Film Analysis: The Shining

In the horror film, The Shining, Stanley Kubrick distorts time through thematic and stylistic motifs. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) and his family, Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and Danny (Danny Lloyd), are sent to maintain the Overlook Hotel over the harsh winter months. As time becomes more abstract, paranormal events within the hotel gradually develop. Through the use of time cards and body language Kubrick distorts time that ultimately serves to explain the uncanny ending.

Kubrick uses time cards to separate the scenes in The Shining, but also to distort time. At first the time cards are extremely specific (“The Interview”), but later, the time cards become broad (“Tuesday”). Which Tuesday in which month is never explained or developed and is deliberately left ambiguous. The more and more time broadens, paranormal happenings increasingly occur. As time broadens, so does the scope of the Overlook Hotel’s history. The Overlook becomes the centripetal of the past (the Grady family) and the present (the Torrance family). This allows Grady and Jack to meet.

As Jack submits to the will of the sadistic hotel, he is formally encountered by Delbert Grady (Philip Stone) in a minimalist bathroom. Jack is hesitant and cautious as he asks Grady if he “was once the caretaker here”. Grady disagrees and explains that to Jack that “you are the caretaker. You have always been the caretaker.” Time freezes as the two stare at each other; their bodies stiff and paralyzed. Time has frozen so that the torch can be past from Grady to Jack. Jack is given his instructions and “responsibilities to his employers (the Hotel)” to carry on the legacy by killing his family.

The frozen body language is repeated again at the end of the film. Jack chases Danny with an axe in the garden maze during a violent blizzard. Jack eventually loses track of Danny and is engulfed in the onslaught of snow. Jack dies and the next day is found literally frozen in place underneath a bevy of snow. His eyes are rolled up and his face is stiff as a board. This shot is juxtaposed with a truck-in shot of an uncanny photo taken of Jack at a 1921 party. As Delbert explains, Jack has always been in the Overlook Hotel. Jack had lived in the 1920’s, died in the 1920’s and reborn again in the present to continue the legacy, but the reincarnated Jack had failed in his duties to kill his family. As punishment Jack and his legacy are now frozen in time in a picture. A snap shot of Jack is all that remains; a frozen vestige of what once was.

Stanley Kubrick distorts time in The Shining by using elements such as the time cards and body language. From the gradual broadness of the time cards to the stiff body language of Jack, time is left ambiguous in order to converge the past and present. Ironically the ambiguity of time serves to develop a specific plot. It is in the subtleties in the film that must be found in order to make sense of The Shining and all Kubrick is asking is a moment of the audience’s time to make these resolutions.