by Jerry Brimacomb
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ART OF THE GAMES ROOM
1976 OLYMPICS ⎔ COWBOY ⎔ DENVER FLOOD ⎔ 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 just read a 2013 article in the Steamboat Pilot about how this is one of the most iconic photographs of the area, and one of the main reasons why people tour the area still. The riders are a man and a woman, Rusty Chandler and Jo Semotan, both ski instructors, both carrying skis across their laps. The photographer, Brimacomb, was a LIFE Magazine photographer of 45 years. The photograph wasn’t meant to take place just after a snowstorm, it just worked out that way.
Versions of the poster say, “Welcome to Ski Town U.S.A.” and “Happy Trails.” But for the record, I couldn’t find any version online with all the text the one in the film seems to have.
SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE
When Danny goes to face off with zombie Jack, he’s wearing a sweater with Steamboat Willie himself, Mickey Mouse, kicking a football. A sticker of Mickie also appears on Danny’s door in Boulder (14:21-14:24).
In the zombie Jack scene, Jack paraphrases the ghost girls at Danny, and in Boulder, Danny has the vision of the twins.
HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE
Steamboat Springs, Colorado is located in Routt county, one of the counties with a glowing outline behind Wendy in the radio room (the upper one). And this scene cuts right into Danny meeting the twins for the last time.
In the scene before he gets the flash of the twins from touching room 237, Wendy is listening to the news, which is saying that an “Aspen woman” went missing in the mountains near “Ouray”. Ouray is its own county, but Aspen is in Pitkin county, which is the lower region glowing here. Maybe that’s too loose, but if you count that, then there’s a Steamboat reference right before both other twins scenes. And if you read that last link, you’ll very quickly read about how the Utes were forcibly removed from the land to make Steamboat. So that’s not good. This was partly accomplished by the invasion of trappers, and Wendy’s here sitting next to where Trapper’s Camp was not long ago.
Also, there’s a neat bit of business with the mountain behind the barn. That’s Werner mountain, formerly Storm Mountain. It was renamed in 1965 to honour Buddy Werner, an olympian from Steamboat who died in an avalanche in St. Moritz, Switzerland. St. Moritz is named for, yep, St. Maurice, the martyr from Log Hut on the St. Maurice. Also, Werner’s death was partially the result of participating in a film about skiing. The avalanche also took the life of the director’s fiancee Barbi Henneberger, who was to feature in the film. That director, Willy Bogner Jr., went on to become the cameraman for a lot of the snow scenes in later James Bond movies, Bond being a running subtext throughout The Shining (like how Barry Nelson (Ullman) played the first ever Bond, as we’ll discuss later). So the mountain is named for someone killed in a way by a filmmaker. I doubt that was lost on Kubrick. Especially since Werner was a character in the 1975 film The Other Side of the Mountain, about the life of another skier, Werner’s one-time girlfriend, Jill Kinmont. Coincidentally, that film also features a main character named Nicholson.
I’m guessing the St. Moritz thing was the main impetus for using Steamboat, but talk about a lot of little grace notes.
MYTHOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE
That said, there is another travel poster on the other side of the room here that also appears to be of Steamboat Springs. So, just as the MONARCH and The Cowboy posters will seem to have a kind of mirroring/butterfly significance to one another, these two posters showing a place named after a large ship, and with a poster in the middle commemorating the Denver flood of 1912, is probably meant as a reference to Noah’s Ark. There’s a series of paintings inside room 237 by Ralph Thompson, whose works were largely inspired by Gerald Durrell’s “Stationary Ark” Zoo. This ski poster in particular features a giant wooden barn that has a certain Ark-ness to it.
So anytime we see a Steamboat reference, I’m guessing we’re meant to think of Danny receiving the vision of the bloodfall from Tony, with all its connections to the twins, to room 237, to the snow storms that do trap the Torrances in the Overlook, and to the death of Dick Hallorann.
Next art reference: Vail Last Run Ski Poster
MAIN PAGE ⎔ SECTION PAGE ⎔ SITE MAP ⎔ GLOSSARY
OTHER MAIN PAGES FOR SHINING ANALYSIS
THE MIRRORFORM ⎔ THE BEATLES ⎔ THE RUM AND THE RED
BACKGROUND ART ⎔ OVERLOOK PHOTOGRAPHS ⎔ GOLDEN SPIRALS
PHI GRIDS ⎔ PATTERNS ⎔ VIOLENCE AND INDIGENA ⎔ ABSURDITIES
THE STORY ROOM ⎔ ANIMAL SYMBOLS ⎔ THE ANNOTATED SHINING
EYE SCREAM 