“I thought afterwards, "How come I saw this and a lot of other people didn't?"
And I've thought about it —
It's a combination of factors.
First, I grew up in Chicago and, therefore, just north of the Calumet Harbor and spent summers up in the sand dunes of Michigan, around on the other side of Lake Michigan.
My father took me and my sister out to collect little bits of Indian pottery.
I'd already... I'd already covered, at that point in 1980, five years of the Lebanese Civil War.
I was, at that point, covering John Paul ll.
I was the Rome Bureau Chief.
And listening to what he was saying about... because he had experienced the Holocaust at its epicenter and also other horrors.
And so all of those factors were very much alive in my mind when we went to see The Shining, which I just thought was going to be some kind of horror movie by this great moviemaker.
And all of those coming together along with the little key, the Calumet baking soda can, is why I just happened to tune to it as we were driving up out of that underground parking garage just off Leicester Square.
I first saw the movie in 1980 when it first came out and saw it probably two times.
I can say that I remembered the skier poster.
That is one thing that really stuck with me.
And the window.
The window in the office, that's another thing that really stuck with me.
I remember, you know, in the newspapers afterwards, people being disappointed.
And I remember people that I knew, yes, in dialogue afterwards, being disappointed that it was not more a horror film.
Well, no Kubrick film's really just a regular movie.
I understood that from, well, when I was 10 years old and I first saw 2001.
I walked away.
I thought, "This is a film that's supposed to make me think."
I had my first religious experience seeing the film 2001 : A Space Odyssey in 1968.
I was a smart kid and liked art, but I really did not like movies and thought that they were really a substandard art.
And, you know, films like My Fair Lady and Doctor Dolittle were out.
And it was a rather pathetic time in the '60s for films.
And my girlfriend, she pulled up and told me that she'd seen a movie the night before and she wanted to see it again.
So she took me to the theater, the Cinerama Dome, and I watched it.
And I had never in my life envisioned that a movie could do what this movie was doing.
And it was showing me things that I had never seen, and it was intellectually challenging.
And it was an artistic masterpiece in every way, from the soundtrack to the visuals to the story line.
And when the movie ended, I couldn't get out of my seat.
I was frozen in the seat, completely paralyzed by what I'd just witnessed.
And the usher actually had to come and get me out.
And I was the last person, me and her.
And I staggered out of the theater completely changed as a human being and decided at that moment that the only thing that I wanted to do for the rest of my life was to make films in one fashion or another.
And so I have done that.
So I owe Stanley Kubrick and his film 2001: A Space Odyssey everything for everything that I have become in my life, so...
I saw a number of Kubrick films before I had an academic interest in him.
And then I went to see The Shining in 1980.
And frankly, I didn't think that much of it.
I thought the other Kubrick films that I'd seen were far superior.
But as I thought about the film afterwards... and even when I wasn't thinking about it... there were things that bothered me about it.
It seemed as if I had missed something.
And so I went back to see it again.
And I began to see patterns and details that I hadn't noticed before.
And so I kept watching the film again and again and again.
And since I'm trained as an historian and my special expertise is in the history of Germany and n*zi Germany in particular, I became more and more convinced that there is, in this film, a deeply laid subtext that takes on The Holocaust.
I think it probably was the typewriter, which was a German brand, which might seem arbitrary, but by that time, I knew enough about Kubrick that most anything in his films can't be regarded as arbitrary, that anything... especially objects and colors and music and anything else, probably have some intentional as well as unintentional meaning to them.
And so that struck me.
Why a German typewriter?
And in connection with that, I began to see the number 42 appear in the film.
And for a German historian, if you put the number 42 and a German typewriter together, you get the Holocaust, because it was in 1942 that the n*zi made the decision to go ahead and exterminate all the Jews they could.
And they did so in a highly mechanical, industrial, and bureaucratic way.
And so the juxtaposition of the number 42 and the typewriter was really where it started for me in terms of the historical content of the film.
Of course "adler" in German means "eagle."
And eagle, of course, is a symbol of n*zi Germany.
It's also a symbol of the United States.
And Kubrick generally has recourse to eagles to symbolize state power.
Kubrick read Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews.
And Hilberg's major theme in there is that he focuses on the apparatus of k*lling.
And he emphasizes how bureaucratic it was and how it was a matter of lists and typewriters.
