Well, it’s not exactly Crocodile Dundee II, now, IS it?

THE (AS IT WERE) SEMINAL IMPORTANCE OF TERMINATOR 2

By David Foster Wallace

  1990s MOVIEGOERS WHO HAVE sat clutching their heads in both awe and disappointment at movies like Twister and Volcano and The Lost World can thank James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day for inaugurating what’s become this decade’s special new genre of big-budget film : Special Effects Porn. 

“Porn” because, if you substitute F/X for intercourse, the parallels between the two genres become so obvious they’re eerie. Just like hard-core cheapies, movies like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park aren’t really “movies” in the standard sense at all. What they really are is half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes — scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff — strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative.

  T2, one of the highest-grossing movies in history, opened six years ago. Think of the scenes we all still remember. That incredible chase scene and explosion in the L.A. sluiceway and then the liquid metal¹ T-1000 Terminator walking out of the explosion’s flames and morphing seamlessly into his Martin-Milner-as-Possessed-by-Hannibal-Lecter corporeal form. The T-1000 rising hideously up out of that checkerboard floor, the T-1000 melting headfirst through the windshield of that helicopter, the T-1000 freezing in liquid nitrogen and then collapsing fractally apart. These were truly spectacular images, and they represented exponential advances in digital F/X technology. But there were at most maybe eight of these incredible sequences, and they were the movie’s heart and point; the rest of T2 is empty and derivative, pure mimetic polycelluloid.

  It’s not that T2 is totally plotless or embarrassing—and it does, admittedly, stand head and shoulders above most of the F/X Porn blockbusters that have followed it. It’s rather that T2 as a dramatic narrative is slick and cliché and calculating and in sum an appalling betrayal of 1984’s The Terminator. T1, which was James Cameron’s first feature film and had a modest budget and was one of the two best U.S. action movies of the entire 1980s,² was a dark, breathlessly kinetic, near-brilliant piece of metaphysical Ludditism. Recall that it’s A.D. 2027 and that there’s been a nuclear holocaust in 1997 and that chip-driven machines now rule, and “Skynet,” the archonic diabolus ex machina, develops a limited kind of time-travel technology and dispatches the now classically cyborgian A. Schwarzenegger back to 1984’s Los Angeles to find and Terminate one Sarah Connor, the mother-to-be of the future leader of the human “Resistance,” one John Connor³; and but that apparently The Resistance itself somehow gets one-time-only access to Skynet’s time-travel technology and sends back to the same space-time coordinates a Resistance officer, the ever-sweaty but extremely tough and resourceful Kyle Reese, to try desperately to protect Ms. Sarah Connor from the Terminator’s prophylactic advances,⁴ and so on. It is, yes, true that Cameron’s Skynet is basically Kubrick’s HAL, and that most of T1’s time-travel paradoxes are reworkings of some fairly standard Bradbury-era science fiction themes, but The Terminator still has a whole lot to recommend it. There’s the inspired casting of the malevolently cyborgian Schwarzenegger as the malevolently cyborgian Terminator, the role that made Ahnode a superstar and for which he was utterly and totally perfect (e.g., even his goofy 16-r.p.m. Austrian accent added a perfect little robofascist tinge to the Terminator’s dialogue⁵). There’s the first of Cameron’s two great action heroines⁶ in Sarah Connor, as whom the limpid-eyed and lethal-lipped Linda Hamilton also turns in the only great performance of her career. There is the dense, greasy, marvelously machinelike look of The Terminator’s mechanized F/X⁷; there are the noirish lighting and Dexedrine pace that compensate ingeniously for the low budget and manage to establish a mood that is both exhilarating and claustrophobic.⁸ Plus T1’s story had at its center a marvelous “Appointment in Samarra”–like irony of fate: we discover in the course of the film that Kyle Reese is actually John Connor’s father,⁹ and thus that if Skynet hadn’t built its nebulous time machine and sent back the Terminator, Reese wouldn’t have been back here in ’84, either, to impregnate Sarah C. This also entails that meanwhile, up in A.D. 2027, John Connor has had to send the man he knows is his father on a mission that J.C. knows will result in both that man’s death and his (i.e., J.C.’s) own birth. The whole ironic mess is simultaneously Freudian and Testamental and is just extraordinarily cool for a low-budget action movie.

