A Sense of Terror: The First Ten Minutes of "The Shining"
It's Halloween season, which is one of my favorite movie times of the year. Not only do I like scary movies, but I'm also someone who tends to be stimulation-oriented, and scary movies – or the best of them, at least – function through stimulation.
That this isn't a groundbreaking observation should be clear from the language we often use to describe the feeling of watching something of this sort: it puts us on "the edge of our seats" or it's "hair-raising" or "spine-tingling." All of these phrases, and many more, are about physicality. Do these movies actually move us forward in our chairs, or cause reactions in our bodies? Sometimes, yes. But the language here is also metaphorical: they at least make it feel as though our bodies are responding.
To a stimulation junkie like me, there's something incredibly rewarding in engaging with things that make me aware of the force of my own physical and psychic reactions. I love roller coasters, and being alone in the wilderness looking at overawing vistas, and sitting in front of screens on which something moving or exciting or terrifying is happening.
In terms of the topic of this journal, I wonder if this kind of stimulation, as basic as it is to cinema, is actually something that doesn't get discussed enough. What are the ways in which movies (or any art, really) actually stimulate us?
Usually, we shorthand this, talking about how a film is "scary" or "funny" as if these were things that occur to everyone in the same way. But they don't. What's amusing to me, you may find inane; what's terrifying to you, I may find comedic. Sure, there are commonalities – who doesn't like the comedy stylings of Dave Chappelle? (That's a joke, of course, for the people who love following contemporary controversies. Or is it?) But we're all individuals, with unique nervous systems and personal histories and cultural referents, and stimulation affects all of us differently.
The flip side of this is, of course, that we can communicate about that stimulation. If you find something scary and I don't, or vice-versa, we can talk about why. And not just talk about it, but understand each other, and learn from the way the other experiences things. Communication of this sort is vital to everything we do – perhaps even to our very existence, for, as Karl Jaspers once noted "the individual cannot become human by himself" – and thus it seems to me that it's worth trying to work through the details of how films affect us, and why.
A great (and seasonally appropriate) candidate for this kind of exploration is The Shining. Like many people, it strikes me as wonderfully terrifying. But I also find that most of the descriptions of why this is fall back into abstraction, or onto relating details about the characters or what happens to them, rather than on what a particular viewer is actually experiencing as they watch.
So I thought I'd try to do that. The film is long and complicated (watch it, if you never have!), so I'll just work through the first ten minutes (or several elements of those ten minutes, because a full and true account of even that much would take far more space than I have here) and explain how they affect me, and perhaps a bit about how they set up the movie as a whole.
Briefly, so that we're all on the same page, the story of the movie goes as follows. There’s a huge old hotel on a mountainside in Colorado called the Overlook. This hotel gets closed down every winter, but they need a caretaker to live there during those months to make sure the place doesn't fall apart.
A writer named Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes the job and brings his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and his son Danny (Danny Lloyd) to the hotel with him for the winter. From the start, there are indications that not everything is right at the Overlook, or with the Torrances. The place is lonely, isolated, and snowbound; a few years ago, one of the winter caretakers went crazy and killed his wife and twin girls, perhaps because of the famed "cabin fever" that can affect people in places like this.
Beyond this, we soon learn that Danny has a gift, which is a kind of extra-sensory perception that manifests itself in an imaginary friend named Tony; the old hotel scares Tony, and thus Danny. As the family is being shown around the place before everyone else leaves, Danny realizes for the first time that he shares this gift with other people; one of them is the Overlook's chef, named Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), who calls this power The Shining. Dick realizes that Danny is terrified of the place, but tells him not to worry, as it can't hurt him.
Unfortunately, Dick's warning is entirely wrong. Under the influence of the Overlook, Jack slowly goes mad as the winter sets in. He interacts with the ghosts of the place – perhaps better understood as the dark spirit of the hotel itself – and eventually tries to murder Wendy and Danny. When Dick, alerted by The Shining, shows up to try to help, Jack kills him with an ax. He then chases Danny into a hedge maze, only to freeze to death when Danny tricks him into getting lost there.