Spielberg picked that up in Schindler's List, of course.
I mean, the film begins with typewriters and lists and ends with a list, of course.
And so that informs... and I had a chance to talk to Raul Hilberg.
He visited Albion College.
And he said that he and Kubrick corresponded about this.
And the fact that he read it then, in the 1970s, when there was a big wave of interest in h*tler and the Holocaust and the n*zi, I think...
I think just tells us that that typewriter, that German typewriter... which by the way, changes color in the course of the film, which typewriters don't generally do... is terribly, terribly important as a referent to that particular historical event.
I worked in a film archive for a decade, kind of like fast-forwarding through World w*r II ten times a day.
But, you know, like, when you see things over and over and again, their meanings change for you.
Like, when you see these... see, like, World w*r ll newsreels, like, after a while, you come to realize that it's all faked on film.
You are not seeing troops storming Normandy.
You're seeing troops storming a beach in Hollywood.
You know, like, you're not seeing a plane flying to Japan.
You're seeing a plane flying over, you know, New Mexico.
What you're really being shown is, like, staged heroism.
You know, like, you're seeing men moving with machines, but you're not seeing what they're talking about.
And I think that that's something that Kubrick plays on.
Like, he plays on your acceptance of visual infor... and also your ignorance of visual information.
Like he'll often, like, put little special clues that you see, like, in the corner.
Every scene, there's an impossibility, like the TV doesn't have a cord or even something as simple as, like, them... they, like... they bring too much luggage up.
They, like... Jack, you know, glances over at a pile of their luggage that they brought, and ifs about the size of a car.
You know, a lot of it is jokes.
Like, they're taking the tour.
They're crossing the street from the maze to go check out the garage.
Like, a car is just about to h*t them.
And then it cuts right before.
I had anticipated the film and had read the Stephen King novel before the film came out and found it a very appealing story.
And I had spent a lot of time at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, which is where he was inspired to write the book The Shining.
And so I, you know... I knew a little bit of the background.
And when Kubrick's film came out, I was first in line to see it, of course.
And I was just really disappointed and walked out of the theater wondering what the hell I had just witnessed.
And, I... actually, my reverence for Stanley Kubrick diminished after that.
I was disappointed, but I still watched it every few years.
I couldn't understand why I was so attracted to watching a film that I actually didn't like.
And now in all these years later, I know why it is a great film.
It is a masterpiece, but not for the reasons that most people think.
We are dealing with a guy who has a 200 IQ.
I believe that when Stanley Kubrick finished with Barry Lyndon, he was bored.
He had conquered the filmmaking landscape.
He had succeeded in making masterpiece after masterpiece, and he was bored.
Barry Lyndon is a boring movie.
It is wonderfully sh*t.
It is beautifully costumed.
But it is a film made by a guy who is bored.
And I could see that.
And so I think Stanley retreated after Barry Lyndon.
And he began working on a new kind of film, a film that had never been made before, a film that was made by a bored genius who had thoroughly emptied the jug of everything that could be done in filmmaking.
And he was looking for the next thing.
And what he did was he began reading Subliminal Seduction and a number of other books which were about how advertisers were injecting... injecting images, subliminal images, into advertising to sell products more.
Suggestible trends.
You know, there'll be an ad for Gilbey's Gin, and inside, the ice cubes will be various sex organs and things to add a subliminal appeal to the ad.
Kubrick went to these advertisers, and he asked them what their methods were.
And then he took those methods and he applied them to The Shining.
Inside The Shining are hundreds of subliminal images and sh*t line-ups.
And what these images are telling is an extremely disturbing story about sexuality.
And the subtext of the story, besides the other subtexts of the story, is a story of haunted phantoms and demons who are sexually attracted to humans and are feeding off of them.
You'd have to be able to be a complete fanatic like I am in order to find all this, but, you know, I'll give you my favorite.
I'm only gonna give you one, but I'll give you my favorite.
When Jack meets Stewart Ullman in the office at the very beginning of the movie and he reaches over to shake Jack Nicholson's hand... and so step through that scene frame by frame.
And the minute, the moment, the frame that he and Jack Nicholson touch hands and right after the line that Barry Nelson says, which is, "Nice to see you," you can see that there's a paper... a paper tray on the desk.
