MAIN PAGE ⎔ SECTION PAGE ⎔ SITE MAP ⎔ GLOSSARY
MIRRORFORM ANALYSIS – SKIP TO A SECTION
INTRO ⎔ THE INTERVIEW ⎔ CLOSING DAY ⎔ A MONTH LATER ⎔ TUESDAY
THURSDAY ⎔ SATURDAY ⎔ MONDAY ⎔ WEDNESDAY
SPECIALS: GREAT PARTY ⎔ GINGERBREAD HOUSE ⎔ SHINED & CONFUSED
MIDWAY ⎔ MIDDLE-END
Preamble: Each section of text that follows will always refer to the image that first appears below it. Line breaks will be used to divide between unrelated points, which are frequently not of equal significance. I might sort the points in descending order of significance, but it might be hard to say at times. If anything in the analysis is unclear, let me know.
If you’re more curious about how the novel uses the mirrorform, or how the Beatles subtext relates to the mirrorform, or how the Fibonacci sequence impacts the mirrorform, I won’t be covering those subjects here.
Also, this analysis focuses mainly on what can be gleaned purely by studying individual moments. However, there is also the phenomenon where tracking how individual artworks appearing multiple times tells us things about how Kubrick structured the timing of the film, but that commentary won’t appear here. Instead, I’ve composed those analyses on the pages for the given artwork, which I’ll link to somewhere near the corresponding image.
Alright, let’s get into it.
The first/last moment of the film give us all these references to conquerors and the conquered:
- Montanan mountains, with their diverse, mostly indigenous names, referring to people slaughtered by smallpox, murdered in the Piegan massacre, or the Meeker massacre.
- The 13th century Judgment Day song Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) is on the forward soundtrack. A song describing the armies of heaven and hell making their final battle against one another.
- A month (July) that refers to Julius Caesar (the first of numerous references to him) in the Julian and Gregorian calendars, and a day referring to an American holiday (Independence Day), which commemorates the ideological birth of their country.
- This exact date 4/7/21 may have numerous significances (like the election of the socialist Ivanoe Bonomi in Italy, who was ousted the next year by Mussolini’s fascist regime), but since the film is otherwise laced with WWII references, it seems significant to me that the period that started two weeks before this date, and ended two weeks after this date, is the period of time in which Hitler’s National Socialist party almost crumbled, and in which Hitler went from being a significant speaker and member to total control of the group, the Führer, where he remained unto his death.
- The backward song playing here, Midnight, the Stars, and You (recorded at Abbey Road studios), by Al Bowlly, is connected to Hitler in two ways:
- Bowlly’s last recorded song was Irving Berlin’s satirical song about Hitler, When That Man is Dead and Gone.
- 2 weeks later a Luftwaffe parachute mine detonated just outside Bowlly’s apartment, blowing his door off its hinge and killing him.
No one should be expected to recognize all this, this opening flurry of obscure references, but remember the first works of art Jack will pass in the lobby is Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel, which is exactly about this horror of lost connection, lost understanding. When you do the research, there’s a horror in realizing you didn’t know. You’d either forgotten, or no one took the time to teach you, or you just didn’t care.
Also, combining a mythological apocalypse with something that was an apocalypse for many (the Holocaust) is brutally, sickly optimistic. WWII was the apocalypse for untold millions of people who went screaming to their bitter deaths, but life, a life those lost will never know, went on. And life has gone on after every seeming apocalypse in herstory, whether it was the Spanish Flu, the Younger Dryas Cataclysm, or Genghis Khan. Life on earth has come through five great extinctions, and it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere anytime soon (regardless of what ravages the anthropocene are about to visit upon us).
There’s also a lot of subtext in both the book and film about the nature of large-scale separation and small-scale divorce. Danny is terrified that Jack and Wendy will break up for good, and an instigating factor in that is Jack beating up his student, George Hatfield. A boy who happens to be named for one half of the most famous set of feuding families in America: the Hatfields and the McCoys. Follow that all the way up to the subtexts about warring nations, and you’re considering separation at every level. Well, this opening shot shows us Wild Goose Island, which is named after a myth about a couple of young kids from feuding tribes living on opposite sides of this lake, who would meet on the island for the sake of their forbidden love. When they were found out, I think they were turned into geese somehow to escape retribution. Then, on the opposite side you have a group of ghosts celebrating Independence Day, the day when America divorced itself from the British monarchy.
