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APPEARANCE
80:04-80:17; 121:20-121:26
There are wide shots of the room during this scene, but it’s not clear if the magazine is still there, so I’m not going to count them. And thanks to Juli Kearns’s taller aspect ratio, we can see that it replaces the Burda that was there when Tony was REDRUMing, and the Outdoor Life that was there when he was waking Wendy.
IDENTITY
This is another one coming to us from fan of the site, Neal Bridges, who ID’d the Denver Post from Boulder, and the Businessweek from inside Dick’s rescue plane. Apologies – I won’t be updating the image for some time; I’m at my limit for image storage, and need to upgrade. Give it time.
Recall that the last one was just outside this room. The magazine is a mash-up of two different magazines (Travel and Holiday) that came together in 1977.
This issue touts coverage on North Carolina, Bay of Islands, Scottsdale and Munich, with the headline “PACIFIC PLANNER” and a lush cover photo of “A performer with the Peking Opera in Taipei, Taiwan” by photographer Shirley Fockler.
SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE
The first one appears right after Danny sees the twins in the ghostflesh for the first time, and this appears right after Jack’s experience with the one ghost who is two women.
Scottsdale may be the main thing, as this was famously the home of Frank Lloyd Wright (he’s mentioned in the article), who is credited by some as the inspiration for the design of the Gold Room bathroom. It’s been claimed that it was based upon the bathroom from Wright’s Biltmore Hotel design in Phoenix, Arizona (where Lolita meets the father of her child). I suspect this is false or in error, as no evidence to support that claim has ever emerged, and the Biltmore looks almost nothing like the Gold Room area. But it’s quite the coincidence, isn’t it, that this magazine only appears right before Jack is summoned to the ghost ball, where he’ll enter the impossible bathroom.
Scottsdale’s motto is “The West’s most Western Town” (a phrase repeated in the table of contents), which is obviously not a geographical fact, but it does remind of Ullman inviting Wendy to live with him in LA (in the deleted ending), or of Jack saying Lloyd is the best bartender from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon.
I suspect the next most significant aspect of the cover is Peking Opera, which had just seen the end of the Cultural Revolution’s influence over its programming, which had seen an exclusionary shift toward communist artwork and ideology. If you’ve seen the Palme d’Or-winning Farewell, My Concubine (1993), you’ve seen a dramatization of these events. You’ve also seen Leslie Cheung wearing the same headdress as appears on the woman on the cover, so, despite Shirley Fockler not mentioning what show this is in her article, and despite the fact that I can’t find a listing of performances from these years, I’m thinking that, of the five traditional performances this could be, we’re looking at the play known as The Hegemon-King Bids His Lady Farewell, aka Farewell, My Concubine. It tells the tragic episode of Overlord Xiang Yu’s favourite consort deciding to kill herself rather than become a distraction for the Overlord, at a moment when he was surrounded by his enemy Liu Bang’s forces, and already effectively defeated.
The book that inspired the film was written after The Shining was filmed, so Kubrick would have to have done his homework. But given a high degree of connections between TS and FMJ (which I haven’t published about yet), I wouldn’t be surprised if this nod to the waning of Maoism was made consciously. In fact, I think I’ll wait before commenting further on that.
The thing to note now is that the Chinese opera was still in the habit of having men perform all the roles, male and female, despite the May 4th Movement, which helped women get into women roles in the conventional theatre. Fockler refers to the actor on the cover as “a performer”, masking the gender. Something she doesn’t clarify in her article. Maybe she didn’t know. But that does make this an intriguing artefact. If Kubrick understood this reality of the opera, he could’ve been deploying this in part to deal with the issue of Jack’s sexuality. Something that gets complicated when we realize he owns the first gay romance novel ever published in Australia. It could be Wendy’s copy, but it’s not exactly obscure. As this magazine appears, Jack is angrily laying out his prospects, “…shovelling out driveways… working at a car wash… would any of that appeal to you?” Society, throughout history, allows the artist to pursue their ambition only when the artist can succumb to something like a sex worker’s career path. Only in the last century has this begun to change, and only slightly as I understand it. So maybe if Jack could learn to love this side of himself, instead of hating it, he could learn to free himself from the shame that drives him to murder. I suspect that’s why it appears again as Wendy realizes she needs to lock herself in the closet, as it were. Jack has taken the lesson from the Overlook that the solution to these pressures is to become the abuser. Not to realize that the beautiful woman you’ve been keeping on your bed stand… is a man, baby.
As for the Munich reference, that goes well with the Burda that was here a moment ago.
The North Carolina article is about how there’s now skiing in the state, which reminds of all the posters in the games room.
And the Bay of Islands reminds of the Man of Van Diemens Land outside room 242.
Next literary reference: The Masque of the Red Death
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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 