  Its big-budget sequel adds only one ironic paradox to The Terminator’s mix: in T2, we learn that the “radically advanced chip”¹⁰ on which Skynet’s CPU is (will be) based actually came (comes) from the denuded and hydraulically pressed skull of T1’s defunct Terminator… meaning that Skynet’s attempts to alter the flow of history bring about not only John Connor’s birth but Skynet’s own, as well. All T2’s other important ironies and paradoxes, however, are unfortunately unintentional and generic and kind of sad.

  Note, for example, the fact that Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a movie about the disastrous consequences of humans relying too heavily on computer technology, was itself unprecedentedly computer-dependent. George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, subcontracted by Cameron to do T2’s special effects, had to quadruple the size of its computer graphics department for the T-1000 sequences, sequences that also required digital-imaging specialists from around the world, thirty-six state-of-the-art Silicon Graphics computers, and terabytes of specially invented software programs for seamless morphing, realistic motion, digital “body socks,” background-plate compatibility, congruences of lighting and grain, etc. And there is no question that all the lab work paid off: in 1991, Terminator 2’s special effects were the most spectacular and real-looking anybody had ever seen. They were also the most expensive.

  T2 is thus also the first and best instance of a paradoxical law that appears to hold true for the entire F/X Porn genre. It is called the Inverse Cost and Quality Law : it states very simply that the larger a movie’s budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be. The case of T2 shows that much of the ICQL’s force derives from simple financial logic. A film that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make is going to get financial backing if and only if its investors can be maximally—maximally—sure that at the very least they will get their hundreds of millions of dollars back.¹¹ I.e., a megabudget movie must not fail—and “failure” here means anything less than a runaway box-office hit—and must thus adhere to certain reliable formulae that have been shown by precedent to maximally ensure a runaway hit. One of the most reliable of these formulae involves casting a superstar who is “bankable” (i.e., whose recent track record of films shows a high ROI). The studio backing for T2’s wildly sophisticated and expensive digital F/X therefore depends on Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreeing to reprise his Terminator role. Now the ironies start to stack, though, because it turns out that Schwarzenegger—or perhaps more accurately “Schwarzenegger, Inc.” or “Ahnodyne”—has decided that playing any more malevolent cyborgs would compromise the Leading Man image his elite and bankable record of ROI entails. He will do the film only if T2’s script is somehow engineered to make the Terminator the Good Guy. Not only is this vain and stupid and shockingly ungrateful¹²; it is also common popular knowledge, duly reported in both the trades and the popular entertainment media before T2 even goes into production. There’s consequently a weird postmodern tension to the way we watch the film : we’re aware of what the bankable star’s demands were, and we’re also aware of how much the movie cost and how important bankable stars are to a big-budget movie; and so one of the few things that keep us on the edge of our seats during the movie is our suspense about whether James Cameron can possibly weave a plausible, non-cheesy narrative that meets Schwarzenegger’s career needs without betraying T1’s precedent.

  Cameron does not succeed, at least not in avoiding heavy cheese. Recall the premise he settles on for T2 : that Skynet once again uses its (apparently not all that limited) time-travel device, this time to send a far more advanced liquid metal T-1000 Terminator back to 1990s L.A., this time to kill the ten-year-old John Connor (played by the extremely annoying Edward Furlong,¹³ whose voice keeps cracking pubescently and who’s just clearly older than ten), and but that the intrepid human Resistance has somehow captured, subdued, and “reprogrammed” an old Schwarzenegger-model Terminator—resetting its CPU’s switch from TERMINATE to PROTECT, apparently¹⁴ — and then has somehow once again gotten one-time access to Skynet’s time-travel technology¹⁵ and sent the Schwarzenegger Terminator back to protect young J.C. from the T-1000’s infanticidal advances.¹⁶

