Over That and
How Not to Be a Victim of History.
You know, if you doubt
what I've written about it,
just go see The Movie.
I've figured all this out from
just seeing The Movie. It's there.
It's obvious, and most people
who went and saw the movie said,
"Oh, my goodness. It is there."
