What kind of a show you guys putting on here today? You're not interested in armed now? No, look, we're going to do this thing. We're going to have a conversation.
Hey, film Spotters were digging deep into the archive, going way back to episode four nineteen. Michael Phillips joined us for a Sacred Cow conversation about Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which is forty five this year, and we thought it was only fitting because we're talking about Zach Kraiger's weapons, a huge influence on Craiger as a filmmaker. If you google his name, Josh, you will find Kubrick in The Shining mentioned almost in any conversation that this filmmaker has.
And of course when you watch the film, you know that that time two seventeen comes up again and again, And I thought, well, is that the is that the room and the Shining? There has to be some relevance, right, And then I remember me, waight, no, maybe it's just random because the room is two three seven. Well I did a little bit more digging. Two one seven is the book, the Stephen King book The Shining. Turns out two one seven is the room.
There Craiger trying to provey smarter than all of us.
There you go with that one.
Yeah, we didn't play a ton of spot the reference in our review of weapons, we name checked a movie or two, but definitely the Shining is in that mix. And yeah, never a bad time to talk about the Shining. And you know, if you are a member the Film Spotting Family, you have access to our archives, so you could listen to an older show like this any time you want, reviews, top fives, all that good stuff, going
all the way back to two thousand and five. So yeah, archive access, it's just one of the benefits you get as a member of the Film Spotting Family. If you're not a member already, please do consider joining. It keeps us doing this show and you can learn more at Filmspotting Family dot com. From episode four nineteen, then here is that Sacred Cow review of the Shining.
Crab.
Here's Johnny, I'm coming down, come and play with us.
How much does the Shining mess with our heads, Adam and Michael? So much that some thirty years later, a documentary has been made profiling the way fans of the film have been haunted by it over the years. Room two, three, seven, which was recently shown at the Chicago International Film Festival, digs into the various interpretations and conspiracy theories that obsessive viewers have come up with in their attempts to explain
this deeply disturbing film. I wonder if these theories are in some sense of defense mechan a way to process the terror that the movie causes. After all, if it can be reduced to a puzzle that's been solved, the Shining is perhaps less troubling.
Michael.
The last time you were with us, we learned of your love for Jaws, So I know that great white sharks scare you. I'm not sure how you feel, however, about creepy twin girls decomposing bodies in bathtubs or elevators bursting with blood. Did the Shining get to you then in nineteen eighty and does it still have the power to disturb you today?
This is the question. This is the question. It's the essential question.
Say this is the great It's a film. I honestly, Josh, I honestly don't have settled, fixed opinions on a lot of the Kubrick work that post dates two thousand and one. A space honesty, I know the films I absolutely adore of his and seem to get so much out of every new experience with them. They tend to be the They tend to be the period from nineteen fifty six the Killing up through and including two thousand and one.
And I'm much more.
Not ambivalent because he's too he's too distinctive a filmmaker to provoke ambivalence in a viewer.
I think, but I'm much I tend to.
I tend to slip around and change my mind depending on how many years have gone by on almost everything he made since then, up until his UH and including his final film, Eyes White Shot. I I did love going back to the Shining for this show because it had been years and years since I saw it, and just to kind of see and remember what that incredible elegance of those steady cam shots and and that really
that's not a minor issue in this film. It's it's a major issue with so much of the film is spent barreling behind Danny on that big Wheel, which takes you just seeing the big wheel in action on all all through those amazing maze like quarters of the Overloak Hotel.
It's it's it's.
Why a lot of the lot of the film does feel hypnotic because it is visually casting a kind of trance. But I also, Josh, do feel that I haven't changed my opinion in one way in that the common complaint about Nicholson's performance in The Shining that it goes bug House too early, and that you see the documentaries and you read a little more about you know, you know the dozens and dozens of takes that Cubrick was taking, and he tended to I believe, correct me if I'm wrong.
He tended to always select the nuttier, more outsized editions of whatever Nicholson was coming up with, and sometimes he would do align a scene or set a tone in a more sympathetic, comforting way, and Kubrick would never.
Choose that take. It was always the crazier one. Sam at them.
In the same time, he was always trying to get Shelley Duvall to play it a little less nuts. And the film has a very strange tension because really it's not a horror film. I mean, I don't even know what I think of it. Frankly, again, I.
