Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
A.) Hercules.
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 shot. 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.
And this deeper story has its birth, I guess, in the idea that Stanley Kubrick was involved with faking the Apollo moon landings.
