Kubrick's THE SHINING

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THE SHINING forces me to wonder why a film so well-directed, so splendidly-photographed, should fail so thoroughly to scare me.

I could blame the source, a book that did nothing for me at all, but this would be unfair to a director as transformative as Kubrick. Like Tarkovsky, Bergman, and Lynch, Kubrick had his own perspective on the world, and his films owe more to that perspective than they do to any adapted text.

But unlike these other directors, Kubrick seemed to lack any strong sense of the non-rational. He was always good with the horrors of misapplied rationalism, and so we have the trial in PATHS OF GLORY, the megadeath plans in DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, the failure of Hal 9000 to understand the need for human beings on a human mission. In a Kubrick film, tools of reason are often put to work on goals unreasonable.

The non-rational demands different methods. To create atmosphere and anxiety in a dreamlike story, directors can manage well without any belief in the supernatural, but they do need to accept -- and perhaps even to fear -- the subconscious. IVAN'S CHILDHOOD, SOLARIS, THE MIRROR, THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, THE SILENCE, HOUR OF THE WOLF, PERSONA, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, INLAND EMPIRE: these are nightmare films, and they speak directly to those functions of our brains that explore nightmares. Kubrick seemed more at home with fears of rationality gone cold: the military industrial complex in PATHS OF GLORY, DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, and FULL METAL JACKET; the manipulative state in CLOCKWORK ORANGE; the polite society unable to accept ordinary human strangeness in BARRY LYNDON; the tool that develops a will of its own beyond human concerns in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. These are nightmares of the conscious mind.

For this reason, the breakdown of Jack Torrance begins to seem as ridiculous and stylized as the antics of the cartoon characters who lurk at the margins of this film. Leering, rolling his eyes, lolling his tongue, he becomes Wile E. Coyote, and like the Coyote, he fails because of his own bull-headed stupidity. I, for one, have never been afraid of Wile E., neither in the Road Runner films, nor in THE SHINING.

This overblown, cartoonish view of madness becomes all the more unfortunate to me, when I consider the one moment of THE SHINING that left me unsettled. In the sequence where Danny sneaks up to the family apartment to get his toy fire engine, only to find his father seated on the bed and staring at winter light, Jack Torrance is calm and loving and, in his words, at least, reasonable -- yet I can see an odd glint in his eyes that hits me in places where his later bellows and prancing fail to reach. And the frozen alarm in Danny's eye tells me everything I need to know about his response to this calm and loving father.