The Family of Man

by Bill Blakemore

Fans found it surprising in 1980 when Kubrick turned out a movie that was apparently no more than a horror film. The action took place at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado, where the winter caretaker, a chilling Jack Nicholson, became progressively madder and tried to murder his wife and his telepathic son. But The Shining is not really about the murders at the Overlook Hotel. It is about the murder of a race -- the race of Native Americans -- and the consequences of that murder.

The Calumet Connection

If you are skeptical about this, consider the Calumet baking powder cans with their Indian chief logo that Kubrick placed carefully in the two food-locker scenes. (A calumet is a peace pipe.) Consider the Indian motifs that decorate the hotel, and the way they serve as background in many of the key scenes. Consider the insertion of two lines, early in the film, describing how the hotel was built on an Indian burial ground. These are "confirmers" such as puzzle-makers often use to tell you you're on the right track. The Shining is also explicitly about America's general inability to admit to the gravity of the genocide of the Indians -- or, more exactly, its ability to "overlook" that genocide. Not only is the site called the Overlook Hotel with its Overlook Maze, but one of the key scenes takes place at the July 4th Ball. That date, too, has particular relevance to American Indians. That's why Kubrick made a movie in which the American audience sees signs of Indians in almost every frame, yet never really sees what the movie's about. The film's very relationship to its audience is thus part of the mirror that this movie full of mirrors holds up to the nature of its audience.

Bloody Empire

The film is about how the all-male British military establishment, itself forged in bloody empire-building, passed on to its off-spring continental empire, the United States, certain timeworn army-building methods, including separating weak males from the balancing influence of their more sensitive womenfolk and children. The Shining is also about America's current racism, particularly against blacks. Stuart Ullman tells the caretaker's wife Wendy in the only lines in the film in which the Indians are mentioned. 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." This bit of dialogue does not appear in Stephen King's novel The Shining. The first and most frequently seen of the film's very real American "ghosts" is the flooding river of blood that wells out of the elevator shaft, which presumably sinks into the Indian burial ground itself. The blood squeezes out in spite of the fact that the red doors are kept firmly shut within their surrounding Indian artwork embellished frames. We never hear the rushing blood. It is a mute nightmare. It is the blood upon which this nation, like most nations, was built, as was the Overlook Hotel.

No Actual Indians

Indian artwork appear throughout the movie in wall hangings, carpets, architectural details and even the Colorado state flag. Yet we never meet an actual Indian. But we do get to know, and like, and then see murdered, a powerful black character, Chef Hallorann -- the only person to die in the film other that the protagonist, villain and victim, Jack. The murdered black man lies across a large Indian design on the floor -- victim of similar racist violence. Kubrick carefully controls every aspect of his films' releases, including the publicity. The posters for The Shining that were used in Europe read across the top, "The wave of terror which swept across America," and centered below that, the two word "is here." At first glance this seemed to be a poster bragging about the film's effect on America. But the film wasn't out yet when the posters first appeared. The wave of terror that swept across America was the white man. As manager Ullman says in the opening interview, after telling Jack of the horrible murders that took place earlier in the Overlook, "It's still hard for me to believe it actually happened here, but it did." The type of people who partied in the Overlook included, as Ullman tells Jack and Wendy, "four presidents, movie stars." And when the impressed Wendy asks, "Royalty?" Ullman replies simply, "All the best people." King's novel has nothing to do with any of these themes. As he has with other books that gave their titles to his movies, Kubrick used the general setting and some of the elements of King's novel, while drastically altering other elements and ignoring much of it, to suit the needs of the multi-film oeuvre about mankind's inhumanity to man that he's been making at least since Dr. Strangelove.

Visual Puzzle

As with some of his other movies, Kubrick ends The Shining with a powerful visual puzzle that forces the audience to leave the theater asking, "What was that all about?" The Shining ends with an extremely long camera shot moving down a hallway in the Overlook, reaching eventually the central photo among 21 photos on the wall. The caption reads: "Overlook Hotel-July 4th Ball-1921." The answer to this puzzle, which is a master key to unlocking the whole movie, is that most Americans overlook the fact that July Fourth was no ball, nor any kind of Independence day, for native Americans; that the weak American villain of the film is the re-embodiment of the American men who massacred the Indians in earlier years; that Kubrick is examining and reflecting on a problem that cuts through the decades and centuries.