The apocalypse imagery, then, could be viewed through the same prism, on the grandest of scales: mass death separating the living from life.
Oh, also, this version of Dies Irae was composed by Wendy Carlos, so we have a “Wendy” on the forward soundtrack, and a Jack in the backward image. Husband and wife separated by a mirrorform.
Starting the film with a song about end times is a nice way to suggest the nature of the mirrorform: we are starting at the end.
Dies Irae happens to echo the way old Roman weekday names were named: like Dies Martis for Tuesday (Day of Mars), or Dies Lunae for Monday (Day of the Moon). Days named after Norse gods will appear later in the film as placards to help demarcate the middle 55 minutes of the 143 total (TUESDAY, THURSDAY, SATURDAY, MONDAY, WEDNESDAY), while the final 48 are known through the ancient Egyptian 12-hour clock system (8am, 4pm). The first 40 minutes (THE INTERVIEW, CLOSING DAY, A MONTH LATER) are known (and not known) through inference and context clues. THE INTERVIEW is the only placard that doesn’t signify a given time, but “day of wrath” is fading into silence while we see that placard appear. So this is a film about time, but it’s also about how all these different cultures contributed to our understanding of time. In my Tower of Fable analysis, I explore how the hotel itself is modelled after ancient Mesoamerican pyramids that were built one atop another, as new conquerors came and wanted to express their dominion over the old regime. So perhaps the Frankensteinian mish-mash of eras that get expressed through our various time signatures is a sign of how far we’ve come. As a global culture, we’re feeling less and less the need to eradicate the old history.
It’s neat that the song at the beginning is about a “Day” while the song at the end is about a “Midnight”. It’s not the only duality. The ending is black and white while the beginning is colour. The ending has only representations of human civilization and meaning (art/language/photography) while the beginning has only meaningless nature (putting aside the place names). The ending is indoors, the beginning is outdoors.
In other words, this is a film that will juggle and contrast opposites. Oodles of opposites.
One of my favourite sections of analysis is the one on all the objects that appear and disappear, or that behave in absurd ways, and this photo of Jack never appears before in the film (to say nothing of the ghostly Jack Torrance). And only five of the “Final 21” photos ever appear on this wall of the lobby earlier in the film, so right away the film is contrasting the absurd against the real.
Lastly, the first and last shots of the film introduce us to two major keys for understanding the film’s various subtexts: the first shot shows us the Four Directions Key, and the last shot shows us the F21 Key.
In this overlay, Going-to-the-Sun Road makes a winding curve that seems to flow through photo Jack’s face, somewhat resembling the bloody curve that winds through the face of the GREAT PARTY ghost, who, in that moment, is wearing the same outfit as photo Jack here. (Note that the ghost is holding ghost booze in the same hand as photo Jack is holding his little secret message, as we’ll see more clearly in a few shots.)
This first shot of backward Jack’s face pairs with the first shot of Jack’s car driving up past Lake MacDonald. When the audience first sees Jack walk into the hotel at the start of THE INTERVIEW, he’ll be passing a painting by JEH MacDonald. I don’t know if there’s a “MacDonald” in the 1921 photo, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Furthering the WWII imagery, as the backward fade occurs between the two photo Jacks, the smaller Jack’s widow’s peak creates, as others have noted, a kind of Hitler moustache on the larger Jack face. This effect happens right atop the road, and almost right atop the Hitlermobile Jack’s driving.
Do you see that little note tucked in the hand of backward Jack? And the arm that’s coming to suppress him showing it off…?
…well, much later in the film, while Wendy’s trying the radio that doesn’t work, there’s two photo-postcards showing beautiful mountain shots (like the one you see below), pinned to a wooden bannister by Wendy’s face (one of which was photographed by one Francis Kies (which sounds like “keys” in English)). Above these is a montage of black and white faces (see second image below). Across from these is a letter pinned to a cork board, wedged slightly open (see below in the second red box).
Are we supposed to know what exactly is in these secret messages? Or are we simply supposed to realize that there is a secret message?
The message right above the wedged-open note says “EYE SCREAM” (a phrase that sounds like “ice cream” in English), which might imply that our photo Jack here is screaming only with his eyes, unable to do so in any other way. My own interpretation of EYE SCREAM is that it has to do with opening one’s eyes to as much information as the mind can handle as one passes through life. And as you’ve probably noticed so far, in just 37 short seconds of mirrorform, we’ve been introduced to quite a bit.