  Cameron’s premise is financially canny and artistically dismal: it permits Terminator 2’s narrative to clank along on the rails of all manner of mass-market formulae. There is, for example, no quicker or easier ingress to the audience’s heart than to present an innocent child in danger, and of course protecting an innocent child from danger is Heroism at its most generic. Cameron’s premise also permits the emotional center of T2 to consist of the child and the Terminator “bonding,” which in turn allows for all manner of familiar and reliable devices. Thus it is that T2 offers us cliché explorations of stuff like the conflicts between Emotion and Logic (territory already mined to exhaustion by Star Trek) and between Human and Machine (turf that’s been worked in everything from Lost in Space to Blade Runner to RoboCop), as well as exploiting the good old Alien-or-Robot-Learns-About-Human-Customs-and-Psychology-from-Sarcastic-and/or-Precocious-but-Basically-Goodhearted-Human-with-Whom-It-Bonds formula (q.q.v. here My Favorite Martian and E.T. and Starman and The Brother from Another Planet and Harry and the Hendersons and ALF and ad almost infinitum). 

Thus it is that the 85 percent of T2 that is not mind-blowing digital F/X sequences subjects us to dialogue like: “Vhy do you cry?” and “Cool! My own Terminator!” and “Can you not be such a dork all the time?” and “This is intense!” and “Haven’t you learned that you can’t just go around killing people?” and “It’s OK, Mom, he’s here to help” and “I know now vhy you cry, but it’s somesing I can never do”; plus to that hideous ending where Schwarzenegger gives John a cyborgian hug and then voluntarily immerses himself in molten steel to protect humanity from his neural net CPU, raising that Fonziesque thumb as he sinks below the surface,¹⁷ and the two Connors hug and grieve, and then poor old Linda Hamilton — whose role in T2 requires her not only to look like she’s been doing nothing but Nautilus for the last several years but also to keep snarling and baring her teeth and saying stuff like “Don’t fuck with me!” and “Men like you know nothing about really creating something!” and acting half-crazed with paramilitary stress, stretching Hamilton way beyond her thespian capacities and resulting in what seems more than anything like a parody of Faye Dunaway in Mommy Dearest — has to give us that gooey “I face the future with hope, because if a Terminator can learn the value of human life, maybe we can, too” voiceover at the very end.

  The point is that head-clutchingly insipid stuff like this puts an even heavier burden of importance on T2’s digital effects, which now must be stunning enough to distract us from the formulaic void at the story’s center, which in turn means that even more money and directorial attention must be lavished on the film’s F/X. This sort of cycle is symptomatic of the insidious three-part loop that characterises Special Effects Porn —

  (1) Astounding digital dinosaur/tornado/volcano/Terminator effects that consume almost all the director’s creative attention and require massive financial commitment on the part of the studio;

  (2) A consequent need for guaranteed megabuck ROI, which entails the formulaic elements and easy sentiment that will assure mass appeal (plus will translate easily into other languages and cultures, for those important foreign sales…);

  (3) A director—often one who’s shown great talent in earlier, less expensive films—who is now so consumed with realizing his spectacular digital visions, and so dependent on the studio’s money to bring the F/X off, that he has neither the leverage nor the energy to fight for more interesting or original plots/themes/characters.

  —and thus yields the two most important corollary formulations of The Inverse Cost and Quality Law :

  (ICQL(a)) The more lavish and spectacular a movie’s special effects, the shittier that movie is going to be in all non-F/X respects. For obvious supporting examples of ICQL(a), see lines 1–2 of this article and/or also Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Forrest Gump, etc.

  (ICQL(b)) There is no quicker or more efficient way to kill what is interesting and original about an interesting, original young director than to give that director a huge budget and lavish F/X resources. 

The number of supporting examples of ICQL(b) is sobering. Have a look, e.g., at the differences between Rodriguez’s El Mariachi and his From Dusk till Dawn, between de Bont’s Speed and Twister, between Gilliam’s Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, between Bigelow’s Near Dark and Strange Days. Or chart Cameron’s industry rise and artistic decline from T1 and Aliens through T2 and The Abyss to—dear Lord—True Lies. Popular entertainment media report that Cameron’s new Titanic, currently in post-production, is (once again) the most expensive and technically ambitious film of all time. A nation is even now pricing trenchcoats and lubricants in anticipation of its release.