Sound of Moviegoers

And in a final stroke of brilliance, Kubrick physically melds the movie audience leaving his film with the ghostly revelers in the photograph. As the credits roll, the soundtrack ends, and we hear the 1920s audience applaud, and then the gabble of that audience talking among themselves -- the same sound the crowd of moviegoers itself is probably making as it leaves the theater. It is the sound of people moving out of one stage of consciousness into another. The moviegoers are largely unaware of this soundtrack, and this reflects their unawareness that they've just seen a movie about themselves, about what people like them have done to the American Indian and to others. Thus to its very last foot, this film is trying to break through the complacency of its audience, to tell it, "You were, are, the people at the Overlook Ball." The opening music, over the traveling aerial shots of a tiny yellow Volkswagon penetrating the magnificent American wilderness, is the "Dies Irae". At the end of the movie, in the climactic chase in the Overlook Maze, the moral maze of America and of all mankind in which we are chased by the sins of our fathers ("Danny, I'm coming. You can't get away. I'm right behind you"), the little boy Danny escapes by retracing his own steps (an old Indian trick) and letting his father blunder past.

Maze and Hotel

Kubrick carefully equates the Overlook Maze with the Overlook Hotel, and both with the American continent. Chef Hallorann emphasizes to Wendy the size and abundance of the kitchens, remarks upon the extraordinary elbow room (so attractive to early settlers) and begins his long catalog of its storerooms' wealth with those most American of items: rib roast, hamburger and turkey. The Calumet baking powder can first appears during Hallorann's tour of the dairy goods storage locker. In a moment of cinematic beauty, we are looking up at Hallorann from Danny's point of view. As Hallorann tells Wendy about the riches of that locker, his voice fades as he turns to look down at Danny and, while his lips are still moving with words of the abundant supplies, Danny hears the first telepathic "shining" from Hallorann's head as he says, "How'd you like some ice cream, Doc?" Visible right behind Hallorann's head in that shot, on the shelf, is one can of Calumet baking powder. This approach from the open, honest and charismatic Hallorann to the brilliant young Danny is an honest treaty, and Danny will indeed get his ice cream in the very next scene.

The other appearance of the Calumet baking cans is in the scene where Jack, locked in the same dry-goods locker by his terrified wife, is talking through the door to the very British voice of ghost Grady. Grady speaking on behalf of the never identified "we," who seem to be powerful people, is shaming Jack into trying to kill his wife and son. ("I and others have come to believe that your heart is not in this, that you haven't the belly for it." To which Jack replies, "Just give me one more chance to prove it, Mr. Grady.") Visible just behind Jack's head as he talks with Grady is a shelf piled with many Calumet baking powder cans, none of them straight on, none easy to read. These are the many false treaties, revoked in bloody massacre, that the U.S. government gave the Indians, and that are symbolically represented in this movie by Jack's rampage to kill his own family -- the act to which Grady is goading Jack in this scene. Nor is the treaty between Grady and Jack any less dishonest. For Jack will get no reward for doing Grady's bidding, but rather will reap insanity and death.

Weak Males

Kubrick has sought to expose in several of his movies before this one the delusionary tricks by which big powers get weak males to do brutal and ultimately self-destructive battle. We never see ghost Grady in this scene, but if we're wondering whether the voice of Grady is just in Jack's head or comes from the "real" ghost who can do real damage, we are chillingly convinced when we hear the pin being pulled out on the outside latch of the locker door. All ghosts in this movie are real horrors in America today, and indeed in most cultures present and past. The second set of ghosts seen in the movie is that of the British twin girls -- Grady's murdered daughters, alike but not quite alike. The represent, quite simply, duplicity, and not only the duplicity of the broken treaties with the Indians. Only young Danny sees these twins; children have a sensitivity to duplicity in the adult world around them. Kubrick is examining in this movie not only the duplicity of individuals, but of whole societies that manage to commit atrocities and then carry on as though nothing were wrong. That's why there have been so many murders over the years at the Overlook; man keeps killing his own family and forgetting about it, and then doing it again. This is why, too, Jack has such a powerful sense of deja vu when he arrives at the Overlook, as though "I'd been here before." Later Grady tells him, "You are the caretaker (who murdered his children). You've always been the caretaker." ("Born to kill" perhaps, as the ads for Full Metal Jacket proclaim?) Kubrick is not a moralist. He's an artist, a great one, and along with the greatest artists he is holding the mirror up to nature, not judging it. Though he has made here a movie about the arrival of Old World evils in America, he is exploring most specifically an old question: Why do humans constantly perpetuate such "inhumanity" against humans? That family is the family of man.