At the beginning of the zoom on Jack, there was no way in hell we were ever going to see the date on Jack’s photo. There wasn’t even a way to tell Jack would be in the photo. It’s only because of this massive zoom, this zeroing in on tiny details, that we begin to see what Kubrick was doing all throughout. His camera is insisting to us, look closer, look closer, look closer. Open yourself to the eye scream.
In fact, there’s another detail in the backward crossfade that we can look closer on. See at one of the peaks of Red Eagle Mountain, how a lady’s eyeball is situated both right in the centre of a smaller man’s head, and right at the peak of the mountain? This could be a mash-up of the concept of a third eye, and what’s called the eye of providence, in Christian iconography. This is the eye of god that watches over all and keeps people provided for. I’m not exactly sure how to read this (if intentional). On the one hand, you have it appearing in tandem with Dies Irae, a song that seems to suggest a judgmental god. And on the other hand, this symbol is best known for being on the American one-dollar bill, and that symbol, which incorporated an unfinished pyramid, was originally meant to imply the future growth of the States, the promise of future conquest. By 1921, every state but Alaska and Hawaii were states, so it’s not like there was much more old school conquesting to do. So perhaps this is simply a foreboding of things to come, a caution against military imperialism, and the expansion of the 1% types, who Ullman is only too happy to count among the hotel’s denizens.
This has been noticed before me, but I would be remiss not to point out one of the most fabulous coincidences of the mirrorform Shining: the three Jacks. Photo Jack, bug-driving Jack, and Jack the actor, all overlay in the same spot at the same moment. I’m not sure how you arrive at the idea to play The Shining backward and forward at the same time (beyond what’s said in the documentary Room 237), but if you got to this point, and then saw the 3 Jacks and thought nothing more about it, I could see how you could dismiss everything else I’m saying.
Other things of note:
- The mountain to the immediate right of Beetle Jack is still Goat Mountain, here, and overtop of photo Jack is the horns-shaped light fixture, which vaguely resembles a buffalo or bull head. Since the minotaur is partially decapitated in the myth, this makes a nice symbol of Jack’s eternal demise and defeat.
- Notice the rugs to the left and right of the photos? I call these the bloodrug and waverug. The bloodrug appears to have a double helix DNA pattern on it, and the waverug simply has half of a double helix, in a zig-zag, like conjoined 3s or Ms. I interpret these as signifying the film’s interest in cycles (blood) and symmetries (wave). So perhaps the waverug mirrors over Goat Mountain because goats have symmetrical horns, and the bloodrug mirrors over Red Eagle Mountain because the rug is also red. Red Eagle Mountain is also named for a man who survived the Piegan massacre – named by his daughter, in fact. So if the bloodrug consistently represents murder, it would apt that it hovers over the southwestern mountains, since these also include Matotope, named for a man who was slaughtered, along with his family and people, by smallpox.
- Also, this “blood” and “wave” could be echoing the “bloodwave” that spills from the elevators near the Gold Room, which I usually call the “bloodfall”. If the connection there is intentional, one of my interpretations of that moment is that it has to do with the Pillars of Hercules, which is a myth with a historic connection to the flooding of the Mediterranean Sea. And we’re just about to fly out over a large body of water here: St. Mary Lake.
- Incidentally, I should mention that details like this, images like this, were what lead me to realize that the left side of the screen could be associated with work, and the right side with play, as I analyze in some length in my study on phi grid framing in the film.
- Also, while it’s true that the F21 photos were only partially on this wall before (5 out of 21), there was still a set of 3×7 photos in every other scene. This moment (1:27) is the first moment where we see that wall rugs have replaced what used to be giant mirrors, and there is no longer a large red couch beneath the F21 photos. The story of that couch’s unique behaviour has a lot to do with the mirrorform, but it’s too complex for this analysis, so head here to read all about it.
- But also, yes, 1:27 would be our first jumble of a majorly significant number in the film’s time codes. A jumble of the evilest room from the novel, room 217. In my Avenue of the Dead theory, Jack’s spirit gets absorbed into room 231 (more so than into this photo), so it seems apt that this overlay of real Jack and photo Jack would happen for only a second, and that second would be an evil room jumble.
Shelley Duvall’s name appears just as we’re about to coast off Goat Mountain and head toward Four Bears Mountain (with its smallpox association). Wendy is linked to bears throughout.