Just saw it, but even after seeing it recently.
Is not a horror film. It is just it's a black comedy about an America, a particularly American kind of family that deserves what's happening to them.
Okay, I know Adam that it terrifies you, at least in references that you've made on the show. We hadn't really dug into it at any point. Is that something that it did for you right away when you first saw it? And when did you first see it? Because nineteen eighty hopefully you were a little young to have seen it then. But I'm assuming this is a tear you've had sent your childhood at some point.
Yeah, it is. My parents, I've said this before on the show. They didn't really stop me from watching anything. I had a TV in my bedroom pretty early. I had HBO pretty early. I was lucky, and so they didn't shield me from watching things like The Shining that I shouldn't have been watching. And I saw some of this stuff.
And how were you then?
I was probably eight or nine or ten when I saw the Terrific Yeah, exactly explained everything it does. But I probably never saw the entire film. I just saw parts of it, partly because I was too terrified to watch the entire film. I don't think I actually saw the film in its entirety until I was in and was going through a little bit of a Kubrick phase, as I think we all went through at some point in our cinematic lives. So this was fun for me
to go back and revisit. And in terms of whether or not it still scares me, it didn't this time, thankfully, because I had my wife sitting next to me, So even though we were sitting bars a part in my basement in the dark, and when those twins come on screen and those strings, that eerie music leaps up on you, I didn't jump out of the couch because my wife was there to protect me, so she kept everything on an even keel, which is great. But I love what
you said about the cinematography. I think you can't help but talk about the film without mentioning John alcott cinematography and the steadycam used. They actually got the guy who invented the steadycam to run the steadycam on this film.
And hypnotic is the right word.
But it's not just in terms of what the steadycam is doing in the movement and how fluid it is. It's also even in I think the dialogue scenes, how he calms the camera down in scenes like the meeting with Olman when he takes the job and has offered the job early in the film, he doesn't do anything
really crazy with the camera at all. It settles into this really simple back and forth shot reverse shot style, the same shots every time that almost luwly you to sleep a little bit, the same way the steady cam does. And the deep focus, of course, here is another fascinating part of the film, and they're using these wide lenses to make the characters look so dwarfed inside the overlook.
But then you realize what he's doing in the close ups where he deliberately tries to get rid of all the deep focus he can, which is pretty normal with a close up anyway, but there's no focus at all, So all you can see in these moments is the face. Those shots that you've see in a lot of Kubrick films are that close up straight on of the face. I love how we get that jexposition of all that deep focus and then no deep focus at all, and
you just look at the face there. So right from that opening helicopter sequence, you know you're in for something really interesting with this film and what the camera is going to do, And I just want to mention that, going back to Nicholson's performance, we could probably spend the whole show just talking about that performance and what we make of it. There's no doubt he goes a little
crazy and he's big right away in this film. But watching it again this time, it occurred to me that there's actually a sense from the very beginning that everything here is preordained, which makes sense when you get to the end of the film. But you think about some of the references that are made early in this film.
There's the Donner party conversation as the family's driving to the overlook, the music that is eerie right from the beginning of the film, with the helicopter sequence, the fact that we learned that the hotel's built on a burial ground, an Indian burial ground, and you even get things like Shelley Duval being shown the freezer and the storage room down in the kitchen as if it's foreshadowing that she's gonna end up using this room later. So there's a
sense that this family's doomed from the very beginning. It's not really about any kind of suspense building on whether or not Jack Nicholson is going to lose his mind. It's just a matter of when and how many casualties they're going to be.
That's funny that you say you watch it in bits and pieces. First, I think I probably did the same thing, catching it on TV maybe or something like that, or turning it off as a kid when I couldn't take it, And I think that probably fed the power of it because this is a very sub liminal movie. You get quick shots of horrifying things, and that's how it works when you sit down and watch it from start to finish, So even watching it in bits, you get a sense
of that before you're ready for the whole thing. My recent watching experience, believe it or not, was in an off season hotel. We were recently in northern Wisconsin on vacation and we put it on in a hotel that thankfully had other guests, but I did think it was a little too close to home for the subject matter. Still terrifying stuff. I mean, this is a really frightening movie, and watching it again, I realized one of the things that's most impressive about it is that it doesn't really
need suspense to terrify you. That's a little bit what you were getting at, Adam, in that it's clear from the beginning this guy's gonna go off his rocker. The family is gonna get it in some way. I guess there is that suspense that, okay, are the mom and kid gonna make it out alive? But Kubrick doesn't really seem to be all that interested in whether or not
they really make it out alive. He feels the need to serve that story, I guess, and I'm sure the studio demanded it, but you get a sense that it's all gonna go really badly here.