And as soon as they touch hands, the paper tray turns into a very large straight-on hard-on coming out of Barry nelson.
Yeah, it's hilarious.
It's a joke... a very serious joke... but a joke by Stanley.
And there's many of these in the film.
And very disturbing, some of them.
And this will all be in my film, Kubrick the Magician.
I'll give you one more.
This one's harder to find, okay?
And you have to know what Stanley Kubrick looked like during the making of The Shining to know this one.
But if you go to the opening credits and you pan the frame... you... you go through the frames, right after it says "Directed by Stanley Kubrick," as soon as his name passes off the frame, stop and you will see that the clouds have Stanley Kubrick airbrushed into them, his face... with the beard and the wild hair and the whole thing.
I know this one's a little harder to find.
And I will have to...
I will have to Photoshop this one to show people it, but there is definitely the photograph of Stanley Kubrick in one frame airbrushed into the clouds.
In most films, a dissolve is used to indicate a long passage of time between two scenes.
But in The Shining, the dissolves go on for so long that they create a superimposition, where different scenes seem to be interacting with each other.
For example, you have the exterior image... a tracking sh*t of the lobby of the camera moving along the western wall south towards the entrance.
And you see a janitor mopping the floor, but it looks like he's... it looks like a he's a giant, mopping, like, clearing the forest because he's mopping, like, a vacant area in the forest.
And then the... then the ladder lines up... lines up with the pyramid form of the exterior of the hotel, which, in the exterior set, disappears.
Like, we don't see... we only see that in the Timberline exteriors.
But the England movie set exteriors of the hotel, like, the pyramid is missing, and it seems as if the hotel then takes both sides of the Timberline Hotel and then kind of, like, makes a composite of it.
So it's... you know, it's a perceptual shift of making people look like giants, also making the hotel look larger or smaller than it is.
I mean, these things kind of litter the movie.
But then the sh*t goes on.
We see a... we see a janitor pushing a folded-up bed on wheels.
And then he's followed by another... he's followed by another guy, who's carrying, like, one... like, one coffee table?
And then another... like, another guy is carrying one chair.
Like, where are these guys going with, like, these light loads, you know?
Then we see Jack sitting on a chair, eating lunch.
And the manager and his assistant crosses paths with two women who... and just as he's in the corner of the screen... you just see it for a second.
You see one of the women is wearing, like, a 13, a number 13 jersey?
Can you hear that?
My boy, yelling?
Hold on one second.
I'm gonna see if I can...
I can see if I can calm him down.
You know, so, like, he's like, leaning back and eating a sandwich.
And he's got, you know, a magazine in his lap.
And as he stands up to greet them, he, like, throws it down.
And if you look at" look at... look at it, you know, close up, it's an actual Playgirl magazine.
Yeah, a Playgirl magazine in the lobby of a hotel right in front of his boss, like on his first day at work.
Yeah.
Like, the cover is like, people getting ready for New Year's.
There's an article about incest.
At the beginning of the film, Danny's been physically abused.
But there's a suggestion that he's been sexually abused as well.
You know, so like, just in that one... one sh*t, there's all these, like, you know, complex things going on in the background, like things that are choreographed to match up exactly.
Like, we see a guy... we see a guy, carrying a... entering the room, carrying a rug.
And by the time the scene is just ending, we see him walking up the stairs.
Like, he's crossed the entire place, you know, timed exactly.
I don't even...
Yeah.
When Ullman is leading the Torrances out of the elevator and into the Colorado Lounge for the first time, there's a pile of suitcases.
And in the dissolve into that scene, the scene before, a group of tourists are standing in the lobby.
And those tourists dissolve into the suitcases.
Now, as an historian of the Holocaust, I find that very, very striking and certainly not accidental
'cause he's using those sort of cross-dissolves.
Now, that could be, along with the ladder, where he's trying to make substantive connections as well as formal ones.
Oh, the window in Ullman's office, it is absolutely beautiful.
The casual viewer isn't going to see so many things in Kubrick's films, although I think they may register unconsciously.
You know, but they're not going to, you know, perceive perhaps these things because as I've said, he presents them as being real.
You know, it's realism.
And it's not your typical horror... you don't have a horror film except for this one section at the end, right where Wendy walks in and the lobby is blue and you've got the cobwebs all around.