More to the mirrorform: Shelley’s name appears at the very moment that the Dies Irae theme leaves the music, and I have good reason to think that Wendy’s four trials at the end of the film have to do with the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So perhaps this signifies the fact that Wendy survives this judgment day, and Jack doesn’t.
The title appears in time with the Gold Room sign, which is the room where the bulk of the hotel’s shining occurs at Jack. This pathway through the lobby is also where Jack sees all the balloons leading to the ghost ball (and where Wendy encounters two of the four horsemen). Also, the two singers being advertised on the sign are named Danny Haynes and Kim Woodman. I couldn’t find good evidence that these were real people, but Danny is obviously our main shiner, and Kim is the name of one Rudyard Kipling’s great novels, and Kipling will be referenced in the Gold Room when Jack quotes his poem The White Man’s Burden. In fact, the novel Kim inspired a thing called Kim’s Game, where you’re presented with mixed objects, and then some are removed, and you have to guess which were removed. The film is filled with disappearing and moving things. And, as we’ve seen, these first shots of the lobby are filled with things that weren’t there before (including white sheets over all the furniture). Maybe the F21 Key is Kim’s Game itself. So if the reference is intentional, this assortment of photos is a bit like asking “what happened to the ones here before?” And isn’t that a neat way of expressing the film’s general interest in days, places, peoples gone before us? Isn’t that what “the shining” is all about: being able to see things from the past, the future, and in the moment, that are unusual, and being able to make sense of it?
It also might be worth noting here that the Rocky Mountains were known as the “shining mountains” by the indigenous peoples stretching from the present American south all the way to up to present day Canada. And “shining” in the film largely happens in both the Rockies and in a “Gold” Room (and even in a “Gould” room, as we’ll see). So perhaps Kubrick’s setting up a bit of a shine triumvirate here. There’s the positive-negative effects of nature’s shine (like the glorious sun (which abandons us for half the day), and these glorious mountains (which can be quite isolating)), the positive-negative effect of society’s shine (like how gold corrupts the hearts of sapiens, and how science (Gould) clarifies the minds of sapiens), and the positive-negative effect of the shining’s shine (allowing Danny and Hallorann to bond so rapidly, and allowing the hotel to transform Jack so rapidly into a monster).
Danny Lloyd also appears together with the Gold Room sign with Danny Haynes on it. And of course, the Gold Room is where we meet ghost Lloyd.
Also, Jack is driving beside Mt. Gould, Montana during this entire shot. So we have a Gould and a Gold onscreen for these scant 11 seconds of overlay.
Scatman (Hallorann) met his end by walking up this same lobby in the very backward direction the camera is now moving, only to get whacked by…
…this guy. Who is also dead (and staring up at the name of his victim).
There’s also a fascinating series of colour-crossovers when it comes to the cars the Beetle is passing in this sequence. So, as the backward shot shifts to this snowy whiteness, he’s passing that white wagon. We’ll notice this happen again, after the next few points.
Next I have to note that as Ullman’s name appears, Jack’s car disappears into a tunnel. As we’ll see later on, Ullman is a rather sinister character indeed, so perhaps this enveloping of Jack (against his frozen corpse) is an ill portent. And this is still Mt. Gould he’s driving into, and paintings by John Gould appear in room 237. This shot of Jack being enveloped continues during the second of 1:57. And 157 seconds is 2:37.
I also want to note that there’s a second Barry in the film, Barry Dennen, who plays Watson, Ullman’s sidekick. Dennen’s name never appears in the opening credits, which obscures this mild twin effect. Similarly, the frozen death face backward Jack is making is mildly twinned by the post-first-drink face he makes 4.25 minutes before the middle of the film (see below). We might also consider that the two Barrys stand to either side of where Jack first “dies” during the end of the tour (see below), and how Ullman’s Red Book may indicate that Ullman (Nelson) is the ultimate reason for Jack’s frosty corpse.
Similarly, trans pioneer Wendy Carlos, who wrote the gorgeous, haunting soundtrack, is not mentioned in the credits, and whose name would invoke that twin “Wendy”. In fact, in the section of the credits that announces “MUSIC BY” Wendy’s name doesn’t show up until the third screen of names (after Bartók and Penderecki) at 142:03, and she shares the credit with Rachel Elkind, who I believe only contributed vocally to the music. I wonder how deliberate the effort to suppress the notion of a “Wendy” floating over so much of the story’s action really was.