  —1998

  1 (actually defined in the film as “mimetic polyalloy,” whatever that’s supposed to mean)

  2 The ’80s’ other B.U.S.A.M. was Cameron’s second feature, the 1986 Aliens, also modestly budgeted, also both hair-raising and deeply intelligent.

  3 (whose initials, for a prophesied saviour of humanity, are not particularly subtle)

  4 The fact that what Skynet is attempting is in effect a retroactive abortion, together with the fact that “terminate a pregnancy” is a pretty well-known euphemism, led the female I first saw the movie with in 1984 to claim, over coffee and pie afterward, that The Terminator was actually one long pro-choice allegory, which I said I thought was not w/o merit but maybe a bit too simplistic to do the movie real justice, which led to kind of an unpleasant row.

  5 Consider, for example, how the now-famous “I’ll be back” line took on a level of ominous historical resonance when uttered by an unstoppable killing machine with a German accent. This was chilling and brilliant, commercial postmodernism at its best; but it is also what made Terminator 2’s “in-joke” of having Ahnode repeat the line in a good-guy context so disappointing.

  6 It is a complete mystery why feminist film scholars haven’t paid more attention to Cameron and his early collaborator Gale Anne Hurd. The Terminator and Aliens were both violent action films with tough, competent female protagonists (incredibly rare) whose toughness and competence in no way diminished their “femininity” (even more rare, unheard of), a femininity that is rooted (along with both films’ thematics) in notions of maternity rather than just sexuality. For example, compare Cameron’s Ellen Ripley with the panty-and-tank-top Ripley of Scott’s Alien. In fact it was flat-out criminal that Sigourney Weaver didn’t win the ’86 Oscar for her lead in Cameron’s Aliens. Marlee Matlin indeed. No male lead in the history of U.S. action film even approaches Weaver’s second Ripley for emotional depth and sheer balls—she makes Stallone, Willis, et al. look muddled and ill.

  7 (This is a ponderous, marvelously built-looking quality [complete with ferrous clanks and/or pneumatic hisses] that—oddly enough—at roughly the same time also distinguished the special effects in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. This was cool not only because the effects were themselves cool, but also because here were three talented young tech-minded directors who rejected the airy, hygienic look of Spielberg’s and Lucas’s F/X. The grimy density and preponderance of metal in Cameron’s effects suggest that he’s looking all the way back to Méliès and Lang for visual inspiration.)

  8 (Cameron would raise the use of light and pace to near-perfection in Aliens, where just six alien-suited stuntmen and ingenious quick-cut editing result in some of the most terrifying Teeming Rapacious Horde scenes of all time. [By the way, sorry to be going on and on about Aliens and The Terminator. It’s just that they’re great, great commercial cinema, and nobody talks about them enough, and they’re a big reason why T2 was such a tragic and insidious development not only for ’90s film but for James Cameron, whose first two films had genius in them.])

  9 (So actually I guess it would be more like “Luke Skywalker’s Appointment in Samarra”—nobody said this was Art-Cinema or anything.)

  10 (viz., a “neural net processor” based on an “uncooled superconductor,” which I grieve to report is a conceit ripped off from Douglas Trumbull’s 1983 Brainstorm)

  11 The Industry term for getting your money back plus that little bit of extra that makes investing in a movie a decent investment is ROI, which is short for Return on Investment.

  12 Because Schwarzenegger—compared to whom Chuck Norris is an Olivier—is not an actor or even a performer. He is a body, a form—the closest thing to an actual machine in the history of the S.A.G. Ahnode’s elite bankable status in 1991 was due entirely to the fact that James Cameron had had the genius to understand Schwarzenegger’s essential bionism and to cast him in T1.

  13 It augurs ill for both Furlong and Cameron that within minutes of John Connor’s introduction in the film we’re rooting vigorously for him to be Terminated.

