Chula Vista

Kubrick put those in there on purpose. There's not a single aspect of any of his movies that he didn't meticulously plan out.

Note the number on Danny's shirt early in the movie. 42. Wendy swings the bat at Jack exactly 42 times. The movie that Danny and Wendy are watching (on a TV that has no plug or wire BTW) is the summer of 42.

1942 was the year of the Nazi "Final Solution".

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Oriphiel

Yeah, there's obviously a connection to the year, but is there anything in the movie that actively provides a commentary of the events that happened during it? I guess what i'm asking is, what do you think Kubrick was trying to say by including the year in multiple places?

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Chula Vista

He's just f*cking with people. The 42 connection wasn't made until many years after the film was released. The same with the Playgirl magazine.

Here's a doozy. You know the two hacked up dead girls lying in the hallway? They weren't dead. The were not only breathing but breathing very heavily. If Kubrick had wanted them dead he would have asked them to hold their breath for those few seconds. Instead he had them breath real heavy.

He also knew that this wouldn't be discovered for decades later until the advent of digital technology that allowed for viewing the frames one at a time.

Download these 4 pics and then view them quickly as a slideshow to see the girls breathing.

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Oriphiel

I didn't notice that. It's pretty freaky.

Anyway, do you think that the movie is partly a commentary on perspective? I mean, every character sees things that couldn't possibly have happened (like the unplugged television playing a show, the impossible windows, etc.), and yet you also get the feeling that none of the characters are outright lying (or meaning to, anyway), kind of like the movie Rashomon.

So, maybe the reason Kubrick keeps alluding to real life tragedies (like the holocaust) is that he's trying to explain why humans end up doing such things? I mean, nobody wakes up and thinks "I'm the bad guy. Today, i'm going to kill people", and yet groups (divided by fear, different perspectives, and the social/tribal nature of humanity) keep committing atrocities to other groups as history goes on. You also said that there are references to the moon landing, and that fits in with this theme as well, because it was the culmination of a race between two nations both that thought the other was evil. Also, it goes back to the theme of perspective in another way; though everyone saw the same footage of the moon landing, there were (and still are) people who believed it to be fake (kind of like how all the characters in the movie technically lived through the same events, but they all saw different things happening).

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Chula Vista

Nah.

Another thing he did all throughout the shoot was move things around and/or remove/add them to scenes. In some scenes of the Colorado room there's a huge bearskin rug on the floor. In others it's gone. When Jack is being interviewed, Unger has a cigarette in his ashtray. Cut to Jack and then back to Under and the cigarette is gone. When Danny sees the two girls in the rec room holding hands there's a couple of tables with chairs in the frame. Cut to Danny then back to the girls and the chairs have all been moved very slightly.

In an early scene there's a glass display case on one side of a hallway. In a later scene it's been moved to the opposite wall. In another Wendy is talking to Jack while he sits at his typewriter and there's a chair in the background against the wall. Cut to Wendy then back to Jack and the chair is gone.

There's dozens and dozens of instances like this all throughout the movie. Kubrick knew that no-one was going to catch all of this when they first watched the flick. They'd be too busy paying attention to the foreground and dialogue. But he put it all in anyway knowing that eventually people would analyze the movie knowing that Kubrick simply wasn't going to tell a straight ahead ghost story and that there had to be more there.

The Shining was Kubrick's magnus opus of using the cinematic experience to totally mess with people's heads.

Check this one out.

Danny is playing with his trucks and a tennis balls rolls up out of nowhere.



Camera angle changes to Danny looking down the hall where the ball came from. Do you see what Kubrick did here?

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Oriphiel

Anyway, the ball came from one direction, but the next shot showed him (and the direction) reversed (which you can tell by looking at the carpet; the orange ring in the pattern is only broken on one side, not both, so he should have had a black line in front of him and not a closed off orange ring).

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Chula Vista

So Kubrick sets up the overhead shot, films it, yells cut, and has the crew move everything 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Why? I can guarantee that pretty much no-one noticed this during their first viewing of the movie. So why do it?

During the scene where Wendy is going through the hotel with the knife looking for Danny they have the camera filming her straight on a number of times inter-cut with showing us what she's seeing. Each time they show Wendy the background color is either predominantly red or blue.

When it's red the knife is in one of her hands and when it's blue it's in the other. Again, why do this?

Stanley being Stanley.

And it was Danny who let Jack out of the food storage room.........

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Oriphiel

Again, I don't think it's that crazy that he was making a commentary about perspective, casting doubts on what supposedly "good" characters like Wendy and Danny encountered. After all, isn't that one of the main themes of the movie anyway?

Red is the color of blood, and for that reason our bodies are able to notice that color more than others, since it's basically the color of danger and pain. Jack truly makes up his mind about "correcting" his family in a room that is painted completely red, Wendy is holding a knife when the color red appears, etc., all makes sense as a commentary on fear.

What drove Jack to try to kill his family (or, alternatively, what caused Wendy to believe he was attacking her)? Is the fear that warped their perceptions the same as the fear that drove the Americans into massacring the Native Americans? Is it the same hysteria that caused Germany to follow the Nazi party? Is it the same paranoia that makes it easier for people to believe that the government staged various historical events than to go by what has been verified by people they don't trust? After all, they're giving into timeless survival instincts and the tribal mentality that has existed throughout humanity's history, and it's just like Grady says (and again, i'm paraphrasing): "I've always been here, and so have you".

Was it the ghosts that gave it away? When you first watch the movie, he's the one who is pegged as the obvious villain. But like Chula said earlier, there are different narratives going on, and different ways to look at the movie. Jack isn't the only one who sees things that don't make sense, and that may just be Kubrick screwing with the audience, it still makes you wonder if maybe the whole family wasn't afflicted by cabin fever and latent fears/grudges coming to surface.

Edit: Hey Chula, I have a question. Throughout the movie, you hear Jack typing his "story". Has anyone ever listened to when he hits the letter and space keys, to see if he's actually typing "All work and No Play... etc."? It'd be freaky if he was actually typing something else the whole time.

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Frownland

I think that with The Shining you could make a case that those are subtle cues hinting at Jack's deteriorating mental state.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Oriphiel

I don't know, if Kubrick really filmed a fake landing, I think he would have snuck something into the footage itself (like, things being randomly reversed).

Edit: That'd be the ultimate Kubrick mind-f**k!

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