Any plot summary of The Shining will necessarily fail to do it justice. This is primarily, I think, because so much of the film relies on the creation of an almost overwhelming sense of the macabre. This is based on a number of sequences that are as famous as any in the history of horror cinema: Danny riding his three-wheeler through the hotel; Jack breaking down the bathroom door with his ax; the apparitions of the murdered daughters of the other caretaker; the walls of blood rushing out from behind the elevator doors; the woman in the terrifying room 237; the word "murder" scribbled backwards on a door; and many more.
The creation of the filmic texture into which all of this is woven begins with the first frames. Below is the credit sequence of the film, which is comprised of a series of landscape-sized shots of the Torrances driving up to the Overlook for the first time, so that Jack can interview for the job.
There are a number of things that strike me when I watch this sequence. The first is the forward motion. (People who've seen the movie will recognize that this anticipates, from the first shot, so much of the Steadicam work of the rest.) For me, there's something unsettling in the very first cut into the image, in which we find ourselves suddenly rushing forward over a lake. I am put immediately off-balance, or perhaps on edge (physical metaphors, of course) by this jump into motion.
The strange, haunting score plays a huge part in this (it's from Hector Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," arranged and performed by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind) but for me there are several purely visual aspects of the image that stimulate the feelings – apprehension? uneasiness? – that begin here and will be magnified through the course of the film.
The first is the diminution of human existence that begins with the high overhead shots. There's a car below us, but it's tiny, insignificant. The human is dwarfed by the natural, and the natural is in turn made ominous. The landscape is overwhelming, and, beautiful as it is, there's a bleakness in it, an unwelcoming coldness of rock and water and forest and sky. The feeling, for this viewer, is one of moving away from the things of humanity, away from safety, and into a world that is ominous because it's so much larger than the things of the human, here represented by this tiny little yellow car; beyond this, the sense it gives me is of a world that’s indifferent to us…but also one that’s filled with things, or more exactly a something, that is becoming aware of us.
This second feeling comes, I think, simply from the way the camera moves. It tilts to swing past the island in the lake in the first shot. It does not keep the little car at the center of its eye, so to speak; instead, it follows it like a living being, sometimes moving past it (as in the shot when the first credits appear) almost as if it's eager to lead the car to its destination, sometimes forced to take a different route (as when the car moves through the tunnel), and often focused more on the landscape than on the car itself.
This gives me the sensation of something sentient but a non-human. Not the filmmaker, but something else, something that's watching this car, accompanying it, flying above it, already knowing where the car is going (to the hotel in the final shot). And this is unnerving, because I'm used to films being centered on their human characters.
One way to understand this is to think about how this camera work compares to the drone shots in so many contemporary films (my assumption is that the footage in The Shining was captured from a helicopter). Our contemporary drone shots – many of which are similar on the surface – tend to be far steadier, and to employ a much more fixed framing: the camera moves smoothly and keeps the car (or whatever is being filmed) at the center of the image; or perhaps it does a smooth, regular fly-over; in either case, the feeling it instills is a rather mechanical one. What's not present in many of these drone shots, in other words, is the feeling of the presence of some kind of being, the thing that Kubrick intimates from the start.
We then get a title card, followed by the opening of the narrative of the film. This begins with a magnificent dolly shot.
This shot shows Jack walking into the lobby of the hotel (actually on a movie lot in England), inquiring about the interview for the caretaking job, and then moving into the office of the manager.
The first thing that affects me here is the way the camera moves. We pan from left to right while subtly dollying back; we watch as Jack speaks to the woman at the desk and pan from right to left while he walks past us; we then roll into movement, following him into the outer office and almost completely catching up to him as he reaches the doorway of the inner office; there, we move out from behind him, sliding to his left to see into the office with him; finally, we step into the inner office to watch his interaction with the manager and the secretary.
