Few films have been pored over in such painstaking detail as Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece The Shining.
First released 40 years ago today, perhaps it’s no surprise that a piece of work so packed with ambiguities, strangeness and mystifying eccentricities should still be provoking such fervent discussions between fans.
The Shining is ostensibly about the plight of the Torrance family, led by Jack Nicholson’s troubled, alcoholic writer Jack, who moves into the Overlook Hotel. A place with dark history, soon the presence of evil apparitions lead him to drift into insanity and threaten his wife and son.
It’s largely down to Kubrick himself that theories surrounding the film’s meaning have persisted for so long. The filmmaker never left things to chance, often running scenes dozens of times to capture the perfect take. His desire for control over every aspect of his productions went far beyond the foreground, with background details often holding just as much significance as the action taking place in front of them. His obsession, it seems, has continued to rub off on fans over the years.
The film’s structure is at times as baffling as the layout of the labyrinthian Overlook Hotel, full of strange narrative strands that lead off to nowhere like dimly-lit corridors. The dreamlike – or nightmarish – quality of the whole movie adds surreal layers to the viewing experience, too. It’s enigmatic so much as it is a glorious, compelling mess, and it's these intriguing loose ends that have become the unsolved mysteries at the heart of the film.
There are so many different interpretations of The Shining out there that reading on the subject is the equivalent of journeying down the rabbit hole, uncovering all kinds of strange insights. In fact, there’s a whole documentary dedicated to these interpretations, called Room 237. It's been a compelling, baffling four decades of theories, in other words.
It’s an apology for faking the moon landings
Perhaps the most popular theory is one that claims The Shining is Kubrick’s elaborate apology for collaborating with the US government to fake the moon landings – it's long been claimed Kubrick mocked up footage of the Apollo 11 mission landing on the moon while he was working on 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There are some fascinating references to the mission itself scattered inside the film itself. In the scene where young protagonist Danny sees a tennis ball mysteriously roll towards him seemingly from nowhere, he’s wearing a jumper with a design of the Apollo 11 rocket upon it. There’s also boxes of Tang, a popular food among astronauts, seen on the shelves in the Overlook pantry.
There’s more speculation on the subject, too. Room 237, the ominous location so central to the action, was originally Room 217 in Stephen King’s book. It was one of the many things the director changed about the source material, with some suggesting that it’s a hidden reference to the distance between the earth and the moon, which is around 237,000 miles.
Rather than any sort of admission, of course, it’s much more likely that Kubrick’s way of laughing at the theorists and giving them more "evidence" to pore over. The overt references are intriguing nonetheless.
It’s about the plight of Native Americans
It’s no secret that the film is at least loosely connected to the displacement of Native Americans – we’re even told during one scene that the Overlook Hotel is built on an ancient burial ground.
Hotel manager Stuart Ullman says: “The site is supposed to be located on an Indian burial ground, and I believe they actually had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it.” It’s a throwaway line in the film, but a development many fans believe could be behind the strange circumstances and ghostly apparitions seen inside the hotel.
It’s the most obvious reference to Native American history in the movie, but not the only one. We see tribal art hung on the walls of the hotel as well as a number of references to the Calumet Baking Powder Company, with cans lining the pantry featuring the company’s logo – a Native American in a headdress.
The reading of the film as a parable for the mistreatment of Native Americans took prominence in a 1987 article titled Kubrick’s Shining Secret, written by The Washington Post’s Bill Blakemore. In that piece, the journalist set out a theory that the references had a profound deeper meaning and even argued that the name of the Overlook Hotel was a dig at the overlooked nature of their history. It feels like a jump to put these things together, but with direct and indirect references throughout, it’s not hard to see how some fans could see these elements of the movie as having greater significance.
It’s a parable for Theseus and the Minotaur
There are essentially two Shinings – the Kubrick version and the Stephen King version. The director made many alterations to the subject material which plenty of fans took against, and led King himself to publicly criticise the adaptation.
One of the most notable additions made by Kubrick is the labyrinth maze in the grounds of the Overlook, in which the final chase sequence of the movie takes place. It’s this addition that led fans to speculate that the movie version is a take on the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. The Minotaur in this case is of course Jack – the bull-like figure who meets his grisly fate inside the maze itself. As a visual reference and allusion to an ancient myth, this is one we can get on board with.
It’s about the holocaust
Kubrick had been working on a project known as the Aryan Papers in the mid to late 70s, which was intended to be a sprawling and typically ambitious analysis of the Holocaust, seen through the eyes of one individual person. The film was never made, with Kubrick’s wife claiming that working on the project had left him depressed. There are, however, fans who claim that the Shining is in some way concerned with Nazism and the Holocaust.
There are repeated inclusions of the number 42, which people have claimed is a reference to 1942, the year the Nazi party initiated the Final Solution. It’s seen on Danny’s shirt sleeve, it’s in the title of the film that Danny and Wendy watch (The Summer of ’42) and there are supposedly 42 cars seen in the Outlook’s car park. Tenuously, it’s also the number you achieve if you multiply the individual numbers in Room 237.
Jack’s famous typewriter, on which we see him type out the words “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over, is a German model – an Adler Universal 39 typewriter, which has fuelled speculation on the subject as well, with some drawing parallels between Jack and the architects of the greatest atrocity of the 21st century. It is of course possible that all of the above claims are true to some degree, and the film is a reflection of a vast number of different themes, however oblique. But actually about the Holocaust? We're not convinced.
The film is meant to be viewed backwards and forwards simultaneously
One of the most abstract interpretations to arise from Room 237 is that the "Kubrick Code", the so-called key which reveals the hidden meanings in the film, can only be unlocked by playing the film both forwards and backwards simultaneously, with the images laid on top of one another.
It achieves a strange, trippy effect, and it certainly adds an even ghostlier tone, especially when the evil twins who appear sporadically during the film are overlaid over Jack’s face. If anything it highlights Kubrick’s use of symmetry in the film and masterful cinematography, creating an experience entirely of its own. But does it reveal any hidden meanings? Not that we noticed.
Kubrick’s face in the clouds
This is where things start to get even more abstract. As put forward in the documentary Room 237, some fans claim to be able to see the face of Stanley Kubrick in the clouds at the very beginning of the film as the Torrance family made their ominous journey up the winding roads towards the Overlook.
Plenty of directors like to make cameos in their own films – Alfred Hitchcock being perhaps the most famous example – but it would be a strangely narcissistic move from the director to go to the trouble of adding his own face in post production. Having said that, is there what looks like a vague face-shaped cloud on the inside left of the picture? No, surely not…