And it's almost like a Saturday morning kind of horror film suddenly there for a second.
And you kind of go.
"Ooh, what is this with the skeletons and the cobwebs?"
And it's kind of cheesy.
But then, after that, following that, you've got her going down the red hallway, which... on the big screen, that's petrifying.
So I think the kind of cheesiness before it helps set up that red hallway.
So anyway, what was I saying?
Right, the windows.
So you got... Jack has entered.
And you can see... you are...
Kubrick shows you.
But he shows you this lobby, and you get to see... as Jack moves across the lobby, you see the elevator beyond.
And you see beyond that, a hallway.
You don't see yet how far back it goes, you know, the other things back there, but you have an impression that this place is towards the middle of the hotel.
You just have that impression that it's towards the middle of the hotel.
And you go from the lobby into the general manager's office and then into Ullman's office, and there's this window.
And the window's a powerful window.
I mean, the light coming through there is glaring.
It's like a character in itself.
It takes over.
And you've got these tendril-y, sinister kind of trees that are outside the window.
And you've got... it's just such a forceful presence, this light that comes over everything.
And, you know...
And there's something wrong with it.
There's something wrong with it, and I think it registers as something wrong.
This is an impossible window.
It's not... it is impossible.
It is physically impossible.
It cannot be there.
It should not be there.
There's no place in the hotel for this window to exist.
It's only toward... finally, towards the end of the film, that you have the realization that there are several hallways in succession behind the office.
You see it when Wendy, when she's later down there and she sees Dick Hallorann's body after he's been k*lled.
You have her behind... in that hallway behind the office.
So really, now, what can I tell you about the maps?
No, I did not sit down with graph paper.
I did not even begin to attempt to do them to scale.
Let me see.
I can't say which room I started off with.
I don't remember.
I just went through and decided I was going to do... try to do as much as I could, feeling that...
I felt, eventually, that there were places that I could plot out, such as where the girls were k*lled.
I was not absolutely sure at that point, when I started out doing the maps, where the girls were k*lled.
But I felt that it was somewhere back around the area where they lived.
Suite number, what?
They lived at suite number 3.
When Jack is sitting, typing at his typewriter, and Wendy comes in and interrupts him while he's working... and in one sh*t of Jack...
You get a lot written today?
Sitting at the typewriter, a one sh*t, you look back behind him.
And of course, you can see very clearly
'cause Kubrick was the master of depth of field.
He kept everything in focus so he would have lots of space in which to puts things that he wanted you to notice.
And in the first sh*t, behind Jack sitting at his typewriter, back against a wall, behind him probably 10 or 12 or 15 feet is a chair.
And then there's a switch to a one-sh*t of Wendy saying something.
Hey, the weather forecast said it's gonna snow tonight.
And then the camera switches back to Jack, and the chair is gone.
What do you want me to do about it?
And my students and I always have fun with that, saying, "Well, continuity error?"
Could be.
Or it's not, and the answer, if it's not... or if it was originally and then Kubrick saw it and decided to keep it, is that he's parodying honor films in order to remind you that this isn't just a horror film.
And there's another one in The Shining that's, I think, less well-noticed.
And I think it's even more clearly substantive.
When Danny has his first vision of the elevator gushing blood and the camera is tracking toward him, past the open door of his bedroom and toward the hall and the bathroom, the open bathroom door across the hall... and his bedroom door, as you would expect a kid's door, has lots of cartoon characters on it And, the one who is most apparent, because it's right at the edge of the door and it's the largest one that you can see and it's the last one you can see as the camera moves past it, is one of the Seven Dwarves.
And it happens to be Dopey, okay?
Subsequently, after Danny has passed out, Wendy and the pediatrician leave Danny's room.
And as they do, they, of course, go out his door.
And you again see the door, the open door with all the cartoon characters on it, and Dopey isn't there.
Now, again continuity error?
I don't think so.
I think what Kubrick is saying is that before, Danny had no idea about the world, and now he knows.
He is no longer a dope about things.
He has been enlightened.
Anything you say, Lloyd.
Anything you say.
The the advocaat is spilled.
There's the accident.
Kubrick is setting it up as where they come around in a circle, 'cause I feel like that's what the camera does.
I feel like the camera brings us around in a circle so that we're coming back.