There is no score. The only sounds are dialogue and the background noise of the hotel. Which is to say that the soaring, score-laden opening credits sequence has led us here, from out of that eerie, almost supernatural world into the hotel itself. Watching, I understand that this is the place to which the presence Kubrick created in the opening has led Jack (and us). And yet the camera (or that presence) will not leave us alone; it is not gone, but still with us. The movement here resembles nothing so much as someone standing in the lobby, watching Jack enter, and then following him into the office, stepping to the left to see what he sees in the inner office, and then following him in.
It is, for this viewer at least, an extraordinarily eerie shot, precisely because of its match of almost-human (or extra-human) movement with a rigorous, classical framing. (Notice, for example, the composition of the sequence with the secretary: the manager is framed between Jack and the secretary when he's in the doorway; she is framed between Jack and the manager for the opening bit of dialogue, and then she moves to the left so that the manager is again framed between her and Jack before the fade that takes us out of the scene.) That is to say that, just as in the credit sequence, Kubrick matches a kind of sentient movement with a kind of inhuman (or non-human) visual ordering, a sense that things are just a bit too arranged, a sense that whatever this presence is, it’s larger and colder and more organized than are we.
And this gives me, as I watch, the very clear sensation of humanity being pitted against something scary. Which makes me uneasy, the first pale intimations of fear appearing somewhere in the back of my mind…
The next section, I’ve cut into two pieces. I'll run through the first more briefly, in order to set up what really freaks me out about the second, which is captured in a pair of terrifying shots of Jack.
Much of this first clip is expository. We fade to the exterior of an apartment building. Inside, Wendy and Danny are having lunch; we meet Tony, and find out that he doesn’t want to go to the Overlook. We then cut back to the interview, and the manager gives Jack the rundown of what's going to happen. The hotel is isolated, cut off from civilization by miles of snow-covered roads; it needs some light maintenance if it’s going to survive the winter months. This isn’t difficult work, but it does entail what the manager calls "a tremendous sense of isolation."
It’s in the next few moments that things get interesting.
Here, Jack assures the manager that this kind of isolation is exactly what he's looking for so he can work on his writing project; he also claims that Wendy and Danny will love it. Most importantly, the manager tells Jack the story of Charles Grady (who will become known as Delbert Grady, later in the film), the previous caretaker who killed his family with the ax.
I find all of this deeply unnerving, not because it's scary in itself (although it's a great, creepy setup) but because it so clearly presages what’s to come. We know Danny is apprehensive about going to the Overlook, and Jack's strange grinning certainty that Danny and Wendy are going to love it there – combined with the descriptions of cabin fever, isolation, and the killings – are a clear indicator that they are not going to love it at all, and that these horrible things are exactly what’s waiting for them.
(As an extended aside, a great deal can and has been written about Nicholson's performance in the film. I find it so deliciously unhinged that I never believe Jack, Wendy and Danny are anything like a stable family, even at the beginning. This is, in turn, what lies, I think, at the heart of Kubrick and Duvall's decision to make her character so irritating, or at least irritatingly vulnerable, throughout. She is, importantly, not a weak character: she gets the best of Jack literally every time they have a physical confrontation: knocking him down the stairs with the baseball bat, locking him in the walk-in dry storage room, and fighting him off with a knife when he tries to break down the bathroom door with the ax. But she is played as vulnerable to the point of being submissively needy; exactly the kind of character who would end up in a relationship with someone who is cruel, alcoholic, and physically abusive.)
So the fear in this scene, for this viewer, comes from the fact that the film tells us exactly where it's going. There’s a sense of predestination in the dialogue and construction of these sequences that exactly matches the sensation of the eerie, malevolent, more-than-human presence which Kubrick has intimated with his camera work.
But where this all comes to a head for me are a pair of reaction shots of Jack during the manager's description of the "tragedy we had up here in 1970."
This sequence begins when the manager asks if anyone mentioned anything to Jack about this, and Jack responds "I don't believe they did." We then cut to a shot of the third man in the room (we've only been seeing one-shots, in which each man is alone in the frame, for several minutes now); this man is watching, dead-faced, presumably to see what Jack's reaction to this "tragedy" is going to be. This shot cues us, as well, to be interested in Jack's reaction.