Well, and that's part of the joke. I mean, I mean, he's got a pitiless sense of humor. He always has. And and you know, it's not about creating this any
kind of conventional suspense speeds. It's all about, as Adam said, you know what you get visually out of a film like that that has all this sort of wide lens dread in every frame and you don't really know what these details are even adding up to, But you know that heavy, as you say, that sort of heavy methodical back and forth and sort of the simple dialogue scenes There's always been a lot of deliberate sort of a half second or second of dead air around every piece
of dialogue in almost every Kubrick film that just makes you feel like something is amiss, something, And no one was more amused in the most heartless way by banal small talk than Kubrick. You know, when you think of some of the conversations in two thousand and one early on, or that meeting with Barry Nelson as the hotel owner where it just or even just shots of Shelley Duvall and the boy I'm forgetting the bloody like Danny Lloyd.
Of course, mister Danny is sitting in front of the TV, which is always on at the worst moments, while she's smoking like it's nineteen eighty, which it is, and smoking two inches away from him.
My wife commented on that too, It said, hey, it was nineteen eighty.
It is like coffee tea or me with the cigarettes there. I mean, it is very smoking, and Danny is eating the whitest bread whites. It's like a shade of wonderbread that's beyond white, right, it's and this is I think, not to make too much of what's encoded in this film.
At least we will talk about that with the documentary.
But it's that's what's kind of Yankee Kubrick's chain with this material.
It's that it's a way of.
Getting at this family that's already corroded from the inside. We hear that Nichols, and you know, Jack Torrance's character in a drunken rage yanked his son's dislocated.
His sons momentary laps, the momentary.
Lapse of extreme violence which we don't see what we do hear about and in a sort of a weirdly casual.
Way, there isn't really that much violence. I mean, that's another traditional horror tool that he sets aside. He doesn't rely on the suspense, he doesn't rely on that much violence. And yet I count this for me personally as probably the most frightening movie I've seen. It's all about those little It's all about those little subliminal shots of things that don't necessarily even matter for the main narrative at hand.
Like the elements the elevator and also I do elevator.
Things that are just when you look at them in the larger span of the story, they're not really necessary. Yet they are the things that haunt me. And maybe it's because they aren't necessary, you know, they aren't these obvious tools that I'm used to when I'm watching horror films.
Instead, I get these.
Odd images, the twin even just standing there, that I can't quite process or fit into the normal horror trajectory, and so it sets me off a little bit. I don't quite know what to do with them.
Let me say two things. First of all, I've stayed at much worse hotels. Secondly, do you guys both love this film?
I do not.
I'd say I'm pretty close.
Mom is a hard word to use for it. I feel manipulated by it in a way. I admire. Let me put it that way.
Yeah, I kind of love it.
Yeah, I was more intrigued than I remember, because it's not a film I saw more than once or maybe twice, back when I was in college. But it does strike me as awfully minor Kubrick, it does.
It does. I don't know why.
I think it's minor in terms that is, what is he really after here? And maybe that's part of what you're getting at, in the sense that here's someone who's just playing with a horror story that maybe he's not all that interested in I do get a sense of that. Yet at the same time, that doesn't mean he set
his craftsmanship aside. And so all the intricate care that is going into those tracking shots with a big wheel or even the who are at the beginning, it's all to set up the geography of this hotel, and just to admire the amount of care and attention and how it pays off later when we are running through that hotel too, now this time for our lives, and it's very insidious because he's given us so many tours of it with his camera that we think, Okay, we should
know where to go, we know where is a safe place. But then they start running and it happens early on which room two three seven nods too, where Danny is on his big wheel downstairs and without explanation, suddenly he's upstairs. Yeah, And suddenly we become disoriented and we're thrown off because we should know this place but we don't. He's screwing with us again, and that's just impossible not to admire.