Mt. Oberlin is the mountain across the valley here, and book Jack is from Berlin, New Hampshire. So there’s another birth/death thing for ya.
And Jack’s car reappears as we see Grady’s name flow by, and now we’re also getting a better view of Oberlin Mountain across the way. So if Jack and Grady are echoes of each other, and echoes of Hitler, it’s interesting that Oberlin would share the frame (Hitler killed himself in Berlin, Germany). Also, the man Oberlin is named for almost couldn’t be less of a Hitler figure.
The mountain Jack dies upon is Mt. Hood, known as Wy’east to the Multnomah tribe, for the brave who was transformed into the mountain as punishment for fighting with another brave, Pahto, over their love of the beautiful maiden Loowit. Their battle was even said to have destroyed the Bridge of the Gods (believed to have been a real land bridge of stone, which was collapsed by rising sea levels, perhaps), which created the Cascades Rapids and the Columbia River. That will seem more significant to those who’ve read the Pillars of Hercules section.
Actually, just a detail on the Hercules myth: it’s complicated, but I believe several of the images in the film are referencing Hercules 10th labour, the retrieving of the red Cattle of Geryon. Geryon was the grandson of Medusa, and he was a beast of numerous forms (a song called Polymorphia, which means “many forms” will play over an insane Jack in several instances). Here, the icy tendrils that snake down Jack’s face give him the look of a defeated Medusa figure. In any case, frozen Jack overlaying Mt. Gould, and sitting on the side of what should be Mt. Hood, technically, it’s as if Jack, for warring with Danny over Wendy’s affection (if you want to look at the film that way), has been turned into a mountain himself. And perhaps Philip Stone’s name is coincidental (stone = mountain/Medusa), but it’s a darn good coincidence, anyway.
Lloyd the bartender appears while backward Jack is coming back to life, or sitting down to die, depending on how you look at it. In my Julius Caesar comparison, I make the case that Jack’s first drink from Lloyd is dramatically in step with Caesar’s murder in the play (again, with the death mask twinnery).
Also, again, we’re getting that effect of the cars Jack’s passing on Going-to-the-Sun Road reflecting the colours in the backward action. So in the backward, Jack’s about to collapse next to that light that’s right beneath the U in TURKEL, and in the forward we have that car parked on the shoulder, right beneath the K in TURKEL. The car has a white roof and a black body, and the backward image of Jack is mostly blue-black with that white spotlight.
As Jack’s passing a third, blue-black car, backward Jack is now up and obscuring the white light, causing the image to be mostly blue-black.
As for the doctor, I’m not sure what referencing her there does for the story. The actor, Anne Jackson was in a few movies with relevant-sounding titles (The Tiger Makes Out, for instance, sounds like a reference to Tony), but perhaps the effect of including her in the titles (or even casting her at all – the doctor is a man in the book, named Bill Edmonds) was to get that “Jack’s Son” effect. There’s a painter (Alexander Jackson) whose work is featured in the film for perhaps the same reason. And, again, Jack is driving under Mt. Gould, which shares a name with a painter who forms one of Danny’s two bird keys.
That said, Wendy and Danny have just escaped in the backward action, and will be seen for the last time 22 seconds after Jackson’s name vanishes offscreen. And while dying Jack here is screaming out for Wendy and Danny…I don’t know if that quite counts. Then again, the next name to appear is Tony Burton. So of the three names that appear while Jack stumbles to his death, all three have a link to Danny Torrance. Joe Turkel plays Lloyd while Danny is played by Danny Lloyd. Jackson sounds like Jack’s son. and Tony Burton shares a name with Danny’s “genius“. Could this be a way of suggesting that Danny truly is the reason Jack dies?
Perhaps her name applied more to this second shot that features her name, where her name scrolls over a mountain called Heaven’s Peak (the other two mountains here are still Gould and Oberlin). Jack screams Danny’s name into the sky upon discovering the dead end of his tracks in the snow, so he still might believe, moments before collapsing, that Danny bested him by taking off into the air. So perhaps he believes in some small way that Jack’s Son went off to a heaven’s peak somewhere, while Jack himself may be on a slightly different trajectory.
