Seeing Is Digesting: Labyrinths of Historical Ruin in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

The world we live in is a mistake, a clumsy parody. Mirrors and fatherhood, because they multiply and confirm the parody, are abominations. Revulsion is the cardinal virtue. Two ways may lead us there: abstinence or the orgy, excess of the flesh or its denial.

—Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

The stomach is a place almost as private as the grave.

—Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists

Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film, The Shining, based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel, makes apparent the power of horror to represent the coexistence of surface and depth, inner and outer, word and image, mind and body. The film’s dramatic presentation of a 1970s nuclear American family—Jack (Jack Nicholson), Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their son, Danny (Danny Lloyd)—plays out upon the surface of modern problems: domestic abuse, alcoholism, and failed communication. Underneath these problems lie the deeper labyrinth of American history and the collective “ghosts” of its power ideologies. What may draw some viewers to Kubrick’s films is that they repeatedly present thresholds: places where one may identify with the apparent intellectual distance his films afford, yet at the same time feel an ache, or a pull, at the pit of the stomach.

As one of the “body genres,” the horror film in Kubrick’s vision transforms the structure of narrative into a series of still photographs, which, like the ghosts that inhabit the Overlook, materialize and are revealed to have “touchable” bodies. The horror film in particular elicits a “digestive” response from the viewer: for example, one may say of such a film, “It scared the shit out of me,” or “It made me want to throw up.” Indeed, as critic Bridget Peucker has claimed, The Shining is clearly “haunted by photography, [which] resurfaces as an aspect of the film’s imaginary, as a return of the repressed—a ‘return of the dead’” (666). In Kubrick’s film, photographs are palpable ghosts. In response to critics’ views that the film is pessimistic, Kubrick has said that the presence of ghosts actually signifies an optimistic view of the future: “If ghosts exist, then they are a clue that there is indeed an afterlife” (A Life in Pictures). Besides functioning as a surface upon which history can be glimpsed, if not understood, photography also functions as a catalyst for seeing and internalizing what one sees: as a means for representing an “inner” vision, or the personal experience that undermines the surface presentation of photographs that populate the hotel and barely conceal its bloody history, just as the surface of banal conversation between the Torrance family members barely conceals the rage and fear beneath the surface.

This essay explores how Kubrick’s horror film presents a narrative of digestion: the revelation of hidden depths seen by the mind and not necessarily the eye alone. As a result, the deceptively simple narrative of The Shining gives the viewer a rich bodily experience, in that viewers comprehend Kubrick’s vision of American history through the intimate lens of largely nonverbal, lived, imagined, and felt moments. Throughout the essay, I link these moments to the film’s labyrinthine presentation: the winding road through the mountains at the opening of the film, the interior of the hotel, the hedge maze on its property, Jack’s mind, and Kubrick’s reading of American history.

Kubrick’s vision of history includes the notion that human beings have always been engaged in battle, and that the future is unknowable. His view of human nature was very bleak, without pity; his films consistently tell us about ourselves as we really are, rather than as we wish we were. What distinguishes Kubrick’s filmic vision is the act of dissection: he looks unflinchingly at the things from which we want to recoil and seems to ask, “In such a world, are hope and virtue possible?” In a 1960s radio interview, Kubrick stated that, in an age of increasing cynicism, largely due to the growing popularity of television, films need to be made with more sincerity and daring—that, in fact, television has made...