The first time I watched The Shining was after watching Kubrick's sci-fi trilogy. Compared to Dr. Strangelove's perfect satire, the era of Space Odyssey, and the evil beauty of a clockwork orange, The Shining did not get it. There were too many evaluations about film aesthetics, but at that time it was often regarded as a commercial success and one of the representative works of horror film history. However, since it is Kubrick's work, it cannot be just a horror movie.
When I first watched The Shining, I took the experience of watching Kubrick films in the past and paid more attention to the pictures and details, and only saw hints of the Native American Holocaust. Hotels built on Aboriginal mass graves, and a drunk (hallucinating) Jack's "confession" that disdains people of color are the most obvious cues.
The image of the blood gushing from the elevator appeared again and again. The first time it appeared, it only seemed like a horrible image. However, with the ingenious symbols and hints of details, each blood brought a new meaning, even not only It is the blood of the buried natives. The Aboriginal decorations and hanging paintings scattered around the hotel, painted with Aboriginal calumet flour, did not appear by accident. After being surprised to discover these details, The Shining has become a completely new work. This is also quite characteristic of Kubrick. His films are always able to integrate various concepts and relationships that seem to be unrelated at multiple levels. It is always very important to analyze Kubrick's films. It's fun, you can watch it over and over again, and each time there are new discoveries and new concepts.
The documentary "Room 237" about The Shining gathered a group of veteran Kubrick fans with various explanations and speculations about the Shining, although the proposals are unrealistic, believe it or not, as a reference book for watching The Shining Actually quite useful. For example, the aforementioned Native American symbols, Nazi symbols everywhere and the number 42 in 1942, which represents the Holocaust, suggest room 237 where the moon landing is fake. The seemingly chaotic speculation on the theme of The Shining makes one have to wonder if this is the same movie, and what exactly is "The Shining"?
key words: exploitation and monarchy
Where did the blood spilling from the elevator come from? The most obvious explanation is the Aboriginal people buried under the hotel, but there is more to it. It can actually represent all the blood exploited behind the vanity of civilization, the "Shining" capable person killed by Jack, a black man. In the original book, Jack's wife, who was blond, has also been changed to black and brown hair that looks like a non-white race. The bartender in Jack's fantasy also looks like a different color, and Kubrick's carefully arranged abler typewriter, German Nazis The cold-blooded machine used in the period to make lists of Jews, at first glance unrelated elements, actually point in one direction, that is, historical glory and economic prosperity are almost inseparable from the exploitation of vulnerable groups. And relatively exploitative, the concept of "monarchy" also runs through the whole film. In fact, apart from The Shining, many of Kubrick's films involve the "monarchy", and in The Shining, the hotel owner dressed like Kennedy and his The eagle on the desk continues Kubrick's dark sense of humour and satirizes the modern social structure that is dressed in sugar-coated cannonballs.
Key words: Family and group
"The Shining" is not just a prying into political history or American history, it actually has a commonality of cosmic laws. Jack's family is actually a microcosm of the human group structure, or conversely, such a ubiquitous family constitutes the existing social structure. Jack is the typical "ordinary person", ordinary and even boring. He is exploited by the "monarch", and for a reliable salary, he guards the hotel that is closed in the winter and has happened. However, because he is a white male, he has " opportunity for exploitation". All his hotel care work is done by his wife Wendy, while he himself has a typical mortal dream, expecting himself to be able to turn over. His violence against his wife and children, and his violence against blacks in the end, are all manifestations of the exploitation of vulnerable groups. However, in the end, Jack is just a "tauren" kept in captivity by the "monarch", and he can only wander around in the labyrinth forever. And people like Jack exist among most people. They tacitly endure and are accustomed to distorted values. When they become slaves, they enslave others without any sense of guilt.
key words: dream interpretation and illusion
Among the various analyses of The Shining, especially in Room 237, I think the best concept is to see "The Shining" as a huge "dream", a world soul, a human community brain nightmare. Scholars usually think that the function of dreaming is to extract, arrange and integrate all previous experiences, and transform them into the plot of the dream to examine whether there are common rules, such as how to avoid similar crises and so on. Kubrick is a supporter of Freud's theory, and he also used Freud's philosophical theory and dream analysis in many places in The Shining.
Among them, what happened in room 237 is the best example. Jack saw the beautiful woman in the bathroom of 237, but suddenly turned into a grandmother whose body had already decayed. For Jack's son Danny, the Oedipus complex can only be achieved through the "grandmother". Being Jack's mother can be said to control Jack's "superego", which makes Jack unable to make "extraordinary actions". "The behavior coincides with the "extraordinary" abuse of the son implied in the film. "Illusion" is also an indispensable element in dreams.
There are also many irrational and deliberately arranged "fakes" in The Shining. For example, Danny's honeycomb carpet, which symbolizes group order, changes direction before entering room 237, and Danny's Apollo 11 sweater and the number symbolizing the moon. Although 237 seems to be a satire on the false moon landing, it also implies that what was found in Room 237 is also a false one. In addition, Kubrick cleverly used the lens of tracking Danny to create an illusion of the structure of the hotel, which made people have a distorted and wrong concept of the structure in the hotel, and also turned the whole building into a labyrinth-like device. . The strange windows and light in the manager's room, the funny pig-headed man's behavior in the guest room, and the scenes and skeletons that suddenly seem like B-level horror movies are all subtly out of touch with reality, but these illusions are also the key to the dream. .
As mentioned above, dreams are trying to summarize past experiences and predict the future. Although the world recreated in dreams is based on real memories, it is strangely unreasonable and surreal, and these places often imply danger. place. In the labyrinth of finding answers, there are always traps, "The Shining", perhaps the ability to spy on the dream that is common to all things. This huge nightmare accumulated by history has staged the world's repeated tragedies. Human beings have repeatedly committed Sin, and to escape from the nightmare, you can only find and face the "truth" that is ignored in reality.
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