The manager goes on to talk about Charles Grady being hired, noting that (just like Jack, presumably) Grady seemed like a "completely normal individual." But, he continues, Grady must have suffered some sort of a breakdown, because he "killed his family with an ax." At this line, we cut back to a shot of Jack, and hold on him while the manager describes what Grady did with his family after he killed them, and how he then killed himself.
Jack has been marked from the beginning of the his appearance in the film by the kind of self-aware but on-the-edge-of-something-strange animation that Nicholson is famous for. He smiles and nods and wrinkles his forehead and gives us a panoply of expressions. But as the manager has begun to talk about the hotel, and then specifically about Grady, all the reaction, all the animation, has drained from Jack's face.
He is, perhaps, simply listening intently. But the stillness here, counterpointing all the motion of camera and character in the film to this point, and reflected in the very similar shot of the third man waiting for Jack’s reaction, is striking. We have been cued by that other shot to be curious about Jack's reaction to this story, and what we get is a kind of strange internality. A blankness.
We cut back to the manager while he talks about the police speculating that it must have been cabin fever, and then cut back to Jack while the manager ends this thought. This second shot of Jack is different. He seems to be leaned ever so slightly back in his chair, his mouth is slightly open, and the look in his eyes, to this viewer at least, reads as falling somewhere between fear and recognition.
As the manager ends his recitation, Jack nods slightly, and then almost seems to rouse himself, or to come back from somewhere, and says, "Well, it is, ah, quite a story." Indeed it is, and indeed it will be. But what strikes me every time I watch this sequence is the place I denoted as "somewhere" two sentences ago.
Where has Jack's mind been? What has his mind's eye seen? And if I'm right that something has been keyed in him by the manager's tale, then what is that something? My mind goes directly and inevitably to these questions (or, more exactly, while I'm watching, a kind of inarticulate sense of these questions), and my recognition that Jack himself is recognizing something – particularly because I know it's there but do not quite know what it is – holds real creeping tendrils of terror.
The working out of these questions (feelings), or the continuous extension of them, is what the movie takes us through in its next two hours. But at least some of the major elements of the way it makes me afraid have already been unearthed here at the beginning: the dialogue and cutting between Jack's sequence and that of Wendy and Danny have prefigured what’s to come in the plot; the camera work from the credits and the office sequence have intimated that there is a kind of presence at work, something exterior to our puny little daily affairs and deadly to them; and then this has been matched, in these shots of Jack's face, with the intimation that this thing, whatever it is (and it’s nothing so simple as "evil," whatever that strange word means), already exists in Jack in some way, or at least already finds resonance in him, is perhaps even in some awful way attractive to him.
Ultimately, this ties to one of the deepest feelings The Shining instills in me throughout: a chilling horror at the notion of this external, extra-human thing finding a willing receptacle in a very human body.
(As another aside, one way to understand the film in this regard is as a story of descent: the next time you watch it, attend to the way Kubrick shows us his spaces – the hotel interiors, the hedge maze, the dry storage room, the bar. He moves us through each of them at least twice, first setting them up as ordinary, and then revealing them as threatening. Which is to say that even the location, like Jack, changes over the course of the film, moving from the normal to the macabre. It, and them, and we, are being sucked down into something, into some other realm. A descent, then, but a descent into what? Into exactly, I think, what has been almost entirely intimated by the opening ten minutes.)
This thing, or presence, as I’ve been calling it, this great powerful malignancy, is created in part by the austere remove of Kubrick's film technique, for which he is so famous. It’s animated but cold, sentient but other. And it can in some way enter us and possess us. Not because, or not simply because, of its power. But perhaps because when we look into the place inside us that Jack is looking into in that opening sequence, we find it already lurking there. Which is to say that it’s both otherworldly and human, both entirely supernatural and nothing more than a crazed alcoholic suffering from cabin fever.
Or at least that's the way the opening few minutes of the film affect me, as closely as I can get it into language.
Happy Halloween.
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