I think, though, there is this larger question that we have to ask, which is what is this film about? What do we take away from this film beyond maybe just being scared by it or reflecting on and really admiring the craftsmanship. But one of the things that struck me this time that I certainly didn't notice when I saw it originally back in college for the first time in its entirety, was that this really is a film
about repression. There is this psychological terror I think Kubrick is exploring that can come from someone repressing themselves, from stifling their natural urges and desires. It actually made me think recently of our discussion of The Master, the Paul Thomas Anderson film. I see a little bit of that same kind of broken quality to Jack Torrance as I
do in Freddie Quell. Someone who's kind of haunted by his inability to be the man slash husband slash father he wants to be, or thinks he should be, or think society expects him to be. And so you think about the ways Jack Torrance is repressing himself. We know he can't drink anymore, and later he can't wait to get a drink. He says, I think he'd give his soul to have one drink. He's a writer, but he's blocked. He can't say what he wants to say, he can't
get that out there. And his relationship with his wife, of course, is interesting too, because they don't seem to be that affectionate, they don't seem to be physical in any way with each other. And when Ulman is showing them around early on, when they're getting the tour originally, I love this little throwaway moment where two block blond women, attractive blonde women are checking out and they go by and they say goodbye to him, and of course Jack's the last guy to go, and he has to look
back at it to watch him go. I mean, he notices the blonde women, and of course he notices the naked blonde woman in room two three seven, which seems to be this room where maybe you get to explore those desires, you get to finally let it all out, whatever you're feeling. And I think that the key part for me is that conversation with Grady, who is the waiter I think in the gold room and the actor I had to write his name down, Philip Stone. I think he's so good, he is so fun to watch,
just really relishing every single line. But when he talks to him later in the film, when Jack is trapped. The phrases he uses are really telling. He talks about how Jack is failing to take care of the problem, failing. She seems to have gotten the better of you. She needs a good talking to. It's this constant suggestion that he has to assert himself over her, and he even says at one point, you don't have to rub it in. So I feel like Jack is this character who feels stifled.
He feels like she's largely holding him back, and that's why he really can't abide her then holding his one his one mistake, his one eruption of violence against him, the way he perceives that she does, and that misunderstanding. Remember when she says you did this to him, she thinks that he put his hands on him and choked him. That's really what starts the slide where all the violence in this film comes from.
I think that's all there, and maybe this is what you're getting at, Michael. I think it's there on the surface, but for whatever reason, I don't really feel that the movie cares that much about it or is that invested in it. It's there narratively and to add a little bit of context, but I don't know that we can truly say that's what the movie is about. To me, the movie is about its own technique, and I don't know if you're looking for doesn't I think it might be a pretty shallow movie.
I didn't feel that way done movie.
But possibly a shallow one. And I'm not saying that makes it bad, but that's maybe part of my distance from it. And I don't know if that's where your level of.
Engagement this time through. I thought, okay, what would make this? And I do I was kind of semi entranced by a lot of the thing visually, and that's nothing new for Kubrick, but there's something about the match of that director's meticulously obsessively controlled a visual approach when you match that up with an actor as kind of methodically crazy
as Nicholson. I mean, there's not a lot of surprise in the Nicholson performance, and I find that anytime Nicholson, even more recently, and something is very different is about Schmid when he might more profitably play normalcy or sort of a neutrality and then kind of give you the intimations of the ripples of sort of you know what's going on behind the facade or whatever. He can't convey that because he doesn't have a lot of that in him.
I mean, somebody I forget who was. Stephen King suggested, well, it should have been John Voight, you know, like nineteen eighty era John Voyd, somebody who can kind of start here and then go there. But you know, once he got Nicholson in and certainly didn't hurt. You know, the film was not a big success at the box office, but it's grown in the reputation, like most of kubrick
stuff has grown with the passing years. Whatever one thinks of it, it's once you get Nicholson in there, he responded to Hubrick responded to the more operatic approach, and I just don't know if the film to me is fantastic in those flourishes you mentioned, Josh, just in that image that it comes back to a lot, and I never, without getting lazy, that image of the blood, you know, sort of seeping through these closed elevator doors and then gushing,
you know, with the gallons and gallons. There's only I learned in the making of film that his daughter, Kubrick's daughter made the documentary, that there's really only one actual special effects shot in that film where Nicholson is looking at the model of the maid and then you see two tiny character yeah, and that that was actually you know, two stand ins, real actors shot from a great height in kind of a recreation of the Amazon, and then that super imposing that was madded in, and that that
is a genuinely mysterious moment to really think, Okay, what's going on?