I should point out an interesting little bit of pop culture connective tissue. Kubrick’s assistant Tony set up a company employing people to read books for him (the process that seemingly lead to the discovery of Stephen King’s The Shining, as discussed in the documentary Kubrick’s Boxes), was called Empyrean Films. And Empyrean is the word for the top level of heaven, or…Heaven’s Peak. Remember, that name is supposed to have come from before The Shining was discovered by the team. So is it possible that Kubrick already had it in mind to shoot in the Montanan mountains, and to apply these animal name dynamics to whatever story he decided to go with? I wonder.
For Tony Burton we might say the same thing as we said about Jack’s Son: the name Tony is appearing over Heaven’s Peak (Burton happens to be Bill Watson’s middle name in the novel…coincidence?).
Also, Burton played Apollo Creed’s trainer (Tony “Duke” Evers) in the Rocky films, and would’ve made Rocky II (1979) while The Shining was in production. And here we are in the Rockies. But more than that, both Rocky and The Shining end with the main figure loudly slurring the name of the woman in their life incoherently (“WENDY!!!” “ADRIAN!!!”). That’s what Jack’s doing right here as he stumbles to his death. And of course, Danny wears a sweater with “APOLLO” on it, for a spaceship that went right up to the empyrean level.
It’s impossible to make out here, but backward Jack is waving his silver-headed axe with the tan wooden handle…right overtop a silver car with a tan canoe on top. And with that, every car that passes Jack bears some colour connection to the mirrorform image. If that’s a coincidence…seriously, what a coincidence.
Incidentally, this is happening right at 2:31, which is the room Jack might be swallowed into, to join the peak of the Overlook’s heaven. Actually, going by Juli Kearns’ maps of the area, the door to room 231, should open onto a small antechamber that would be right through the wall from where the room 237 bathroom and bedroom are. In fact, there’s a mirror in the bedroom, which reflects the John Gould paintings into the room 231 space. And, again, Mt. Gould here.
As Stan and Diane scroll by, the backward action is showing Danny and Wendy escaping the Overlook for the last time, which they do by following the tracks Hallorann made by coming in, echoing Danny’s escape from the maze. Also, if you read my section on Going-to-the-Sun Road, you know that there’s some interesting retreads going on during all of Jack’s driving-to-the-Overlook sequences.
In fact, I’ll just state here, how this shot, the seventh shot in the film, is part of the second-third-seventh (or 237) slash that cuts through all the other locations of shots from the intro (see below). So perhaps this credit appearing here is to credit Johnson with her contribution to the script’s many internal machinations that differ from the novel (like room 237), and which allow the film to be so uniquely brilliant. Also, Jack is a proper nickname for people named John, so Johnson is synonymous with Jackson. In fact, book Jack is named as John Daniel Edward Torrance. It’s interesting that our two “Jacksons” would be women, Anne and Diane.
Actually, the mountain right behind the one in front of Jack is Mt. Jackson. It’s possible some little bit of it is visible.
The shot of Wendy and Danny escaping happens to be the seventh last shot in the film. And the second and third last shots appear in concert with the second and third shots, in case you’re wondering. And just in case you want even more 237 out of this moment, this is exactly 2:37 seconds into the film.
As you’ll read in my section decoding the photographs that hang around the hotel, the number 237 possesses a unique relationship to the murder of Hallorann. In that analysis we discover that 237 is the number associated with the real “work” the hotel desires from Jack: Dick’s on-the-property demise. And here, the mountain that Jack’s car is speeding toward is Heavy Runner Mountain, named for a man murdered while running toward American troops with a safe conduct paper in his hands. Hallorann is murdered in a fairly similar fashion. Chief Heavy Runner was the first to die in a massacre known as the Piegan massacre (Mt. Piegan is to Jack’s right), for the fact that “around 230” Piegan people were slaughtered in the massacre. According to one of the more reliable sources (a scout named Joe Kipp, who tried to stop it), there were 217 dead from the murdering, a number that might’ve resonated with Kubrick.
During a good chunk of the opening shot of the hotel, we see Danny and Wendy fleeing past the exterior for the last time. The overlay effect gives the night-vision Overlook a ghostly appearance as it floats above the drab, ordinary building of the intro.
There’s also a few seconds of Jack screaming out at the sky in defeat (not pictured here), which, set against the opening Overlook gives a nice feeling of “Lloyd! Why hast thou forsaken me?!!?”
Click here to continue on to Through the Mirrorform, Part 2: The Interview
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 