  14 A complex and interesting scene where John and Sarah actually open up the Terminator’s head and remove Ahnode’s CPU and do some further reprogramming—a scene where we learn a lot more about neural net processors and Terminative anatomy, and where Sarah is strung out and has kind of an understandable anti-Terminator prejudice and wants to smash the CPU while she can, and where John asserts his nascent command presence and basically orders her not to—was cut from the movie’s final version. Cameron’s professed rationale for cutting the scene was that the middle of the movie “dragged” and that the scene was too complex: “I could account for [the Terminator’s] behavior changes much more simply.” I submit that the Cameron of T1 and Aliens wouldn’t have talked this way. But another big-budget formula for ensuring ROI is that things must be made as simple for the audience as possible; plot- and character implausibilities are to be handled through distraction rather than resolved through explanation.

  15 (around which the security must be just shockingly lax)

  16 That’s the movie’s main plot, but let’s observe here that one of T2’s subplots actually echoes Cameron’s Schwarzenegger dilemma and creates a kind of weird metacinematic irony. Whereas T1 had argued for a certain kind of metaphysical passivity (i.e., fate is unavoidable, and Skynet’s attempts to alter history serve only to bring it about), Terminator 2’s metaphysics are more active. In T2, the Connors take a page from Skynet’s book and try to head off the foreordained nuclear holocaust, first by trying to kill Skynet’s inventor and then by destroying Cyberdyne’s labs and the first Terminator’s CPU (though why John Connor spends half the movie carrying the deadly CPU chip around in his pocket instead of just throwing it under the first available steamroller remains unclear and irksome). The point here is that the protagonists’ attempts to revise the “script” of history in T2 parallel the director’s having to muck around with T2’s own script in order to get Schwarzenegger to be in the movie. Multivalent ironies like this—which require that film audiences know all kinds of behind-the-scenes stuff from watching Entertainment Tonight and reading (umm) certain magazines—are not commercial postmodernism at its finest.

  17 (His hair doesn’t catch on fire in the molten steel, though, which provokes intriguing speculation on what it’s supposed to be made of.)

 

Napoleon-Box

Lost Kubrick - The unfinished films of Stanley Kubrick

Narrated by Malcolm McDowell, this short documentary examines 

the films Stanley Kubrick developed but didn't live long enough to make. 

Features interviews given by Kubrick's longtime producer Jan Harlan, 

Jack Nicholson,Sydney Pollack etc. 

Through interviews and abundant archival materials, this documentary examines 

these "lost" films in depth to discover what drew Kubrick to these projects, 

the work he did to prepare them for production, 

and why they ultimately were abandoned. 

Some of the unfinished project discussed here are "Napoleon" , 

"The Aryan Papers" and also "A.I" 

(which we know finally made by Steven Spielberg).

Transcript 

Jack :

You know when you work for stanley he's not going to stop 

until it's exactly the way he wants it right wrong or indifferent.

How many films did stanley make in his lifetime…? Very few.

He took a long long time between the films he was obsessed with those films; 

Stanley always admired Woody Allen for turning out every year, a new film I mean —

it's wonderful, he would have loved to do it but he couldn't; it wasn't his style.

he was a man of such varied interests that he was always busy 

and went through sequential obsessions 

I would talk to him sometimes every day you know 

and there were endless endless interests 

What he really wanted to make was a film about Napoleon because 

Napoleon was someone he revered, Napoleon was one of 

the abiding interests of Stanley's Life along with 

Extraterrestrial Intelligence 

The Holocaust 

Concentration Camps 

Julius Caesar 

English place-name etymology 

and 3000 other things —

Stanley had a tough time keeping up with his interests you know it was a full-time job being stanley so he is considered by many the greatest film director the medium has ever known yet in a 45-year career stanley kubrick's films number only a dozen that he strove for perfection is well established what is less known is that he lavished years of energy on several films that never saw the flickering light of the silver screen the most famous of these a.i artificial intelligence was made by steven spielberg with kubrick's blessing but there were two other films that came tantalizingly close to creation after the success of 2001 a space odyssey a success which means that kubrick had an opportunity to do what he wanted and what he wanted to do was napoleon now kubrick was fascinated by napoleon he was this man who changed the political landscape of the modern world stanley was always interested in things military and i think he was very interested in those campaigns and so forth it's really interesting when he was talking about making um his film in napoleon he describes these battle scenes as ballets as violent ballets and he has this image in his in his mind of choreographing violence 