Can he really see them? Is he imagining?
It's like he's the lord of this sea?
I know, but it's not. You don't get a literal explanation. And that's what Kirbric is living for.
He lives for that right.
I'll say this about Nicholson's performance, It's probably the least frightening element to me in the movie. I enjoy it in terms of its comedy, really not bad comedy, but just it gets you laughing, and in that way it maybe releases some tension. But if there was a way for the shining to be scarier, it might be with a different lead actor, because then that whole attack the family sequence, which to me, I start to feel like
I've seen this, you know what, I've seen variations on this. Again, not saying that it's bad or doesn't entirely work, but I wonder if the shining would have been scarier with someone like John Voyd in the lead that took a different task.
This is what cubric makes you, even if you feel a little not dismissive, but more like, Okay, it's a minor work in my view, but even so many of his films provoke enormous objections, and you can kind of have objections to your own objections. Like in other words, Barry Linden is a film that I feel like, like anything, as I say Anything Posts two thousand and one, I'm not even sure where I stand on all these movies anymore. Barry Linden I did see two or three times when
it came out. I was sort of just knocked out by it as a period piece. But at the same time I thought, Okay, any actor in the world would be better than Ryan O'Neil. And I still believe that that was purely for box office insurance, and he can barely get by, I think in that picture. And it's too bad that that film didn't have and essentially more of an Albert Finny level a craftsman in there.
I guess I don't want to dwell on Nicholson too much more.
I think we've covered it, but I do disagree because I think it fits in with how I'm reading the film in terms of this movie and the narrative being one that is preordained and a lot of the dread coming from not just that you know where it's going, but with him being so big and so clearly capable of violence, it then does become this interesting operatic question of, Okay, how big is the carnage going to be? How much
damage is he really going to do? I agree that it would be interesting to see someone like John Voight, someone more subtle, go on more of a progression to that point, but I think it works just as well, or maybe is even more scary because it is so operatic, And just to close one small thing I was saying about his character and this kind of loser character that he seems to be responding to that line about all work and no play that she reads on the typewriter.
If you think about it, though we've always kind of just joked about it, it's become a cliche. We know it's this nursery rhyme kind of line, but it does work in the grand scheme of this film, where he's saying all work and no play makes him a dull boy. This idea that he has to be just a father who has to collect a paycheck, who doesn't get to do the fun things that he wants to do. It is an expression of him being stifled in some way.
So again I'm on board with Nicholson, but I do want to ask you guys about any of the aspects after probably viewing Room two three seven, as you watch the Shining, did you think about some of those things where you really focused in on some minor detail and maybe obsessed over it or tried to make too much of it.
It was hard not to, but I really tried to avoid that, actually, because I didn't want to be caught in that place where the people who are profiled and that documentary are they're trapped by their theories and we'll get.
To that film. Yeah, So yeah, I tried to avoid that.
Well, there were three things that jumped out for me, and the first one is really really minor. I just thought it was kind of a funny joke where he's in the office with Olman and he says, well, I've got a writing project that I'm working on, And of course you think, well, I really hope he knows where he's going with this writing project, because he's going to
be there for five months. So if you're a writer, writing's already hard enough, but if you know where you're going, you have a basic roadmap that could be very productive. He doesn't have a clue what he's doing. And I love the fact that he says he's got this writing project, and then what we learned is he didn't have a story. And Olmen says, well, I've got this little story for you, and it's the story about the gradies what went wrong there?
And you almost have to think, if only Torn's been smart enough to go, well, that's an interesting story, why don't I write about that? I've just written it lived in Yeah, exactly, then he'd have something. But I love the fact you mentioned Michael Danny eating the Wonderbread, Shelley Duval smoking as they're watching TV. They're eating lunch there in that opening sequence, the first time we meet Danny
and Wendy. Do you remember what else Wendy is doing in that scene As she's smoking a cigarette and talking to Dan, she's.
