Last night I watched Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in a shabby little art house theater in the 5th arrondissement. I’ve seen the film dozens of times and can practically do a call and response routine to it à la Rocky Horror. Plot and dialogue are so well-mapped for me that last night I had the luxury of just losing myself in the colors, the lighting, and those delicious late-1970s costumes. Setting aside the fact the film deviated so far from the novel that Stephen King disowned it, the film is really something to look at. A visual feast, some might say. Fucking Kubrick.
There are a handful of films I’ve seen multiple times, but perhaps no film I’ve seen as many times as The Shining. Full disclosure, many of these viewings transpired during my last year of high school, when my best friend Darlene and I would regularly pool our lunch money to buy a nickel-bag of weed after our morning classes at Modesto High. We’d stop by Swenson’s in Roseburg Square for two pints of ice cream (the last of our pooled lunch funds) and then go to my house because my mom worked and we had the place to ourselves. We would get really high and watch The Shining and eat our ice cream. If we didn’t do this every day then we did it enough that looking back, 40 years later, it sure seems like it was every day.
Although The Shining doesn’t place in my top 5 list of all-time favorite films, it definitely makes the top 20 cut. It is an important film for me, with a history beginning years before the ice cream and redbud afternoons. I have a distinct memory of my favorite cousin Anitra being in town when the film was released in May 1980. I was eleven and Anitra was a year or so younger. My uncle – Anitra’s dad — was in the Air Force and the family was returning to the U.S. from the Philippines, my uncle’s final foreign deployment. They always made a point to visit my grandparents between deployments. These were epic visits that lasted weeks and I looked forward to them eagerly.
I begged my mom to take us to see the movie. I was already a huge King fan by then, having cut my teeth on Night Shift and then read The Shining and ‘Salem’s Lot in rapid succession. Needless to say, my mom never censored my reading. Even better, my mom’s best friend Bonnie was the assistant manager of a mall bookstore, so I had the ability to get my hands on anything in paperback for free. Bonnie would just strip off the front cover and send it back to the publisher as an unsold title. I read hundreds of coverless books as a kid. Don’t judge Bonnie: everyone knows corporate theft is okay when it promotes childhood literacy.
My mom called my aunt and secured permission for Anitra to join us (it was a rated R film; we felt very grown up) and away we went. And oh my god did it scare us. Like, from the moment the film starts it’s terrifying, with that extended aerial shot over Going to the Sun Road and Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s eerie Dies irae scoring. Carlos and Elkind scored Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, too, and the opening to that film is no slouch. But the moment The Shining starts, with the camera gliding over the landscape like an evil spirit looking for a human host, a sense of primitive dread is ignited. A dread that Kubrick then relentlessly maintains for 144 minutes. Kubrick’s The Shining is far different from the book, true, but for me – then and still — it works perfectly as a horror film, even if it is a different type of horror than King intended. I don’t blame the author for being disappointed: the film isn’t the novel. The film is its own thing, and it’s pretty magical.
Last night – more than 46 years later – The Shining worked its magic on me again. My heart still begins to thud as the camera swoops over Saint Mary Lake and those ominous horns set in. I still have to remind myself to breathe. But before too long I’m smiling because I know this story so well. I went to the cinema because Russell and Raoul are in Lyon, but I don’t feel a bit lonely. I know every word, every movement of these characters by heart. They feel like family almost. Wildly dysfunctional, obviously, but in that predictable way one learns to accept after years of therapy. I’ve read and watched so many accounts of the development and execution of this film that I feel an artistic affinity with the cast and crew, too. It’s never hard for me to imagine them there on the other side of the camera, scripts in hand drinking lukewarm coffee from the craft table.
The magic is such that I’m sitting there in the theater with my cousin Anitra – who lives in Belize now and who I haven’t seen live and in person for 15 years at least. We’re kids again, clutching onto each other and sobbing with terror. Darlene is there, too. We’re cutting class and pleasantly stoned, with the sticky-sweet taste of Swenson’s ice cream in our mouths. We don’t need to go to school because we know everything already.
Twyla Tharp once said “Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.” Sometimes art can take you back home, too.
