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ART OF THE GAMES ROOM
1976 OLYMPICS ⎔ COWBOY ⎔ DENVER STOCK SHOW ⎔ JACKSON HOLE ⎔ MYSTERIES ⎔ NATIONAL WESTERN STOCK SHOW ⎔ SKI BROADMOOR ⎔ STEAMBOAT SKI POSTER ⎔ STEAMBOAT SPRINGS ⎔ VAIL LAST RUN
APPEARANCE
Seen behind the twins in the games room, in two shots, across 23 seconds (21:47-21:53 + 21:57-22:10).
IDENTITY
I should say up front, I had originally mistaken the piece for a possible poster commemorating the 1912 Denver flood, as the only legible words in the version I had were the site and the date, which I was misreading anyway. I kept a version of this page up from June of 2020 to February of 2024, when a fan of the site with greater noise-reducing abilities than myself shared with me the version now seen above, that shows the words NATIONAL WESTERN STOCK SHOW in the oval encircling the main image.
Even with this enhancement however, it remains uncertain whether this is a fabrication, or some forgotten relic of 1970s design, local to the Denver region. Like the halo landscape above the bed in Suite 3, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was something picked up by one of Kubrick’s research teams.
SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE
My original thought about this was that it would play off the subtext about the Pillars of Hercules, and the ancient flood that would’ve created the Mediterranean Sea, but now the only way it could do so is by thinking of all those droving cattle as a kind of flesh river. Although it’s true that Hercules was questing for the red cattle of Geryon when he smashed apart the mountain that created the two pillars, letting in flood. So we’re not without some apt association.
Another poster for the National Western Stock Show appears reflected in the phone booth beside the twins, which means we have a sort of cross-shape of cattle imagery in this room, with Remington’s The Cowboy to the right of the entrance, and that minotaur-esque silhouette in the SKI MONARCH poster to the left. Also, note the bull’s-head shape created by the white space inside the ring.
There’s also something to be said for how this imagery of droving cattle works with the Steamboat posters to give us a subtle Noah’s Ark theme.
There’s also a cool historic aspect to this. 1972 was the most infamous year in the history of the stock show, when a white Charolais cow, raised by the name of Jeep, had been purchased by someone who used shoe polish to make him appear to be a rather large Black Angus cow, named Big Mac, and so winning the competition. The name was inspired by McDonald’s new hamburger of the same name. Amazingly, Jeep’s original owners (including an animated child) recognized the cow, and were able to correct the forgery. You can read a New York Times article about it here, or watch a little news story about it here, on YouTube.
So there’s two main points to be made about this, with a bonus third to follow.
The first main thing involves Jack moaning out the lyrics to the Al Jolson musical Bombo while dying in the labyrinth, while a doll that could be a golliwog appears both in Boulder and at the Overlook (near the spot where Hallorann is axed to death, no less). This idea of a white cow being painted black goes crazily well with this concept of the Torrance family being one that has respect for blackface iconography.
The other main thing is closely related: Hallorann is axed to death right between two paintings by Canadian Group of Seven painter JEH Macdonald: The Solemn Land and Mist Fantasy. Macdonald is considered one of the two painters for formulated the Group of Seven, which disbanded after his death, so that may be part of what makes him a “big” Mac, as it were. Also, my deeper feeling about the Macdonald connection is to do with Canada’s first prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald, whose role in the suppression and assimilation of indigenous peoples is only recently beginning to fuse with his cultural identity. Canada can sometimes feel good about itself for not committing the kinds of physical genocide as took place in America, but the residential school system is regarded as a cultural genocide, designed to eradicate many ways of life, languages, and traditions. And so, in the death of Hallorann we may have a kind of yin-yang of cultural and physical murder: the one seeming preferable to the other, but not without its evil.
And the bonus thing: I also read an article, which I can’t seem to trace now, where Kubrick was interviewed by a magazine journalist, who would ride to set with him every day for a week (or something like that), during which the journalist witnessed Kubrick scarfing down hamburgers while driving, and tossing his wrappers out the window. I don’t recall if they were Big Macs, but if so, that would be something. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m misremembering other details there, but I’m going to leave this until I get a good link.
Next art reference: The Cowboy
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