Wearing her watch over the red.
Pull over, which she looks looks interesting.
Psychotic right there, but what is it?
What I noticed was she's reading a book. She's reading a book and it happens to be Catcher in the Rye. And I just love the fact that she's married to a writer or an aspiring writer, and she's a reader. She's clearly a reader because what we also are oppressive and what we also see in the shot is behind Danny is a bookshelf full of books. Keeping with my theory about this pressure on him to be this certain kind of husband or man. She's a reader and he's
a writer. And it also works nicely that it's Catcher in the Rye written by a recluse, a guy who basically shut himself in.
Right. You have to wonder if.
You're like the sixth guy that I know he really should have.
Here's my last one though, and you can keep going.
You can totally scoff at this one, but think about why does Kubrick spend so much time showing Scatman Cruthers, Dick Kaler and the chef show Wendy all the food in the freezer. He spends like five minutes going through the number of ribbis, all the different types of meat that are in the freezer, and I watch it and I was thinking, I think a lot of people wonder this as you watch the shining. What is all that blood in the elevator? What is this supposed to symbolize
in some way? And I'm thinking about all the animals that must have been slaughtered.
Right, just.
What you're saying, not necessarily, but I wonder if there is a little bit of visual playfulness going on, or textual playfulness on Cubuck's part to suggest that think about the number of animals.
Forget the Indians.
That they they've clearly the people who built that territory slaughtered, but then the people they've dug up the bones to build the hotel on that burial ground. But then we've got the animals as well. The sheer quantity of animals that have to be slaughtered to keep that place running.
That's the blood eye it.
I just assumed it was some of those early New Year's Eve parties in the twenties that got a little lot of hands.
Maybe so guy with the rabbit suit we see later? Yeah, what about then, any major aspects of the film. We've covered a few of them. But what about things that maybe clearly didn't work for you? Beyond Nicholson's performance, were there aspects of the film that didn't.
I think a lot of it is hooked up for me with nick questions about the casting of Nicholson and devolve frankly, although right these days, of course, whatever one thinks of that movie, their faces in extremists were either reacting to or causing some horrifying moment of the you know is it's part and parcel of the movie's image, and it's why we we kind of rolls around in our heads even if we don't really know what we of it. I guess I find Kubrick's not I wouldn't say sending up the.
Material, but he it comes close, he looks.
He's not interested in you know? But what is Eyes Wide Shot? What is is that a conventional you know, hinerance to any certainly now I got a huge issue with Eyes Wide Shot that I'm eager to revisit in a few years when I see it again, or maybe sooner. In that I think that story not necessarily with those actors, but that story came from a different period. I think it would have made more sense than a different I
don't know. I just always had these enormous questions with Kubrick in the later stuff about either casting or some decision.
But at the.
Same time you have to admire how how damn far he went with every single choice, often in you know, the direction he always went. But I mean, when you look at the visual quality of the Shining and you have to go straight back to the trenches and pass the glorium.
He was doing amazing.
Things in nineteen fifty seven with the camera. Never a subtle filmmaker in many ways, not a subtle He didn't view humanity or humans in extremists under attack in any particularly subtle way. But he somehow turned these simple parables of good and evil into the stuff of if not necessarily numbers, but it's stuff of the kind of.
Very unsettling dreams. And that's why he's still the filmmakers.
Yeah.
I don't have any major criticisms for the Shining, but with your interpretive skills we've seen on display here, I do want you to explore why do we get so much of Dick hallerin traveling. One of my notes, we get him in Miami on the plane, we get him in the car. I'm surprised if there were computers around we would have gotten him placing his order on experience for his.
Playing tak You're so right. It's one of my notes. That's one of the things I didn't understand about the movie.
It's absurd, it's just misdirection.
It doesn't really detract from the film. But you're right, it's interesting that they show so. And you wonder me if he is trying to make Maybe he's trying to make a sort of ironic joke out of it, because how much time does he devote to seeing scatman Crothers get to the overlook and then once he gets there, he's killed in thirty seconds. It clearly seems to be a joke on his part. But you're right, I don't know why we had to spend that much time with him.