Even then, Kubrick was fascinated by this man, 

by what he did politically and culturally 

but also personally —

Kubrick wasn't just interested in 

the big fight sequences, the big wars,

he was interested in what Napoleon did the night before 

and usually it was paperwork, because you don't 

run An Empire by telling people what to do 

you've got to Do The Paperwork 

and I'm sure that aspect of Napoleon 

appealed to Kubrick, who did quite 

a lot of paperwork himself —

He compiled the screenplay, which is very interesting because 

it is not entirely about Napoleon as a military genius, 

a lot of it is about napoleon's early days, when he he was in Paris 

and he was the protege of various other rich and influential people 

and there's an enormous amount of sex in it which is surprising and 

the descriptions are all of these women with décolleté gowns and 

people having it off in closets and so on and 

the battles of course take place but they're not — 

it's not like a film like Waterloo. 

bold brilliant and exacting obsessed with detail the phrases have been used to describe both napoleon and the director who yearned to tell his story well it's an easy parallel to make i don't know if it tells us much about stanley or napoleon 

Napoleon also had a technique among his staff 

which was that he would rotate them in and out of his regard,

so one week he'd have one favorite and he'd defer to this person 

and give them all the good jobs, and then 

the next week this person would notice they were pushed 

a little to one side and someone else was being brought in 

and he would rotate these people all the time so that 

everybody was was on tenterhooks and 

everybody was desperate to to do what he asked— 

In fact the thing you heard over and 

over again in The Kubrick Unit is, 

“But what shall I tell Stanley…?” 

napoleon would have been a very very typical kubrick film his downfall was self-inflicted now he was a man who was enormously gifted for his job colossally successful from a small officer who came from a foreign country namely from corsica and was trained in the south of france uh he crowned himself emperor of france in 1804. 

Now you know this is just quite astonishing 

and this man, however, in the end 

was governed by his emotions 

more than by his intellect 

and this is an old story of Stanley — you know this is this conflict between emotion and intellect as with any kubrick project the first step was to accumulate exhaustive and meticulous research he had teams going around all over the place gathering up huge quantities of a visual material documentary material he sent off andrew burke and his assistant to paris to find actual artifacts of napoleon andrew arrived with notable ill timing in may 1968 at the height of the student revolution so they're walking around in the streets with you know cars on fire and police shooting at students and so on looking for napoleon's portable lavatory so obsessive was Kubrick that andrew brought back a sample of the earth of waterloo so that wherever they recreated the battle they could do it with exactly the same colour earth!

He bought thousands of books in every language about Napoleon, 

everything he could find…. now, there's research and there’s research —

now Kubrick got it to a point where he had a filing cabinet 

full of cards and on these cards were every day Napoleon's Life;

he could pick a card and he would be able to tell you 

where Napoleon was, what he was doing, why he was doing it….

That's the level of research detailed research that he did on Napoleon.

One of Kubrick's challenges in developing the project 

was realising the enormity of his vision 

within the confines of a realistic budget —

Well, he had designed it so that it was reasonably inexpensive considering the fact that it was Napoleon and 

had vast battle scenes and so what Kubrick did, 

he came with this great idea of having paper costumes,

so you would have like 4 000 people in proper costumes,

the people you would be able to see, but in the background 

you would have 10, 20, 100,000 people 

in paper costumes 

and so it would just be a disposable costume; and 

he did camera tests on these to see how they 

would register and they look just the same 

as a normal costume close-up 

“One of the problems with doing Napoleon the way Stanley wanted to 

would be access to these great rooms at Versailles and things like this 

which nobody's going to let you shoot it, and so he realised that 

with the front projection, the technology we had used for 2001 

for the ape sequence he could use that same technology and be able 

to tell the story of Napoleon like it had never been told before 

because you could be there at The Battle of Austerlitz 

you could be there in the hall of mirrors of Versailles 

so he was very excited about that.