The bathroom seems to be overlaying the Gold Room and... so that the advocaat situation in the bathroom is occurring about in the same area that it did in the Gold Room.
They use the camera to create an emotional architecture in your mind but at the same time, showing you that it's false.
The set is complete... so completely plastic that its contradictions pile up in your subconscious.
Hallorann is showing... showing Wendy, you know, the place where she will, you know, basically, entrap Jack... entrap him both physically, but also, like, that will be the last straw for him, last straw for the management of the hotel.
It's in the store room that he finally is like, "Okay. Now I'm gonna do it."
And, you know, the opening of that door is the famous, like, only thing that's supernatural happens in the movie that can't be explained any other way.
Yeah.
But except that it can be explained another way, in that Danny lets him out.
I do have this idea that Danny is a lot more consciously m*rder his father than the narrative lets on.
I don't know. It's weird.
Like, you notice how, like, Wendy's walking backwards when she's having that confrontation with Jack in the lounge, you know.
And she's being drawn up to the hexagonal hallway room.
And you see Danny shining at the beginning of that.
He's in his room, and there's, like, lights flickering in his eyes.
Like, is Danny drawing... you know, drawing his mother up the stairs so that she can, you know, sacrifice Jack on top of that, you know, weird pyramid?
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 sh*t 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...
"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.
This is our famous hedge maze.
It's a lot of fun.
But I wouldn't want to go in there unless I had an hour to spare to find my way out.
I did not look at it again for a number of years until it came out in rental.
And then I picked it up a couple of times.
And, what, you had three days in order to watch a rental?
And so, I can remember watching it over and over again during those three days and really taking a good look at it then.
And I was able to think "Oh, yes, this is what I remember.
This is what I thought I saw," and then catching more things.
But it wasn't, of course, until DVD came out that I was really able to sit down and take a good look at it as far as just running through it over and over and over again.
Kubrick presents these things where it's, you know, real... you know, it's realistic.
You're not supposed to see what's actually going on.
You've got Danny.
He's in the game room. He turns around.
We're supposed to be focused on the two girls there.
And than you... I saw... over on the left, I see this skiing poster.
And the thing is that you already have Jack.
He's already asked about skiing.
But why isn't... you know, "What about skiing?
Isn't the skiing good here in the hotel?"
And he's already given the story of why it isn't good, why they can't do that.
But you got the skiing poster.
And my eye is drawn to it.
And I realize that's not a skier.
That's a... that's a minotaur.
It just leaped out at me.
And so that was something that I was able to look at later on VHS and say, "Yes, I had actually seen a minotaur there," where the upper body, you've got this really, you know, overblown physique, very physical physique.
And then you've got the suggestion... you have a suggestion of a skiing pole there, but it's not really there.
It's just a suggestion of one.
And the lower body is positioned, the way the legs are, it's like a minotaur, the build is.
And you've actually got the tail there.
And so it is a minotaur.
And this is in... on the opposite side of the door you have a cowboy on a bucking bronco, so... and so you got a kind of echo there, where you got the minotaur on one side, the bull man, and on the other side, you got the cowboy, the man on the bucking bronco.
And this is just following the scene where they...
Ullman has been taking Jack and Wendy through the Colorado Lounge, showing off the Colorado Lounge.
And they go into the hall behind the Colorado Lounge.
And what's there, but on the wall, there is a painting of an American Indian with a buffalo headdress on.
And at that point, Ullman is discussing with Wendy who has stayed there at the hotel.
Royalty, the best people, stars have stayed there.
Royalty?
All the best people.
You have "monarch" on the bottom, which, you know, keys in with royalty.
And you also have this whole idea of the stars.
And the minotaur's name is, what, Asterius?
His name is Asterius, which means "starry."
So you know, you got several things there to do with mythology that fit in.
It's very exciting to me.
That was the... you know, that's the kind of leap-up-end-down moment where you go, "Oh, wow, look at what Kubrick has there."
Yeah, I mean the minotaur lives at the heart of the labyrinth.
He's a part of the labyrinth.
The labyrinth, at least in the myth... you know, in this particular myth... was built for the minotaur.
The hotel is... you know, it is the labyrinth.
And Jack is the minotaur.
You have scenes with him where he... such as in... what is it?
The Thursday scene.
The snowfall has started.