The two things for me, and I'll just quote you directly from my notes as I watched the film, WTF the Dog the Dog? Do you remember the sequence when Wendy's losing her mind and she finally sees the blood come out of the elevators. Is at the end of the film, Danny's being chased by Jack through the maze.
She's looking for them.
In the overlook and she goes upstairs and there's a sequence where a character in a dog out for.
About outfit.
I think it's a dog because I did some Google searching today to be like, there must be something on this. Apparently it's in the book, and it was something Kubrick shot but otherwise didn't explain it at all, except for that one shot where we see a dog seemingly performing a sex act on a man, and that's one of those talking about Yeah, but that's one of those things that completely doesn't fit in with anything else we see
in the movie. And I think that whole sequence with Wendy doesn't really work where things we see the cobwebs. It kind of becomes a little bit too conventionally horror movie there.
It's weird because a lot of it almost seems David lynchian, and he was by by then Lynch had made a racer Head, and you know, I think The Elephant Man came out that same year, and and but but Cubrick's kind of the kind of rhythm he favors as a filmmaker, and and the kind of anal attention to a certain pacing and this methodical vibe. He's always kind of sort of like, you know, playing out. It's the opposite of the kind of really free floating dream imagery that Lynch
is into. So when you when you get a moment like that and the shining, you have this sort of you know of all kind of coming upon this salacious sexual act going on it. It doesn't seem to be coming out of any kind of like subconscious or dream moments. No, you're right, it's a laid out with this kind of ridiculously heavy hand and a very matter of fact you're right, And at the same time it's all part and parcel of Kubrick just as a filmmaker. And I know, I
don't know. I mean, I mean, I don't know. Where do you I want to ask this though, Where do you put it in relation to the films? It's nearest on the timeline, we have Barry Lindon and we have a full metal jacket on the inicide.
But where does that go for you?
Well, I've never seen Barry Linden, so I can't put it overall.
And Kubrick's I'm sorry, I'm leaving.
I would say you should, I don't.
I mean, I would put it at the top, but for different reasons, and the films that I value more like two thousand and one would be way above it. That makes any sense, I don't know.
Get back to me in bonus content. I'll have thought about it a little bit more in terms of where I rank this. I do want to mention one last thing though, that I'm curious how you guys responded to, which is something that I don't even know if I'm
saying it as a criticism. It's more just an open question I have about the film, which is I don't know how I feel about the fact that a major aspect of the plot revolves around Grady, a character who clearly doesn't quote unquote really exist, letting Jack out of the storage room in the basement of the Overlook Hotel. Because if you think about how the film is set up, obviously you have to buy in a little bit too
supernatural things going on. Clearly Danny has the shining and Scatman Cruthers has this ability to shine.
You buy that.
You also can buy very easily that everything that is going on in Jack's head is going on in his head. He's walking around the hotel he thinks he's meeting these characters, but they're not quote unquote really there.
Well, well, is all that cut and dry.
No, I don't think it is. But I think you can go with it if you want to just suspend disbelief so far. You can say, Okay, I get that certain characters have supernatural abilities. I get that this place is haunted.
Bruce, Danny and Room two three seven.
Well, exactly, you're right. So that's one of the things that comes up, and the other one would be him getting let out. Is just it takes it to a plane where a film that's already clearly bizarre and out there and supernatural, it takes it to another level where then these ghosts in this house it's not just haunted, or it's not just a place that that praise on your fragile mind. It can actually cause physical things to happen in the real world, like a ghostly character opening.
Actually, yeah, it's.
Just not completely in keeping maybe with the rest of the film.
It was Adam, why are you so little reminded?
I don't understand what It's a curse.
It's part of my fragile mind, unfortunately, Michael, Mom, Yeah, they really will go at Hotel for the Vader. Sure I do. It'll be a lot of fun.
Yeah, I guess so.
Good timing too, as we recently talked about Jack Nicholson and shared our top five Jack Nicholson scenes. We hope you enjoyed that dip into the film Spotting Archive. A reminder that archive access is just one of the many benefits you get by being a film Spotting Family member, and you can learn more at film spotting family dot com. Thanks for listening.
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