In the late 1960s, Kubrick saw an actor he immediately realised 

would be perfect to play his Napoleon :

Jack :

 He called me, like he does many people out of nowhere; 

I didn't believe it was him on the phone and 

as he is to almost all other people very flattering and 

very nice about your work, and you know still….

Being Stanley, he tried to he wanted to make sure 

I could speak other than as A Southerner;

he had seen Easy Rider so he had me read 

something from a play and put it on tape,

make sure I spoke regular English, you know but —

The Problem was that this went on too long and some 

other people had the idea of doing films about Napoleon….

The Film was pulled by MGM because the Rod Steiger movie Waterloo — 

not a bad film at all, was not really as successful 

as the studios had hoped and mgm then didn't want to proceed and the film wasn't green lighted we had an enormous amount of pre-production cost already in it but not the rest and so stanley was very very disappointed he was really quite depressed for a few days but you know life has to go on then the question of course arose well why didn't stanley just do it it's public domain for crisix it's napoleon so mgm can't own napoleon but he could never do it again because if he tried to do it at warner's for example mgm would come after warners and stanley and say hey wait a minute you're infringing upon our story and say no this is another screenplay to sam europe and they'd say yeah but napoleon's napoleon you know you can't get the guy to do it twice and there would be no way because his concept was so brilliant and so much a part of his enthusiasm for doing it that he could not do another version that would be satisfactory to him so it just languished there the thing does strike you is how much Barry Lyndon was to become in a way a summation of of everything he was thinking in in those days,

this very hierarchic form this very slow, 

even adult way of making films,

this long looks at things slow movement…

you know all that stuff that that you can see in scraps in some of these other movies it all comes together in Barry Lyndon. 

Though he would return to Napoleon on occasion in the coming years, 

Kubrick never got the film as close to production as he did 

in the heady days following the release of 2001. 

in the meantime he continued to develop a number of other projects including what he hoped would be the definitive film about world war ii and the holocaust stanley would have loved to make a film about this topic yeah it was an important topic the holocaust and the whole nazi period i 

