A Quality of Obsession Considerably Further East: The Holocaust in the Cinema of Stanley Kubrick

The Shining (1980) is the prime instance among Stanley Kubrick's films of a curious, conflicted, and creative approach-avoidance syndrome with regard to the Holocaust. Kubrick's family origins in the shtetl of Eastern Europe, together with his upbringing and movie-going in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, produced a lifelong obsession with human evil and the capacity of modern film art to portray and mitigate it. Kubrick's open narrative style of filmmaking leaves issues unresolved and ambiguous not only as a reflection of the world but also as a means toward audience reflection. In The Shining there is a deeply laid visual and aural subtext that locates the Holocaust as the benchmark for modern evil in a way that reflects not only Kubrick's own personal and artistic struggle with the subject but also his habitual method of bringing the world to artistic expression.