You have Wendy and Danny outside playing.
And Jack is inside the Colorado Lounge, and he's looking out at them.
His head is tilted down, and his eyes are somewhat... his eyes are elevated.
They're pointing up.
And his eyebrows are drawn up.
But he has this expression on his face that he gets progressively throughout the film that is very bull-like.
It has a very minotaur-like expression.
It's the same kind of expression that Kubrick pulls out in other films, such as it was on Private Pyle's face in the berserker scene in the bathroom in Full Metal Jacket.
So it's, you know, not specific to this film.
There's more minotaur imagery and labyrinth imagery.
There's the Gold Room.
In front of the Gold Room, you have the "Unwinding Hours" sign.
And that plays in with the labyrinth, where you have...
Theseus enters into the labyrinth, and he has the thread with him that he ties at the beginning that, you know, assists him in going through the labyrinth, where he can find his way back out.
And so I see the "Unwinding Hours" sign as having to do with that thread.
For a while there, I was into baseball.
And I get very excited with baseball when I'm into baseball.
You know, I can be by myself, and I will be leaping up and down.
And Kubrick is like that for me, where all I have to do is see the minotaur poster there, and I go, "Oh, my goodness. Look at this!"
Because you're not supposed to see the minotaur.
Danny is shown riding his big wheel through the hotel three times.
The first ride, I think, is about realism.
That's Danny is a...
Danny is doing a loop around the lounge set.
You know, he goes through the service hallway and then he goes through the lounge and then he goes back into the service hallway.
And, you know, when you first see the movie, you're like, "He's just wandering around.
It's crazy, it's just"...
But it... no, it's very... it's just a very simple loop.
He does it once.
But that gives you an idea of where... of What that place is.
I mean, you know, all right, you understand that that set is real.
You know, like, it's a continuous sh*t.
There are no tricks.
In the second ride, in the hexagonal hallway, there are a lot of... there are more tricks.
Like, he doesn't do a loop.
He does kind of like a key-shaped... you know, or a p-shaped loop around this hallway.
And you see The Realism of the connection to the lounge set.
And... but you also see the fakery of the fake elevators.
And you see... for just one second, you see the big stained glass windows out of the corner, in the corner of the frame right before he takes a turn around the elevator.
Like, that's incredible because, like, that connects that whole hallway to the giant Colorado Lounge set.
I mean, that's just for one second.
They didn't have to do that, you know?
But it's also... you know, it's a metaphor because he's also elevated.
He's one level up from where he was before.
Like, he starts in the same place, just one floor up, you know, in the northeast corner of the set.
So now he's in the northeast corner and one level up.
And if you take it as a metaphor of, like, going from a mundane reality to up into your head to more of a fantastical reality...
The third one is even stranger, 'cause he starts off in the service unit.
He starts off in the same, you know, northeast corner of the lobby hall, of the lobby service hallway.
And then he takes a turn, and suddenly he's upstairs in the area outside their apartment So, like, it's a kind of a combination of the first two, where like he's down low and then he's up high.
And then he takes a turn, and he's suddenly... he's in that that yellow, yellow and blue wallpaper.
Let's say that's in the service hallway area.
He's, you know, right outside his parents' bedroom, so there's this connection between him going on these big wheel rides and dreaming.
Like, he's near his bedroom.
He's near... like, you see his parents are working downstairs, but he's upstairs.
You know, like, you see his mom on the telephone, and then he's flying.
He goes above her to the bedroom, which is above where she's working, just as the hexagonal hallway is above where his dad is working.
So these big wheel rides become like a visionary way of Danny to explore his parents' headspace.
You know, like, room 237 is his, like... that's his father's fantasy chamber where, like, he gets it on with the witches.
And the twins are like his mother's fantasy... fantasy headspace where, like, they're these double blue women who want to play with Danny forever and ever.
We're all gonna have a real good time.
My interpretation of The Shining is that there's many levels to this film.
This is like three-dimensional chess.
And he's trying to tell us several stories that appear to be separate but actually are not.
And he's doing this both through the overt script that he wrote.
He's telling it through tricks of the trade, the subliminal imagery and these constant retakes, giving him odd angles and things.
And he's also telling you through the changes that he made to the Stephen King novel.
So if you watch those three things, you begin to understand this deeper story.