I'm not sure that even Stanley could tell you 

why he wanted to make a film about 

The Holocaust…

i mean beyond — it's interesting it's dramatic it's shocking it's awful it had always fascinated him i mean what happened in in germany in in the 30s and 40s and this is a kind of theme that sort of also echoed in clockwork orange the culture and civilization doesn't preclude savage irrational behavior he felt that he could make a very important film about the nazis the the whole issue of of that nightmare so he looked around for an existing book and he read a book by an american-based but polish-born writer named louis begley called wartime lies i gathered from what jan harlan told me was that kubrick had always wanted to make a movie about the war in europe and he decided that wartime lies was the book that he wanted to use i have always admired kubrick as a filmmaker just boundlessly so when i was told that it was he who was acquiring the rights i practically jumped up for joy kubrick determined to call his film the aryan papers a reference to the documents sought by jews in occupied countries to avoid internment the theory on which hitler and the nazis proceeded was that there was the aryan race of which they were the splendid examples and non-aryans such as jews were a vermin-like species that as was finally decided that vansay should be exterminated so if you got papers to establish you as a non-jew the point was really to establish you as an aryan airing papers is about a jewish boy and his aunt trying to survive in nazi occupied poland during world war ii it's a film about survival kubrick liked to do films about people in extreme situations people making life and death decisions for the key role of the young boy in his story kubrick chose joseph mazzello fresh off his co-starring role in steven spielberg's jurassic park i think that the first time i remember airing papers being talked about was um on the set of jurassic park what happened was stanley kubrick saw radio flyer which was the movie i did when i was seven my first real big movie and from that he was really interested in me for the role of the aunt uma thurman was an early favorite ultimately however kubrick sets his sights on dutch actress johanna terestea he just rang me up one day and said i'm starting preparation for this film could you come out and do some tests for three or four days so i said yes of course you know what's it about and he said i'll tell you when you get here and i said well who's in it he said a young actress i said what's her name he said i'm not gonna tell you i said okay and i went out there and we did all these tests he wouldn't tell me the name of this girl he just wouldn't tell me i finished up jurassic park and stanley kubrick wanted to meet me i was flown out to meet him i was flown out for my mom to read the script she had read the script and stanley came in and i remember um most of the meeting consisted of him um staring at me he even commented at one point he said um i'm sorry joe don't feel uncomfortable but i'm just i'm just looking at you i'm just looking at your eyes i have to look at your eyes it was really important to him i remember to get a three-year-old that looked like me and so he was looking at me to make sure he got the right person to play me as a as a younger kid meanwhile kubrick and his team were immersed in their research i did a lot of work on that for about 18 months two years i did most of the initial research when it was when stanley had read the story you know tracking down books going to photo libraries this that and the other producer jan harlan made frequent calls to novelist lewis begley compiling the rich tapestry of detail that fed kubrick's creativity kubrick rang up and said there's a song mentioned in chapter six or something what is the song begley he's a very very formal lawyer had to sing the song down the telephone lines so it could be transcribed by kubrick teams were dispatched throughout europe to scout locations we went mainly into czechoslovakia found some wonderful locations a fantastic town on the border with poland that was still bombed it was perfect for bum town and then we went over to our house and it was perfect we found wonderful apartments we found this old army barracks they had an even we had a stage with a dirt floor so we could have built forests and things in there they had offices parade ground you could use it a lot and build streets whatever you know everything we found everything he began researching in denmark went to the danish film institute acquired enormous quantity of films of the period documentaries and dramas started looking for for people to play in the material brought in huge quantities of papers the mayor of arkhus i think wrote him a letter of warm appreciation at the expectation of a lot of work coming to the country little realising that kubrick would never have shot there at all he would have recreated it we were as far as getting permission from the city of bruneau to have the trams from the tram museum on on the street for a weekend to close the center city for a weekend and have nazi flags hanging down the buildings and all this as pre-production dragged on kubrick was in danger of losing his young star the film kept getting pushed back and pushed back and i did another movie called the river wild where they wanted to darken my hair and this is how close we were really doing is that they wanted to darken my hair and somehow his agent got wind of it and told him and he called the production and said you cannot touch joe's hair and so for a while after i was signed to do it there were he there were negotiations between the movies that i was doing and him as with napoleon circumstances beyond his control force kubrick to abandon the aryan papers and move on to other projects schindler's list came out we had a similar topic and warner brothers terry semel and and stanley decided not to come you know a few months or a year after schindler's list with a a similar film we had been burned already in full metal jacket because platoon was ahead of us and it was an excellent film platoon so um and you know normal moviegoers they they don't want to necessarily see two vietnam or two holocaust films in in one season or whatever so that was the reason why it was postponed in fact we got to the point where stanley had to say yes or no to shoot the film suddenly anya his middle daughter got pregnant and i said to phil who i was with that's the end of this film because stanley would go nowhere without christiana christiana would stay with anya so i said we're going to do this film so we know we look but what put it over the edge ironically is that jurassic park came out with jurassic park stanley kubrick saw how technology had advanced and he said well i think i'm going to do ai instead ultimately kubrick turned a.i over to steven spielberg focusing his own energies on eyes wide shut it was during the final stages of post-production on that film that stanley kubrick died on march the 7th 1999 in his passing cinema lost one of its greatest artists and with him the films he might have made you

Desert Voices

You wanted to know how 

I get My Ideas...? By God.

The Whisper Behind You

"Dreams always come from behind You, 

not right between Your Eyes.... 

It sneaks up on You. 

Sometimes a Dream almost whispers,

and I've always said to My Kids, 

The Hardest Thing to 

Listen to Your Instincts

Your Human, personal Intuition.

[it] always whispers, 

it never shouts --

— Steven Spielberg

Caedroia

“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.